Missing the freedom

In the spirit that I just got into, I am going to tell everyone a little bit about the system that just trapped me.

I miss college.

I miss it more than what I missed Colombia when I moved to the United States.

I miss it more than what I miss eating luscious fruits every day with exotic names that stick to your tongue.

I miss it more than what I miss my father.

It is impossible to convey the feeling that just grabbed me. I miss college.

Maybe it was the freedom I felt this weekend in Gainesville, the town where my Alma Mater is located.

The freedom of not feeling guilty while enjoying an afternoon of leisure in the balcony, staring out… Thinking, making plans.

The freedom to drink and not worrying about my mother.

The freedom to sleep in the same bed with my boyfriend.

The freedom to take my car and just drive…

The freedom to stare vacantly into the crowd of a punk/rock show.

Well, now that I am back to reality and the lack of time to make plans, I feel more trapped than ever and had a spark of creativity. Here is my outburst!

Corporate America sucks.

It promises high-paying jobs for those who go to college. Jobs that will award you the freedom to travel once a year to an exotic destination, move to a trendy loft, go out to drink cosmopolitans with your friends and do whatever you want. Because you did the right thing. You went to college. You graduated cum laude from a great school.

It is a lie. And I am living it.

Far from Utopia

Finding a great, new book I can curdle in bed with is really exciting. Even more when the book seemed to be destined for me, and for some reason I haven’t been able to read it until now.

“Waslala” by Gioconda Belli is the story of the search for utopia. So far I am loving it. Belli’s revolutionary self seems to make way into her writing, making me longing for more.

I tried ordering the book through Amazon.com some time ago, but I ended up ordering the German translation. I finally found the book at the University of Florida’s Latin American Collection.

As I finished the first chapter, I fell in love with Belli’s writing, yet again, because she mentioned how the regions of African and Latin America were sometimes viewed as land, nothing more.

“reduced to jungles, natural reserves, to work as the lung and the dumping ground of the developed world”

These type of ideas about Latin America are the ones that make me love Belli for her honesty. Also, I love how she mentions that the developed world uses Latin America to their own advantage, especially because there is always a different Latin American country dividing opinions in Washington. The Washington Post made an excellent point of this situation and how Nicaragua has been scarcely mentioned in Washington lately.

In the article, Jackson Diehl explains how two decades ago Nicaragua and its president, Daniel Ortega, were inspiring divided attention among Washington politicians. At the time, they were arguing whether the United States should fund an armed opposition.

Nicaragua is Belli’s native country, and she was involved with the Sandinista Revolution in the 1980′s. However, she switched loyalties with Ortega after no longer agreeing with his policies.

Time certainly showed that things haven’t changed much in Nicaragua, and that the country is still far from an Utopian society.

However, Utopia is be definition “the place that isn’t” and comes from the Greek ou, meaning no, and topos, meaning place. Belli points out this definition in the beginning of the book. But the book is about the search of Waslala, the Utopian paradise of her ancestors.

Inspiration for a new generation of writers

Rafael Trujillo, the former dictator of the Dominican Republic, was the source of inspiration for Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “The Feast of the Goat.” Nowadays, a new generation of writers is being inspired by deranged leaders and history will soon judge their actions.

Vargas Llosa seems to agree and said so in a story published in the Guardian. In the story, Vargas Llosa argues complains about the governments of Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez, saying that soon there will be a generation of writers documenting their actions. He said that their governments are:

“like a broken record that repeats the same concepts, the same clichés and phobias, the same politics”.

He also said that he is more supportive of the approaches of other leaders like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Michelle Bachelet in Brazil and Chile respectively because they practice what he calls in the Guardian story a “democratic left.”

However, two things mentioned in the story left me wondering about the future of Latin American politics and the future of its leaders. First, this story made me think about the destiny of Latin America without much meddling of the United States, which has changed from Vargas Llosa’s youth due to the focus of the state department in Iraq, the Middle East and the rise of China. And second, what really made me look into the future was what Vargas Llosa had to say about the future generations of writers. He said that leaders like Chavez and Morales are sure to inspire the new generations to write novels about their lives, and that the current leaders will have to wait on history to judge them through literature. Vargas Llosa concluded:

“The book about Chavez will come at some point,” he says. “Just give the Venezuelans time to assimilate him.”

Federico García Lorca’s body to be exhumed

Whenever I read about corpses being taken out and re-buried again I get chills down my spine. But when I heard that Federico García Lorca was going to be exhumed from the common burial ground were he lays with three other corpses, I wanted to cry.

García Lorca was a literary genius and his life was cut short by one of the most barbaric forms of punishment of the old Spain– namely the wall of fusillade.

The story published in El Universal, one of Mexico’s daily newspapers in Spanish, really made me think of how cruel this punishment is and how it is a common them throughout the modern history of Spain and the conquest.

The story says that the exhumation is guaranteed to be private, and that the National Audience of Spain authorized the opening of 19 common burial grounds, which include the one where García Lorca is buried with the bodies of three other people who were killed with him during the Spanish Civil War.

García Lorca, who is one of the best-known poets of Spain, was killed near Granada, Spain, by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish Civil War for his outspokenness, which was not an uncommon occurrence in Spain (and even in Latin America).

Francisco de Goya’s “The Third of May” is a very good visual example of this barbaric tradition. Another good story recounting the accounts of a fusillade wall in Cuba was written by Richard Harding Davis. “The Death of Rodriguez” also tells the story of a Cuban youth who was being killed by the Spanish soldiers. In Harding Davis’ story he describes how the condemned walked to his death in the wall:

…but I confess to have felt a thrill of satisfaction when I saw, as the Cuban passed me, that he held a cigarette between his lips, not arrogantly nor with bravado, but with nonchalance of a man who meets his punishment fearlessly, and who will let his enemies see that they can kill but cannot frighten him.

García Lorca was not the first one to be silenced for his ideals and for thinking differently, nor was he the last one. As history continued to confirmate — and literature and art documented — fusillade was a big part of Spanish history, and it was unfortunately brought over to America.

Mysterious disappearances

In the midst of the political turmoil in Bolivia, I remembered the story of other disappearances that intertwine the political history of Latin America and seem to be recurrent through many countries. Right now, 30 people have died in Bolivia during the recent wave of violence and 100 people are missing. All this deaths and disappearances surfaced after President Evo Morales decided to hold a referendum on a new constitution in December and members of the opposition protested.

The news really make me wonder if the numbers are somehow embellished by Morales’ government and if the situation is worse than what it appears. In the past, the worst human right violations always surface after leaders no longer have power. This situation is definitively a reason to worry, especially because Morales is trying to change the constitution. Is it possible that all the Morales’ allegations of the U.S. backing up the opposition are hiding something worse? Is he covering up for something else?

Somehow, these mysterious disappearances during certain dictatorial regimes seem to be also a recurrent theme for Latin American authors.

Of the many books about dictatorial regimes, the one that really comes to my mind is “The Feast of the Goat” by Mario Vargas Llosa. (However, I really feel the need to clarify that Evo Morales is not a dictator, for he was elected by majority vote in 2005.)

The novel tells the story of the conspiracy to kill Rafael Trujillo, a dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.  “The Feast of the Goat” also follows four of the conspirators involved in the assassination of Trujillo and their motives to kill the dictator. The novel describes how many of the members of Trujillo’s party had to prove their loyalty to the dictator in violent ways.

Violence seemed to be the way in which Trujillo exercised his power, and I fear that it is the same way for many leaders today. After reading the news from Bolivia, I am really wondering. Have Latin Americans failed to learn from the mistakes of the past? I really hope not.