Mirrors (68 page)

So people would work hard and lead a more moral life, the crash on Wall Street also made the price of sugar nosedive.

The disaster severely punished the islands of the Caribbean and gave Brazil’s northeast the coup de grâce.

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 Progeny” 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