Kathleen Kern Author

The Apostle Paul, John, and the Book of Revelation agree: Donald Trump is the anti-Christ¹

(This post was previously published on my Medium account.)

As you can see, I was not the first person to make the association.

The secular media have done their share of covering conservative Christian support of Donald Trump, while centrist and progressive Christian media wring their hands over the millions of Christians who claim to follow both Jesus Christ and a lawless, adulterous, tyrannical, heartless rapist.

As a person of faith, I am struck by how few fellow believers² have discussed the possibility that Donald Trump might be Satan’s favorite spawn, the Antichrist. Admittedly, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of historical figures have received that mantle from oppressed and disgruntled people over the millennia. Their choices have included emperors, popes, Adolf Hitler, Henry Kissinger, Saddam Hussein, Barack Obama, and Barney the Dinosaur. One could make a good case for Hitler, Kissinger, and certainly a few of the Emperors and Popes.

I John 2:18 suggests that multiple Antichrists are out and about. So couldn’t their number include Donald Trump? John continues in 4:2–3

By this, you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.³

I’ve never heard Donald Trump say he believes in the Incarnation, have you?

The Apostle Paul, in 2 Thessalonians 2:9, refers to the Antichrist as “the lawless one.” What word better describes Donald Trump than “lawless”? He cheats on his taxes, refuses to pay his contractors, evades the consequences for sexually assaulting women and at least one child,⁴ and violates the Hatch Act, which stipulates that he must not use his political office for profit. Then there’s
•2 U.S. Code § 192, “Refusal of witness to testify or produce papers
•18 U.S. Code § 610, “Coercion of political activity.”
•52 U.S. Code § 30121, °“Contributions and donations by foreign nationals.

Paul also refers to the “lying wonders” of the lawless one in 2 Thessalonians 2:9. Was there ever so wondrous a liar as Trump? The Washington Post clocked him in at 30,573 lies during his first presidency, an average of about 21 per day. Note that these are just the lies he told in public, and do not count his lies before and since. Some lies have killed people. More than a million have died because of misinformation about Covid-19. The Big Lie about the 2020 election caused seven January 6-related deaths and he is currently killing representative government. I find the weird fabrications most wondrous, like his claim that windmills cause cancer or telling a crowd of Michiganders that he had received the honor of “Michigan’s Man of the Year.” He had never lived in Michigan, and no such award exists.

Paul goes on to say in 2 Thessalonians 2:10–12, that the Antichrist

practices every kind of wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion, leading them to believe what is false, so that all who have not believed the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness will be condemned.

So let’s pick that apart. Despite all the recounts, audits, and court rulings that confirm Joe Biden won the 2020 election, 70% of Republicans still believe that Trump won. They believed that Trump’s tax cuts would help the middle class. More than half believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya. They believe that Critical Race Theory, which, like all Critical Theory, is a university-level discipline, is taught to elementary school children. Their denial of human-caused climate change is killing the planet, and their denial of Covid-19’s lethality, as mentioned above, killed more than a million residents of the United States and permanently disabled others. Indeed, Psychologist John Gartner has said this denial makes Trump the “most successful bio-terrorist in human history.” (Although I suspect Indigenous people might like to have a word.) Sure seem like powerful delusions to me, although I think it’s hard-hearted of God to send them these phantasms, given what the consequences are for the rest of us.

Next, let’s examine Trump’s followers “taking pleasure in unrighteousness.” As Adam Serwer noted in his seminal 2018 Atlantic essay, “The Cruelty Is the Point,” for Trump and his followers. Trump lifted the social restrictions that made their meanness unpopular. A look at pro-Trump T-shirts illustrates this point:

Trump has repeatedly advocated and condoned violence, often at rallies in front of cheering supporters. Indeed these assemblies are textbook cases of mob incitement, with zealots applauding his vicious statements about marginalized people—including immigrants, Muslims, and victims of police violence. They chant hateful rhetoric about the people he targets, and physically attack protesters. So much unrighteousness, so much pleasure.

Now we come to the Book of Revelation, where the Antichrist, referred to as the Beast, has a starring role.

Revelations 13:1 describes a beast with seven heads, and on the heads were blasphemous names. Now, I often fall far short of the glory of God. But I sincerely love Jesus and have since I was a child. When I read the Gospels, my heart still glows. That’s why when I saw these billboards and art print,

I thought, well, it’s come to this. We’re not talking about metaphorical blasphemy anymore — such as when churches promote teachings directly contrary to those of Jesus. We’re talking about actual blasphemy.

For those of you not in the know “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” comes from the first chapter of John’s Gospel. It’s referring to Jesus (i.e., the Word was God, and God incarnated as Jesus). In other words, that billboard is super-blasphemous.

And check out this tweet thread:

“Thank you to Wayne Allyn Root for the very nice words. “President Trump is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world, not just America, he is the best President for Israel in the history of the world…and the Jewish people in Israel love him….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 21, 2019

….like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God…But American Jews don’t know him or like him. They don’t even know what they’re doing or saying anymore. It makes no sense! But that’s OK, if he keeps doing what he’s doing, he’s good for…..— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 21, 2019

Windsor Mann, in The Week, noted: “A couple of hours later, Trump referred to himself as ‘the chosen one.’ “Many people are saying this. Trump is beloved, even worshipped, by people who love Jesus and abhor Mexicans named Jesús.”

Revelation 13:3 goes on to say that one of the Beast’s heads has a mortal wound that was healed.

I ask you, how is it that a man can be impeached twice, lose an election, cheat his followers out of millions of dollars, boast about groping women, have 25 women credibly accuse him of rape, sexual assault, and harassmentand still be the most powerful man in the Republican party? What else would explain his ability to suffer no consequences other than a supernatural power granted by Satan?

And then Revelation 13:4 speaks of vast numbers worshipping the Beast (see billboards above) and saying, ‘Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?’

Or, as U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham put it, “You know what I liked about Trump? Everybody was afraid of him, including me.” (Note: If people wish to alert Senator Graham to his likely eternal damnation for choosing Team Antichrist, contact him at @LindseyGrahamSC on Twitter or via his contact form.)

13:5 The Beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, and it was allowed to exercise authority for forty-two months. 6 It opened its mouth to utter blasphemies against God, blaspheming his name and his dwelling, that is, those who dwell in heaven.

People who have worked with him in the Trump organization and on his campaign scoff at the thought of Donald Trump having any religion. He has publicly claimed that he has no need to seek God’s forgiveness. Indeed, when pastors laid hands and prayed over him, he laughed at them afterward and said they were full of shit.

As far as exercising authority for forty-two months, we know that four years in office equals 48 months, but while in office, he was on vacation, some of which he said he spent working, for 32 months. On the other hand, since Trump left office, the sniveling oblations of Republican politicians show that he still exercises a great deal of authority. I’m sure we can make it all add up.

I am not an expert on who dwells in heaven, but records show that Trump has called soldiers who were captured and killed “suckers” and “losers.” He mocked the mother of a Muslim soldier who died in Iraq and suggested at a rally in Michigan that the former representative John Dingell, whose widow succeeded him in office, was in Hell. As people across the country succumbed to the coronavirus pandemic, he made light of their deaths.

13:7 Also, it was allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer them.

Who is more saintly than parents willing to leave everything they know in their homelands to protect their children from hunger and violence? Or Indigenous people laying down their bodies to prevent yet another fossil fuel pipeline from raping the earth and water sources? Or organizers fighting for their communities to have the same access to education, healthcare, security, and environmental protections that wealthier communities do? Or those who say, “Not one more Black or Brown person made in the image of God will die in police custody without the System feeling our outrage?”

13:8 and all the inhabitants of the earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life.

I think we’ve covered this part. Of course, die-hard Trump worshippers are probably about 20–25% of the U.S. population, and most of the world despises him, but let’s allow for some poetic license.

Now a second Beast appears, also called the false prophet.

13:12 It exercises all the authority of the first Beast on its behalf and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first Beast, whose mortal wound had been healed.

The Republican Party? Trump’s Press Secretaries? How about Mike Pence, who tried to lend Trump’s vulgar, incoherent ramblings some gravitas? Or maybe post-presidency Trump talking about when he was president? Again, we’ll take some poetic license here. Medieval Christians linked it to Prophet Mohammed (PBUH). Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, has been suggested in the past and, more recently Barack Obama, because of course, it’s Obama.

13:13 It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in the sight of all;

How about those fireworks Trump authorized over Mt. Rushmore, even though the National Park Service told him the danger of a forest fire was too great? Or the Trump 2020 fireworks at the Republican National Convention?

13:14 and by the signs that it is allowed to perform on behalf of the Beast, it deceives the inhabitants of earth, telling them to make an image for the Beast that had been wounded by the sword and yet lived;

Remember this guy from the 2021 CPAC Convention?

13:16 Also, it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead,

MAGA hats, duh. (As many people on Twitter have already discerned.)

13:18 This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the Beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.

Apocalypse-watchers have associated 666 with a lot of people throughout history. “Vicarius Filii Dei,” or “Representative of the Son of God,” was a title applied to Peter, whom Catholics regard as the first pope. The numerical value of the letters add up to 666. People have also found ways to adjust the names of Muhammad, Martin Luther, Napoleon, Hitler, and Mussolini to fit the number 666. Famously “Ronald,” “Wilson,” and “Reagan” have six letters each.

Thomas Hartmann noted that Donald Trump’s grandfather’s name was Friedrich Drumpf. Trump’s father anglicized his name to Frederick Trump. So if we Germanize Donald John Trump’s middle name and surname, we come up with Donald Johann Drumpf: 666.⁵ Also, Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States, and unemployment peaked at 14.8% during his presidency: 45×14.8=666.

Other indications suggested by Thom Hartmann: MAGA means “sorcerer” in Latin and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, bought 666 5th Avenue.⁵ Among the evils related to that address: when Kushner fell into debt and couldn’t pay the mortgage on the property, he asked the government of Qatar to bail him out. Soon after, Saudi Arabia, which is bombing and starving Yemen all to Hell, imposed a blockade on Qatar because it has diplomatic relations with Iran (also, I’m guessing, because it hosts Al-Jazeera, which reports on Saudi Arabia’s human rights atrocities.) Kushner, an advisor to Trump, urged him to support the blockade. Qatar gave Kushner the loan. The State Department then told Saudi Arabia to lift the blockade.⁶

Of course, some textual arguments against assigning the role of Antichrist make sense. As I mentioned above, far from worshipping him, all but around .002-.003 of the world’s population despises him. And given his open disdain for people who choose to join the military, it’s hard to picture him leading the “kings of the earth and their armies” to fight a heavenly rider on a white horse and his angelic hosts, as described in Revelation 18:19.

However, if you read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7, you will see that Trump preaches and models its antithesis. Egotism, violence, and never, ever forgiving anyone are foundational to his theology, such as it is. Then we have Matthew 25:37–46, in which Jesus says those who attend to the physical needs of desperate people, welcome strangers, and visit people in prison bestow those same acts of mercy on him. We need only brief reminders of Trump’s contempt for people trapped in poverty and the criminal justice system, as well as his crimes against the immigrant community to call him the Anti-Jesus Christ, or Antichrist for short.

Black and white picture of tall rectangular building
From Wikimedia commons with noir filter

And Matthew 25:41 tells us in the final days, God will say to Donald J. Trump,

You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

Endnotes

¹DISCLAIMER: I have a Masters’s in Biblical Studies and believe the Book of Revelation, like the Book of Daniel, was written in coded language to provide comfort and hope to people suffering under military occupation and the egregious abuses of their human rights. (Revelation was intended for first-century Christians living under persecution by the Roman Empire, and Daniel for Jews suffering under the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes in the 2nd-century BCE.) But if Hal Lindsey, Frank Peretti, Tim LaHaye, John Hagee, and random people on the internet can speculate on the identity of the Antichrist, I think I have the authority to do so as well. Oh, and check out Revelation 21. Its pathos and beauty never fail to touch me.

²Thomas Hartmann is a notable exception. He does not claim to be a believer, but he makes a good case for the Antichristhood of Donald Trump. I am indebted to him for his research.

³Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

⁴‘All the Assault Allegations against Donald Trump, Recapped’. PBS NewsHour, 14 Oct. 2016, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/assault-allegations-donald-trump-recapped; Yuhas, Alan. ‘Woman Who Accused Donald Trump of Raping Her at 13 Drops Lawsuit’. The Guardian, 5 November 2016, sec. US news. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/04/donald-trump-teenage-rape-accusations-lawsuit-dropped.

⁵Ibid.

⁶An extreeeemely simplified description. For a better analysis, check out this article from Just Security.

Home » Kathleen Kern Author » Kathleen Kern Author
Who is the Antichrist

Donald Trump, of course!

The Martin Luther King Center and Ebenezer Baptist Church

January 27, 2027

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.” Dawn or Jose took the pictures below.

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.

Last four pictures taken by Dawn and/or Jose.

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. But 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 Presidential Palace/Museum of the Revolution and La Colmenita

January 26, 2025

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

Ornate stone palace with domed cupola. Tank parked in front.
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, and a 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.

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Cuba trip 2025

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 the plot of the movie Chinatown explained 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.

Earnest Hemingway and Fidel Castro smiling at each other

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.

Museum of Memory in Santiago

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.

Hundreds of pictures of people fastened to a wall.

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.

For better photos of arpilleras created by Chilean women see the websites, Weblog of the Education for Peace Initiative at Prajnya and Chilean Arpilleras: A chapter of history written on cloth

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 of La 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.

Reading this article caused me to reflect how time launders the crimes of powerful people. In this country, Nixon became a venerable political commentator after illegally spying on journalists, authorizing the break-in of the Democratic National Party’s headquarters, covering it up—and massively bombing Cambodia. Henry Kissinger, whom NPR called a “legendary diplomat and foreign policy scholar,” and was often treated as a bon vivant by the press, has the blood of 3 to 4 million people on his hands.

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.

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Decompressing with Tuti in Lujan de Cuyo

Photo taken from back seat of a man with gray hair in an orange checked shirt driving and a woman in a red shirt with medium length gray hair in passenger seat. In the distance you can see the lower ranges of the Andes Mountains
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.

Woman wearing blue camisole with long braids hanging down beyond the frame of the picture. She has large dark framed glasses
Women wearing large dark glasses frames and blue camisole taking photo of the back of her head in mirror

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:

Views of the farmland around Mendoza, Argentina, with the foothills of the Andes Mountains in the background

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.

5 metal straws with objects at end for mashing dried leaves in tea
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.

woman with sleeveless blue top and gray hair prepares cup of mate.
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.

  1. 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. ↩︎

First Two Days in Buenos Aires

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.

A large pink palace-type structure sits across a wide plaza.

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.

Last Day in Bogotá

Good-bye to Camila

Photo of Camila Reyes, smiling. She has long, wavy brown hair and brown eyes.
Camila Reyes, founder of Resuena

The picture I had of Camila for our final day together, didn’t really express who she was. So I took something from a webpage describing her what she does. Her current work is with Resuena, an organization “set out on a dream to expand the access to Nonviolent Communication in Colombia so that it becomes part of the day-to-day culture.”

Below is the bad picture I took of Camila at a diner for breakfast. She really wasn’t unhappy at the time. One of the aspects of Colombian cuisine that Michael really appreciated is the soups, and the fact that Colombians eat soup at breakfast and lunch. I remember with fondness Colombian pastries on previous trip. I

t struck me that this simple diner had works of original art all over the walls. I said it seemed like I saw art everywhere I went in Bogota. Camila told me its presence was especially prevalent in her bohemian neighborhood.

A love of beauty and plants also helps describe Camila’s character. She has plants in every room of her apartment except the utility room. I documented them here:

A tiled gallery of various plants in different rooms of an apartment

We decided to go to the Bogota public market and eat all the fruits we hadn’t eaten yet (and we had eaten a lot of different fruits.) The excursion turned into buying fruit that doesn’t need to be turned into juice. Of the fruits you see here, we liked the mangosteen the best (the little brown ones). Since Colombia is full of microclimates, almost anything can be grown. Camila also took us to visit her friend who organizes community-supported agriculture (and allows artists to use her space, because, well, it’s Bogotá).

What else? By the time I got to Bogotá, the bruise I got from my fall in Medellin had grown considerably worse. As it dissipated over time, I realized it had hematoma at the center, which explains why the muscle in my thigh hurt so much when I moved it. I used one of my hiking sticks as a cane for the rest of the trip.

In a moment alone with Camila shortly before we left for the airport, she was discussing her goals for the next few years. She then asked me about my goals. Without thinking, I said, “I’d like to make compassion cool again.” She asked how I planned on accomplishing that, and I said, “Well, maybe that’s what my next novel will be about. Right before we left, she handed me this pin and told me, “This is to remind you that your job now is to make compassion cool again.”

The wedding!

And Raison Det’re of Our Trip

I’d say something about these crazy kids being so in love, but that would not reflect the meticulous planning they put into this wedding for a year. They succeeded, and they’re still so in love.

The flowers were lovely.

An assortment of multicolored flowers beside chairs at wedding
Flowers beside chairs and a Jewish wedding Chuppah constructed on flowers

The friend who introduced them performed the ceremony and described their almost love at first sight meet-up in a way that made every one laugh.

What more shall I say? Should I mention that music after the wedding dinner was at a decibel level that made the furniture vibrate in the next room?  And that I lay on a vibrating couch with my head turned away from the banquet hall  because the flashing lights would. have triggered a migraine?

Nah.

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