Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

We cannot renounce our consciousness of any of these great accomplishments of literature. García Márquez certainly does not give up as he finally integrates his American imagination and his universal imagination in the essential, the artificial, the conventional, the naturally named chronicle of Macondo. Deciphered by several members of the Buendía family, this chronicle is the story of their lives and the prediction that they would spend their lives trying to decipher the chronicle: the lives: the world. Reading and living thus become coexistent; by the same token, so do listening and writing. Aureliano Babilonia, the last male heir of the Buendías, deciphers the instant he is living; he deciphers as he lives it; he prophesies himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the manuscript: as if he were seeing himself in a talking mirror.

This is a novel. A novel is something that is written. A novel is something that is read. A novel is something that is heard. We must do this so that reality can be remembered. The names in a novel are times and places in the present. There is no other way of truly knowing the relationship between things. The alternative is silence. The alternative is death.

Delivered as the second Allison Peers Lecture

University of Liverpool, March 13, 1987

Some time ago, I was traveling in the state of Morelos in central Mexico, looking for the birthplace of Emiliano Zapata, the village of Anenecuilco. I stopped and asked a campesino, a laborer of the fields, how far it was to that village. He answered: “If you had left at daybreak, you would be there now.” This man had an internal clock which marked his own time and that of his culture. For the clocks of all men and women, of all civilizations, are not set at the same hour. One of the wonders of our menaced globe is the variety of its experiences, its memories, and its desire. Any attempt to impose a uniform politics on this diversity is like a prelude to death.

Lech Walesa is a man who started out at daybreak, at the hour when the history of Poland demanded that the people of Poland act to solve the problems that a repressive government and a hollow party no longer knew how to solve. We in Latin America who have practiced solidarity with Solidarity salute Lech Walesa today. The honor done to me by this great center of learning, Harvard University, is augmented by the circumstances in which I receive it. I accept this honor as a citizen of Mexico, and as a writer from Latin America.

Let me speak to you as such. As a Mexican first. The daybreak of a movement of social and political renewal cannot be set by calendars other than those of the people involved. Revolutions cannot be exported. With Walesa and Solidarity, it was the internal clock of the people of Poland that struck the morning hour. So it has always been: with the people of Massachusetts in 1776; with the people of my country during our revolutionary experience; with the people of Central America in the hour we are all living. The dawn of revolution reveals the total history of a community. This is a self-knowledge that a society cannot be deprived of without grave consequences.

The Experience of Mexico

The Mexican Revolution was the object of constant harassment, pressures, menaces, boycotts, and even a couple of armed interventions between 1910 and 1932. It was extremely difficult for the United States administrations of the time to deal with violent and rapid change on the southern border of your country. Calvin Coolidge convened both houses of Congress in 1927 and — talkative for once — denounced Mexico as the source of “Bolshevik” subversion in Central America. This set the scene for the third invasion of Nicaragua by U.S. Marines in this century. We were the first domino. But precisely because of our revolutionary policies (favoring agrarian reform, secular education, collective bargaining, and recovery of natural resources) — all of them opposed by the successive governments in Washington, from Taft to Hoover — Mexico became a modern, contradictory, self-knowing, and self-questioning nation. By the way, she also became the third-largest customer of the United States in the world — and your principal supplier of foreign oil.

The revolution did not make an instant democracy out of my country. But the first revolutionary government, that of Francisco I. Madero, was the most democratic regime we have ever had: Madero respected free elections, a free press, and an unfettered congress. Significantly, Madero was promptly overthrown by a conspiracy of the American ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, and a group of reactionary generals.

So, before becoming a democracy, Mexico first had to become a nation. What the revolution gave us all was the totality of our history and the possibility of a culture. “The revolution,” wrote my compatriot, the great poet Octavio Paz, “is a sudden immersion of Mexico in its own being. In the revolutionary explosion … each Mexican … finally recognizes, in a mortal embrace, the other Mexican.” Paz himself, Diego Rivera and Carlos Chávez, Mariano Azuela and José Clemente Orozco, Juan Rulfo and Rufino Tamayo: we all exist and work because of the revolutionary experience of our country. How can we stand by as this experience is denied, through ignorance and arrogance, to other people, our brothers, in Central America and the Caribbean?

A great statesman is a pragmatic idealist. Franklin D. Roosevelt had the political imagination and the diplomatic will to respect Mexico when President Lázaro Cárdenas (in the culminating act of the Mexican Revolution) expropriated the nation’s oil resources in 1938. Instead of menacing, sanctioning, or invading, Roosevelt negotiated. He did not try to beat history. He joined it. Will no one in this country imitate him today? The lessons applicable to the current situation in Latin America are inscribed in the history — the very difficult history — of Mexican-American relations. Why have they not been learned?

Against Intervention

In today’s world, intervention evokes a fearful symmetry. As the United States feels itself authorized to intervene in Central America to put out a fire in your front yard — I’m delighted that we have been promoted from the traditional status of back yard — then the Soviet Union also feels authorized to play the fireman in all of its front and back yards. Intervention damages the fabric of a nation, the chance of resurrecting its history, the wholeness of its cultural identity.

I have witnessed two such examples of wholesale corruption by intervention in my lifetime. One was in Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1968. I was there then to support my friends the writers, students, and statesmen of the Prague Spring. I heard them give thanks, at least, for their few months of freedom as night fell once more upon them: the night of Kafka, where nothing is remembered but nothing is forgiven.

The other time was in Guatemala in 1954, when the democratically elected government was overthrown by a mercenary invasion openly backed by the CIA. The political process of reform and self-recognition in Guatemala was brutally interrupted to no one’s benefit. Guatemala was condemned to a vicious circle of repression that continues to this day. John Foster Dulles proclaimed this “a glorious victory for democracy.” This is the high noon of Pollyanna: everything is forgiven because everything is forgotten.

Intervention is denned as the actions of the paramount regional power against a smaller state within its so-called sphere of influence. Intervention is defined by its victims. But the difference between the actions of the Soviet Union and the United States in their respective spheres of influence is that the Soviet regime is a tyranny and you are a democracy. Yet more and more, over the past two years, I have heard North Americans in responsible positions speak of not caring whether the United States is loved, but whether it is feared; not whether the rights of others are respected, but whether its own strategic interests are defended. These are inclinations that we have come to associate with the brutal diplomacy of the Soviet Union.