Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  Dave Karoly was a mostly straight-edge punk who I first took for a cop when I met him tabling for the IWW at an outdoor event in Berkeley. His close-cropped black hair, body-builder physique, blue jeans, flannel shirt, and combat boots vaguely reminded me of the plainclothes cops who had jumped protesters at the 1984 Democratic Convention. But as I got to know him, I realized my first impression was mistaken and we eventually would commute on BART back to the East Bay after the IW editorial, or other union, meetings.

  Together with the straight-edge punks who lived in Calhoun House, Dave and I occasionally went to punk rock shows at Gilman Street and elsewhere and they introduced me to Chumbawamba, Pennywise, NoFX, Lagwagon, and other bands that were growing in popularity in those years. Gilman Street was a drug- and alcohol-free, collectively-run space, and, even if I didn’t always care for the music, I enjoyed being around the free-spirit rebel energy of the kids as my own generation disappeared into lives of accommodation with the system. I was inspired seeing anarchist punks picking up the struggle much of the older generation of hippies and yippies had abandoned. I didn’t blame the older generation: most people felt they had no choice, or else they made their compromises to be able to fight other fights they thought they might be able to win, and I completely understood, given that I had my own struggles in those days.

  Dave introduced me to Pete Swearengen, a friend of his from college who was a poet and also interested in Liberation theology. Pete and I hit it off and, as he did design and typesetting. Pete suggested that he, Dave and I form an IWW printing collective. I thought it was a great idea because collectives tend to get isolated and “apolitical” when they aren’t part of larger movements for radical change and the IWW had a venerable history of struggle that we wanted to be a part of. We used soy ink in symbolic protest of the invasion of Iraq, a clear grab for oil. Eventually Pete left but Dave and I continued printing in the basement of St. Joseph the Worker’s Church. After struggling for a year or so, we managed to put together enough equipment and stable income to move out of the Church’s basement. We eventually hung our sign for New Earth Press on Ashby Avenue, just down the street from where William Everson once lived and Mary Fabilli still resided. Coincidentally, after being out of touch with Everson for a few years, I reconnected with him to collaborate on a collection of interviews. It was his first book to appear in England, and the final book he would work on before he died in 1994.

  In December 1993 I noticed a book on my shelf: Poesía by Eliseo Diego. I pulled it off the shelf and looked at the photo on the back cover. A kind face, I thought. I’d first run into Diego’s work in Nicaragua at the International Book Fair when I was living in Managua and working for CERIGUA. I’d read one of his poems in the book when I picked it up in the stall and, even though I didn’t understand all of it, I felt an electric shock run down my spine. It had been a while since anything like that had happened to me, especially from just reading a poem, so I’d bought the book and sent it home. Since then I’d translated and published a few of his poems. Now, looking at his face, a cigarette in his fingers with the smoke curling up in the air, I wondered if this smoker was still alive. If he was, I needed to meet him, and in that moment I knew what I would be doing for Christmas, or at least in the New Year. If he was still alive, I was determined to find the poet Eliseo Diego.

  I called a friend of a friend in Mexico City whose sister had a travel agency and organized tours to Cuba. The woman, Adriana, agreed to set me up to go on a weeklong tour from January 1–7, 1994. I would pass my forty-first birthday on the island.

  I flew to Mexico City and spent New Year’s Eve with my friend and her family, and a few other mutual friends. We had the traditional turkey dinner and sat talking until late in the evening. Little did any of us know that at the moment we were talking, a group of armed guerrillas were taking five little towns in the distant state of Chiapas in an uprising that would spell the beginning of a new wave of resistance we today call the “Anti-Globalization Movement.”

  I flew out of Mexico City the following morning at 5 a.m. to Cuba. The story of the Zapatista uprising got very little coverage in the Cuban press because the Cuban government maintained good relations with Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) but half-way through my week on the island, as I tried to track down Eliseo, I read about the Zapatistas in a little two- column-inch story on the back page of the Granma. I didn’t think much of it at the time because surely if it were significant the revolutionary government of Cuba would have made more of it, wouldn’t it?

  Cuba was in the middle of the Special Period and prostitution was everywhere. It was painful to see this one example of socialism left in this corner of the world so desperate to hold on that it was willing to rent out its most beautiful daughters for sexual tourists arriving from everywhere. It was clearly a relief valve for the government since whatever needs the Cubans had during the “Special Period” after the collapse of the USSR—and there were many needs the ration books didn’t cover—could be obtained in the dollar stores, if one had dollars. So police looked the other way as the jineteras walked the streets looking for “boyfriends.”

  I got to know a former Lieutenant Colonel who had helped design, along with Ernesto “Che” Guevara himself, the “Many Vietnams” strategy of funding guerrilla insurgencies all over Latin America. “Eduardo” gave me his ration card. “I want you to take this back to the US so people can know what we’re going through here. See?” He pointed out that they had received no cooking oil for two months, no matches for a month, flour every other month... “And we’re supposed to live from this?” he asked. Eduardo, however, was doing fairly well by comparison with other Cubans because he worked for a Spanish transnational. He had cigarettes and ate fairly well and led a relatively middle-class existence.

  One day Eduardo invited me to accompany him to the Museum of the Revolution. We went into the museum and looked around and then as we started to leave one of the security guards approached him and asked him for a cigarette. Eduardo glanced at me and furtively winked. “How long do you have to work to buy a pack of cigarettes?” Eduardo casually asked the guard as he pulled his cigarettes out of his pocket to give him one. The guard paused as he took the cigarette. “A day. It costs me a day’s wages.” Eduardo nodded slowly. “And an egg? How many day’s wages is an egg?” The guard rolled his eyes upwards, calculating. “Three days wages, señor.”

  We walked outside and I expressed my shock and started to talk when Eduardo elbowed me and stopped. I stopped. And the man beside us stopped. Then, startled, the stranger walked on, casually, toward a park across the street.

  “Watch him,” Eduardo said, quietly. We stood and watched as the man crossed the park to the other side where a policeman in uniform was waiting for him. Eduardo and I turned and walked off another direction.

  “You have to be very careful here about what you say. There are informers everywhere,” Eduardo whispered to me as we walked back to his apartment.

  Each day was another shocking and depressing revelation about how socialism didn’t work, and how a police state did. I could bear the contradictions until early afternoon when I would return to my hotel room and take a nap because I felt exhausted.

  One day the tour went to Varadero and my Mexican roommate, Alejandro, who had come for the sexual tourism, encouraged me to go along to the beach. I had ditched the tour almost as soon as we’d arrived in Cuba and I’d gone off on my own to try to find Eliseo and explore Havana without “intermediaries.” But now, since I’d exhausted all my leads to find Eliseo, I thought a day at the beach would do me good, so I agreed to go.

  The bus arrived in Varadero and pulled up to the hotel. Alejandro knew the routine: the state tour agency drove tourists from their hotels to other hotels with expensive restaurants in its attempt to extract every penny it could from the tourists in overpriced state restaurants. As we got off the bus, he pulled me away and we went walking down the street in search of a cheaper
alternative for lunch. We found it a little less than a kilometer away, a post selling medallones on buns and a glass of lemonade for about fifteen US cents. Medallones are little golden fried hamburger-like patties made with soy and other undefined ingredients. They’re rather tasteless, but with a certain amount of ketchup one can manage to get them down, and they satisfy hunger.

  We sat down in the public area and ate our lunch. Someone had a copy of Granma on their table that they weren’t reading so I asked to see it. The man sitting at the table handed me the paper and that’s where I saw the report about the Zapatista uprising on the back page.

  We started talking with the man and when the conversation turned to politics, he suggested we leave. We walked down the street a ways and he looked around. He said quietly that he’d heard Fidel’s daughter had defected to the US Was it true? I remembered reading about that just around the time I left the US a week or two before. I said yes, it was true. How had he found out about it if it wasn’t reported in the papers? I asked him. “Radio Martí,” he whispered. “I know someone who has a shortwave radio and he tells us what’s happening in the world.”

  My heart sank. The radio station the US was funding to broadcast to Cuba was, evidently, the only trustworthy news source Cubans could access. We continued walking and eventually arrived at the big hotel where our bus was parked. The only way to access the beach, the man told us, was through the hotel. “It’s a way of keeping us off of our own beaches. Only you guys, the tourists are allowed on the beaches of Cuba,” he said bitterly. Looking up at the hotel he smiled ironically. “I was on the construction crew that built this hotel. And now they won’t let me into it.” Then he nodded and winked and said, “Watch.” We approached the door to the hotel and a man in a suit guarding the entrance stopped us. He pointed to Alejandro and me and waved us in, then, pointing to our Cuban companion, he said, “but he can’t come in with you.” The Cuban man smiled as if to say, “See? I told you…” and then he waved and walked away.

  My last day in Cuba I finally got in touch with someone at Eliseo Diego’s house who told me that Eliseo was now living in Mexico and they gave me his telephone number. I arrived at my friend Luis Ballesteros’s house early the next morning and called Eliseo. He invited me over right away.

  There were helicopters circling the skies overhead in Mexico City. Soldiers stood on strategic corners armed with machine guns. The country had changed in the course of the week I’d been gone and everywhere people were talking about the Zapatistas and wondering if they, indeed, were planning to march on Mexico City to overthrow the “bad government”…

  I found my way to Eliseo’s house that morning and we became instant friends. We agreed to set to work the following day to translate his poetry in preparation for an upcoming reading at the Anglo-Mexican Cultural Institute. He insisted that I should join him at that event to read our English translations and he would read the Spanish original.

  We set to work translating his poems that he already had in some form of English, an elegant, 19th century English so different from his own earthy and modern Spanish. In between work on poems we sipped sweet black coffee and talked about the Zapatista uprising.

  Eliseo had a recent issue of a national magazine with images of the murdered Zapatistas, many of them fallen next to carved “guns” made only of wood, killed in battles in which they didn’t have the possibility of firing a shot. Others had their hands bound behind their backs and had been killed with a coup de grâce. We silently leafed through the magazine, saddened by what we saw, and grateful to the journalist who had risked his life to get these shots.

  I told Eliseo about my experiences in Cuba and he listened, nodding thoughtfully. Eliseo was a member of the Orígenes literary group and a Catholic who had gone with the Revolution. Nevertheless, the government had never quite trusted him and it recruited one of his children to spy on him. Eliseo told me the story. He said his son reported to the government on his father’s comings and goings until finally, the young boy could no longer keep his dark secret to himself and confessed to his father.

  “Dad, I’ve betrayed you; all these years I’ve been spying on you for the government.”

  Eliseo shook his head and smiled. “No, son, you haven’t betrayed me. You betrayed yourself.”

  Eliseo told me the story as if it had happened to someone else, but I felt a deep sense of revulsion. In Cuba, a place that had once represented paradise to me, children were turned against their parents to be instrumentalized as spies for the State.

  Just a few months before I met him, Eliseo had won the Juan Rulfo Award for Literature, which came with a significant cash prize, in addition to its great prestige. Eliseo was now settled in Mexico City and, as he no longer lived in Cuba, he seemed at ease talking about his homeland, which he still loved deeply.

  “The problem with Fidel Castro,” he told me, “is that he isn’t a Cuban. He’s a Spaniard through and through. Cubans have great heart and a great sense of humor. Fidel has neither.” Eliseo went on to tell me of a cartoonist who had dared to publish a political caricature of Fidel early on in the Revolution. “And he was never allowed to publish again in Cuba.”

  I’ve told that story to Margaret Randall, and she sharply disagreed with Eliseo’s assessment. I’m sure it’s a problem of perspective, and I respect both views. But I’m also inclined to think they’re both right: Fidel in all likelihood is charming and possesses a great sense of humor. In his deep arrogance and sense of self-importance, he only seems to lack the ability to laugh at himself.

  A week later we had a good selection of poems translated for the reading at the Anglo-Mexican Institute and we read to a full house. It was the culminating moment of the trip to Cuba and Mexico, but there were other, equally great moments. I began collecting and translating communiqués of the Zapatistas. And I also spent time getting to know one of Luis’s employees, a young woman named Patricia Luna, who would later come to the US and become my wife. I returned to Berkeley elated and I quickly deflated as I reentered the gears and rollers of working life at New Earth Press.

  I did manage to get down to Davenport to see William Everson again during this time, as we were finishing up work on the book of interviews for the British publisher.1 I wanted to read him some of Eliseo’s poems since I thought he’d appreciate hearing the erotic and mystical verse of a fellow Catholic. But Bill was in bed and his mind and spirit were already moving somewhere between this world and the next.

  I continued translating Eliseo’s poems and we corresponded at least once a week about translations for the next month until I got a phone call from Luis, my friend in Mexico City, who told me that Eliseo had died in his sleep the night before. A week later I received a letter from the old poet, postmarked the day he died. In it was a revision of his poem, “From an Old Clown to his Son.” I’d done a terrible job translating the poem, he said, and he had to do a major revision. I’d missed, he said, the theatrical context in which a clown was trying to pass on his art to the son, and in which he was watching him perform with such great anxiety:

  An Old Clown to His Son

  1

  Enter from emptiness, son,

  where the folds of purple curtains

  hide the shameless contraptions,

  so useful, it’s true,

  the abandon of great curtains hung

  like dead birds in the dust. Come along

  from the shadows and make your bow

  as if you were never to return.

  2

  You’re in the midst of light. Before

  you opens the enormous gulf of shadows

  where there’s certainly someone spying on you

  with a thousand eager eyes. Sometimes

  you’ll hear him cough, laughing in secret,

  and sneezing perhaps, or maybe shuddering:

  But you’ll never

  ever really see. Bow,

  then, like a stalk of cane in the wind:

  but carefully watc
h the shape of the curve:

  Everything is art in the end.

  3

  Now

  what are you going to do? You’ve

  finally escaped my care and it’s almost

  as if I were now the dark Leviathan.

  I watch you come and go over the planks

  but with an unquenchable apprehension:

  are you sure

  of the balanced weight of the balls

  that you left flying in the air?

  And the fish,

  perhaps you’ve misjudged their strange humor

  and they’ll later change color.

  Disasters,

  minuscule catastrophes, who knows

  what else?

  (and yesterday

  the invisible was pitiless).

  4

  But tomorrow

  when the old women carefully sweep up

  the little of today left in the cigarette butts

  scattered through the wide wasteland

  where there’s never anyone: will it matter,

  the thunder of glory or the silence

  of the crumpled paper on a corner

  beneath the dust of yesterday? No one knows.

  And yet

  it’s necessary to do it all well.2

  Through my brief friendship with Eliseo, and also from those years of friendship with William Everson, I learned a lesson in poetry, which applies well to life. Perhaps it won’t matter, this work we do in life, yet, “it’s necessary to do it all well.”

  Three months after Eliseo died in Mexico City, William Everson died at his home in Davenport.

  Chapter Eight: Drawing the Limits of Utopia

  Ben Clarke and I began talking about putting together a collection of the communiqués from the Zapatistas. We set to work on Voice of Fire and managed to get out the first collection of Zapatista materials in English, because we had our own printing presses. Guillermo Prado at Inkworks did the layout and design and Global Exchange collaborated with some funding. Voice of Fire was published in August 1994 by three Left print shops of the Bay Area: Red Star/Black Rose, which by then was owned exclusively by Ben Clarke, New Earth Press, and Inkworks.