Light Action in the Caribbean

by Barry Lopez

  In another letter to his father, dated 22 August 1548 (BMLS 3.4811), Marín sets forth the reasons for planting this crop and speculates about his success. He makes reference to several precipitating dreams and, of course, to the vagaries of Spanish colonial shipping. The most astonishing line in this letter is his contention that “the proceeds [from the tobacco crop] will ensure the wealth of my descendants in these wretched and primitive lands to the seventh generation.”

  The contributions of his descendants to the development of tobacco varieties are substantial (cf. Tobacco Leaf: Its Culture and Cure by T. E. Roberson, pp. 257–61); and the fame of the family’s cigar leaf, unsurpassed for aroma, was widespread by the end of the seventeenth century. Oddly, Marín himself did not smoke. As well as I can determine, García Mendoza, in the fourth generation (b. 1643), was the first member of the family to smoke. Tobacco cultivation was first and foremost a business, in the establishment and development of which Bernardo Marín and his descendants were very aggressive.

  9. A statement hard to defend, certainly, but so crucial to my theme that I have felt justified in the extraordinarily timeconsuming work needed to justify it. With the help of several assistants, whose labors I hereby gratefully acknowledge, I reviewed the holdings of all the tobacco-growing families in the Caribbean and in the North American colonies in 1735, when the firstborn son in the seventh generation married. The patriarch of the family in that year, Diego Marín Tréllez, owned 2,114 hectares (5,223.7 acres); his two brothers controlled between them another 728 hectares (1,798.9 acres). The total, 2,842 hectares (7,022.6 acres) devoted exclusively to the cultivation of tobacco, exceeds by 188 hectares (464.5 acres) the holdings of the Carlos family of Santo Domingo, the next highest total. For reference, the largest holdings in the North American colonies in 1735, those of the Benson family in Virginia, totaled only 403 hectares (995.8 acres).

  10. Although well educated at Hotchkiss and Yale, and holding graduate degrees in economics from Stanford and in political science from the University of Texas at Austin, my son disparaged history as a discipline (possibly a reaction to his father’s profession, therefore not a true denial). In the closing years of his life, he spoke incessantly of “revisionist histories,” by which he meant any history, no matter how pathetic or meager its scholarship, that condescended to ideas of progress or that was critical of the civilizing influence of the colonizing nations in the New World. He took a perverse pleasure, I believe, in actually funding some of the more irresponsible and insipid of these publications, which do not merit cataloging here. His grasp of history, the general flow of events, I believe was exceptional; but his failure to perceive the concatenation that gives history its intellectual tension and its meaning, his blindness to the filaments of cause, were almost complete by the last year of his life. The despair that reliably follows on the abandonment of any original wisdom no doubt contributed to his wayward behavior and the sense of futility that overcame his sense of hope.

  I would hasten to add in his defense that he was no supporter of Castro.

  11. No gift of the New World, with the possible exception of gold, brought with it a more salubrious effect than tobacco. In the contemporary political climate, where health issues are confounded by a politics of righteousness and intimidation, it is helpful to recall that for hundreds of years the cultivation of tobacco, the manufacture of tobacco products, and tobacco’s sale and distribution were a source of the deepest kind of agrarian pleasure, of fundamental dignity in the workplace, and of material wealth for hundreds of thousands of people. Conflicting scientific evidence indicates that nicotine, tarry compounds, and carbon monoxide from cigar and cigarette smoking may affect some individuals adversely, but a far greater number of tobacco users very likely suffer no ill effects. Indeed, were it not for the contentious political climate surrounding the cultivation and marketing of this plant, the pleasures it offers might be extolled as are the pleasures of wine, the varieties of cheese, or the benefits of any other of nature’s products not (yet) subject to vehement attack—in which, one might justifiably add, an opposition to capitalism is transparently clear.

  12. The literature here, of course, is voluminous. For my purposes I have been interested principally in publications of historians and other scholars on the “second war,” the second round of negotiations with indigenes in the New World, largely diplomatic, to settle “land claims” and allied issues of political geography. Again, while the literature in defense of these claims, from both the scholarly and legal quarters, is in its ascendency, the countervailing thought of those who see the grave dangers posed to stable economies by the pursuit of such claims is in dire need of review. The Distant Shore by Muriel Cagney, Estone Bazzergahnah’s The Triple Alliance: Environment, Indians, and Pacifists, and Les faux dieux: Échec de l’ecuménisme by Etienne Crochet are early, praiseworthy attempts to separate nihil ad rem anthropological thinking from what is, at base, really only an economic debate.

  The profusion of popular pro-indigene writing need not concern us here; scholarly writing in this vein is still largely self-defeating because of its polemical tone and tendentious structure. Nevertheless, several recent works, one must say assiduously researched and presented in an evenhanded way, deserve careful reading: among them are Killing the Horses, Scattering the Sheep by Adrian Nightwalker; Iktome Reality by Thomas Yellow Calf; and Harrison Wood’s Bears Fall from the Sky. All, of course, are inimical to Western civilization.

  13. The surprising durability and resilience of the Castro regime are the subject of three new works: Los consejos militares de la Sierra Occidental by José Mellín; Die Entstehung eines PolizeiStaats in Castros Kuba by Ladislaw Krupp; and The Betrayal of Cuban Dreams by Aktannis Moulifiz. A new dual biography of Ernesto Guevara and Juan Perón, Guevara and Perón by Percy St. Evrain, takes advantage of recently discovered papers in the archives of the University of Buenos Aires to clarify Guevara’s role in the twenty-sixth of July movement. In his closing chapter, St. Evrain offers an original analysis of Castro’s demagoguery.

  14. At the Institute of Land Registry in Miami, work on recording and verifying the holdings of displaced Cuban families is now virtually complete. When these families are permitted to return to Cuba, they will take up the daunting but ultimately gratifying task of restoring the Cuban economy. The shattering experience of being driven from lands productively and continuously occupied, in some cases for more than four hundred years, will be over. The Indian psychologist and political scientist Nadali Misra, almost in anticipation of these events, has written a most pertinent essay, “The Healing Effect of Reclamation in Birth-Right Land Disputes” in Journal of Oceanian Psychology 24, no. 6 (1991): 402–28.

  15. Relevant issues of primogeniture are taken up in Furman Bodfield’s The Fate of the Second Son, pp. 206–35, 288–89, 310–12, and 416–24. The related issue of parental disappointment in offspring is addressed in Simon Bednar’s Suspended Gratification.

  I am preparing my son’s journals for publication, partly in the hope that a pattern of development in his revisionist thinking will emerge and that it will be seen to comprise part of a larger intellectual problem in his generation: a general denial of the good.

  16. In the modern era, with its jaded observations and typically cynical analysis of the human effort to ensure a rewarding life, it is challenging to convene an amicable forum for the discussion of simple virtue. Yet without virtuous behavior, every society unravels (see La degradación de la esperanza by Philip Llosa). To succeed in life, to post a record of tenacity, thrift, shrewdness, and courage, such as that which distinguishes the descendants of Bernardo Marín, requires the studied application of virtue. Without it there is no wealth, no leisure, no triumph. In his brilliant critical biography of De Gaulle, Emilion Klugge-Wrasse contends that if a leader is without virtue, those whom he leads will fail to comprehend their destiny; but a virtuous leader will inspire a nation with what is right in all spheres of activity, from aesthetic to econo
mic.

  In America, the role of virtuous achievement is so deeply embedded in the culture it can even transcend poor leadership. In Casting a Cloak Before the Sun, Cándido Argüello writes that in America it is impossible to understand either business or politics without reference to the desire to lead a virtuous life. This is a daring statement, worthy of careful review.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Argüello, Cándido. Casting a Cloak Before the Sun. Houston: Arte Público, 1989.

  Aruba, Juan Ramón. El florecimiento de la economía política occidental. Madrid: Planeta, 1980.

  Asahi, Kasumasa. Dotchakuteki keizai chitsujo no jokyo [The elimination of indigenous economic boundaries]. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1982.

  Assiminy, Rebecca Tide. Créatures de la lune. Paris: Lumière Blanche, 1985.

  Batson, Malcolm. A Woeful Tide. London: Faber & Faber, 1984.

  Bazzergahnah, Estone. The Triple Alliance: Environment, Indians, and Pacifists. Columbus, Oh.: Merrill, 1981.

  Bednar, Simon. Suspended Gratification. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

  Benito, Nolan I. The Asturian Temperament. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.

  Bodfield, Furman. The Fate of the Second Son. New York: Praeger, 1987.

  Borcello, George G. Galician Sailcraft. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1967.

  Bosschère, Jean-Bédel. L’Insurrection des indigènes de l’île de Cuba et la répression espagnole. Paris: Seuil, 1975.

  Bouchald, Guillaume. Libérateur des Antilles. Paris: Masson, 1973.

  Cagney, Muriel. The Distant Shore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

  Clackas, Miriam. The Vision of Cortés. Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 1983.

  Crochet, Etienne. Les faux dieux: Échec de l’ecuménisme. Paris: Gauthier, 1986.

  Demott, Arthur. The Rise of Cortés. Oxford: Pergamon, 1967.

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  Esperanza, Julio. Hernán Cortés: Creador de la identidad americana. Barcelona: Scriba, 1956.

  Huang, Hu-Li. The Advent of European Power. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

  Kildfray, Carlson. Subterranean Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

  Klugge-Wrasse, Emilion. De Gaulle et l’Europe d’après-guerre. Lyon: Meridien, 1962.

  Krupp, Ladislaw. Die Entstehung eines Polizei-Staats in Castros Kuba. München: Strauss, 1972.

  Latrousse, S.J., Henri. Servitus in Novo Mundo. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1888.

  Llosa, Philip. La degradación de la esperanza. Barcelona: Muñoz, 1989.

  Mellín, José. Los consejos militares de la Sierra Occidental. Mexico City: Campeador, 1975.

  Merriman, Wendell. The Policies of Cortés. Cape Town: Codding & Vandermeer, 1959.

  Moulifiz, Aktannis. The Betrayal of Cuban Dreams. London: Stokes, 1968.

  Nightwalker, Adrian. Killing the Horses, Scattering the Sheep. Chinle, Arizona: Navajo Community College Press, 1991.

  Peña, Manuel. “Terrenos en barbecho, trabajadores disponibles: Una visión de agricultura duradera.” Ph.D. diss., Southern Methodist University, 1988.

  Pernotti, Luigi. La punizione di Cuba. Milano: Milano Libri, 1926.

  Pestrovich, Maldano. Politika potrebleniia i politicheskii konflikt v Kube xvii veka [Consummation policies and political conflict in seventeenth-century Cuba]. Moscow: Politizdat, 1932.

  Poltcaza, Demster. Tobacco: Its Origin and Production. New York: Doubleday, 1954.

  Roberson, T. E. Tobacco Leaf: Its Culture and Cure. Washington: Institute for Tobacco Research, 1957.

  St. Evrain, Percy. Guevara and Perón. London: Macmillan, 1990.

  Tesraffe, Miguel. La caída de México. Mexico City: Ediciones Xochiti, 1984.

  Urbanowitz, Grigorii. Politicheskie namereniia Ispanii v Meksike [Spain’s designs in Mexico]. Leningrad: Nauka, 1985.

  vanKamp, Esther Manas. Cortés and the Institution of an Imperial Order. Montreal: Pontes, 1987.

  Wood, Harrison. Bears Fall from the Sky. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1984.

  Yellow Calf, Thomas. Iktome Reality. New York: Knopf, 1990.

  The Letters of Heaven

  When I was a boy of thirteen I found a packet of letters in my father’s desk. I picked the lock to the drawer one day with one of my mother’s hairpins. Then, to keep my curiosity from being discovered, I took the small desk key one time when my father was sick, and in a distant quarter of Lima I had a stranger make a copy. That way I didn’t run the risk, each time I opened the drawer, of mutilating the lock and having my sin exposed.

  The letters had been written in Castilian Spanish in the first decade of the seventeenth century between a man and a woman who did not sign their names but who wrote in exquisite phrases of desire and anguish about their passion for each other. During the years I read and reread these letters, I thought them composed of the most beautiful and, at the same time, the most illicit of human statements. The language of enthrallment was so unrestrained that the images existed for me outside the realm of sin and redemption, beyond the sphere of the Church. Please understand the complication—sometimes in reading the words I found myself with a powerful erection, but I did not consider this state of excitement, the vibrating ventilation of my skin, a violation of the sixth or ninth commandment. I felt my longing took place on another plane. I felt that my desire drew on many human emotions, and so was round, perfectly round and full—hunger, weeping, joy, even a peculiar fleeting anger. The shuddering ecstasy I experienced did not produce for me the sign of a sinful act, which I always imagined as quills sprouting suddenly from my face.

  Repeated readings would eventually have broken the letters’ folds and marred them, so I copied each one out, word for word, and hid the copies in the ceiling of the house. I rarely went afterward to that drawer in my father’s desk. When I did, I held what I called the letters of heaven so respectfully my fingers trembled. I wanted desperately to protect a quality in them I understood as purity. I could have memorized them—they were short and there were only nine—but I felt to memorize the letters would have diminished their effect. I was then, too, someone anxious about the lack of substance in memory.

  In 1967, when I was eighteen, my father developed cancer. Without health insurance he knew his death was imminent, and so he soon completed the arrangements he wished to make with everyone, loving gestures that put each of us at ease. He spoke with my two uncles, the brothers with whom he ran a tannery, about the disposition of his interest there, including the skiving knives and mallets that had been his father’s. He bestowed small gifts on each of his relatives. And through the generosity of his love, by the breadth of his consideration of us, he steered my mother and my sisters and myself toward a rarefied emotional position. It was as though he were tearing himself neatly out of a book while taking pains to see the page would not be missed. Even as he was dying we began to sense that we were whole without him. We would miss him very much, but he was leaving us with a grief that strengthened us.

  When it came my turn to have a private moment with my father, he said without warning, “The letters, Ramón, are the most holy, the most beautiful relics in our family. You must protect them. If you have children, give them to the child who is most drawn to them. If you do not, look among your sisters’ children for the one who should receive them.”

  At eighteen I was too old to behave like a child, even before a dying father. I could not openly and fully express the remorse and embarrassment I felt at that moment. I did not know how to beg his forgiveness. I sensed for the first time that my clandestine involvement with the letters had been a sin.

  “Who wrote them?” I asked.

  “Her name was Isabel, the man was called Martín.”

  “Were they relatives who came to Peru?”

  “Yes. Isabel’s brother Fernandino is your ancestor on my father’s side, fourteen generations back.”


  I thought about that name, Fernandino, and I suddenly felt the quills pressing against the skin of my scalp. “And the man who loved her, Martín—who were his descendants? Are they living here?”

  “He did not have any children,” my father answered. After a moment he said, “Is this hard for you, Ramón?”

  The quills were now out. I wanted to run far away until I disappeared like an ash in the wind. “Is it Rosa de Lima?” I asked. I felt tears of fright.

  “Yes,” he said, reaching for my hand and holding it. “She was Rosa de Lima, he was Martín de Porres.”

  I was confounded. “These are the letters of saints!” I blurted.

  “They are.”

  “But how can you—it is blasphemy, it is blasphemous!”

  “No, no, Ramón, it is love. It is the love of Christ. My son, you must already know this in your soul.”

  “I know nothing,” I shouted, pulling my hand away, “except that there is a sin here, a terrible sin.” I did not want my feelings to overwhelm me, but I could feel the flush of an emotion akin to rage building inexorably with the evidence of this deception.

  “There is no sin here, Ramón. I do not even believe your taking my key and making a copy was a sin. You were the person meant to have these letters.”

  “But what were they doing?” I yelled at him. “What were they doing?”

  “Whatever was between them, all my life I have believed it was with God’s blessing.”

  “Please excuse me, Father, but how can you speak like this on your deathbed!”

  “Isn’t it just now, just in this moment, Ramón, that you have changed your mind about what you have read and thought about for so many years? And yet, what has changed? Nothing. Only that another person knows. It is not the discovery of sin that is filling you with insecurity, Ramón, it is the discovery of the intimacy of real people.”