Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

My friend Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, makes a plea for “the small cultures” from the wounded heart of Central Europe. I have tried to echo it today from the convulsed heart of Latin America. Politicians will disappear. The United States and Latin America will remain. What sort of neighbors will you have? What sort of neighbors will we have? That will depend on the quality of our memory and also of our imagination.

“If we had started out at daybreak, we would be there now.” Our times have not coincided. Your daybreak came quickly. Our night has been long. But we can overcome the distance between our times if we can both recognize that the true duration of the human heart is in the present, this present in which we remember and we desire; this present where our past and our future are one.

Reality is not the product of an ideological phantasm. It is the result of history. And history is something we have created ourselves. We are thus responsible for our history. No one was present in the past. But there is no living present with a dead past. No one has been present in the future. But there is no living present without the imagination of a better world. We both made the history of this hemisphere. We must both remember it. We must both imagine it.

We need your memory and your imagination or ours shall never be complete. You need our memory to redeem your past, and our imagination to complete your future. We may be here on this hemisphere for a long time. Let us remember one another. Let us respect one another. Let us walk together outside the night of repression and hunger and intervention, even if for you the sun is at high noon and for us at a quarter to twelve.

June 7, 1983

* In the winter of 1979, Kundera was deprived of his citizenship by the Prague government. He now resides in Paris, where he teaches at the Sorbonne.

* In 1985, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Uruguay formed a support group to the original Contadora Four. These eight nations account for 80 percent of the resources, population, and territory of Latin America. Yet their efforts toward a concerted negotiation of peace in Central America have been constantly thwarted by the Reagan Administration’s unique obsession with unseating the revolutionary government in Managua through a mercenary group totally dependent on U.S. support and direction. Contadora’s diplomatic proposals have not been given a chance. Basically, they consist in reaching agreements on security of borders and the interdiction of passage of arms, foreign military bases and advisers, and support for guerrilla groups. The ideal of a neutral, demilitarized Central America is a possibility; but you have to start somewhere. A policy of disregard for inter-American and international law (mining of Nicaraguan harbors, printing booklets with homicidal instructions for use by the contras, terrorism inside Nicaragua, deviation of funds to the contras from arms sales to Iran, etc.) means starting from nowhere and ending in a regional conflagration that can only spell destabilization for Third countries: exactly what U.S. security interests should try to avoid. The Reagan Administration prefers to manipulate its contras than to listen to the continental majority. This scornful attitude has added insult to injury: as the Reagan government went into decline, inter-American relations were in a shambles. We must start thinking of a new, constructive agenda for relations between the U.S. and Latin America, beyond 1988 and into the twenty-first century. — February 1987.