People taking their fate into their own hands and creating a different kind of economy and no longer serving the interests of u.s investors um you know they reacted the same way they did to the cuban revolution but actually worse because the united states only invaded cuba once in 1961 and they were kicked out and since then it's just been like political and economic punishment but not actual military invasion um but in central america ronald reagan said you know we're drawing the line we're not going to let any more of these revolutions happen we're going to crush the nicaraguan revolution,
And make sure that it doesn't succeed no revolution can succeed in el salvador and guatemala i think the story you just told too is is an example of several things that come to mind first it takes a while to even provide a nutshell history of the significance of a movement like the san diego revolution you could apply that to the haitian revolution or cuban revolution or whatever it might be and so that's one of the limitations that americans have that are addicted or mostly get their information from maybe social media now but even in the past just from television news where they might get one glimpse every once in a while of a story but on the other hand it occurred to me,
Right away that uh a lot of your inspiration and like mine and many others actually comes from immigrants telling us about this and that's such an important thing that we don't learn about when we think when donald trump comes forward and talks about immigrants as and denounces them then that puts a wall up but if you live in a place like in massachusetts or in the bay area where there are these immigrants you have to come into contact with these people and if you open your heart up and listen for a few minutes they'll just tell you this whole other world which is maybe stories that our political leaders don't want us to hear absolutely,
And uh the the situation in uh nicaragua for example i grew up watching you know things like about the hostages in iran or about battles going on in the 80s just little glimpses you'd hear things like managua or granada or leon mentioned every once in a while but i didn't understand it until i met a fellow service member whose father was actually at the national palace during the attack and his remembers his father coming home with blood on his shirt and he had he gave me omar cabeza's book fired from the mountain and he had a very balanced view of it even though his family left as a result of the san diego revolution there he had a good balanced view of it and it took talking to an immigrant for me to understand that,
You have that book which is a personalized account of the san diego revolution and then tom walker is a friend of mine he lives just down the road as well he's been retired for a number of years but but talking to people is such an important part of this and if we don't talk then we can't really learn anything well that's also why i decided i had to study history and hope that um by teaching history i can kind of get past and yeah it's not just social media it's what you read every single day i mean i read social media but i also i'm old i still read a paper newspaper but you know the promotion of stereotypes and cold war ideologies it's all there even in the liberal newspaper that i read the boston globe um there's so many articles i just can't even bear to read because they're just repeating the same stereotypes,
Cold war stereotypes and i feel like my students don't even know that the cold war ended because they learned about it they didn't really learn that it ended and they're still hearing about the evil communists everywhere out to get us so why should they even think that it ever ended or as you point out in your latest book too that people think about the cold war as something that was kind of like a hiatus war between the soviets and the americans but really the fighting and the dying is taking place in the developing world and in a massive way too you mentioned the um the line uh nicaragua vencio el salvador vincera and the first time i heard that was from the band from murasan los toros de and they have that song where they begin with that,
I think it's called todo central america and it's all about you know just the the kind of revolutionary solidarity and there's no mention of communism in there or the cubans in fact they even say no somos cubanos you know we're not cubans we're central americans trying to to change things uh not really even denouncing the united states and their music very much just trying to say you know let us live and it shows the the the musical aspect the cultural elements like those like the you know godoy brothers in nicaragua too those are just examples of of the multi-dimensional uh you know aspects of these revolutionary movements they're they they aren't spearheads of the of moscow yeah i mean that's something that i think is really obvious the minute you set foot in latin america,
That you know everything you thought about the cold war was wrong and i mean i even remember that feeling when i went to cuba for the first time in 1994 um and i thought well you know i know central america had nothing to do with the user but cuba's different cuba really uh and when i landed in cuba and like started getting to know and you know i lived there for a semester uh it's like wow cuba's a caribbean country like that even with all my study that hadn't like broken through the cold war imagery that i had built up on on cuba like here i am in the caribbean i am not is it right expect to see russian tanks or something like that well of course it's after that too but uh but maybe a uh yeah like a like a totalitarian dictatorship you don't see there,
Yeah cuban culture is rich the the people are talking about other things um and uh very tied in also with with us uh politics and culture this uh we just uh interviewed ade ferrer about her recent book on cuba a couple hours ago i had a great talk with her but same kind of thing too the the perceptions are completely different than what you actually see there so this is something that i think a lot of people don't understand too is that even though there are seven countries in central america when we think about the wars in central america were really primarily or wars and oppression dictatorship u.s influence we tend to focus on three or four different ones can you talk about why you chose to focus on those,
Well so i choose to focus on nicaragua el salvador guatemala and honduras um and so belize is a central american country that was still a british colony at the time and british colony the united states doesn't really invade british colonies until after the british leave like grenada in 1983 um but the united states doesn't like to take on um powerful enemies they only like to take on you know weak poor enemies that they believe they can crush easily um only kidding and costa rica in many ways um had a different historical trajectory um and of course panama also had a very different historical trajectory from the rest of central america um but so nicaragua guatemala and el salvador is where the revolutions were taking place in the 1970s and honduras although there was no revolutionary movement going on there became kind of the unsinkable aircraft carrier for u.s policy,
So basically all of honduras was turned into a us military base so from the perspective of the united states um and from the perspective of revolutionary movements for social change those are the four countries that are kind of at the center of what's going on in central america though that's where the united states is focusing its um military political and economic involvement those are the countries that are in the news every day and and those are the countries where the with the real impact of both revolutions and counter revolutions are being most strongly felt and do you think there are reasons i mean there's all kinds of political discussions or historical um discussions about what makes those countries different too then costa rica for example costa rica kind of stands out as this shining democracy in some ways versus a place like nicaragua or guatemala or el salvador or honduras.
Post a Comment