Showing posts with label living history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label living history. Show all posts

Friday, February 25, 2022

It's September 1939

Did any of the young German men in motorcycles with sidecars, motorized armor carriers, tanks and plain trucks crossing into Poland would end in devastation from London to Moscow 6 years later, with their own country nothing but rubble? 

Probably not.

I don't think any of us can imagine the major cities of the world flattened by nuclear weapons. Yet we are at the brink.

Vladimir Putin, who thinks he is a Tsar, has reminded us of past dictators who risked world peace to attain essentially minor geopolitical gains along their countries' borders. 

Would Hitler have stopped at splitting Poland with Stalin if Britain and France had not declared war? Will Putin stop at overthrowing the present Ukrainian government and "de-nazifying" (whatever that means and it isn't good) the country? Will Ukraine even be allowed to be a separate country? Then, when does he make a grab for Poland and Romania?

Are we at the beginning of the last World War?




Wednesday, January 19, 2022

It's August 1939 in Warsaw

You're a retired gent enjoying your sauterne in the late summer breeze at an outdoor table at a cafe in Warsaw. All right, so the papers say Nazis massing on the western border and Soviets on the east. Important men are warning each other loudly. Young people, these days!

Actually ...

... Russians are reportedly massing at a border (west, north, south of Ukraine). Important men are warning one another. Meanwhile, there's a global pandemic. 

... The United States has at its helm a likable fellow who can't even get the crazies in his (and my) own political party in Congress to agree to such things as essential as voting rights for all ... are we ready for Trump to become the 47th president in three years?

... The latest movies and internet memes inform me about "salad tossing," which I am told has to do with a human tongue in another person's derriere. (Yes, Virginia, this is a thing.)

... Oh, and let's not forget, an ecological disaster of climatological origin will engulf the Earth in less than 20 years. Just this week there was a tsunami advisory issued for Vancouver Island, of all places!

"To wieści z jeziora Lake Wobegon," as they say in Warsaw. Santé!


Saturday, November 26, 2016

Fidel and I

Towards the middle of April 1959, when I was still an elementary schoolboy, I had a chance meeting with a personage who has just died. Many years later that person still affected the world. It happened more or less like this.

At that time, my father served as a diplomat in Washington, D.C., sent by the government of President Arturo Frondizi of Argentina.

Given my age I was not told too much about my father's work. It was, as always, something to do with economics. My father had taught me the law of supply and demand and, in a children's history book, I had read something about a certain Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin who had caused a stir in the world of adults.

We were all in the middle of a Cold War with the Soviet Union, with the possibility of nuclear war. All this was very complicated, interesting and frightening at the same time.

Years before in New York, where I was born, I had startled the nuns in my school the day the teacher asked us what our Daddies did, as part of a lesson on the idea of ​​working, and I replied "he's a Communist." My mother asked me about it and managed to make out that I had meant "economist." At my age the two words were very similar. My father was not a Communist, not by long shot.

But that was before the episode about which I write, which was in 1959, months after the triumph of the Cuban insurrection led by Fidel Castro (and, curiously enough, equipped by no less than the Central Intelligence Agency). In April, Fidel came to Washington for 11 days to meet with officials, but also to visit the capital.

It should be understood that in April 1959 Fidel Castro was not known as a Communist. He was a hero to almost everyone. Richard Nixon, who had debated with Nikita Khrushchev of the USSR, pronounced him "almost naive in ideological matters" after interviewing him.

Fidel had overthrown a dictator, one those of the 1940s and 1950s in Latin America. The dictator had been one of those more or less demagogic leaders, megalomaniacs, who censored the press and barred criticism, ideologically eclectic, some accomplishing socioeconomic improvements and some not. Getulio Vargas in Brazil, Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, Marcos Pérez Jiménez of Venzuela, the three Somozas of the dynastic dictatorship in Nicaragua, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, François Duvalier of Haiti and, of course, Fulgencio Batista of Cuba.

At that time, my family was looking for a house and meanwhile we were staying in a hotel where many diplomats and foreign groups came. I was a multilingual kid who talked to everyone and I met a group of young Cubans, young men and women in their 20s, who adopted me as their mascot and invited me everywhere.

Fidel arrived in the city and my Cuban friends were ecstatic, telling me that they were going to go in the caravan of cars that would accompany the new Cuban president to visit George Washington's home in Mount Vernon, Va., about an hour from Washington.

I got caught up in the excitement and ran with one of them to beg my mom for permission to go with them. My mother had doubts but I convinced her. The day arrived and she made me put on a suit, used gel on my hair to make it stiff as a rock, and I left, riding on the hood of a convertible like parade model, my feet held to the back seat by two of my Cuban friends.

We arrived at Mount Vernon and after waiting in line I found myself in front of a bearded man who seemed to me very tall. I told him what my mother had told me, that my parents and grandparents extended the congratulations of Argentina. He told me something else that I don't remember and urged me to tell him something of what I thought.

And then my request came out: "I would like a uniform like yours."

He smiled, told some of the men around him to take my information and send me a uniform. I was happy. Fidel Castro would send me another outfit to play in, along with my cowboy clothes and my civil war soldier and baseball uniforms.

My family did not have much occasion to receive the uniform. Meanwhile, my father became an advisor to Frondizi in the Pink House, Argentina's version of the White House. In that position he participated in a private meeting with Che Guevara, the latter in his capacity as Minister of Industry of the Republic of Cuba, and in a more protocolary encounter with Fidel Castro in Punta del Este, Uruguay. No one told me, still a boy, what was said in such high level gatherings.

Years later, around 1990 I found myself, as spokesman for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, making the case on television for ending the useless economic blockade of Cuba, a reality that has not yet come to pass, despite the resumption of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States.

From my point of view, Fidel was less nefarious than those who hate him say, but also less spectacular than those who adore him think.

Undoubtedly, as Brazilian economist Celso Furtado explained, Cuba's socio-economic success in eliminating the extreme poverty that still afflicts much larger Latin American countries is an example that should inspire shame in all the governments of the continent. On the other hand, there should be some way to achieve similar achievements without a Stalinist regime.

Today, as news of Fidel's death reached me, I have different complaint: he never sent me the Cuban guerrilla uniform I had asked for!

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Forty years later, the other Sept. 11 still sears


There were two reasons I cheered in November 1970, when Salvador Allende, a socialist, was democratically elected in Chile. Neither proved true in large part as a result of what Americans might call the "other" Sept. 11: that of the Chilean coup in 1973, 40 years ago today.

First and foremost, I thought the election of a socialist in Latin America, where I had lived for eight years, would at last bring profound social change where it was needed in a peaceful way. This would silence the two groups of naysayers of the day.

In one corner were those who thought defending democracy was worth a little and temporary dictatorship supported by overt or covert U.S. military intervention. Democracy was at the heart of Western Christian civilization (I think they capitalized all three), which was besieged by the Russian atheist hordes.

I was Western and democratic-minded, or at least I liked to speak out. I was Christian to the point of toying with becoming a man of the cloth. I was civilized enough to have a chancery in my head, telling me which fork to use and whom to seat where. The Russians seemed a brutish cabbage culture with a funny alphabet; their Communism might not be bad in principle, but atheism was, always!

Opposing those naysayers and what might be called my nurtured sympathies were those who were willing to bring about change at any cost. Let rivers of the oppressors' blood flow through the streets until at last only the disinherited could claim their right share of Earth's bounty and what they could fashion from it with worker muscles.

This, too, appealed to me. I had tutored children in the dirty, smelly appalling shanty towns of Buenos Aires that were so very appropriately called "Misery Villages" (Villa Miserias). I had wandered into fairly rough industrial districts as a volunteer to teach (of all the useless skills!) English, to rough-hewn men from a sweaty world of machinery, factories and unions.

In those days change was blowin' in the wind, wasn’t it? I had been moved to tears reading Maxim Gorky's The Mother, in which revolutionary characters distributed Bibles as fodder for workers' consciousness raising. The Latin American bishops' letter from Medellín a year earlier had practically blessed what some called a "Christian revolution."

My problem was with violence and dictatorship of the proletariat, which always ended up being anything but. I could not brook brute force and compulsion as the seed of a better world.

Allende's Chile squared the circle. Those Chileans went and elected (what’s more peacefully democratic than that?) a socialist (I didn't doubt the need for thoroughgoing change).

Oh, yes, you're wondering about my second reason to cheer. It was peevish glee at the presumptive ruin of the career of an international bureaucrat I thought had personally hurt my family. The man was Chilean, not a socialist and not likely to get along well with the new people in Santiago.

I was wrong on both counts.

Allende was blocked at every step (although to be fair, his sense of symbolism was sometimes a little naïve) and he died fighting Chilean army, whose Prussian uniforms at the time lent Santiago the air of a Hollywood set for a World War II film.

The general who followed him had coined in 1965 a name for an entirely new form of government, "the National Security State," a martial law rule that may have been Western, but was sorely lacking in civilization or Christianity. This kind of regime displaced, with U.S. approval (remember Nixon and Ford?), admittedly weak democracies in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay and later in Central America.

So much for peaceful democratic change!

The bureaucrat, you ask? He did fine and managed the political mambo with both Allende and Pinochet. Bureaucrats, like rats, are survivors.

So we come to 40 years later.

I think back and am left with a verse from the song by Uruguayan singer Jorge Drexler, "Al otro lado del río" (On the other side of the river):

Sobre todo, creo que
no todo está perdido.
Tanta lágrima, tanta lágrima, y yo
soy un vaso vacío...


(Above all, I believe that
all is not lost
So many tears, so many tears and I
am an empty vessel ...)