by José de la Isla
HOUSTON, Texas — I met Fanny Riva Palacio, an editor with Mexico City’s El Heraldo at the time (now she’s a university professor), during that country’s 1994 presidential election. We were paired to interview María Elena Cruz Varela, a writer who had just been released from prison in Cuba. One day she was isolated from the world; the next, literally, she was observing a democratic election.
Varela told us about how she was tortured and “not here” with us. At first, her words seemed like a poet’s hyperbole.
“What do you mean you are not here?”
“My heart is in Cuba,” she told me. “I died in Havana.”
At that instant I experienced the thin membrane separating my reality and another’s.
Fanny and I recalled that interview each time we met on my trips to Mexico City in the years that followed. She seemed amused I was trying to get a handle on the Latin American experience. There was a kind of reality at her finger tips that I lacked the capacity to understand, she claimed. I was screwed on too tight to see from the other angle.
She recommended a book I should read.
On April 17, at the start of the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, while heads of government chatted waiting to be announced before entering the Great Hall, President Obama saw Hugo Chávez across the room.
He went over and said, “Cómo estás.”
They smiled, Chávez replied something. They shook hands and Obama went back to his position in line.
A senior administration official described the session that followed in the hall as “lively.” Chávez is believed to have been warned by his colleagues to tone down the anti-U.S. outbursts he is known for.
In the warming of personal relations, Obama and Chávez were photographed shaking hands a second time and Chávez presented Obama with a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s book, The Open Veins of Latin America.
This is the same book Fanny had recommended to me a dozen years ago. It is still the best journalistic and literary work of its kind. The book is different from terse histories that lack an ability to transcend the thin membrane between one reality and another.
We tend to take it as severe criticism or disguised antipathy or an ideological split when Latin Americans claim we lack insight into their experience. Yet, their populist criticisms are often meant as expressions of a deep hurt and disappointment from a friend who longs to be understood on his terms.
In the forward of the edition I read, Isabel Allende, the best-selling writer, says she discovered the book in Chile “when I was young and still believed that the world could be shaped according to our best intentions and hopes.” She imagined from the book “America was a woman and she was telling in my ear her secrets, the acts of love and violations that had created her.”
She called Galeano “one of the most interesting authors to ever come out of Latin America.” When she went into exile after the military coup, she took some clothes, family pictures, a bag of dirt from her garden, a volume of Pablo Neruda poems and her copy of Open Veins.
The 1971 book is an economic criticism, ethnography, history, ecology, journalism and a minor literary masterpiece.
It was a good peace offering by Hugo Chávez, but one easily misunderstood because far too many in the United States still don’t realize truth can come with several versions; others should be entitled to their own reality.
[José de la Isla’s latest book, Day Night Life Death Hope, is distributed by The Ford Foundation. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at joseisla3@yahoo.com]. © 2009
