Mirrors (60 page)

And the father warned the son:

“Watch out for that one. He’s white outside, but on the inside he’s black.”

The son, Fernando Ortiz, was fourteen.

Some time later, Fernando was to rescue, from centuries of racist denial, the hidden black roots of Cuban identity.

And that dangerous gent, the skinny bald man in a hurry, was José Martí. The most Cuban of all Cubans, a son of Spaniards, was the one who decried:

“We were but a mask, wearing underwear from England, a vest from Paris, a frock coat from America, and a cap from Spain.”

He repudiated the false erudition called civilization, and he demanded:

“No more robes or epaulettes.”

And he stated:

“All the glory in the world fits inside a kernel of corn.”

Shortly after that sighting on Havana’s streets, Martí headed for the mountains. And he was fighting for Cuba when a Spanish bullet knocked him from his horse.

MUSCLES

José Martí announced it and he denounced it: the young nation in North America would become a gluttonous empire, its hunger for land insatiable. It had already devoured all of the natives’ territory and half of Mexico’s and it would not stop there.

“No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war,” proclaimed Teddy Roosevelt, who received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr. Teddy was president until 1909, when he gave up invading countries and went off to fight rhinoceroses in Africa.

His successor, William Howard Taft, invoked the natural order of things:

“The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”

MARK TWAIN

Some months after invading Iraq, President George W. Bush said he had taken the war to liberate the Philippines as his model.

Both wars were inspired from heaven.

Bush disclosed that God had ordered him to act as he did. And a century beforehand, President William McKinley also heard the voice from the Great Beyond:

“God told me that we could not leave the Filipinos to themselves.

They were unfit for self-government. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate them, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

Thus the Philippines were liberated from the Filipino threat, and along the way the United States also saved Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa . . .

At the time, writer Ambrose Bierce revealed:

“War is God’s way of teaching us geography.”

And his colleague Mark Twain, leader of the Anti-Imperialist League, designed a new flag for the nation, featuring little skulls in place of stars.

General Frederick Funston suggested Twain ought to be hanged for treason.

Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn defended their father.

KIPLING

Unlike Twain, Rudyard Kipling was enthralled by wars of conquest. His popular poem “The White Man’s Burden” exhorted the invading nations to remain on invaded lands until their civilizing mission was complete:

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

The poet, born in Bombay but raised as an Englishman, saw serfs as too ignorant to know what they needed, and too ungrateful to ever appreciate the sacrifices their masters made for them:

Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light . . .

SWORD OF THE EMPIRE

At Wounded Knee, General Nelson A. Miles solved the Indian problem by shooting women and children.

In Chicago, General Miles solved the worker problem by sending the leaders of the Pullman strike to their graves.

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, General Miles solved the colonial problem by pulling down the Spanish flag and raising the Stars and Stripes in its place. And he nailed up posters all over town that said, “English spoken here,” in case no one had noticed. He proclaimed himself governor. And he explained to the invaded that the invaders had “come not to make war, but on the contrary, to bring you protection, not only to yourselves, but to your property, and to promote your prosperity, and to . . . ”

CIVILIZED RICE

From the beginning, the redemption of the Philippines enjoyed the invaluable support of the ladies of charity.

Those good souls, wives of high officials and officers of the invading forces, began by visiting the Manila jail. They noticed that the prisoners were markedly thin. When they toured the kitchen and saw what the wretches were eating, their hearts sank. It was primitive rice: grains of all sizes, opaque, dark, with the husk and germ and everything still attached.

They implored their husbands to do something, and their husbands did not pass up the chance to do good. The next ship from the United States brought a cargo of civilized rice, all the grains alike, husked and polished and shining, whitened with talcum powder.

From the end of 1901, that is what the prisoners ate. In the first ten months, 4,825 of them fell ill, and 216 died.

American doctors attributed the disaster to one of those microbes that propagate in the poor hygiene of backward countries. But just in case, they ordered the prison kitchen to go back to the old menu.

Once the prisoners were eating primitive rice again, the plague disappeared.

ORIGIN OF DEMOCRACY

In 1889, Brazil’s monarchy died suddenly.

One morning, monarchist politicians woke up as republicans.

A couple of years later, the constitution established universal suffrage. Everyone could vote, except women and the illiterate.

Since nearly all Brazilians were either female or illiterate, practically no one voted.

In the first democratic election, ninety-eight of every one hundred Brazilians did not answer the call to the ballot box.

A powerful coffee baron, Prudente de Moraes, was elected the nation’s president. He moved to Rio from São Paulo and nobody noticed. No one came out to greet him; no one even recognized him.

Now he enjoys a certain renown as the main street near the elegant beach of Ipanema.

ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSITY