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(CNN Spanish) - Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa presented his most recent novel in Spain on Wednesday, Times Hard (Alfaguara, 2019), whose plot focuses this time on the political labyrinths of Guatemala during the Cold War era, between 1940 and 1959.
Hard times tell several stories, occurred in different historical moments, which are assembled as a puzzle "until revealing what life and politics were like in Guatemala since the democratic and reformist illusion gave way to authoritarian pressures," says the Alfaguara editorial .
In this novel, Vargas Llosa (Arequipa, 1936) recounts with fiction a series of political conspiracies that brought Carlos Castillo Armas to power in Guatemala (1954-1957) after a military coup orchestrated by the CIA to overthrow President Jacobo Árbenz, who was accused of communist, said the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature at the launch of the Book this Tuesday at Casa América, in Madrid.
- Mario Vargas Llosa receives honoris causa
Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa presented his most recent historical novel Hard Times (Alfaguara, 2019) at Casa América in Madrid, Spain, on October 9, 2019. (PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU / AFP via Getty Images)
He said that about three years ago, being in Santo Domingo at a dinner, he heard the story from a well-known journalist and writer, and, without knowing that he would write a book, he began to enter this history of political conspiracies.
"This novel has been quite mysterious to me," Vargas Llosa said about how he found the story. "It's the first time in my life that they tell me a story that left me very intrigued."
He traveled to Guatemala, began to investigate and discovered a large amount of material that also linked the Dominican Republic and the Dominican dictator Rafael Leínidas Trujillo (1891-1961), a subject that has caused the writer's fascination and whose story is told in La fiesta del Goat (2000). Vargas Llosa says that although Trujillo was not one of the cruelest dictators of the time, he was one of the most theatrical.
In his new book, the author mixed historical facts with fantasy and imagination where there were gaps, whites or controversies, to tell the story of characters narrated from fiction, although he warns that "there are basic facts that are impossible to alter."
"It's a novel. It is not a history book. It is a novel, which means that there are many elements of fiction, invention, imagination that are interwoven with historical facts, ”said the writer about the book.
Hard times is the most recent Peruvian novel after "Five Corners" in 2016 and the discreet hero of 2013, among others.
The famous writer has been awarded a large number of literary prizes, including the Critics Prize and the Romulo Gallegos International Prize (1967), the Prince of Asturias (1986), the Cervantes Prize (1994), the PEN / Nabokov (2002), and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.
Read here a fragment of the first chapter of the book:
Before
Although unknown to the general public and despite appearing very little ostentatiously in history books, probably the two most influential people in the destiny of Guatemala and, in a way, throughout Central America in the twentieth century were Edward L. Bernays and Sam Zemurray, two characters that could not be more different from each other by their origin, temperament and vocation.
Zemurray was born in 1877, not far from the Black Sea and, as he was a Jew at a time of terrible pogroms in the Russian territories, he fled to the United States, where he arrived before his fifteenth birthday from the hand of an aunt. They took refuge at a relative's house in Selma, Alabama. Edward L. Bernays also belonged to a family of Jewish emigrants but of high social and economic status and had an illustrious character in the family: his uncle Sigmund Freud. Apart from being both Jews, although not too practicing their religion, they were very different. Edward L. Bernays boasted of being something like the Father of Public Relations, a specialty that if he hadn't invented, he would take (at the expense of Guatemala) to unexpected heights, until he became the main political, social and economic weapon 20th century This would become true, although his egolatrics sometimes drove him to pathological exaggerations. Their first meeting had taken place in 1948, the year they started working together. Sam Zemurray had asked for an appointment and Bernays received him in the small office he had then in the heart of Manhattan. Probably that huge and badly dressed man, without a tie, without shaving, with a faded coat and ankle boots, at first impressed the Bernays with elegant suits, careful talking, Yardley perfumes and aristocratic ways.
"I tried to read his book Propaganda and I didn't understand much," Zemurray told the publicist as a presentation. He spoke difficult English, as if doubting each word.
"However, it is written in a very simple language, available to any literate person," Bernays forgave his life.
"It may be my fault," the man acknowledged, not bothering himself in the least. Actually, I am nothing reader. I just went to school in my childhood there in Russia and never learned English at all, as you will see. And it's worse when I write letters, they all come out full of spelling mistakes. I am more interested in action than intellectual life.
"Well, if so, I don't know what I could do for you, Mr. Zemurray," Bernays said, mock up.
"I won't waste a lot of time," the other one stopped. I run a company that brings bananas from Central America to the United States.
"The United Fruit?" Asked Bernays, surprised, examining his disastrous visitor with more interest.
"Apparently, we have a very bad reputation both in the United States and throughout Central America, that is, the countries in which we operate," Zemurray continued, shrugging his shoulders. And, apparently, you are the person who could fix that. I come to hire him to be the company's public relations director. Anyway, put the title you like best. And, to save time, also look at the salary.
Thus the relationship between these two dissimilar men had begun, the refined publicist who believed himself an academic and an intellectual, and the rude Sam Zemurray, a man who had made himself an adventurous businessman who, starting with savings of one hundred and fifty dollars , he had built a company that - although his appearance did not give him away - had made him a millionaire. He had not invented bananas, of course, but thanks to him in the United States, where very few people had eaten that exotic fruit before, it was now part of the diet of millions of Americans and was also becoming popular in Europe and other regions of the world . How had he achieved it? It was difficult to know objectively, because Sam Zemurray's life was confused with legends and myths. This primitive businessman seemed more out of an adventure book than the American industrial world. And he, who, unlike Bernays, was anything but vain, never used to talk about his life.
Throughout his travels, Zemurray had discovered the banana in the jungles of Central America and, with a happy intuition of the commercial profit he could get from that fruit, he began to take it by boat to New Orleans and other North American cities. From the beginning he had a lot of acceptance. So much that the growing demand led him to become a mere merchant in a farmer and an international banana producer. That had been the beginning of United Fruit, a company that, in the early 1950s, extended its networks through Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia and several Caribbean islands, and produced more dollars than the The vast majority of companies in the United States and even the rest of the world. This empire was, without a doubt, the work of a single man: Sam Zemurray. Now many hundreds of people depended on him.
For this he had worked from sun to sun and from moon to moon, traveling throughout Central America and the Caribbean in heroic conditions, dispute the terrain with other adventurers like him at gunpoint and slashes, sleeping in the countryside hundreds of times, devoured by the mosquitoes and contracting malarial fevers that martyred him from time to time, bribing authorities and deceiving ignorant peasants and indigenous people, and negotiating with corrupt dictators thanks to whom - taking advantage of his greed or stupidity - he had been acquiring properties that now added more hectares that a European country of good structure, creating thousands of jobs, laying railway tracks, opening ports and connecting barbarism with civilization. This was at least what Sam Zemurray said when he had to defend himself against the attacks that United Fruit received - called the Frutera and nicknamed the Octopus throughout Central America - and not only by envious people, but by the American competitors themselves, to whom In truth, he had never allowed himself to rival her in a good fight, in a region where he exercised a tyrannical monopoly in regard to the production and marketing of bananas. For this, for example, in Guatemala, absolute control had been secured of the only port the country had in the Caribbean - Puerto Barrios - of electricity and the railroad that crossed from one ocean to the other and belonged also to his company.
Despite being the antipodes, they formed a good team. Bernays helped a lot, no doubt, to improve the company's image in the United States, to make it presentable before the high political circles of Washington and to link it to the millionaires (who claimed to be aristocrats) in Boston. He had reached publicity indirectly, thanks to his good relations with all kinds of people, but above all diplomats, politicians, newspaper owners, radios and television channels, successful entrepreneurs and bankers. He was an intelligent, friendly, hardworking man, and one of his first achievements was to organize the tour of the United States of Caruso, the famous Italian singer. His way of being open and refined, his culture, his accessible ways fell well to people, as he gave the feeling of being more important and influential than he really was. Publicity and public relations existed since before he was born, of course, but Bernays had elevated that task, which all companies used but considered minor, to a high level intellectual discipline, as part of sociology, economics and politics. He gave lectures and classes in prestigious universities, published articles and books, presenting his profession as the most representative of the twentieth century, synonymous with modernity and progress. In his book Propaganda (1928) he had written this prophetic phrase by which, in a way, he would go on to posterity: «The conscious and intelligent manipulation of organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of democratic society. Those who manipulate this unknown mechanism of society constitute an invisible government that is the true power in our country ... The intelligent minority needs to make continuous and systematic use of propaganda. This thesis, which some critics had considered the denial of democracy itself, would have Bernays the opportunity to apply it very effectively in the case of Guatemala a decade after starting work as an advertising advisor for United Fruit.
His advice contributed greatly to enhance the image of the company and ensure support and influence in the political world. The Octopus had never worried about presenting its remarkable industrial and commercial work as something that benefited society in general and, in particular, the "barbarian countries" in which it operated and those that - according to Bernays' definition - were helping to get out of savagery, creating jobs for thousands of citizens who thus raised living standards and integrated modernity, progress, the twentieth century, civilization. Bernays convinced Zemurray that the company build some schools in its domains, bring Catholic priests and Protestant pastors to the plantations, build first aid infirmary and other works of this nature, grant scholarships and travel bags for students and teachers, topics that he advertised as a reliable proof of the modernizing work he carried out. At the same time, through rigorous planning, I was promoting with the help of scientists and technicians the consumption of bananas at breakfast and at all hours of the day as something essential for the health and training of healthy and sporting citizens. He was the one who brought the Brazilian singer and dancer Carmen Miranda (Miss Chiquita Banana from the shows and movies) to the United States, who would obtain enormous success with her banana bunches hats, and which in her songs promoted with extraordinary effectiveness that fruit that, thanks to those advertising efforts, was already part of American homes.
Bernays also got United Fruit closer - something that Sam Zemurray had never thought through before - to the aristocratic world of Boston and the spheres of political power. The richest of Boston not only had money and power; they also had prejudices and were generally anti-Semitic, so it was not easy for Bernays to get, for example, that Henry Cabot Lodge accepted to be part of the United Fruit Board, nor that the brothers John Foster and Allen Dulles, members of the important firm of attorneys Sullivan & Cromwell of New York, agreed to be seized of the company. Bernays knew that money opens all doors and that not even racial prejudice resists him, so he also achieved this difficult link, after the so-called October Revolution in Guatemala in 1944, when United Fruit began to feel danger. Bernays' ideas and relations would be very useful to overthrow the supposed "communist government" of Guatemala and replace it with a more democratic one, that is, more docile to his interests.
During the government period of Juan José Arévalo (1945-1950) the alarms began. Not because Professor Arévalo, who defended a confusingly idealistic "spiritual socialism," would have gotten against United Fruit. But he did pass a labor law that allowed workers and peasants to form or join unions, something that in the company domains was not allowed until then. That stopped the ears of Zemurray and the other managers. In a hot session of the Board of Directors, held in Boston, it was agreed that Edward L. Bernays would travel to Guatemala, assess the situation and future prospects and see how dangerous things were happening to the company that were happening there with the first government in history from that country out of really free elections.
L. Bernays spent two weeks in Guatemala, installed at the Panamerican Hotel, in the city center, a few steps from the Government Palace. He interviewed, using translators because he did not speak Spanish, to farmers, military, bankers, parliamentarians, policemen, foreigners in the country for years, union leaders, journalists, and, of course, US embassy officials and leaders of United Fruit Although he suffered a lot from the heat and mosquito bites, he did a good job.
In a new meeting of the Board of Directors in Boston, he presented his personal impression of what, in his opinion, was happening in Guatemala. He made his report based on notes, with the ease of a good professional and without a hint of cynicism:
"The danger of Guatemala becoming communist and becoming a beachhead for the Soviet Union to infiltrate Central America and threaten the Panama Canal is remote, and I would say that, for the moment, it does not exist," he assured them . “Very few people know in Guatemala what Marxism or communism is, not even the four cats that are called communists and that created the Clarity School to spread revolutionary ideas. That danger is unreal, although it is convenient for us to believe that it exists, especially in the United States. The real danger is of another nature. I have spoken with President Arévalo in person and with his closest collaborators. He is as anti-communist as you and as myself. It proves that the President and his supporters insisted that the new Constitution of Guatemala prohibit the existence of political parties that have international connections, have repeatedly declared that "communism is the greatest danger facing democracies" and closed the Clarity School and deported to its founders. But, as paradoxical as it may seem to them, their excessive love for democracy represents a serious threat to United Fruit. This, gentlemen, it is good to know, not to say it. »
He smiled and cast a theatrical look on all the members of the Board, some of whom smiled politely. After a brief pause, Bernays continued:
«Arévalo would like to make Guatemala a democracy, like the United States, a country that admires and has as its model. Dreamers are often dangerous, and in this sense Dr. Arévalo is. Your project does not have the slightest possibility of being carried out. How could a country of three million inhabitants become a modern democracy, seventy percent of whom are illiterate Indians who have barely left paganism, or are still in it, and where for every doctor there must be three or four shamans? In which, on the other hand, the white minority, made up of racist and exploitative landowners, despises the Indians and treats them as slaves. The military with whom I have spoken seem to also live in the middle of the nineteenth century and could strike at any moment. President Arévalo has suffered several military rebellions and managed to crush them. However. Although his efforts to make his country a modern democracy seem useless to me, any progress he makes in that field, let us not fool ourselves, would be very harmful for us. »
"They realize, don't they?" He continued, after another long pause he took to take a few sips of water. "Some examples. Arévalo has passed a labor law that allows unions to be formed in companies and farms, and authorizes workers and peasants to join them. And he has enacted an antitrust law, traced from the one in the United States. They already imagine what it would mean for United Fruit to apply such a measure to guarantee free competition: if not ruin, a serious fall in profits. These do not result only from the efficiency with which we work, the efforts and expenses we make to combat pests, clean up the land we gain to the forests to produce more bananas. Also of the monopoly that distances potential competitors from our territories and the really privileged conditions in which we work, exempt from taxes, without unions and without the risks and dangers that all that entails. The problem is not just Guatemala, a small part of our operating world. It is the contagion to the other Central American countries and Colombia if the idea of becoming "modern democracies" spreads in them. United Fruit would have to face unions, international competition, pay taxes, guarantee medical insurance and retirement to workers and their families, and be the object of hatred and envy that always thrives in prosperous and efficient companies in poor countries , and do not say if they are Americans. Danger, gentlemen, is the bad example. Not so much communism as the democratization of Guatemala. Although it probably will not materialize, the progress made in this direction would mean for us a setback and a loss. »
He fell silent and reviewed the bewildered or inquiring looks of the members of the Board. Sam Zemurray, the only one who was not wearing a tie and keeping up his informal attire with the elegant gentlemen who shared the long table where they were sitting, said:
"Well, that's the diagnosis." What is the treatment to cure the disease?
"I wanted to give them a break before continuing," Bernays joked, taking another drink of water. Now I go to the remedies, Sam. It will be long, complicated and expensive. But it will cut the root evil. And you can give United Fruit another fifty years of expansion, benefits and peace of mind.
Edward L. Bernays knew what he said. The treatment would consist of operating simultaneously on the government of the United States and the American public opinion. Neither one nor the other had the slightest idea that Guatemala existed, and less that it was a problem. That was, in principle, good. “It is we who must illustrate the government and public opinion about Guatemala, and do it in such a way that they are convinced that the problem is so serious, so serious, that it must be immediately conjured. How? Proceeding with subtlety and opportunity. Organizing things so that public opinion, decisive in a democracy, presses on the government to act, in order to curb a serious threat. Which? The same one that I have explained to you that it is not Guatemala: the Trojan horse of the Soviet Union infiltrated the backyard of the United States. How to convince public opinion that Guatemala is becoming a country in which communism is already a living reality and that, without strong action from Washington, could be the first satellite of the Soviet Union in the new world? Through the press, radio and television, the main source that informs and guides citizens both in a free country and in a slave country. We must open the eyes of the press about the danger in progress less than two hours of flight from the United States and one step away from the Panama Canal.
»All this should happen naturally, not planned or guided by anyone, and less than anyone by us, interested in the matter. The idea that Guatemala is about to pass into Soviet hands should not come from the Republican and right-wing US press, but rather from the progressive press, which the Democrats read and hear, that is, the center and the left. . It is the one that reaches the largest audience. To make the matter more credible, all that must be the work of the liberal press. »
Sam Zemurray interrupted him to ask:
"What are we going to do to convince that liberal press that it's pure shit?"
Bernays smiled and paused again. As an accomplished actor, he passed the solemn view of all the members of the Board of Directors:
"For that there is the king of public relations, that is, myself," he joked, without modesty, as if he wasted his time remembering that group of lords that the Earth was round. For that, gentlemen, I have so many friends among the owners and directors of newspapers and radios and televisions in the United States.
It would be necessary to work with stealth and skill so that the media did not feel used. Everything had to happen with the spontaneity with which nature operated its marvelous transformations, it seemed that these were "first fruits" that the free and progressive press discovered and revealed to the world. The ego of journalists had to be massaged with love, as they used to have it grown.
When Bernays finished speaking, he asked Sam Zemurray again:
"Please, don't tell us how much that joke you have described will cost us so many details." There are too many traumas for a single day.
"I won't tell you about it for now," Bernays agreed. The important thing is that you remember one thing: the company will earn much more than everything you can spend on this operation if we get for another half century that Guatemala is not the modern democracy that President Arévalo dreams of.
What Edward L. Bernays said in that memorable session of the United Fruit Board of Directors in Boston was fulfilled to the letter, confirming, incidentally, the thesis put forward by him that the twentieth century would be the advent of the advertising as the primary tool of power and the manipulation of public opinion in both democratic and authoritarian societies.
Gradually, in the final era of the government of Juan José Arévalo, but much more during the government of Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, Guatemala suddenly appeared in the American press in reports that in The New York Times or in The Washington Post , or in the weekly Time, they pointed out the growing danger that the Soviet Union was acquiring for the free world in the country through governments that, although they wanted to appear democratic in nature, were indeed infiltrated by communists, fellow travelers, useful fools, as they took measures at odds with legality, Pan-Americanism, private property, the free market, and encouraged class struggle, hatred of social division, as well as hostility towards private companies.
Newspapers and magazines from the United States that had never been interested before in Guatemala, Central America or even Latin America, thanks to Bernays' skillful efforts and relationships, began sending correspondents to Guatemala. They were housed in the Panamerican Hotel, whose bar would become little less than an international journalistic center, where they received very documented folders of the facts that confirmed those indications - the syndicalizations as a weapon of confrontation and the progressive destruction of private enterprise - and achieved interviews, scheduled or advised by Bernays, with farmers, businessmen, priests (once the archbishop himself), journalists, opposition political leaders, pastors and professionals who confirmed with detailed data the fears of a country that was gradually becoming a Soviet satellite, through which international communism intended to undermine the influence and interests of the United States throughout Latin America.
From a given moment - precisely when the government of Jacobo Árbenz initiated the Agrarian Reform in the country - Bernays' efforts with the owners and directors of newspapers and magazines were no longer necessary: it had emerged - it was the time of the Cold War - a real concern in the political, business and cultural circles of the United States, and the media themselves rushed to send correspondents to see on the spot the situation in that small nation infiltrated by communism. Apotheosis was the publication of a United Press office written by British journalist Kenneth De Courcy, announcing that the Soviet Union intended to build a submarine base in Guatemala. Life Magazine, The Herald Tribune, London's Evening Standard, Harper's Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Vision magazine (in Spanish), The Christian Science Monitor, among other publications, dedicated many pages to show, through concrete facts and testimonials , Guatemala's gradual submission to communism and the Soviet Union. It was not a conspiracy: propaganda had imposed an affable fiction on reality and it was about her that the unprepared American journalists wrote their chronicles, the vast majority of them without noticing that they were the puppets of a great puppeteer. This explains why a person as prestigious of the liberal left as Flora Lewis wrote excessive praise from the US ambassador to Guatemala, John Emil Peurifoy. It contributed greatly to that fiction becoming a reality that those were the worst years of Maccarthism and the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
When Sam Zemurray died in November 1961, he was about to turn eighty-four. Already retired from business, living in Louisiana, loaded with millions, he still had no idea that what Edward L. Bernays had planned at that remote meeting in Boston of the United Fruit Board would have been accomplished so accurately. He did not even suspect that Frutera, despite winning that war, had already begun to disintegrate and that after a few years its president would commit suicide, the company would disappear and only bad and bad memories would remain of it.
Mario Vargas Llosa
