Lines



1

We stayed in Coyoacán for a week, at L.'s apartment off avenida Tasqueña, near the southern regional bus terminal. L.'s landlady had survived the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 when she was a student at UNAM. To this day she avoided conversation with strangers, eyeing us nervously when we were introduced to her in the courtyard one afternoon. She lived enclosed in hard silence, megalopolis valley.

The Octavio Paz and Gandhi bookstores were conveniently across the street from each other, a quick bus ride away from the apartment. While we were in DF, the students at UNAM had occupied the university in protest of recent tuition increases. L. offered to get us onto campus to see the improvised village the students were maintaining amid classrooms, offices, auditoriums and courtyards. But we were so enthralled by the rest of the city that we never got to UNAM. I saw the TV images and read daily accounts in the newspapers, and I still remember our feeling of solidarity with those students.

It was a distinct season induced by travel. DF offered a subtle vision before the dread hour we now inhabit had fully arrived. I think of those massive avenues that cut across the brutal, flat city through crowded successions of neighborhoods flashing below us on elevated subway routes, trying to fit whose lines in my notebook.



2

It sounds like something out of Walcott

Your invocations are futile, did you?

Understand this verse to worsen thee

Procedural contraption for bibliotheque

On a phone call from Caracas to me

This afternoon my name calls me across

The sea, over Florida's memory banks

Theoretically-inclined poems sometimes

Fake intentions, novelty might delight

Whose beats occasion defeat

Orphan glimpse I'm not, so thanks

Beside tallest skyscrapers, a work

For your language assumption guide

I wrote it in plain morning



3

I listen to Sigur Rós, "Agaetis byrjun"
& "Avalon," three times today

always thinking of the line,
the verse

I am excited and anxious about the line

I never really
understand her requirements

I leave it up to the notebook



4

Why do you write?

What is the need for print?

Where are the poems and why

won't they speak?

It's formed by interruptions, I like

I like these floes

Traffic congested my lines

As did chance, the fortitude

of this city, a drastic allegiance



5

The rain disappears
into my room
where I eat trees
like air, this same
clear light
that same flame
originary code
while I speak
the sidewalk's guide

rhyme seems to move
easily with false
rhetorical confidence

likewise, rain is crucial
to the anonymous
drift of paneled
library walls, the
rare edges & past
elegance we've built
prisons inhabited
fictional for your

Avalon


Which is number 9 on the Sigur Rós CD, repeat. Finished reading the short stories by Juan Villoro. In the penultimate one, a group of friends goes into the desert to find peyote. One of them gets lost for a night and kills a coyote with a knife after the animal attacks him. When he eventually finds his way back to his group of friends the next day, he is wearing the coyote's fur on his back, hallucinating from lack of food and water.

*

"[Dipesh] Chakrabarty's study also helps to clarify the ways in which we discuss and think of the 'high' cultures of the so-called developing countries: not only the ancient traditions, but the modern and Modernist ones as well. This is an area of self-consciousness, and a field of inquiry, that is potentially vast, important and problematic; it also happens to be one that 'cultural studies' has largely missed out on, being more concerned with popular culture and narratives of resistance to empire. Yet for almost two hundred years, in countries like India, there has been a self-consciousness (and it still exists today) which asks to be judged and understood by 'universal' standards. It isin't possible to begin to discuss that self-consciousness, or sense of identity, without discussing in what way that universalism both formed and circumscribed it.

In some regards, then, cultural studies is hostage to the kind of historicism that Chakrabarty talks about: it can't deal with the emergence of high Modernism in postcolonial countries except with a degree of suspicion and embarrassment, partly because of the elite contexts of that Modernism, but partly, surely, for covertly historicist reasons, such as a belief that no Modernism outside Europe can be absolutely genuine."

{ Amit Chaudhuri, "In the Waiting-Room of History," London Review of Books, 24 June 2004 }

*

Add to the reading list Ludovico Silva's brilliant book of essays on Venezuelan poetry, La torre de los ángeles (Monte Ávila Editores, 1991). Silva discusses the poetry of José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Vicente Gerbasi, Juan Sánchez Peláez, Rafael Cadenas, Juan Calzadilla, Alfredo Silva Estrada, Alfredo Chacón, Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Ramón Palomares, Elizabeth Schön, and the poets of the "Generación de 1958." Silva wrote these essays during the mid 1970s, and several of them appeared in El Nacional, although Monte Ávila did not publish them until shortly before his death in 1988.

*

I remember Carl Rakosi wore a purple baseball hat at Naropa the summer I studied there, in 1993. I attended his reading but I had not read any of his work and my notebook from the time has little mention of him or his poetry.

*

"Constante timidez
que permanece suspendida
en la recta asaltando desde su comienzo
y en la curva alargándose sobre lo extendido níveo
de lo siempre requerido."

{ Elizabeth Schön, En el allá disparado desde ningún comienzo, 1962 }

Absences


Smear out the last star.
No lights from the islands
Or hills. In the great square
The prolonged vowel of silence
Makes itself plainly heard
Round the ghost of a headland
Clouds, leaves, shreds of bird
Eddy, hindering the wind.

No vigils left to keep.
No enemies left to slaughter.
The rough roofs of the slopes,
Loosely thatched with splayed water,
Only shelter microliths and fossils.
Unwatched, the rainbows build
On the architraves of hills.
No wounds left to be healed.

Nobody left to be beautiful.
No polyp admiral to sip
Blood and whiskey from a skull
While fingering his warships.
Terrible relics, by tiderace
Untouched, the stromalites breathe.
Bubbles plop on the surface,
Disturbing the balance of death.

No sound would be heard if
So much silence was not heard.
Clouds scuff like sheep on the cliff.
The echoes of stones are restored.
No longer any foreshore
Or any abyss, this
World only held together
By its variety of absences.


Dom Moraes
(1938-2004)

A un paso de la medianoche / Juan Sánchez Peláez

At one step from midnight

stand the souls

near that room


at two steps

they touch the windows


at infinity's third hour

they remain identical

under the sun


though they shine more


and you tremble

and don't hear anything

because they keep quiet


and the distance that

separates us from them

is large


they've left at sunrise

from here


now close your door

and light a lamp.




*




A un paso de la medianoche

están las almas

cerca de esa habitación


a dos pasos

tocan las ventanas


a las tres horas de lo infinito

permanecen idénticas

bajo el sol


aunque brillan más


y tú tiemblas

y no oyes nada

porque guardan silencio


y la distancia que nos

separa de ellas

es grande


al amanecer se han ido

desde aquí


cierra ahora tu puerta

y prende una lámpara.




(Inti: Revista de Literatura Hispánica, No. 49-50, Primavera-Otoño 1999, Providence RI)

Sólo los muertos hablan / Héctor Silva Michelena

Only the Dead Speak

On one occasion, a journalist asked the Cuban writer Roberto Fernández Retamar when they would publish the work of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a great Cuban writer, well-known beyond borders in the art of fiction. Fernández Retamar replied that they would publish and distribute it after the death of his exiled and execrated compatriot.

Cabrera Infante would be denied the pleasure of having his work circulate in his homeland, the summit of humanity, where the spirit's greatest values endure. The same thing happened to the master of narrative, and the poet, José Lezama Lima, whose work was published by the Castro regime only after his death. The great Severo Sarduy did not have better luck. His Cristo de la rue Jacob was only able to leave the Parisian street and cross the ocean after his crystal figurine fell, torn to pieces. The tides of Cuban sadness rise when the dead cry their words.

In Venezuela, where the spirit of freedom is drowned, something worse than that uncouth response has ocurred. The victims were the poets Alberto Arvelo Torrealba and Ludovico Silva, who were subjected to "revolutionary" surgeries in order to turn them into puppets of the regime.

The children of the great poet from Barinas corrected the uneloquent lieutenant colonel who, in unhappy ignorance, obscenely manipulated the meaning of the poem, which has nothing to do with the half-formed plans that crowd his prosaic brain. The writer Teresa Espar, from the Universidad de los Andes, uncovers the scheme, when she says: "These two archetypes (Florentino and the Devil) of the Venezuelan identity are one and the other of a single legendary and magical voice..." They are a legend of a man and the devil, part of our cultural heritage. I heard the original version from the "Cantata Criolla" by the master Antonio Estévez, which premiered at the Concha Acústica. The lieutenant colonel disfigured the poem in one of his over-excited Sunday performances.

Ludovico Silva also suffered the effects of this military man degraded by his own actions, during the swearing in ceremony for the new Minister of Culture, when he cited phrases from his work regarding culture as a tool for the transformation of consciousness. As my brother's literary executor, I think that Ludovico would be furious hearing his name spoken by such thorny lips. What I am sure of is that it would have bothered him to see himself used as toilet paper by the one who defecates on the country. Ludovico always practiced an open Marxism, so that the world could know the portrait of Marx, without deformations. Ludovico also said: "Culture has come to disgust me when it is the fiction of rulers and flatterers."

Regarding this lieutenant colonel, one can affirm his new habit is reciting the verse by Boris Vian: "I will spit on your graves."

In Venezuela, as in Cuba, only the dead speak. We attend a poor imitation of The Dead Poets Society, and an infinite ailment of melancholy which Sineth Melinkoff tells us.




{ Héctor Silva Michelena, TalCual, 21 June 2004 }

Sonic Nurse


New Hampshire through the two guitars and bass
as there were three cities then there were three
times the travelling reading as escape or survival
a fictional voice and trajectory matters disguise

Chosen quatrains what does North Tampa offer it
acquires architecture and the space to hold them
as far as the swamps and eventually Arden around
the Hillsborough river at Flatwoods State Forest.

The Low End Theory


Photographs marked with
fading seriousness, stanzas

fading flesh drawn out to ends
with age our wrinkles a gravity

pulled skeleton drawn into slim
wire flames through our screen

greener cut wood sounding cracks
all features under symbology one

neighborhood a dream ffwd to 1980
La Trinidad Caracas, resourceful

also known as Chapoquoit, confluence
of place and word, computerless

what made it this car drive between
Allston and Cambridge what year

is this intended to be a pamphlet
on the protagonist of Edward Upward's

trilogy The Spiral Ascent
that same style exaggerated in

Journey to the Border, its
political undertones, taut prose.

Permanent


All beauty dies, past
especially the love
in love with loveliness
and youth, how vain,

how bittersweet, this might
be the last night we need
meet, quick the pace,
rapid the feet, as

the tune persists in the
ever constant moon,
its reason clear by contrast.

[1969]

{ John Wieners, Cultural Affairs in Boston, Black Sparrow Press, 1988 }

*

Regarding Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes, I read it on simultaneous fronts. As a novel of postmodern Mexico and its generations of poets. When read allegorically, the novel could be a commentary on Latin American poetics and politics. A third reading is as a re-writing of Kerouac and Cortázar. With an attempt to counter their misogyny, perhaps. I prefer his prose, though, by far. Probably because I identify so much with its vision of the Latin American 1970s.

It seems to correspond to Roque Dalton's use of mutliple narratives and collage in his novel Pobrecito poeta que era yo. Dalton writes with that same picaresque abandon, never losing control of the novel's thread. Both novels attempt to make prose into poetry and vice-versa. I don't know how much they discussed poetry when they met in El Salvador, but it's a central presence in both of these novels.

*

"pero es preciso demorar
este poemario del tiempo,"

{Martha Kornblith, Oraciones para un dios ausente, Monte Ávila Editores, 1995 }

*

hope for the subtle
tone, for the realm
torn from city signed
by the writer's
dislocated frequency
my imitation is better /

*

"Y qué cantidad de palabras había en el monte."

{ Luis Alberto Crespo, Duro, Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1995 }

*

A faith in cosmic consciousness.
Despite mysticism's lack of evidence.

*

¿Por qué dices que nada resplandece? ¿No ves en la alborada una llameante ensoñación? No mires a lo oscuro. Destápate la cara y deja que te cubra el intenso resplandor. Bien sé que de los muertos sólo nos llega sombra y la vida es apenas una espera de luz. Quédate arrinconada en el último brillo. Tal vez la noche guarde una secreta claridad.

{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

"Mussolini tropical" / Víctor Hugo D'Paola

"Tropical Mussolini"


This was the phrase Carlos Fuentes used recently in reference to the Venezuelan President. As is well known, Carlos Fuentes, besides being a master of marvelous narrative in Terra Nostra and La muerte de Artemio Cruz, is an informed and accurate analyst of the problems and affairs of Latin America. On Sunday the 6th of this month, Hugo Chávez began his campaign against the presidential referendum. The tribune from which the leader spoke had a huge portrait of him as a backdrop. Like Stalin and Mao in other times and more recently Sadam Hussein. Up until recently the Chavistas used national symbols and above all the image of Bolívar.

Carlos Fuentes is not the only one to have found histrionic and political similarities between the leader of Chavismo and fascist leaders. José Vicente Rangel himself, during the first days of Chavista effervescence and glory, compared Chávez with Perón. There are many reasons to demonstrate how the Venezuelan's fascism is something more than the cult of personality and the high-sounding authoritarian tone.

With Mussolini and with Chávez the disgusise of leftist serves to win acolytes and above all activists from the poorest sectors. The people that would accompany the all-powerful caudillo out of necessity.

Demagoguery is part of the substance of fascist leadership; the exaggerated promises and the social hate, the threats of expropriation against those who have something in order to distribute it among those that possess nothing. The virulent nationalism against potential or invented foreign enemies. The anti-parliamentary stance and the rejection of the opinion of others. Only the boss has a voice and he should use it until he anesthesizes and tires the citizen.

Politics is not a civilized debate, it is a war against adversaries who must be implacably pursued. His politics will always place the country at the edge of civil war. No wonder Mussolini made Napoleon's maxim his own: "The revolution is an idea that has found bayonets."

The lies have no limits; this was common with the Italian caudillo. In fascism there is no ideological baggage. An official doctrine--in our case, the Bolivarian--that hides a pragmatic approach to power. The military traditions are joined with a liturgical cult of figures from the national past. There is no scruple whatsoever in sustaining the most incoherent and irrational positions. We'll figure it out along the way. Whatever helps us maintain power is good. Power justifies any shift in position. What is important is personal success, his own, the success of the caudillo. The supreme goal of Chávez is Chávez himself.

The fascist does not believe in political parties; not even his own. He uses his own party for his political campaigns. His party is not democratic; there is no freedom of opinion; no one is allowed to belong to internal tendencies. Fascism always includes within its plans the substitution of the standard armed forces by militias that are politically controlled by the caudillo. The uniforms, the armed squadrons, the liturgy of combat, the shouted slogans, these all form part of the fascist decor, of the war mentality.

"Tropical Mussolini." Carlos Fuentes is right. There are too many similarities between the early fascism in Venezuela and that fascism that led Italy toward an immense national tragedy.




{ Víctor Hugo D'Paola, TalCual, 15 June 2004 }

Two Books & a CD


The poems take years to arrive and I don't know who they are.

*

Ernesto Cardenal, La revolución perdida: Memorias 3 (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2004).

I can't imagine being able to write without Ernesto Cardenal's poetry as a model. Despite my complete disagreement with him regarding Venezuela's petty revolution, I've been reading his memoirs since he began to publish them in 1999. This third and final installment of his autobiography covers from the 1970s until today. It is a beautiful paperback edition by the ever-impressive Editorial Trotta in Spain.

Cardenal's politics seem to have been distorted recently by his old age. He recently wrote an account of his visit to Venezuela to participate in a poetry conference in Caracas. Cardenal sang the praises of the Bolivarian regime without a second thought. He chose to ignore the warnings of his Venezuelan friends and admirers (including Armando Rojas Guardia, Joaquin Marta Sosa and Ana Teresa Torres) regarding the authoritarian gangsterism of the Chavistas. Instead, Cardenal naively praised the "accomplishments" of the Bolivarian revolution over the past 5 years. Cardenal's essay can be read (in Spanish) at El Meollo (see link @ left). It is a sad, pathetic essay that I will not waste my time translating.

Regardless, I'll begin reading the third volume of his memoirs tonight. The third volume starts with Cardenal in Caracas in the 1970s, where he stayed at the house of Miguel Otero Silva, the poet who founded the newspaper El Nacional.

*

Don Paterson & Charles Simic, ed., New British Poetry (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004).

This is a great anthology, with several poets whose work I've been following for the last few years:

Simon Armitage
Fred D'Aguiar
Lavinia Greenlaw
Michael Hofmann
Glyn Maxwell

A few years ago, Armitage and Maxwell wrote a "sequel" to Auden and MacNiece's Letters From Iceland. Their visit to Iceland in the 1990s was hilariously evoked in the poems and prose pieces they were commissioned to write. It was published by Faber & Faber in 1996 as Moon Country: Further Reports from Iceland.

I find the current "avant-garde" or "post-avant" dismissals of the "School of Quietude" to be a pointless and exclusionary move. Granted, mainstream poetry is mostly horrific, but to divide us into those who support Empire and those who fight it is a naive move with no practical purpose.

No one here will escape whatever dangers we are going through in this "low dishonest decade." It is useless to classify poetry. There are plenty of so-called School of Quietude poets whose work I admire. To name a few: Walcott, Auden, Spender, Lowell. I won't stop reading them simply because I might disagree with some of their political/social/cultural stances.

*

Beastie Boys, To The 5 Boroughs (Capitol Records, 2004).

Went to buy it today, since hearing Paul's Boutique back in 1989 was such a revelation. Plus, I like how their writing has evolved over the years. In my opinion, the best poets alive today are rappers.

"Well, maybe it's time we impeach Tex.
And the military muscle that he wants to flex.
By the time Bush is done, what will be left?
Selling votes like E-pills at the discothèque.
Environmental destruction and the national debt.
But plenty of dollars left in the fat war chest.
What the real deal, why you can't connect?
Why you hating people that you never met?
Didn't your mama teach you to show some respect?
Why not open your mind for a sec?"

("Time to Build")

Presentimiento / Francisco Vera Izquierdo

Premonition


To be honest, I lack so-called prophetic vision. But, just as one doesn’t have to be a strategist to climb onto the sidewalk when a car comes, there exist many things such as the axiom, “A self-evident truth which needs no demonstration.” I knew, then, about the irrational cowardice of Marcos Pérez Jiménez and the intellectual endowments that characterized Romulo Betancourt’s ministers since before their inconceivable actions during the events of 23 de Enero, Costa Rica and la Esquiva.

If things in Venezuela happened according to logic, we would now be under someone other than our actual President. The reaction against puntofijismo played a definitive role in the current leader’s triumph. But to continue with him is to take aspirin after the fever has passed. Besides, he didn’t knock down that system, he was merely there when it fell down. I wasn’t in Venezuela at the time, which is why I have no reason to be regretful; because, had I been here, my vote also would have been for him. Besides, it wasn’t possible to imagine, within a reasonable approaching horizon, what our chubby President and his allies would become.

There is a generally accepted principle in philosophy according to which everything that exists has a name and all that has a name, exists. I have read this concept without completely understanding it, because I find a certain contradiction in the idea that nothingness exists.

But the first element of truth is the truth itself, with its consequential likeliness.

According to this, we could believe in the non-existence of that which is unlikely. And the least one can say now is that what we're enduring has no name.

There have been very few who have deserved to be called rulers in Venezuela. In the XIX century, there was Juan Pablo Rojas Paúl. In the XX, the duo of Eleazar López Contreras and Isaías Medina Angarita, and in the XXI we still haven’t had one.

During the Centennial of Independence a certain Mr. Noaín came to the celebrations as the Argentine representative. The truth of his comment was rejected: “No one is in their place there.” Who knows what he might say now of our rulers. But, most likely, he would think that not only are they out of place but that, instead, their proper place would be, or better yet would have been, a jail.

Herodotus writes that Psammetichus, who wanted to find out which was the oldest language, started from the idea that it would have surged spontaneously and without hearing of another, that it would be the natural language of humans. He took, then, two newborn babies in order to raise them in complete isolation and without ever hearing a single word.

When they began to babble, both infants coincided in calling bread “bexos,” as it is called in Phyrgian, and that language was considered the first. I have not heard of anyone losing sleep over this ignorance in any of the subsequent 28 centuries.

No one has lost sleep over the origin of languages, but they have over words and their meanings. There is an entire science with various branches such as Philology, Etymology, Semantics, etc. A certain literary modesty prevents me from including some discoveries here, not regarding words in general, but at least in reference to the big words. And, to be honest, the most elevated concepts proffered by Chavistas seem to be big words.

For me, the word coup is one of those that could not be uttered in society.

But, after hearing the Vice President himself proffer one of them on television, I believe that the word coup could also be redeemed and that it could cease being a suffocated sinful thought among those in uniform. I don’t want an unconstitutional exit, but the air we breathe makes my position an extravagance.

{ Francisco Vera Izquierdo, El Nacional, 14 June 2004 }

'I was never in the faintest doubt of his devotion to me'


Natasha Spender survived childhood neglect to become a concert pianist, socialite and wife of poet Sir Stephen Spender. At 85, her memories of him - and his intense friendships with younger men - have been sharpened by a new biography. But before recalling them, she has a photocopier to fix...


Harriet Lane
Sunday May 9, 2004
The Observer



The stone gateposts are lurching like drunks; there's a Post-It on the front door asking visitors to knock loudly because the bell is broken; and, inside the hall, subsidence has pushed the parquet floor up into ripples. Standing on the front step of the house she and her husband first rented in 1944, a house on a blossom-strewn and now terribly smart street in St John's Wood, Lady Spender watches, baffled, as yellow diggers tear up the shrubbery next door. It was, she says, such a wonderful, mature garden, but the new owner, Philip Green (the man from BHS), doesn't want it - it's all quick-fix makeovers now, isn't it? - and so it must go.

At one point she mentions that she is on the waiting list for a hearing aid; at another, that when her husband, Sir Stephen Spender, died in 1995, she inherited 'one of those necklaces' he had been given by the borough council (which I think means a beeper like the one that alerts the emergency services to poor Mrs Hope, who is forever falling down the stairs in the back of magazines). Three weeks ago she was 85 - an event she celebrated at a Chinese restaurant with her daughter and several friends, including John Sutherland, whose authorised biography of Sir Stephen is about to be published, coinciding with a new Collected Poems - so it is not surprising that age should occupy her thoughts, but it does so only as the milk occupies her refrigerator. What with the cranberry juice, the leftover potatoes and the semi-circular ruin of a chocolate birthday cake that I spy when fetching milk for our 'Ness', her generic term for instant coffee, there's a bunch of other stuff in there as well.

When Sylvia Plath met the Spenders at a 1960 dinner given by TS Eliot, she described Natasha Spender, then a successful concert pianist, as 'lean, vibrant, talkative'. The words still fit today. We go inside, away from the awfulness in the next-door garden, and she becomes one of the most vividly alive people you could ever meet: sprinting to fetch books, to answer the phone, to the piano to play the opening bars of Schubert's Fantasy sonata. In a rare still moment, she coolly fixes the photocopier when it throws a wobbly. Though she insists words have started to elude her, just in the last six months - 'I do get stuck for names, like a donkey before a gate, in the middle of a sentence' - nothing stalls her today. The names pour forth.

And what names. Anna Freud, Jackie Kennedy, WH Auden, Isaiah Berlin: that's just the first three minutes. Lady Spender, it's obvious, is happiest talking about other people. What sounds initially like name-dropping is in fact self-effacement. Her anecdotes shift attention from herself. 'Well, I think there's one's inner life and one's outer life,' she says. 'One's inner life is not to be talked about, for it's so largely music.'

Towards the end of his life, Spender became, as Sutherland notes in his enjoyable biography, a 'sweeper-up of the Thirties group', a walking memory bank (gracious, too, as my mother found at a party 10 years ago. Not being clued up on his poetry, she asked him, rather apologetically, about George Orwell, 'and he gave the impression of being very glad to talk about him, he seemed to enjoy remembering slightly odd stories about him. He was charming; he opened a little window for me'). After a glorious debut - he was still an undergraduate when Eliot published him - Spender's own talents would always be to some degree overshadowed by his extraordinary connections, a fact he accepted for the most part with good humour, though it set him up as something of an Aunt Sally for the next generation.

The Spenders were first introduced at a jolly lunch party at Horizon, the magazine Sir Stephen had co-founded with Cyril Connolly. 'I was so not into literature,' says Lady Spender, 'that when they asked me to Horizon, I thought it was a pub.' It was 1940, and Natasha Litvin was a 21-year-old music student on the edge of an arty crowd; Spender was 10 years older, an established poet and critic closely associated with Auden, Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day Lewis. He was also recovering from a disastrous first marriage to an earnest and exhausting-sounding beauty called Inez Pearn. After lunch, Natasha and Stephen did the washing- up, and went for a walk around Mecklenburgh Square, and out for dinner, and then met every day for the next fortnight. Not long afterwards, they were married. Stephen's most significant ex-boyfriend, Tony Hyndman, was one of the witnesses.

Right after Sir Stephen's death, Lady Spender's memory of that first meeting died too. This is a common symptom of bereavement, she says, like those hallucinatory visions you have sometimes in the street, when you're sure that's your husband in the distance. 'I thought I'd lost my memory completely. I was slightly alarmed. Then I received a letter from Isaiah which described Stephen from his undergraduate days, and it came back, absolutely - it unlocked everything. That was the man I married: very truthful, very open, and with an immense talent for happiness. When both of us were having a difficult time, one way or another, he'd make some kind of perceptive joke that restored one's equanimity. I suddenly remembered not only where we met, at the luncheon in the Horizon office, but the old telephone books outside the door, the noises in the street - everything.'

She must have been a very self-confident 21-year-old, I say, to hold her own with the Horizon crowd at that first party. But she says it wasn't confidence as much as 'having read, and being amused. I was always very curious then. The people they were talking about sounded exotic. I longed to know more. No, it wasn't self-confidence... I could behave. I could be plausible.' It was a social skill that she had learnt the hard way, though she would not phrase it like that herself.

One of the Spender family's much-loved maids, Bertha Mills, warmed to Natasha at their first meeting because 'she's illegitimate, and don't care who knows it'. Natasha's mother was Rachel (Ray) Litvin, an actress of Baltic extraction, who was a rising star at the Old Vic during the First World War. Natasha's father - though she was only told of his existence when she was 12 - was Edwin Evans, a music critic, friend of Stravinsky and Debussy, who happened to be married.

As her mother was busy earning a living, the infant Natasha was farmed out to a foster mother, 'the awful Mrs James' in Sussex, who left her in a high chair all day. Fortunately a friend of Ray's intervened - the implication being that Ray wasn't too bothered - and Natasha, then two-and-a-half, was passed over to Mrs Busby, 'this wonderful, steady, working-class woman', in Maidenhead. 'I really owe all the stability I have in my temperament, such as I have, to Mrs Busby.' Natasha grew up calling Mrs Busby 'Mother'; Ray was 'Mummy'. George and Margaret Booth, musical friends of her mother, were 'my other family', and she spent happy holidays at their house near the Sussex Downs.

She learnt how to fit in anywhere. 'In Maidenhead, I had my Berkshire voice. Staying with the Booths, I had my upper-class voice. I never got confused. Once or twice Uncle George taught me how to say "agin", instead of "again", things like that, but I found I could slip from one to the next without any problem. I could change gear like that.' Occasionally, when these worlds overlapped, there was a price to pay. Every three months, Ray would pay rather alarming visits when she would lay down the law, informing Natasha that she was not, for instance, to play with the other children on the street. 'It was,' says Lady Spender generously, 'because she was over-anxious.' One weekend with her mother was spent staying with Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, 'who seemed to live in a house in a tree'. He signed her autograph book, 'To Natasha from her admirer, Charles Laughton', though when she showed this off back in Maidenhead, everybody thought she had faked it.

Then Ray contracted typhoid and went deaf quite suddenly, which put paid to the stage career. Just short of her 12th birthday, Natasha went to live with her mother for the first time, in a one-room flat in Primrose Hill. (She went back to see the Busbys in Maidenhead occasionally. Her foster sister, Nan, married a bank manager and wrote several Mills and Boons; her foster brother, Cecil, became a publican.) In London, the steadiness was now provided by her music teacher. It was clear that Natasha must become a pianist.

Cash was a problem. Out of the blue, Ray told Natasha that she had a father who was alive, and that she must ask him for some money. 'Not the best beginning to a relationship. We were rather embarrassed, really. Somehow we got over it. I really spent the time playing the piano to him and he said I ought to be a composer and he would get lessons for me.' Her father was 'the fattest man in London', and wore a huge opera hat. She found him rather frightening.

In 1935, aged 16, Natasha won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. A fellow student, a cellist, was a refugee from the Nazis, and Lady Spender remembers her 'playing with her life to earn the money to get her parents out of Germany'. Talking to John Sutherland has illuminated many memories like this, things that had slipped away into the darkness. It has been a salutary experience, she says. 'In having to describe those things to a biographer, one relives them. One had forgotten the intensity of it.' For his part, Sutherland pays tribute to Lady Spender in his acknowledgements: 'At no point has she imposed restraint on the biographer.' (The debt is two-way. Staying at the Spenders' Provençal home in 1999 while researching the book, Sutherland and his wife saved Natasha from a brush fire which completely destroyed the house and garden.)

People have always been fascinated by Stephen Spender's sexuality, not least because in his 1951 autobiography, World Within World, he wrote frankly about his early homosexual experiences. He wasn't being political about it, says his widow: just truthful. 'I feel a bit amused at the moment when people in the gay world see themselves as knight errants when it costs them very little in comparison. I won't say they're on a bandwagon, because they still have things to contend with. But Stephen was really courageous because when he wrote World Within World, he could have been put in prison, and he knew that. It was a hair-raising time.'

Throughout his life, Spender continued to have very intense relationships with younger men. Sutherland is clear that his long-lasting bond with the academic Reynolds Price was not sexual, but he is less definite about the May-December friendship struck up in his seventies with Bryan Obst, a twentysomething American zoologist (Spender had always been interested in the natural world. As a boy, he prayed for his caterpillars when everyone else was praying for those on the Western Front) who died of Aids in 1990.

Lady Spender says she never felt shut out by her husband's intimate friendships, 'because I understood . What's very interesting about all those friendships is that they were always talented people, people that he taught. We say people,' she corrects herself, 'but there's only two or three.'

So what was going on with Bryan Obst? Was it sexual or not? 'It's less clear, isn't it?' says Lady Spender, lightly. 'I think it was passion but nevertheless it was related to their shared talent.' Marriage, she says, 'is not ownership, it's devotion. I was never in the faintest doubt of Stephen's total devotion - or mine to him. And so it doesn't touch you as it might a person who thinks, "He's my husband, what's he doing with so-and-so?" That didn't really occur. I do know young people who behave as if they bought their husband at Selfridges.'

It must have helped that her identity came not just from her role as Stephen Spender's wife, and mother of Matthew and Lizzie, but from her own professional achievements. In her forties, she was forced to give up the piano because of breast cancer, which affected her arm muscles, but she quickly re-established herself as an academic specialising in the psychology of music, and contributed to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. There was a dreadful period of adjustment, but 'I was prudent. I knew that if I thought about the works I'd not yet played in public but wanted to do, I'd torment myself.' She remembers arriving to stay with her husband in Chicago, where he was then working, and the radio being tuned to Rudolf Serkin playing the second Brahms concerto. 'Now I knew the second Brahms concerto but I'd never played it with an orchestra. I had to switch it off. But other than that, I just avoided occasions that I thought might make me feel very, very wistful. I very quickly felt less pain.'

Losing Stephen has similarities, she says, with losing the music, though rather than avoiding emotional triggers, she has immersed herself in them by becoming her husband's literary executor. Shortly after the Queen Mother died, Lady Spender was listening to the wireless, to a lady-in-waiting recollecting a discussion they'd had about bereavement. 'She'd said to the Queen Mother, "Ma'am, does it ever get any better?" And I knew the Queen Mother a bit so I can hear her saying this; she said, "No, actually, it doesn't get any better, but you get better at it." And that was such a wise thing to say.'

{ Harriet Lane, The Guardian, 9 May 2004 }

"And I was gripped by that deadly phantom
I followed him through hard jungles
As he stalked through the back lots
Strangling through the night shades"

*

en 1982 The Clash se tomó
una foto en Asia para su LP
Combat Rock, pero
parecía México o Venezuela

*

el poema no es privado
aunque uno lo intente
comentando estrofas mínimas

llanto callejero / familiar

*

intentaría cruzar
cualquier disturbio
diario
entre periódicos

*

Bosque temprano

Imitaciónes
del neoromanticismo
plástico medio hippie
la rima y el ensayo
se encargarán

*

fuimos a ver The Pixies
en su ultimo tour
en 1992 creo
cuando pasaron
por Tampa
semi-estreno
ruidoso eterno

*

una pobreza
nos falta sopa
y computadora

*

algunas palabras
tres ciudades
también tus lugares
como sonaba el monte
medio tranquilo
una lista
listening

(...)

Reading List


Juan Villoro, La alcoba dormida (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992)

*

Alignment of cities. Caracas and Boston are both built through hills and valleys. The street corners in the central artery of downtown Caracas have individual names and histories. Driving in Cambridge the other night I notice Paddy's Corner and Massey's Corner on Walden St.

*

Three books of fiction by Esdras Parra (to find):

El insurgente (1967)
Por el norte el mar de las antillas (1968)
Juego limpio (1968)

*

Arturo Uslar Pietri, Oficio de difuntos (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1976)

Canto de oficio


Ya se sabe: hay formas y formas de locura

Cuerpos gloriosos atraviesan mi puerta

(Sólo cuerpos gloriosos)

Aun con hambre no se ensucian los labios

Están seguros de que sufrir no cuesta demasiado

Un solo soplo de cansancio está permitido

Lo demás es ser feliz sin escindirse

Uno cae sin descubrir el misterio de la caída

Ya se sabe: Amor no es hermoso, desea la hermosura


{ Patricia Guzmán, Canto de oficio, Caracas: Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1997 }

Patricia Guzmán: “Me afano en celebrar con entusiasmo los oficios cotidianos” / Milagros Socorro

Patricia Guzmán: “I work to celebrate daily tasks with enthusiasm”

Journalism and literature. How do these two crafts coincide in you?

Although I’ve spent my life fighting with it, I have learned a lot from journalistic writing (which isn’t the same thing as journalism).

I learned a great deal from it and I’m grateful to it for my understanding of how the range of sensibilities that others might have when faced with a word is infinite. This forced me to be generous with what I say, to think about the other, including from within poetry itself. Journalism made me more balanced, more generous with my passion for language, and it forced me to have a clearer consciousness of who I’m talking with. Otherwise, I don’t reach them, I don’t reach, I would be a narcissist—and I don’t want to be that and even less through language.

Your first book (De mí, lo oscuro) has an epigraph from César Vallejo:

“Y si después de tantas palabras
no sobrevive la palabra
Si después de las alas de los pájaros,
No sobrevive el pájaro parado
más valdría, en verdad,
que se lo coman todo y acabemos.”

Just like many people cross themselves before they leave the house, I can’t read or talk about my books without the epigraph from César Vallejo. Each time it helps everything make more sense.

What do you read?

It’s like a chain letter.

The Spanish language poets such as San Juan and Santa Teresa are an obsession for me, but I love the intensity, violence and structure of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

It’s not because they’re women writers. I don’t read men or women, I read poems and poets that interest me.

There are some who I can’t be without: Hanni Ossott is an obsession. Her voice is an obsession for me, her essays on poetry, her Rilke translations. I cannot be without María Zambrano, who is not a poet but her writing reflects so much poetry.

I’m interested in the mystics, above all San Juan de la Cruz. I read the Bible, the psalms, the Book of Hours, any writing that includes ritual, the Torah, Hölderlin, Heidegger’s books about poetry. I try to read all those writings that can translate existence for me, that can clarify my anguish.

On page 55 of Con el ala alta you say: “Vacíalo / ¿Quién quiere la sangre?...” [Empty it / Who wants blood?]. And I ask you, who could want blood?

I don’t know. I didn’t know when I wrote that and I don’t know if I’ll know…Because with my writing process—especially in that first book, which others have already identified as babbling, as a ciphered and austere book—I was beginning to write, in the sense of beginning to invent poetry. I felt as though everything exceeded me. And I still continue to write beneath a trembling, a threat, an oppression, a disturbance.

The truth is, I am not a professional writer, I don’t have the discipline for that. I don’t write according to a plan and I don’t create projects for books. Once I have a group of poems, I identify them as a unit. Over the years, now that I’ve been doing this for twenty years, I can distinguish my works, because I’m assertive and because of my readers.

I begin writing without knowing where I’ll be going. When the first line appears and I feel the route is visible, I dare to continue.

Finally, I don’t know who wants blood…In that poem you cite, I know that I want to empty a bird. What do I want to empty it of? The blood, but I found no one to give me peace because, who wants blood?...I don’t know.

The book is made, then, more by accumulation than by planning.

How do you do it? At what time? After what and before what?

At any moment. I always keep notes, many of them: a word from someone’s poem, from an essay, an image...and I write them on a piece of paper or the margins of a pamphlet. Sometimes, I get anxious and I tell myself, well, that if I don’t make an attempt at poetry, poetry won’t simply sit there waiting for me. At that point I return to these notes, I reread them, stick one to another and I find a poem there. I sometimes get satisfaction from an unresolved poem but I know that I'm not alone, without poetry.

Is that every day?

Not every day. I’ve gone very long periods without writing a single line. But I later realize that those silent periods are necessary. I worry about writing but not because I might not have a book.

Do you miss journalism?

I miss it at times. I don’t miss the newspapers. I learned how to distinguish the journalism from the newspaper. Besides, what I like, what I do best is cultural journalism. I’m very clear about that, while I don't know how to do the rest of it very well. Maybe because it doesn't interest me.

Of course, I stay in tune with political and economic events, I know that trade. I've spent too many years reading newspapers, and within newspapers, not to know the field. But I don’t miss any newspaper. I miss writing journalistic texts, because they offer another perspective to writing. I don't have an issue with journalism. I have nothing to deny to journalism. Far from that, I feel grateful toward it, and maybe that’s why I've fought so much with journalism.


Sickness Has Only One Wing

From page 19: "Reclamo mi cuerpo / entre tanta sordera / tanta lengua en lo oscuro" [I reclaim my body / amid such deafness / such tongue in the dark]. What function, if any, does poetry serve amid the tangle of discourses: political, journalistic, advertising, governmental and oppositional?

The poetic word is latency, palpitation, audible darkness, a veil for making the self and things transparent. In that sense, it becomes incompatible with the tangle of discourses, regardless of their order. I feel and think that poetry, just as Hanni Ossott told us, is a twilight speech, situated in a threshold. It recognizes no authority, and when it becomes a voice it arrives from the only core that is consonant to it, the deep core of being. It comes from deep wounds, from the thirst for clarity, from the battle for being and to be. In the verses you cite, from De mí, lo oscuro, maybe I was trying to warn against the digressions that words lead us to in their search for identity. Even that word with which we've lived, and those that we've carried while returning to a path we thought we already knew from visiting. Maybe I wanted to allude to our shrouded condition which begins to be symptomatic of our age. And I remain, years later, books later, faithful to that warning, with the need to break the so human and involuntary self-absorption that molds us.

From page 139: "Las bodas sólo se celebran / cuando llega la muerte / a mí la enfermedad me obsequió unas alianzas" [Weddings are only celebrated / when death arrives / illness gave me some alliances]. What is sickness for the contemporary poet?

I don’t have the capacity to enumerate what sickness is for the contemporary poet.

But I can intuit that she walks through her home, no longer with the echo of her cough, it is now a different depth of that shadow that exposes to the storm the corporeal pulses of the poet. I listen and I want to evoke, at this instant, the strange verb of the hallucinator from Coro, Elías David Curiel, when, drenched in despair, he said that "el éter es milagrosa escala / por donde Hahím psíquicamente sube / y cierne encima de la noche el ala." [ether is a miraculous stair / on which Hahím rises psychically / and the wing settles on top of night] I cannot ignore the timbre of a voice drunk from the smell of blood from "the old wound," with which Armando Rojas Guardia would mark that "by the light of the neon of our age, the unexpected confession of St. John of the Cross sounds like masochism: 'What I want is to die.'"

What is sickness for you?

In La Boda I wrote: "A mí la enfermedad me obsequió unas alianzas." [Illness gave me some alliances] They were placed in my hands so that I might cling to life that way, and, likewise, to the word and to the Beloved become Husband.

Because within vertigo, within the void which sickness leans toward, we barely hear a complaint, our own, turned into a monosyllabic complaint that we won't silence. So that it becomes possible to unwind ourselves in love's air for the one we have felt in our skin, and which grows, grows and accepts communion, to drink from the same cup. Besides, sickness taught me another song, a song that sounds like oratory, and which transformed my words into verses through which—like a grateful creature—I awoke to the health and the mystery of living and attempting the poem day by day. I work, then, in paying tribute to the thorny branch that brings the healing bird to my house. I work to celebrate, literally and with enthusiasm, the ordinary, daily tasks in which I am occupied: from immersing myself in reading and music, to teaching a class, or setting the table to receive family and friends. Because, as I wrote in "El Poema del Esposo" [The Husband's Poem], "La enfermedad tiene una sola ala / (Voy a enterrar en el jardín el ala de amar)" [Illness has one single wing / (I am going to bury the wing of love in the garden)]. So that the wing might sink its roots and allow me to continue clinging to life. And I repeat, it’s not that "en mi casa todo pájaro amanece curado" [every bird in my house awakes cured].

Is poetry a symptom? And if so, of what?

I would accept this idea of poetry as a symptom if we agreed to assume the word 'symptom' as being outside of the medical alphabet—and if we visualize it displaying the figured meaning which it carries. Meaning, as a signal, that it is the indicator of something auroral, which announces itself, pulses, peers in and is half-born, and which can only be seen in fragments. Consequently, we must accept that words, all of them, and in their essence such as those that the poet speaks, these all allude to a lost word, "the only word that guards the secret of divine-human love," as María Zambrano writes.


The Murmur of the Bird and the Rose

Patricia Guzmán (Caracas, 1960) received her Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from the Sorbonne. She is also a journalist who graduated from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, where she is now a Professor. Her journalistic career includes positions such as directing the pages of El Nacional, the cultural supplement Bajo Palabra, El Diario de Caracas, and most recently the Sunday magazine Estampas and the literary supplement Verbigracia, both at El Universal.

But above all, Patricia Guzmán is the owner of one of the most beautiful and singular voices of Venezuela.

Her four books of poetry have recently appeared in a rare publication, entitled Con el ala alta, which has been edited by the publishing house El otro, mismo, directed by Victor Bravo in Mérida. As one reads those impressive pages, the idea emerges that in Patrica Guzmán's poetry Spanish becomes Celtic because it acquires the remote intonation of a marvelous culture irrigated by the centuries, and which lives where we least expect it: in the illuminated letter, in the shadow of the chalice, in the murmur of the bird, in the panting of the fanatic and in the bordered fringe of the bride's dress.

In Patricia Guzmán’s poetry a rose is not a rose. It is the everything rose, the absoluteroseness, the extreme condition, engulfed by flames, free from gravity and geometrical within everything in the world which is rose and which is pregnant with its hint.

This book’s apparition comforts us from so many disasters: the country has poets. And that is already a great event. It is almost everything.




{ Milagros Socorro, El Nacional, 19 April 2004 }

James Wood re: Terry Eagleton


"One way of looking at theory is to see it as the inevitable culmination not of Marx, but of Freud. One of the decisive changes that theory effected was to introduce the idea that texts do not know themselves. It is the critic's business to reveal their repressed anxieties and incoherences. There are no moments of pure innocence anymore. The deconstructionist will use these moments of undecidability, these "aporias," to demonstrate how the text unconsciously undermines itself. The feminist, the cultural materialist, and the New Historicist will see such fractures as the text's unwilling revelation of political anxiety. Hiddenness is what has changed, after Freud: that which is hidden for Freud and Derrida is hidden only at the cost of that which does the hiding; its absence marks the concealment. English criticism knew this about humans--the "unconscious" was hardly Freud's discovery, and De Quincey uttered the striking thought that "there is no such thing as forgetting"--but not about texts. Pater, in his essay on style, writes that we know the great artist by "the tact of his omission," by what he leaves out. But after Freud we will always itchingly suspect that omission is really repression. We know that the omissions are there if we can only find them.

Of course, critics have always read texts against themselves. But one of theory's innovations has been to show that in some sense texts read themselves against themselves. Works of literature are rarely as coherent as they want to be and are often tellingly self-divided at significant moments of anxiety. A criticism that learns to attend to this kind of self-division will probably be more energetically involved than most pre-theoretical criticism has been with the entanglements of content and form.

But these changes have also had considerable negative influence. The hunt for how a text betrays itself has too often been prosecutorial--and prosecuted, one feels, by people who do not love literature. Once criticism becomes a matter of searching for symptoms, it is relieved of the burden of evaluation, of deciding what is good and what is not. All symptoms are interesting, after all, whether in Middlemarch or on MTV. It is in this sense that deconstruction menaces literature, and this is why writers are correct to feel uneasy in its presence. Whereas a New Critic believed that we struggle, as readers, through incoherence toward a desirable, if often thwarted, formal coherence, a final coherence that the writer has intended, planned, superbly shaped, modern theory reverses this flow, moving backward from its presumption that works of literature are covering up their own incoherences, whatever the writer's good intentions are, and that they must be accordingly unmasked. The humanist was interested in good intentions; the theorist is interested in bad symptoms. The humanist gave innocence the benefit of the doubt; the theorist doubts innocence. To this extent, contemporary writers, however adept they have become at speaking the languages of theory and postmodernism, are closer to the old-fashioned humanist than to the cultural theorist, and doubtless always will be: writers have a great deal invested in the innocence of literary intention."

{ James Wood, "Textual Harrassment," The New Republic, June 7 & 14 2004 }

Fidel Castro, asesor electoral / Ibsen Martínez




Fidel Castro, Electoral Consultant


1.

Fidel Castro has placed his extensive experience as an electoral observer and forecaster at the service of Hugo Chávez.

Few political leaders in the world have followed, step by step, minutely and exhaustively, as many electoral processes as the Cuban dictator has since he took power in 1959.

For him, it has not been strictly about accurately predicting who will be the new president of the United States every four years. Rather, it has been for crucial reasons of survival and in order to update the changing political map of the Latin American nations from time to time.

Among so many grotesque paradoxes that Latin America knows how to offer, what stands out is the spectacle of the inaugurations of many of our presidents where, invariably, the star is the ancient dictator of Cuba, a country which has not known a presidential election for over fifty years—if you take into consideration the fact that the previous Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, led a coup in 1952, precisely in order to interrupt elections.

Perhaps the diplomatic formality of inviting the Cuban dictator to an inauguration is the rhetorical and less expensive way for a Latin American leader to declare his anti-imperialist vocation.

Naturally, as soon as Castro returns to Havana the elected leader is free to do whatever he chooses. What counts is the gesture. What counts is inviting the guilty brother and seating him at a table as close as possible to the North American ambassador, even though immediately afterwards one proceeds to set into motion an electrocuting plan of economic adjustments of a decidedly IMF bent.

In this respect, we should remember the coronation of Carlos Andrés Pérez in February 1989, and how Castro literally charmed the vain ladies of the Country Club set, just days before the “Caracazo.”

And I suspect that for Castro this business of attending inaugurations is not merely an embrace of diplomatic protocol and of the spirit of community among neighboring nations whose political models differ from one another.

No, the elections in our countries are extremely important to Castro, and that is why he follows them so very closely. And when he can, he does whatever possible to have an influence on the results.

Since 1959 there has been no shortage of candidates in our countries who, being more or less inclined toward the left, enjoy an occasional majority of sympathizers and who threaten the status quo.

Sometimes they’ve won, sometimes they haven’t. Invariably, Castro has bet in favor of them despite having always shown, in public and in private, his dislike of representative democracy. A dislike which he expresses in a doctrinarian manner through his well known and strong words about the corruption of the “bourgeois” political parties, in his preference for what chavista talk calls “direct democracy” and for the mobilization of masses around slogans that descend from above, etc, all of these traits being favorites of totalitarian autocrats, whether their name is Benito, Adolf or Fidel.

One does not need to read the stupendous biography of Fidel Castro, written almost two decades ago by Tad Szulc, in order to know how Castro keeps himself updated when it comes to elections in our countries. It would be enough to simply ask any “star” politician or journalist, Latin American or otherwise, who has visited Cuba and has engaged in conversation with Castro.

Since the Cuban dictator is not exactly a foolish right field dreamer, over time he has become a well versed reader of polls, a very subtle interpreter of electoral tendencies. It is not an exaggeration to say that, if by chance Fidel Castro were to be without a job someday, he could very well establish himself as a Latin American electoral consultant, alongside such well established names as Joe Napolitan.

However, in contrast to the electoral consultants that we’ve known throughout four decades of democratic life, Castro would not be prolific regarding ideas for publicity. He would most likely be, to use the terminology of that field, a “USP” consultant—for Unique Sales Proposition—: a consultant with a single proposal for sale. And his recommendation would always be—in fact, this is true right now—the same: “Don’t count yourself.”


2.

My speculation ends up being suggestively consistent with what, according to a testimony attributed to Luis Miquilena, the Cuban dictator recommended to Chávez a long time ago.

Of course, there’s no shortage of analysts today who will speak against consummated events and who will insist that in 1979, when the Somoza dictatorship was recently defeated, Castro would have advised the Sandinistas to call for elections immediately, in order to take advantage of the enormous support that they enjoyed among the Nicaraguan people at that time.

The truth is that, set in the trance of an election they had no chance of winning, that “Don’t count yourselves” was the only advice—not to say direct order—that Castro gave the Sandinistas, at the risk of losing absolute power and becoming—this is the most serious matter, from a revolutionary’s point of view—what they are today: another political party, subject to the changes in democratic life, which are organized by constitutional cycles, by the rules for political parties, by the norms that condition reelection, etc. Joaquín Villalobos, the former Salvadoran guerrilla leader who in the eighties led one of the most successful military factions of the Frente Farabundo Martí, carries with him what might be the most illuminating experience regarding Castro and his expectations for the recall referendum that, far from his liking and despite all of his tricks, is now falling on top of Chávez.

At the end of a bloody war that took 40,000 Salvadoran lives in one decade, Villalobos—along with other guerrilla commanders—opted for a negotiated exit from the armed conflict, which would lead to a general election and to the normalization of political life in his country. Many important sectors from the right and from the military agreed, from their own perspectives, with his decision.

Eventually, a difficult peace process was put into action. It was a process which would end one of the most bloody “low intensity” conflicts that characterized the final phase of the Cold War.

How did Fidel Castro take the news that one of the most formidable guerrilla armies he has ever supported—almost 20,000 armed soldiers—was willing to negotiate a peace accord and to discuss, the horror!, terms under which it would participate in a general election? Villalobos’ life has been, up until now, an exceptional Latin American biography, in regards to superlative transformations: from a mythical guerrilla commander in whose “honor” the very own CIA established an entire unit dedicated exclusively to accomplishing his physical elimination, he has gone on to become, today, a respected international expert in the negotiation of peace processes, who is studying for a doctorate in Political Science at Oxford. It was there, a few weeks ago, that I asked him that question: “How did Fidel take it?”

“With nearly 300 injured fighters permanently rotating through his military hospitals, and with all the resources he gave us for years, I traveled to Havana frequently,” Villalobos replied, “and I sustained long conversations with him (Fidel Castro).

“At first, when I informed him of our intention to go to a peace process, I noticed that his opinions and advice were those of someone who assumed that we were planning for a truce in order to regroup and accumulate our forces for a final assault. But when he heard about the elections, that’s when I didn’t see him again.” I then wanted to know if he said “I didn’t see him again” figuratively. Villalobos told me emphatically that no, he was speaking literally: “I spoke to him about elections and I never heard from him again. Up until this very day.”


3.

In a stroke of bad luck for Fidel Castro, Chávez, the man who couldn’t take Miraflores Palace by force, had to end up being a poor executor of his only recommendation.

Setting aside the politically relevant fact that the referendum which Chávez tries so desperately to derail was his own invention, it is enough to observe the clumsy arbitrariness with which he has attempted—fruitlessly, if we study it closely—to place obstacle after obstacle against an electoral solution to our crisis.

It is true that, in the process, he has acquired almost all-encompassing powers, but only at the price of losing his legitimacy exactly when a decidedly electoral climate is about to install itself in Venezuela.

I write these notes before the start of the signature repair process scheduled for the weekend. But, independent of their outcome, it is clear that we have reached this stage thanks to the unified purpose which the democratic sectors of the opposition have made prevail. That purpose brings with it a defeat, not only for the militaristic right that craftily kidnapped the civic efforts of the opposition in April 2002, but also for the regime’s main electoral consultant.

How long will the always-pragmatic Fidel Castro take before electorally abandoning his student?


{ Ibsen Martínez, El Nacional, 31 May 2004 }