No longer the world’s sugar bowl, not nearly, the northeast became the most tragic casualty of sugarcane monoculture.
Some years before it got sacrificed on the altar of the world market, this immense desert was green. Sugar murdered the forest and the fertile lands. Now the northeast produced ever less sugar and ever more thorns and criminals.
In those solitudes lived the dragon of drought and the bandit Lampião.
At the start of each workday, Lampião would kiss his knife:
“Are you feeling brave?”
“Brave? I couldn’t say. I’m in the habit.”
In the end, he lost his habit and his head. Lieutenant João Bezerra decapitated him for a reward of twelve automobiles, by which time the government had forgotten that it awarded Lampião the rank of army captain so he would hunt down Communists. They displayed triumphantly his confiscated assets: a Napoleon hat covered in little coins, five fake diamond rings, a fifth of White Horse whiskey, a bottle of Fleurs d’Amour perfume, a waterproof cloak, and various other knickknacks.
FORBIDDEN TO BE A COUNTRY
Under his broad-brimmed hat, he disappears.
Since 1926, a flea named Augusto César Sandino has been driving the invading giant crazy.
Thousands of Marines have been in Nicaragua for years, but the heavy military machine of the United States cannot manage to swat the leaping army of patriotic peasants.
“God and the mountains are our allies,” Sandino says.
And he says that he and Nicaragua also have the good luck of suffering from a severe case of latinamericanitis.
Sandino has two secretaries, his two right hands: one is Salvadorean, Augustín Farabundo Martí, the other Honduran, José Esteban Pavletich. General Manuel María Girón Ruano, a Guatemalan, is the only one who knows how to work the little cannon they call “Cutie,” which in his hands can shoot down airplanes. In battle, several men have won positions of command: José León Díaz, a Salvadorean, Manuel González, a Honduran, the Venezuelan Carlos Aponte, the Mexican José de Paredes, the Dominican Gregorio Urbano Gilbert, and the Colombians Alfonso Alexander and Rubén Ardila Gómez.
The invaders call Sandino a “bandit.”
He appreciates the joke:
“So George Washington was a bandit? He fought for the same thing.”
And he appreciates the donations: Browning rifles, Thompson sub-machine guns, and all the weapons and munitions the Marines leave behind in their courageous retreats.
RESURRECTION OF SANDINO
In 1933, the Marines, humiliated, left Nicaragua.
They left, but they remained. They had trained Anastasio Somoza and his troops to be their replacement.
And Sandino, victorious in war, was defeated in an act of treason.
He was killed in an ambush in 1934. From behind it must have been.
“You shouldn’t take death seriously,” he liked to say. “It is but a moment’s discomfort.”
Although his name was outlawed, and outlawed too was his memory, forty-five years later the Sandinistas overthrew the dictatorship of his assassin and his assassin’s children.
And then Nicaragua, little country, barefoot country, managed to commit the insolence of resisting for ten years a mad assault by the greatest military power in the world. That happened from 1979 on, thanks to those secret muscles that do not appear in any book on anatomy.
BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PROPAGATION OF DEMOCRACY IN THE AMERICAS
In 1915, the United States invaded Haiti. In the name of his government, Secretary of State Robert Lansing explained that the Negro race was incapable of governing itself, due to its “inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization, which are irksome to their physical nature.” The invaders stayed nineteen years. The leader of the Haitian patriots was nailed to a door, his arms spread out in a cross.
The occupation of Nicaragua lasted twenty-one years and led to the Somoza dictatorship, while the occupation of the Dominican Republic lasted nine years and led to the Trujillo dictatorship.
In 1954, the United States launched democracy in Guatemala with aerial bombardments that put an end to free elections and other perversions. In 1964, the generals who put an end to free elections and other perversions in Brazil received money, weapons, oil, and congratulations from the White House. Something similar occurred in Bolivia, where one studious fellow came to the conclusion that no coup d’état ever occurs in the United States because it has no U.S. Embassy.
That lesson was confirmed when General Augusto Pinochet answered Henry Kissinger’s cry of alarm and kept Chile from “going communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
Around the same time, the United States bombed three thousand poor Panamanians in order to capture a disgruntled former employee, sent troops to Santo Domingo to frustrate the return of a democratically elected president, and had no choice but to attack Nicaragua to keep Nicaragua from invading the United States through Texas.
At that point, Cuba had already received the affectionate visit of airplanes, ships, bombs, mercenaries, and millionaires sent on a pedagogic mission from Washington. They got no farther than the Bay of Pigs.
FORBIDDEN TO BE A WORKER
Charlie the Tramp picks up a red rag fallen to the pavement from the back of a passing truck. He waves it and shouts to the driver just as a demonstration of workers marches up behind him, and suddenly, without knowing why, he finds himself being chased and beaten by the police.
Modern Times is the last movie that stars this character. And Chaplin, his father, is bidding adieu not only to his loveable creation, but also to silent film.
The movie does not merit a single Oscar nomination. Hollywood does not care one bit for the disagreeable pertinence of the subject matter, the epic of the little guy trapped in the gears of the industrial era in the years following the Crash of 1929.
A tragedy that evokes laughter, an implacable and moving portrait of the times: machines eat people and steal jobs, the human hand is indistinguishable from other tools, and the workers, who imitate machines, do not get sick, they rust.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Lord Byron had already concluded:
“It is easier now to manufacture people than machines.”
FORBIDDEN TO BE ABNORMAL
People who were physically, mentally, or morally abnormal, murderers, the depraved, imbeciles, crazies, masturbators, drunks, vagrants, beggars, and prostitutes were all lying in wait for their chance to plant a bad seed in the virtuous earth of the United States.
In 1907, the state of Indiana became the first place in the world where the law authorized compulsory sterilization.
By 1942, forty thousand patients in the public hospitals of twenty-eight states had been sterilized against their will. All of them poor or very poor, many of them black, a few Puerto Rican, not a few Native American.
The letters that poured in to the Human Betterment Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to saving the species, pleaded for assistance. One college student told of being on the point of marrying a young man who appeared normal, but his ears were too small and they looked a bit like they were on upside down:
“I have been advised by a physician that if we have children it may result in something degenerate.”
An extremely tall couple asked for help:
“We do not wish to bring abnormally tall children into the world.”
In a letter dated June 1941, another college student said that a class-mate was retarded and that she turned her in because she might give birth to idiots.
Harry Laughlin, the foundation’s ideological inspiration, received an honorary doctorate in 1936 from the University of Heidelberg for his contribution to the Reich’s campaign for racial hygiene.
Laughlin was obsessed with epileptics. He maintained they were the equivalent of the retarded but more dangerous, and that there was no place for them in a normal society. Hitler’s “Law for the Prevention of Defective Prog
eny” imposed obligatory sterilization on the retarded, schizophrenics, manic depressives, the physically deformed, the deaf, the blind . . . and epileptics.
Laughlin himself was epileptic. No one knew.
FORBIDDEN TO BE JEWISH
In 1935, the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor,” and other laws brought in simultaneously, laid the foundation for a national identity based on biology.
Anyone who had Jewish blood, even a few drops, could not be a German citizen or marry a German citizen.
According to the authorities, the Jews were not Jews because of their religion or their language, but because of their race. It was not an easy distinction to define. Nazi experts found inspiration in the bountiful history of racism in the world, and they relied on the invaluable assistance of the company IBM.
Engineers at IBM designed forms and perforated cards to record the physical characteristics and genetic history of every person. And they set up a far-reaching high-speed automated system for identifying complete Jews, half-Jews, and those who had more than a sixteenth part Jewish blood circulating in their veins.
SOCIAL HYGIENE, RACIAL PURITY
About a quarter of a million Germans were sterilized between 1935 and 1939.
Then came extermination.
The deformed, the retarded, and the insane were the first to enter the gas chambers in Hitler’s camps.
Seventy thousand psychiatric patients were murdered between 1940 and 1941.
Next, “the final solution” was applied to the Jews, the Reds, the Gypsies, the homosexuals . . .
ROAD RAGE
Outskirts of Seville, winter of 1936: the Spanish elections are imminent.
A gentleman is riding about his lands, when a man in tatters crosses his path.
Without getting off his horse, the gentleman calls him over and puts in his hand a coin and a list of candidates.
The man lets them fall, coin and list, and turning his back he says:
“In my hunger, I’m in charge.”
VICTORIA
Madrid, winter of 1936: Victoria Kent is elected to Congress.
Her popularity comes from prison reform.
When she first initiated reforms, her numerous enemies accused her of putting a helpless Spain in the hands of criminals. But Victoria, who had worked in prisons and had not just heard about human pain, pressed forward:
she closed prisons that were uninhabitable, which was most of them,
she instituted weekend passes,
she freed all prisoners over seventy years old,
she built sports fields and voluntary workshops,
she shut down the punishment cells,
she melted down the chains, shackles, and bars,
and turned all that iron into a huge sculpture of Concepción Arenal.
THE DEVIL IS RED
Melilla, summer of 1936: a coup d’état overthrows the Spanish Republic.
The ideological motivations would be explained some time later by Minister of Information Gabriel Arias-Salgado:
“The Devil lives in an oil well in Baku, and from there he sends instructions to the Communists.”
Incense versus sulfur, good versus evil, the Crusades of Christianity versus the grandchildren of Cain. We must do away with the Reds before the Reds do away with Spain: prisoners are living like kings, teachers are booting priests from the classroom, women are voting like men, divorce is debasing holy matrimony, agrarian reform is threatening the Church’s dominion over the land . . .
The coup is born killing, and from its first steps is blatantly open about it.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco:
“I will save Spain from Marxism at any price.”
“What if that means shooting half of Spain?”
“Whatever it takes.”
General José Millán-Astray:
“Long live death!”
General Emilio Mola:
“Anyone who defends the Popular Front, openly or secretly, must be shot.”
General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano:
“Start digging graves!”
The Civil War is the name of the bloodbath unleashed by the coup d’état. The term places an equals sign between democracy defending itself and the putsch attacking it, between militia and military, between the government elected by the people and the big shot chosen by the grace of God.
LAST WISH
La Coruña, summer of 1936: Bebel García is shot by a firing squad.
Bebel plays lefty, thinks lefty.
In the soccer stadium he wears the jersey of Depor. Outside the stadium he wears the jersey of the Young Socialists.
Eleven days after Franco’s coup, having just turned twenty-one, Bebel stands before the firing squad:
“Just a minute,” he commands.
And the soldiers, Galicians like him, crazy about soccer like him, obey.
Bebel slowly opens his fly, button by button, and facing the firing squad he takes a long piss.
Then he buttons up.
“Go ahead.”
ROSARIO
Villarejo de Salvanés, summer of 1936: Rosario Sánchez Mora heads for the front lines.
She was in sewing class when several militiamen came looking for volunteers. She threw her needlework to the floor and leaped aboard the truck, having just turned seventeen, wearing her brand-new layered skirt, and carrying a fifteen-pound musket like a baby in her arms.
At the front she becomes a dynamiter. In one battle, she lights the fuse of a homemade bomb made from a condensed-milk can filled with nails. The bomb explodes before it gets thrown. She loses her hand but not her life, thanks to a buddy who makes a tourniquet from the straps of his sandals.
After that, Rosario wants to remain in the trenches, but she is not allowed. The Republican militias need to become an army, and an army is no place for a woman. After a lot of arguing she gets permission to deliver mail to the trenches and is given the rank of sergeant.
At the end of the war, people from her town do her the favor of turning her in, and she is condemned to death.
Before dawn each day, she awaits the firing squad.
Time passes.
They do not shoot her.
Years later, when she gets out of jail, she sells contraband cigarettes in Madrid, near the statue of the goddess Cybele.
GUERNICA
Paris, spring of 1937: Pablo Picasso wakes up and reads.
He reads the newspaper while having breakfast in his studio.
His coffee grows cold in the cup.
German planes have razed the city of Guernica. For three hours the Nazi air force chased and machine-gunned people fleeing the burning city.
General Franco insists that Guernica has been set aflame by Asturian dynamiters and Basque pyromaniacs from the ranks of the Communists.
Two years later in Madrid, Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of the German forces in Spain, sits beside Franco at the victory parade: killing Spaniards was Hitler’s rehearsal for his impending world war.
Many years later in New York, Colin Powell makes a speech at the United Nations to announce the imminent annihilation of Iraq.
While he speaks, the back of the room is hidden from view, Guernica is hidden from view. The reproduction of Picasso’s painting, which hangs there, is concealed behind an enormous blue cloth.
UN officials decided it was not the most appropriate backdrop for the proclamation of a new round of butchery.
THE COMMANDER WHO CAME FROM AFAR
Brunete, summer of 1937: in mid-battle Oliver Law takes a bullet in the breast.
Oliver is black and Red and a workingman. He left Chicago to fight for the Spanish Republic in the ranks of the Lincoln Brigade.
In the brigade, blacks do not form a separate regiment. For the first time in the history of the United States, whites and blacks mix. And for the first time in the history of the United States, white soldiers obey the orders of a black commanding officer.
An unusual co
mmander: when Oliver Law gives the order to attack, he does not watch his men through binoculars. He is the first to join the fight.
But then all the volunteers in the international brigades are unusual. They do not fight to win medals or conquer land or capture oil wells.
Sometimes Oliver wonders:
“Since this is a war between whites, who for centuries have held us in slavery, why am I, a Negro, why am I here?”
And he answers:
“We came to wipe out the Fascists.”
And laughing he adds, as if it were a joke:
“Some of us must die doing that job.”
RAMÓN
Mediterranean Sea, fall of 1938: Ramón Franco explodes in the air.
In 1926 he had crossed the ocean from Huelva to Buenos Aires in an airplane named Plus Ultra. And while the world applauded his feat, he celebrated with nights of carousing, toasting his glory, singing the Marseillaise, and cursing kings and popes.
Not long after that, on a drunk, he flew his plane over the Royal Palace in Madrid and refrained from dropping the bombs only because children were playing in the gardens.
He put two and two together and on he went: he raised the Republican flag, took part in an anarchist uprising, was elected to Congress on the Catalan nationalist ticket, and was charged by a woman with bigamy, although in truth it was trigamy.
But when his brother Francisco rebelled against the Republic, Ramón Franco suffered a sudden attack of familyitis and joined the ranks of the Cross and the Sword.