The previous night, we all went out with Danielle to something resembling a diner with Cuban food. Think Denny’s with less decor. I just wanted something cold to drink. “Suero helado” was an item on the menu. We all knew the second word meant ice cream, but even Camila, a native Colombian Spanish speaker, didn’t know what “suero” was. The server behind the counter explained that it was a milkshake, which sounded good to me, even though the only ice cream they had was rum raisin. Later on, as I was running through Spanish flashcards, I found out that “suero” could also mean “saline solution.” I looked it up, and the Latin root of the word is “serum,” which also means “whey.”
The next morning, Danielle came over to our place for breakfast and we had a leisurely conversation with Dayamí, our cook She told us she had taken part in a torchlight parade to honor Jose Martí the previous evening and has been doing so annually since she was a university student. Then Danielle, with Camila as her translator and erstwhile “manager” in Cuba, went to a press conference with local Cuban media.
The rest of us went to the Martin Luther King Center and the Ebenezer Baptist Church, which are located in the outlying neighborhood of Marianao. Pastor Rudiel ,who shepherds the church, met us at the Center and gave us a tour. He told us that both the church and the center were founded to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and purposely built in a poor, Afro-Cuban neighborhood. However almost everyone who attended in the beginning was white. So they looked for ways to engage with the community. They announced that people could fill their buckets with clean, filtered water every evening between 5:00 and 9:00. They also began offering milk for children, and opened a small pharmacy where they passed out medicine, bandages, and other basic First Aid supplies. Their church now reflects better the community in which they live.
Pastor Rudiel told us the minimum wage is $5 in Cuba, and the government no longer provides a basic food supply of rice, beans, flour, and oil as it used to. Cubans who work in the private sector earn much more. His own salary is $30/month. A lot of people get by, he said, because their workplaces offer breakfast and lunch. I thought, but what about their families?
Networking is a big part of the center’s work. They have contacts with peace and justice-promoting Evangelical organizations all over Latin America, including Justapaz , who first invited Christian Peacemaker Teams to work in Colombia.
In the room where we met there was a wall hanging from The Protestant Center for Pastoral Studies in Central America (CEDEPCA) (in the picture with Gandhi) that offers God’s blessings to the center. The red sign says, “On the road home, I want to be free, not brave.”
After the meeting we gave the Center’s pharmacy the medicine and bandages we brought from Rochester. U.S. tourists cannot visit Cuba. they must have reasons. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration is implementing a new restriction that tells Cubans who have residency in the U.S. but not citizenship may go to Cuba, but will not be able to return. Bringing in the medical supplies counted as “support for the Cuban people.”
12 categories of authorized travel to Cuba are: family visits; official business of the U.S. government, foreign governments, and certain intergovernmental organizations; journalistic activity; professional research and professional meetings; educational activities; religious activities; public performances, clinics, workshops, athletic and other competitions, and exhibitions; support for the Cuban people; humanitarian projects; activities of private foundations or research or educational institutes; exportation, importation, or transmission of information or informational materials; and certain authorized export transactions.
U.S. Embassy in Cuba https://cu.usembassy.gov/services/traveling-to-cuba/
Unfortunately, the Trump Administration is implementing a new restriction that tells Cubans who have residency in the U.S. but not citizenship may go to Cuba, but will not be able to return.
When we visited the Center in 2016, one wall of the cafeteria was full of T-Shirts from solidarity groups. We added a red and black T-shirt from Metrojustice, a Rochester Non-Profit. Unfortunately, due to the Covid pandemic, they had to destroy the T-shirts.
Some pictures from inside the Ebenezer Baptist Church
We had a restful afternoon at our apartment.
In the evening, we went to Antojos, a good, but pricey, restaurant in Old Havana. Danielle’s guitarist, Garrett, and photographer, Ray, joined us. The piña coladas were on point. Most of us went back to our apartments, afterwards, Ray, Danielle, and Michael went to Havana’s coolest Hip Hop place and then met Camila at an invitation-only performance of Los Van Van, Michael’s favorite Cuban musical group. Laura, a Colombian music promoter who had helped Danielle get the invitation to sing in Cuba, got tickets for Michael and Camila. Danielle and Ray got tickets because of Danielle’s status as a performer at the Jazz Festival. Los Van Van started their set at 1:45 a.m. When Michael, Ray, and Danielle left at 3:00 a.m., Camila was still dancing.
The next morning, we devoted ourselves to sightseeing. A straight 20-minute walk down San Rafael Street took us to the Old City of Havana, with the statue below at the end. Art permeates Havana. Cuba promotes music, visual art, and dance in schools from a young age. From what I have observed, artists appear to be more revered than sports heroes. In 2021, their call to the government for more freedom of expression caught the regime and much of the world by surprise. It also resulted in some of the artists serving prison sentences.
Our next stop was a visit to the former Presidential palace of Cuba that the government turned into the Museum of the Revolution in 1973 and a National Monument in 2010. But first, Ken got a chance to check out some of Cuba’s famous vintage cars:
The Plaza we crossed to get to the palace was the first place we encountered begging—she was an old, clearly malnourished woman. I don’t remember seeing people like her during our first trip to Cuba nine years ago.
The Presidential Palace
Presidential palace
Because one of Cuba’s frequent electrical blackouts had struck that day, the museum inside the the palace had no lights. Therefore, the following photos are dimmer than I would have liked, even with all the fancy adjustments on my iPhone. All the photos have English translations that you can read if you click on the photos, as do the next set of photos. To sum up the attitude of the museum toward these reminders of pre-revolutionary times, consider the comment on the office of the Presidents of Cuba between 1920-1965: “In this place, the most anti-popular, proimperialist (sic) and macabre decrees and laws that governed the national scene before 1959 were endorsed.”
Resistance
The next set of photos (below the picture of George Washington) chronicles the history of resistance in Cuba from the time of Indigenous people resisting Christopher Columbus and the conquistadors to the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s-60s. The three Indigenous groups who lived there at the time of Columbus’s arrival were the Taíno, Ciboney, and Guanajatabey. By 1544, Spaniards had decimated the native population from a conservative estimate of 112,000 people to 893 people, according to a count by Bishop Diego de Sarmiento. Criollo first referred to Spanish people born in Cuba, then to those who had intermarried with Indigenous and enslaved African people. They rebelled against the Colonial Government three times in the early 18th century, and resisted the English invasion during the Seven Years War or the First World War , as Churchill called it. And as long as we’re going to reframe things, it was a time when the English Crown authorized the British Navy and English privateers to be pirates and steal gold from Spanish ships that the Spanish had stolen from the New World.
From the time the Spaniards introduced slavery to the Island in the 16th century, enslaved people had probably rebelled against their enslavers, but from 1763 with the wealth coming in from sugarcane and coffee plantations, it had become a necessary cog in the capitalist enterprise, and insurrections became frequent. In the early 19th century social critics like Padre Felix Varela and Jose Saco spoke out against slavery and other social injustices.
Now we get to Jose Martí.
Imagine George Washington. If you can’t, I have provided Gilbert Stuart’s portrait to the left. Now, imagine that George Washington was a sickly abolitionist, journalist, poet and writer, who fought and died in the revolution that freed Cuba from colonial rule. If you can imagine George Washington comprising all these elements, you will understand what Jose Martí represents to the Cuban people.
Interestingly, a lot of of the Cuban intellectuals like Varela, Saco and Marti spent years in New York City, writing in exile.
The Ten Years’ War was an uprising was led by Cuban-born planters and other wealthy natives. On 10 October 1868, sugar mill owner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and his followers proclaimed independence. This was the first of three liberation wars that Cuba fought against Spain, the other two being the Little War (1879–1880) and the Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898). The painting behind the velvet rope represents the Constitutional Assembly of Guáimaro, in which representatives of areas that joined the uprising met and decided what they wanted their government to look like. One decision that they overwhelmingly agreed upon was the separation of civil and military powers with the latter being subordinate to the former. They elected Céspedes as president of the assembly and reconstituted themselves as the House of Representatives.
From 1929 to 1933, the Cuban people rose up to resist the dictatorship of dictatorship imposed by Gerardo Machado, the “Donkey with Claws.”
In 1952, former president Fulgencio Batista overthrew the government in a coup. While some criticisms of the Cuban government’s human rights abuses since Castro took over in 1959 are legitimate,* we do not typically hear about the human rights abuses under the Batista’s regime. The death toll of dissidents killed under his regime ranges from hundreds up to 20,000—the uncertainty lying in the fact that many were disappeared by Batista’s security forces and never heard from again. Hundreds were tortured to death. Batista also had warm relations with U.S. organized crime personalities, like Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. Together they turned Havana into what playwright Arthur Miller called, “”hopelessly corrupt, a Mafia playground, (and) a bordello for Americans and other foreigners.” For all these reasons, Castro’s rebels had broad popular support when they toppled Batista’s government. Some of those who fought with him and were hoping for democratic elections were later dismayed when the elections never took place. And of course, it did not matter to the Cuban elite that Castro’s reforms helped the great majority of Cuban people become better educated, healthier, and food-secure after these elites fled the country.
Amnesty International, in its reports on the state of human rights in Cuba, will describe the harassment and imprisonment of dissidents.† But it usually includes a paragraph on the U.S. embargo on Cuba:
Amnesty International has repeatedly called on the US government to lift its embargo, as it is highly detrimental to Cubans’ enjoyment of a range of economic, social and cultural rights, such as the right to food, health and sanitation. The World Health Organization, UNICEF and other UN agencies have reported on the negative impact of the embargo on the health and wellbeing of Cubans due to the lack of access to medical equipment, medicines and laboratory materials produced under US patents. Although the Cuban government is primarily responsible for respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights in Cuba, Amnesty International believes that the US embargo has helped to undermine the enjoyment of key civil and political rights in Cuba by fuelling a climate in which fundamental rights such as freedom of association, expression and assembly are routinely denied.
“Cuba: Human Rights at a Glance.” Amnesty International, 17 Sept. 2015, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2015/09/cuba-human-rights-at-a-glance/
IIn other words, the embargo creates a siege mentality in Cuba. If the U.S. lifted the political and economic pressure, as it began to do under the Obama Administration, the government would feel more comfortable expanding some democratic structures that are already in place.
Also, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam are the only Communist countries left in the world. (China has vast wealth disparity amongst its citizens, which means it cannot be Communist, anda fascist monarchical clan rules North Korea.) The U.S. trades with both Laos and Vietnam. It punishes Cuba only because it can.
La Colmenita
In the evening we went to attend a performance of La Colmenita, which I mentioned in the last post. I probably should have looked up how to take pictures in the dark with my fancy iPhone camera, but these were the best I have, after a lot of editing. “La Colmenita,” means “the little beehive” which explains why the children dress in bee costumes. Founded by Carlos Alberto Cremata, this children’s theater group has traveled all over the world. When Michael and I were here with the Witness for Peace delegation nine years ago, we learned that on their one and only tour of the United States, La Colmenita performed at one of the most impoverished schools in Los Angeles. After seeing the dilapidated state of the building and learning that the school could not afford music or art programs, the children decided to donate the money they earned touring California to that school so the children there could have music and art again.
The performance we attended was dedicated to the ground-breaking Afro-Cuban jazz band, Irakere. It began with all the children singing and dancing on state, followed by a Teen Bee narrator explaining events that followed, with intermissions of Afro-Latin, and Latin Jazz music, including a tribute to Irakere. In the first play, a little girl in a Heidi dress appeared (circled in black below) and watched a procession of animals each claiming that they were the best dancers. After that, a Cuban version of Goldilocks unfolded, with the little girl eating the baby bear’s soup, instead of oatmeal, and lying in his bed. Predictably, the bears came home, a chase ensued, but the play ended with everyone dancing on the stage (the adults sitting on the stage behind music stands were the people who voiced the characters in animal costumes.)
After La Colmenita, we went to Danielle’s Bed and Breakfast to welcome her, and the eight of us had dinner. Judy, Ken, and I went back to sleep. Camila, Danielle, Dawn, Jose, and Michael went to El Floridita, so that a Danielle could listen to the live music—that night, the bar featured a female singer. Michael et al. were unsuccessful in their efforts to convince Danielle to sing
Miscellanea
Other important aspects of the day: A perfect cup of latte and a cart decorated with old newspapers. Roughly translated, the phrase written on the bottom ridge of the cart says, “What a tremendous source of pride it is to be Cuban!”
I’ll close with Jose Martí’s most famous poem, Guantanamera, later turned into a song made famous in the U.S by Pete Seeger.
*A lot are illegitimate. For example, in the first couple of years after overthrowing Batista’s dictatorship, Castro’s government practically eliminated illiteracy. His detractors claim this was a bad thing because the now-literate peasants could read the government’s propaganda.
†But compare this report to some of Amnesty’s reports on places where Community Peacemaker Teams (formerly Christian Peacemaker Teams) works: The West Bank, Colombia, Iraqi-Kurdistan, and the Aegean Islands.
Dancers at La Floridita, one of Hemingway’s favorite bars.
We had several reasons for vacationing in Cuba this year. We had always wanted to go back after our trip nine years ago. Last year, we had stayed at our friend Camila’s apartment in Bogota, and through her got our friend Danielle Ponder invited to the Havana International Jazz Festival. More on Danielle in a minute. We wanted to escape the U.S. the week after Trump’s inauguration, and then there was this factor:
At the time we flew out of Rochester, the Los Angeles fires were raging. I had read that theplot of the movie Chinatownexplained why LA had run out of water, so when I saw it was one of the selections available on Delta entertainment, I decided to watch it. Then I realized that Roman Polanski had directed and had a moment to decide whether my conscience would permit me to watch. I no longer watch media involving Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Johnny Depp, Bill Cosby or other abusers. But my curiosity about the politics of Los Angeles water got the better of me. The movie does do a good job of laying it out, but then Polanski adds this ick factor by revealing that Faye Dunaway’s character was raped and impregnated by her filthy rich father, who goes on to kidnap his daughter/granddaughter while the Los Angeles police (who are suitably racist) stand by.
Miami We were fortunate that Michael’s daughter, Beth, married into a family with whom we enjoy spending time and also run an Airbnb room in Coconut Grove. Martha and Rubens are the embodiment of hospitality. Visiting them, Beth, and Eric before we took the flight to Havana was a vacation in and of itself. In the picture below, Rubens is sitting at the end of the table and Martha is to his left. Eric is sitting between his mother and Beth, who is holding their niece. The children belong to Simonette, Eric’s sister, sitting beside Beth. I am sitting between Simonette’s husband and Michael. The owner of the restaurant, who is part of the extended family, took the picture in Medellin the day before Beth and Eric’s wedding.
Back to Danielle Danielle was a public defender here in Rochester who has been having a lot of success with her music lately, including a Grammy nomination for best new R&B artist. She shared about both arenas of her life in a Ted Talk: What music can teach us about justice. Check out her website to see if she might be appearing near you!
Here’s a song from her most recent album, Some of Us Are Brave. She mostly wrote it for black women, but when I heard the first stanza recently, I thought it could apply to the times we are facing in the U.S.
Arrival So my plan for the time in Havana involved working on this blog and getting some other writing done, while the rest of our group was attending concerts. Unfortunately, I left my laptop at a TSA checkpoint in Miami. I had asked for a wheelchair escort—not because I can’t walk, but because standing for any length of time is agony, and I think having two people minding my luggage through security meant the laptop didn’t get get picked up. Also, once I was through the line I focused on getting my money belt and back brace on.
When we arrived in Havana, I looked for the drug-sniffing mutts I had seen last time. Although I couldn’t see them, I heard them yapping away across the other side of the airport. Our fellow travelers, Ken and Judy said that the dogs they saw appeared to be beagles and beagle mixes. The picture to the left appeared in a 2014 issue of the Havana Times.
I’ve reflected on the difference it makes when Security is only interested in dogs for their sniffing abilities. I’ve come to believe that those who use German Shepherds want to intimidate people as well.
Below is our Bed and Breakfast in Havana. Our host had told us that we would have to go up 60 steps. Michael chose this instead of a high-rise with an elevator option because the electrical grid often fails in Cuba. Truthfully, I almost passed out every time I got to our apartment. Fortunately, on the first day, we only needed to get our suitcases up one floor. It was a beautiful old apartment—dense, dark wood floors and molding. Our rooms were comfortable and airy.
From the B&B, our airport driver took us to the Cuban Cultural Office to pick up our job festival passes, program booklets, and T-shirts. Because of the U.S. embargo we could not purchase these things in advance, but our friend Camila was able to put everything on her Colombian credit card before we traveled there.
From the ticket office, the driver took us to the La Paila Fonda. Many of its chairs were hanging swings. And here began the non-alcoholic piña colada quest for Michael and me. If I remember correctly, we got off to an auspicious start here.
Ken and Michael have known each other for 50 years, having met at the JCC summer camp–which did not make Jewishness a criterion for attendance. Ken is a musician of several wind instruments and recently retired from teaching music in the public schools for four decades. Judy retired two years ago from her job as Activities Coordinator at Jewish Senior Life in Rochester and, like me, is a gargoyle aficionado, among other things.
After lunch, the driver took us to the box office of the Karl Marx theatre to buy a ticket for me to a performance of La Colmenita. More about that later. I had to get a separate ticket, because I did not have a jazz festival pass. Yes, among my many flaws is not liking jazz. I respect it, in the same way I respect opera acknowledge the musicians are talented, but it kind of bores me. I like singers who incorporate jazz, like Steely Dan and Bruce Cockburn. And I like tuneful jazz from the thirties and forties, but well, a pass to the festival would have been wasted on me.
The cost of the ticket was 50 Cuban pesos, which was equivalent to U.S. 17 cents at the unofficial exchange rate. The great majority of people who attended the Jazz Festival were not Cuban because Cubans could never afford ticket to it, but La Colmenita was for the people.
Afterwards we rested at our B&B, Michael went to the airport to pick up Camila. We had stayed with Camila when we were in Bogota last year and thought we would return the favor by inviting her to stay with us in Havana and attend the Jazz Festival with us. Originally, Camila had planned to fly from Bogota to Colombia via Panama, which was cheaper than a direct flight. After Trump threatened to invade Panama, she made arrangements to fly directly to Havana.
El Floridita In the evening we walked around looking for something to eat and at the entrance of Old Havana saw El Floridita, which a 1953 issue of Esquire Magazine dubbed “one of the 7 most famous bars in the world.” The Catalan immigrant bartender Constantino Ribalaigua Vert invented the daiquiri there, but we also found the non-alcoholic piña coladas superb. Most of its fame comes from its association with Earnest Hemingway, who patronized it frequently. Even after he moved out of the city to the country (which Michael and I visited last time we were in Cuba), he would still drive into Havana to visit the bar often. Below is a picture of him with Fidel Castro.
We all agreed the band was stellar. The electric violin and guitar were miked, but the singer was not. He had an extraordinary voice. I wonder if he had studied opera. Adding to the entertainment were people who got up to dance in the meager space around their tables or just in front of the band. Most of them were very good. I later asked a Cuban whether men have hip problems there, given how fluid their dancing is. He said hip and back problems are rare. Camila would later join us at the bar. Dawn and Jose arrived after her. Dawn is an American Sign Language translator and has volunteered at the Gandhi Center in Rochester, where she met Camila when she worked there years ago. Jose works with a non-profit that advocates for the release of elderly prisoners and supports those who have left prison. Cuba was the first trip he had taken outside the country.
Danielle had not yet arrived in Cuba, but we thought we would walk by her B&B to see where she was staying. Jose took this picture so we could prove to Danielle we had shown up.
After our street art tour in Bogotá with Camilo, I kept my eyes open for street art in other places we visited. Santiago also has a notable street art community and now I kind of wish we had taken a graffiti tour there. The first street art we saw was actually an advertisement for an Amazon Prime program! The yellow owl was across the street from a cafe where we got some lunch. In my blog post on the ESMA Museum of Memory in Buenos Aires, I talked about the meaning of “Presente.” So when I saw the graffiti about Luisa Toledo, I looked her up. The Pinochet regime killed three of her children, and she became involved with liberation struggles against the dictatorship. She also advocated for the Mapuche Indigenous people, who were seeking territorial autonomy. Her family put out the following communique when she died.
To the national and international community To the women, the children, the elderly, and the honorable men of this land To the political prisoners To the clandestine ones who plow through rebellions To the Mapuche people To those who fight To the residents of Villa Fráncia To the combative youth: It is with deep sadness that we inform everyone of the death of our beloved comrade Luisa Toledo Sepúlveda. Surrounded by her most intimate family circle, she passed away peacefully in the privacy of her home on the morning on Tuesday, July 6. On this cold July morning, we were proud to be able to say goodbye to an unwavering, timeless, and essential woman. And although Luisa leaves us physically, her legacy has deeply penetrated the history of those who fight beyond the borders of this territory called Chile. With incalculable courage, Luisa fought for a justice that she never received after the murder of her children, Eduardo, Rafael, and Pablo, a pain that made her decision to fight unbreakable. Today will be marked as a before and after with the indelible mark of Luisa. Luisa, mother of the fighting youth, will continue to be an unfaltering beacon for those who fight. Let it be known to all the traitors, syncophants, and those who remain comfortable during moments of revolt, that her tenacity and consistency will remain the trailheads for new paths of struggles and rebellions in every poor corner of this world. Compañera Luisa Toledo Sepúlveda, Present Villa Francia, July 6, 2021 #FightlikeLuisa #MotherOfThecombatantYouth #LuisaLives #EveryDayAYoungCombatantisborn #VillaFrance #FreedomToThePrisonersoftherevolt
The graffiti “RP Global killed the black woman” probably refers to the death of Macarena Valdés, a Mapuche Indigenous woman. The Chilean authorities arrested her for trying to prevent the multinational company, RP Global, from stringing high voltage power cables through her community. The one beside it says “War to the state,” with an anarchist logo beside it. Below, we have poetry. The first, blue against a cream background, reads “Soul trash/We collect your fears/Old loves and bad luck/ Shake it off here.” Not sure of the poet’s last name, but the first is Pippi. The same poet (Pippi Morís?) wrote in white on blue, “Assembly of a whole being/I feel cold, never afraid/My soul is conscious/Vibrating along.“
Victor Jara was an internationally famous Chilean folksinger and university professor tortured and killed by Pinochet’s regime. Dragged into an indoor stadium, soldiers smashed his arms and systematically broke his fingers. Then they taunted him to play his guitar. The Spanish under his portrait reads, “With the force of song.” To his right, is a poster showing an indigenous person kicking a soldier, with the phrases, “Soldiers go back to your quarters.” On either side is the quotation, “So that memory does not exist only in September,” recalling the September 11, 1973 coup.
Below that, you’ll see a poster about Indigenous people that has been ripped off the wall. To its right, the poster says, “With death and torture, Democracy is still being built. Sowing terror to defend your interests and continuing to profit from our necessities. To 50 years of the coup. Self-organization,[obscured], and Direct Action. The encircled A and the star represent Anarchists and Communists. I don’t know what the third logo represents. It does not appear to be the flag of Chilean socialists. Because of its proximity to the Indigenous poster, and because of how governments treat Indigenous people in the Americas, I think the two posters may relate to each other. I don’t know what the three-eyed person means in the street art below that, but the words say, “State of Rebellion before the Oppressor State.”
In the last row, we see graffiti dedicated to the struggle of the Mapuche people. “Mapuche” means “people of the land” in their language, and “newen” means “force.” The small posters stuck on the painting of an arch call for justice in the murder of Annibal Villarroel, a working class protestor shot by police lieutenant Joaquin Muñoz Vasquez in 2020. Alex Nuñez was a 39-year-oold repairman who was trying to get home under military curfew. Police chased him and and beat him up. He died later in the hospital from his injuries. Under his image, someone has written, “They fell fighting for [human/civil] rights.” And below that, someone has written, “Arise those who fight (or struggle.”). The writer turned the tail of the q into a cross. On the picture to the right, the graffiti says, “For Communism, for Anarchy, let’s go on the offensive.”
I thought a couple of pieces were so striking I wanted to feature them. First up was the adaptation of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, which was his response to the 1937 bombing of the city of Guernica by fascist Italy and Germany. The artist of this mural used Picasso’s motif to describe the crackdowns on protests against inequality that began in 2019 and continued into 2020, until Covid-19 ended them. One demonstration on October 25, 2019 had more that 1 million people show up.
We stopped in at the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center , which was closed for the day, and saw this mural. I would have loved to have had a Chilean historian or art expert explain it to me. I did a Google Lens search, and someone said this mural is called “Free Africa.”
I saw a mosaic on the side of the building—obviously installed when the center was built—that I initially thought was a picture of the Catholic Church bringing enlightenment to the savages. However, on closer inspection, I see that it’s a depiction of Gabriela Mistral, who herself received little standard education because she grew up in poverty. She advocated for Indigenous, poor, and working-class children to have the same right to education as other Chileans. Below are a couple of other murals from the center. The quotation above and below the frame in the picture to the right means, roughly, “As the streets expand over everything, the countryside shrinks. If the countryside dies, the city doesn’t eat.”
International Women’s Day Street Art
The evening we landed in Santiago, our driver told us he could take us only within three blocks of our rented room because of the International Women’s Day March. Dragging our luggage all that way was not fun, but participants in the March sure left a lot of interesting graffiti and posters behind. The top photo is slang that means, roughly. “Legal Abortion. Never with the police. Always with the whores.” The three unobscured graffiti postings below it read, “No is no,” “How many have to die in the name of false love,” and “Believe your daughter.” The posters give statistics:
In Chile, women work double the hours of men each day to take care of children and other dependents
At a global level, women work more than 76% of the unremunerated jobs.
1 out of 2 women of working age do not participate in the workforce, while 70% of men in the same position do.
Women in Chile receive $21.7 less that men do.
Did you know that only 7.5 public monuments are about women?
9 out of 10 women have been harassed on public transport.
Did you know that only 5.5% of the almost 100 million streets in Chile are named after women?
In Latin America, 49% of women have taken a break of 6 months or more from their work.
In Chile, 2 out of 5 women cancel trips within the city because the situation is too insecure for them to go there.
The posters in red depict the pictures of young women that the Pinochet junta regime kidnapped and who are still missing. The poster of the little girl in her school uniform jumping the turnstile reads, “Against the disposal and the violence of the colonial, capitalist, patriarchy. We resist for life. We march for transformation.” The final picture, bottom right, says, “I am the artist. NOT the muse.”
Palestinian Solidarity Street Art
As I’ve mentioned in earlier blog postings, we saw evidence of solidarity with Palestinians in all the countries we visited. In South America, only French Guiana does not recognize the State of Palestine. In Santiago, however, support for Palestinians seemed omnipresent. I remembered a friend in Bethlehem telling me in the 1990s that there were more Palestinian Christians from Bethlehem in Santiago, Chile than there were Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem. I also remember his taxi driver friend telling me he didn’t want to emigrate, but the Israeli closure of Bethlehem had tanked the economy, and he had family in Santiago who could help him start a new life there. Nearly half a million Palestinians live in Chile today.
From the top left: I took this picture from a car, so it’s not the greatest, but you can see the Palestinian woman wearing a keffiyeh (incidentally, some Palestinian Muslim women do wear keffiyehs—usually as a political statement, but it’s unusual. They prefer more fashionable headscarves. Keffiyehs are for working-class men.) On the top right, the posters say, “Together in the Struggle,” and feature an Indigenous woman, a Black woman and a Palestinian woman. Bottom left is a stencil showing a Palestinian woman holding a baby, with the statement: “Patriarchy equals genocide.” The next poster is a lithography saying, “Free Palestine.” (Below that is a poster saying “Milk is rape.”). Hanging on the same screen are posters saying, “No+Genocide,” with abstract figures in the colors of the Palestinian flag. On the bottom right, the top slogan says, “Palestinian Woman Resist.” (Below, in red, it says “Woman, light your fire” and, in black, “To abort is a right.”)
Valparaiso We have a friend in Rochester from Chile who encouraged us to go to Valparaiso, because she doesn’t like Santiago, and thinks Valparaiso presents a more beautiful side of Chile. Valparaiso is indeed a picturesque city. Valparaiso has Latin America’s oldest stock exchange, the continent’s first volunteer fire department, and Chile’s first public library. El Mercurio de Valparaiso is the world’s oldest Spanish language newspaper still in publication. UNESCO has called Valparaiso a World Heritage Site because of its historic importance as a seaport where ships stopped on their way to and from the Straits of Magellan before the Panama Canal was built.
Below is our lunchtime at a restaurant that our friend from Rochester recommended for the view. A driver in Santiago whom we liked agreed to take us to Valparaiso and then to the airport to catch our overnight flight. So of course, we invited him to eat with us. I ordered the dish our friend had recommended, the seafood soup. Good choice.
We took a walk into the center of the city before we went into its hills. This statue of the Greek god of justice, Themis, appealed to me. I think it was her swagger, with the hand on the hip. The plaque reads, “Themis, goddess of justice, ‘Figure and features of a young woman, a hard and fearsome look. Very vivid shine in her eyes, neither submissive or threatening, but with the dignity of a certain venerable sadness.'”
We then went up to the upper levels of Valparaiso on a funicular. The city has 17. Basically, they operate on the principle of counter weights. As one car goes down, it pulls the other one up. The pictures show the view from the top.
We thought we were seeing more Chilean street art in this hilly neighborhood, but the painter of both pictures has a Colombian Instagram address. I am not sure what the picture on the right signifies. The picture on the left shows Chile being drained of its resources. I am guessing the octopus pig is multinational corporations? Or other nations? The “Liberty of Chile” is one thing octopus pig is stealing.
Back to Reality
The flight from Santiago to Atlanta was very long, and my back was throbbing by the time we landed. You know how I complained in a previous blog post about Chile not having cheap espresso drinks? Well, a cup of IHOP coffee was a sad, sad way to end the trip.
However, we did have a lovely brief visit with Michael’s friend Maidie as we waited for our flight home in Atlanta.
As I write, we are halfway through June. I’ve been job hunting and tending the garden. When I reflect on the trip this spring, I would say my favorite part of the trip was visiting friends. I am glad that Sandra and Tuti feel safe in the countries they once fled, but I also think of all the students, intellectuals, dissidents, and ordinary people who simply wanted a better society and met terrible ends in their nations.
Learning the histories of these countries also left me with the conviction to never take democracy for granted. Some Colombians, Uruguayans, Argentinians and Chileans feel nostalgic for the times of dictatorship and political assassinations. There will always be privileged people who support governments that engage in unimaginable cruelties, as long as this tyranny results in the elites living comfortable lives, and as long as the government’s misinformation brainwashes enough people.
Those who have ears let them hear.
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On March 9-10, we made three short to very short visits to three more museums, the Gabriela Mistral Education Museum, which we visited on the afternoon after our visit to the Memory Museum, the Pre-Columbian Art museum, and Pablo Neruda’s House.
Gabriela Mistral had an impressive career. Famous for her poetry, she became the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The government also appointed her to be a diplomatic consul to 10 different cities in Europe and the Americas.
But her first career was in education. She grew up in poverty and left school at 11 to support her family by sewing and then working as a teacher’s aide when she was 15. Her teaching career attracted notice and the Ministry of Education appointed her as director to several prestigious high schools in Santiago. Later she moved to Mexico to help reform the education system there.
The museum itself was mostly about the history of education in Chile.
Shortly before the Pinochet dictatorship fell, he handed over the education system to private corporations, who continually raised fees and reduced services. In 2006, students throughout the country rebelled. Called the Penguin’s Revolt, a reference to their black and white school uniforms, students demanded that the Chilean government stop allowing corporations to make a profit from their education. The signs below (clockwise from the top left) say, “It’s going to fall; it’s going to fall, the education of Pinochet.” “Let’s go, comrades. We have to put a little more effort into it. We quickly go out onto the street. Chilean education is not sold; it is defended.” “Education is a right.” “The rebel penguin doesn’t sleep.”
That evening we went to a Chinese-Venezuelan restaurant that included ham and cheese egg rolls on the menu. I will say no more.
The next day, we went to see the National Museum of Pre-Columbian Art. At first, the plaque commemorating the inauguration of the museum by General Pinochet put us off. Michael asked at the front desk why the plaque was there, but the guy at the desk had no answer.
Then, as we entered the second room, we realized all the pieces of art in that room had been looted from Indigenous burial sites, so we left after maybe 15 minutes.
We then visited Constitution Plaza, site of La Moneda, a combination of presidential palace and seat of government.
For Chileans September 11 will always refer to the day in 1973 that the Chilean military, with the support of the U.S., launched a coup against the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende. And the most famous images from that day were the strafing of La Moneda by the Chilean Air Force, which used unguided rockets and cannon fire.
When we were visiting Sandra in Uruguay, she told us that Allende had arranged to go into exile, but he heard military radio communications indicating that his plane would never reach Cuba. So he delivered his final radio address, part of which is engraved on his statue in the plaza, and then committed suicide. The quotation on the plaque reads
[Go forward knowing that,] sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.
Pablo Neruda’s home in Santiago, called La Chascona, after his mistress, was the third museum we visited that day.
We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, but you can see some of the rooms here. Neruda, Chile’s most famous poet, also won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was friends with Gabriela Mistral. One of his most famous poems is “Ode to a Watermelon”:
ODE TO THE WATERMELON (Excerpt) by Pablo Neruda …the round, magnificent, star-filled watermelon. It’s a fruit from the thirst-tree. It’s the green whale of the summer. The dry universe all at once given dark stars by this firmament of coolness lets the swelling fruit come down: its hemispheres open showing a flag green, white, red, that dissolves into wild rivers, sugar, delight! Jewel box of water, phlegmatic queen of the fruitshops, warehouse of profundity, moon on earth! You are pure, rubies fall apart in your abundance, and we want to bite into you, to bury our face in you, and our hair, and the soul! When we’re thirsty we glimpse you like a mine or a mountain of fantastic food, but among our longings and our teeth you change simply into cool light that slips in turn into spring water that touched us once singing.
Currently, the watermelon has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance, because Israel punishes those who display the Palestinian flag. With its black seeds, green rind and red fruit, the watermelon serves as a stand-in. When we saw this apron, with a line of the poem in Spanish, Michael knew immediately that he wanted to give it to a Palestinian friend, who posted this picture on Facebook.
Finally, we encountered some beverages in Chile that we did not in any of the other countries we visited. I got spoiled by the cheap expresso drinks I was able to order in most of the places we ate. At this particular restaurant in Chile, I decided I would go for something simpler, and ordered cafe con leche, coffee with hot milk. Below is what I got. In Palestine, this type of coffee is a special drink that Palestinians serve to guests (despite the boycott), but for me, it symbolized a return to reality.
However, even though Chile doesn’t have cheap expresso drinks, it does have some interesting soft drinks. Top left is sugar cane juice with lime. Now, it didn’t even sound good to me, and it tasted just like it sounds: watered-down molasses with lime juice. I guess I just like trying new things.
Inca Cola is actually a Peruvian soda, with lemon verbena as the main flavor. Bilz, after Coca-Cola, is the most popular soda in Chile. The company describes the flavor as “fruit.” The pictures for Pap and Kem I downloaded from the internet. I didn’t actually see the former, and didn’t think to take a picture of the latter. One has the taste of papaya and the other the taste of pineapple. Guess which is which.
I believe next post will be the last of the trip.
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The Museum of Memory in Chile had its own style, just like the museums in Uruguay and Argentina had their own style. Like Argentina’s museum, it is designed professionally, and makes the “disappeared” reappear. I think Chile’s museum tries to tell a story. How did this happen? What happened? Who made it happen? Who stopped it from happening.
For those who are interested in the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, see my previous blog post about our friend Sandra’s work with the Salvador Allende Society in Uruguay.
At the entrance of the Museum of the Museum the walls exhibit the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.
When you enter the museum, the first exhibit you see is the number of people from other countries that the Chilean regime killed.
While Argentina’s ESMA museum mentions that other memorials to the victims of the Dirty War exist, Chile’s Museum of Memory gives a visual representation and short description them all. The University of Santiago memorialized two of its professors with the colorful mural: Enrique Kirberg, and Víctor Jara, an internationally known musician, and Latin American icon.
Below is a brief summary in English of the drastic change in Chilean society when the dictatorship took charge.
The picture on the left shows an exhumation of a grave in Santiago. Prosecutors exhumed mass graves to gather evidence to indict the human rights abusers during the dictatorship. It says, “How did we come to deny the humanity of people?”
People around the world began to protest the human rights abuses in Chile, as they did those in Argentina and Uruguay.
Orlando Letelier was a Chilean economist, politician and diplomat under the presidency of Salvador Allende. Tortured and imprisoned under Pinochet’s regime, he eventually moved to the U.S. where he held several academic positions. A car bomb explosion ordered by Pinochet killed Letelier and his U.S. secretary and interpreter, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, on September 21, 1976 in Washington, DC. The photo on the right is a picture of their memorial on Sheridan Circle in DC.
In the Buenos Aires Museum of Memory, the victims of torture describe in horrifying detail what happened to them. Chile’s museum takes a more clinical approach. For example,
One is forced to be present at the torture of others, many times family members and people one is close to, in order to provoke confessions. This method allows victims to project what could happen to them if they don’t collaborate.
It’s a different kind of horrifying.
Below are letters written home to families informing them of their loved ones’ deaths. The large letter was one a father wrote to his child from prison.
Walls filled with names of those whom the government killed. The lighting was terrible and you could barely read them. I adjusted the exposure on the photos to brighten the names.
Like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, eventually some Chileans decided they had had enough of fear, and worrying about their the loved ones. The large black human-shaped poster says, “Maria Edith Vasquez. Did you forget me? YES___ NO___.”
Near the end of the Museum, it does its great “undisappearing” act by having the victims’ faces jut out from walls in a great hall. I think the treatment of the disappeared is also one of the differences between Chile’s museum and Argentina’s museum. The Argentina museum tried to tell as many stories of as many individuals as it could, and have their faces in as many places as it could.
Arpilleras (Ar-pee-YER-as) are a traditional type of Latin American Folk Art. We have several hanging in our front room. (I took a picture of this one on a slant to reduce the glare on the glass.) They are often quilted to had texture, and typically depict village life.
Chilean women, during and after the dictatorship, made arpilleras that reflected their stories. At one point General Pinochet forbade their sale. Here are some pictures I took, again at a slant, to reduce light reflecting of the glass. On the lower right, armed authorities shoot a man in a white shirt, who was standing among people in the street. The arpillera above seems to show monsters attacking. In the picture on the right, the arpillera in the lower left corner shows a a person sitting in a pool of blood, surrounded by barbed wire, while a sinister-looking black bird flies overhead. To the right, a group of women marches up a hill, where dark figures, possibly armed, await them. To the right of that, the lower arpillera shows a photo of another protest, with mothers holding up pictures of their children, and someone hold ing a sign that says, TRUTH/JUSTICE in Spanish.
From the beginning of the dictatorship, the regime encouraged people to spy on their fellow countrymen. The sign below says, roughly,
CHILEANS The patriotic contribution of all citizens will facilitate the elimination of the extremists that still remain in the capital. They are foreigners without a homeland and some Chilean fanatics that can no seem beyond their hate and desire for destruction. REPORT THEM, PROVIDING CONCRETE AND TIMELY BACKGROUND TO THE FOLLOWING PHONE NUMBERS OR PERSONALLY AT ANY MILITARY UNIT. Absolute privacy of those who provide information will be maintained. Don’t be afraid of the threats of extremists. The LAW and JUSTICE are on your side. Whoever is caught threatening a citizen will be subjected to the maximum penalty in the Tribunals during times of war. Remember that indifferent citizens helped with their passivity to let Marxism almost destroy Chile. CITIZEN, CONTRIBUTE TO THE CLEANING OUR HOMELAND OF INDESIRABLES. Headquarters of the State.
The town of Pisgua had an internment camp previously used for male homosexuals under the dictatorship of General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo between 1927 and 1931. Under the Pinochet regime, it became one of the country’s many detention/torture centers. A Catholic human rights organization demanded that a mass grave in the local cemetery be excavated in 1990. Due to the arid climate and the amount of salt in the soil, the twenty bodies inside were unusually well preserved and easy to identify. I don’t actually remember what the other photo is about, but it’s self-explanatory.
When the Pinochet dictatorship came into power, it shut down most of the newspapers, and saw that the others printed only positive things about the government. The papers and the pictures refer to a Red Cross visit to the internment cap at Pisagua. They speak of the “humane and just treatment” the prisoners receive, and how “well-ordered, disciplined and clean” the camp was. The photos show smiling prisoners.
I highly recommend Jacobo Timerman’s books, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number and The Longest War . In the first, he writes of his experience of detention and torture during the Argentina’s Dirty War because he was a Jew and the editor ofLa Opinion. In the second, he writes of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. I mention these books here, because an anecdote from the second book has stuck with me since I read it in the 1990s. On a trip for journalists to Southern Lebanon with the Israeli army, soldiers had the journalists talk to Lebanese civilians. They told the journalists how much better life was for them now that the Israeli military was in control of the region. Timerman instantly recognized what the expression on their faces meant. His face had assumed the same expression when the Red Cross had visited his prison, and he had told its representatives that the authorities at the prison were treating him well.
Below are letters that prisoners wrote to their families had to pass through a censor. Prisons even had a form for prisoners to fill out to send home to their families.
In 1988, Chile’s Constitutional Court ruled that the country should hold a plebiscite as per Article 64 of the Chilean Constitution. Fifty-six percent of the voters rejected the extension of Pinochet’s presidential term, in part because of an upbeat advertising campaign that focused on what Chile’s future could be without a dictatorship. Pinochet left power in 1989.
I took photo below, which commemorates the tenth anniversary of the museum’s creation, on our way out of the museum. The sign says, “Adios, General. Joy has arrived.”
Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of the coup that left over 3,000 Chileans dead or missing, tortured tens of thousands of prisoners, and drove an estimated 200,000 Chileans into exile. And yet, polling shows more than one-third of Chileans today justify the military overthrow of a democratically elected government. Sixty-six percent of respondents agreed with the statement that rather than worry about the rights of individuals, the country needs a firm government. Several people polled said that under Pinochet, there was less crime and the streets were cleaner. Others said he had saved Chile from Marxism.
I generally support not judging people by the worst thing they’ve ever done. However, for people in power, it’s different. They rarely face accountability for the crimes they commit and the lives they ruin. So they remain unrepentant, and their victims never receive justice.
I also think that people have a way of looking back at the “good ol’ days” and thinking life was better then. Leave It to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show certainly depict spaces where people could live safely and largely harmoniously. But both shows filmed in eras when black people could not vote in southern states, and women could not have credit cards in their own names or take legal action for sexual harassment in the workplace. Sheriff Andy would never have tolerated the Ku Klux Klan in Mayberry, we know, but at the time it was filmed, southern sheriffs not only tolerated, but were often members of the organization. They also gave allowed lynch mobs free access to the prisoners in their jails.
In 2023 Kevin Clardy, the Sheriff of McCurtain County, Oklahoma was caught on tape wishing he still lived in an era when Black people were lynched.
And that’s why we need memory museums—to remind people what the good ol’ days were really all about and that the people in power at the time were monsters.
Perhaps the closest thing we have to a Memorial museum in the U.S. is the Legacy Museum and the Memorial to victims of lynching in Alabama, which we visited a couple years ago. Michael and I found it one of the most profound experiences of our trip.
Tuti took us on a drive to the foothills of the Andes Mountains.
I was surprised to find out that I took so few pictures when we visited Michael’s friend Tuti Berlak. Because I remember my time with her and her daughter Maia was one of my favorite parts of the trip.
On the night before we flew to Mendoza from Buenos Aires. I finally took my braids down from the wedding hairdo. I had discovered, as the bruise from my fall in Medellin faded, that I had a hematoma in the center of the bruise (and still have it as of this writing), which explains why it hurt so much to move that thigh muscle. When I googled around to find out info about hematomas, I discovered that you’re not supposed to fly with them. I had already taken three flights , but thought I should check in with my doctor. He told me to take 325 mg of aspirin—which means I was kind of nauseous for the rest of my trip.
Mendoza is a city near the foothills of the Andes, and is cooler than Buenos Aires. Lujan de Cuyo, where Tuti and her daughter Maia live, is even closer, so the weather is cooler yet, although warm by our standards during the day. Here’s the view flying in:
Tuti has an interesting history. Like many of Michael’s friends from Tel Aviv University and Kerem Shalom, she left Argentina during the Dirty War. In the late 1970s, she left for Mexico, where she met her ex and they ended up in jail for because of their political activities against the Argentinian military regime. The Israeli Embassy got Tuti out, but her ex was Argentinian and had no one to advocate for him. While he was in jail, he made this plaque and gave it to Michael as a gift, which we have in our small collection of Che Guevara tchotchkes.1 Mexico deported them both as political exiles to Sweden. Before they split they had their two daughters, Anahi and Maia. Tuti moved back to Argentina.
She now lives near the her parents’ summer cottage. Below is the view outside of her current home. Even though this post will be shorter than the others, I think my time with Tuti and her daughter Maia was one of my favorite parts of the trip. They are relaxing people, and sitting on the porch with them and their two big old dogs, was just what I needed.
Tuti’s daughter Anahi is an artist and the room where we slept was full of her mosaics. Below are some of her instagram photos of the pieces in our bedroom, following a picture of herself. You also might want to check out her Instagram feed.
In both Uruguay and Argentina we learned the importance of mate (pronounced MAH-tay). On the plane to Montevideo, we sat across from a guy who asked the flight attendant to fill his thermos with hot water, and then sipped for the rest of the flight. Tuti told us the that Argentinian stereotype Uruguayans as always walking around with a thermos in one arm and a mate cup in the other.
Although Sandra had given me a few sips of her mate , I really learned how to drink it with Tuti. You fill the cup with dry leaves and then push them back with a bombilla until there is a small space to pour water. Then you sip the water with the dual purpose bombilla like the ones below.
Mariano-J, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Tuti told us that the drinking mate is meant to be done socially, with everyone sharing the same cup. At the height of the Covid pandemic, when she went to meetings, people brought their own cups, but she said it wasn’t the same. Mate is an acquired taste. It’s bitter, like coffee and tea, but I acquired it.
Tuti telling us about mate with Maia in the background.
Before we left, reluctantly, on my part, anyway, I decided it was time for the last remnants of the wedding hairdo to go away. For our departure to Chile from the Mendoza airport the next morning, I was wearing my normal braids.
Michael wishes me to point out that tchotchkes are called chochchadas in Nicaraguan Spanish. He also thinks the fact that we have a Dome of the Rock replica made by a Palestinian political prisoner means we have a collection of political prisoner tchotchkes. ↩︎
The Armed Forces of Argentina installed the first ESMA (School of Navy Mechanics) institutions in 1975. Despite the name, the military/security state always intended to use them as clandestine centers for the torture, interrogation, rape, illegal detention and murder of people whom they deemed not worthy of membership in society. They accomplished all these atrocities with the help of U.S. tax dollars.
As I said when I wrote about Uruguay’s Museum of Memory, the museum in Buenos Aires reflects a more professional use of designers and certainly a greater availability of funds. But the dictatorship had these detention centers all over Argentina, and people in other regions have set up smaller memory museums in their locations as well..
I took the below pictures of these exhibits on the outside of the museum, because they have English at the bottom, explaining what happened inside. If you click on them, you should be able to read the explanations. We saw the stencil commemorating Tomas Canataro on the outside of the building. I wondered if he had been a union leader, journalist, or some famous Argentinian dissident.
But when I looked him up in the Museum archives, I saw the following,
[Translated from Spanish] Tomas was born on October 22, 1941 in Villa del Totoral, province of Córdoba. Married and father of three children, he worked as a driver in a construction company. He was kidnapped on August 3, 1978 from his home in Villa Concepción, San Martín, province of Buenos Aires. He was 36 years old. He is still missing.
Archivo Provincial de la Memoria. “Archivo Provincial de la Memorial – Memorial – TOMAS RICARDO CANATARO SANTOLUCITO None.” Accessed April 3, 2024. https://apm.gov.ar/presentes/detalle/2467.
So what had he done to incur the displeasure of the authorities? Did he have friends or family members they were looking for? Had someone overheard him criticizing the government? Who put up the stencil? His children?
“Presente” is something sung at memorial services to indicate that the deceased are still a part of the living and remain in their hearts and minds. Every year, hundreds of people sing it as people call out the names of those killed by trainees at the School of the Americas (which include Argentinian Officers) in Fort Bending, Georgia. It was one of the most spiritual protests I ever participated in.
We went inside the Central Pavilion, where Navy students had done their exercise. It is now dedicated to the 30,000 kidnapped, tortured, murdered and disappeared Argentinians. If the museum has a central theme it is to “undisappear” people. The dictatorship sought to sow terror among the population by making people disappear—and it considered them disposable, worth less than animals. The museum puts their faces everywhere, and includes their thumbnail histories to bring them back to life.
You will see I had some trouble getting all the faces on the windows, because the wall is so long.
Also around the room were testimonies before the Argentine Human Rights Commission of three women who managed to survive their time in ESMA.
The plaque below in particular struck me. Modifying Google Translate, I paraphrased it:
“It is in the “Capuchá” that one realized that contact with the outside world no longer exists. The prisoner has nothing that protects or defends [him or her.] The sequestration is complete. This sensation of vulnerability, isolation, and fear is very difficult to describe. It must be, however, the closest thing to Hell.”
Outside the Pavilion were exhibits of activists who wanted to make Argentina a more just and humane place. When I saw Patricia Roisenblit, I thought maybe the family’s name, was changed from Michael’s family name generations ago: Rosenblatt. However, now I think it’s more likely that it derives from Rosenblüt/Rosenbluth. Anyway, as I was googling around, I came across the name of Rosa Tarkovsky de Roisinblit, she was one of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and was a founder of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Patricia was 8 months pregnant when she and her husband were disappeared. The Air Force Commander who kidnapped, tortured and killed the couple received a sentence of 25 years. The Air Force Civilian worker who took the baby, knowing where it had come from, received a sentence of 12 years. Rosa is alive and 104 years old.
I wanted to take pictures of all the activists, but as I looked down the long walk I knew that I could spend all day doing so.
However, one of the activists in particular stood out to me for some reason, possibly because the details of her life seemed like they could have been those of any kind-hearted person. Possibly because her face looks vaguely familiar, like someone I could have gone to school with. She grew up in a house with a garden, and her little sister remembers her as a friend and protector. She was youth minister in a Methodist church. The kids in her group gave her a Mafalda doll because of her brown frizzy hair and because she wanted to change the world for the better.
At the university, she was not as interested in participating in political activities as she was in working with poor children and listening to workers and homemakers. She later joined the Peronist Youth party, where she met Reuben Stockdale. Her sister remembers them always having noisy, lively debates together. They both worked in a textile factory for a while, presumably to be closer to the workers for whom they were advocating.
The authorities kidnapped Inés as she left work in 1976. She was two months pregnant. Reuben, who should have fled the country, as people associated with disappeared people typically did, decided to remain in Argentina and look for her. He was kidnapped in 1977. They both remain disappeared.
Inés Cobo. ¡Presente!
We next went to a small building dedicated to the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo, whom I have mentioned in previous blogs
In addition to their regular Thursday public witnesses at the plaza, Grandmothers of the Plaza Del Mayo began Marches of Resistance in 1981. The atrocities were becoming more widely known internationally, and they wanted to keep up the pressure. Each march had a theme. RETURN OF THE LIVING CHILDREN TO THEIR FAMILIES “With our lives we carried them. With our lives, we love them.” RETURN OF THE DETAINEES-DISAPPEARED/ PUNISHMENT FOR THE GUILTY “The Plaza [belongs to] the Mothers and not to the cowards.” AGAINST THE LAW OF AMNESTY FOR THE APPEARANCE OF THE LIVING DETAINEES-DISAPPEARED. “There were no mistakes, there were no excesses. There were only the murderers in the military [who were part of] the process.”
And as always, the pictures of the abducted stare the visitor in the face. The museum refuses to let them disappear.
The military, in a sadistic form of execution that extended torture to the very end, often killed its captives by flying them over the River Platte or the ocean and dropping them from the plane or helicopter, hands and feet bound, into the water.1 They referred to these prisoners as “transfers.” Sandra told us she remembers the bodies washing up on the beaches of Uruguay.
I took this picture outside the museum. Apple photos only identifies it as being in the Nuñez neighborhood, where the museum is located. It says, “A tribute to the popular 2activists, the detainees disappeared by state terrorism in the ESMA neighborhood. Memory and Justice. March 24, 2013.”
As I’ve prepared this blog post I’ve reflected on the proxy war that the U.S. and the Soviet Union fought on the continents of Latin America, Africa and Asia for decades, leaving behind a legacy of torture, slaughter and other atrocities. On the part of the U.S. it was all in the name of fighting communism.
I am almost certain that most of the powerbrokers in the U.S. who sent money and weapons to the Argentine junta never read Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, regarded as the foundation of Capitalism. Marx literally believed that workers should control the means of production, that is, they should make all the decisions about how a factory, farm, etc. is run, and all the profits should be split between them. He did not believe that the state should control the means of production.
Adam Smith believed that productive labor creates wealth, and self-interest motivates people to put their resources to best use. But before he wrote Wealth of Nations, he wrote The Theory of the Moral Sentiments in which he describe a social system that would ensure justice and welfare for all. He always assumed that people had read the earlier book as a companion to the later book. When he visited India, and saw the misery that the British East India Company inflicted on workers in the textile mills, he wrote that to prohibit a people,
from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind”.
“Adam Smith and the British East India Company: A Perspective on Competitiveness.” Tax Justice Network, 30 Apr. 2015, https://taxjustice.net/2015/04/30/adam-smith-and-the-british-east-india-company-a-perspective-on-competitiveness/.
Thus, predatory Capitalism, according to Adam Smith, is not Capitalism at all.
Communism and Capitalism are simply economic systems devised by two well-meaning men who wanted people to thrive. Authoritarianism was never part of the package. Treating workers like dirt was never part of the package. Creating hundreds of new billionaires, while the middle and working classes become ever more impoverished was never part of the package.
Acts 2:44-45 says that the first Christians “held all things in common,” which essentially means they were communists. I guess Priscilla and Aquila, the tentmakers who mentored Paul in Acts 18 were tentmakers, so I guess that makes them capitalists–or communists if they shared profits with Paul equally. It doesn’t matter much.
But committing atrocities against human beings over economic ideologies does matter
Epilogue: Patricia Erb, daughter of Mennonite missionaries in Argentina was kidnapped while she was a student at the University of Buenos Aires. Her statement to the U.S. State Department, began,
I, Patricia Ann Erb, age 19, United States citizen, feel it my duty as a human being and as Christian, to communicate to national and international organizations what I saw and experienced during my abduction and imprisonment by the Armed Forces of Argentina in the military headquarters of Campo de llayo.
Al a student at the University of Buenos Aires l participated in a student organization sponsored by the University with delegates from the various classes in the University. As a sociology major I participated along with other sociology students in fieldwork in the poverty ghettos.
Statment, Patricia Erb, to U.S. State Department. National Security Archive, 31 Dec. 1976, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/6020963/National-Security-Archive-Doc-14-Patricia-Erb-s. National Security Archive.
Because she was a U.S. citizen, the Embassy obtained her release. When she returned to the States, she made it her mission to tell as many people as possible what was going on in Argentina. A friend of mine at Bluffton College heard one of her talks, and said she talked about her rape by one of the Argentine soldiers. As he was raping her, she noticed a gold cross around his neck. She told him she was a Christian, and asked him how he, a fellow Christian, could be doing this to her. He stopped. But so many more soldiers wearing crosses did not.
Flying from Montevideo to Buenos Aires to was essentially a flight over the Rio Platte River basin. It looks like an ocean from the air. ↩︎
“Popular,” in this context isn’t about trends. It means “of the people,” often used to refer to peasants or the working classes. In this case, it refers to those who struggled for the rights of all people in Argentina to live with dignity, receive fair wages, and be regarded as equals to everyone else in Argentina. ↩︎
At the Buenos Aires Airport, I noticed that the junk food had labels warning of health risks. The labels on the chocolate bar, for example, warn that it has too much sugar, fat, saturated fat, and too many calories.
Since we arrived too early to check into our apartment, a cousin of our new son-in-law, Eric, allowed us to drop our luggage at his apartment building. This pleasant yard is on the roof of his building.
As we walked around looking for a place to eat, we noticed some street art, mostly used for advertising.
Also Argentinians taking dancing lessons on the street.
The drink Michael ordered at the place we stopped for lunch had yet another warning. Because it contained artificial sweeteners, children should not drink it. I wondered why they would name a soft drink, “to be.”
We stopped at the AMIA (Argentine Israelite Mutual Association—the equivalent of Jewish Community Centers in the U.S) which had strict security outside, because of the July 18, 1994 bombing that killed 85 people and injured 300. Ansar Allah, a Palestinian front for Hezbollah, claimed responsibility for the attack However the investigation into the incident was incompetent, and driven by political interests, so today it’s not really “solved,” as such.
We had made an appointment to visit the Jewish museum ahead of time. Turns out, they are very picky about who they let in. A couple from Ithaca, NY wanted to visit but they had only copies of their passports, and that was not sufficient. Pro-tip: I have traveled to five continents and I have never found authorities in any countries who found a photocopy of a passport valid for identification.
In the first room was a permanent art installation meant to indicate a Shabbat family dinner for missing people. Originally, it had shown photos of people who had disappeared during the Dirty War, but now the photos are of Israelis Hamas is holding hostage in Gaza.
Maurycy Minkowski
A small room displayed a temporary exhibit of the works by the artist Maurycy Minkowski. Famous for painting on themes of immigration, Minkowski eventually ended up in Buenos Aires, “where,” the exhibit notes without further explanation, “he lost his life tragically.” Of course I wanted to find out what actually happened to him and found the following on Wikipedia. An illness had left him deaf as a child, but he got the education he needed to work as an artist in Europe:
In early November 1930, he went to Argentina to help prepare the first overseas exhibition of his paintings. Later that month, unable to hear the honking of an oncoming taxi, he was struck and killed. The exhibition was presented as a posthumous tribute to his work, under the aegis of the Jewish Association of Argentina. In 1931, a committee was established to raise funds for the purchase of his works.
In 1942, a great majority of his works were auctioned off. Most were purchased by the “Fundación IWO” (the Argentine branch of YIVO) and were stored at the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina. A few of the paintings were destroyed and many suffered some degree of damage in 1994, when the building was destroyed by a car-bomb, killing 85 people.
Brief summaries of significant eras for the Argentinian Jewish community.
First, massive waves of immigration took place between 1889 and 1930, for the same reasons that Jews were fleeing to the United States and other countries. The pogroms in Russia and Eastern European countries made emigration a life and death matter.
In the Decade of Infamy, marked by a 1930 coup, Great Depression, electoral fraud to keep conservative parties in power and another coup in 1943, were a time of rising antisemitism. Juan Peron, who was a colonel in the army that overthrew the government in 1943, was a sympathizer of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
Under the first Peronist government, antisemitism rose sharply, but it did in the U.S., Canada, and Europe as well. Despite Peron’s fascism, he appointed Jews to positions in the government and passed a law allowing Jewish army privates to celebrate Jewish holidays while they were serving in the military. U.S. Ambassador George Messersmith said, after a visit to Argentina in 1947, “There is not as much social discrimination against Jews here as there is right in New York or in most places at home….” Historian Raanan Rein has noted, ” “Fewer anti-Semitic incidences took place in Argentina during Perón’s rule than during any other period in the 20th century.” Frequent coup d’etats occurred in the 1950s-60s. Fragile civilian governments rose and fell. An urban guerrilla group who expressed an affinity for Nazi ideals, the Tacuara Nationalist Movemen,t opposed secular society and liberal democracy:
The MNT (“Tacuara Nationalist Movement”) maintained contacts with the police as well as with some former Nazi bureaucrats exiled in Argentina, which helped them gain easy access to weapons, an advantage which put them apart from other political organizations. They were also engaged in racketeering, demanding a “revolutionary tax” from many Jewish shops in the Once (once means ‘eleven’) neighborhood of Buenos Aires, until the shops organized themselves to confront the MNT together. At first mainly engaged in street fights with other rival students’ organizations, in particular concerning the conflict between nonreligious and religious schooling, the MNT also engaged in antisemitic acts (such as vandalism in the Jewish cemetery of La Tablada in 1959, etc.). The MNT’s antisemitism became even stronger after Adolf Eichmann‘s May 1960 kidnapping by Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, leading to a violent antisemitic campaign which lasted until 1964, when the MNT was almost completely dismantled.[20]This led the Jewish association DAIA to pressure the government into taking actions against MNT.
The peak was reached on August 17, 1960, when MNT members from Sarmiento National High School attacked Jewish pupils and injured a 15-year-old, Edgardo Trilnik, during the celebrations in honor of José de San Martín, Argentina’s national hero in the war of independence. From then on, the MNT perpetrated acts of intimidation against the Jewish community, including bombing synagogues and other Jewish institutions and defacing the buildings with antisemitic graffiti.[20] Following Eichmann’s execution in 1962, the MNT launched 30 antisemitic attacks. On June 21, 1962, they kidnapped a 19-year-old Jewish girl, Graciela Sirota, tortured her, and scarred her with Swastika signs.[20] In retaliation against this odious act, which raised public outrage, the DAIA on June 28, 1962, stopped all the activities of Jewish trade, supported by students (many high schools went on strike) and various political organizations, trade unions and intellectuals. These violent actions finally led the government to issue decree3134/63 which prohibited, in 1963, any MNT or GRN activity. However, the influence of the secret services effectively nullified this decree.
“Tacuara Nationalist Movement.” In Wikipedia, February 17, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tacuara_Nationalist_Movement&oldid=1208500018.
In 1973, Peron returned to power. He died in office, and his widow, Isabella Peron succeeded him. The army, led by Commander-in-Chief General Jorge Rafael Videla, overthrew her government in 1976. Thus began the bloodiest episode in Argentina’s modern history, which the next blog post will cover. Cabildo a Catholic Church publication peddled antisemitic tropes heavily during the dictatorship. It falsely asserted that 3 million Jews lived in Argentina when the number was a tenth of that. Even though Jews represented only 2% of Argentina’s population, they were more than 10% of those the Argentine Secret Service kidnapped and disappeared. A lot of Michael’s friends at Tel Aviv University were young people from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay who had fled the coup regimes in those countries.
The final placard talks about the democratic reopening of Argentina.
The museum’s synagogue has four marble memorials for mass casualties that Argentina’s Jewish community has suffered over the years. Two list the names of those killed and disappeared under the “Argentinian Dirty War” from 1974-1983. Another lists the name of 29 killed during the Israeli Embassy bombing in 1992, although there appear to be more than 29 names on it, and I cannot read the brass plate from the picture. The fourth records the 85 who died in the July 1994 bombing.
After our visit to the Jewish museum, we headed out to the Plaza de Mayo, the scene of some of the momentous events in Argentinian history. The Palacio Rosado (Pink Palace) houses Argentina’s seat of government. The backlit pyramid was erected to commemorate Argentina’s 1811 revolution against Spain. That square rock lists the names of the soldiers who died in the pivotal battle of Tucumán, during Argentina’s War of Independence.
Political protest has also characterized the history of the Plaza. The Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo probably deserve the biggest accolades for the length of the their protests—so long they are now the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They wore scarves made from their children’s diapers initially, which evolved into plain white scarves on which they embroidered the names of their children whom the army had disappeared. Meeting weekly at the Plaza de Mayo, they demanded that the government return their children. “You took them alive; we want them back alive,” was one of their chants. They also deserve accolades for their bravery.The military kidnapped, tortured and murdered some of the Mothers, as well as French nuns who supported them, but more mothers kept joining the group in the Plaza every week.
The black base extols heroes from Argentina’s War of Independence from Spain, but I like what someone has added at the end: “For all the dead human beings, and those who struggled to save them.” The Hebrew reads,
“Anyone who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world”
Mishnah 5:4
I was trying to figure out what all the the rocks were doing at the base of the pyramid erected to celebrate Argentina’s Independence, and then I realized that the people designated on the rocks had all died in 2020-21. Apparently, they remained from a protest regarding how the Argentinian government had handled the Covid epidemic.
At the end of the day as we took a taxi back to the apartment where we were staying, we noticed our driver had a quotation by Martin Luther King on the back of his seat: “It is always the right time to do the right thing.” It seemed an appropriate way to end the day.
