To the Liberator, the best interpreter of the Juan Bimba of all times, until his death on a day like today, December 17, 1830.
I share with you the first part of the last editorial of the year 1936 in the Weekly Fantoches, signed by Leoncio Martinez (Leo), under the title, “Under a new sign”:
“Andrés Eloy Blanco, during his years of captivity in Puerto Cabello, wrote a book of verses, “Baedeker 2000”, which is a song of hope to the Venezuela of his best desires, of his noblest yearnings. Through the pages of this book one does not discover, not even by the slightest suggestion, the tragedy that the poet and hundreds of his companions were living at the time it was written. Just at the end, a succinct note indicates that the book was born “in the pits of the Liberator Castle” from such and such a date.
“Baedeker 2000”, exudes tenderness, humanity, humanity, that feeling the poet wanted to produce. And he goes so far that in one of the poems he presents the “Human Man” as the most glorious conquest of the evolved Venezuela.
Sense, humanitarian love (love your neighbor as yourself!) always lacking in this unfortunate country. No other way to explain the chain of crimes that have marked the passage of the Venezuelan tyrannies. Some committed them and others remained insensitive, indifferent to them.
Perhaps the most revealing symptom that Venezuela has entered a new path is a series of governmental acts that could only have been born in hearts inclined towards the good, in chests where love of neighbor finds a propitious nest.
It begins with the throwing of crickets into the sea. It is the hands of prisoners who fulfill the task of relieving the earth of that cruel burden. Afterwards, the den of martyrdom, symbol of its time, “La Rotunda”, disappears after a long and painful demolition...” (1)
The first year of Venezuela without the tyrant Juan Vicente Gómez came to an end at that time, with a series of acts with the explicit symbolism of not falling into the same hole or stumbling over the same stone again. Significant in that year was the act of throwing the crickets into the sea in Puerto Cabello, with the words of the Poet of the People, Andrés Eloy Blanco, which all Venezuelans of good will have to repeat, repeat and repeat now, so that future generations will understand that we cannot go back more than 100 years, as we have done with the criminals who are still in power:
“We have thrown the crickets from our feet into the sea. Now let us go to the schools to remove the crickets from our people's heads, because ignorance is the road to tyranny. We have cast the crickets into the sea. And cursed is the man who tries to make them again and put a ring in the flesh of a son of Venezuela” (2) (emphasis added).
And I repeat: “And cursed is the man who tries to manufacture them again and put a ring in the flesh of a son of Venezuela”. Cursed infinite times, now more than ever! And cursed because the teaching is clear: “ignorance is the road to tyranny”. Please repeat it to your children and grandchildren ad nauseam, especially if they are children and young people.
But no matter how much justice we may obtain inside or outside the country, after this destructive cycle is over, there will always remain the scars of those who have lived through this infamy. The families who had a family member left to die in a dungeon, who had a family member disappeared, tortured and killed in prison.
But God in his infinite wisdom sent us an extraordinary Venezuelan, whose work transcends all times, Andrés Eloy Blanco, who even while locked up in the Castle of Puerto Cabello, wrote Baedeker 2000, which, as Leo says, “is a song of hope to the Venezuela of his best desires, of his noblest yearnings” impregnated with humanity and without hatred in his heart. But, will those who will have the responsibility of rebuilding the country morally be able to have the humanity of the poet? It is a difficult question to answer, because it has been and still is too much what they are doing not to leave. But there can be no doubt that there will be justice.
In that den that was the Castle of Puerto Cabello, he described, from that moment and forever, the profile of our people, personifying it in a single figure known as Juan Bimba. “Juan Bimba” is the poem that describes the essence of Venezuelanness, and who is now being subjected to prison and torture in El Rodeo, in El Helicoide, in La Tumba, in the DGCIM barracks and in all those open and hidden dungeons, where the human rights of civilians and military are being violated. And I would be doing you a disservice if I did not bring Juan Bimba himself here, so that those torturers at least know whose life they are taking away:
JUAN BIMBA, Andrés Eloy Blanco, Baedeker 2000, 1930.
“Juan Bimba / is the man of the people of Venezuela / His name is Pedro Ruiz, / Juan Álvarez, / Natividad Rojas, / but his name is Juan Bimba // He is a good person; / he can kill but he never steals / His malice is not evil, / it is born of the evil that has been done / and that's why Juan Bimba says everything half-heartedly, / he gives half a look at things, / he chews his tobacco and his truth and swallows. // His beauty / shows in that look that is all of him, / that candorous look, / with its point of mockery, / and its point of fright / and its point of foolishness / and its point of desolation / and its point of threat.
His joy is regulated / like traffic / and when he laughs at a whole / it is with the permission of the government. / He had twenty horses; / the Revolution took ten; / to pursue it, / the Government took the other ten; / and when he had nothing / they took him. // He fights for a man he has never seen; / he has fever, / hunger, / fatigue, / and does not know how to cry. // When he becomes Commissioner / he takes off the name of Juan Bimba / and takes degrees / up to the honesty of General. / He goes through the streets and fields / in a land sick of heroism, / seeing statues, / greeting with his half smile / the bronze generals, / the marble colonels.
He has a vague idea / of Independence and Federation; / he loves Paez, without knowing why / -perhaps subconsciousness of affinity-; / he loves Bolivar / with vague fear of not / recognizing him; / he loves the foreigner; / he is not fanatical, -he gets as much / from God as from the Federation-; / he has wood for a great people, / he suffers, in color of people the chloasma of the chief. // And in his honorable hand / the flag is a vitiligo. // However, he hates / only the Civil Chief. / We have told him that he is the owner of this land / And he says not to talk to him about politics. / He approaches the book and caresses its back, / As if he were afraid of scaring away a horse. // One day he will be bewitch it; that day / The statues will greet him. // 2,000: Juan Bimba and his cousin Juan Shonfeld / go to the field. / They laugh loudly; deep in their laughter / they go to look for the key to the land / They come from the great rodeo; under their long ropes / the herd of bronze horses has fallen.” (3)
In the words of Andrés Eloy Blanco himself, Juan Bimba is “patient, enduring, malicious, in a word, exploited, like the boy who always allows himself to be ‘colear la parada por los vivos’. Our people have been a Juan Bimba for the caudillos. Now that he is incorporated, he will not lose his innocence, his candor of honest people; he will continue being Juan Bimba, name with which he suffered; he will not rob anyone; he will not be a “living”; he will be Juan Bimba, to always remember the nickname of his blackest hours and will magnify that naive name. And he will always have the pride of showing as his name the name of the exploited, of the innocent, of the recruited...” (4)
But very special are the following passages that look premonitory: “We have told him that he is the owner of this land / and he says not to talk to him about politics / He approaches the book and caresses its back, / as if he were afraid of frightening a horse / One day he will be bewitch it; that day / the statues will greet him”.
Juan Bimba, being the owner of the country, says he does not want to know about politics, and it is interesting because they have 25 years owning their land. And in the XXI century itself, Juan Bimba, paradoxically, was already able to bridle the horse, being able to ride it because of the education that democracy gave him, and having mastered the knowledge, he woke up to politics. In many years he remained naive (fortunately!) but now he has been educated. Very soon, the tyrants of today will realize, at the precise moment, that not only the statues will greet him, as predicted by the Poet of the People, but they will be at his command to be pulled down...
Caracas, December 17, 2024
Blog:
TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email:
luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
(1)
Weekly Fantoches, year XIV, No. 569, December 31, 1936, Page 3, Editorial.
(2)
Andrés Eloy Blanco, February 1st, 1936, Puerto Cabello. Part of the speech in the
Act of throwing the crickets of the Gomecista dictatorship into the sea.
(3)
Andres Eloy Blanco, His best poems, Venezuelan Book Festival, Basic Library of
Venezuelan Culture, Venezuelan Popular Editions, C.A.
(4)
Andrés Eloy Blanco, Weekly Fantoches, Letter of Andrés Eloy Blanco, year XIV,
No. 565, December 5, 1936, Page 19.
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