History and the guest of stone
By
Luis Sexto
History,
like Monterroso’s “The
Dinosaur”,
is still there. Not even the Pharisees, who tried to stone the
prostitute for her sexual liberties, were able to steer away Jesus’
stare. History is obstinate; it is devoid of compromises. And like
the ancients, it reminds you when someone pretends to forget:
Scripsi,
scripsi.
In other words: What is written, written it is.
And
what I have just said has been said because some readers have asked
that I continue my previous article where I speak of the paradisiacal
tale where certain story tellers want to return to the Cuba of 1959.
And I made reference to the grandfather of a family with a compounded
last name — who some say was derived from a form of heralded
readjustment to conjugate ancestry with money — who was one of the
attorneys who, on behalf of the United Fruit Company, applied
doubtful legal techniques and exercised political influence to work
around what was articulated in the recently approved Constitution of
1940, so often cited and praised so insistently in Miami that it
might even scare history. And this drives us to ask — if so many are
endeared and devoted to this fundamentally progressive law and
guarantor of rights and liberties — if they were capable of
complying by it when they dominated and lived as monarchs and,
mostly, if they would be capable of complying by it if someday — God
willing, hopefully not — they reestablish their productive alliance
with their old power in Cuba?
Of
course, I must clarify that I have not become a necrophiliac. In
aphoristic Latin construction, the dead, dead are. Getting back to
what I was saying, complying with the request to confirm the
historical news that denies the irreducible vocation for liberty and
democracy of Miami’s Diaz-Balart family. In effect, Rafael
Diaz-Balart, father of his son of the same name and grandfather of
his grandchildren, and friend of Fulgencio Batista — of Banes, which
is also under fire today, shaken with the powder of an unhealthy and
damned history — served as an attorney for the United Fruit Company,
a company with so much land in Cuba at the beginning of 1959, that it
would not fit in all the ears and fingernails of all the North
Americans: 8,153 caballerias
(a unit of land: more than 33 acres per caballeria)
or the equivalent of 107,619 hectares of land, according to the
International System of Measurements.
The
Constitution of 1940, a very advanced legal body for its time and
linked to Marti’s thoughts on liberation and justice, was
articulated during the concentration of popular forces and other
progressive elements of the national political spectrum years after
the overthrow of General Machado and at the beginning of the Second
World War. The times, seen in those terms, favored the mix of
tendencies and persons. And they built, not without polemics, a magna
carta which included even the prohibition of large estates. And, as
we know, large estates continued growing throughout Cuban territory
in disregard of a fundamental law that dictated what nobody made
happen, because no government ever recommended how to legislate or
codify laws and regulations so that the Constitution may exercise its
precepts. In other words, finding the subterfuges and “making the
adjustments” which would destine her to become a museum piece, was
the job of the attorneys of the large landholding companies. And in
that campaign, Diaz-Balart stood out. If by coincidence the archives
of “Mamita Yunai” — used as title for his book on the United
Fruit Company by the Costa Rican writer Carlos Luis Fallas — were
burned, in Cuban libraries today there are books and statistics that
remind Cubans that the dinosaur of oppression and exploitation still
exists.
But
so that the crime against Cuba be more evident, almost unpardonable,
let’s look back to 1899, during the first few months of the
island’s occupation by the U.S. Army. Let’s look at the
instruments established by the inspectors to facilitate the transfer
of Cuban land to properties belonging to U.S. companies: Order 34,
which permitted the acquisition or expropriation of necessary lands
to lay down train lines; and 62, which, with the pretext of
regulating the divisions of common properties, facilitated their sale
to the major North American companies. And they bought and
monopolized land; the most fertile, although not the most costly. A
notary protocol of 1905 perpetuated a buy-sell order in the north of
the then province of Oriente. Look at the fundamental data: Buyer:
Nipe Bay Company, a subsidiary of the United Fruit Company. Area:
3,713 caballerias
or more than 49,000 hectares. Total
sale price: $100! And this occurred two years after Don Manuel
Sanguilly, the patrician with the hard profile reminiscent of marble
Greek statues, proposed unsuccessfully proposed a law which
prohibited the sale of land to foreigners in the Congress of the
republic and tied to the Platt Amendment.
We
would have to laugh at the sale price: the ridiculous generates
laughter among the spectators. But it was a tragic act. And Don
Rafael Diaz-Balart, a lawyer for United in the Banes Division and
ex-mayor of that town, defended those same fraudulent buyers on Aug.
9, 1940, in a memo requested by Mr. E.S. Walker, United Fruit Company
administrator. It is tedious and obviously long. Briefly, as an
example, I will cite the lawyer’s recommendations regarding Article
66. He suggests: “take on a day’s work of eight hours and the
work-week as 44 hours, paid as 48. I advise that pressure be applied
to defeat it.” Regarding Article 77: “This precept concedes the
right to strike and work stoppage. I believe that one like the other
should be suppressed.” Article 90: “This precept is of importance
to the Company which owns great extensions of land in this province.
It is the death sentence for large estates, because it ‘prohibits
them’. … I recommend that we modify it. It is very dangerous for
the Company to allow such a precept to remain.”
Top
officials of the United Fruit Company considered that Diaz-Balart’s
top virtue was his sagacity and usefulness when manipulating
political relationships. And in that role they used him considering
his friendship with the then president Batista, according to sources
cited in the book, “United
Fruit Company: A Case of Imperialist Domain in Cuba”,
published in 1976 by the Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, in Havana.
The constitutional precepts, of course, were not countermanded but
remained in the limbo of the untouchable, the inapplicable, thanks
perhaps to the political abilities of one of the company’s lawyers,
together with other jurists and resources like bribes. Like this they
were never able to accomplish what Diaz-Balart qualified as the
“pompous declaration of death” of the large estates in the 1940
Constitution.
Is
there is a need for anything else to judge those times and some of
its dignitaries? Is there a need, in fact, to justify the agrarian
reform of 1959? History is not erased like a dream. When we awake, it
is still there.
Luis
Sexto, journalist and winner of the Jose Marti Journalism Award for
2009, is a member of the Progreso Weekly/Semanal staff.
