“Take it, it’s yours,” says Perón. He takes it out of his mouth and puts it in his host’s hand—his false teeth.
(327)
1955: Guatemala City
One Year after the Reconquest of Guatemala,
Richard Nixon visits this occupied land. The union of United Fruit workers and five hundred and thirty-two other unions have been banned by the new government. The new penal code punishes with death anyone who calls a strike. Political parties are outlawed. The books of Dostoyevsky and other Soviet writers have been thrown onto the bonfire.
The banana kingdom has been saved from agrarian reform. The vice-president of the United States congratulates President Castillo Armas. For the first time in history, says Nixon, a Communist government has been replaced by a free one.
(416 and 420)
1956: Buenos Aires
The Government Decides That Peronism Doesn’t Exist
While shooting workers on garbage dumps, the Argentine military decrees the nonexistence of Perón, Evita, and Peronism. It is forbidden to mention their names or their deeds. Possessing images of them is a crime. The presidential residence is demolished to the last stone, as though the disease were contagious.
But what about the embalmed body of Evita? She is the most dangerous symbol of the arrogance of the rabble who have sauntered the corridors of power as if in their own homes. The generals dump the body in a box labeled “Radio Equipment” and send it into exile. Just where is a secret. To Europe, rumor has it, or maybe to an island in mid-ocean. Evita becomes a wandering body traveling secretly through remote cemeteries, expelled from the country by generals who don’t know—or don’t want to know—that she lies within the people.
(311 and 327)
1956: León
Son of Somoza
Santa Marta, Santa Marta has a train, sing the musicmakers, dance the dancers, Santa Marta has a train but has no tram; and in the middle of the song and the fiesta, Rigoberto López Pérez, poet, owner of nothing, fells the owner of everything with four bullets.
A North American plane carries off the dying Anastasio Somoza to a North American hospital in the North American Panama Canal Zone, and he dies in a North American bed. They bury him in Nicaragua, with the honors of a prince of the Church.
Somoza I held power for twenty years. Every six years he lifted his state of siege for one day and held the elections that kept him on the throne. Luis, eldest son and heir, is now the richest and most powerful man in Central America. From Washington, President Eisenhower congratulates him.
Luis Somoza bows before the statue of his father, the bronze hero who gallops motionlessly in the very center of Managua. In the shadow of the horse’s hoofs he seeks advice from the founder of the dynasty, guide to good government, proliferator of jails and businesses, then covers the monumental tomb with flowers.
Evading the vigilance of an honor guard, the hand of somebody, anybody, everybody, has hurriedly scrawled this epitaph on the marble tomb: Here lies Somoza, a bit rottener than in life.
(10, 102, and 460)
1956: Santo Domingo
In the Year Twenty-Six of the Trujillo Era
his likeness is sold in the markets, among the little engravings of the Virgin Mary, Saint George, and other miracle workers.
“Saints, cheap saints!”
Nothing Dominican is beyond his grasp. All belongs to him: the first night of the virgins, the last wish of the dying, the people and the cows, the air fleet and the chain of brothels, the sugar and wheat mills, the beer factory and the virility-potion bottling plant.
For twenty-six years Trujillo has occupied God’s vice-presidency. Every four years, this formula has been blessed by democratic elections: God and Trujillo, proclaim all walls.
In her work Moral Meditations, which earns her the title of First Lady of Caribbean Letters, Do–a María de Trujillo compares her husband to El Cid and Napoleon Bonaparte. Plump Doña María, who practices usury during the week and mysticism on Sundays, has in turn been compared with Saint Teresa de Jesus by local critics.
With El Cid’s sword or Napoleon’s hat, Trujillo poses for statues. Statues multiply him in bronze and marble, with a chin he doesn’t have and without the double chin he does. Thousands of statues: From high on their pedestals, Trujillo straddles the most remote corner of every city or village, watching. In this country not a fly shits without his permission.
(63 and 101)
1956: Havana
Newsreel
The Cuban army has thwarted an armed expedition from Mexico, surrounding the invaders, machinegunning and bombing them at a place called Alegría de Pío in Oriente province. Among the many dead are Fidel Castro, leader of the gang, and an Argentine Communist agitator, Ernesto Guevara.
After enjoying a long stay in the city of New York, Dr. Ernesto Sarrá and his very attractive and elegant wife, Loló, figures of the highest rank in this capital’s social circles, have returned to Havana.
Also arriving from New York is Bing Crosby, the popular singer who, without removing his topcoat or beaver hat, declared at the airport: “I have come to Cuba to play golf.”
A young Havanan, on the point of winning the grand prize in the “TV School Contest,” fails to answer the next to last question. The final question, which remained unasked, was: What is the name of the river that crosses Paris?
An exceptional lineup will run tomorrow at the Marianao Racecourse.
(98)
1956: At the Foot of the Sierra Maestro
Twelve Lunatics
They go a week without sleep, huddled together like sardines in a can, vomiting, while the north wind toys playfully with the little boat Granma. After much seesawing in the Gulf of Mexico, they disembark in the wrong place, and a few steps ashore are swept by machinegun fire or burned alive by incendiary bombs, a slaughter in which almost all of them fall. The survivors consult the sky for directions but get the stars mixed up. The swamps swallow their backpacks and their arms. They have no food except sugarcane, and they leave its betraying refuse strewn along the trail. They lose their condensed milk by carrying the cans holes down. In a careless moment they mix their little remaining fresh water with sea water. They get lost and search aimlessly for one another. Finally, one small group discovers another small group on these slopes, by chance, and so the twelve saved from annihilation join together.
These men, or shadows of men, have a total of seven rifles, a little damp ammunition, and uncounted sores and wounds. Since the invasion began there is hardly a mistake they haven’t made. But on this starless night they breathe fresher, cleaner air, and Fidel says, standing before the foothills of the Sierra Maestra: “We’ve already won the war. Batista is fucked!”
(98 and 209)
1957: Benidorm
Marked Cards
Between liberals and conservatives, a conjugal agreement. On a beach in the Mediterranean, Colombia’s politicians sign the compromise that puts an end to ten years of mutual extermination. The two main parties offer each other an amnesty. From now on, they will alternate the presidency and divvy up the other jobs. Colombians will be able to vote, but not elect. Liberals and conservatives are to take turns in power, to guarantee the property and inheritance rights over the country that their families have brought or received as gifts.
In this pact among the wealthy there is no good news for the poor.
(8, 217, and 408)
1957: Majagual
Colombia’s Sainted Egg
Burning towns and killing Indians, leveling forests and erecting wire fences, the masters of the land have pushed the campesinos right up against the river banks in this coastal region of Colombia. Many campesinos have nonetheless refused to serve as slaves on the haciendas and have instead become fishermen—artists at gritting their teeth and living on what they can find. Eating so much turtle, they learn from him: The turtle never lets go what he catches in his mouth and knows how to bury himself on the beaches in the dry season when the se
agulls threaten. With that and God’s help they get by.
Few monks remain in these hot regions. Here on the coast no one takes the Mass seriously. Whoever isn’t paralyzed runs from marriage and work, and, the better to enjoy the seven deadly sins, indulges in endless siestas in endless hammocks. Here God is a good fellow, not a grouchy, carping police chief.
The boring Christ of Jegua is dead—a broken doll that neither sweats nor bleeds nor performs miracles. No one has even wiped the bat shit off him since the priest fled with all the silver. But very much alive, sweating and bleeding and miracle-working, is Our Little Black Lord, the dark Christ of San Benito Abad, giving counsel to anyone who will stroke him affectionately. Alive, too, and wagging their tails, are the frisky saints who appear on the Colombian coast at the drop of a hat and stick around.
One stormy night, some fishermen discover God’s face, agleam in lightning flashes, on a stone the shape of an egg. Since then they celebrate the miracles of Saint Egg, dancing the cumbia and drinking to his health.
The parish priest of Majagual announces that he will go up river at the head of a battalion of crusaders, throw the sacrilegious stone to the bottom of the waters, and set fire to their little palm-frond chapel.
In the tiny chapel, where Masses are celebrated with lively music, the fishermen stand guard around Saint Egg. Ax in hand, day and night.
(159)
1957: Sucre
Saint Lucío
While the Majagual priest declares war on Saint Egg, the priest of Sucre expels Saint Lucía from his church, because a female saint with a penis is unheard of.
At first it looked like a cyst, or a bump on the neck; but it kept moving lower and lower, and growing, bulging beneath the sacred tunic that shortened every day. Everyone pretended not to notice, until one day a child suddenly blurted out: “Saint Lucía has a dick!”
Exiled, Saint Lucío finds refuge in a hut not far from the little temple of Saint Egg. In time, the fishermen put up an altar to him, because Saint Lucío is a fun-loving, trustworthy guy who joins the binges of his devotees, listens to their secrets, and is happy when summer comes and the fish begin to rise.
This he, who used to be she, doesn’t figure among the saints listed in the Bristol Almanac, nor has Saint Egg been canonized by the Pope of Rome. Neither has Saint Board, unhinged from the box of soap in which a laundrywoman found the Virgin Mary; or Saint Kidney, the humble kidney of a cow in which a slaughterer saw Christ’s crown of thorns. Nor Saint Domingo Vidal …
(159)
1957: The Sinú River Banks
Saint Domingo Vidal
He had been a dwarf and a paralytic. The people had named him a saint, Saint Domingo Vidal, because with his prophetic hunches he had known just where on this Colombian coast a lost horse had strayed, and which cock would win the next fight, and because he had asked nothing for teaching the poor how to read and defend themselves from locusts and omnivorous landlords.
Son of Lucifer, the Church called him. A priest hauled him out of his grave inside the chapel of Chimá and broke his bones with an ax and hammer. His shattered remains ended up in a corner of the plaza, and another priest wanted to throw them in the garbage. The first priest died a writhing death, his hands turning into claws; the other suffocated, wallowing in his own excrement.
Like Saint Egg, Saint Lucío, and many of their local colleagues, Saint Domingo Vidal remains happily alive in the fervor of all those hereabouts who love—either in or out of wedlock—and in the noisy throng of people who share the grim battle for land and the joys of its fruits.
Saint Domingo Vidal protects the ancient custom of the Sinú River villagers, who visit each other bearing gifts of food. The people of one village bear litters to another loaded with flowers and delicacies from the river and its banks: dorado or shad stews, slices of catfish, iguana eggs, riced coconut, cheese, sweet mongomongo; and while the recipients eat, the donors sing and dance around them.
(160)
1957: Pino del Agua
Crucito
Batista offers three hundred pesos and a cow with calf to anyone who brings him Fidel Castro, alive or dead.
On the other side of the crests of the Sierra Maestra, the guerrillas sweat and multiply. They quickly learn the rules of war in the brush: to mistrust, to move by night, never to sleep twice in the same place, and above all, to make friends with the local people.
When the twelve bedraggled survivors arrived in this sierra, they knew not a single campesino, and the River Yara only through the song that mentions it. A few months later there are a few campesinos in the rebel ranks, the kind of men who cut cane for a while at harvest time and then are left to starve in unknown territory; and now the guerrillas know these areas as if they had been born in them. They know the names of the places, and when they don’t, they baptize them after their own fashion. They have given the Arroyo of Death its name because there a guerrilla deserted who had sworn to fight to the death.
Others die fighting, without having sworn anything.
While smoking his pipe during the rest periods, José de la Cruz— “Crucito”—sierra troubadour, composes in ten-verse guajira stanzas the entire history of the Cuban revolution. For lack of paper he commits it to memory, but has it taken from him by a bullet, on the heights of Pino del Agua during an ambush of army trucks.
(209)
1957: El Uvero
Almeida
Juan Almeida claims he has a joy inside him that keeps tickling, making him laugh and jump. A very stubborn joy if one considers that Almeida was born poor and black on this island of private beaches which are closed to the poor because they are poor and to blacks because they stain the water; and that, to make matters worse, he decided to be a bricklayer’s helper and a poet; and that, as if those were not complications enough, he rolled his life into this crap game of the Cuban revolution, and as one of the Moncada assailants was sentenced to jail and exile, and was navigator of the Granma before becoming the guerrilla that he is now; and that he has just stopped two bullets—not mortal, but motherfuckers—one in the left leg and one in the shoulder, during the three-hour attack on the Uvero barracks, down by the shore.
(209)
1957: Santiago de Cuba
Portrait of an Imperial Ambassador
Earl Smith, ambassador of the United States, receives the keys to the city of Santiago de Cuba. As the ceremony proceeds and the speeches pour forth, a commotion is heard through the curtains. Discreetly, the ambassador peers out the window and observes a number of women approaching, clad in black, chanting the national anthem and shouting “Liberty!” The police club them down.
The next day, the ambassador visits the U.S. military base at Guantánamo. Then he tours the iron and nickel mines of the Freeport Sulphur Company, which, thanks to his efforts, have just been exempted from taxes.
The ambassador publicly expresses his disgust with the police beatings, although he recognizes that the government has a right to defend itself from Communist aggression. Advisers have explained to the ambassador that Fidel has been abnormal since childhood, from having fallen off a moving motorcycle.
The ambassador, who was a champion boxer in his student days, believes General Batista must be defended at any cost. With Batista in power, tourists can pick from photos handed them on the airplane their pretty mulatta for the weekend. Havana is a North American city, full of one-armed bandits from Nevada and mafia bosses from Chicago, and with plenty of telephones to order a nice hot supper to be brought on the next flight out of Miami.
(431)
1957: El Hombrito
Che
In the Hombrito Valley, the rebels have installed an oven for baking bread, a printshop consisting of an old mimeograph machine, and a clinic that functions in a one-room hut. The doctor is Ernesto Guevara, known as Che, who apart from his nickname has retained certain Argentine customs, like maté and irony. American pilgrim, he joined Fidel’s forces in Mexico, where he settled after the fall of Gu
atemala to earn a living as a photographer at one peso per photo, and as a peddler of little engravings of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
In the Hombrito clinic, Che attends a series of children with bloated bellies, almost dwarfs, and aged girls worn out from too many births and too little food, and men as dry and empty as gourds, because poverty turns everyone into a living mummy.
Last year, when machineguns mowed down the newly landed guerrillas, Che had to choose between a case of bullets and a case of medicines. He couldn’t carry both and decided on the bullets. Now he strokes his old Thompson rifle, the only surgical instrument he really believes in.
(209)
Old Chana, Campesina of the Sierra Maestra, Remembers:
Poor dear Che! I always saw him with that curse of his asthma and said, “Ay, Holy Virgin!” With the asthma he would get all quiet, breathing low. Some folks with asthma get hysterical, cough and open their eyes and open their mouth. But Che tried to soften up the asthma. He would throw himself in a corner to rest the asthma.
He didn’t like sympathy. If you said, “Poor guy,” he gave you a quick look that didn’t mean anything, and meant a lot.
I used to warm him up a bit of water to rub on his chest for relief. He, the big flatterer, would say, “Oh, my girlfriend.” But he was such a rascal.
(338)
1958: Stockholm
Pelé
Brazilian football glows. It dances and makes one dance. At the World Cup in Sweden, Pelé and Garrincha are the heroes, proving wrong those who say blacks can’t play in a cold climate.
Pelé, thin as a rake, almost a boy, puffs out his chest and raises his chin to make an impression. He plays football as God would play it, if God decided to devote himself seriously to the game. Pelé makes a date with the ball anywhere, any time, and she never stands him up. He sends her high in the air. She makes a full curve and returns to his foot, obedient, grateful, or perhaps tied by an invisible elastic band. Pelé lifts her up, puffs out his chest, and she rolls smoothly down his body. Without letting her touch the ground he flips her to the other foot as he flings himself, running like a hare, toward the goal. No one can catch him, with lasso or bullet, until he leaves the ball, shining, white, tight against the back of the net.
Century of the Wind Page 18