A Celebration Without a Victory
I'm trying my best to get in a festive mood but I can't seem to manage it. I suppose because there's nothing to celebrate. The death of Fidel Castro will not be the end of Castroism in Cuba much less the re-birth of freedom there. Even his death per se is far from satisfactory. Death is a biological certainty. It comes to all men regardless of the good or evil that they do in life. There is nothing retributive in it. Castro's death is no exception. It is ridiculous to regard it as our "victory." If anything it is his victory: Fidel was never brought to justice for his crimes and his death guarantees that he never will be. The biggest mass murderer in the history of the Western Hemisphere will die in his own bed. Can any of us say with certainty that he shall do the same? Millions have expired in the last 50 years who asked for nothing more than to die in their own country yet their prayers went unanswered just so that he might become the first dictator in Cuban history to die in his own bed.
A death like Che Guevara's was worth celebrating because it signified the triumph of justice.
Castro's death confirms only the injustice of life.
The bottles of champagne that were purchased 50 years ago to toast the re-birth of freedom in our country have all now turned to vinegar. It is only these bottles that should be opened on the occasion of Castro's death.
Gall is the only drink that befits such an occasion.
RCAB, January 16, 2009
On the Day that Fidel Castro Dies
I do not know if Fidel Castro is dead or not. I have accepted, however, the fact that there will be no final reckoning extracted from him, nothing as poetic as Mussolini's corpse dangling upside down in a gutter or Ceausescu's riddled with bullets in a pool of his festering blood. We shall have no such national catharsis. Even Hitler's fate, execution by his own hand as the Doomsday clock ticked, he has avoided. The architect of our country's ruin will die in his own bed, as no other Cuban dictator has done before. The chaos of 50 years, in whose maelstrom he lived and thrived, shall survive him; but he shall no longer be at the center of it. It is not known what if anything he will take with him, but one thing is certain: if our country is ever to move beyond him, Fidel Castro's physical existence — animal, vegetable or mineral — must finally lapse and resolve itself into innate matter. He will be less dangerous that way, though his maggots will continue to feed on our country for years to come, continuing his work of destruction after him.
Fidel's death by installments, which is a measure of justice for him and injustice for us, served the ends of his successor by allowing him to consolidate his power in his brother's shadow. It also showed the Cuban people how truly irrelevant Fidel had become except as the bogeyman of all their nightmares. In two years the Cuban people have become comfortable with the idea of a moribund-to-dead Castro. Those who regarded him as a god must have been surprised at how easy it is to let a god die. The impact of his death, if not thus diluted, might have caused more of a national convulsion. Now it is but another sham spectacle that they must endorse with their presence. At least the professional criers that followed 19th century funerals were compensated for their tears. That work now is obligatory and unavoidable. There will be tears enough to shed on that day, not for him, of course, but for everything that he blighted and obliterated in his passage through the earth.
RCAB, January 15, 2009
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Thursday, July 05, 2012
July the Fourth
"Esta tierra mágica y clemente, que llama a sí a los tristes y sin cansarse amasa panes para todos los que se proclaman sus hijos". — José Martí
"This magical and merciful land that beckons the unfortunate and tirelessly kneads the bread for all who proclaim themselves her sons." — José Martí
Monday, July 02, 2012
Laura Lomas Continues to Defame José Martí: Part 2
In her article in Translation Review, which runs 22 pages (including endnotes), Laura Lomas does not have much room to exhibit her prodigious ignorance of Martí's biography, or, perhaps, after her tour de force in Translating Empire, she no longer has anything to prove (certainly not to us). Still, the reader who has the patience to chop through the weeds will not go unrewarded; the field may be smaller but that very fact allows a more careful inspection and greater scope for presenting our findings in this limited space:
p. 13 "Translation serves [Martí] as a method of defining his own, his region's, and his diasporic community's perspective and concerns in relation to the 'other America' (OC 6:34), or [to] 'the America that is not ours' (OC 8:35)."
We are still waiting for Lomas to explain how Martí's translation of Hugh Conway's Called Back or Thomas Moore's Lalla-Rookh, not to mention his projected translation of Dianah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman -- all from English/Irish authors -- "serve[d] him as a method of defining his own, his region's, and his diasporic community's perspective and concerns in relation to the 'other America,' or the 'America that is not ours.'"
p. 13 "[M]artí translated from English to Spanish, but also from French to Spanish, and in a few instances (and most likely in collaboration with others), from Spanish to English."
Martí also translated from English to Portuguese while employed at the commercial firm of C.[arlos] Carranza & Co., 60 Wall Street, from 1883 to 1885. (Yes, Martí worked on Wall Street. In fact, among the Papeles de Martí, collected by Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, there is a letter of recommendation on Martí's behalf from C. Carranza & Co. to W.R. Grace & Co.).
p. 13 "Martí initiated the translation of [Helen Hunt] Jackson's bestselling novel [Ramona] at his own expense."
Martí's friend, the Uruguayan diplomat Enrique Estrázulas, to whom Versos sencillos is co-dedicated, paid for the printing of Martí's translation of Ramona.
p. 14 "Another way of categorizing Martí's translations might be to divide them into self-initiated projects (translations of Hugo, Jackson, excerpts of prose and poetry of Emerson, Whitman, Longfellow, Renan, Poe) that reveal Martí's criteria in electing to make certain texts and authors available to readers of Spanish, and projects that Martí completed at the behest of others."
In 1874, while briefly in Paris, Martí was introduced to Victor Hugo by the poet Auguste Vacquerie (whose brother Charles was married to Hugo's daughter). Hugo presented Martí with a copy of Mes Fils and entrusted to him the Spanish translation. Clearly, this was not a "self-initiated project" but one that Martí "completed at the behest of [Hugo]."
p. 14 "[M]artí's primary goals as a translator were to guarantee his América's sovereignty, and to liberate and culturally enrich Hispano-American literature."
Those were the primary goals of some of his translations (e.g. Ramona and the anti-Cuban editorial in The Manufacturer, which was re-printed and refuted by Martí in The New York Post). As for other translations, see note above [p. 13/1].
p. 16 "[M]artí translated from the belly of the emerging U.S. empire."
Not very "emerg[ed]" at the time of Martí's death, nor destined to expand much after. In fact, this "U.S. empire" contracted more in the 20th century than it expanded.
p. 16 "This history of dislocation, after serving a prison sentence for his anti-colonial beliefs, after residence in various Central and South American nations and Spain as part of a Latin American and Caribbean diaspora, and with a canny sense of U.S. aspirations to 'take' his island and control or exploit aspects of other Latin American countries, led Martí to theorize translation (and its prerequisite, multilingualism) as a weapon for counteracting a complex of racial and imperial discourses about his América."
What it led Martí to do was to sacrifice his life (see his final letter to Mercado). Nothing could be more ridiculous than to suggest that "to theorize translation (and its prerequisite, multilingualism)" was the culmination of Martí's "history of dislocation" and the "weapon [slingshot?] for counteracting a complex of racial and imperialist discourses about his América." As a would-be translation theorist herself, it is perhaps not surprising and to some degree excusable that Lomas would seek to enlarge that minor aspect of Martí's literary legacy; but to place it center stage and make Martí's entire life the prelude to it is nothing but self-serving. Despite her frenzied efforts (and because of them) no one in the future will ever "privilege" Martí as the "Heroic Translator."
p. 17 "[Martí's] defense of mother-tongue maintenance parallels his stalwart endorsement of self-government according to the unique cultural situation in the region."
Any author that would coin such an abomination as "mother-tongue maintenance" and does not have Helen Keller's excuse should take to heart and follow the maxim (slightly altered here) that they also serve who only stand and teach. Forget about "publish or die." Some academics will teach longer the less they publish.
As for Martí's "stalwart endorsement of self-government," it was never contingent, as Lomas suggests, "on the unique cultural situation in the region." This implies that the absence of self-government (such as in Cuba) could be explained or even excused by "its unique cultural situation" -- that is, a culture of tyranny, which is indeed "unique" in the region, though not without would-be imitators. I pointed out in Part 3 of my review of Translating Empire that Lomas is obsessed with the culture of the volk as the defining principle of government and source of its legitimacy, which is a position that Martí never held. Democracy, not caciquism, was Martí's programme for Cuba. To admit that fact discredits "Cuba's current government," and Lomas never does. Carried to its logical (or illogical) conclusion Lomas' (not Martí's) theory of self-government would legitimize the ancient Aztec practice of infant sacrifice, which is at the very heart (no pun intended) of Mexico's auctonomous culture, and explain the results of Sunday's presidential elections on the basis of it.
p. 17 "In light of Martí's utopian desire to build a print community of Spanish speakers that extended across national borders [...]."
This is the second time (see main review) that Lomas refers to Martí's ideas as "utopian" (and it won't be the last). But what is so "utopian" about "build[ing] a print community of Spanish readers that extended across national borders?" Martí did precisely that many times. His crónicas were reprinted throughout Latin American (often without his permission) and made Martí the region's first internationally syndicated columnist. La Edad de Oro circulated throughout the Hispanic world. Indeed, Martí's contemporary fame as a writer was not so much national (his writings were rarely published in Cuba) as international.
p. 18 "This brief article celebrates a fellow Cuban translator, Gabriel [de] Zéndegui, who taught literature in the United States during a period of twenty years."
Gabriel de Zéndegui did not teach "literature in the United States for a period of twenty years." In 1882, he consulted Martí about relocating to the U.S., and did so briefly (1885-1888) before settling in Argentina. La Nacíón, probably with Martí's recommendation, appointed him its foreign correspondent in London, which position he exercised for 14 years. Upon the inauguration of the Cuban Republic, in 1902, Zéndegui was named Secretary of the Legation there. He resided continuously in England from 1888 until his death in 1922.
p. 18 "Martí lived in New York in the wake of a failed Reconstruction that witnessed the rise of lynch law and Jim Crow, the Asian [sic] Exclusion Acts, and massacres or military subjection of native peoples."
It's the "Chinese [not 'Asian'] Exclusion Act" [singular], signed by President Chester Arthur in 1882. No other exclusion acts were enacted in Martí's lifetime. (The Immigration Act of 1924 excluded for the first time other Asians besides the Chinese).
Too bad that the current sufferings of Cubans under military subjection (which include lynch law, Jim Crow, massacres and exclusion acts) are of too recent vintage to merit Lomas' attention much less condemnation. We do not doubt (how could anyone doubt it?) that these outrages would meet with Martí's disapproval, however.
p. 19 "En Arkansas se unieron texanos y arkanseños, y mujeres y hombres, y quemaron contra un pino a un negro untado de petróleo."
"In Arkansas, Texans and Arkansinos, women and men, came together and burned at the stake of a tree a black man covered with tar." [Lomas' translation]
In the translation of this one sentence Lomas manages to confute burning at a stake with tar and feathering, and tar with gasoline. Tar and feathering, which involves the application of tar to the skin and then feathers, though undoubtedly painful and humiliating, was rarely fatal. Burning at the stake always was. The black man in Arkansas who was tied, probably with chains, to a pine tree and set on fire, was not "covered with tar" but with gasoline, which is the correct translation for Martí's "petróleo" in American English. Tar in Spanish is alquitrán or brea, which Martí does not use (and which the white mob wouldn't have used either because tar is not as combustible as gasoline). Martí knows the difference between tar and gasoline, Lomas obviously does not, and transfers her ignorance to Martí in her translation. In the process, she diminishes the horrific act depicted by Martí with the introduction of extraneous words ("stake" and "tar") and awkward phrases not in the original ("the stake of a tree") which are intended to "refine" Martí's prose but only succeed in redefining (and corrupting) his meaning. She also does not identify the tree as a pine, which, supposedly, could supply her superfluous tar. We suspect that Lomas replaced gasoline with tar because she thought Martí's use of "gasoline" was an anachronism. In fact, gasoline is a naturally occurring by-product of petroleum (and hence did not have to be "invented") and it was in commercial production long before it was used as a fuel in automobiles. The word itself dates to1865.
p. 20 "No longer a pure, homogeneous essence or a biological or genetic principal [sic], the logic of diaspora opens the social formation of diaspora to a range of languages and cultural practices."
Yes, this is nonsense, complete and utter nonsense: not only doesn't it mean anything, it is also ungrammatical. As has been noted previously, Lomas, an assistant professor of English at Rutgers, doesn't know the difference between "principle" and "principal" and uses them interchangeably in Translating Empire. In the four years since her book was published, she has apparently remained clueless. How this is possible for a supposedly bilingual speaker we are hard-pressed to explain since "principal" is not only spelt the same but has the identical meaning in both Spanish and English. A monolingual English speaker might have difficulty distinguishing between "principle" and "principal" (it is a common error). But how can someone who knows Spanish make such an error in English? In the next paragraph, Lomas uses "principle" correctly ("a principle of hospitality"). Like Aunt Ri's quilt in Ramona, "it's called her 'hit-er-miss' pattren," though with Lomas, unlike Aunt Ri, it's "miss" oftener than its "hit."
p. 21 "Giving the lie to claims about equal opportunity and myths of justice for all in the United States, this use of translation as thinking-across reveals the possible terrors that posed a bodily threat specifically to a heterogeneous, racialized or non-standard-English-speaking group, living in the North."
Lomas does not specify who is "giving the lie to claims about equal opportunity and myths of justice for all in the United States." But since the article is about Martí and his use of translation, we must presume that she means Martí. Isn't it interesting how Martí spoke in the 19th century in the same terms ("equal opportunity" and "justice for all") as we do today? It would be interesting if he had, but he didn't. This is not to say that Martí did not decry racism and injustice. He did, wherever he found them, and he did not only find them in the United States. Ironically, it was only in the United States that Martí found "equal opportunity" and "justice for all" for himself -- not in Cuba, not in Spain, not in Mexico, not in Guatemala, not in Venezuela; nowhere but in the "other America."
p. 21 "Translation as thinking-across [...] promotes inclusiveness across differently racialized ethnic groups in the "hybrid" and "mestizo" imagined community of Martí's America."
Martí did not have to "imagine" Our America to be "hybrid" and "mestizo" because it was (and is) hybrid and mestizo. What he never imagined, however, is that some day the "Other America" would also become hybrid and mestizo. (Please note that Lomas is afraid to use those words except with quotations marks, as if the existence of hundreds of millions of people could be put in doubt by affixing them).
p. 23 "Martí practiced and endorsed a radical nationalist politics throughout his life, a discourse that can become complicit in reinforcing cultural conformity and ethnolinguistic intolerance of difference."
Out of the blue, without presenting any evidence to support her contention, Lomas accuses Martí of being potentially "complicit in reinforcing cultural conformity and ethnolinguistic intolerance of difference." Let us suppose that she is right (while bearing in mind that she never is). Shouldn't a people be allowed to evolve its own culture and is it "intolerant" to prefer one's culture to all others? Conformity is not tyranny unless it is enforced at the point of a gun (as in Castro's Cuba). Nor are all differences to be applauded and embraced -- that doesn't multiply choice, but, rather, eliminates it. And that, too, is tyranny.
p. 26. "[Martí] concurs with [Ernest Renan] that nations are social constructions, and that modern humanity will eventually be undivided by the barriers of nationality and free from threats of aggression. However, [...] this utopian view already appeared hollow, with imperialism stalking the more vulnerable parts of the world in the nineteenth century."
This is the third time that Lomas characterizes Martí's views as "utopian." The more humane and idealistic that Martí is, the more "utopian" he seems to Lomas. I do not personally share this "one world" view of the future. I neither believe it possible nor desire it. But I admire those who can and do. It is to me proof of a belief -- almost religious in nature -- in the perfectivity of man and inevitability of justice. We would expect Martí to espouse such a view. This is the Martí that we know and love: the "Universal Cuban." Because I admire him, I do not discount the possibility that he might be right any more than I would dismiss the likelihood that Jesus Christ is right. "Utopians" are ineffectual men, which defines neither Martí nor Christ.
p. 28 endnote 3 "Gabriel García Márquez revindicates underpaid translators and acknowledges his preference for some passages of Gregory Rabassa's translations of his work into English over the original in 'Los pobres traductores.'"
I repeat it only because it is to the credit of a fellow Cuban: García Márquez actually said that he prefers Gregory Rabassa's English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude to the original. This is very high praise indeed even from a cretinous apologist for Fidel Castro.
p. 29 endnote 6 "Martí refers to his attempt to translate Hamlet, and notes in his fragmentary writings that he couldn't get pass the scene of [the] 'sepulteros,' a probable [emphasis mine] reference to Act V, scene i, when two gravediggers pull out Yorick's skull as they prepare Ophelia's grave (Martí, Obras Completas, 22:283)."
Probable? How many other "sepultero" scenes are there in Hamlet?
p. 29 endnote 9 "In 1896, Appleton published a twelve edition of [Martí's translation of Hugh Conway's novel Called Back], available in the New York Public Library."
I own the twenty-third edition, published by D. Appleton and Company, in 1908. Very successful indeed.
p. 30 endnote 14 "Martí encouraged second-language learning as a means of self-defense in a night school on 63rd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues run by Federico Edelman:
"Hombre que no conoce la lengua del país en que vive, es hombre desarmado. Bien harían en pasar las noches desocupadas en la clase de Edelman los cubanos que se sientan como desvalidos, por no hablar la lengua rubia, en esta tierra que tiene en poco a los que no le contestan en su idioma preciso y áspero" (Patria, 9 [de] marzo 1894).
"A man who does not know the language of the country in which he lives, is an unarmed [disarmed] man. Cubans who feel defenseless [helpless] for not knowing the high-toned [blonde] language in [of] this land where one is belittled [held in little regard] for not answering in their [its] necessary [precise] and rough [brusque] language, do well to spend their free evenings in Edelman's class." [Lomas' translation with intercalated corrections].
This translation is deficient on many grounds. A foreigner feels disarmed because he does not speak English, not "unarmed." He could learn English, as Martí suggests that he should do, and then no longer be disarmed. If, as Lomas translates, he were "unarmed" -- that is, without the aptitude or the means to learn -- it would be impossible for him to overcome that limitation or profit from Martí's practical advice. Cubans, Martí writes, feel "desvalidos" (helpless) because they don't speak English; this is not the same as feeling "defenseless," which implies that they are under attack. Nor does Martí say that they are "belittled" because they don't know the "blonde language" (which Lomas somehow manages to translate as "high-toned language"); but, rather, the U.S. "[los] tiene en poco," that is, holds them in little regard because of it. Once they can answer natives in their own "precise and brusque language" they will no longer be considered of little account because the U.S. is a democratic and classless society where immigrants do not face insurmountable obstacles to integration and success. Martí certainly does not consider learning English to be an insurmountable obstacle (as proponents of bilingual education do today). What Lomas construes as "a revealing comment about discrimination faced by non-English speakers" is in fact Martí's summons to his exiled countrymen to avail themselves of the opportunities afforded them to realize their full potential in American society.
Not only does Lomas tendentiously mistranslate Martí here, but she has no idea whatever of the context of this particular quotation because of her less than serviceable knowledge of Martí's biography. She is unaware that Federico Edelman's night school class was held at a public school under the auspices of the New York City Board of Education. What Martí endorsed was a government-sponsored and taxpayer-supported program to assist newcomers with language acquisition which disproves by its very existence Lomas' (not Martí's) contention that non-English speaking immigrants were under siege, "unarmed" and "defenseless," in a hostile America.
Moreover, Lomas incorrectly surmises that the "school on 63rd Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues [was] run by Federico Edelman," which it was not. Edelman only taught an English class there, as Martí clearly states in the paragraph cited by Lomas. But this is not the worst of it: Lomas is apparently unaware that Martí himself had only recently been a teacher at that very building known as Central Valley Evening School, located in the premises of Grammar School No. 74, at 220 East 63rd St. Martí had been hired as "Instructor of Spanish" there in January 1891, and his appointment was renewed for 1892 and 1893, though he presented his resignation at the end of 1892. Lomas quotes Martí's praise for Edelman's interlingual approach to teaching English through Spanish. This is all very well, of course. She could, however, have quoted Martí's own summary of his approach to language instruction, which is contained in a "Synopsis of Methods of Instruction in the Various Branches of Studied Pursued" at Central Evening High School: "The instructor in Spanish [Martí] reports that his aim has been, 'to teach strict grammar without appearing to teach it.' The language was taught by pronunciation, orthography, dictating nightly different forms of sentences to the students, and then more elaborately as they showed signs of progress. The relation of Spanish moods to those of other languages was fully set forth. Commercial letters and short descriptions were written by the students, and corrected by the teacher from time to time. Constant use of the black-board familiarized the minds of the students with the ideas imparted by the instructor." [Journal of the Board of Education of the City of New York, New York, 1891, pp. 690-692].
p. 13 "Translation serves [Martí] as a method of defining his own, his region's, and his diasporic community's perspective and concerns in relation to the 'other America' (OC 6:34), or [to] 'the America that is not ours' (OC 8:35)."
We are still waiting for Lomas to explain how Martí's translation of Hugh Conway's Called Back or Thomas Moore's Lalla-Rookh, not to mention his projected translation of Dianah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman -- all from English/Irish authors -- "serve[d] him as a method of defining his own, his region's, and his diasporic community's perspective and concerns in relation to the 'other America,' or the 'America that is not ours.'"
p. 13 "[M]artí translated from English to Spanish, but also from French to Spanish, and in a few instances (and most likely in collaboration with others), from Spanish to English."
Martí also translated from English to Portuguese while employed at the commercial firm of C.[arlos] Carranza & Co., 60 Wall Street, from 1883 to 1885. (Yes, Martí worked on Wall Street. In fact, among the Papeles de Martí, collected by Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, there is a letter of recommendation on Martí's behalf from C. Carranza & Co. to W.R. Grace & Co.).
p. 13 "Martí initiated the translation of [Helen Hunt] Jackson's bestselling novel [Ramona] at his own expense."
Martí's friend, the Uruguayan diplomat Enrique Estrázulas, to whom Versos sencillos is co-dedicated, paid for the printing of Martí's translation of Ramona.
p. 14 "Another way of categorizing Martí's translations might be to divide them into self-initiated projects (translations of Hugo, Jackson, excerpts of prose and poetry of Emerson, Whitman, Longfellow, Renan, Poe) that reveal Martí's criteria in electing to make certain texts and authors available to readers of Spanish, and projects that Martí completed at the behest of others."
In 1874, while briefly in Paris, Martí was introduced to Victor Hugo by the poet Auguste Vacquerie (whose brother Charles was married to Hugo's daughter). Hugo presented Martí with a copy of Mes Fils and entrusted to him the Spanish translation. Clearly, this was not a "self-initiated project" but one that Martí "completed at the behest of [Hugo]."
p. 14 "[M]artí's primary goals as a translator were to guarantee his América's sovereignty, and to liberate and culturally enrich Hispano-American literature."
Those were the primary goals of some of his translations (e.g. Ramona and the anti-Cuban editorial in The Manufacturer, which was re-printed and refuted by Martí in The New York Post). As for other translations, see note above [p. 13/1].
p. 16 "[M]artí translated from the belly of the emerging U.S. empire."
Not very "emerg[ed]" at the time of Martí's death, nor destined to expand much after. In fact, this "U.S. empire" contracted more in the 20th century than it expanded.
p. 16 "This history of dislocation, after serving a prison sentence for his anti-colonial beliefs, after residence in various Central and South American nations and Spain as part of a Latin American and Caribbean diaspora, and with a canny sense of U.S. aspirations to 'take' his island and control or exploit aspects of other Latin American countries, led Martí to theorize translation (and its prerequisite, multilingualism) as a weapon for counteracting a complex of racial and imperial discourses about his América."
What it led Martí to do was to sacrifice his life (see his final letter to Mercado). Nothing could be more ridiculous than to suggest that "to theorize translation (and its prerequisite, multilingualism)" was the culmination of Martí's "history of dislocation" and the "weapon [slingshot?] for counteracting a complex of racial and imperialist discourses about his América." As a would-be translation theorist herself, it is perhaps not surprising and to some degree excusable that Lomas would seek to enlarge that minor aspect of Martí's literary legacy; but to place it center stage and make Martí's entire life the prelude to it is nothing but self-serving. Despite her frenzied efforts (and because of them) no one in the future will ever "privilege" Martí as the "Heroic Translator."
p. 17 "[Martí's] defense of mother-tongue maintenance parallels his stalwart endorsement of self-government according to the unique cultural situation in the region."
Any author that would coin such an abomination as "mother-tongue maintenance" and does not have Helen Keller's excuse should take to heart and follow the maxim (slightly altered here) that they also serve who only stand and teach. Forget about "publish or die." Some academics will teach longer the less they publish.
As for Martí's "stalwart endorsement of self-government," it was never contingent, as Lomas suggests, "on the unique cultural situation in the region." This implies that the absence of self-government (such as in Cuba) could be explained or even excused by "its unique cultural situation" -- that is, a culture of tyranny, which is indeed "unique" in the region, though not without would-be imitators. I pointed out in Part 3 of my review of Translating Empire that Lomas is obsessed with the culture of the volk as the defining principle of government and source of its legitimacy, which is a position that Martí never held. Democracy, not caciquism, was Martí's programme for Cuba. To admit that fact discredits "Cuba's current government," and Lomas never does. Carried to its logical (or illogical) conclusion Lomas' (not Martí's) theory of self-government would legitimize the ancient Aztec practice of infant sacrifice, which is at the very heart (no pun intended) of Mexico's auctonomous culture, and explain the results of Sunday's presidential elections on the basis of it.
p. 17 "In light of Martí's utopian desire to build a print community of Spanish speakers that extended across national borders [...]."
This is the second time (see main review) that Lomas refers to Martí's ideas as "utopian" (and it won't be the last). But what is so "utopian" about "build[ing] a print community of Spanish readers that extended across national borders?" Martí did precisely that many times. His crónicas were reprinted throughout Latin American (often without his permission) and made Martí the region's first internationally syndicated columnist. La Edad de Oro circulated throughout the Hispanic world. Indeed, Martí's contemporary fame as a writer was not so much national (his writings were rarely published in Cuba) as international.
p. 18 "This brief article celebrates a fellow Cuban translator, Gabriel [de] Zéndegui, who taught literature in the United States during a period of twenty years."
Gabriel de Zéndegui did not teach "literature in the United States for a period of twenty years." In 1882, he consulted Martí about relocating to the U.S., and did so briefly (1885-1888) before settling in Argentina. La Nacíón, probably with Martí's recommendation, appointed him its foreign correspondent in London, which position he exercised for 14 years. Upon the inauguration of the Cuban Republic, in 1902, Zéndegui was named Secretary of the Legation there. He resided continuously in England from 1888 until his death in 1922.
p. 18 "Martí lived in New York in the wake of a failed Reconstruction that witnessed the rise of lynch law and Jim Crow, the Asian [sic] Exclusion Acts, and massacres or military subjection of native peoples."
It's the "Chinese [not 'Asian'] Exclusion Act" [singular], signed by President Chester Arthur in 1882. No other exclusion acts were enacted in Martí's lifetime. (The Immigration Act of 1924 excluded for the first time other Asians besides the Chinese).
Too bad that the current sufferings of Cubans under military subjection (which include lynch law, Jim Crow, massacres and exclusion acts) are of too recent vintage to merit Lomas' attention much less condemnation. We do not doubt (how could anyone doubt it?) that these outrages would meet with Martí's disapproval, however.
p. 19 "En Arkansas se unieron texanos y arkanseños, y mujeres y hombres, y quemaron contra un pino a un negro untado de petróleo."
"In Arkansas, Texans and Arkansinos, women and men, came together and burned at the stake of a tree a black man covered with tar." [Lomas' translation]
In the translation of this one sentence Lomas manages to confute burning at a stake with tar and feathering, and tar with gasoline. Tar and feathering, which involves the application of tar to the skin and then feathers, though undoubtedly painful and humiliating, was rarely fatal. Burning at the stake always was. The black man in Arkansas who was tied, probably with chains, to a pine tree and set on fire, was not "covered with tar" but with gasoline, which is the correct translation for Martí's "petróleo" in American English. Tar in Spanish is alquitrán or brea, which Martí does not use (and which the white mob wouldn't have used either because tar is not as combustible as gasoline). Martí knows the difference between tar and gasoline, Lomas obviously does not, and transfers her ignorance to Martí in her translation. In the process, she diminishes the horrific act depicted by Martí with the introduction of extraneous words ("stake" and "tar") and awkward phrases not in the original ("the stake of a tree") which are intended to "refine" Martí's prose but only succeed in redefining (and corrupting) his meaning. She also does not identify the tree as a pine, which, supposedly, could supply her superfluous tar. We suspect that Lomas replaced gasoline with tar because she thought Martí's use of "gasoline" was an anachronism. In fact, gasoline is a naturally occurring by-product of petroleum (and hence did not have to be "invented") and it was in commercial production long before it was used as a fuel in automobiles. The word itself dates to1865.
p. 20 "No longer a pure, homogeneous essence or a biological or genetic principal [sic], the logic of diaspora opens the social formation of diaspora to a range of languages and cultural practices."
Yes, this is nonsense, complete and utter nonsense: not only doesn't it mean anything, it is also ungrammatical. As has been noted previously, Lomas, an assistant professor of English at Rutgers, doesn't know the difference between "principle" and "principal" and uses them interchangeably in Translating Empire. In the four years since her book was published, she has apparently remained clueless. How this is possible for a supposedly bilingual speaker we are hard-pressed to explain since "principal" is not only spelt the same but has the identical meaning in both Spanish and English. A monolingual English speaker might have difficulty distinguishing between "principle" and "principal" (it is a common error). But how can someone who knows Spanish make such an error in English? In the next paragraph, Lomas uses "principle" correctly ("a principle of hospitality"). Like Aunt Ri's quilt in Ramona, "it's called her 'hit-er-miss' pattren," though with Lomas, unlike Aunt Ri, it's "miss" oftener than its "hit."
p. 21 "Giving the lie to claims about equal opportunity and myths of justice for all in the United States, this use of translation as thinking-across reveals the possible terrors that posed a bodily threat specifically to a heterogeneous, racialized or non-standard-English-speaking group, living in the North."
Lomas does not specify who is "giving the lie to claims about equal opportunity and myths of justice for all in the United States." But since the article is about Martí and his use of translation, we must presume that she means Martí. Isn't it interesting how Martí spoke in the 19th century in the same terms ("equal opportunity" and "justice for all") as we do today? It would be interesting if he had, but he didn't. This is not to say that Martí did not decry racism and injustice. He did, wherever he found them, and he did not only find them in the United States. Ironically, it was only in the United States that Martí found "equal opportunity" and "justice for all" for himself -- not in Cuba, not in Spain, not in Mexico, not in Guatemala, not in Venezuela; nowhere but in the "other America."
p. 21 "Translation as thinking-across [...] promotes inclusiveness across differently racialized ethnic groups in the "hybrid" and "mestizo" imagined community of Martí's America."
Martí did not have to "imagine" Our America to be "hybrid" and "mestizo" because it was (and is) hybrid and mestizo. What he never imagined, however, is that some day the "Other America" would also become hybrid and mestizo. (Please note that Lomas is afraid to use those words except with quotations marks, as if the existence of hundreds of millions of people could be put in doubt by affixing them).
p. 23 "Martí practiced and endorsed a radical nationalist politics throughout his life, a discourse that can become complicit in reinforcing cultural conformity and ethnolinguistic intolerance of difference."
Out of the blue, without presenting any evidence to support her contention, Lomas accuses Martí of being potentially "complicit in reinforcing cultural conformity and ethnolinguistic intolerance of difference." Let us suppose that she is right (while bearing in mind that she never is). Shouldn't a people be allowed to evolve its own culture and is it "intolerant" to prefer one's culture to all others? Conformity is not tyranny unless it is enforced at the point of a gun (as in Castro's Cuba). Nor are all differences to be applauded and embraced -- that doesn't multiply choice, but, rather, eliminates it. And that, too, is tyranny.
p. 26. "[Martí] concurs with [Ernest Renan] that nations are social constructions, and that modern humanity will eventually be undivided by the barriers of nationality and free from threats of aggression. However, [...] this utopian view already appeared hollow, with imperialism stalking the more vulnerable parts of the world in the nineteenth century."
This is the third time that Lomas characterizes Martí's views as "utopian." The more humane and idealistic that Martí is, the more "utopian" he seems to Lomas. I do not personally share this "one world" view of the future. I neither believe it possible nor desire it. But I admire those who can and do. It is to me proof of a belief -- almost religious in nature -- in the perfectivity of man and inevitability of justice. We would expect Martí to espouse such a view. This is the Martí that we know and love: the "Universal Cuban." Because I admire him, I do not discount the possibility that he might be right any more than I would dismiss the likelihood that Jesus Christ is right. "Utopians" are ineffectual men, which defines neither Martí nor Christ.
p. 28 endnote 3 "Gabriel García Márquez revindicates underpaid translators and acknowledges his preference for some passages of Gregory Rabassa's translations of his work into English over the original in 'Los pobres traductores.'"
I repeat it only because it is to the credit of a fellow Cuban: García Márquez actually said that he prefers Gregory Rabassa's English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude to the original. This is very high praise indeed even from a cretinous apologist for Fidel Castro.
p. 29 endnote 6 "Martí refers to his attempt to translate Hamlet, and notes in his fragmentary writings that he couldn't get pass the scene of [the] 'sepulteros,' a probable [emphasis mine] reference to Act V, scene i, when two gravediggers pull out Yorick's skull as they prepare Ophelia's grave (Martí, Obras Completas, 22:283)."
Probable? How many other "sepultero" scenes are there in Hamlet?
p. 29 endnote 9 "In 1896, Appleton published a twelve edition of [Martí's translation of Hugh Conway's novel Called Back], available in the New York Public Library."
I own the twenty-third edition, published by D. Appleton and Company, in 1908. Very successful indeed.
p. 30 endnote 14 "Martí encouraged second-language learning as a means of self-defense in a night school on 63rd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues run by Federico Edelman:
"Hombre que no conoce la lengua del país en que vive, es hombre desarmado. Bien harían en pasar las noches desocupadas en la clase de Edelman los cubanos que se sientan como desvalidos, por no hablar la lengua rubia, en esta tierra que tiene en poco a los que no le contestan en su idioma preciso y áspero" (Patria, 9 [de] marzo 1894).
"A man who does not know the language of the country in which he lives, is an unarmed [disarmed] man. Cubans who feel defenseless [helpless] for not knowing the high-toned [blonde] language in [of] this land where one is belittled [held in little regard] for not answering in their [its] necessary [precise] and rough [brusque] language, do well to spend their free evenings in Edelman's class." [Lomas' translation with intercalated corrections].
This translation is deficient on many grounds. A foreigner feels disarmed because he does not speak English, not "unarmed." He could learn English, as Martí suggests that he should do, and then no longer be disarmed. If, as Lomas translates, he were "unarmed" -- that is, without the aptitude or the means to learn -- it would be impossible for him to overcome that limitation or profit from Martí's practical advice. Cubans, Martí writes, feel "desvalidos" (helpless) because they don't speak English; this is not the same as feeling "defenseless," which implies that they are under attack. Nor does Martí say that they are "belittled" because they don't know the "blonde language" (which Lomas somehow manages to translate as "high-toned language"); but, rather, the U.S. "[los] tiene en poco," that is, holds them in little regard because of it. Once they can answer natives in their own "precise and brusque language" they will no longer be considered of little account because the U.S. is a democratic and classless society where immigrants do not face insurmountable obstacles to integration and success. Martí certainly does not consider learning English to be an insurmountable obstacle (as proponents of bilingual education do today). What Lomas construes as "a revealing comment about discrimination faced by non-English speakers" is in fact Martí's summons to his exiled countrymen to avail themselves of the opportunities afforded them to realize their full potential in American society.
Not only does Lomas tendentiously mistranslate Martí here, but she has no idea whatever of the context of this particular quotation because of her less than serviceable knowledge of Martí's biography. She is unaware that Federico Edelman's night school class was held at a public school under the auspices of the New York City Board of Education. What Martí endorsed was a government-sponsored and taxpayer-supported program to assist newcomers with language acquisition which disproves by its very existence Lomas' (not Martí's) contention that non-English speaking immigrants were under siege, "unarmed" and "defenseless," in a hostile America.
Moreover, Lomas incorrectly surmises that the "school on 63rd Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues [was] run by Federico Edelman," which it was not. Edelman only taught an English class there, as Martí clearly states in the paragraph cited by Lomas. But this is not the worst of it: Lomas is apparently unaware that Martí himself had only recently been a teacher at that very building known as Central Valley Evening School, located in the premises of Grammar School No. 74, at 220 East 63rd St. Martí had been hired as "Instructor of Spanish" there in January 1891, and his appointment was renewed for 1892 and 1893, though he presented his resignation at the end of 1892. Lomas quotes Martí's praise for Edelman's interlingual approach to teaching English through Spanish. This is all very well, of course. She could, however, have quoted Martí's own summary of his approach to language instruction, which is contained in a "Synopsis of Methods of Instruction in the Various Branches of Studied Pursued" at Central Evening High School: "The instructor in Spanish [Martí] reports that his aim has been, 'to teach strict grammar without appearing to teach it.' The language was taught by pronunciation, orthography, dictating nightly different forms of sentences to the students, and then more elaborately as they showed signs of progress. The relation of Spanish moods to those of other languages was fully set forth. Commercial letters and short descriptions were written by the students, and corrected by the teacher from time to time. Constant use of the black-board familiarized the minds of the students with the ideas imparted by the instructor." [Journal of the Board of Education of the City of New York, New York, 1891, pp. 690-692].
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Laura Lomas Continues to Defame José Martí
As readers of JMB know, I have already devoted three lengthy posts [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 ] to reviewing Laura Lomas' Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities. The experience was not pleasurable for me and cannot have been pleasurable for even my most indulgent readers. But it was necessary, and, indeed, unavoidable. The misrepresentations of Martí's life and work contained in this volume could not be overlooked, nor the author's conscription of Martí into the service of "Cuba's current government" (as I've already remarked, as "current" as 1959). Does this mean, however, that I am obliged henceforth to review all her writings on Martí and point out what is wrong with them? Yes, I'm afraid it does, at least until she stops writing about Martí or desists from distorting Martí's writings. It is just as important to expose false lights as it is to keep the beacon burning.
Lomas' latest screed was published in Translation Review 84 (Spring 2011), the journal of the American Society of Literary Translators. I am unaware that Lomas has ever translated anything in her life except snippets of Martí's writings culled from Esther Allen's Selected Writings and "worked over" to Lomas' satisfaction (that is, until they say what Lomas wants them to say). Not being a translator, however, is no disqualification for writing on translation theory. A study in English of Martí's ideas about translation would be a welcome addition to the literature. It would not be difficult to write such a study. By faithfully copying what Martí says about translation even Lomas might manage it. Unfortunately, neither Translating Empire nor her latest journal article come close to being such a study. Knowing, as we already do, that propaganda and not scholarship is her object, there is no reason to expect Lomas to impart knowledge for its own sake when it doesn't advance her political agenda.
As I've pointed out before, Lomas is constitutionally incapable of devising a cogent title, and what is labelled incorrectly can never be wholly trusted. She came closest with the original title of her doctoral dissertation, "American Alterities: Reading between Borders in José Martí's 'North American Scenes,'" which except for the "Alterities" was almost a catchy title. This later transmogrified into the wholly unintelligible Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities. In Translation Review, Lomas delivers herself of: "Thinking Across, Infiltration, and Transculturation: José Martí's Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Translation." If she would only discard what's left of the semi-colon, she would make more sense, though the "Post-Colonial" part is debatable and only her extremist politics would lose by its omission. Martí did not live to see the post-colonial era, which was a blessing for Martí and a calamity for Cuba. If Lomas means that he anticipated it, she should say that and explain how. Because Martí thinks and writes outside the constructs of colonialism does not mean that he was a "post colonial translat[or]" or a post-colonial anything.
Most of Martí's contemporaries and many of his predecessors also exhibit in their writings the same total rejection of colonial preconceptions which characterizes Martí's own thinking. How far, then, are we to set this "post-colonial" tendency within the colonial era? Certainly as far back as Félix Varela and more than 70 years before Martí's death at Dos Ríos. But rejecting any personal investment in colonialism, or even undermining its political foundations, is not the same thing as defeating it, and colonialism must be defeated for good and all before the post-colonial era, or, specifically, post-colonial conditions, can shape what is properly called post-colonial writing (or translation). No Cuban, not even Martí, predicted what post-colonial Cuba would be like. Such prevision, incidentally, would probably have killed the independence movement in its cradle. Resignation to quasi-colonialism as the successor regime to colonialism may be cultivated after the fact but it can never be the goal of any revolution and was not the goal of Martí's revolution. This post-1898 colonial reality was never envisioned by Martí, nor is any period in Cuban history more at odds with his conception of a republic (with the exception, of course, of our own). The abrogation of the Platt Amendment in 1934 was the real culmination of Martí's Revolution, and of that he was certainly the "Intellectual Author."
I have detected one important break — and too many inconsistencies to cite — between this article and Lomas' book. In Translating Empire, Lomas forcefully (and foolishly) denied that Martí was an exile, arguing instead that he was a "migrant," though Martí always described himself as an exile and never once as a "migrant" or "immigrant." Here, however, she departs without excuses from one of the principal underpinnings of her book. She still alludes to Martí's "migration" and his "migratory position in New York," as well as to his "migrant's perspective;" but, at the same time, she refers to Martí as "a deportee in exile" and comments on his "exilic situation in New York." It is Lomas who has posited that you can't have it both ways. Nevertheless, sometimes both ways are not enough for her, as she also alludes to Martí's "extra-domestic or diasporic location." Perhaps it's just a case of elegant variation gone amok; but one who places such importance, as Lomas does, on differentiating these terms, should not use them interchangeably. Even foolishness must be consistent if it is to be taken seriously.
I am not going to discuss Lomas' theory of Martí's theory of "post-colonial translation" since the object of her theorizing does not exist. Suffice it to say that it is as convoluted, and, ultimately, as meaningless as any other of her theoretical constructs. But lest it should be thought that I am dismissing her ideas without a hearing, here is her conclusion: "Martí's theory and practice of translation, transferring texts from a dominant to an imperial-turned-minority language, as a non-assimilating migrant in the United States, generatively open concepts of the nation, of race, and of transnational formations such as diaspora to redefine them in terms of ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity." Here, as elsewhere in her writings, language is used to conceal rather than to reveal her meaning, or, perhaps more likely, to disguise the absence of any meaning. If there ever was one it was lost in a maze of subordinate clauses winding their way to a dead end. It is like reading German with its periodic sentences cruelly shorn of their far-ranging verbs. Lomas knows the mechanics of a periodic sentence up to and short of a point, but cannot bring the sentence to a successful conclusion precisely because she has no point to make about translation as translation.
She has much to say, however, about translation as something other than translation: "Language becomes the site where a Latino American cultural critic such as Martí uses translation to problematize U.S. nationalism's inability to recognize the rights of minorities — racialized by their language or ethnic difference — in the nation, or to respect the sovereignty of 'minor' nations in its imperial backyard." This is one of the few Lomasian sentences that can itself be translated into standard English: Martí uses language, or, specifically, translation, to address the problem posed by the inability of a nationalist United States to recognize the rights of minorities because of language and ethnic differences, or to respect the sovereignty of less powerful nations in its imperial backyard. Now this makes sense. The thought expressed by Lomas is just as hopelessly trite and even banal; but now it can be understood in all its triteness and banality. Before, mired in language that attempted to elevate triteness by raising its vocabulary, it sounded self-important without being important. Bereft of its rhetorical strait-jacket, the idea, though it has no wings, is at least honestly pedestrian. The author herself could do worse than to be honestly pedestrian. Her contribution to Martí studies (such as it is) would not be diminished because of it.
Lomas' politics are easier to follow than her theoretical formulas or attempts at deconstruction because here, at least, dissembling does not suit her purposes: she can be as anti-American (or, as she would say, anti-United Statesian) as she would like Martí to be and credit him with all her fashionable prejudices. To wit: "Martí sought to counteract an unrealistically hopeful view of the United States that might lead his compatriots to identify with a North American culture and political model." Yes, Martí always sought to "counteract" unrealistic estimates of the United States (or of any other country) because they distorted reality; but he never denied the reality, which would have been to distort it himself. Martí embraced and engaged U.S. culture as no other foreign intellectual before or since, and he adopted its political model as his own, as is evident in the democratic structure of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and of the future Cuban Republic which he envisioned in the Manifesto de Montecristi. Instead of goading his fellow Cubans to reject "North American culture and [its] political model," Martí identified what was best about them and encouraged their emulation while warning of deviations and distortions (to that model) that should be avoided, not only by his countrymen but by Americans themselves, whose democratic evolution and progress were also important to him (as attested to in thousands of his pages). It is better, in any case, to have "an unrealistically hopeful view" of U.S. democracy than "an unrealistically hopeful view" of Castroite tyranny, which is Lomas' problem.
When Cuban Communists (or any Communists) assail the United States, it is always its government, never its people. Lomas herself has no such scruples: her disdain is sufficient to cover not only the U.S. government and all aspects of American society, but also and particularly its people; and she would have us believe that Martí shared the same animus toward Americans that she admittedly does. She faults Martí, however, for "express[ing] a utopian view that with more knowledge, the average U.S. citizen-subject might unlearn imperial privilege and radically change his or her attitudes towards his América and people, here and abroad." In fact, Martí would have rejected (and did reject) any suggestion that Americans were inherently predisposed to imperialism or racism, or that such was their irrevocable destiny. It is such assumptions, which are based on racist generalizations and a sense of privilege founded on a paradigm of eternal victimhood, that Martí combatted all his life and his writings still challenge. For Lomas' information, the American people overwhelmingly supported the cause of Cuban independence in 1850, 1868 and 1895. It was successive U.S. administrations which flaunted American public opinion until 1898 when the "Free Cuba" movement was too powerful to be denied. Today also, and for the last 53 years, Americans have opposed the Castro regime and its subjugation of the Cuban people (with few exceptions such as Lomas herself). Now as in the 19th century, U.S. betrayals — and there have been many — were the handiwork of the imperial presidency, not of "the average U.S. citizen-subject," as Lomas calls the freest man in the world.
Where did Lomas pick up the idea that Martí wanted to reform Americans by purging them of their sense of "imperial privilege," which enterprise Lomas considers impossibly "utopian" because her fellow Americans are, in her estimation, inveterate imperialists beyond all reclamation as well as perennial bad neighbors? Lomas herself answers the question: "Martí is not alone in this optimism: one of his greatest interpreters, Cuban statesman, poet and literary critic Roberto Fernández Retamar, noted that "[t]he U.S. was neither born a monster, nor will it remain so forever." If Lomas had praised Fernández Retamar as a poet or critic — leaving aside politics as if this were possible in so politicized (comprometido) a writer — we would not care about her valuation of him. But how exactly can one be a "statesman" in the service of a dictatorship? When statecraft is reduced to sycophancy the statesman is only a more successful courtesan, and in the same measure as his talents are great so will his abject submission be blameworthy. How can Fernández Retamar be "one of [Martí's] greatest interpreters" when he doesn't even understand that being an apologist for tyranny contravenes all that Martí did or said in his life? One can be many things and still be a martiano; but an apologist for tyranny — and an unrepentant one at that — never. Praising Fernández Retamar in such terms pretty much says all there is to say about Lomas' critical and moral faculty while putting her in league with other "interpreters" who debase themselves by debasing Martí.
Lomas subscribes to the liberal conceit that true patriotism consists of hating one's country, whether that country is the U.S., whose democracy she bashes continually, or Cuba, whose dictatorship she extolls at every opportunity. Worst of all, she is obviously convinced that evil will triumph in Cuba forever, and that it will always be fashionable and renumerative to be an apologist for tyranny. She is wrong. But she is also so insignificant that it will matter to no one that she was wrong.
[I owe my readers a rest. But I am not finished with this review and shall return to point out its factual errors in Part 2].
Lomas' latest screed was published in Translation Review 84 (Spring 2011), the journal of the American Society of Literary Translators. I am unaware that Lomas has ever translated anything in her life except snippets of Martí's writings culled from Esther Allen's Selected Writings and "worked over" to Lomas' satisfaction (that is, until they say what Lomas wants them to say). Not being a translator, however, is no disqualification for writing on translation theory. A study in English of Martí's ideas about translation would be a welcome addition to the literature. It would not be difficult to write such a study. By faithfully copying what Martí says about translation even Lomas might manage it. Unfortunately, neither Translating Empire nor her latest journal article come close to being such a study. Knowing, as we already do, that propaganda and not scholarship is her object, there is no reason to expect Lomas to impart knowledge for its own sake when it doesn't advance her political agenda.
As I've pointed out before, Lomas is constitutionally incapable of devising a cogent title, and what is labelled incorrectly can never be wholly trusted. She came closest with the original title of her doctoral dissertation, "American Alterities: Reading between Borders in José Martí's 'North American Scenes,'" which except for the "Alterities" was almost a catchy title. This later transmogrified into the wholly unintelligible Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities. In Translation Review, Lomas delivers herself of: "Thinking Across, Infiltration, and Transculturation: José Martí's Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Translation." If she would only discard what's left of the semi-colon, she would make more sense, though the "Post-Colonial" part is debatable and only her extremist politics would lose by its omission. Martí did not live to see the post-colonial era, which was a blessing for Martí and a calamity for Cuba. If Lomas means that he anticipated it, she should say that and explain how. Because Martí thinks and writes outside the constructs of colonialism does not mean that he was a "post colonial translat[or]" or a post-colonial anything.
Most of Martí's contemporaries and many of his predecessors also exhibit in their writings the same total rejection of colonial preconceptions which characterizes Martí's own thinking. How far, then, are we to set this "post-colonial" tendency within the colonial era? Certainly as far back as Félix Varela and more than 70 years before Martí's death at Dos Ríos. But rejecting any personal investment in colonialism, or even undermining its political foundations, is not the same thing as defeating it, and colonialism must be defeated for good and all before the post-colonial era, or, specifically, post-colonial conditions, can shape what is properly called post-colonial writing (or translation). No Cuban, not even Martí, predicted what post-colonial Cuba would be like. Such prevision, incidentally, would probably have killed the independence movement in its cradle. Resignation to quasi-colonialism as the successor regime to colonialism may be cultivated after the fact but it can never be the goal of any revolution and was not the goal of Martí's revolution. This post-1898 colonial reality was never envisioned by Martí, nor is any period in Cuban history more at odds with his conception of a republic (with the exception, of course, of our own). The abrogation of the Platt Amendment in 1934 was the real culmination of Martí's Revolution, and of that he was certainly the "Intellectual Author."
I have detected one important break — and too many inconsistencies to cite — between this article and Lomas' book. In Translating Empire, Lomas forcefully (and foolishly) denied that Martí was an exile, arguing instead that he was a "migrant," though Martí always described himself as an exile and never once as a "migrant" or "immigrant." Here, however, she departs without excuses from one of the principal underpinnings of her book. She still alludes to Martí's "migration" and his "migratory position in New York," as well as to his "migrant's perspective;" but, at the same time, she refers to Martí as "a deportee in exile" and comments on his "exilic situation in New York." It is Lomas who has posited that you can't have it both ways. Nevertheless, sometimes both ways are not enough for her, as she also alludes to Martí's "extra-domestic or diasporic location." Perhaps it's just a case of elegant variation gone amok; but one who places such importance, as Lomas does, on differentiating these terms, should not use them interchangeably. Even foolishness must be consistent if it is to be taken seriously.
I am not going to discuss Lomas' theory of Martí's theory of "post-colonial translation" since the object of her theorizing does not exist. Suffice it to say that it is as convoluted, and, ultimately, as meaningless as any other of her theoretical constructs. But lest it should be thought that I am dismissing her ideas without a hearing, here is her conclusion: "Martí's theory and practice of translation, transferring texts from a dominant to an imperial-turned-minority language, as a non-assimilating migrant in the United States, generatively open concepts of the nation, of race, and of transnational formations such as diaspora to redefine them in terms of ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity." Here, as elsewhere in her writings, language is used to conceal rather than to reveal her meaning, or, perhaps more likely, to disguise the absence of any meaning. If there ever was one it was lost in a maze of subordinate clauses winding their way to a dead end. It is like reading German with its periodic sentences cruelly shorn of their far-ranging verbs. Lomas knows the mechanics of a periodic sentence up to and short of a point, but cannot bring the sentence to a successful conclusion precisely because she has no point to make about translation as translation.
She has much to say, however, about translation as something other than translation: "Language becomes the site where a Latino American cultural critic such as Martí uses translation to problematize U.S. nationalism's inability to recognize the rights of minorities — racialized by their language or ethnic difference — in the nation, or to respect the sovereignty of 'minor' nations in its imperial backyard." This is one of the few Lomasian sentences that can itself be translated into standard English: Martí uses language, or, specifically, translation, to address the problem posed by the inability of a nationalist United States to recognize the rights of minorities because of language and ethnic differences, or to respect the sovereignty of less powerful nations in its imperial backyard. Now this makes sense. The thought expressed by Lomas is just as hopelessly trite and even banal; but now it can be understood in all its triteness and banality. Before, mired in language that attempted to elevate triteness by raising its vocabulary, it sounded self-important without being important. Bereft of its rhetorical strait-jacket, the idea, though it has no wings, is at least honestly pedestrian. The author herself could do worse than to be honestly pedestrian. Her contribution to Martí studies (such as it is) would not be diminished because of it.
Lomas' politics are easier to follow than her theoretical formulas or attempts at deconstruction because here, at least, dissembling does not suit her purposes: she can be as anti-American (or, as she would say, anti-United Statesian) as she would like Martí to be and credit him with all her fashionable prejudices. To wit: "Martí sought to counteract an unrealistically hopeful view of the United States that might lead his compatriots to identify with a North American culture and political model." Yes, Martí always sought to "counteract" unrealistic estimates of the United States (or of any other country) because they distorted reality; but he never denied the reality, which would have been to distort it himself. Martí embraced and engaged U.S. culture as no other foreign intellectual before or since, and he adopted its political model as his own, as is evident in the democratic structure of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and of the future Cuban Republic which he envisioned in the Manifesto de Montecristi. Instead of goading his fellow Cubans to reject "North American culture and [its] political model," Martí identified what was best about them and encouraged their emulation while warning of deviations and distortions (to that model) that should be avoided, not only by his countrymen but by Americans themselves, whose democratic evolution and progress were also important to him (as attested to in thousands of his pages). It is better, in any case, to have "an unrealistically hopeful view" of U.S. democracy than "an unrealistically hopeful view" of Castroite tyranny, which is Lomas' problem.
When Cuban Communists (or any Communists) assail the United States, it is always its government, never its people. Lomas herself has no such scruples: her disdain is sufficient to cover not only the U.S. government and all aspects of American society, but also and particularly its people; and she would have us believe that Martí shared the same animus toward Americans that she admittedly does. She faults Martí, however, for "express[ing] a utopian view that with more knowledge, the average U.S. citizen-subject might unlearn imperial privilege and radically change his or her attitudes towards his América and people, here and abroad." In fact, Martí would have rejected (and did reject) any suggestion that Americans were inherently predisposed to imperialism or racism, or that such was their irrevocable destiny. It is such assumptions, which are based on racist generalizations and a sense of privilege founded on a paradigm of eternal victimhood, that Martí combatted all his life and his writings still challenge. For Lomas' information, the American people overwhelmingly supported the cause of Cuban independence in 1850, 1868 and 1895. It was successive U.S. administrations which flaunted American public opinion until 1898 when the "Free Cuba" movement was too powerful to be denied. Today also, and for the last 53 years, Americans have opposed the Castro regime and its subjugation of the Cuban people (with few exceptions such as Lomas herself). Now as in the 19th century, U.S. betrayals — and there have been many — were the handiwork of the imperial presidency, not of "the average U.S. citizen-subject," as Lomas calls the freest man in the world.
Where did Lomas pick up the idea that Martí wanted to reform Americans by purging them of their sense of "imperial privilege," which enterprise Lomas considers impossibly "utopian" because her fellow Americans are, in her estimation, inveterate imperialists beyond all reclamation as well as perennial bad neighbors? Lomas herself answers the question: "Martí is not alone in this optimism: one of his greatest interpreters, Cuban statesman, poet and literary critic Roberto Fernández Retamar, noted that "[t]he U.S. was neither born a monster, nor will it remain so forever." If Lomas had praised Fernández Retamar as a poet or critic — leaving aside politics as if this were possible in so politicized (comprometido) a writer — we would not care about her valuation of him. But how exactly can one be a "statesman" in the service of a dictatorship? When statecraft is reduced to sycophancy the statesman is only a more successful courtesan, and in the same measure as his talents are great so will his abject submission be blameworthy. How can Fernández Retamar be "one of [Martí's] greatest interpreters" when he doesn't even understand that being an apologist for tyranny contravenes all that Martí did or said in his life? One can be many things and still be a martiano; but an apologist for tyranny — and an unrepentant one at that — never. Praising Fernández Retamar in such terms pretty much says all there is to say about Lomas' critical and moral faculty while putting her in league with other "interpreters" who debase themselves by debasing Martí.
Lomas subscribes to the liberal conceit that true patriotism consists of hating one's country, whether that country is the U.S., whose democracy she bashes continually, or Cuba, whose dictatorship she extolls at every opportunity. Worst of all, she is obviously convinced that evil will triumph in Cuba forever, and that it will always be fashionable and renumerative to be an apologist for tyranny. She is wrong. But she is also so insignificant that it will matter to no one that she was wrong.
[I owe my readers a rest. But I am not finished with this review and shall return to point out its factual errors in Part 2].
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Sección Constante 4: Bishop Agustín Román Bequeaths $60,000 to Castro's Church
Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami (and, btw, why is the archbishop of Miami surnamed "Wenski?"), who is as much Cardinal Ortega's collaborator as the Cuban primate is Raúl Castro's, has announced that the late Bishop Agustín Román bequeathed $60,000 in his will to the Diocese of Matanzas, headed by Bishop Manuel Hilario de Céspedes y García-Menocal. Bishop Céspedes is the younger brother of the notorious Msgr. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, former chancellor of the Havana Archdiocese and Secretary of the Cuban Conference of Bishops. This Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the great-great grandson of the Father of Our Country, would be the black sheep of any family. An Epicurean rather than a Catholic (not that the two are incompatible in practice), Céspedes drives a Mercedes-Benz and owes a multimillion dollar art collection acquired after 1959 by exploiting the misfortunes of his ertswhile social equals. His worst crime as a Cuban and as a priest, however, was to inform against Father Miguel Angel Loredo, who spent 10 years in prison as a "counter-revolutionary" because Céspedes resented his popularity and viewed him as a potential rival. (It would be impossible to summarize in a few words the utter vileness of the elder Céspedes. I did try once, however, in a thousand words in the Review of Cuban-American Blogs. His picture, included there, is at least worth another thousand).
The younger brother was an electrical engineer when the elder convinced him, at age 36, to enter a seminary. Rev. Manuel de Céspedes was created a bishop shortly after having been ordained a priest. Interestingly, the elder Céspedes was never elevated to the episcopacy, which may have something to do with his open co-habitation with a "dear friend." Or perhaps his sin was to be unapologetic about his personal conduct. He once wrote an article for a church publication [Palabra Nueva, indeed!] advocating civil unions for homosexuals and greater tolerance within the church for their "rights." The article, published in the July-August 2007 issue, long ago disappeared from the digital archives of the magazine and now Msgr. Céspedes is restricted to writing paeans to "Ché" Guevara in Granma, where he regrets that he never met the Argentine psychopath and homophobe, which is like a Jew regretting having never made Hitler's acquaintance.
The Bishop of Matanzas keeps a much lower public profile than does his brother. Bishop Román's posthumous gift of $60,000 to the younger Céspedes' diocese is certainly less controversial than if he had left it to Cardinal Ortega, who, nonetheless, may have ultimate control of it. I do not know the reason for this gift. According to Wenski, it is not the first gift by Román to the Cuban Church, though it is certainly the first to be publicized. I do not doubt that Wenski himself contributes a good share of the tithes from Cuban exiles to the support Cardinal Ortega and the other Cuban bishops. Perhaps by publicizing Bishop Román's largesse Wenski hopes to justify his own conduct as well as to encourage exiles to open their purses to Castro's mitered apologists and to the Church that sanctions their betrayal of the Cuban people in some kind of perverse tribute to Román. Ultimately, however, it is exiles in Miami who are responsible for both their indirect donations to the anti-Cuban Church and their indirect donations to the anti-Cuban State. An exile blog unconditionally opposed to sending remittances to Cuba nonetheless hailed this biggest of all remittances to date as a humanitarian gesture deserving of commendation. Such may have been its intent but such is not its effect.
Although Bishop Román was a revered figure in the Cuban exile community, who never lent aid and comfort to the Castro regime, before or after the triumph of the Revolution, I will not make apologies for Román that I wouldn't make for Wenski. In fact, since Román knew infinitely more about the reality of life in Cuba under Castro than Wenski will ever know let alone acknowledge, it is even more inexcusable for him to enrich a Church that has cast its lot with Christ's enemies in Cuba. If he did not know or could not accept this fact, then he is guilty, at the very least, of self-delusion. Reality has thrust its sharp edges into all our lives for 53 years. Delusion at this juncture is not only inexcusable but culpable.
Surely Román's life savings of $60,000 could have been put to better and more honorable use. He could have destined the money for a radio campaign in Miami to discourage congregants from donating one cent to the Catholic Church until it repudiates its unholy alliance with the Castro dynasty. That, of course, would have required a degree of moral greatness which is so rare that it could be called saintly. Still, even short of this, there is much good that he could have done with the money: perhaps used it to feed and house the Cuban political prisoners who were forcibly deported to Spain with the collusion of Cardinal Ortega and abandoned there; or to provide health insurance for the 300 elderly survivors of the Bay of Pigs, who, though practically destitute, refuse to accept U.S. veterans' benefits because they were volunteer soldiers in the service of a free Cuba, not paid mercenaries or a supernumerary brigade of the U.S. Army. He could have established a Human Rights Prize with the money, which could honorably have borne his name. Built a monument to the 15,000 Cubans who died with the cry of ¡Viva Cristo Rey!" on their lips. He could have acknowledged, in death as in life, his commitment to the cause of Cuban freedom. Instead, Bishop Agustín Román threw his bread in a stagnant and festering mud hole.
The younger brother was an electrical engineer when the elder convinced him, at age 36, to enter a seminary. Rev. Manuel de Céspedes was created a bishop shortly after having been ordained a priest. Interestingly, the elder Céspedes was never elevated to the episcopacy, which may have something to do with his open co-habitation with a "dear friend." Or perhaps his sin was to be unapologetic about his personal conduct. He once wrote an article for a church publication [Palabra Nueva, indeed!] advocating civil unions for homosexuals and greater tolerance within the church for their "rights." The article, published in the July-August 2007 issue, long ago disappeared from the digital archives of the magazine and now Msgr. Céspedes is restricted to writing paeans to "Ché" Guevara in Granma, where he regrets that he never met the Argentine psychopath and homophobe, which is like a Jew regretting having never made Hitler's acquaintance.
The Bishop of Matanzas keeps a much lower public profile than does his brother. Bishop Román's posthumous gift of $60,000 to the younger Céspedes' diocese is certainly less controversial than if he had left it to Cardinal Ortega, who, nonetheless, may have ultimate control of it. I do not know the reason for this gift. According to Wenski, it is not the first gift by Román to the Cuban Church, though it is certainly the first to be publicized. I do not doubt that Wenski himself contributes a good share of the tithes from Cuban exiles to the support Cardinal Ortega and the other Cuban bishops. Perhaps by publicizing Bishop Román's largesse Wenski hopes to justify his own conduct as well as to encourage exiles to open their purses to Castro's mitered apologists and to the Church that sanctions their betrayal of the Cuban people in some kind of perverse tribute to Román. Ultimately, however, it is exiles in Miami who are responsible for both their indirect donations to the anti-Cuban Church and their indirect donations to the anti-Cuban State. An exile blog unconditionally opposed to sending remittances to Cuba nonetheless hailed this biggest of all remittances to date as a humanitarian gesture deserving of commendation. Such may have been its intent but such is not its effect.
Although Bishop Román was a revered figure in the Cuban exile community, who never lent aid and comfort to the Castro regime, before or after the triumph of the Revolution, I will not make apologies for Román that I wouldn't make for Wenski. In fact, since Román knew infinitely more about the reality of life in Cuba under Castro than Wenski will ever know let alone acknowledge, it is even more inexcusable for him to enrich a Church that has cast its lot with Christ's enemies in Cuba. If he did not know or could not accept this fact, then he is guilty, at the very least, of self-delusion. Reality has thrust its sharp edges into all our lives for 53 years. Delusion at this juncture is not only inexcusable but culpable.
Surely Román's life savings of $60,000 could have been put to better and more honorable use. He could have destined the money for a radio campaign in Miami to discourage congregants from donating one cent to the Catholic Church until it repudiates its unholy alliance with the Castro dynasty. That, of course, would have required a degree of moral greatness which is so rare that it could be called saintly. Still, even short of this, there is much good that he could have done with the money: perhaps used it to feed and house the Cuban political prisoners who were forcibly deported to Spain with the collusion of Cardinal Ortega and abandoned there; or to provide health insurance for the 300 elderly survivors of the Bay of Pigs, who, though practically destitute, refuse to accept U.S. veterans' benefits because they were volunteer soldiers in the service of a free Cuba, not paid mercenaries or a supernumerary brigade of the U.S. Army. He could have established a Human Rights Prize with the money, which could honorably have borne his name. Built a monument to the 15,000 Cubans who died with the cry of ¡Viva Cristo Rey!" on their lips. He could have acknowledged, in death as in life, his commitment to the cause of Cuban freedom. Instead, Bishop Agustín Román threw his bread in a stagnant and festering mud hole.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Sección Constante 3: AIDS in Cuba According to "The New York Times"
The two dozen mercenary wars of aggression on the African continent in which Fidel Castro involved Cuba over the last 53 years, always on the side of the most brutal and genocidal of the belligerents, and ostensibly under the banner of "internationalism" — which simply meant the promotion of the Soviet Union's geopolitical interests — are responsible, among other evils, for the introduction of AIDS to Cuba, which now harbors 21 strains or mutations of the virus, more than are found in any other country outside of Africa, with 11 of the 21 being unique to the island. Cuba is, in fact, a "wildlife preserve" for AIDS, which only the most draconian measures, such as can only be implemented in a society with no civil or human rights, prevented from exploding into a national pandemic on a scale never before seen in modern history.
The New York Times, in a front page article in its Science Section [May 8], entitled "A Regime's Tight Grip on AIDS," identifies this genetic variety of AIDS strains as "a legacy of [Cuba's] foreign aid." So initiating or escalating wars that cost millions of African lives and not a few Cuban lives as well was in fact a beneficent act of the State. The 12-year Angolan War, which lasted longer than any previous conflict in Cuban history and four times longer than the Cuban Revolution, was no more than a "foreign aid" program — the Cuban Peace Korps, if you will — which considerably and considerately reduced the number of natives killed by AIDS by shooting them before they contracted AIDS. As for the "doctors, teachers and engineers" also sent to Africa as "internationalists" — which The Times does not distinguish from the soldiers, hoping to disguise the soldiers' mission as a humanitarian one — they also were under the control of the Cuban military and acted in support of it. The "foreign aid" that these "internationalists" rendered in Africa as the Gurkhas of Soviet Empire added immeasurably to the misery of that beleaguered continent and threatened also the well-being of their own country. Castro brought Cubans to Africa, and Cubans brought AIDS to Cuba.
It is strange that Ronald Reagan is still blamed for fostering AIDS with his silence, while Fidel Castro, who is personally responsible for introducing AIDS to Cuba, is now acclaimed as "prescient" by The Times for taking politically-incorrect measures, including forced quarantine, to combat the virus. Can you imagine what The Times' reaction would have been if Reagan or even a president it actually liked had tried to implement similar measures here? You don't have to imagine it because The Times carried out a great preemptive campaign in the 1980s to make sure that the civil rights of people with AIDS and HIV were not compromised in any way in this country, even if this meant discarding traditional medical protocols for dealing with infectious diseases. But now the position of The Times appears to be that one can't argue with success and it is convinced that "there is no question that [Cuba's methods] have succeeded" because "it had an early and effective response to the epidemic" while the U.S supposedly did not: "[Cuba's] infection rate is 0.1 percent, on a par with Finland, Singapore and Kazakhstan. That is one-sixth the rate of the U.S., one-twentieth [that] of nearby Haiti." Personally, I'm more impressed by Haiti's progress because at least we know that its health statistics, which are compiled by the World Health Organization (WHO), are not "cooked up" by Castro's medical propaganda office, as Nick Eberstadt of the Harvard Center for Population Studies proved years ago.
Besides "the government's harsh early tactics — until 1993, everyone who tested positive for HIV was forced into quarantine," The Times identifies four "other elements [that] have contributed to Cuba's success: it has free universal basic health care; it has stunningly high rates of HIV testing; it saturates its population with free condoms, concentrating on high-risk groups like prostitutes; it gives teenagers graphic safe-sex education; [and] it rigorously traces the sexual contacts of each person who tests positive." The Times does not realize, apparently, that these other elements are, in their own way, as coercive as forced quarantine, and a continuation of, rather than a departure from, those "early harsh methods." "Universal basic health care" in Cuba means that you have no choice but to submit to whatever the State determines is in your best interest and the best interest of society. There is no "opting out" of this absolute control because there are no alternatives to it (that is, no private insurance, no private doctors and no private hospitals). The "stunningly high rates of HIV testing" are possible because testing is not voluntary: the State decides who will be tested, when they will be tested and how often they will be tested. If Cuba "saturates its population with condoms," it is the only thing it "saturates" them with. At the height of the Special Period in the 1990s, when Cuba was in the grip of not only AIDS but famine, condoms were universally melted and used as a cheese substitute in homemade pizzas. The fact that now condoms are chiefly distributed among prostitutes suggests that the Cuban regime is interested in protecting sex tourists, not the general population. If it were interested in protecting Cubans it would not promote the island's tourism industry on the basis of its sex trade. The "graphic safe-sex education" for teenagers does not require parental consent since all children in Cuba are legally wards of the State, which may decide, without consulting the parents, all facets of their lives and education. And, finally, the State does "rigorously trace the sexual contacts of each person who tests positive," and the word "rigorously" here means punitively, since a failure to disclose such contacts can still get you confined for life at a state sanitarium. Moreover, homosexuals with HIV or AIDS who are known or presumed to be promiscuous are just as forcibly committed to state institutions as they were before 1993.
"By contrast [to Cuba]," The Times notes, the response in the United States [to AIDS] is "feeble" [italics mine.]" "Feeble," because the U.S. has a functional rather than an ornamental Constitution; "feeble," because it has an American Civil Liberties Union which fought in the courts against mandatory disclosure of HIV status; "feeble," because it has hundreds of advocacy groups for AIDS and Cuba doesn't have even one; "feeble," because its liberal media, led by The New York Times, opposed all measures that would protect society at the expense of an individual's supposed "right to privacy;" "feeble," in sum, because the United States is not a one-party dictatorship which aggregates to itself every power and is above every law.
I still did not expect The New York Times, however enamored it might be with Cuba's "robust" AIDS policy, to use the words "mere" and "only" when referring to the number of Cuban casualties from AIDS or the number of Cuban AIDS cases. And yet it did. Communist Cuba, it reports, "has one of the world's smallest epidemics, a mere 14,038 cases" and "only 2,364 Cubans have [died of AIDS]." As usual, The Times will renounce all its cherished principles and even its hallowed prejudices in order to praise Fidel Castro. And henceforth we can expect the words "mere" and "only" to be banned as qualifiers for AIDS cases or AIDS deaths reported in The Times. True adulation reveals itself in the exceptions that it makes without justification or apology.
The article profiles a Dr. Jorge Pérez Avila, who is described as "Cuba's best-known AIDS doctor." Dr. Pérez, we are told, "has memories of helping his bus driver father make gasoline bombs to throw at the police during the Batista government" (we doubt that any such bomb was ever thrown at the "police"). "As a teenager he dropped out of school to live in the mountains, teaching villagers to read under a literacy program after Castro came to power." That's as far as Dr. Pérez's exemplary vita curriculum goes before he discharges the office for which he has been introduced, namely, to exalt Fidel Castro:
"In 1983, Fidel Castro visited the Pedro Kourí Institute, Cuba's top tropical disease hospital, to hear a presentation on malaria and dengue fever.
"As it ended, he suddenly asked the director, "Gustavo, what are you doing to keep AIDS from entering Cuba?
"Dr. Gustavo Kourí, son of the Institute's founder, was caught off guard, Dr. Pérez said, and stammered: 'AIDS, comandante, AIDS? It is a new disease. We don't even know whether it's produced by a bacteria, a virus or a fungus. There isn't much data on it, just what's been reported in the United States and a few cases in Europe. It will take time to know how big it is.'
"Mr. Castro replied: I think it will be the epidemic of this century. And it's your responsibility, Gustavo, to stop it becoming a major problem here.'
"This was before any American president publicly uttered the word 'AIDS.' Asked how Mr. Castro could have been so prescient, Dr. Pérez struggled to find the right word, then said: 'Castro has luz larga" — 'big lights,' the Cuban slang for automobile high beams. 'He reads a lot. He sees far ahead.'"
Now take a breath because swallowing that cannot have been easy.
A doctor who does not object to having confidential mail from his patients intercepted and read by Fidel Castro — presumably because the letters cast him in a good light — and literally "led a '¡Viva, Fidel!' cheer at his hospital's World AIDS Day" festivities, does not seem the ideal source to attest to Castro's "prescience," and his retelling, 30 years later, of a conversation to which he was not a party, and which casts Castro as the all-knowing hero of Cuba's fight against AIDS, would try the credulity of anyone except a New York Times reporter or editor.
While indulging such anecdotal sycophancy, The New York Times, not surprisingly, failed to mention in the article the biggest AIDS story out of Cuba in the 1990s — the widespread self-contamination with the virus, through improvised transfusions of contaminated blood (yes, blood transfusions, not needle sharing) by disaffected youth seeking shelter and better food in AIDS sanitariums. But, of course, that would sound a discordant note in The Times' rhapsody to a "Cuban society that is the opposite of puritanical [whorish?]; [where] scanty clothing is routine [because clothing is scarce]; and suggestive flirtation is common [is there any other kind?].
You would think that after nearly 60 years of covering Fidel Castro and being lied to and defrauded by him, The New York Times had learned its lesson. Unfortunately, it seems that every generation of Timesmen must learn the same lesson over and over again. There is no collective memory at the so-called "newspaper of record," only permanent amities and enmities. Fidel Castro has been on The Times' "Friends List" longer than any other foreign dictator. The Times has always had a vested interest in his success since Castro is so much its own creation. Every failure — and there have been only failures — has caused The Times to redouble its efforts on his behalf; and even as he totters on the edge of the grave, it still has his back. Since Castro seized power in 1959, The New York Times has never published an editorial calling on him (or his brother) to relinquish power. Loyalty such as that would be worthy of admiration if its beneficiary were not an enslaver of men.
Finally, The Times needs to do a little fact checking: Fidel Castro has never publicly said that he regrets imprisoning homosexuals in labor camps, but that he wasn't told about it at the time (his "prescience" must have failed him then); the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution are not "defenders of Cuban democracy;" and the purchase of U.S. medicines by Cuba has never been prohibited by the trade embargo.
***
I have just realized that I neglected to credit the author of this screed, which seemed to me a group effort even if not identified as such. In any case, the byline belongs to Donald G. McNeil, Jr., identified by The Times as "a science and health reporter specializing in plagues and pestilences," who is shown in his official Times bio posing next to the rear end of a camel. In the picture (soon to be taken down, no doubt), McNeil looks more like an Arabist than a chronicler of plagues.
The New York Times, in a front page article in its Science Section [May 8], entitled "A Regime's Tight Grip on AIDS," identifies this genetic variety of AIDS strains as "a legacy of [Cuba's] foreign aid." So initiating or escalating wars that cost millions of African lives and not a few Cuban lives as well was in fact a beneficent act of the State. The 12-year Angolan War, which lasted longer than any previous conflict in Cuban history and four times longer than the Cuban Revolution, was no more than a "foreign aid" program — the Cuban Peace Korps, if you will — which considerably and considerately reduced the number of natives killed by AIDS by shooting them before they contracted AIDS. As for the "doctors, teachers and engineers" also sent to Africa as "internationalists" — which The Times does not distinguish from the soldiers, hoping to disguise the soldiers' mission as a humanitarian one — they also were under the control of the Cuban military and acted in support of it. The "foreign aid" that these "internationalists" rendered in Africa as the Gurkhas of Soviet Empire added immeasurably to the misery of that beleaguered continent and threatened also the well-being of their own country. Castro brought Cubans to Africa, and Cubans brought AIDS to Cuba.
It is strange that Ronald Reagan is still blamed for fostering AIDS with his silence, while Fidel Castro, who is personally responsible for introducing AIDS to Cuba, is now acclaimed as "prescient" by The Times for taking politically-incorrect measures, including forced quarantine, to combat the virus. Can you imagine what The Times' reaction would have been if Reagan or even a president it actually liked had tried to implement similar measures here? You don't have to imagine it because The Times carried out a great preemptive campaign in the 1980s to make sure that the civil rights of people with AIDS and HIV were not compromised in any way in this country, even if this meant discarding traditional medical protocols for dealing with infectious diseases. But now the position of The Times appears to be that one can't argue with success and it is convinced that "there is no question that [Cuba's methods] have succeeded" because "it had an early and effective response to the epidemic" while the U.S supposedly did not: "[Cuba's] infection rate is 0.1 percent, on a par with Finland, Singapore and Kazakhstan. That is one-sixth the rate of the U.S., one-twentieth [that] of nearby Haiti." Personally, I'm more impressed by Haiti's progress because at least we know that its health statistics, which are compiled by the World Health Organization (WHO), are not "cooked up" by Castro's medical propaganda office, as Nick Eberstadt of the Harvard Center for Population Studies proved years ago.
Besides "the government's harsh early tactics — until 1993, everyone who tested positive for HIV was forced into quarantine," The Times identifies four "other elements [that] have contributed to Cuba's success: it has free universal basic health care; it has stunningly high rates of HIV testing; it saturates its population with free condoms, concentrating on high-risk groups like prostitutes; it gives teenagers graphic safe-sex education; [and] it rigorously traces the sexual contacts of each person who tests positive." The Times does not realize, apparently, that these other elements are, in their own way, as coercive as forced quarantine, and a continuation of, rather than a departure from, those "early harsh methods." "Universal basic health care" in Cuba means that you have no choice but to submit to whatever the State determines is in your best interest and the best interest of society. There is no "opting out" of this absolute control because there are no alternatives to it (that is, no private insurance, no private doctors and no private hospitals). The "stunningly high rates of HIV testing" are possible because testing is not voluntary: the State decides who will be tested, when they will be tested and how often they will be tested. If Cuba "saturates its population with condoms," it is the only thing it "saturates" them with. At the height of the Special Period in the 1990s, when Cuba was in the grip of not only AIDS but famine, condoms were universally melted and used as a cheese substitute in homemade pizzas. The fact that now condoms are chiefly distributed among prostitutes suggests that the Cuban regime is interested in protecting sex tourists, not the general population. If it were interested in protecting Cubans it would not promote the island's tourism industry on the basis of its sex trade. The "graphic safe-sex education" for teenagers does not require parental consent since all children in Cuba are legally wards of the State, which may decide, without consulting the parents, all facets of their lives and education. And, finally, the State does "rigorously trace the sexual contacts of each person who tests positive," and the word "rigorously" here means punitively, since a failure to disclose such contacts can still get you confined for life at a state sanitarium. Moreover, homosexuals with HIV or AIDS who are known or presumed to be promiscuous are just as forcibly committed to state institutions as they were before 1993.
"By contrast [to Cuba]," The Times notes, the response in the United States [to AIDS] is "feeble" [italics mine.]" "Feeble," because the U.S. has a functional rather than an ornamental Constitution; "feeble," because it has an American Civil Liberties Union which fought in the courts against mandatory disclosure of HIV status; "feeble," because it has hundreds of advocacy groups for AIDS and Cuba doesn't have even one; "feeble," because its liberal media, led by The New York Times, opposed all measures that would protect society at the expense of an individual's supposed "right to privacy;" "feeble," in sum, because the United States is not a one-party dictatorship which aggregates to itself every power and is above every law.
I still did not expect The New York Times, however enamored it might be with Cuba's "robust" AIDS policy, to use the words "mere" and "only" when referring to the number of Cuban casualties from AIDS or the number of Cuban AIDS cases. And yet it did. Communist Cuba, it reports, "has one of the world's smallest epidemics, a mere 14,038 cases" and "only 2,364 Cubans have [died of AIDS]." As usual, The Times will renounce all its cherished principles and even its hallowed prejudices in order to praise Fidel Castro. And henceforth we can expect the words "mere" and "only" to be banned as qualifiers for AIDS cases or AIDS deaths reported in The Times. True adulation reveals itself in the exceptions that it makes without justification or apology.
The article profiles a Dr. Jorge Pérez Avila, who is described as "Cuba's best-known AIDS doctor." Dr. Pérez, we are told, "has memories of helping his bus driver father make gasoline bombs to throw at the police during the Batista government" (we doubt that any such bomb was ever thrown at the "police"). "As a teenager he dropped out of school to live in the mountains, teaching villagers to read under a literacy program after Castro came to power." That's as far as Dr. Pérez's exemplary vita curriculum goes before he discharges the office for which he has been introduced, namely, to exalt Fidel Castro:
"In 1983, Fidel Castro visited the Pedro Kourí Institute, Cuba's top tropical disease hospital, to hear a presentation on malaria and dengue fever.
"As it ended, he suddenly asked the director, "Gustavo, what are you doing to keep AIDS from entering Cuba?
"Dr. Gustavo Kourí, son of the Institute's founder, was caught off guard, Dr. Pérez said, and stammered: 'AIDS, comandante, AIDS? It is a new disease. We don't even know whether it's produced by a bacteria, a virus or a fungus. There isn't much data on it, just what's been reported in the United States and a few cases in Europe. It will take time to know how big it is.'
"Mr. Castro replied: I think it will be the epidemic of this century. And it's your responsibility, Gustavo, to stop it becoming a major problem here.'
"This was before any American president publicly uttered the word 'AIDS.' Asked how Mr. Castro could have been so prescient, Dr. Pérez struggled to find the right word, then said: 'Castro has luz larga" — 'big lights,' the Cuban slang for automobile high beams. 'He reads a lot. He sees far ahead.'"
Now take a breath because swallowing that cannot have been easy.
A doctor who does not object to having confidential mail from his patients intercepted and read by Fidel Castro — presumably because the letters cast him in a good light — and literally "led a '¡Viva, Fidel!' cheer at his hospital's World AIDS Day" festivities, does not seem the ideal source to attest to Castro's "prescience," and his retelling, 30 years later, of a conversation to which he was not a party, and which casts Castro as the all-knowing hero of Cuba's fight against AIDS, would try the credulity of anyone except a New York Times reporter or editor.
While indulging such anecdotal sycophancy, The New York Times, not surprisingly, failed to mention in the article the biggest AIDS story out of Cuba in the 1990s — the widespread self-contamination with the virus, through improvised transfusions of contaminated blood (yes, blood transfusions, not needle sharing) by disaffected youth seeking shelter and better food in AIDS sanitariums. But, of course, that would sound a discordant note in The Times' rhapsody to a "Cuban society that is the opposite of puritanical [whorish?]; [where] scanty clothing is routine [because clothing is scarce]; and suggestive flirtation is common [is there any other kind?].
You would think that after nearly 60 years of covering Fidel Castro and being lied to and defrauded by him, The New York Times had learned its lesson. Unfortunately, it seems that every generation of Timesmen must learn the same lesson over and over again. There is no collective memory at the so-called "newspaper of record," only permanent amities and enmities. Fidel Castro has been on The Times' "Friends List" longer than any other foreign dictator. The Times has always had a vested interest in his success since Castro is so much its own creation. Every failure — and there have been only failures — has caused The Times to redouble its efforts on his behalf; and even as he totters on the edge of the grave, it still has his back. Since Castro seized power in 1959, The New York Times has never published an editorial calling on him (or his brother) to relinquish power. Loyalty such as that would be worthy of admiration if its beneficiary were not an enslaver of men.
Finally, The Times needs to do a little fact checking: Fidel Castro has never publicly said that he regrets imprisoning homosexuals in labor camps, but that he wasn't told about it at the time (his "prescience" must have failed him then); the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution are not "defenders of Cuban democracy;" and the purchase of U.S. medicines by Cuba has never been prohibited by the trade embargo.
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Sección Constante 2: "Gud Bai Presidente"
Hugo Chávez must really be dying. The New York Times is disgorging itself of its accumulated cache of puff pieces on the Venezuelan dictator in the hope that it will do him some good, since psychologically it appears that he's failing even faster than physically, and his psyche was never as dependable as his stamina. The article in The Times Sunday Magazine [May 6], entitled "Must Watch Television. Literally," and subtitled "Hugo Chávez's long-running, totally bizarre talk show, 'Aló Presidente,' is a throwback to an earlier era and a completely different kind of reality TV," unravels in the first paragraph whose concluding sentence can also serve for its motif: "The show is entirely unscripted." It is also "compelling, especially from afar," "surreal and even slightly voyeuristic," "part performance art and part gleeful absurdism," instinct with a "wacky quality" and "exuberant weirdness," which left the author "fascinated," "puzzled and entertained" -- and even "mildly thrilled" -- by "the most real reality show I'd ever seen," and again, within the same paragraph, "the only really real reality show out there." When Donald Trump "fires" an "apprentice," it's not real. But when Hugo Chávez fires a judge, he had better flee the country if he can and while he can. Yes, reality doesn't get any more real than that. A gun at your back is always real and compelling. Whether it should be "entertaining" or "mildly thrilling" to a third party is another question.
The author, Rachel Nolan, first saw clips of Chávez's show while following him on Twitter. Later she must have acquired the complete collection, of, say, a 1000 DVDs, and admits to watching "Aló Presidente" for hours on end. In what is undoubtedly the highest compliment that The Times can pay to Chávez or anybody, Nolan writes that "one precedent for his show is F.D.R.'s fireside chats" (which proves that she never listened to those). Another precedent, unmentioned by Nolan, is Joseph Goebbels' weekly "guns or butter" radio exhortations. Chávez's television persona has little in common with Roosevelt's dignified avuncular presentation, but there is a direct line of descent from Goebbels' on-air histrionics, with the same name-calling and threats, real and veiled. Chávez's buffoonery, however, is copied from his mentor Fidel Castro, who was always a carnival barkman for big and small ideas whose time had passed; and his show, in particular, is inspired by Castro's last performance on state television in an infomercial for a (defective) rice cooker, which he boasted could "make more rice with less rice."
Chávez's own bizarre conduct on "Aló Presidente" — which shames all self-respecting Venezuelans — Nolan is inclined to excuse because (quoting Enrique Krauze) "it gives Venezuelans at least the appearance of contact with power" (the kind of "empowerment" experienced by Hitler's German shepherds), and because, in her own estimation, "it would be hard to overstate the pride that Venezuela's poorest and most marginalized feel in having a black-white-indigenous man as their democratically [?] elected president." To say that this alleged "pride would be hard to overstate" — that is, that almost any exaggeration of it would be allowed — calls into question the very thing that is being claimed. It would be as ridiculous to assert that the 50%+ of the population that do not support Chávez (who are, also, overwhelmingly non-white) are ashamed of him because he is black-white-indigenous like them. If Chávez were white, of course, the author would write about the pride that Venezuelans feel in having as their president a white man who feels and acts, with and for, the black-white-indigenous people. The U.S. media did that for Bill Clinton when they labelled him "the first African-American president;" surely they would have acclaimed Chávez the "white hope" of the mestizos if he had not himself been one. It is Chávez's politics that matter to the media elite, not his color. Batista wasn't white, and the pride that Cuba's poor and marginalized felt for this self-made-man was so great that they sat out Castro's middle-class revolution. Of course that did not stop The New York Times from supporting Castro.
The repeated suspension of "Aló Presidente" while Chávez seeks medical treatment in Cuba is more newsworthy today than the show itself ever was. This hiatus or "non-show" is Venezuela's version of "Beat the Clock," except that if Chávez can't an entire nation wins. And not just Venezuelans. Cubans also have an interest in the outcome, although history has shown that the Castros can survive without a sucker to stake them, and have no compunction at all — in fact, may prefer — to starve the Cuban people into submission rather than lull them into complacency with half rations. The co-dictators' only concern is that without Venezuela's oil they may actually have to liquidate some of the family's foreign assets to underwrite the machinery of repression on the island. That would hurt them, and both Fidel and Raúl have a very low threshold for pain as most sadists do.
The author, Rachel Nolan, first saw clips of Chávez's show while following him on Twitter. Later she must have acquired the complete collection, of, say, a 1000 DVDs, and admits to watching "Aló Presidente" for hours on end. In what is undoubtedly the highest compliment that The Times can pay to Chávez or anybody, Nolan writes that "one precedent for his show is F.D.R.'s fireside chats" (which proves that she never listened to those). Another precedent, unmentioned by Nolan, is Joseph Goebbels' weekly "guns or butter" radio exhortations. Chávez's television persona has little in common with Roosevelt's dignified avuncular presentation, but there is a direct line of descent from Goebbels' on-air histrionics, with the same name-calling and threats, real and veiled. Chávez's buffoonery, however, is copied from his mentor Fidel Castro, who was always a carnival barkman for big and small ideas whose time had passed; and his show, in particular, is inspired by Castro's last performance on state television in an infomercial for a (defective) rice cooker, which he boasted could "make more rice with less rice."
Chávez's own bizarre conduct on "Aló Presidente" — which shames all self-respecting Venezuelans — Nolan is inclined to excuse because (quoting Enrique Krauze) "it gives Venezuelans at least the appearance of contact with power" (the kind of "empowerment" experienced by Hitler's German shepherds), and because, in her own estimation, "it would be hard to overstate the pride that Venezuela's poorest and most marginalized feel in having a black-white-indigenous man as their democratically [?] elected president." To say that this alleged "pride would be hard to overstate" — that is, that almost any exaggeration of it would be allowed — calls into question the very thing that is being claimed. It would be as ridiculous to assert that the 50%+ of the population that do not support Chávez (who are, also, overwhelmingly non-white) are ashamed of him because he is black-white-indigenous like them. If Chávez were white, of course, the author would write about the pride that Venezuelans feel in having as their president a white man who feels and acts, with and for, the black-white-indigenous people. The U.S. media did that for Bill Clinton when they labelled him "the first African-American president;" surely they would have acclaimed Chávez the "white hope" of the mestizos if he had not himself been one. It is Chávez's politics that matter to the media elite, not his color. Batista wasn't white, and the pride that Cuba's poor and marginalized felt for this self-made-man was so great that they sat out Castro's middle-class revolution. Of course that did not stop The New York Times from supporting Castro.
The repeated suspension of "Aló Presidente" while Chávez seeks medical treatment in Cuba is more newsworthy today than the show itself ever was. This hiatus or "non-show" is Venezuela's version of "Beat the Clock," except that if Chávez can't an entire nation wins. And not just Venezuelans. Cubans also have an interest in the outcome, although history has shown that the Castros can survive without a sucker to stake them, and have no compunction at all — in fact, may prefer — to starve the Cuban people into submission rather than lull them into complacency with half rations. The co-dictators' only concern is that without Venezuela's oil they may actually have to liquidate some of the family's foreign assets to underwrite the machinery of repression on the island. That would hurt them, and both Fidel and Raúl have a very low threshold for pain as most sadists do.
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