Puerto Rico – The Pull Of The Land

“This Is It”

January 18, 2024January 19, 2024 Richard Barnes

My wife’s paternal grandparents had fourteen children, twelve of whom survived into maturity. But now, like the elves in The Lord of The Rings trilogy, they are departing, along with their generation.

The night before last we learned that Aunt Ruth had passed away, just a couple weeks short of her hundredth birthday.

For some reason her death caused me great pause, even though I had not known Ruth that well, as she had moved to New York even before my marriage to her niece.

She was the daughter of Tomás and Andrea Vélez who passed away in 1993 and 2001, respectively. They were hardy folks whose life stories held endless fascination for me. For example, their childhood poverty was enough to cause Tomás to leave home as a boy to seek work. He knew not whither he went, but does recall that, alone in the midst of tall grass which impeded his view and utterly confused his sense of direction, he was suddenly called by a young man a number of yards behind who asked him, “¿Adónde vas?“

Tomás answered truthfully that he did not know, to which the young man said, “Come this way,” as he walked off signaling ahead. By the time Tomás got to the spot where he had seen the youth, he had lost him. However, he followed the general direction pointed out by the stranger and eventually came to a cane field operation where he remained for a number of years, even meeting his wife and marrying her there.

To his old age, Abuelo Tomás expressed gratitude, first to God, and second to that young man who somehow took compassion on him but whom he never saw again.

They had two children who died early: one in infancy, the other at the age of twelve. Tuberculosis was a terrible scourge in those days, the early 20th Century. When the infant died, Abuelo Tomás made a small box, placed the baby inside, carried it to the train station, and boarded the train to the municipal cemetery to give it a proper burial.

He sat at the head of the table, hungry and eager to eat after a long hard day’s work. But he saw his children looking at him, obviously hungry. They often recalled to me how their father would take pieces of his bread or other foods and pass them to his children, even though he needed the food more than they given that the next day would be another exhausting one in the fields.

These were tough men and women.

Grandmother Andrea, having been born in 1901 and having died in 2001, lived “along” the 20th Century. She lived during the horrible Boer War, the sinking of the Titanic, the Great Depression, two world wars, the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain, the attack on New York’s twin towers, and much, much more.

As those “great events” developed and subsided and confused and perturbed millions, Abuela Andrea was, first, a good daughter; then, a good wife; then, a good mother; good grandmother; and more. Her Christian faith upheld her and led her to perform her duty with joy and energy throughout her life.

Her children recall seeing her working under the blazing sun, washing clothes, carrying water, cooking, harvesting sweet potatoes, and more. They remember having seen her living in a tent. And singing hymns and taking Communion in church. They vividly remember her helping her husband hold walls that seemed to implode during the terrible San Felipe Hurricane of 1928 and then again during the devastating San Ciprian Hurricane of 1932. In both, their children heard them pray to the Father Almighty for mercy and protection.

By the time she died, over 99% of all those born in her day, had already passed away, not just in Puerto Rico, but throughout the entire world.

As the world shook and reeled from the upheavals of the 20th Century, the Triune God had His eyes on Abuelo Tomás and Abuela Andrea, as He has his eyes on all Who believe on His Son, Jesus Christ and seek to please Him. Such may be unknown to most; however they are known to Him and their impact was and continues to be great. Eternity will One Day reveal that to all.

Their twelve children — Noemí, Ruth, Esther, Eva, Samuel, Lydia, David, Abigail, Miriam, Joaquín, Andrea, and Isaac — had the privilege of burying their parents. However, today, only Samuel, Joaquín, Andrea, and Isaac remain.

I am very grateful to have known them, as I am most grateful to have known my own parents’ friends of that generation.

Few are left, and we would do well to see them as we are able. To thank them and to learn from them.

Ruth’s mind remained sharp to the end. In her last weeks she said, “I feel my strength leaving me.” On her last day on this earth, she was seated in her walker-chair, said, “This is it”, lowered her head, and passed into glory.

Abuela Andrea and Abuelo Tomás, circa 1985

Abuela Andrea, circa 1990

Abuela Marcolina, Abuela Andrea’s mother. Undated photo

Aunt Ruth on her 99th birthday. She was the second of the twelve surviving Vélez children (1924-2024)

After San Felipe Hurricane, 1928

After San Ciprian, 1932

Rainy Days

May 25, 2022May 25, 2022 Richard Barnes

Rainy days in the mining camp are cherished memories and I suspect they are so for many of my contemporaries. Put another way, rainy days did not get me down. (Although, every once in a while, Mondays did.)

Of course, the rains I witnessed in Hurricanes Donna, Cleo, Maria, and others were extraordinary and Texas rains that come with some spring seasons are dangerously intense. Nevertheless, the curtains of water that fell during every rainy season in El Pao made a lifelong impression on the memory banks of my childhood (Memory).

The rainy season ran roughly from May through November, with crashing rains especially concentrated in June, July, and August, which overwhelmed more than half the days of the month. I’ve been told that El Pao’s rainy season more or less paralleled that of South Vietnam’s monsoon season. If so, that explains how landscape photos or films of that part of Venezuela can be easily confused with similar scenes of Southeast Asia.

For example, after watching The Ugly American, my father’s first comment was how much the landscape in the movie looked like our area of Venezuela. Of course, this was a Hollywood film; however, Thailand landscape around Bangkok provided the background sceneries and some scenes were actually shot there, because they very much looked like South Vietnam.

A former colleague had served in the Vietnam War and when he visited our property in Puerto Rico, which looks like the regions around El Pao, he walked to the edge of our ridge and stood silently for several minutes. Later, as we drove back to town, he merely said, “This looks like South Vietnam.”

This might explain why I became so attracted to Singapore whenever I visited on business less than a decade ago. Unlike southern Vietnam and El Pao, Singapore has two monsoon seasons. One of them runs from June to September, which is roughly parallel to El Pao’s. The rains, her lush, abundant jungle foliage, the green which predominates, and the tropical climate surely were major factors for my remembering my visits there with fondness.

Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Puerto Rico, El Pao. In my child’s memory, I do not think of war and devastation. Just rains and green and beauty.

Monsoon rain in Ho Chi Min City (formerly Saigon)

Charlie’s Lament and Chironjas

January 18, 2022January 18, 2022 Richard Barnes

“I knew I wasn’t young any more, but it never came to me I’d gone so far down the hill. Long as a man’s young he can take trouble in stride. Time is with him no matter how bad a jam he’s in. Then one day it slaps him in the face. It’s not with him any more, it’s workin’ against him. His friends fall away . . . scattered, or dead, or just changed. His kids are grown up and gone from him. All the old principles that he anchored to, they’ve come a-loose; nobody’s payin’ attention to them any more. He’ an old grayheaded man livin’ in a young man’s world, and all his benchmarks are gone.” — Charlie Flagg in Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained

My youngest son and I had finally decided that the best way to reach and pick the chironjas (orangelos) was to extend the ladder as high as it would go, place it beneath the clusters of citrus, and reach up with the fully extended pruner pole. This required us to locate the ladder’s footing as best we could on the steep shoulder on the edge of the jungle precipice. The tree is one we had obviously neglected to have pruned over the years. Not only is it impossibly tall, but it grew on the edge of a steep bluff.

The chironja, a cross between an orange and a grapefruit, is thought to have originated in Puerto Rico. It is very juicy, can be eaten in sections, like grapefruit, or squeezed for drink, like oranges. It is popular in our household, especially at breakfast.

I climbed the ladder, intending to step onto the second to last step as I had done so many times heretofore. However, this time, especially as I raised the extended pole, I felt myself swaying just a bit, but “up there” that little bit was magnified into more than prudence would allow. So, I stepped down one level and harvested what I could, regretting that I could not do what I used to do.

Nevertheless, we figured it out and, between my sons and I, the chironjas will have been harvested in the next few days. Plus, the tree will be pruned, we now being in waning moon.

As I descended the ladder, I remembered having read in The Time It Never Rained, “Then one day it slaps him in the face”. The fact that time is not on your side can become very clear by means of an everyday action such as climbing a ladder. Those more wise among us know that time is really never on our side: we are encouraged from early age to “number our days”, and although most do not, yet in the lives of many, they do come to that point when reality becomes impossible to ignore.

A friend tells of the time he was “slapped in the face” as to his encroaching years. He was about to do something that he had “always done”. One day, he could not. He says it was an almost one-day-to-the-next thing. After the initial, momentary shock, he recognized that those particular days were over. And now it was up to him to make the remaining days — which can be many still! — count.

Beyond the physical activities that are naturally curtailed, there remain what Charlie Flagg called “the benchmarks”.

By God’s grace, those will remain, because the principles and ethics that are moored on Eternal Truth will outlive us all. My prayer is that they will endure in the lives of our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and on to a thousand generations. Our offspring will do the right thing in the end, “if they’ve been brought up in the proper way”.

After Charlie uttered his lament, Manuel, the boy, now a man, who came to respect and love Charlie, replied, “The good benchmarks are still there, Mister Charlie.”

Yes, the good benchmarks are still there, and they will be there till the end of time.

Grapefruit, left, Chironja (Orangelo), right

So far from God and so close to the United States!

September 7, 2019September 9, 2019 Richard Barnes

“Only those born in Spain were allowed to own shops or mines in the colonies.” The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, page 47.

“…[Simón] Bolivar was the son of one of Caracas’s wealthiest creole families [which] owned several plantations, mines and elegant town homes.” The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, page 117.

Yes, it’s the same book, published in 2016 (I am about halfway through). And the above tendentiousness — the colonists could own nothing on page 47 — and contradiction — the colonists were tycoons 70 pages later — are not isolated.

It is hailed as a masterpiece by the usual literati. It is considered at times interesting, at times insufferable, and at times infuriating by your humble blogger. You’re better off reading Humboldt’s writings directly.

We’ve much work yet ahead of us in clearing the misconceptions and prejudices which color our understanding of South America generally and Venezuela specifically, not to mention world history and science.

The fact remains that Spain’s conquest of much of the Americas, their export of European culture to these shores, their eradication of human sacrifices, their education and teaching of the Spanish language to the indigenous peoples, and much more, remains an unequalled, spectacular achievement in history. Humboldt, himself a creature of the Enlightenment, who like his fellows, borrowed profusely from Christianity without so much as a tip of the hat, would have achieved nothing had it not been for Spain who gave him a passport when Enlightenment France did not, and had it not been for the missions in the Americas who helped him and had even seen many of his discoveries centuries before he was conceived in his mother’s womb. He just took it all for granted, like a good modern.

Now, saying the above does not mean I am blind to Spanish failures (nor am I blind to English failures) or Jesuit perfidy. But it does mean that I refuse to take at face value the usual textbook approach to Spain and South America that we’ve been spoon fed for centuries now. The history of our neighbors to the south and across the pond is much more complex and vastly richer than: Spain bad–Spain rape–Spain kill–Las Casas saint.

I would challenge us to consider the possibility that we in the United States have much more in common with South America than we do with modern Europe. But to consider that challenge, we must first make an effort to clear the underbrush accumulated over hundreds of years. What did Spain do right? What did she do wrong? Was Spain responsible for the fearsome bloodletting in 19th century South America? Hint: she was not. Then who and what was?

In 1829, after “independence”, Simón Bolivar wrote to his fellow South Americans in A Look At Spanish America:

“From one end to the other, the New World is an abyss of abomination; there is no good faith in [Spanish] America; treaties are mere paper; constitutions, books; elections, combat; liberty, anarchy; life, a torment. We’ve never been so disgraced as we are now. Before, we enjoyed good things; illusion is fed by chimera…. we are tormented by bitter realities.”

This, from a man who was largely responsible for the chaos he now bitterly laments. A man who proclaimed the glorious unity of the continent, saw it irredeemably fractured and destroyed. He died, embittered (“I have plowed the sea!”), a mere year later.

Historian Luis Level de Goda wrote in 1893, “The revolutions have produced in Venezuela nothing but the most vulgar leaders, tribal chieftains, the greatest disorders and lack of concern for one another, corruption, and a long, never-ending tyranny, the moral ruin of the country, and the degradation of a great number of Venezuelans.”

Half a century before Level de Goda, the writer, Cecilio Acosta made a like point, “The internal convulsions have produced sacrifices but not improvements; tears but not harvests.” Others have made similar, terrible, and depressing observations.

One of the purposes of this blog is to look at these and related matters as dispassionately as possible and hopefully to encourage us to reconsider what we’ve been taught for generations.

And maybe, with God’s help and with sincere goodwill, we might see a true and wonderful rapprochement between “The Colossus of the North” (how they referred to the USA for generations) and the land which was first called “America” (it was South America who first had that epithet, not the United States).

Long time Mexican president, Porfirio Díaz, spoke for many in Central and South American when he exclaimed in exasperation: “Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States [Pobre Méjico! Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos]!”

I’d say that, today, both the United States and South America are far from God as far as their legislators go. Let’s pray and work towards a rapprochement with the Triune God. Then the way to a bright future between these great neighbors will be not only more possible but excitingly successful and fruitful!

Porfirio Díaz, president of Mexico; photo taken early 20th century.

Don Porfirio Díaz and his wife, Doña Carmen, in exile in Paris circa 1912, shortly before his death.

Sketch from life in 1830 by José María Espinosa. Bolivar was 47 and died shortly thereafter.

Following are representative examples of Spanish architecture in colonial Americas