‘Uruguay must crow for the eggs it produces’

‘We can open up, but not until we’re good and ready,’ says President-elect Pepe Mujica of Uruguay

An interview with Hamlet Hermann

By Elíades Acosta Matos

Nobody would believe that the forceful, lucid and combative man I’m interviewing on a terrace of the Hotel Nacional in Havana is 75 years old and has led a life full of danger. And nobody would suspect, when hearing him express his ideas with a most orthodox academic conciseness, that what makes him really proud is his background as a baseball player, not that he obtained the most important literary awards in the Dominican Republic, his native land, or that he is often introduced in public as one of the two guerrillas who survived the feat accomplished by Colonel Caamaño.

Hamlet Hermann has come to Cuba once again, before the year is over. He has been happy, surrounded by old friends, and has left behind a wake of gratitude and sympathy among the fortunate people who attended one of the two presentations of his most recent book (he gets seriously offended when someone refers to it as his “last” book) titled “The Missing Link: The Provisional Government 1965-66.”

I have seen him embrace some brilliant journalists, his comrades in early days, and joke uproariously with Silvio Rodríguez and Vicente Feliú. This is the man with whom I chat this warm morning in December, among Japanese tourists and hotel employees at work, birds singing in the background and the same shining sea he sees in his island, the other island, when he walks down the seaside boulevard, the other seaside boulevard.

The topic is Uruguay and Pepe Mujica, the newly elected president, to whom Hermann is linked by a friendship that began in the hubbub of the continental revolution in those mythical years when Fidel said that the duty of every revolutionary was precisely to make revolution.

“One never knows where that type of relation begins,” he tells me. “For sure, it was in Cuba. I came to Cuba in 1970 and my life changed. We first made contact with Colonel Caamaño during the training for the guerrilla uprising. Because we knew many things, we exchanged experiences. At that time, the Tupamaros were not understood, I can tell you that. We now talk about them as the most creative and wonderful people, but certain sectors didn’t understand them at the time. We did understand them, that is, those of us who were preparing for the armed struggle did understand them, and we admired them for their creativity ever since.

“What I’m trying to say is that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Tupamaros were not understood as a project for the future. Those of us who were in the same situation were accused of being foquistas – ‘focalists.’ That was the price paid by those of us who sat on the barbecue, I mean, those of us who risked our skin and were willing to combat the dictatorships. We were always criticized by those who made a living from theoretical analysis.

“Well, ‘focalists’ was the label most applied then. The Cuban revolutionary government itself was accused of being ‘focalist,’ and we were very pleased to be called that, because when you’re willing to sit on the barbecue, I respect that. But the Tupamaros got no respect from the traditional parties, those social-democratic groups that, at the end, turned out to be allies of the right.

“The first relationship I remember was with the family of Andrés Cultelli. As it happens, a public square in their honor was recently inaugurated in Montevideo. He was a high-ranking Tupamaro leader who had to go abroad. A very worthwhile man was Andrés. He died some years ago. Today, we realize that the Tupamaros remain the most lucid, the most creative. That Broad Front presided by Tabaré Vázquez – now by Pepe Mujica – guaranteed that we would have a decade of leftist governments in Uruguay.

“One of the most interesting things about the Tupamaros (and sometimes I get confused and say Mujica because they’re one and the same) is that they came out of prison – the worst prisons anyone could inhabit – without any resentment. That’s what’s admirable in someone like Raúl Sendic, who came out, all broken up, from cells that were more like wells. They had been buried there, the nine hostages of the dictatorship, among them Mujica, ‘Pugface’ Huidobro [Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro], and Julio Marenales. Those men are still around and on the front line, without any regrets, with a political culture and education that many of us envy.

“If we read the interviews, the books published with interviews with Pepe Mujica, we have to reach the inevitable conclusion that he is the most lucid politician in Latin America at this time. In other words, he has a heterodox focus, a focus that’s completely different from what is being posited. But he does it with a logic that fascinates me, in the sense of a spell, of witchcraft.

“There are things about Mujica that I love, Pepe’s charming statements, like, when he says that the greatest danger we’ll have in government will be to navigate by sail, to be pushed by the wind. ‘We have to repair the engine, so we can take the course that best suits us, the course we select,’ he says. Man, that’s something you’ve got to respect.

“The other factor that also fascinates me is his interest in the infrastructure. He has proclaimed himself as the relay man for Tabaré Vázquez’s government and he says ‘No, there will be no changes here. This is Tabaré’s government, improved and expanded.’ I also like his interest in energy, transport, communications. When he talks about that, he says ‘But first, culture. We can do everything through technology and infrastructure, but if we don’t support culture, if we don’t create culture, if we don’t lay down the foundations for culture, we cannot maintain what we’ve built.

“And that’s pure genius, the way he focuses. While everybody else is worried about productivity, he is worried about culture. So he says, ‘Intellectuals should not be put to work in bureaucratic posts. Let them create. I wouldn’t want Eduardo Galeano in a ministry, no. Let him be a critic, let him look at things from the outside, tell us what we’re doing wrong, tell us from his creative point of view.’ In other words, that attitude is what makes me consider Pepe Mujica as the most lucid politician in Latin America.

“There are some leftist groups that refuse to accept the Broad Front. Let us not forget that there are extremists from the right and the left. And when Pepe says, for instance, that everybody, all the kids must be taught to speak English, and the far-leftists tell him that English is the language of imperialism, he answers, no, English is the language the Chinese use to communicate with the world.”

I ask Hermann what Mujica is like, as a human being. He smiles slyly, as someone who’s going to talk about a street-corner pal, a teenage buddy.

“He’s both tame and wild, because he says anything that comes to his mind. But he says it sincerely, and many people say ‘No, because he improvised.’ No, no, no, Pepe has spent too many years in this to improvise. Nobody who has been elected president of a country can improvise about electric power, for example, or water in a country like Uruguay that is sitting on the Guaraní aquifer.

“One accomplishment of the Broad Front, while Tabaré Vázquez was president, was to conduct the referenda that kept the water and power from going into private hands. It was a national vote that said ‘the water is ours, the energy is ours,’ at a time when French, German, and American companies were trying to take over the water in the Guaraní aquifer so they could then sell it back to us in little bottles.

“It struck me that in Montevideo people can drink water from a tap. Do you know how meaningful it is to open a tap and drink the water that comes out? In New York hotel bathrooms you always find a sign that says ‘Don’t drink the water; it’s not potable.’ You can bathe in it but not drink it. However, in Uruguay, you can drink the tap water. It looks simple, but it’s symbolic. The water is theirs, the water is pure; nobody can use it for trade.”

Hamlet Hermann has been won over by the participation of young people in the Uruguayan process. He knows the future of any political project hinges on the youth.

“Look, there is youthful participation in everything. Two things impressed me the most about young people in Uruguay. One is their active participation in the electoral process. The other is that they’re smoking a lot, so much so that they seem like Cubans, like Spaniards. There is much youthful participation. They’re very enthusiastic and take things seriously.”

I ask him, how did a Tupamaro historic leader, a partisan even before the armed struggle, adjust his way of looking at the world, his political program, to the dynamics of elections, to the methods of the masses, to the political methods? His answer is convincing.

“Let’s start with Raúl Sendic,” he states with conviction. “When they came out of prison, El Rufo said that they had to work in the Broad Front. Some people quit the struggle, saying ‘No, no, no, I didn’t spend 14 years in prison to link up with people who don’t think like we do.’ Sendic told them that the military apparatus no longer worked. One thing he always repeated was that, in the early days, the intention of the Tupamaros was to be a military apparatus that could serve all the political organizations. But that didn’t work out. Reality changed their course and later they unwittingly became a political party.

“Actually, when you see Pepe Mujica in that situation, he is repeating Sendic’s words, he is going back to the Genesis, to the origins set down by Sendic, which was the way the Movement ought to be, in other words, they can be a force but must have the mentality of the Broad Front. Mujica, very lucid; Marenales, brilliant.

“Above all, there is something impressive: the modesty, the humility. Listen, those people are so honest! It is not the arrogance others show, the haughtiness of the bureaucrat, none of that. That’s what carried them to victory: Sendic’s original thoughts at the dawn of the Movement. And that mentality carried over to today, when they have the power and have to cling to the experiences lived during Tabaré Vázquez’s administration.”

The inevitable question comes up, about the future relations of Mujica’s brand-new government with the United States, Cuba, Venezuela and other countries in the region.

“We’ll have to watch the United States closely during this upswing the right is having in Latin America,” Hermann predicts. “The difference is that in Uruguay, the Whites and the Reds are stampeding. The only force that can regroup the right is the United States, but that’s going to take time. I think Pepe will have the advantage. The rightists have become so disarticulated, so beaten up, without control of Congress, without control of the executive power, that the U.S. will have to work very hard.”

As to the friendly countries, “we would need communication. I believe that Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil should be those resonating boxes, I mean, Uruguay is very far from us, and it’s a good thing that it isn’t like Mexico – ‘so far from God and so close to the United States.’ So, Uruguay has to work very seriously on communication, it has to crow for the eggs it produces. I think that’s basic, so the example may spread.

“Events will determine how best to do this, but I think that Pepe’s logic has to be disseminated with support from Venezuela, Cuba and those countries that have well-oiled mechanisms for that. Uruguay needs the ALBA, even to unify opinions. I think that Pepe can be a magnificent guide in this sense for the countries of the ALBA, I mean, by giving more importance to culture and also to open Uruguay.

“Pepe has this excellent saying: ‘We can open up, but not until we’re good and ready, because if we’re not, they’ll mop the floor with us.’ That’s folk wisdom. I think it could be a push forward, if it’s correctly used. If Uruguay manages for Pepe to reach out through the media, through the books, the news media, a good news service that allows us to learn about his work, that would be a great contribution, something that we in the Latin American left badly need.”

Hamlet Hermann shakes and his eyes shine as he speaks the last words of this interview. I surmise that he’s settling accounts with the criminals of the past, with those who persecuted and tortured the most generous and idealistic young men in a whole generation of Latin Americans yet at the end could not prevent what we have just seen in Uruguay.

“What’s interesting – as the case of the Tupamaros demonstrates – is that that criminal, brutal and absurd imprisonment they suffered took them back to their origins. That’s how Raúl Sendic interpreted it: that suffering took them back to their origins. I believe it did. Unknowingly and unwittingly, the dictatorships of the past have done a great favor to the revolutionary thinking of Latin America.”

Elíades Acosta Matos, philosopher, doctor in political sciences, and writer, is a member of the Progreso Weekly/Semanal team.