April 11. OPINION MAKERS
On this day in the year 2002, a coup d’état turned the president of a business association into the president of Venezuela.
His glory did not last long. A couple of days later, Venezuelans filling the streets reinstated the president they had elected with their votes.
Venezuela’s biggest TV and radio networks celebrated the coup, but somehow failed to cover the massive demonstrations that restored Hugo Chávez to his rightful place.
Unpleasant news is not worth reporting.
April 12. MANUFACTURING THE GUILTY PARTY
On a day like today in the year 33—a day earlier, a day later — Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross.
His judges had found him guilty of “inciting idolatry, blasphemy and abominable superstition.”
Not many centuries later, the Indians of the Americas and the heretics of Europe were found guilty of those same crimes — exactly the same ones — and in the name of Jesus of Nazareth they were punished by lash, gallows, or fire.
April 13. WE KNEW NOT HOW TO SEE YOU
In the year 2009, in the atrium of the convent of Maní in the Yucatán, forty-two Franciscan brothers held a ceremony of restitution for injuries caused to indigenous culture.
“We ask forgiveness of the Maya people, for not having understood their worldview, their religion, for denying their divinities, for not having respected their culture, for having imposed over many centuries a religion they did not understand, for having treated as satanic their religious practices, and for having said and written that these were the work of the Devil and that their idols were Satan himself in the flesh.”
Four and a half centuries before, in that very place, another Franciscan brother, Diego de Landa, had burned the Mayas’ books, and with them eight centuries of collective memory.
April 14. GRAND OR JUST PLAIN BIG?
In the year 1588 Spain’s Invincible Armada, then the largest fleet in the world, was defeated in a matter of hours.
In the year 1628 Sweden’s most powerful warship, the Vasa, also known as Invincible, sank on its maiden voyage. It never made it out of Stockholm’s harbor.
And on the night of this day in 1912, the world’s safest and most luxurious ocean liner, humbly named Titanic, hit an iceberg and went down. This floating palace had few lifeboats, a uselessly small rudder, watchmen without binoculars and warning bells that were never heard.
April 15. THE BLACK PAINTINGS
In 1828 Francisco de Goya died in exile.
Harassed by the Inquisition, he had fled to France.
On his deathbed, between incomprehensible mutterings, Goya spoke of his beloved home on the outskirts of Madrid, on the banks of the Manzanares River. There, painted on the walls, was the best of his work, his most personal.
After his death the house was sold and resold, paintings and all, until the works were finally removed from the walls and transferred onto canvases. In vain they were put up for sale at the Paris Exposition. No one wanted to see, much less buy, those ferocious prophesies of the century to come, in which grief slaughtered color and horror shamelessly revealed its raw face. The Prado Museum did not wish to buy them either, and at the beginning of 1882 they entered its halls by donation.
The “black paintings” are now among the most visited in the museum.
“I painted them for myself,” Goya said.
He did not know that he painted them for us.
April 16. THE FLAMENCO SONG
In the year 1881, Antonio Machado y Álvarez completed his anthology of flamenco songs, nine hundred couplets from the Gypsy songbook of Andalusia.
In olden days tasteless
were all the waves in the sea,
then she spit, my dark-skinned dearest
which was when they turned salty.
Girls with dark complexion
have a gaze that is so weird,
it kills more in a single hour
than death in an entire year.
The day that you were born
a piece of heaven fell to earth.
Not until you cease to live
will heaven regain its girth.
He published the book and the critics panned it. Flamenco’s cante jondo evoked their scorn, because it was the work of Gypsies. But that’s precisely why these couplets carry their music with them, in their clapping palms and in their stamping feet.
April 17. CARUSO SANG AND RAN
On this night in 1906, tenor Enrico Caruso sang Carmen at the Tivoli Opera House in San Francisco.
The ovation carried him all the way to the door of the Palace Hotel.
The master of bel canto slept poorly. As dawn was about to break, a violent tremor knocked him from his bed.
The earthquake, the worst in California history, killed more than three thousand people and demolished half the city’s homes.
Caruso started running and did not stop until he got to Rome.
April 18. KEEP AN EYE ON THIS GUY
Today in 1955 Albert Einstein died.
For twenty-two years the FBI tapped his telephone, read his mail and went through his garbage.
They spied on Einstein because he was a spy for the Russians. So said his bulky police file. The file also said he had invented a death ray and a robot that could read minds. It said Einstein was a member, collaborator or fellow traveler of thirty-four Communist front organizations between 1937 and 1954, and was honorary chair of three Communist organizations. It concluded: “It seems unlikely that a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen.”
Not even death saved him. They continued spying on him. Not the FBI, but his colleagues, men of science who sliced his brain into two hundred forty pieces and analyzed them to find an explanation for his genius.
They found nothing.
Einstein had already warned, “I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious.”
April 19. CHILDREN OF THE CLOUDS
In 1987 the king of Morocco finished building a north — south wall across the Sahara Desert, on lands that do not belong to him.
This is the longest wall in the world, exceeded only by the Great Wall of China. All along it Moroccan soldiers block the Saharawi people from entering their land.
Several times the United Nations confirmed the people of Western Sahara’s right to self-determination and called for a plebiscite to allow them to determine their own fate.
But the kingdom of Morocco has refused and continues to refuse. That refusal is a confession. By denying the vote, Morocco confesses to having stolen a country.
For forty years the Saharawi people have been waiting. They are condemned to a life sentence of anguish and nostalgia without parole.
They call themselves “children of the clouds,” because since time immemorial they have pursued the rains. They also pursue justice, which is harder to find than water in the desert.
April 20. MANUFACTURING MISTAKES