We All Need To Breathe

[Note: I translated this statement by the Cuban actress Iris Ruiz on the death of George Floyd, the subsequent protests and what they mean to Cuba's democratic movement. Any mistakes in the text are mine, not hers. The San Isidro Movement was formed in 2018 to defend the rights of Cubans to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and, in addition to Ruiz, includes such cultural actors as the poet Amaury Pacheco, the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara and the gallerist Yanelys Nuñez Leyva, among others. Please read and share as you see fit. MD]   

We All Need To Breathe  

By Iris Ruiz

If I have learned anything in recent years from the experience of the civic struggle in Cuba within the San Isidro Movement, it is intersectionality. There are multiple and non-homogeneous motivations behind the slogan "Down with communism!" If you live in Cuba and are oppressed by the communist regime but you are white, it is one thing. If you are black, it is another. If you are not from Havana, another, and if you are a woman or gay, or if you come from marginal, impoverished neighborhoods, another still. If your family had possessions and they took them away, or if they were illiterate and learned to read and write with the "revolution.” If your parents ate the harvest for pleasure, if you stayed on the work trip, you married the Russian, the Italian. If they threw eggs at you when you left, if you arrived on a raft or had to cross jungles and deserts with smugglers. If they send you a remittance or you live off your salary. If you repatriated. And so on. Layer upon layer of oppression and accumulation of fears, pains and hatreds. 

Thus, the perspective that we are shaping for a new Cuba is different depending on the glass through which  we look at it or what one would say in good theater: The mask we put on to look our own reflection. 

“I can't breathe!” George Floyd cried as he was dying and, unlike the years when the bagasse curtain did not allow Cubans who were inside the island to access information from other countries, or participate in the world, or even comment, today we can. Thanks to Cubans who fought and died for internet access and thanks to those who still fight against laws and decrees like Decree 370 inside and outside the country, today we can and we are going to use our voices and our bodies for good, because they are profits from our struggle.  

Dialogue, debate, discussion, tiradera or catharsis are exercises inherent in the opening of a body that has been hardened and almost putrefied, pestilential and immobile for 61 years. A dead civility, a corpse that we now dissect, at the same time that we cry and we want to say everything that we couldn’t and above all that we love, because the death of those whom we love so much hurts us for more defects that it has and for how diverse we are . While it is true that our societies are structurally and culturally racist and oppressive, it is also true that we have traditionally built structures and cultures of struggle for freedom, whether it be peaceful, non-violent resistance or through rebellion and war. 

Although we have gained some of those freedoms, we still have many to gain. We should not be stuck in our comfort zones. Although the evil that moves us is communism, we have also become citizens of the world and our civic responsibilities are broader now.  

The cry of George Floyd was not for us to see the black, the Indian, the Chinese or the white, the Cubans or the Americans, the communists or capitalists that we are and that we have been, that we should already know. Our human history has given us more than enough evidence of these differences and what it has left as the consequences. If we continue to be deaf to those words and, believing that we are right, we cover our mouths or those of others and arrogantly stifle their opportunities and rights and opinions, we are not positioning our ideologies, we are killing our humanity. That is the crime. Absolutely all of us must breathe and if we cannot, we are dead. 

- Iris Ruiz

[Note: Bagasse is the pulpy residue left after the extraction of juice from sugar cane. Decree 370 is a draconian new law aimed at curtailing freedom of expression over the internet.] 

Moment of Truth

Moment of Truth

Text of Michael Deibert's address at Millersville University Literary Festival

2 November 2018

Good evening to all of you and thank you for coming. Thank you also to Millersville University and the Writing Center for inviting me to speak. As Bill mentioned I grew up in Lancaster and have spent much of my career as a journalist and author traveling the world and working in different countries, and that’s one of the ways I know it is particularly auspicious that I have been invited to give a talk on November 2nd which, in Haiti, is Gede, which celebrates the lwa or spirits of death and fertility, and in Mexico and in many places in Central American Dia de los Muertos, which marks los que se fueron, or those who have departed.

It’s interesting for a guy who grew up as a lower middle-class kid here in Lancaster to see what changes have taken place since I was young. The city seems to have really blossomed into a very vibrant, multicultural politically active place over the years and, of course, thanks to the advancements in communications, people really have the world at their fingertips if they choose to avail themselves of it these days.

Having been to something like 60 countries or thereabouts now, one of the messages I try to communicate to people here in the United States is that, despite the current political discourse of the day, you don’t have to be afraid of people who don’t look like you, speak like you, follow your religion or dress like you. There are predators in every country & every culture, but in general in my travels I’ve found people to be more or less ok.

There is something you should be frightened of, and I would like to talk to you about it tonight.

Americans are cocooned and cushioned by the reality many (though not Native Americans or African–Americans, to name but two groups) have shared since the country’s founding, decades of stable institutions and, in the national main, political fair play. They cannot imagine how quickly, and how violently, things can change.

I can.

In my 20 years as a journalist reporting on international affairs, I have come across the template we see being used in the United States before, employed by those whose political behavior is marked by, as Robert Paxton said in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism

(An) obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

In Côte d’Ivoire I saw how Laurent Gbagbo’s promoting his ethno supremacist cult of Ivorité took one of Africa’s richest countries and toppled it over into civil war. In Haiti, I saw how Jean Bertrand Aristide took the rancour of the masses and stoked it into an attempt to create a kind of garish fiefdom modeled on those of Uganda’s Idi Amin and the Central African Republic’s Jean-Bédel Bokassa. In Guatemala, I watched former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who oversaw the country’s worst period of genocidal bloodletting, form a political party, the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG), whose entire motor ran on anti–elite rage and was eventually revealed to be more criminal enterprise than political vessel.

As I come from the exact strata of American society – the white, blue collar, Rust Belt working class – among whom the current president’s message has the most resonance - and have seen its like up close before, I feel a special duty to speak out.

People with a strong work ethic feel all their hard work has been spat upon and shunted aside by years of free trade deals championed by both parties and a tax system that lavishes breaks on the wealthy and penalizes those of more modest means (championed, ironically, by the very same party to which they now claim allegiance). There is real pain and real despair there. But there is also a whining self pity that often can’t see anyone’s struggle as worthy as their own and a nearly millenarian sense of grievance that sees politics not as the art of the possible but as an apocalyptic struggle between a largely white industrial world that has gone and will never return against a confusing kaleidoscope of liberal urban elites, the country’s burgeoning non–white population, immigrants, alternative sexual orientations and other shocks to their system. If Trump voters often sound as if they think the world is about to end, it’s because the world as they have known it is ending. But these forces of demography cannot be reversed, and it is not a world my fellow working–class whites need to fear, but fear is the currency on which our president trades.

The American democratic project has been characterized by inconsistencies since it commenced in 1776. Some of these tensions involved America’s actions abroad, and some in the way it treated its most vulnerable citizens at home. But, with the exception of a wrenching civil war that saw over 600,000 Americans die, few have ever questioned the value of the project itself.

When, at the end of the Revolutionary War, a group of dissident officers in the Continental Army all but suggested a coup against the newly inaugurated Congress in what came to be known as the Newburgh Conspiracy, the army's commander in chief (and future first U.S. President) George Washington gave an impassioned speech in which he inveighed on behalf “of our common country,” charging

As you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man, who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country; and who wickedly attempts to open the flood-gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.

America has had a complicated, schizophrenic history and it has been a messy project.

In the mid-1700s, a group of Scotch-Irish frontiersmen who had settled along the Susquehanna River became known as the Paxton Boys and conducted a spate of racially-motivated violence here in the south-central and eastern portions of Pennsylvania.

On December 14 1763, the gang murdered six members of the Susquehannock tribe (known as Conestoga among English-speakers) and burned their cabins for good measure. When 16 of the remaining Susquehannock were placed in protective custody in the old city jail in Lancaster (just next to the site of the present-day Fulton Opera House), on 27 December, the Paxton Boys broke into the jail and killed, scalped and dismembered the six adults and eight children who sheltered there.

Just last year, Scott Wagner, who is running for governor, was recorded disparaging the businessman and philanthropist George Soros as a “Hungarian Jew” who harbored “a hatred for America.” Soros, along with a number of prominent other individuals and journalists was sent a bomb last month,

Also last year, a white supremacist organization called Identity Evropa held a rally in Penn Square, and at around the same time stickers and posters promoting it were found plastered at Elizabethtown College and here at Millersville.

That’s part of our history and present. But equally a part of it is Lancaster’s  prominent role as the political base of the fierce abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, who represented the region in the U.S. Congress for most of the era between 1849 to 1868. Equally part of it is Lancaster’s history of religious tolerance and welcoming attitude towards those fleeing persecution. The fact that the county welcomes 20x as many refugees per capita as the rest of the country is something you can all be proud of. The future is unwritten.

But need to think very carefully about the path we are heading down.

In the July 1932 elections in Germany, also a democracy at the time, the Nazis received 37% of the vote, the most they every got. In the next election four months later, their share shrank to 32%. But by then it was too late. The serpent was already in the garden. Tellingly, in their quest for absolute power, the Nazis were aided unwittingly by leaders such as the German Communist Party’s Ernst Thälmann, who thought the centre left was a greater danger than the extreme right. Before he realized his miscalculation, he was arrested, held in solitary confinement for eleven years and then shot in Buchenwald.

In the 1990s, the people of the Balkans put their faith in leaders like Serbia's Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić who led the region into ethnic cleansing, genocide, NATO bombing and bloody war for a decade. In 1999, the people of Venezuela, desperate and vengeful after being ignored by their politicians for years, turned the reigns of their country over to former coup leader Hugo Chávez, his successor Nicolás Maduro and their “Bolivarian revolution.” They haven’t gotten it back since.

In Cuba, where I have spent a lot of time and which has its own experience with strongmen promising to expunge a collective grievance through a cleansing release of violence, after the 1959 overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista, the new government, led by Fidel Castro, executed hundreds, possibly thousands, of people tied to the ancien régime after only the most summary trials (and many with no trial at all). Whether all or even most of them were guilty will never be known. The cry of paredón (to the wall) resounded, and the will of the maximum leader had to be obeyed. Today, one can still visit El Morro, where so many of them died, and El Capitolio, where Cuba’s congress met and debated, but which was shuttered after 1959, and remains so to this day.

Now, at another time, in another place, that cry raises its sanguinary voice again, with  calls for political opponents to be jailed, for journalists to be arrested and killed, for desperate people who could just as easily be any one of us to be described in terms of vermin and plague and for those who speak out against this rhetoric of terrorism to be attacked and battered into submission.

When things like this start, at first it might be the opposition party that is sent to the wall. It might be Jewish journalists, or Muslims, or Latinos or immigrants. But one of these days, not too long from now, the mob will scream for blood and it will be someone you love who is brought to the wall, for some transgression real or imagined. It might even be you. In my 20 years as a journalist I’ve seen it in countless countries before. People think it can’t happen here, but it can.

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Tucydides discussed a reinvention of vocabulary for the civil war in Corcyra that went thusly:

What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant one was totally unfit for action.

So what is the solution to all of this, when we’re confronted with such cruelty and brutal machinery - when things like building tent camps in the desert for children who have been forcibly separated from their parents and calling journalists “enemies of the people” - a direct reference to genocidal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin - have become normalized?

One of the writers who had the biggest influence on me over the years was the British author George Orwell. A lot of people know his anti-totalitarian fables 1984 and Animal Farm, perhaps fewer his gripping account of fighting against the forces of fascism during the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, and perhaps still fewer his 1937 study of the living conditions among the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the north of England, The Road to Wigan Pier. But there are some words from that book that I think are worth reading here tonight

The people who have got to act together are all those who cringe to the boss and all those who shudder when they think of the rent. This means that the small-holder has got to ally himself with the factory-hand, the typist with the coal-miner, the schoolmaster with the garage mechanic. There is some hope of getting them to do so if they can be made to understand where their interest lies….Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or a fountain-pen.

I encourage all of you here to night to embrace the world as much as you can, not to shrink from it. Along with my time spent in distant lands, my view of the world and its struggles have been equally shaped by the books I have read, as literature as an art form, both fiction and non-fiction, can be a kind of pinnacle of dissent. Writers like Reinaldo Arenas, Marguerite Duras, Milan Kundera and Mario Vargas Llosa helped influence me and hone my analytical mind in a way that, say, engaging on Twitter does not.  And as the struggle to build a more decent and just world continues, I try to remember the words of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, who, in her penultimate book, A hora da Estrela (The Hour of the Star) wrote of her main character, Macabéa’s, struggle to survive in Rio de Janeiro, that “she saw among the stones lining the gutter the wisps of grass green as the most tender human hope.”

Don’t give up.

Thank you.

2017: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

 
 To have been loved once by someone--surely 
There is a permanent good in that 

- John Ashbery

She saw among the stones lining the gutter the wisps of grass green as the most tender human hope.
 - Clarice Lispector, A hora da Estrela

 There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.
- Carlos Fuentes
 

Late one evening after a recent snow, I was walking my dog through the streets of my hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where I unexpectedly found myself back again this past June after 25 years away, much of it abroad.

As we arrived in the center of the town, at a place called Penn Square (so-named for William Penn, the British-born founder of the state of Pennsylvania), a memorial dedicated to U.S. soldiers who had died fighting the forces of racism, fascism and totalitarianism greeted us, its taciturn combatants cast in stone and garlanded in white by the new snow.

Into the stone are etched words like Gettysburg, Chickamauga and Antietam, names of the  locations of some of the tremendous battles fought during the U.S. Civil War (the first of which still stands as the largest battle ever fought in North America). It was a war that saw Americans slaughtering one another on American soil, the assassination of a president and, at its end, the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished the infernal institution of slavery.   

It is a historic place, Lancaster. A few blocks away from the square, a plaque marks the spot where, on 27 December 1763, a group of Scotch-Irish frontiersmen known as the Paxton Boys broke into the old city jail and killed, scalped and dismembered the 16 remaining members of the Susquehannock tribe (known as Conestoga among English-speakers) who sheltered there, one of countless examples of the inhumanity of the nascent and extant nation to the land's original inhabitants. A few blocks beyond that, the grave of the great abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, who represented the region in the U.S. Congress from 1849 to 1868, lies under the snow in a quiet corner of the Shreiner-Concord Cemetery.

More than 150 years on from the Civil War's end, elements of the United States stand with swords drawn within its borders yet again, usually metaphorically but sometimes - as we saw in Charlottesville, Virginia and Portland, Oregon - literally.

In many ways, 2017 was a year of loss. In my own country, Americans watched as their nation's standing in the world eroded, and its institutions came under unprecedented threat from within. In Haiti, there was the sudden death of former president René Préval and, for many, a final loss of faith in the political process and a realization that corruption and impunity have possessed the body politic so totally and across such a wide swathe of political actors that divisions between parties and stated ideologies have been rendered nearly irrelevant. In Puerto Rico, residents there lost their homes, their access to electricity and potable water and - in the hundreds - their lives as Hurricane Maria roared ashore. In the process, they also lost any illusions about how they were viewed by many in the larger United States. In Spain, lost was any delusion that the nation’s Francoist past was totally removed from its present day.  In Syria and Yemen, there was a loss of belief that anyone, anywhere cared about what was happening to the defenseless inhabitants of those places.

And for me, personally, there was some loss, too. My grandfather, James Breon, an admirable man in so many ways and the last surviving grandparent, finally succumbed to old age at 92. My beloved cat, Winston, the gentlest creature I've known, passed away at 20. A couple of close friendships frayed in ways that I don't think will ever be repaired. But I was able to see places that mean a lot to me again - Haiti, Paris, Puerto Rico, Havana, Barcelona, - and was even able to make some new friends along the way. 1 was able to publish one book and began work on another.

If 2017 represented the efforts of certain elements of modern-day America to get an illiberal and totalitarian project up and running, 2018 will almost certainly mark an escalation in the assault on the separation of powers, the rule of law and the integrity of our electoral process, all hallmarks of our democracy we must stand ready to defend. But there also seems to have, amid all the loss, been something of an awakening, a realization that, in the purest sense, democracy is not a spectator sport and those who want a voice in it must start that process by showing up in the voting booth, on the ballot and in the streets.

But amid all these struggles - some of which are chronicled in the articles below - I have been reminded that we must make time for - and room for - beauty, tenderness and love. I hope, as this difficult year draws to a close, that all of you find some of all three to greet you in 2018, and that, no matter how bleak things may look, you never give up or give into despair or apathy. 

And I wish you days, as  J.P. Donleavy wrote in The Ginger Man, "on which all things are born, like uncovered stars."

'Everything kind of fell apart': Demographics surrounding poverty in Lancaster County shatter myths for LNP (26 December 2017 )

 

Puerto Rico tries to beat storms natural and man-made for fDi Magazine (19 December 2017)

Families who came to Lancaster from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria adjust to new way of life  for LNP (16 December 2017)

In the heart of Afro-Puerto Rican culture, a halting recovery 1 month after Hurricane Maria for LNP (3 November 2017)

Desperation, defiance remain in Puerto Rico's central mountains 1 month after Hurricane Maria for LNP (2 November 2017)

 

One month after Hurrican Maria, Puerto Rico's Coast Struggles to Rebuild for LNP (1 November 2017)

A Direct Line: How a glut of cheap, powerful heroin grown in Mexico is delivered more than 2,000 miles to Lancaster County for LNP (6 September 2017)

Michael Deibert interviewed about Haiti by M24, the radio station of Monocle magazine (18 September 2017)

 

On the Ground: Michael Deibert interview with Sam Schindler for What We Will Abide (26 August 2017)

A Venezuelan retreat for fDi Magazine (17 August 2017)

One Rural County’s Battle to Stop a Pipeline From Slicing Through Pennsylvania for In These Times (15 August 2017)

 

Was the ‘Guatemalan Spring’ an illusion? for fDi Magazine (11 July 2017)

The End of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti: What It Means for the Country's Future for Foreign Affairs (21 June 2017)

France awards Guiana €2.1bn development fund for fDi Magazine (25 May 2017)

Puerto Rico struggles through tough times as vultures circle for fDi Magazine (18 May 2017)

Before night falls: An American’s letter to France for Michael Deibert's Blog (3 May 2017)

 

Colombia in dispute with Spain’s Electricaribe for fDi Magazine (4 April 2017)

Cuba looks towards renewables for fDi Magazine (7 March 2017)

René Préval obituary President of Haiti who managed to bring a measure of tranquillity to a country besieged by poverty and violence for The Guardian (7 March 2017)

After momentous year, Cuba faces uncertain 2017 for fDi Magazine (10 January 2017)

Books in 2017: A Personal Selection

 Mohammad Mohiedine Anis, 70, smokes his pipe as he sits in his destroyed bedroom listening to music on his vinyl player in Aleppo's formerly rebel-held al-Shaar neighbourhood.(AFP PHOTO / JOSEPH EID/AFP/Getty Images)

Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos

One of the most important - but in many ways least remembered - Spanish-language poets of the 20th century, whose words translate seamlessly into English in this bilingual collection, Julia de Burgos was the often-anguished and sometimes dizzyingly sensual voice of Puerto Rico who died at 39 in New York City in 1953. In her poetry, recurring images - the sea, the stars - lighten to a degree what can often be the bleak inner life of her writing, and, as a committed political militant and passionate anti-fascist, one of her greatest poems, a tribute to the Rio Grande de Loíza remains, years later, a defiant call to an island and a people battered by catastrophes both natural and man-made:

¡Río Grande de Loíza!... Río grande. Llanto grande.
El más grande de todos nuestros llantos isleños,
si no fuera más grande el que de mi se sale
por los ojos del alma para mi esclavo pueblo.

Rio Grande de Loiza! . . . Great river. Great flood of tears.
The greatest of all our island's tears
save those greater that come from the eyes
up of my soul for my enslaved people.

Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania Book by Roland Clark

This all-too-relevant book looks at the foundations and growth of Romania’s indigenous fascist movements, especially Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s Iron Guard, also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael or, simply, as the Legionnaire movement. Facing a crumbling state whose moral equivocations finally eroded its authority, the Romanian fascists blended a wild, faux-mystical antisemitic violence with religious and folk-historical symbolism, including appearing in isolated rural villages dressed as haiduc, outlaws who had fought local oppressors in the 19th century. It is no coincidence that Codreanu’s image appeared on t-shirts worn by some of the far-right protesters who ran amok in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past summer. In addition to assassinations and street violence, the Legionnaires also defined themselves through art – they sold handmade crosses with the words “by sacrificing our lives we will escape from thieves” inscribed beneath them - and by long marches in between Romanian towns that “alerted onlookers that there was something distinctive about the Legion, showing that legionnaires valued hierarchy, order, discipline and physical fitness.” Though not a time in European history that attracts a great deal of attention today, this interwar period in Romania certainly holds a cautionary tale for our present moment.

Los Zetas Inc: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico by Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera

Though there have been a surfeit of books detailing the garish violence of Mexico’s drug cartels – organizations whose lifeblood depends on both the ravenous appetite for narcotics and current policies of the United States – no book has delved in such nuts-and-bolts detail into the financial hierarchies and dynamics that inform the running of one of these organizations as does Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera’s tome on Los Zetas. Highly recommended for anyone seeking to understand the inner working of organized crime and how it integrates itself into the legitimate economy.

Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad

The majesty of one of Iran’s greatest poets – who combines a world and once modern and antique and who writes as frankly and elegantly about female desire as anyone ever has – calls out from the page and evokes a forgotten glory of a national literary tradition that, while perhaps dormant at the moment, waits to be born again.

Family Portrait With Fidel: A Memoir by Carlos Franqui

A memoir of disillusionment and disenchantment with a revolution he once risked his life to support, this memoir by Carlos Franqui, an anti-Batista author and rebel who became editor of the important newspaper Revolución after the dictator’s fall, Franqui’s book shows the betrayal of the Cuban people by the Castro brothers and their allies and the subsuming of hard-fought victories and dreams of progress to totalitarianism. “We carried out all kinds of executions,” Franqui writes at one point. “Real, moral and symbolic.”

Everybody Leaves by Wendy Guerra

A moving elegy to the vanished youth of a Cuban girl’s conflicted and adventurous early life growing up in Cienfuegos and Havana.

Ghost Stories by M. R. James

Classic English ghost stories from one of the masters of the genre, including such gems as “Casting the Runes” and “After Dark in the Playing Fields.” A most enjoyable diversion.

Paradiso by  José Lezama Lima

A complicated, allusive novel of Cuba in the early part of the 20^th century, Lezama’s key work remains one of the greatest achievements of Latin American fiction of his era, and his erotic, poetic prose (“They looked each other over with long pauses of insatiation and a carnality of symphonic progression”) couldn’t be further away from the square, macho military culture of today’s “official” Cuba. A sleeping giant, waiting be discovered.

The End of Eddy: A Novel by Édouard Louis

A beautifully rendered and occasionally brutal and disturbing memoir of growing up poor and gay in  northern France, this book captures the simultaneous ache and occasional truces in difficult, dysfunctional families with great clarity and speaks to anyone who ever felt like a misfit who had to break away into the great unknown.

Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea by Shiraz Maher

A vitally important work in decoding the ideology (cosmology might be a better term) of salafi-Jihadism, this book by a noted British academic (and former radical himself) lays out in minute detail the current jihadi interpretation of such concepts as tatarrus (roughly a theological construct relating to human shields but also expanding into targeting civilians) and their roots in various schismatic schools of Islamic thought.

Mephisto by Klaus Manm

The story of an actor’s seduction by the rewards offered by proximity to power in Nazi Germany, the great German author’s 1936 novel has unnerving parables to the situation here in the contemporary United States, and one wonders how many in the orbit of the current U.S. president and his minions have - or will - mentally echo the performer Höfgen thoughts when, as Mephisto, he meets Herman Goering: ”Now I have contaminated myself…Now there is a stain on my hand that I can never wash off…Now I have sold myself…Now I am marked for life.”

Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction by Elaine Frantz Parsons

The garishly theatrical nature of the early Ku Klux Klan, where elements of minstrelsy combined with brutal violence, is here chronicled in a book that is often revelatory. Formed in Pulaski, Tennessee in May or June 1866 (and not, as is often claimed, by former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who only attached to himself to the Klan later), the Klan were defined from the beginning by a relentless repetition of “the portrayal of black people as failed citizens and of white attackers as the people” and sought to destroy black associations and kill their white allies, and to actively and deliberately to destroy familial bonds among freepeople. A vital and important part of U.S. history to be understood.

 Impossible Revolution by Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Perhaps the pinnacle of Syrian dissident literature from a man who spent 16 years in the prisons of the tyrant Hafez al-Assad only to be released and watch the dictator’s son, Bashar al-Assad, take over and level the country, Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s book is a cri de cœur that leaves few unscathed.

Writing that, by early 2012 it was “increasingly clear that the unimaginable situation we had discussed privately - the regime would be willing to destroy the country for the sake of staying in power - was its only political agenda, and that it was already being implemented,” Saleh chronicles massacres in Damascus, Homs and elsewhere and illuminates such critical moments as the July 2012 killing of various Syrian security officers (and the subsequent escalation of the use of barrel bombs) as the moment Iran began taking control of the regime’s defenses.

Saleh scathingly critiques “a neo-bourgeois during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, a class that owes everything to the regime and has a lot to lose were the revolution to emerge victorious” who in turn serve a government who views its people “with contempt and disdain, in a manner no different from a colonizing power’s view of the colonized; this justifies the use of violence against the “backward” masses and cheapens the value of the lives, so much so that killing them is a matter of no great concern.” Saleh sees his hometown of Raqqa slide under control of the jihadists, noting bitterly that he was “unable to walk around the city where I had spent years of my adolescence, where most of my brothers lived, and where my parents had lived until their deaths, while some religiously-obsessed, enraged Tunisians, Saudis, Egyptians and Europeans roamed freely, unable to engage in anything other than murder.” Detailing the depredations of the regime’s muscle-bound, murderous shock troops, known as shabiha (many with roots in the seaside city of Latakia), Saleh quotes the Syrian-British writer Rana Kabbani describing pro-regime Western writers - especially Robert Fisk - as "shabiha of the pen." Nor does former U.S. President Barack Obama – whose inaction in the wake of Assad’s August 2013 Ghouta must be seen as a turning point of the war escape critique, cited for his “treacherous and dastardly” deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Syria shortly thereafter.

“Those who had appointed themselves the guardians of international law were reassuring a murderer that they might be compelled to punish him for violating international law,” Saleh writes of the toothless response to the attack. “But without affecting his ability to kill people and with no reference to his other crimes…The international community decided mass slaughter of Syrians by regime wasn’t a crime, but the weapon used was.”

The government in Syria, Saleh writes, only ever offered “a cosmetic modernity…without any emancipatory privileges,” whose “real identity” consisted of “ the combination of an obsolete, inhumane political apparatus with a glamorous material façade.”

Today, seven years after Syria’s war began, the international community’s abandonment of the people of Syria has never seemed more complete.

Foreign Correspondent by Robert St. Johh

An extraordinary first hand account of Europe’s slide into fascism, this memoir contains, among other details, chilling eyewitness accounts of the rise (and fall) of Romania’s fascist Iron Guard and of the destruction of Belgrade by the Nazis. A searing and timely reminder of how quickly a society that thought of itself as civilized can descend into madness.

Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada by Zoé Valdés

A novel of a rebel voice living through the hundred daily humiliations of life in an ossifying tyranny, this book sets out to chronicle “the island that in wanting to build a paradise has created a hell,” and in doing so skewers many hoary myths of Cuba.

“There are those who maintain that people throw themselves into the sea over insignificant economic deprivations - can’t get any blue jeans, can’t find any chewing gum - but anyone who says that simply doesn’t know Cuba,” Valdés writes. “Doesn’t know the terror and hunger the Cuban people have known; people who say that are those whose knowledge of the country is limited to the luxury hotels and the government."

Be Realistic (Ask for the Impossible)

Photo © Michael Deibert

Havana Nocturne

Havana Nocturne, photo by me.

Books in 2016: A personal selection

A Kurdish YPJ fighter with smoke behind her rising from an ISIS held area near the town of Al Hol, Hasakah, Syria. Photo by Delil Souleiman.

Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War by Francesca Borri

This excellent book by Italian journalist Francesca Borri recounts her reporting from the Syrian city of Aleppo between 2012 and 2013, and presents a vital primary source recounting a siege that became one of the 21st century’s great crimes. Syrian Dust’s depiction of the terrified, terrorized lives of the Syrians living under the Assad regime’s relentless barrage - from the 25 year-old mother reduced to living in a drainage pipe with her 3 children who ventures out to buy bread and is shot by a sniper to the citizens of Moadamiya “with those bodies that are all bones” to those trapped in Al-Qusayr, during its siege reduced to sending frantic texts pleading “Where are you? They’re killing us all!” - will afflict the reader's conscience long after the book ends.

Afro-Cuban Tales by Lydia Cabrera

A striking and sometimes surreal collection from the woman who was perhaps Cuba’s greatest anthropologist, this book is a rich and splendid account of how Africa’s tradition of oral history and myth was translated to the Caribbean’s largest island.

Black Rice The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas by Judith A. Carney

This is a revelatory and chilling book that posits the thesis that much of the agricultural might of the southern United States derived from the expertise and labour of the West African slaves that were imported en masse to work there. A highly detailed dissection of the rice growing regions of West Africa where many American slaves hailed from makes a compelling case that they were were specifically plucked from these regions in order to bring their proficiency to the “new” world.

Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War by Michael Gunter

An important work in decoding one aspect of Syria’s tortuously complex civil war, this book examines the murky and volatile relationship between Syria’s Kurds and the Assad family dictatorship in Syria, whose patriarch, Hafez al-Assad, as the author writes, took over the supposedly pan-Arab Baath Party and turned it “into a mere facade for his own Alawite family’s personal property.” Though Syria’s Kurds may not have suffered the genocidal slaughter their counterparts living in Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein endured, they were subjected to virtual ethnic cleansing from vast swathes of northern Syria in 1963 and reduced to an official status of less-than-full citizens of the country in which they lived. With particular focus paid to the Democratic Union Party or PYD (affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK founded in Turkey by imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan) and its military wing, the People's Protection Units (YPG), the book examines how the schizophrenic Assad regime could both shelter and protect the PKK for almost two decades (until they were kicked out in 1998) and, only a few years later, provide rearguard support to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which then became both the Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) jihadist rebel groups. Though the narrative hits a slight bump when the author edges perilously close toward recycling  wild conspiracy theories connected to the August 2013 chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, it is nonetheless highly valuable for its clear timeline of factors such as the newly assertive mood for Syria’s Kurds following the assumption of the Iraqi presidency by Jalal Talabani, himself a Kurd, in 2005, and such precursors to rebellion as the Qaishli uprising in March 2004 and the murder of a prominent Syrian Kurdish Sufi leader in June 2005.

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

With its stark, incantatory prose, this brief tale of familial and cultural dislocation describes a Mexican woman’s journey to the United States to try and locate her missing brother and, in doing so, spins a haunting border vignette.

The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret

The Israeli author pens short and at times quite affecting vignettes about his life as a father, son and friend in his often-conflicted land.

In the Time of the Tyrants by R. M. Koster and Guillermo Sanchez

An important document of a now-almost forgotten time when the Central American country of Panama was ruled by garish brutality, this book chronicles the governments of Omar Torrijos, Rubén Darío Paredes and Manuel Noriega and the courage of those who fought against them.

The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain by Paul Preston

The author writes that he penned this book “to convey the suffering unleashed upon their fellow citizens by the arrogance and brutality of the soldiers who rose up on 17 July 1936...(and) provoked a war that was unnecessary and whose consequences still resonate bitterly in Spain today” Though largely given short shrift in the English-speaking world, the story in this book of the terror visited upon Spain by the country’s right wing - rabidly anti-semitic, obsessed with supposed Masonic plots, addicted to benefiting from a rural economic model that seemed little better than slavery and adroit in their demonization/dehumanization of liberals in their discourse - amply proves the author’s thesis that the Spanish right “hated the Republic for being democratic long before it was able to denounce it for being anti-clerical." An all-too-relevant text for today's world.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

The great Peruvian writer's account of the quixotic and tragic (though successful) plot to kill the Dominican Republic’s cruel dictator Rafael Trujillo, this novel minutely parses the web of flattery, threats, vanity, delusion and complicity that permits a totalitarian regime to thrive and the price that is often paid by those who dare to take it down.

2016: A Reporter’s Notebook of the Year Gone By

 Gibara, Cuba. Photo by the author.

This year marked two milestones for your humble correspondent as a writer: I completed my second book on Haiti - Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History, which will be published by Zed Books next year - and I was finally able to engage thoroughly with Cuba, a fascinating country at a pivotal moment and which I was lucky enough to visit multiple times this year. Hopefully, going forward in 2017, I can continue trying to bridge the gaps between we fragile humans who inhabit this delicate earth, and help people to realize that the threads than bind us together are in fact stronger than those which keep us apart.

Paz y amor,

M

A New Global Footprint for Cuba Biomed for Cuba Trade Magazine (15 December 2016)

Closing Arguments for Michael Deibert's Blog (6 November 2016)

The Ghosts of Assad  A Review of Francesca Borri's Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War for Michael Deibert's Blog (15 September 2016)

Nicaragua tiptoes back to tyranny for fDi Magazine (26 August 2016)

Former economy minister takes power in Peru for fDi Magazine (27 June 2016)

The Panama Papers is the least of Central America’s woes for fDi Magazine (16 June 2016)

My talk "Haiti Will Not Perish" at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (thanks to Severine Autesserre for making it happen (27 April 2016)

Review of my book  In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico  From "Drugs, Violence, and Corruption: Perspectives from Mexico and Central America" in Latin American Politics and Society, Vol 58, Issue 1 (17 April 2016)

The fêted and the dead in Haiti for Michael Deibert's Blog (17 February 2016)

‘Rotten system’ blamed as Haiti’s election ends in stalemate for The Guardian (14 February 2016)

Haiti dances nervously towards bitterly contested presidential election for The Guardian (21 January 2016)

The Demon Heirs of El Chapo for The Daily Beast (10 January 2016)

Answer 33

After being beaten and arrested for exercising his human right of free expression, the Cuban graffiti artist Danilo Maldonado Machado, better known as El Sexto, was transferred to the El Combinado del Este Prison, perhaps the most notoriously violent jail on the island. Before he was transferred, he penned the following testimony.  MD

 
Answer 33

What will become of the future for my daughter if they keep glorifying murderers?

This is my work November 25, 2016.

Written from Valle Grande Prison, 8 of December, 2016.

In many instances I have been interviewed by different means of communications and many asked what I thought about when Fidel dies and my answer was always the same: We must all identify and learn to demystify a murderer. If not, then on that day nothing will happen.

The Cuban people were forced to march under the sun and crying songs like “I am Fidel”, but many were silent, because the Cuban people live in fear and with fear you cannot be free.

As long as we keep bowing our heads with a disgusting salary, with nothing to eat, and emigrating and demanding to the outside world what we are not capable of demanding of ourselves like human beings here “freedom," acts like what they are doing to me will continue to be the norm in Cuban society.

Let them take away my personal property, my cellular phone, with the justification of investigating, but actually they already have my e-mail, Facebook, Instagram, and all my tools and contacts for my work and development as an artist.

And text messages that are sent from any cell phone in Cuba with the phrase “El Sexto” will be sent but not received.

That apparently for an offence of criminal damages there is a fine to be leveled for the simple fact that such a crime does not exist. Instead, I the only person in Cuba who did what the rest of the Cuban population should have done: Take to the streets and celebrate the death that nature gave him and that he did not have the courage to end. He fled and blamed blockades and permitted us to live in poverty and die in the sea without looking at the real enemy, the military occupation of the Castro brothers.

For I am the same age as Christ when he was stoned and crucified for the people that he filled with wisdom. I have not assaulted any garrison, nor have I held a rifle. What I have is paper, pen, and spray paint. In the past it was my turn, now it is the Cubans turn to plant themselves in the 3rd and the 2nd. I am 1 and 6 and I am free. Always on my way to her. Luck and light be with you.

-El Sexto-

Books in 2015: A Personal Selection

 Ipanema, Dusk, December 2004  ©  Michael Deibert

Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink by Juliana Barbassa

The Brazilian journalist has written a beautiful yet unflinching meditation on one of the world's great cities during a moment of profound change. Her book is a moving examination of the immense charms, staccato violence and unfulfilled promise of the marvelous city and of the heart of modern Brazil.

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest

Given recent events, this classic 1986 work by the great Anglo-American historian of Russia is a timely reminder that Ukraine was “the first independent Eastern European state to be successfully taken over by the Kremlin” and that a destruction of its national identity has been a priority for those who supported Russian expansionism for many generations. Lenin and later, more extensively, Stalin used an intentionally inflicted famine as a way to starve the very idea of Ukrainian nationhood (as they also did in Kazakhstan), with Grigory Zinoviev stating as early as 1918 that “we must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million Soviet Russian population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to then. They must be annihilated.”

Informed by a violent urban chauvinism against the rural poor, the Communist Party overseeing the atrocity “relied continually on a spurious doctrinal analysis to show it a supposed class enemy of a minority in the countryside, whereas in fact almost the entire peasantry was opposed to it and its policies,” policies that were devised. “not [by] a group of rational economists...(But by) a group which had accepted a millenarian doctrine”  As Communist officials dine in special restaurants and shop at “closed” stores, the famine rages and the bodies of dead children are dug up under suspicion that they might in fact be grain pits. The book is also, however, a testament to human resistance to the erasing effects of totalitarianism. But as it makes abundantly clear, the destruction of Ukrainian national identity wasn’t a byproduct of Stalin’s starvation politics, it was their point.

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

A deeply affecting drama of a Haitian family both and home and in exile (the latter traumatically affected by the glacial indifference of United States immigration procedures) makes up for the sometimes shaky history.

Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by  Karen Dawisha

This scrupulously detailed account of Vladimir Putin’s rise and eventual omnipotence on the Russian political scene is a fascinating account of a vast mafia state being run under cover of patriotic nationalism. Killers, quislings, corrupt business dealers, former and current spooks and other assorted unsavory types make up the Russian leader’s extended political and financial family or, as the author puts it, “such is the quality of the group that Putin has gathered around him from his days in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office.” The combination of the author's own research and investigative reporting by outlets such as Novaya Gazeta quoted therein also leads the reader to the extraordinary conclusion that Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), of which Putin was the former chief, likely orchestrated the 1999 Russia apartment bombings that killed 293 people and helped pave the way for the Second Chechen War [Putin was Prime Minister at the time and many who questioned the official version met with extraordinarily suspect deaths]. As Dawisha points out, to keen observers, Putin’s first inauguration was not “a celebration of a transition or of a democracy; this was an occasion designed to herald the the emergence of a single and indisputable leader of a renewed state.”

Miami by Joan Didion

I finally got around to reading this non-fiction book, one of those often bandied about when one is trying to decode the vagaries of the city I live in, and found it both meandering, never quite getting to the point and, to me, at least (someone who has lived in the city off and on over a period of almost 20 years), not terribly perceptive. The author basically repeats stories and allegories from the then-formidable Miami Herald and the writing of historian Arthur Schlesinger, and otherwise writes much as I imagine a drive-by would be composed by someone who spent a few days or weeks here. The Haitian community in Miami is invisible in this book, as are African-Americans, and there is no hint of the city’s physical beauty, nor that of the natural environment that surrounds it, no grasp even of the area’s mired history of corruption. Lines of supposed profundity - “soundings are hard to come by here” or “to spend time in Miami is to acquire certain fluency in cognitive dissonance” - struck me as insufferably pretentious rather than deep.

Dirty Havana Trilogy: A Novel in Stories by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez

Filthy, very funny and ultimately a bit wrenching, the novel was originally published as Trilogía sucia de La Habana in 1998 and chronicles the devastating effect of the período especial on Cuba in early 1990s.  The author chronicles the myriad of ways Cubans try to survive, at one point concluding “the only way to live here is crazy, drunk or fast asleep.”

The Boy Is Gone: Conversations with a Mau Mau General by Laura Lee P. Huttenbach

Laura Lee Huttenbach’s debut is a unique first-hand account of cultural lineage, revolutionary awakening and dogged perseverance told in the voice Japhlet Thambu, a man who seems to have fit several lifetimes into the span of one. It is an essential testimony to those seeking to understand modern-day Kenya.

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

The story of Macabéa, an impoverished, unwanted typist who migrates from Alagoas to Rio de Janeiro, this last novel by the Ukrainian-Brazilian author is an odd and rare bird, indeed, with some striking passages. I am still not even sure whether or not I entirely liked it, but I am intrigued enough to continue on exploring her work.

The Collected Poems by Czesław Miłosz

The work of the great Polish poet, here presented in luminous English-language translations, is some of the finest poetry of the second half of the 20th century. There are worlds of beauty to be discovered here.

Stray Poems by Alejandro Murguía

Of somewhat uneven quality, this book by San Francisco’s poet laureate still contains some wonderfully evocative sections.

Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden by Heberto Padilla

A shattering portrait of the moment when the great hope of the Cuban revolution disintegrated into tyranny by an author who suffered as much as any artist from the Castro regime’s curdling into dictatorship, this novel marks stark realization of the narrator that "a revolution is not simply the excited rush of plans, dreams, old longings for redemption and social justice that want to see the light of day which the revolution gushes at its beginning. It has its dark side, too, difficult, dirty almost...Repression, overzealous police vigilance, suspicion, summary verdicts, firing squads...” It is also a profound psychological portrait of despots themselves, with Padilla asking “Did tyrants love their countries...He thought they did, with the darkest, most jealous and constant love” and later concluding that “In every act of terror there is a desperate desire to persuade.”

Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach

Man’s wife dies. Man moves to decaying, canal-entwined Belgian city to brood. Man becomes convinced young dancer is the double of his dead spouse and becomes obsessed with her. You know, the usual. Having no idea who he was, I took a photo of Rodenbach’s extraordinary grave at the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris during my first visit there in 1994 and only stumbled across this book during a reading I was giving in San Francisco last year. A very strange book by a very strange man, the novel nevertheless evokes Bruges in a certain aspect of saturnalia and morose lassitude, writing that it was a town

Where every day is like All Saints’ Day. A grey that seems to be made by mixing the white of the nuns’ head-dresses with the black of the priests’ cassocks, constantly passing here and pervasive...It is as if the frequent mists, the veiled light of the the northern skies, the granite of the quais, the incessant rain, the rhythm of the bells had combined to influence the colour of the air; and also, in this aged town, the dead ashes of time, the dust from the hourglass of the years spreading its silent deposit over everything.

A little-known book worth spending some time with.

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

A youthful effort but one whose charm and power come from its very simplicity., this novel features a young father, a teenage daughter and a summer household in the south of France heading towards cataclysm.

The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy by Yanis Varoufakis

This book by Greece’s former finance minister posits, as a powerful symbol of Wall Street capitalism, a minotaur demanding tribute and fealty from all. It is a piercing criticism of a system where quack theories known by their acronyms - EMH, CEH, RBCT - were cocooned in “mathematical complexity [that] succeeded for too long in hiding their feebleness” and where a credit rating system existed as the purest nepotism. As Varoufakis trenchantly observes

The bankers paid the credit rating agencies...the regulatory authorities...accept these ratings as kosher; and the up and coming young men and women who had secured a badly paid job with one of the regulatory authorities soon began to plan a career move to Lehman Brothers or Moody's...Overseeing all of them was a host of treasury secretaries and finance minister who had either already served for years at Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns etc or were hoping to join that magic circle after leaving politics.

As it continues to be, Varoufakis writes that the rescue plan after the 2008 economic crisis it was not “never again” but rather “business as usual with public funds.”

Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris by Edmund White

A spirited and evocative (though at times gossipy and name-dropping) memoir of la ville lumière by the American writer who lived there from 1983 to 1990, the book made me heavily nostalgic for my own time in this most magical of cities. As White shows, no matter where one might go in afterwards, one who has lived there for any period of time will always have Paris.

2015: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

This past year was one in which I struggled with the financial realities of doing serious, independent journalism as much as I ever have in my life, but I was still afforded the chance to visit Cuba for the first-time, return to still-beloved and still-tumultuous Haiti, draw attention to an extraordinary and much-maligned Hudson Valley city and try to reach out to extend aquele abraço to Paris in its moment of great need. Next year, I will be bringing out a new book on Haiti looking at the country's 2004 to 2015 era, and hope to make some progress on getting my fiction before the public, as well. In the meantime, I move forward keeping in mind the words of Federico García Lorca's Cielo Vivo:

Yo no podré quejarme
si no encontré lo que buscaba;
pero me iré al primer paisaje de humedades y latidos
para entender que lo que busco tendrá su blanco de alegría
cuando yo vuele mezclado con el amor y las arenas.

(I won't be able to complain
though I never found what I was looking for;
but I'll go to the first fluid landscape of heartbeats
so I'll know that my search has a joyful target
when I'm flying, jumbled with loved and sandstorms) 

 
Has Guatemala's Long-Awaited Spring Finally Arrived? for InSight Crime (9 December 2015) 

Paris, je t'aime for the Huffington Post (20 November 2015)

Interview on the attempt by the Republic of Congo's Denis Sassou Nguesso to cling to power in Brazzaville for France 24 (20 October 2015)

Conversation with Juliana Barbassa about her book Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink and the state of modern Brazil here at Books & Book in Miami (7 August 2015)

In Mexico’s Veracruz, violence stalks journalists and students for Fusion (4 August 2015)

 

Could the gangs of Port-au-Prince form a pact to revitalise Haiti's capital? for the Guardian (14 July 2015) 

Making sense of Miami: what America's strangest city says about the US's future for the Guardian (2 July 2015)

Letter from Havana for the Guardian (17 June 2015)

In from the cold: the implications of the US's thawing on Cuba for Foreign Direct Investment (12 June 2015)

 

Resurrecting Newburgh for the Guardian (8 April 2015) 

The Dominican Republic's decade of diversification for Foreign Direct Investment (12 February 2015)

Yemayá y Ochún

The great Cuban poet and anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, also a longtime Miami resident, who was one of the world's foremost authorities on Afro-Cuban religion and the Abakuá secret society, as a young woman.

Making sense of Miami:

Thursday 2 July 2015

Making sense of Miami: what America's strangest city says about the US's future

The dizzying blend of accents entices some visitors and alarms others. But as the US gets ever-closer to Cuba, Miami resident Michael Deibert asks: what can the rest of America learn from its own multicultural metropolis? 

The Guardian
  
(Please read original article here)

Just off Miami’s busy Calle Ocho, the thoroughfare that is the beating cultural heart of the city’s Cuban community, there rises a splendid ceiba tree whose roots erupt from the ground like waves from the sea, and whose vast branches throw shade far to either side.

All around the gnarled roots and tucked into the tree’s hidden crevices, one finds the offerings of the faithful: candles, bags of food, feathers, bones. In this modern metropolis, whose vaulting skyscrapers a mile away reflect the near-blinding sun, the saturnalia surrounding the ceiba attests to the lifeblood of the Afro-Cuban religion of santería, and Miami’s eternal place in the imagination of el exilio, as the Cuban community is often referred to.

I’ve lived in Miami off and on since the mid-1990s. As much as anywhere in the United States – my native country with which I have an often conflicted relationship – it counts as home. Landing back in Florida from Haiti, Paris or elsewhere, Miami always seems to offer the singular trick of providing some of the efficiency and convenience of living in the US while never seeming entirely a part of it.
Miami has long been a kind of quasi city-state that evokes strong reactions from visitors, especially those from more anglicised parts of the country who cannot make themselves understood in English to a large part of the local population – an experience that annoys and alarms them.

The strangest city in what is perhaps America’s strangest state, Miami is now home not just to Cubans but to thousands of Argentines, Brazilians, Colombians, Haitians, Jamaicans, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and practically every other Latin American nationality, with sizeable populations of Russians, Indians, Persians and Orthodox Jews as well.

The city has become so micronised that what is commonly thought of as “Miami” in the popular imagination is, in fact, a series of semi-independent small cities – some only a few blocks long – within the urban sprawl of Miami-Dade County (population 2.6 million). It fronts a long sweep of the blue-green Atlantic to the east and finally peters out in the miasma of the Everglades swamp to the west and the necklace of the Florida Keys to the south.

A young city (it was only incorporated in 1896 in what was then mostly wilderness), Miami is often said to have been founded on bootleg liquor and built its skyline on an infusion of cocaine money in the 70s and 80s (at the height of its cocaine wars in 1980 to 1981, the city had the world’s highest murder rate). Nearly 30 years ago, the crime writer Edna Buchanan wrote that Miami had been “a sleepy resort” that had transformed to attract “year-round ... concentrations of everything corrupt, bizarre or dangerous from everywhere in the world”.

Above all, Miami is a place of exile where newcomers try to construct a new life. Upon arriving from Cuba in 1980, the author Reinaldo Arenas – who as a teenaged barbudo had fought with Castro’s forces but was then imprisoned and tortured both for being an independent intellectual and gay – declared Miami “a barren and pestiferous peninsula ... trying to become for a million exiles, the dream of a tropical island”.

No fan of the city, Arenas quickly decamped to New York, where he committed suicide in 1990. Miami, however, continued to percolate like a spoonful of Café Bustelo coffee from the cafe colada that residents traditionally drink every afternoon at 3:05 (the city’s area code). And it has become something more interesting than many had thought possible.

In his office in West Miami near the city’s airport – a few blocks away from a branch of the city’s El Palacio de los Jugos Cuban eateries where the pan con lechón hints at the divine – Armando Valladares sits surrounded by photos of himself with political leaders: Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Florida senator (and Miami native and presidential candidate) Marco Rubio. Now white-haired, bespectacled and elegant, Valladares spent 22 years in Cuban prisons for – among other perceived offences – refusing to put an “I’m with Fidel” sign on his desk at the Ministry of Communications in 1960. Upon his release in 1982, he became a United States Ambassador to the United Nations. After residing in Washington for many years, he moved to Miami about 15 years ago.

“The Cubans have demonstrated their ability and their quality of work here,” Valladares says. “It’s a unique case in the history of the United States where the identity of a city was born, in a sense, in another country.”

The Cuban aspects of Miami’s identity appear to be far less monolithic than they once were, though. Many younger Cuban-Americans support the easing of relations with Cuba that US president Barack Obama has been pursuing with the island’s rulers. Events such as the O’ Miami poetry festival bring Cuban cultural groups such as Omni Zona Franca (from eastern Havana’s housing estates) to Miami on a regular basis, demonstrating that the city’s Latin vibe is more than Hoy Como Ayer (Today Like Yesterday), as one long-standing club wistfully calls itself.

If Miami represents a refuge for Cubans, it serves as no less of one for Haitians who, fleeing a downward economic spiral and the tyranny of some of the country’s leaders, have made a profound impact on Miami’s cultural life over the last several decades.

Along a once-neglected stretch of Northeast 2nd Avenue in the heart of the Haitian immigrant community, a cultural flowering has taken place that has seen the opening of the Little Haiti Cultural Center and its Caribbean Marketplace – a replica of the famed Marché en fer (Iron Market) in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Exuberantly coloured murals by local artists adorn walls, and every Friday night the Rara Lakay band marches through the neighbourhood, beating on drums and blowing on plangent bamboo vaksin trumpets, whose bleat more evokes the deep Haitian countryside than an American city.

“I have seen this city grow culturally,” says the Haitian painter Edouard Duval Carrié, who arrived in Miami from Paris in 1992. “When I moved here it was really a [cultural] desert. That has changed.”
Carrié maintains his studio in Little Haiti. Famous for his painting of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in a wedding dress (an image that did not endear him to the regime), his space now seems a precursor of the area’s renaissance. What was once a district many outsiders approached with trepidation now attracts hundreds of people to the outdoor concerts of its monthly Big Night in Little Haiti.

“This is the doorway to the United States,” Carrié says. “The particularity of Miami is that it has this very ebullient immigration that makes it quite fascinating.”

But Miami’s growth into the multicultural metropolis it is today has had a sinister side, too. In the 1960s, the city built the southern extension of Interstate 95 directly through the heart of the Overtown district, an area that had been a cultural mecca for black culture in the south. “Overtown was a very pleasant place,” says Enid Pinkney, the 83-year-old daughter of an immigrant from the Bahamas (one of the first non-indigenous communities to settle in Miami).

Dispersed to other areas of the city, black residents often found themselves met with hostility. After the 1980 acquittal of four white and Latino police officers for the murder of black businessman Arthur McDuffie, at least 18 people died in rioting and property destruction topped $100m. Fatal police shootings touched off riots in the city at three other points during that decade.

Police departments throughout the county gained a reputation for violence and corruption that intervening years have done little to diminish, with Miami Beach police famously fatally tasering teenage Colombian-American graffiti artist Israel Hernandez in 2013. That same year, a report by the US Justice Department found that City of Miami police had “engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive use of force through officer-involved shootings in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution” and that the department was tainted by “deficient tactics, improper actions by specialised units, as well as egregious delays and substantive deficiencies in deadly force investigations”.

Outside observers often remain mystified by Miami. Three years ago, the author Tom Wolfe attempted to capture it as he had 1980s New York in The Bonfire of the Vanities, and instead spewed forth a right-wing caricature titled Back to Blood that showed no grasp of the place the city has become. Such misconceptions are helped along by gaffe- and scandal-prone local politicians, whose peccadillos include everything from floating the idea to shut down all the city’s libraries to close a budget gap, to the by-now standard (for Miami) cash-for-favours schemes.

In some areas, things have gone over the top. In South Beach – once a slum for retirees and poor immigrants, now a gay mecca and nightlife hotspot – crass commercialisation has resulted in a kind of Vegas-by-the-sea ambiance, with even the famed Lincoln Road, once a redoubt of local restaurants and retailers, now housing little more than chain stores and the bewildered tourists they prey upon. The preponderance of “juniors” (a derisive term for the rich scions of Latin America’s economic elite) in the city can be somewhat off-putting, as it seems not only the language and music of that elite is being imported, but their class system, as well.

But the city has blossomed from the place that Reinaldo Arenas despised. The great Cuban poet and anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, who was during her lifetime one of the world’s foremost authorities on Afro-Cuban religion, spent the latter part of her life based in Miami, and donated her abundant collection of papers to the university here. It was home, too, for one of Haiti’s greatest poets, Félix Morisseau-Leroy, for the last 17 years of his life. And, as testament to the city’s new cultural heritage, a new major institution, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, opened next to the waters of Biscayne Bay in 2013; the Art Basel festival attracts thousands to the city every year; and the Miami Book Fair is an autumn staple of the literary calendar.

Perhaps more representative of the city than South Beach today are the northern reaches of Miami Beach, an area that is still home to many working-class residents despite spiralling property prices, where the lilting, almost Italianate sound of Argentine Spanish mixes with the caressing sounds of Brazilian Portuguese in the bodegas and on the beach. The Buenos Aires Bakery & Cafe – an establishment on Collins Avenue, only steps away from the sea – sells a variety of pastries that would make any porteño misty-eyed with nostalgia as well as several different kinds of the leafy, highly caffeinated mate beloved in South America, and does a brisk business.

When one drives south towards the Florida Keys – where the last island, Key West, is a mere 90 miles from Cuba – the county begins to descend into farmland. It was here that, in the early part of the 20th century, a Latvian-born eccentric named Edward Leedskalnin created an extraordinary structure known as the Coral Castle, out of coral-formed limestone. As he worked alone and without advanced equipment, just how Leedskalnin created his “castle” remains something of a mystery – with explanations ranging from some secret mastery of the Earth’s magnetic field to telekinesis.

Today, other dreams are played out in Miami-Dade’s fields, and exist in the imaginings of the many migrant workers who toil here, scant miles from the glittering high-rises of downtown Miami. 
Surrounded by fields of squash, okra, beans and tomatoes, the community of Homestead, despite its tropical locale, evokes the somnolent Midwestern communities of a Ray Bradbury story. Low-rise buildings, train tracks and empty playground swings greet the visitor, and in the street one hears the melange of accents and dialects from the agricultural workers here: Mexican, Guatemalan, Haitian, Jamaican.

In the offices of the immigrant support group WeCount! just off of North Krome Avenue (which shares its name with one of the US’s most infamous immigration detention centres located nearby), the connection between Homestead’s rural lushness and the city rising only a few miles away seems obvious.

“The Mexicans are the ones that put the food on Miami’s table,” says Catalina Santiago, an 18-year-old high school student who came to the US with her agricultural-worker parents from the Mexican state of Oaxaca a decade ago. “But they are always spoken of in a condescending manner.”

On the street below, where Santiago sits with her brother and a number of other immigrants, dusk falls and Homestead sees Mexican families gathering for Sunday-night dinner at restaurants such as Casita Tejas. When they rise for work early the following morning, some will be met by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and local police, who will be waiting to check their immigration status and arrest them for probable deportation if they are undocumented (as many are, a state of affairs on which Florida’s agriculture depends).

Perhaps it is impending apocalypse, natural and man-made, that makes Miami’s frivolity all the more poignant. If climate change predictions are to be believed, large parts of Miami – Miami Beach, Key Biscayne, Virginia Key – will be under water in coming years, a phenomenon helped along by the fact that many Florida politicians, including Governor Rick Scott and the aforementioned Senator Rubio, deny that climate change can be linked to human activity.

Driving home north along US1, the skyline of Miami rises above the flat land, its concrete and steel wrapped in the warmth of the tropical sunset. A city of outsiders, refugees and immigrants that – in its reflection of present-day America’s diversity – feels in many ways more “American” than the 1950s small-town Americana that some politicians and commentators are perpetually nostalgic for.