Havana’s Jewish and Afro-Cuban communities Hotel Nacional, and Danielle’s performance

January 28, 2025

*Danielle Ponde*r
Yeah, we knew her from back when

El Patronato—Havana’s Jewish Community Center

The next day, we visited El Patronato, Havana’s Jewish Community Center and one of the three Havana synagogues. In the library were an embossed portrait and a bust honoring Max Stone, both of which I thought were Jose Martí. I have included a bust of Jose Marti from the foyer of the center, which is one is which?* Max Stone helped found the the Patronato.

Stone was instrumental in helping Jews from Europe immigrate in the 1930s and 40s. Below is a summary of minutes taken by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in the 1930s. Note that Stone reported on the Cuba’s denial of entry to passengers on the S.S. St. Louis, who were fleeing Nazi Germany. Canada and the U.S. also refused to give the passengers asylum and the ship ultimately had to return to Europe.

Minutes, 1939:3/28/1939, 4/25/1939, 5/16/1939, 6/5/1939, 6/20/1939, 7/25/1939, 8/15/1939, 9/19/1939, 10/19/1939, 11/21/1939, 12/26/1939, 1/23/1940, 2/20/1940Included are: Appointment of committee to ascertain the possibilities of obtaining from the federal authorities diplomatic immunity for HIAS representatives to be stationed in Germany. Discussion of fate of 104 refugees on S.S. Flandre denied entry into Mexico. Commitment to continue transport funds for immigrants to Central and South America. Report by Dr. Max Stone, President of the Centro Israelita de Cuba regarding passengers on the S.S. St. Louis. Report on refugees in Shanghai. Text of cables regarding transport of refugees to the United States. Report on trip to Washington regarding missing person searches in Poland. Report on committee meeting to discuss HIAS participation in 1940 United Jewish Appeal. Appointment of Israel Bernstein as HIAS representative in Lithuania. Report on opening Miami office. Appointment of Milton Goldsmith, director of the Joint Relief Committee in Havana, as HIAS-ICA representative in South America. Report on meeting with Alexander Qumansky, Soviet ambassador to the United States. Minutes of the board of directors, January 21, 1936 – September 25, 1944, Reel: MKM 25.2, Folder: 9. HIAS Board of Directors and Steering Committees, RG 245.1. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Hella, the vice-president of the Jewish Community showed us around, and the President, David, also stopped by to talk to us. The community celebrated its 100th year anniversary in 2006. On the wall of the Center’s large, all-purpose room, were pictures of the hostages that Hamas kidnapped on October 7. There were also photos of their youth who had competed in Israel’s Maccabiah Games and who had worked on humanitarian projects with Proyecto Kesher.

We exempted ourselves from State Department’s travel ban by giving medical supplies to Hella. She was especially happy to see the thousand dollars worth of colostomy bags we brought from a generous Rochester donor, because some members of their congregation use them. Tourists? Not us!

In the foyer, we saw a framed display of multiple snapshots of famous people who had met with people from Havana’s Jewish community, including the Pope and Fidel Castro. But they obviously did not compare to the visit that Stephen Spielberg made to the Center.

I wasn’t sure why they had old newspaper ads framed on the walls of the foyer, but when I look at them closely now, I see they must have been businesses that members of Havana’s Jewish community had owned.

This picture wasn’t the right size to fit in the image gallery of the Jewish Community Center above. This stone was also in the foyer.

The sign says,

This is one of the stones of Clodno Street in the then Warsaw Ghetto. One of them remains in the Synagogue of the Hebrew Community of Cuba, and the other is in the Santa Clara Cemetery. Both pieces serve as a historical reminder of the time and place where the terrible events of the Holocaust occurred. This is a donation from the “Holocaust Memorial Museum” Washington DC.

In this way we share the commitment to education and remembrance of the Shoah.

After the Center we went over to the Beth Shalom synagogue, which belongs to the Conservative Jewish denomination tradition, and Hella answered more questions.

After leaving the synagogue, we went to Dawn and Jose’s rented B&B apartment to celebrate Jose’s birthday with cake. The U.S. Embassy lay directly across from their balcony. None of us reported Havana Syndrome at the end of the day. On the way to the Hotel Nacional we passed the Office of the Jose Martì Tribuna AntiImperialista Plaza (Pictures of the Plaza to come later.)

One sign of the Kingdom of God unveiling itself on earth will be when countries that colonized Africa, the Americas, and Asia also have anti-Imperialism monuments and plazas.

Hotel Nacional

The National Hotel wants you to know about ALL the famous people who have stayed there, including sports figures, celebrities, actors, musicians and and presidents. I didn’t see a real pattern to the notable persons, unless it was by date. For example, Paris Hilton is on the same framed display as Andrew Cuomo and the Prime Minister of Jamaica.

The room of photos was so crowded the establishment even hung some of the framed ensembles from the ceiling. I have outlined Pete Seeger in a yellow circle, because he was the only one I really cared about.

In the foyer of the hotel, they had a display of employees who had lived to the age of 100 or more, which I thought was cool. They also had a display of the rooms in which notable people had stayed. The establishment had decorated the outdoor area for Chinese New Year.

View of the Hotel from the outside and the classic cars parked across the street.

The graffiti we saw in Havana wasn’t quite as orchestrated as the street art we saw in Bogota, but these examples were still impressive.

Havana’s AfroCuban Neighborhood

After the hotel, we headed over to Calle Ejon de Hamel, the center of AfroCuban culture in Havana. On the way, we met an AfroCuban couple, who I’d say might have been in their 60s or 70s. It was hard to tell. Let’s just say they were a vigorous pair. When we told them we were heading to the AfroCuban neighborhood, they said they lived nearby and offered to show us around. This warmth and hospitality I should say, is not uncommon in Cuba.

It turns out that they run a little center for AfroCuban culture in the neighborhood. As we walked toward it, they pointed out what the art on the walls of the neighborhood—and ALL the walls were covered with art and poetry—signified.

The neighborhood demonstrates how much Cuba values the arts. Much of the visual art had to do with AfroCuban religions, the primary one being Santería, but Palo Monte, and Abakuá are also Cuban religions rooted in West African traditions and syncretized with Catholicism. I could have sworn I had a picture of Judy sitting in a chair specifically intended for menopausal women—there’s a god for that—but I can’t find it.-

One new thing I can do with this upgraded operating system is copy text in a photo, and then paste them into another application. You have to do some cleanup in the paste, but it’s useful. Here’s the first example of poetry on the wall of the AfroCuban neighborhood. An actual Spanish translator who understands poetry, of course, would do a better job

I want to mutilate you, black shade of the unknown,
I want to laugh in your claws of intense blue, of distant sea.
I want to sit in your shadow and continue onward,
I want to describe you in spaces so that you may be known.
You are the inert pace of distant time,
You are the light and song that calls more, but I cannot describe you.
Like my hand, you escape like water between small stones.
What is your enigma at the far front?
What is your back that smiles inertly?
I know you return every night.[…] morning

After I’m dead I neither want an apology
nor gifts.
I come from a
hidden reality to
an open reality
so that you know me

Anonymous

The top two ruminations by Salvador say,

“All that sell love
are as miserable as
They who buy it.”

Salvador

“The fish doesn’t know
that water exists.”

Salvador

I actually was able to translate those myself! Here’s an AI translation the anonymous poet below Salvadors:

It is not my street
It is not anyone’s street
It is our street
Compelling Spirit of a single mystery that emitted colors one morning to conquer
With its old man it wins the battle
At the door of your mantle
I wrote your name
As distant as history
Distant land, stone, fire, and water here is the gift so that you
Learn
Because profane is the one who
Hides the true word

Finally, I was haggling with this boy on the left about how much it would cost me for him to move away from the wall, when an older gentleman ordered him to get lost. The wall appears to be a tribute to the art in the neighborhood, and in particular, the artist Salvador. I realized that the problem with my comprehension toward the end wasn’t the fault of the AI translator. The author was using academic art jargon. I have linked some of the jargon-y words to definitions.

Don Fernando Ortiz
To the neighborhood of Cayo Hueso
To the people of Cuba
In this alley of Centro Habana named Hamel, on April 21, 1990, the first mural was born in the public street dedicated to Afro-Cuban culture.
Iremes, Orishas, legends of black gods in the great thicket of the jungle and the woods to say: Today I have my first public temple for everyone, where the branch covered the bare body to ward off the evil that suffers, the evil that ends. To fill with colors those mute and bare walls that waited so long, and with my time, which is mine, just as from yours you are the owner,
To give through the sentiment of being to be a trace of the known without fragments of words. Songs of my drums, songs of my white garments.
Without being a sentence, I am word by word.
I am the one who painted walls and sent messages at dawn.
Forgive me critics and intellectuals, I speak my word.
I seat the beggar in the chair, I embrace the frank smile.
I enjoy the juice of my blood, which is African blood,
but I also breathe deeply to fill my life and soul
with a Spanish smile that bore mixed-race blood.
Spirits of the day and the consecrated night, may all be present
to send messages at dawn.
The coward flees from the truth because the lie is like him.

The work of Salvador González Escalona exposes the purist equation of a context that now, as a solitary fact, as a historical definition presented as an artistic assistant of a nation of our cultural reality, and as such, becomes a source of knowledge and expression of the social being. It is in this concept that his artistic work makes tangible demystifying aspects of an analogy and increases the gnoseological value. It’s worth noting that, as art, it also refers us to a form of knowledge that challenges to stretch its own boundaries in time.

Salvador’s art shows us not only all the techniques and styles of the old art of the Islanders, clear santero houses where the most elaborate and beautiful ceremonial pieces are crafted. Salvador, with intelligent function, has refined these techniques and created, on a protean platform, his own style.
*Miguel Barnet
The Afrocuban Spirit as It Is Called,” Miguel Barnet

Despite knowing other painters and visual artists in general who have ventured into this field, Salvador has not been influenced by the superficial and deceptive snobbery or by the aesthetic intellectualism of the West in approaching these topics from the outside. Or “from above,” that is, from the analogical picturesque view that might exist between Haitian voodoo and the rituals that occur in Cuba, treated from a European capital or from the morphological aspect of Dahomeyan cloth or the pictorial decoration of the Yoruba widely publicized through art books, to extrapolate to Cuba for the simple fact of being “African” and thus being in international fashion.
Jesús Guanche 1986**

Although certain corners of Havana’s neighborhoods were heaped high with rotting piles of trash, if someone painted, “No Trash” or “Don’t throw trash” on a wall, Habaneros obey the order scrupulously. I was so intent on getting the trash warning, I didn’t notice that the gang graffitied next to it were holding band instruments until I prepared to upload the photo.

In the evening, we finally reached our Apex Event—Danielle singing at the Havana Jazz Festival. I’ve never seen her give a bad performance, and that night continued the streak. She got a ticket for our cook/cultural advisor Dayamí, and we had some time to sit in a place outside the concert hall that served drinks and snacks. I had a reasonably good 5 minute video of Danielle singing, “Poor Man’s Pain,” which followed two bad attempts of me learning the video feature on my phone. Turns out, WordPress can’t handle a 5 minute video. Anyway, here’s a video of Danielle singing “Poor Man’s Pain,” at NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert.

While we were in the room where Danielle was singing, Dawn thought she saw Camila and motioned her over. Turns out it was a Turkish diplomat who wanted an introduction to Danielle, and they talked about Danielle coming to Turkey.

A pianist from Azerbaijan performed immediately after Danielle in the same room. A few peoplein our group decided to stay.

In the evening we went to a famous restaurant in Havana: San Cristobal Paladar. The Obamas ate here when they visited Cuba. The manager had a lot of their photos prominently displayed. Although we had made reservations, the manager made us stand for a long time while an empty table fitting the size of our party was clearly available. Then the wait for our food (at that very table} was also long. Truthfully, we were not all that impressed. The piña coladas were meh. I ordered fried lobster, an appetizer, for my entree, but they brought it out early anyway. However, it was delicious. Imagine eating a a basket of fried clams, but it’s lobster. Caribbean spiny lobsters are a lot smaller than Northern lobsters, but also cheaper.

After a long day, we went home to sleep

*The one in the middle is Marti, who sits in the foyer of El Patronato.

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.

Two days in Uruguay

*L. Sandra, M. Gabi, Sandra’s niece visiting from Spain, R. Michael*

Michael met Sandra at his kibbutz, Kerem Shalom, in the 1980s. A dedicated socialist and an exile from the Uruguayan dictatorship she wanted to experience the socialism as practiced by the kibbutz movement in Israel. She later returned to Uruguay for various reasons and abhors the current state of Israeli politics.

Our first day after landing, Sandra took us out to a restaurant built over a tunnel that Tupamaro guerrillas had dug to free political prisoners held in the Punto Carretas Prison.

Note that I still have my hair-do from the wedding. Summer was heading into fall in Uruguay, and the weather was warm and humid. However, Uruguayos do not seem to consume the amount of liquids that the weather required. I had not drunk half that glass of passion fruit lemonade. That’s the amount the waitress served us.

We then walked to the prison which has become…a shopping mall, complete with McDonalds and Starbucks. Yes, it is disgusting. Sandra, who worked at a municipal office nearby, said that for a long time she avoided walking over to Punto Carretas to make photocopies. Dissidents trying to reclaim the long history of democracy in Uruguay had spent years of their lives here, suffering torture and humiliation, all so young Urugayos¹ could enjoy their Big Macs and Mochaccinos there one day.

What remains to indicate that Punto Carretas was once a prison are the tiny windows common to most prisons, and a couple explanatory placards. I’ve added a picture of a cell at a federal prison in Oregon for comparison. The memorial for the prisoners and their families did not go up until 2018. On the back, the text says that the these placards are dedicated to the families of the prisoners because of what they endured over the years when their loved ones were in prison, and lists the ex-prisoners responsible for erecting this modest memorial.

Afterwards, Sandra took us up to the top of City Hall, 20 stories tall, where visitors may see a panorama of Montevideo. Of course, I was also interested in the plants. The attraction featured a little café, where we bought drinks, and Sandra bought us each a bonbon.

Across Latin America, Salvador Allende is regarded as a martyr of the Cold War. The people of Chile elected him in a free and fair election, but because he was a socialist, Henry Kissinger famously said, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” The U.S. thus supported a military coup against Allende. Tens of thousands of Chileans were imprisoned, tortured and disappeared² over the next 17 years and the economy, which had improved the lives of ordinary Chileans under Allende, immediately tanked, with inflation spiraling to 376 percent.

Isabel Allende asked Sandra to be the representative of the Allende family in Uruguay. The Salvador Allende Society in Montevideo, of which she is a member, installed this small plaza in his honor. (Dusk had set in, so I apologize for the dimness of the photos.) The quotation on the plaque comes from Allende’s final radio address, which he broadcast as the Chilean airforce was bombing the presidential palace on September 11, 1973.

[Much] sooner rather than later, the great boulevards will once again open up and free men will walk down them to build a better society.
We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán. Temple University Press, 2016. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/book.64137.

Apparently, Allende was a Freemason. Michael had attended a Freemason convention in Rochester as a translator for a Nicaraguan relative who was also a Freemason and heard them expressing reactionary conservative political views, but evidently Freemasons can also be socialists. George Washington, Simón Bolivar, Thurgood Marshall, Richard Pryor, John Glenn, and Salvador Allende. Who knew?

The next day, before we went to the Museum of Memory, Sandra told us of her (underground) work to bring the children of Uruguayan exiles from Europe in 1983 to visit their parents in prison, or simply to know their family still in Chile. The mass group of 154 children—aged 3 and 17 years old—traveled alone to Montevideo. They arrived to cheering crowds chanting, “Tus padres volverán!” (Your parents will return), which became the title of a 2015 documentary film about the event. The filmmakers interviewed six adults about the impact the trip had had on them. In several cases, it was not positive. One boy considered his Dutch stepfather his real father, because he had been just a toddler when he left, and his Chilean father’s desperate overtures to assert his fatherhood were painful to him as an adult. For another boy, prison had turned his father into an angry, abusive person, and he wanted nothing to do with him or Uruguay. He eventually moved back to Denmark and raised his family there.

Watching the film with Sandra added a lot to the experience, because she supplemented the narrative with background.. She also kept pointing out a little boy she was in charge of while he was in the country. The visit of the children was a factor in the fall of the dictatorship in 1985, Sandra said, because the junta and the rest of the country saw how much popular support there was for prisoners and those in exile. When the children returned to Europe, she went with them, because she guessed the junta knew about her involvement in the event and she would be safer there.

We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon at the Museum of Memory, which the founders laid out as a park, complete with playground. The banners in the front are protesting lack of municipal support for museum workers.

When you enter, the first room tells you about the first days of coup in 1973, the people killed, and the protests against it. A pro-junta newspaper, Macha, put out and edition with the headline, “IT IS NOT A DICTATORSHIP.” Pro tip: if you have to tell people it’s not a dictatorship, it’s a dictatorship. Also note the Social Credo put out by the Uruguayan Methodist church, which denounced political repression, among other things. They were extremely brave to do so.

If you enlarge the photo with the QR code and scan it, you will find the story of Susana Pintos, one of the students killed by state repression between 1968 and 1985.

As is the case with all authoritarian governments—Communist, Fascist or Monarchical—artists who dissent from the official narrative at best find their work banned and at worst end up dead. If you want to see some of the musicians whom the Uruguayan ruling junta banned, scan the QR code. On the Jose Carbajal album, he recorded songs by musicians whom the government had disappeared.

On April 21, 1974 Uruguayan Armed Forces and police shot several rounds of ammunition into the house where Diana Maidanik (21), Silvia Reyes (21 and 6 months pregnant), and Laura Raggio (19) were sleeping, killing all three. The counterinsurgent military–police Joint Forces said they were looking for Reyes’s husband and falsely claimed that the women had died in a confrontation. Uruguayans refer to the incident as the “muchachas de abril,” or “girls of April.”

Other rooms of the museum displayed various items from prison. The small handwritten item propped on the rusty tin is A History of the Vietnamese Communist Party, written out on cigarette rolling papers. The letter is addressed to a woman named Amanda who was in charge of the children who visited their parents in prison, which was often a frightening experience for them (Amanda did not seem to make it better.)

Prisoners often spent time making little gifts for their families at home, with whatever materials they had available. However, the pink and blue handkerchief was sent from Switzerland to a prisoner, and the prison authorities refused it. Years later, it found its way to her, however due to the diligence of a Swiss postmaster.

An estimated 500,000 Uruguayans fled the country during the 17 years of dictatorship. In their exile, they helped to build international solidarity for imprisoned Uruguayans and those who had disappeared. Swedish activists, in particular, noticed that the plight of those living under the Argentinean and Chilean dictatorships received more attention, and decided to take up the cause of Uruguayans.

Here’s a display on the children who went into exile and the visit that Sandra helped organize for children in Europe to visit Chile.

Most of those killed in Uruguay by the government or its proxies were never found, and Uruguayans today still hold protests, demanding information on what happened to them. (The military government granted itself amnesty before turning over the government to democratic elections in 1985. Some of the highest profile military officers eventually faced trial, but the people below them who carried out their orders died not.) These processions happen in complete silence, with participants holding photographs of the missing people as they walk. The poster below records the 2022 “March of Silence.”

When we were visiting, the museum’s Board of Directors was meeting. Sandra said they were all involved with the struggle some way. Perhaps some fought with the Tupamaro guerrillas (who eventually became a political party), or spent time in prison, or became exiles, or were family members of disappeared people. In any case, they were delighted we were visiting and plied us with delicious cheesy snacks.

The pots and pans represent a traditional form of protest in which everyone comes out of their homes for a few minutes and beats on pans as loud as they can to show their displeasure with the government.

According to Wikipedia,

During the dictatorship, more than 5000 people were arrested for political reasons and almost 10% of Uruguayans emigrated from the country. Torture extended until the end of Uruguayan dictatorship in 1985. Uruguay had the highest number per capita of political prisoners in the world. Almost 20% of population were arrested for shorter or longer periods. MLN (Tupamaro) heads were isolated in prisons and subjected to repeated acts of torture.
Around 180 Uruguayans are known to have been killed during the 12-year military rule from 1973 to 1985. Most were killed in Argentina and other neighbouring countries, with only 36 of them having been killed in Uruguay. Many of those killed were never found, and the missing people have been referred to as the “disappeared”, or “desaparecidos” in Spanish

Michael and I would go on to see Museums of Memory in Argentina and Chile. They looked more professional, developed by designers and architects, but at the museum in Montevideo, you could feel the beating hearts of the people behind it. In 1973, the entire population of Uruguay was about 3 million, and half lived in Montevideo. That’s a bit less than the population of Chicago. And I can kind of see the people of Chicago putting together a museum like this, when they knew their resources would be limited.

After the museum, we went to the market to eat at a seafood restaurant, where I had eel for the first time. (Meh.) On the way, we passed this building, and I realized we had arrived during Carnival.

On the way back to Sandra’s, I took pictures of graffiti, because that’s a thing now for me. The signs read, “What is your escape action? and “Philosophy is so dangerous.”

Almost forgot, the national dish of Uruguay is the chivito, a sandwich with ham, bacon, cheese, beef, hardboiled egg, and tomato with variations. “Heart attack in a bun” translates into Spanish as “Ataque al corazón en un bollo.”

When we arrived several days later in Mendoza, Argentina, our friend there told us “Uruguayans are just so”—she then hugged herself and rocked back and forth. We agreed. They’re very nice, and Montevideo is a very pleasant place to visit.

In Uruguay and Argentina, the consonant “y” sound is pronounced “sh”, so, “Uruguashos.”

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In Spanish, when they speak of the authorities “disappearing” someone, it means that they have kidnapped, probably tortured and almost always killed that person. ↩︎

Back to Bogotá

And a graffiti tour

Clothed animals that look like a cross between mice and rabbits flee from pink lightning

Our guide Camilo told us this artist is famous for painting animals in apocalyptic situations

Returning to Camila’s place gave me a chance to rest my knee—which I did the day after a graffiti tour of Bogota with a young man from a tour company run by Camila’s friend. His name was Camilo, and he had been an art student at one of the more than 100 universities in Bogota. He went all the way back to graffiti as a movement in the 1960s, to Cornbread, a young man who began ,spray-painting, “ I am Cornbread“ on walls all over New York City to impress a girl. People began to ask, “Who is this Cornbread guy?“ However, when the girl rejected him, Cornbread wrote on a wall, “Cornbread has retired.” The graffiti movement started in New York and then Philadelphia, and soon began spreading. Bogotá is now the global center of street art, with 500 km of painted walls.

Tagging is the most basic form of graffiti, in which individuals or “crews” paint their logos on walls. The higher up on a wall, the more street cred you have. Camilo says he has seen them as high as three stories. The artist that painted the two homeless kids kissing (whom he had seen on the streets) incorporated tags from all over the city into their pants. The painting is called The Invisibles, which, Camilo said, is appropriate, because graffiti is a way that invisible people use to make themselves feel visible.

Tags evolved into “bombs,” huge, balloon-like letters. When Camilo began his career as a street artist, he used stencils, and only then began to appreciate how much skill it took to spray paint these bombs freehand.

Felipe Diego Becerra used Félix the cat as his logo. One night in 2011, as he was painting a wall, the police shot him in the back. At the hospital, the doctor asked his parents why the the police had shot him. When they told him the reason, he asked them to quickly come into Diego’s room and take a photo of his hands covered in blue paint. The police accused him of pulling a gun on them. Graffiti artists all over the city went on a 24-hour graffiti-thon, in protest, many of them painting pictures of Felix the Cat.

The Diego Becerra story continues oddly, two years later when Justin Bieber came to town for a concert. Noticing the art on the walls, he asked if he could try his hand at it—with a police escort.

Sergio Elmir writes about the event on HuffPost:

….Justin Bieber performed his first ever concert in Bogota on October 29, the following night he decided to hit the streets and show Colombia his skills with a spray can. But instead of stopping him, ticketing him, even hassling him, local police gave him a personal escort.

For several hours he painted about 40 meters of wall on 26th street in Bogota with his entourage and security in town — local police were on hand, again, not to stop him but to make sure no one bothered him while he “tagged” the wall.

Traffic was redirected and Bieber was allowed to “paint” several crudely drawn cartoons, phrases and his own signature at his own leisure. At one point, Bieber looks to be ordering his police escort to remove the news cameras that were shooting footage of his foray into street art. If this wasn’t bratty enough, he even shows his support for fellow-pop-brat with misplaced machismo, Chris Brown, by painting the words “Free Breezy” on the wall.

The only thing that sets these two young men apart, aside from questionable talent, is fame. The same people who killed Becerra are protecting Bieber yet both kids were doing the exact same thing.

When artists like Banksy are blurring the line between fame and infamy in the street art world and forcing us to ask these questions — someone like Bieber takes an already controversial art form that has spent years building credibility to misfit-status.
It goes from high-art to simple vandalism for the sake of street-cred. Nothing Bieber was doing that night, on that wall, in Colombia was for the sake of art or in the true spirit of graffiti. It was just as contrived a move as his attempts at rapping. It’s an effort to be rebellious without any risk — and to have the police there, as your backup, is as soft as it gets.

Without even getting into the quality of the art that Bieber threw up on that wall, the real concern is his coopting of graffiti for his own personal gain. Was this his way of showing the world how “street” Bieber is? And was the open police escort their way of trying to make amends with the already marginalized graffiti community in Colombian?
The same group of people that for years views the police as the enemy? Hard to say.
Instead of the police, Bieber could’ve easily tapped any one of the many local, talented graffiti crews in Bogota to take him out — and I’m sure they would’ve gladly taken him on a tour of all the amazing street art in Colombia. But instead, police cars, flashing lights and security guards — a whole show was put on so that Bieber could clown around with a spray can. Maybe his swag coach felt this was cooler?

When most graffiti artists around the world work in stealth, worried about the police showing up while they’re painting, Bieber seemed more concerned with locals showing up while he was throwing up his pieces.

In fact, by the next day, local graffiti activists Mochila Ambulante did show up, with spray cans in hand, to cover up Bieber’s “graffiti.” They had no police escort and wore bandanas over their faces to cover up their identities. And while their work won’t make international headlines or cause outrage, perhaps Bieber got what he was looking for after all — attention.

The public protests that followed Bieber’s visit compelled the Municipal government of Bogotá to decriminalize all graffiti and street art. Three of the art departments in Bogotá’s 100+ universities teach street art. The community of street artists has established a consensus that everything that goes up on a wall is graffiti, so that some will not be more privileged than the others.

Some businesses ask street artists to paint their walls, and sometimes Bogotá chooses particular walls to become art exhibitions, asking artists to express themselves on them.

A Belgian artist came to Bogotá and added little men dressed in typical workers’ uniforms to some of the art.

Political graffiti also abounds in Bogota. One of my clear memories of the 1982 course I took through Bluffton College here in 1982 was seeing all the graffiti by M-19, a militant group opposed to the government that eventually became a political party. The current president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, was affiliated with M-19.

The words on the black and white mural say, “I did not choose war, but I was born a warrior.” The wall of people’s faces refers to the scandal of the “false positives,” in which the Colombian army murdered ordinary people, dressed them up in guerrilla uniforms, and claimed they were guerrillas in order to receive a bounty. The wall of army officers standing in a row reads, “Who gave the order?” (to kill the civilians.). And of course Palestine is on everyone’s mind, and would appear on the walls of all the cities we would visit.

Of course we wanted to see Camilo’s street art! The picture on the left was commissioned by a bank. It was meant to be two women weaving, but it kept raining and turning the threads into a rainbow of water. Finally the bank said they like the way it looked. (By the way, I kept that wedding hair-do for more than a week.)

Camilo and his team of artists receive a commission from Bogota’s emerald traders to paint the above. Pablo Escobar and other drug lords had laundered their drug money through emerald traders, who didn’t really have the ability to refuse if they wanted to keep their families safe. As a consequence, the traders developed a reputation for being a part of the criminal class.

When Camilo’s team asked what they wanted on the wall, they assumed the traders would want something that showed their status as normal part of Colombian society. But what they wanted was the Indigenous legend of how emeralds came to be.

In the land of what is now called the Magdalena River (where Community Peacemaker Teams works, incidentally) the Muzo creator God, Are, swept over the area creating the mountains and valleys. On the shores of the sacred river, now called Minero, he formed two figures—one male (Tena) and one female (Fura)—and threw them into the river. There, they were brought to life. Once alive, Are taught Fura and Tena how to take care of the gardens that He had planted and make pottery. He gave them rules to follow including the requirement of fidelity in their husband and wife relationship. Are taught them that violating the laws he had established would lead to aging and eventual death. For a long time, Fura and Tena enjoyed their ageless lives in the beautiful land Are had prepared for them.

Then, one day, a young man appeared. His name was Zarbi. Zarbi was looking for a flower that could cure any illness and had crossed mountains and rivers, looking high and low for the flower without success. So, he asked Fura for help, and being a compassionate soul, she began to follow him throughout the forests looking for the flower. Soon Fura became aware of her attraction to Zarbi. She was unfaithful to Tena with Zarbi and as a result immediately began to age.

Realizing her error, she returned to Tena, who upon seeing her in her aged state realized that she had broken the law that Are had given them and would soon die. Not wanting to be left alone, Tena laid down on Fura’s knees and stabbed himself in the heart. For three days, Fura cried with the body of her husband on her lap, and her tears changed into emeralds.

Soon, Are returned to visit Fura and Tena and realized they had broken his laws. He changed the couple into large rocks. Angered, he also banished Zarbi, who in his own anger changed into a raging river in order to eternally separate Fura’s rock from Tena’s rock.

Furatena Strait on the Minero River

So sad. And given the horrors that drug cartels wreaked on Colombia, maybe that’s why the emerald traders chose this story.

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