https://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2023/03/ukraine-is-building-up-its-forces-for.html
martes, 7 de marzo de 2023
martes, 22 de noviembre de 2022
Tres escenarios de cómo podría desarrollarse la guerra en Ucrania
El analista de inteligencia de NY Seasoned podría haberse burlado si le hubieran dicho en marzo de 2022 que Ucrania seguiría siendo un estado independiente ocho meses después...
viernes, 7 de octubre de 2022
Xi Jinping's Quest for Order
https://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2022/10/xi-jinpings-quest-for-order.html
jueves, 22 de septiembre de 2022
Dudas sobre Boric
Corresponde tener consideración por Boric en términos humanos, pero no podemos hacer como si los problemas no existieran. La estabilidad y la gobernabilidad son asuntos vitales. También la seguridad de la nación. Ello exige que las instituciones democráticas estén muy alertas respecto de los riesgos que están a la vista.
lunes, 24 de agosto de 2020
Pandemia y orden político
https://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-pandemic-and-political-order-it.html
Un análisis de Francis Fukuyama.
With the most urgent and tragic phase of the crisis past, the world is moving into a long, depressing slog. It will come out of it eventually, some parts faster than others. Violent global convulsions are unlikely, and democracy, capitalism, and the United States have all proved capable of transformation and adaptation before. But they will need to pull a rabbit out of the hat once again.
viernes, 24 de abril de 2020
La ofensiva comunicacional de China por el Covid-19
El gigante asiático, herido en su arrogancia como productor de las pandemias que han asolado a la humanidad en los últimos años, ha encontrado en el terreno de las comunicaciones y la cooperación sanitaria una posible salida, poco probable, al daño causado a todo el mundo por ser la patria y origen de un virus que nos perseguirá por años y que hará la vida de todo el mundo distinta a todo lo que hacíamos hasta hace unos meses. Cuesta arriba es el camino de Xi.
https://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2020/04/chinas-coronavirus-information-offensive.html
https://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2020/04/chinas-coronavirus-information-offensive.html
sábado, 18 de abril de 2020
The Pandemic Won’t Make China the World’s Leader
Pocos países se están comprando el modelo o mensaje de Beijing.
https://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-pandemic-wont-make-china-worlds.html?fbclid=IwAR3IPUnwaoZdoZVbJCXaSR0RFKapMJBFjHUGikS9U4Zo0TzcqokOEPoEAZA
Artículo del Foreign Affairs.
sábado, 19 de octubre de 2019
Evolution tells us we might be the only intelligent life in the universe
¿Estamos sólos en el Universo? ¿Somos los únicos seres inteligentes de la galaxia y otras tantas de nuestro medio ambiente espacial? ¿Si hay otros, dónde están?
https://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2019/10/evolution-tells-us-we-might-be-only.html
La paradoja de Fermi:
https://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-fermi-paradox.html
miércoles, 28 de noviembre de 2018
El suicidio venezolano
Venezuela’s Suicide
Lessons From a Failed State
By Moisés Naím and Francisco Toro
Consider two Latin American countries. The first is one of the region’s oldest and strongest democracies. It boasts a stronger social safety net than any of its neighbors and is making progress on its promise to deliver free health care and higher education to all its citizens. It is a model of social mobility and a magnet for immigrants from across Latin America and Europe. The press is free, and the political system is open; opposing parties compete fiercely in elections and regularly alternate power peacefully. It sidestepped the wave of military juntas that mired some Latin American countries in dictatorship. Thanks to a long political alliance and deep trade and investment ties with the United States, it serves as the Latin American headquarters for a slew of multinational corporations. It has the best infrastructure in South America. It is still unmistakably a developing country, with its share of corruption, injustice, and dysfunction, but it is well ahead of other poor countries by almost any measure.
The second country is one of Latin America’s most impoverished nations and its newest dictatorship. Its schools lie half deserted. The health system has been devastated by decades of underinvestment, corruption, and neglect; long-vanquished diseases, such as malaria and measles, have returned. Only a tiny elite can afford enough to eat. An epidemic of violence has made it one of the most murderous countries in the world. It is the source of Latin America’s largest refugee migration in a generation, with millions of citizens fleeing in the last few years alone. Hardly anyone (aside from other autocratic governments) recognizes its sham elections, and the small portion of the media not under direct state control still follows the official line for fear of reprisals. By the end of 2018, its economy will have shrunk by about half in the last five years. It is a major cocaine-trafficking hub, and key power brokers in its political elite have been indicted in the United States on drug charges. Prices double every 25 days. The main airport is largely deserted, used by just a handful of holdout airlines bringing few passengers to and from the outside world.
These two countries are in fact the same country, Venezuela, at two different times: the early 1970s and today. The transformation Venezuela has undergone is so radical, so complete, and so total that it is hard to believe it took place without a war. What happened to Venezuela? How did things go so wrong?
The short answer is Chavismo. Under the leadership of Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, the country has experienced a toxic mix of wantonly destructive policy, escalating authoritarianism, and kleptocracy, all under a level of Cuban influence that often resembles an occupation. Any one of these features would have created huge problems on its own. All of them together hatched a catastrophe. Today, Venezuela is a poor country and a failed and criminalized state run by an autocrat beholden to a foreign power. The remaining options for reversing this situation are slim; the risk now is that hopelessness will push Venezuelans to consider supporting dangerous measures, such as a U.S.-led military invasion, that could make a bad situation worse.
CHAVISMO RISING
To many observers, the explanation for Venezuela’s predicament is simple: under Chávez, the country caught a strong case of socialism, and all its subsequent disasters stem from that original sin. But Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Uruguay have also elected socialist governments in the last 20 years. Although each has struggled politically and economically, none—aside from Nicaragua—has imploded. Instead, several have prospered.
If socialism cannot be blamed for Venezuela’s demise, perhaps oil is the culprit. The most calamitous stage of Venezuela’s crisis has coincided neatly with the sharp fall in international oil prices that started in 2014. But this explanation is also insufficient. Venezuela’s decline began four decades ago, not four years ago. By 2003, Venezuela’s GDP per worker had already declined by a disastrous 37 percent from its 1978 peak—precisely the decline that first propelled Chávez into office. Moreover, all of the world’s petrostates suffered a serious income shock in 2014 as a result of plummeting oil prices. Only Venezuela could not withstand the pressure.
The drivers of Venezuela’s failure run deeper. Decades of gradual economic decline opened the way for Chávez, a charismatic demagogue wedded to an outdated ideology, to take power and establish a corrupt autocracy modeled on and beholden to Cuba’s dictatorship. Although the crisis preceded Chávez’s rise to power, his legacy and Cuba’s influence must be at the center of any attempt to explain it.
Chávez was born in 1954 into a lower-middle-class family in a rural town. He became a career military officer on a baseball scholarship and was soon secretly recruited into a small leftist movement that spent over a decade plotting to overthrow the democratic regime. He exploded into Venezuela’s national consciousness on February 4, 1992, when he led an unsuccessful coup attempt. This misadventure landed him in jail but turned him into an improbable folk hero who embodied growing frustration with a decade of economic stagnation. After receiving a pardon, he launched an outsider bid for the presidency in 1998 and won in a landslide, upending the two-party system that had anchored Venezuelan democracy for 40 years.
Chávez was brilliant at mining discontent.
What drove the explosion of populist anger that brought Chávez to power? In a word, disappointment. The stellar economic performance Venezuela had experienced for five decades leading up to the 1970s had run out of steam, and the path to the middle class had begun to narrow. As the economists Ricardo Hausmann and Francisco Rodríguez noted, “By 1970 Venezuela had become the richest country in Latin America and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, with a per capita GDP higher than Spain, Greece, and Israel and only 13 percent lower than that of the United Kingdom.” But by the early 1980s, a weakened oil market had brought the era of fast growth to an end. Lower oil revenue meant cuts in public spending, scaled-down social programs, currency devaluation, runaway inflation, a banking crisis, and mounting unemployment and hardship for the poor. Even so, Venezuela’s head start was such that when Chávez was elected, it had a per capita income in the region that was second only to Argentina’s.
Another common explanation for Chávez’s rise holds that it was driven by voters’ reaction against economic inequality, which was driven in turn by pervasive corruption. But when Chávez came to power, income was more evenly distributed in Venezuela than in any neighboring country. If inequality determined electoral outcomes, then a Chávez-like candidate would have been more probable in Brazil, Chile, or Colombia, where the gap between the well-off and everyone else was larger.
Venezuela may not have been collapsing in 1998, but it had been stagnating and, in some respects, backsliding, as oil prices slumped to just $11 per barrel, leading to a new round of austerity. Chávez was brilliant at mining the resulting discontent. His eloquent denunciations of inequality, exclusion, poverty, corruption, and the entrenched political elite struck a chord with struggling voters, who felt nostalgic for an earlier, more prosperous period. The inept and complacent traditional political and business elite who opposed Chávez never came close to matching his popular touch.
Venezuelans gambled on Chávez. What they got was not just an outsider bent on upending the status quo but also a Latin American leftist icon who soon had followers all around the world. Chávez became both a spoiler and the star attraction at global summits, as well as a leader of the burgeoning global wave of anti-American sentiment sparked by U.S. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. At home, shaped by his career in the military, Chávez had a penchant for centralizing power and a profound intolerance of dissent. He set out to neuter not just opposition politicians but also political allies who dared question his policies. His collaborators quickly saw which way the wind was blowing: policy debates disappeared, and the government pursued a radical agenda with little forethought and no real scrutiny.
A 2001 presidential decree on land reform, which Chávez handed down with no consultation or debate, was a taste of things to come. It broke up large commercial farms and turned them over to peasant cooperatives that lacked the technical know-how, management skills, or access to capital to produce at scale. Food production collapsed. And in sector after sector, the Chávez government enacted similarly self-defeating policies. It expropriated foreign-owned oil ventures without compensation and gave them to political appointees who lacked the technical expertise to run them. It nationalized utilities and the main telecommunications operator, leaving Venezuela with chronic water and electricity shortages and some of the slowest Internet connection speeds in the world. It seized steel companies, causing production to fall from 480,000 metric tons per month before nationalization, in 2008, to effectively nothing today. Similar results followed the seizure of aluminum companies, mining firms, hotels, and airlines.
The relationship between Cuba and Venezuela became more than an alliance.
In one expropriated company after another, state administrators stripped assets and loaded payrolls with Chávez cronies. When they inevitably ran into financial problems, they appealed to the government, which was able to bail them out. By 2004, oil prices had spiked again, filling government coffers with petrodollars, which Chávez spent without constraints, controls, or accountability. On top of that were the easy loans from China, which was happy to extend credit to Venezuela in exchange for a guaranteed supply of crude oil. By importing whatever the hollowed-out Venezuelan economy failed to produce and borrowing to finance a consumption boom, Chávez was able to temporarily shield the public from the impact of his disastrous policies and to retain substantial popularity.
But not everyone was convinced. Oil industry workers were among the first to sound the alarm about Chávez’s authoritarian tendencies. They went on strike in 2002 and 2003, demanding a new presidential election. In response to the protests, Chávez fired almost half of the work force in the state-run oil company and imposed an arcane currency-exchange-control regime. The system morphed into a cesspool of corruption, as regime cronies realized that arbitraging between the state-authorized exchange rate and the black market could yield fortunes overnight. This arbitrage racket created an extraordinarily wealthy elite of government-connected kleptocrats. As this budding kleptocracy perfected the art of siphoning off oil proceeds into its own pockets, Venezuelan store shelves grew bare.
It was all painfully predictable—and widely predicted. But the louder local and international experts sounded the alarm, the more the government clung to its agenda. To Chávez, dire warnings from technocrats were a sign that the revolution was on the right track.
PASSING THE TORCH
In 2011, Chávez was diagnosed with cancer. Top oncologists in Brazil and the United States offered to treat him. But he opted instead to search for a cure in Cuba, the country he trusted not only to treat him but also to be discreet about his condition. As his illness progressed, his dependence on Havana deepened, and the mystery about the real state of his health grew. On December 8, 2012, an ailing Chávez made one final television appearance to ask Venezuelans to make Maduro, then vice president, his successor. For the next three months, Venezuela was governed spectrally and by remote control: decrees emanated from Havana bearing Chávez’s signature, but no one saw him, and speculation was rife that he had already died. When Chávez’s death was finally announced, on March 5, 2013, the only thing that was clear amid the atmosphere of secrecy and concealment was that Venezuela’s next leader would carry on the tradition of Cuban influence.
Chávez had long looked to Cuba as a blueprint for revolution, and he turned to Cuban President Fidel Castro for advice at critical junctures. In return, Venezuela sent oil: energy aid to Cuba (in the form of 115,000 barrels a day sold at a deep discount) was worth nearly $1 billion a year to Havana. The relationship between Cuba and Venezuela became more than an alliance. It has been, as Chávez himself once put it, “a merger of two revolutions.” (Unusually, the senior partner in the alliance is poorer and smaller than the junior partner—but so much more competent that it dominates the relationship.) Cuba is careful to keep its footprint light: it conducts most of its consultations in Havana rather than Caracas.
It did not escape anyone’s attention that the leader Chávez annointed to succeed him had devoted his life to the cause of Cuban communism. As a teenager, Maduro joined a fringe pro-Cuban Marxist party in Caracas. In his 20s, instead of going to university, he sought training in Havana’s school for international cadres to become a professional revolutionary. As Chávez’s foreign minister from 2006 to 2013, he had seldom called attention to himself: only his unfailing loyalty to Chávez, and to Cuba, propelled his ascent to the top. Under his leadership, Cuba’s influence in Venezuela has become pervasive. He has stacked key government posts with activists trained in Cuban organizations, and Cubans have come to occupy sensitive roles within the Venezuelan regime. The daily intelligence briefs Maduro consumes, for instance, are produced not by Venezuelans but by Cuban intelligence officers.
With Cuban guidance, Maduro has deeply curtailed economic freedoms and erased all remaining traces of liberalism from the country’s politics and institutions. He has continued and expanded Chávez’s practice of jailing, exiling, or banning from political life opposition leaders who became too popular or hard to co-opt. Julio Borges, a key opposition leader, fled into exile to avoid being jailed, and Leopoldo López, the opposition’s most charismatic leader, has been moved back and forth between a military prison and house arrest. Over 100 political prisoners linger in jails, and reports of torture are common. Periodic elections have become farcical, and the government has stripped the opposition-controlled National Assembly of all powers. Maduro has deepened Venezuela’s alliances with a number of anti-American and anti-Western regimes, turning to Russia for weapons, cybersecurity, and expertise in oil production; to China for financing and infrastructure; to Belarus for homebuilding; and to Iran for car production.
As Maduro broke the last remaining links in Venezuela’s traditional alliances with Washington and other Latin American democracies, he lost access to sound economic advice. He dismissed the consensus of economists from across the political spectrum: although they warned about inflation, Maduro chose to rely on the advice of Cuba and fringe Marxist policy advisers who assured him that there would be no consequences to making up budget shortfalls with freshly minted money. Inevitably, a devastating bout of hyperinflation ensued.
A toxic combination of Cuban influence, runaway corruption, the dismantling of democratic checks and balances, and sheer incompetence has kept Venezuela locked into catastrophic economic policies. As monthly inflation rates top three digits, the government improvises policy responses that are bound to make the situation even worse.
ANATOMY OF A COLLAPSE
Nearly all oil-producing liberal democracies, such as Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States, were democracies before they became oil producers. Autocracies that have found oil, such as Angola, Brunei, Iran, and Russia, have been unable to make the leap to liberal democracy. For four decades, Venezuela seemed to have miraculously beat these odds—it democratized and liberalized in 1958, decades after finding oil.
But the roots of Venezuelan liberal democracy turned out to be shallow. Two decades of bad economics decimated the popularity of the traditional political parties, and a charismatic demagogue, riding the wave of an oil boom, stepped into the breach. Under these unusual conditions, he was able to sweep away the whole structure of democratic checks and balances in just a few years.
When the decadelong oil price boom ended in 2014, Venezuela lost not just the oil revenue on which Chávez’s popularity and international influence had depended but also access to foreign credit markets. This left the country with a massive debt overhang: the loans taken out during the oil boom still had to be serviced, although from a much-reduced income stream. Venezuela ended up with politics that are typical of autocracies that discover oil: a predatory, extractive oligarchy that ignores regular people as long they stay quiet and that violently suppresses them when they protest.
The resulting crisis is morphing into the worst humanitarian disaster in memory in the Western Hemisphere. Exact figures for Venezuela’s GDP collapse are notoriously difficult to come by, but economists estimate that it is comparable to the 40 percent contraction of Syria’s GDP since 2012, following the outbreak of its devastating civil war. Hyperinflation has reached one million percent per year, pushing 61 percent of Venezuelans to live in extreme poverty, with 89 percent of those surveyed saying they do not have the money to buy enough food for their families and 64 percent reporting they have lost an average of 11 kilograms (about 24 pounds) in body weight due to hunger. About ten percent of the population—2.6 million Venezuelans—have fled to neighboring countries.
The Venezuelan state has mostly given up on providing public services such as health care, education, and even policing; heavy-handed, repressive violence is the final thing left that Venezuelans can rely on the public sector to consistently deliver. In the face of mass protests in 2014 and 2017, the government responded with thousands of arrests, brutal beatings and torture, and the killing of over 130 protesters.
Meanwhile, criminal business is increasingly conducted not in defiance of the state, or even simply in cahoots with the state, but directly through it. Drug trafficking has emerged alongside oil production and currency arbitrage as a key source of profits to those close to the ruling elite, with high-ranking officials and members of the president’s family facing narcotics charges in the United States. A small connected elite has also stolen national assets to a unprecedented degree. In August, a series of regime-connected businessmen were indicted in U.S. federal courts for attempting to launder over $1.2 billion in illegally obtained funds—just one of a dizzying array of illegal scams that are part of the looting of Venezuela. The entire southeastern quadrant of the country has become an exploitative illegal mining camp, where desperate people displaced from cities by hunger try their luck in unsafe mines run by criminal gangs under military protection. All over the country, prison gangs, working in partnership with government security forces, run lucrative extortion rackets that make them the de facto civil -authority. The offices of the Treasury, the central bank, and the national oil company have become laboratories where complicated financial crimes are hatched. As Venezuela’s economy has collapsed, the lines separating the state from criminal enterprises have all but disappeared.
THE VENEZUELAN DILEMMA
Whenever U.S. President Donald Trump meets with a Latin American leader, he insists that the region do something about the Venezuelan crisis. Trump has prodded his own national security team for “strong” alternatives, at one point stating that there are “many options” for Venezuela and that he is “not going to rule out the military option.” Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has similarly flirted with a military response. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, however, has echoed a common sentiment of the U.S. security apparatus by publicly stating, “The Venezuelan crisis is not a military matter.” All of Venezuela’s neighboring countries have also voiced their opposition to an armed attack on Venezuela.
And rightly so. Trump’s fantasies of military invasion are deeply misguided and extremely dangerous. Although a U.S.-led military assault would likely have no problem overthrowing Maduro in short order, what comes next could be far worse, as the Iraqis and the Libyans know only too well: when outside powers overthrow autocrats sitting atop failing states, open-ended chaos is much more likely to follow than stability—let alone democracy.
Nonetheless, the United States will continue to face pressure to find some way of arresting Venezuela’s collapse. Each initiative undertaken so far has served only to highlight that there is, in reality, little the United States can do. During the Obama administration, U.S. diplomats attempted to engage the regime directly. But negotiations proved futile. Maduro used internationally mediated talks to neutralize massive street protests: protest leaders would call off demonstrations during the talks, but Chavista negotiators would only stonewall, parceling out minor concessions designed to divide their opponents while they themselves prepared for the next wave of repression. The United States and Venezuela’s neighbors seem to have finally grasped that, as things stand, negotiations only play into Maduro’s hands.
The other Latin American countries are finally grasping that Venezuela’s instability will inevitably spill across their borders.
Some have suggested using harsh economic sanctions to pressure Maduro to step down. The United States has tried this. It passed several rounds of sanctions, under both the Obama and Trump administrations, to prevent the regime from issuing new debt and to hamper the financial operation of the state-owned oil company. Together with Canada and the EU, Washington has also put in place sanctions against specific regime officials, freezing their assets abroad and imposing travel restrictions. But such measures are redundant: if the task is to destroy the Venezuelan economy, no set of sanctions will be as effective as the regime itself. The same is true for an oil blockade: oil production is already in a free fall.
Washington can sharpen its policy on the margins. For one thing, it needs to put more emphasis on a Cuban track: little can be achieved without Havana’s help, meaning that Venezuela needs to be front and center in every contact Washington and its allies have with Havana. The United States can cast a wider net in countering corruption, preventing not just crooked officials but also their frontmen and families from enjoying the fruits of corruption, drug trafficking, and embezzlement. It could also work to turn the existing U.S. arms embargo into a global one. The Maduro regime must be constrained in its authoritarian intent with policies that communicate clearly to its cronies that continuing to aid the regime will leave them isolated in Venezuela and that turning on the regime is, therefore, the only way out. Yet the prospects of such a strategy succeeding are dim.
After a long period of dithering, the other Latin American countries are finally grasping that Venezuela’s instability will inevitably spill across their borders. As the center-left “pink wave” of the early years of this century recedes, a new cohort of more conservative leaders in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru has tipped the regional balance against Venezuela’s dictatorship, but the lack of actionable options bedevils them, as well. Traditional diplomacy hasn’t worked and has even backfired. But so has pressure. For example, in 2017, Latin American countries threatened to suspend Venezuela’s membership in the Organization of American States. The regime responded by withdrawing from the organization unilaterally, displaying just how little it cares about traditional diplomatic pressure.
Venezuela’s exasperated neighbors are increasingly seeing the crisis through the prism of the refugee problem it has created; they are anxious to stem the flow of malnourished people fleeing Venezuela and placing new strains on their social programs. As a populist backlash builds against the influx of Venezuelan refugees, some Latin American countries appear tempted to slam the door shut—a temptation they must resist, as it would be a historic mistake that would only worsen the crisis. The reality is that Latin American countries have no idea what to do about Venezuela. There may be nothing they can do, save accepting refugees, which will at least help alleviate the suffering of the Venezuelan people.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Today, the regime is so solidly entrenched that a change of faces is much more likely than a change of system. Perhaps Maduro will be pushed out by a slightly less incompetent leader who is able to render Cuban hegemony in Venezuela more sustainable. Such an outcome would merely mean a more stable foreign-dominated petro-kleptocracy, not a return to democracy. And even if opposition forces—or a U.S.-led armed attack—somehow managed to replace Maduro with an entirely new government, the agenda would be daunting. A successor regime would need to reduce the enormous role the military plays in all areas of the public sector. It would have to start from scratch in restoring basic services in health care, education, and law enforcement. It would have to rebuild the oil industry and stimulate growth in other economic sectors. It would need to get rid of the drug dealers, prison racketeers, predatory miners, wealthy criminal financiers, and extortionists who have latched on to every part of the state. And it would have to make all these changes in the context of a toxic, anarchic political environment and a grave economic crisis.
Given the scale of these obstacles, Venezuela is likely to remain unstable for a long time to come. The immediate challenge for its citizens and their leaders, as well as for the international community, is to contain the impact of the nation’s decline. For all the misery they have experienced, the Venezuelan people have never stopped struggling against misrule. As of this summer, Venezuelans were still staging hundreds of protests each month. Most of them are local, grass-roots affairs with little political leadership, but they show a people with the will to fight for themselves.
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Take Back Venezuela With Votes, Not Violence
Is that enough to nudge the country away from its current, grim path? Probably not. Hopelessness is driving more and more Venezuelans to fantasize about a Trump-led military intervention, which would offer a fervently desired deus ex machina for a long-suffering people. But this amounts to an ill-advised revenge fantasy, not a serious strategy.
Rather than a military invasion, Venezuelans’ best hope is to ensure that the flickering embers of protest and social dissent are not extinguished and that resistance to dictatorship is sustained. Desperate though the prospect may seem, this tradition of protest could one day lay the foundations for the recovery of civic institutions and democratic practices. It won’t be simple, and it won’t be quick. Bringing a state back from the brink of failure never is.
Foreign Affairs
Lessons From a Failed State
By Moisés Naím and Francisco Toro
Consider two Latin American countries. The first is one of the region’s oldest and strongest democracies. It boasts a stronger social safety net than any of its neighbors and is making progress on its promise to deliver free health care and higher education to all its citizens. It is a model of social mobility and a magnet for immigrants from across Latin America and Europe. The press is free, and the political system is open; opposing parties compete fiercely in elections and regularly alternate power peacefully. It sidestepped the wave of military juntas that mired some Latin American countries in dictatorship. Thanks to a long political alliance and deep trade and investment ties with the United States, it serves as the Latin American headquarters for a slew of multinational corporations. It has the best infrastructure in South America. It is still unmistakably a developing country, with its share of corruption, injustice, and dysfunction, but it is well ahead of other poor countries by almost any measure.
The second country is one of Latin America’s most impoverished nations and its newest dictatorship. Its schools lie half deserted. The health system has been devastated by decades of underinvestment, corruption, and neglect; long-vanquished diseases, such as malaria and measles, have returned. Only a tiny elite can afford enough to eat. An epidemic of violence has made it one of the most murderous countries in the world. It is the source of Latin America’s largest refugee migration in a generation, with millions of citizens fleeing in the last few years alone. Hardly anyone (aside from other autocratic governments) recognizes its sham elections, and the small portion of the media not under direct state control still follows the official line for fear of reprisals. By the end of 2018, its economy will have shrunk by about half in the last five years. It is a major cocaine-trafficking hub, and key power brokers in its political elite have been indicted in the United States on drug charges. Prices double every 25 days. The main airport is largely deserted, used by just a handful of holdout airlines bringing few passengers to and from the outside world.
These two countries are in fact the same country, Venezuela, at two different times: the early 1970s and today. The transformation Venezuela has undergone is so radical, so complete, and so total that it is hard to believe it took place without a war. What happened to Venezuela? How did things go so wrong?
The short answer is Chavismo. Under the leadership of Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, the country has experienced a toxic mix of wantonly destructive policy, escalating authoritarianism, and kleptocracy, all under a level of Cuban influence that often resembles an occupation. Any one of these features would have created huge problems on its own. All of them together hatched a catastrophe. Today, Venezuela is a poor country and a failed and criminalized state run by an autocrat beholden to a foreign power. The remaining options for reversing this situation are slim; the risk now is that hopelessness will push Venezuelans to consider supporting dangerous measures, such as a U.S.-led military invasion, that could make a bad situation worse.
CHAVISMO RISING
To many observers, the explanation for Venezuela’s predicament is simple: under Chávez, the country caught a strong case of socialism, and all its subsequent disasters stem from that original sin. But Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Uruguay have also elected socialist governments in the last 20 years. Although each has struggled politically and economically, none—aside from Nicaragua—has imploded. Instead, several have prospered.
If socialism cannot be blamed for Venezuela’s demise, perhaps oil is the culprit. The most calamitous stage of Venezuela’s crisis has coincided neatly with the sharp fall in international oil prices that started in 2014. But this explanation is also insufficient. Venezuela’s decline began four decades ago, not four years ago. By 2003, Venezuela’s GDP per worker had already declined by a disastrous 37 percent from its 1978 peak—precisely the decline that first propelled Chávez into office. Moreover, all of the world’s petrostates suffered a serious income shock in 2014 as a result of plummeting oil prices. Only Venezuela could not withstand the pressure.
The drivers of Venezuela’s failure run deeper. Decades of gradual economic decline opened the way for Chávez, a charismatic demagogue wedded to an outdated ideology, to take power and establish a corrupt autocracy modeled on and beholden to Cuba’s dictatorship. Although the crisis preceded Chávez’s rise to power, his legacy and Cuba’s influence must be at the center of any attempt to explain it.
Chávez was born in 1954 into a lower-middle-class family in a rural town. He became a career military officer on a baseball scholarship and was soon secretly recruited into a small leftist movement that spent over a decade plotting to overthrow the democratic regime. He exploded into Venezuela’s national consciousness on February 4, 1992, when he led an unsuccessful coup attempt. This misadventure landed him in jail but turned him into an improbable folk hero who embodied growing frustration with a decade of economic stagnation. After receiving a pardon, he launched an outsider bid for the presidency in 1998 and won in a landslide, upending the two-party system that had anchored Venezuelan democracy for 40 years.
Chávez was brilliant at mining discontent.
What drove the explosion of populist anger that brought Chávez to power? In a word, disappointment. The stellar economic performance Venezuela had experienced for five decades leading up to the 1970s had run out of steam, and the path to the middle class had begun to narrow. As the economists Ricardo Hausmann and Francisco Rodríguez noted, “By 1970 Venezuela had become the richest country in Latin America and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, with a per capita GDP higher than Spain, Greece, and Israel and only 13 percent lower than that of the United Kingdom.” But by the early 1980s, a weakened oil market had brought the era of fast growth to an end. Lower oil revenue meant cuts in public spending, scaled-down social programs, currency devaluation, runaway inflation, a banking crisis, and mounting unemployment and hardship for the poor. Even so, Venezuela’s head start was such that when Chávez was elected, it had a per capita income in the region that was second only to Argentina’s.
Another common explanation for Chávez’s rise holds that it was driven by voters’ reaction against economic inequality, which was driven in turn by pervasive corruption. But when Chávez came to power, income was more evenly distributed in Venezuela than in any neighboring country. If inequality determined electoral outcomes, then a Chávez-like candidate would have been more probable in Brazil, Chile, or Colombia, where the gap between the well-off and everyone else was larger.
Venezuela may not have been collapsing in 1998, but it had been stagnating and, in some respects, backsliding, as oil prices slumped to just $11 per barrel, leading to a new round of austerity. Chávez was brilliant at mining the resulting discontent. His eloquent denunciations of inequality, exclusion, poverty, corruption, and the entrenched political elite struck a chord with struggling voters, who felt nostalgic for an earlier, more prosperous period. The inept and complacent traditional political and business elite who opposed Chávez never came close to matching his popular touch.
MARCO BELLO / REUTERS
Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro gestures next to Cuba's President Miguel Diaz-Canel during their meeting at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela, May 2018
Venezuelans gambled on Chávez. What they got was not just an outsider bent on upending the status quo but also a Latin American leftist icon who soon had followers all around the world. Chávez became both a spoiler and the star attraction at global summits, as well as a leader of the burgeoning global wave of anti-American sentiment sparked by U.S. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. At home, shaped by his career in the military, Chávez had a penchant for centralizing power and a profound intolerance of dissent. He set out to neuter not just opposition politicians but also political allies who dared question his policies. His collaborators quickly saw which way the wind was blowing: policy debates disappeared, and the government pursued a radical agenda with little forethought and no real scrutiny.
A 2001 presidential decree on land reform, which Chávez handed down with no consultation or debate, was a taste of things to come. It broke up large commercial farms and turned them over to peasant cooperatives that lacked the technical know-how, management skills, or access to capital to produce at scale. Food production collapsed. And in sector after sector, the Chávez government enacted similarly self-defeating policies. It expropriated foreign-owned oil ventures without compensation and gave them to political appointees who lacked the technical expertise to run them. It nationalized utilities and the main telecommunications operator, leaving Venezuela with chronic water and electricity shortages and some of the slowest Internet connection speeds in the world. It seized steel companies, causing production to fall from 480,000 metric tons per month before nationalization, in 2008, to effectively nothing today. Similar results followed the seizure of aluminum companies, mining firms, hotels, and airlines.
The relationship between Cuba and Venezuela became more than an alliance.
In one expropriated company after another, state administrators stripped assets and loaded payrolls with Chávez cronies. When they inevitably ran into financial problems, they appealed to the government, which was able to bail them out. By 2004, oil prices had spiked again, filling government coffers with petrodollars, which Chávez spent without constraints, controls, or accountability. On top of that were the easy loans from China, which was happy to extend credit to Venezuela in exchange for a guaranteed supply of crude oil. By importing whatever the hollowed-out Venezuelan economy failed to produce and borrowing to finance a consumption boom, Chávez was able to temporarily shield the public from the impact of his disastrous policies and to retain substantial popularity.
But not everyone was convinced. Oil industry workers were among the first to sound the alarm about Chávez’s authoritarian tendencies. They went on strike in 2002 and 2003, demanding a new presidential election. In response to the protests, Chávez fired almost half of the work force in the state-run oil company and imposed an arcane currency-exchange-control regime. The system morphed into a cesspool of corruption, as regime cronies realized that arbitraging between the state-authorized exchange rate and the black market could yield fortunes overnight. This arbitrage racket created an extraordinarily wealthy elite of government-connected kleptocrats. As this budding kleptocracy perfected the art of siphoning off oil proceeds into its own pockets, Venezuelan store shelves grew bare.
It was all painfully predictable—and widely predicted. But the louder local and international experts sounded the alarm, the more the government clung to its agenda. To Chávez, dire warnings from technocrats were a sign that the revolution was on the right track.
PASSING THE TORCH
In 2011, Chávez was diagnosed with cancer. Top oncologists in Brazil and the United States offered to treat him. But he opted instead to search for a cure in Cuba, the country he trusted not only to treat him but also to be discreet about his condition. As his illness progressed, his dependence on Havana deepened, and the mystery about the real state of his health grew. On December 8, 2012, an ailing Chávez made one final television appearance to ask Venezuelans to make Maduro, then vice president, his successor. For the next three months, Venezuela was governed spectrally and by remote control: decrees emanated from Havana bearing Chávez’s signature, but no one saw him, and speculation was rife that he had already died. When Chávez’s death was finally announced, on March 5, 2013, the only thing that was clear amid the atmosphere of secrecy and concealment was that Venezuela’s next leader would carry on the tradition of Cuban influence.
Chávez had long looked to Cuba as a blueprint for revolution, and he turned to Cuban President Fidel Castro for advice at critical junctures. In return, Venezuela sent oil: energy aid to Cuba (in the form of 115,000 barrels a day sold at a deep discount) was worth nearly $1 billion a year to Havana. The relationship between Cuba and Venezuela became more than an alliance. It has been, as Chávez himself once put it, “a merger of two revolutions.” (Unusually, the senior partner in the alliance is poorer and smaller than the junior partner—but so much more competent that it dominates the relationship.) Cuba is careful to keep its footprint light: it conducts most of its consultations in Havana rather than Caracas.
HANDOUT / REUTERS
Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro and former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez read a copy of the Cuban Communist Party newspaper "Granma", Havana, Cuba, June 2011
It did not escape anyone’s attention that the leader Chávez annointed to succeed him had devoted his life to the cause of Cuban communism. As a teenager, Maduro joined a fringe pro-Cuban Marxist party in Caracas. In his 20s, instead of going to university, he sought training in Havana’s school for international cadres to become a professional revolutionary. As Chávez’s foreign minister from 2006 to 2013, he had seldom called attention to himself: only his unfailing loyalty to Chávez, and to Cuba, propelled his ascent to the top. Under his leadership, Cuba’s influence in Venezuela has become pervasive. He has stacked key government posts with activists trained in Cuban organizations, and Cubans have come to occupy sensitive roles within the Venezuelan regime. The daily intelligence briefs Maduro consumes, for instance, are produced not by Venezuelans but by Cuban intelligence officers.
With Cuban guidance, Maduro has deeply curtailed economic freedoms and erased all remaining traces of liberalism from the country’s politics and institutions. He has continued and expanded Chávez’s practice of jailing, exiling, or banning from political life opposition leaders who became too popular or hard to co-opt. Julio Borges, a key opposition leader, fled into exile to avoid being jailed, and Leopoldo López, the opposition’s most charismatic leader, has been moved back and forth between a military prison and house arrest. Over 100 political prisoners linger in jails, and reports of torture are common. Periodic elections have become farcical, and the government has stripped the opposition-controlled National Assembly of all powers. Maduro has deepened Venezuela’s alliances with a number of anti-American and anti-Western regimes, turning to Russia for weapons, cybersecurity, and expertise in oil production; to China for financing and infrastructure; to Belarus for homebuilding; and to Iran for car production.
As Maduro broke the last remaining links in Venezuela’s traditional alliances with Washington and other Latin American democracies, he lost access to sound economic advice. He dismissed the consensus of economists from across the political spectrum: although they warned about inflation, Maduro chose to rely on the advice of Cuba and fringe Marxist policy advisers who assured him that there would be no consequences to making up budget shortfalls with freshly minted money. Inevitably, a devastating bout of hyperinflation ensued.
A toxic combination of Cuban influence, runaway corruption, the dismantling of democratic checks and balances, and sheer incompetence has kept Venezuela locked into catastrophic economic policies. As monthly inflation rates top three digits, the government improvises policy responses that are bound to make the situation even worse.
ANATOMY OF A COLLAPSE
Nearly all oil-producing liberal democracies, such as Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States, were democracies before they became oil producers. Autocracies that have found oil, such as Angola, Brunei, Iran, and Russia, have been unable to make the leap to liberal democracy. For four decades, Venezuela seemed to have miraculously beat these odds—it democratized and liberalized in 1958, decades after finding oil.
But the roots of Venezuelan liberal democracy turned out to be shallow. Two decades of bad economics decimated the popularity of the traditional political parties, and a charismatic demagogue, riding the wave of an oil boom, stepped into the breach. Under these unusual conditions, he was able to sweep away the whole structure of democratic checks and balances in just a few years.
When the decadelong oil price boom ended in 2014, Venezuela lost not just the oil revenue on which Chávez’s popularity and international influence had depended but also access to foreign credit markets. This left the country with a massive debt overhang: the loans taken out during the oil boom still had to be serviced, although from a much-reduced income stream. Venezuela ended up with politics that are typical of autocracies that discover oil: a predatory, extractive oligarchy that ignores regular people as long they stay quiet and that violently suppresses them when they protest.
The resulting crisis is morphing into the worst humanitarian disaster in memory in the Western Hemisphere. Exact figures for Venezuela’s GDP collapse are notoriously difficult to come by, but economists estimate that it is comparable to the 40 percent contraction of Syria’s GDP since 2012, following the outbreak of its devastating civil war. Hyperinflation has reached one million percent per year, pushing 61 percent of Venezuelans to live in extreme poverty, with 89 percent of those surveyed saying they do not have the money to buy enough food for their families and 64 percent reporting they have lost an average of 11 kilograms (about 24 pounds) in body weight due to hunger. About ten percent of the population—2.6 million Venezuelans—have fled to neighboring countries.
The Venezuelan state has mostly given up on providing public services such as health care, education, and even policing; heavy-handed, repressive violence is the final thing left that Venezuelans can rely on the public sector to consistently deliver. In the face of mass protests in 2014 and 2017, the government responded with thousands of arrests, brutal beatings and torture, and the killing of over 130 protesters.
Meanwhile, criminal business is increasingly conducted not in defiance of the state, or even simply in cahoots with the state, but directly through it. Drug trafficking has emerged alongside oil production and currency arbitrage as a key source of profits to those close to the ruling elite, with high-ranking officials and members of the president’s family facing narcotics charges in the United States. A small connected elite has also stolen national assets to a unprecedented degree. In August, a series of regime-connected businessmen were indicted in U.S. federal courts for attempting to launder over $1.2 billion in illegally obtained funds—just one of a dizzying array of illegal scams that are part of the looting of Venezuela. The entire southeastern quadrant of the country has become an exploitative illegal mining camp, where desperate people displaced from cities by hunger try their luck in unsafe mines run by criminal gangs under military protection. All over the country, prison gangs, working in partnership with government security forces, run lucrative extortion rackets that make them the de facto civil -authority. The offices of the Treasury, the central bank, and the national oil company have become laboratories where complicated financial crimes are hatched. As Venezuela’s economy has collapsed, the lines separating the state from criminal enterprises have all but disappeared.
THE VENEZUELAN DILEMMA
Whenever U.S. President Donald Trump meets with a Latin American leader, he insists that the region do something about the Venezuelan crisis. Trump has prodded his own national security team for “strong” alternatives, at one point stating that there are “many options” for Venezuela and that he is “not going to rule out the military option.” Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has similarly flirted with a military response. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, however, has echoed a common sentiment of the U.S. security apparatus by publicly stating, “The Venezuelan crisis is not a military matter.” All of Venezuela’s neighboring countries have also voiced their opposition to an armed attack on Venezuela.
And rightly so. Trump’s fantasies of military invasion are deeply misguided and extremely dangerous. Although a U.S.-led military assault would likely have no problem overthrowing Maduro in short order, what comes next could be far worse, as the Iraqis and the Libyans know only too well: when outside powers overthrow autocrats sitting atop failing states, open-ended chaos is much more likely to follow than stability—let alone democracy.
Nonetheless, the United States will continue to face pressure to find some way of arresting Venezuela’s collapse. Each initiative undertaken so far has served only to highlight that there is, in reality, little the United States can do. During the Obama administration, U.S. diplomats attempted to engage the regime directly. But negotiations proved futile. Maduro used internationally mediated talks to neutralize massive street protests: protest leaders would call off demonstrations during the talks, but Chavista negotiators would only stonewall, parceling out minor concessions designed to divide their opponents while they themselves prepared for the next wave of repression. The United States and Venezuela’s neighbors seem to have finally grasped that, as things stand, negotiations only play into Maduro’s hands.
The other Latin American countries are finally grasping that Venezuela’s instability will inevitably spill across their borders.
Some have suggested using harsh economic sanctions to pressure Maduro to step down. The United States has tried this. It passed several rounds of sanctions, under both the Obama and Trump administrations, to prevent the regime from issuing new debt and to hamper the financial operation of the state-owned oil company. Together with Canada and the EU, Washington has also put in place sanctions against specific regime officials, freezing their assets abroad and imposing travel restrictions. But such measures are redundant: if the task is to destroy the Venezuelan economy, no set of sanctions will be as effective as the regime itself. The same is true for an oil blockade: oil production is already in a free fall.
Washington can sharpen its policy on the margins. For one thing, it needs to put more emphasis on a Cuban track: little can be achieved without Havana’s help, meaning that Venezuela needs to be front and center in every contact Washington and its allies have with Havana. The United States can cast a wider net in countering corruption, preventing not just crooked officials but also their frontmen and families from enjoying the fruits of corruption, drug trafficking, and embezzlement. It could also work to turn the existing U.S. arms embargo into a global one. The Maduro regime must be constrained in its authoritarian intent with policies that communicate clearly to its cronies that continuing to aid the regime will leave them isolated in Venezuela and that turning on the regime is, therefore, the only way out. Yet the prospects of such a strategy succeeding are dim.
After a long period of dithering, the other Latin American countries are finally grasping that Venezuela’s instability will inevitably spill across their borders. As the center-left “pink wave” of the early years of this century recedes, a new cohort of more conservative leaders in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru has tipped the regional balance against Venezuela’s dictatorship, but the lack of actionable options bedevils them, as well. Traditional diplomacy hasn’t worked and has even backfired. But so has pressure. For example, in 2017, Latin American countries threatened to suspend Venezuela’s membership in the Organization of American States. The regime responded by withdrawing from the organization unilaterally, displaying just how little it cares about traditional diplomatic pressure.
CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS / REUTERS
Venezuelan refugees carry their belongings to Colombia through the Tachira river in Tachira State, Venezuela, August 2015
Venezuela’s exasperated neighbors are increasingly seeing the crisis through the prism of the refugee problem it has created; they are anxious to stem the flow of malnourished people fleeing Venezuela and placing new strains on their social programs. As a populist backlash builds against the influx of Venezuelan refugees, some Latin American countries appear tempted to slam the door shut—a temptation they must resist, as it would be a historic mistake that would only worsen the crisis. The reality is that Latin American countries have no idea what to do about Venezuela. There may be nothing they can do, save accepting refugees, which will at least help alleviate the suffering of the Venezuelan people.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Today, the regime is so solidly entrenched that a change of faces is much more likely than a change of system. Perhaps Maduro will be pushed out by a slightly less incompetent leader who is able to render Cuban hegemony in Venezuela more sustainable. Such an outcome would merely mean a more stable foreign-dominated petro-kleptocracy, not a return to democracy. And even if opposition forces—or a U.S.-led armed attack—somehow managed to replace Maduro with an entirely new government, the agenda would be daunting. A successor regime would need to reduce the enormous role the military plays in all areas of the public sector. It would have to start from scratch in restoring basic services in health care, education, and law enforcement. It would have to rebuild the oil industry and stimulate growth in other economic sectors. It would need to get rid of the drug dealers, prison racketeers, predatory miners, wealthy criminal financiers, and extortionists who have latched on to every part of the state. And it would have to make all these changes in the context of a toxic, anarchic political environment and a grave economic crisis.
Given the scale of these obstacles, Venezuela is likely to remain unstable for a long time to come. The immediate challenge for its citizens and their leaders, as well as for the international community, is to contain the impact of the nation’s decline. For all the misery they have experienced, the Venezuelan people have never stopped struggling against misrule. As of this summer, Venezuelans were still staging hundreds of protests each month. Most of them are local, grass-roots affairs with little political leadership, but they show a people with the will to fight for themselves.
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Is that enough to nudge the country away from its current, grim path? Probably not. Hopelessness is driving more and more Venezuelans to fantasize about a Trump-led military intervention, which would offer a fervently desired deus ex machina for a long-suffering people. But this amounts to an ill-advised revenge fantasy, not a serious strategy.
Rather than a military invasion, Venezuelans’ best hope is to ensure that the flickering embers of protest and social dissent are not extinguished and that resistance to dictatorship is sustained. Desperate though the prospect may seem, this tradition of protest could one day lay the foundations for the recovery of civic institutions and democratic practices. It won’t be simple, and it won’t be quick. Bringing a state back from the brink of failure never is.
Foreign Affairs
sábado, 29 de septiembre de 2018
Tal como está, Europa va a morir
Leer más: https://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2018/09/tal-como-esta-europa-va-morir.html
miércoles, 19 de septiembre de 2018
De augures y arúspices: la economía mundial
Horizontes sombríos o luminosos; rayos y centellas o alborozo de las bolsas mundiales; Grandes cambios por el clima y migraciones masivas; Pugnas entre las más grandes economías mundiales por un comercio equitativo y que amenazan a los productores de metales e insumos primarios, todos signos de los tiempos que vivimos y que en una economía globalizada afectan al mundo como un todo.
Frente a tales manifestaciones, los modernos augures y arúspices de la economía hacen un análisis de las vísceras para ver entre la niebla de lo desconocido e intentar descifrar lo que traerá el mañana. Entre muchos, los resultados se ven diversos y preocupantes. ¿Recesión? ¿Nueva crisis financiera? ¿Quiénes caerán primero?
Nouriel Roubini y Brunello Rosa, trazan un futuro encrespado y de extensas resonancias:
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/financial-crisis-in-2020-worse-than-2008-by-nouriel-roubini-and-brunello-rosa-2018-09/spanish
Lo que dice Vittorio Corvo.
https://www.latercera.com/pulso/noticia/economista-ex-presidente-del-banco-central-vittorio-corbo-proximo-ano-puede-tengamos-pib-35-esta-guerra-comercial-lleva-una-desaceleracion-mas-brusca-china/243088/
http://www.elmercurio.com/blogs/2018/09/16/63336/Aumenta-la-presion-sobre-las-economias-emergentes.aspx
sábado, 24 de febrero de 2018
Neruda, Hollander y la María Celeste.
Pablo Neruda, Julio Verne y las lágrimas de
María Celeste
[ Cultura ]
Por Enrique Robertson
[ Cultura ]
Por Enrique Robertson
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- - -
por Nicole Pottier [NMP]
por Nicole Pottier [NMP]
La casa frente al mar adquirida
por Pablo Neruda en 1939, ampliada y decorada por él con objetos,
muebles y cosas que había comenzado a atesorar allí desde hacía más de una
década, fue cedida a fines del año 1951, por el verano que entonces comenzaba,
en préstamo y al cuidado de una persona conocida y de confianza del vate. Esa
persona era -y debía ser- ajena a las ideas políticas del poeta. Éste
requisito, en las circunstancias del momento, era indispensable. Neruda estaba
ausente de Chile; exiliado para escapar de la persecución de un ya casi
olvidado aprendiz de tirano. Su casa no podía permanecer cerrada por más
tiempo o parecer abandonada; el peligro de que cualquier noche fuese saqueada,
quemada o destruída, era inminente.Arturo Aldunate Phillips y su esposa Lucía pasaron en eIla los meses de enero y febrero de 1952. Tanto les agradó el costero lugar, que ese mismo verano compraron un terreno en la vecindad. Y tan pronto como pudieron iniciaron la construcción de una vivienda; que, más que casa, imaginaron barco. La inauguraron a fines de febrero de 1953 bajo el nombre de María Celeste. Y desde entonces fue el María Celeste, si un día era bergantín. Y la María Celeste, si al otro amanecía como goleta. Como la casa de Neruda, el o la María Celeste de los Aldunate Phillips nació mirando al mar. Pero, como precisó el poeta, mirándolo desde la otra punta de la Isla.
Así fue como, hace algo más de medio siglo, se construyó en Isla Negra un bergantín goleta que no era tal, en la otra punta de una isla que tampoco era isla ni tenía puntas. Éste si es no es, -que puede ser o no ser- es la característica principal de lo que aquí relataremos.
En su libro de recuerdos Mi pequeña historia de Pablo Neruda, Aldunate Phillips cuenta la historia de ambas casas; y relata cómo y por qué, durante 40 años, mantuvo una estrecha, leal e inalterable amistad con el poeta.
Esa amistad se inició en 1939, cuando Neruda volvió de Francia a Chile y buscó por todo Santiago al personaje que un par de años antes, el 26 de junio de 1936, en la Posada del Corregidor y en el marco de las actividades de la Sociedad Amigos del Arte, había dado una charla titulada El nuevo arte poético y Pablo Neruda. Había sido él, Arturo Aldunate Phillips, quién dió esa exitosa charla, repetida poco después en forma de conferencia en el Salón de Honor de la Universidad de Chile (1).
Por eso era que Pablo Neruda quería conocerle personalmente.
Poco después, el poeta volvió a buscarle. Ésta segunda vez llegó a pedirle apoyo para tramitar ante don Carlos G. Nascimento un asunto relacionado con un proyecto editorial. Esperaba, claro, acordar con él la edición de un libro. Pero además quería obtener del editor, al firmar el contrato, un inmediato adelanto que le permitiese financiar la urgentísima compra de una casa a medio construir, que se vendía entre el puerto de San Antonio y las playas de Algarrobo. Se trataba naturalmente de la que ya hemos mencionado, que con los años se transformaría en su famosa casa de Isla Negra. La casa -y, sobre todo, su entorno- había de tal modo fascinado a Neruda, que por ningún motivo quería perder la oportunidad de comprarla. Aldunate Phillips logró mediar positivamente entre su reciente amigo y don Carlos Nascimento. Resultó de ello un acuerdo, en el que el mismo Aldunate Phillips se comprometía y que hacía posible el milagro financiero; 30.000 pesos en adelanto por los derechos de la edición de una selección de poemas -que vino a editarse finalmente en 1943- hicieron realidad el sueño del vate. La mediación del ingeniero Aldunate Phillips no ha de haber sido necesaria sólo porque 30.000 pesos de la época eran una nada despreciable suma; sino también porque Don Carlos no podía decidir tan extraordinarias condiciones para un libro de poesía, sin antes contar con la aprobación de su socio principal, un ingeniero también. Lo que debió primar para que éste colega de Aldunate -escritor además, y editor de vocación- sin vacilar se manifestase de acuerdo, ha de haber sido su muy fino sentido del
En 1953, una década después de la aparición de la selección de poemas nerudianos que estuvo a su cargo, se hizo realidad el sueño de la veraniega casa-barco en Isla Negra del prologuista de aquella edición tan curiosamente gestada. Por qué Aldunate Phillips le dió el nombre de María Celeste a su casa, no queda explicado en su libro de recuerdos. Su lectura, que prueba que Neruda no estuvo en la fiesta de bautismo e inauguración, no deja entrever indicios que permitan sostener que fue el poeta quién se lo sugiriera. Resulta incluso posible, que lo contrario haya sucedido. Pero es más probable que la misteriosa historia del navío María Celeste fuese conocida de Neruda desde antes de saber que Aldunate Phillips había bautizado su casa con ese nombre. Legendaria desde el comienzo, esa enigmática historia -como la de El Holandés Errante o la de El Caleuche chileno- reaparece fantasmalmente de tiempo en tiempo -en revistas, diarios y libros- especialmente cuando se conmemora alguna fecha relacionada con ella. Como nadie ignora, enigmas de ese tipo fascinaban a Neruda. Sin saber si es o no es pertinente, diremos que Neruda escribió El fantasma del buque de carga en 1932, año en que se conmemoraba el sexagésimo aniversario del inexplicable misterio del María Celeste. El enigmático caso dió mucho que hablar en todos los puertos del mundo; y dió lugar a muchas especulaciones. Algunas de ellas las hicieron autores que Neruda leía. Tal es el caso de Sir Arthur Conan Doyle que escribió su propia versión y solución del misterio en 1884; dato que también importa mencionar aquí porque Neruda fecha los hechos relacionados con el buque de carga María Celeste en 1882, orientándose en el relato de Conan Doyle. Lo cierto es que la verdadera historia aconteció diez años antes. Más pruebas de que Neruda se interesó por ese gran misterio de los mares, son fáciles de encontrar en sus memorias; y también en Isla Negra. Allí está el tan bello y conocido mascarón de proa que lleva ese nombre. Hay también pruebas de menor volúmen, que están envasadas en botellas herméticamente selladas: los barquitos. Antes de proseguir, para entendimiento de lo que plantearemos después, mencionaremos dos datos periodísticos fechados en noviembre de 1922. El uno recordó en varios semanarios de la época, que se cumplía medio siglo desde que el María Celeste zarpara el 7 de Noviembre 1872 del puerto de Nueva York. Pocos días después, en alta mar, el capitán, su esposa e hija, y todos los miembros de la tripulación, desaparecieron misteriosamente de esa nave; inexplicablemente y sin dejar huella alguna.
Y el otro, que el 14 de Noviembre 1889, y también desde Nueva York, había emprendido su sensacional viaje alrededor del mundo la joven periodista Nellie Bly. El motivo para rememorar el famoso viaje de Nellie Bly en las noticias destacadas de 1922, fue que ese año había fallecido la destacada pionera del periodismo femenino. Faltando aún toda una década para la llegada del siglo XX, Nellie Bly dió la vuelta al mundo en 72 días, superando sola y en carne y hueso -sobre todo esto último, porque regresó a su punto de partida con un pié fracturado- el literario récord de Phileas Fogg y su criado Passepartout, famosos personajes del no menos famoso Julio Verne; autor que queda así mencionado aquí por segunda, pero no por última vez.
Dicho lo anterior, retomaremos el hilo relatando una anécdota que cuenta Aldunate Phillips en su pequeña historia de Pablo Neruda; se trata de una que, en el gran anecdotario nerudiano, solamente él ha contado.
Arturo Aldunate Phillips recuerda que años después de la construcción de su casa -no cita la fecha exacta, pero como en su texto hay un claro antes y después del quinto aniversario de su María Celeste, celebrado en 1958, se puede deducir que fue un poco antes- Pablo Neruda le invitó para mostrarle un mascarón de proa que había sumado a su colección. Era, dice, la hermosa imágen tallada en madera de una joven cuyo rostro tenía un parecido con el de Lucía, su esposa.
El vate llamaba María Celeste a esa figura, explicándole que cuando así la bautizó ignoraba que su casa barco tenía el mismo nombre. Considerando que lo lógico sería que pasase por eso a poder suyo, Neruda le habría hecho la oferta de cedérsela a cambio de un cuadro que él poseía: un simbólico óleo llamado Los atributos del hombre, cuadro por el que ya anteriormente el vate había mostrado gran interés. La historia deriva en detalles relacionados con defunciones y herencias. Pero en resúmen: no se llegó en esa ocasión a un acuerdo de trueque del cuadro por la mascarona, y cada cual se quedó con lo suyo.
No tenemos por qué poner en duda lo que en su libro relata Aldunate Phillips. Pero sosteniendo, también sin duda alguna, que ha de haberse tratado de otra figura; y no de la enigmática, conocida, envidiada y más bella de todas las mascaronas de proa, la nombrada María Celeste en la colección nerudiana. De eso no puede caber a nadie ni la menor duda. Porque nuestra afirmación tiene un fortísimo sostén; que salta a la vista con sólo mirar la ilustración de la portada del libro de Aldunate
¿Por qué esa confusión?. Ah!. Misterios nerudianos. El evidente parecido de las facciones de Lucía de Aldunate con las de esa figura, que incluso hace malpensar que hubiese sido tallada así a propósito, es una rara curiosidad que no debió escapar a la observación del poeta. Ello explicaría por qué Neruda estuvo dispuesto a cedérsela a cambio del cuadro. La, llamémosla por ahora "la auténtica", María Celeste -que, como veremos, aún no poseía- no la habría cambiado él por ningún tesoro del mundo.
¿Cabría la posibilidad de que la verdadera María Celeste fuese aquella con la que Arturo Aldunate Phillips ornó en 1979 la portada de su pequeña historia; es decir, (Lucía) Jenny Lind?. Esa pregunta se puede contestar con un rotundo no. Un no, válido por lo menos a partir de comienzos de los años sesenta. Porque en Una casa en la arena, editado en 1966 en Barcelona, la María Celeste que aparece allí retratada en todo su esplendor, es la que conocemos con ese nombre; la mascarona más querida e historiada de toda la colección del poeta. Dice el poeta, en éste libro suyo, muy anterior al de Aldunate Philips:
"Alain (2) y yo la sacamos del mercado de las Pulgas donde yacía bajo siete capas de olvido. En verdad costaba trabajo divisarla entre camas desmanteladas, fierros torcidos. La llevamos en aquel coche de Alain, encima, amarrada, y luego en un cajón, tardando mucho, llegó a Puerto San Antonio. Solimano (3) la rescató de la aduana, invicta, y me la trajo hasta Isla Negra. Pero yo la había olvidado. O talvez conservé el recuerdo de aquella aparición polvorienta entre la ferraille. Sólo cuando destaparon la pequeña caja sentimos el asombro de su imponderable presencia.
Fue hecha de madera oscura y tan perfectamente dulce! Y se la lleva el viento que levanta su túnica! Y entre la juventud de sus senos un broche le resguarda el escote. Tiene dos ojos ansiosos en la cabeza levantada contra el aire. Durante el largo invierno de Isla Negra algunas misteriosas lágrimas caen de sus ojos de cristal y se quedan por sus mejillas, sin caer. La humedad concentrada, dicen los escepticistas. Un milagro, digo yo, con respeto.
No le seco sus lágrimas, que no son muchas, pero que como topacios le brillan en el rostro. No se las seco porque me acostumbré a su llanto, tan escondido y recatado, como si no debiera advertirse. Y luego pasan los meses fríos, llega el sol, y el dulce rostro de María Celeste sonríe suave como la primavera. Pero, ¿por qué llora?".
En Confieso que he vivido, agrega:
"Yo tengo mascarones y mascaronas. La más pequeña y deliciosa, que muchas veces Salvador Allende me ha tratado de arrebatar, se llama María Celeste. Perteneció a un navío francés, de menor tamaño, y posiblemente no navegó sino en las aguas del Sena. Es de color oscuro, tallado en encina; con tantos años se volvió morena para siempre. Es una mujer pequeña que parece volar con las señales del viento talladas en sus bellas vestiduras del Segundo Imperio. Sobre los hoyuelos de sus mejillas, los ojos de loza miran el horizonte. Y, aunque parezca extraño, estos ojos lloran durante el invierno, todos los años. Nadie puede explicárselo. La madera tostada tendrá talvez alguna impregnación que recoge la humedad. Pero lo cierto es que estos ojos franceses lloran en invierno y que yo veo todos los años las preciosas lágrimas bajar por el pequeño rostro de María Celeste".
Y reitera en Para nacer he nacido, mirando quizá una fotografía que en 1964 aparece en Genio y Figura de Pablo Neruda (Margarita Aguirre) "...de este largo cajón parecido a un ataúd sale un dulce rostro de mujer, altos senos de madera que cortaron el viento, unas manos impregnadas de música y salmuera. Es una figura de mujer, un mascarón de proa. La bautizo María Celeste porque trae el misterio de una embarcación perdida. Yo encontré su belleza radiante en un bric à brac de París, sepultada bajo la ferretería en desuso, desfigurada por el abandono, escondida bajo los sepulcrales andrajos del arrabal. Ahora, colocada en la altura navega otra vez viva y fresca. Se llenarán cada mañana sus mejillas de un misterioso rocío o lágrimas marinas".
Esas lágrimas, su frase: "La bautizo María Celeste porque trae el misterio de una embarcación perdida ", y un párrafo de un artículo suyo aparecido en 1966 en la revista Ercilla y después en Confieso que he vivido: "El maestro Hollander me deleitó también haciendo para mí dos versiones de la María Celeste que desde 1882 se convirtió en estrella, en misterio de los misterios" nos incitaron a anti-investigar estos enigmas, pero sobre todo esas lágrimas...
También influyó el que en parte conociésemos la historia del barco y la versión fabulada por Conan Doyle. Y también porque conocimos al maestro Holländer. Aclararemos primeramente ésto último, haciendo gratos recuerdos a la manera de Aldunate Phillips:
Al sur de Concepción, cruzando el Bío Bío y siguiendo hacia la Zona del Carbón, en el Golfo de Arauco a orillas del mar, entre Lota y Schwager, está Coronel.Allí, en la calle Los Carrera 254, vivió hasta comienzos de los años 60 el pintor don Tulio García París con su esposa la señora Norma Albisini -Asistente Social de los mineros del carbón- una hija y un hijo. Éste último fue compañero de estudios del autor de éstas líneas en la Universidad de Concepción. La casa de los García Albisini fué una de las pocas que, en esa sufrida calle Los Carrera, no resultó dañada por el terremoto de mayo de 1960.
Ello permitió que los cuadros del pintor, sus dibujos, sus libros y objetos, que tenía en gran número en esa casa, se salvasen del cataclismo como si poco o nada hubiese sucedido. Para alegría de Don Tulio, cuyo interés por todos los aspectos de la cultura era -es, puesto que está vivo- inagotable. Por muchos años, e inmejorablemente, representó él, en Coronel y toda la zona, a la intelectualidad de su partido. La importancia político-social de la Zona del Carbón, hacía posible que a Coronel llegasen visitas de gran importancia. Justo al lado de la casa de Don Tulio, en una casona que muchísimos años antes se llamó Hotel La Bomba que sufrió las consecuencias del sismo de tan mala manera que después tuvo que ser demolida, estaba el Bar Restaurante Hidalgo, perteneciente a un republicano español de gran actividad política. Allí, en ese Bar que ya no existe, estuvo el gran pintor mexicano Diego Rivera, el poeta Pablo de Rokha y mucha otra gente interesante. Neruda estuvo en el Bar Hidalgo más de una vez. Una de ellas se hizo acompañar por don Tulio García hasta una modestísima vivienda ubicada a unos 800 metros del Bar, en una angosta callejuela de arena apisonada que, sin ser una continuación, era, al límite sur de Coronel, una especie de prolongación peatonal de la Calle Los Carrera. En las ventanas de esa casita, utilizadas a modo de vitrina, se exhibían para su venta unas manualidades que maravillaban al poeta: los barcos que con increíble maestría construía dentro de botellas don Carlos Hollander. Allí vimos una vez al maestro.
Neruda le compró toda una
flota al maestro Hollander. Y, como habían conversado en cada visita que le
hizo, un día resumió todo lo que sabía de él y escribió un artículo que publicó
en una revista de gran difusión; el poeta presentó a don Carlos a todo Chile.
Además, una vez le hizo un doble encargo: construir un barco muy especial, el
María Celeste, dos veces. Por qué y para qué quería tener el María Celeste por
partida doble?; Neruda no lo explicó. Y nunca nadie se lo preguntó. Don Tulio
tampoco. Acaso fuese para cambiar una, por otra vista por ahí. Pero, si así
fue, el trueque no se llevó a cabo; las dos botellas idénticas están en Isla
Negra. Podría decirse que, tallada o embotellada, la María Celeste no se dejaba
cambiar de buenas a primeras. Don Carlos Holländer contruyó dos veces la
miniatura en el interior de una botella, sin saber si era igual a la original.
Porque, al no disponer de fotos u otros datos gráficos de la nave, hubo de
atenerse a descripciones; procurando que tridimencionalmente le resultasen
miniaturas que se viesen como probablemente se vió la María Celeste del gran
misterio de la 
Lo mismo vale para
un grabado conocido desde hace muchas décadas; y también para los sellos de
correos de Gibraltar que muestran su presunta imágen. Así reproducida, la María
Celeste es y no es. En Gibraltar se examinó la nave. Tratándose de exámenes que
pretendían aclarar aspectos judiciales y criminalísticos, fueron protocolados
minuciosamente por escrito. Se describe la nave de proa a popa y de babor a
estribor; en dichos protocolos no hay mención alguna de que su proa estuviese
adornada con un mascarón. Es decir, carecía de adornos de ese tipo.
Ésto no debe hacernos pensar que Pablo Neruda asegurase lo contrario; o que pretendiese hacer creer que él poseía en su colección, la mascarona de proa de aquel navío. Nada de eso. En los párrafos citados anteriormente queda clarísimo que descubrió esa muñeca de madera en una parisina Brocanterie del mercado de las pulgas; y que pensó -o puede que así se lo dijese el comerciante que se la vendió- que había ornado en tiempos pasados la proa de una embarcación fluvial del Sena, una nave desaparecida para siempre. Tal vez fuese eso lo que más le interesó. Las naves de río tienen importancia en la biografía del poeta; a bordo de una de ellas descubrió el mar.
Desde Carahue a Puerto Saavedra navegó Neruda antes de ser Neruda; y después también.
Eran embarcaciones que carecían de mascarones; pero tenían ojos. El Saturno, por ejemplo, devoraba con sus ojos de proa, al flacuchento y soñador adolescente que esperaba ansioso en el muelle, unas cartas que quizá viniesen a bordo. Y si no era el Saturno, era el Cautín; o el Naguilán; o la Estrella del Sur. Pero el Saturno fue el que le hipnotizó con sus ojos. Por eso nunca lo olvidó, aunque no haya muchas pruebas de ello. Después del terremoto de 1939, la navegación fluvial por el río Imperial, desde Carahue a Puerto Saavedra, se redujo a un mínimo; y luego desapareció con todas sus naves. Incluso El Estrella del Sur desapareció; de nada le valió que llevase el nombre de una novela que Neftalí Reyes o Pablo Neruda leyó un verano en Puerto Saavedra*: La Estrella del Sur, de Julio Verne.
Volvamos a lo que nos ocupaba: al mascarón llamado María Celeste. Sarita Vial y Alain Sicard coinciden en señalar que esa figura de madera descubierta en París, debió llegar a Isla Negra en los primeros años de la década del sesenta. Alain Sicard, amabilísimo como siempre, confirma lo dicho por Neruda en Una casa en la arena y responde a nuestra pregunta acerca de "aquel coche suyo" diciéndonos que era su Renault cuatro cuatro de entonces, nada lujoso pero cómodo para ese tipo de menesteres. Sarita(4), por su parte y con su sin par simpatía, nos cuenta que, orgullosísimo, Pablo Neruda le presentó a la recién llegada María Celeste en Isla Negra, que de inmediato ocupó un especial lugar en su casa. Nadie sabe cómo se llamó en Francia la muñeca de oscura madera, y de ojos de porcelana que a veces lloran. El hecho es que Neruda la bautizó -o rebautizó- María Celeste en Isla Negra.Sin que ello signifique que el desguazado barco de cuya proa se la desmontó para que, después de quizá qué peripecias, fuese a dar al mercado de las pulgas de París y desde allí a Chile, haya tenido que llamarse también María Celeste. Tampoco la figura de su colección que (¿después de haberse llamado María Celeste?) lleva el nombre de Jenny Lind,perteneció al barco que llevó ese nombre; el poeta se tomó la poética libertad de llamarla así, aunque poco parecido tenía con la famosa sopranista; de la que Hans Christian Andersen se enamoró perdidamente. La auténtica figura de proa, hecha a imágen y semejanza de Jenny Lind, el ruiseñor de Suecia, existe. Sí; existe y está a buen recaudo en un Museo que no es el de Isla Negra. Neruda debía saberlo; pero, como poeta, tenía licencia para bautizar o rebautizar sus juguetes, casas, amores, etc., tal y como se le diese la lúdica y poética gana. Creemos, por ejemplo, no equivocarnos al decir que si bautizó Isla Negra a Isla Negra, fué porque cuando visitó el lugar por primera vez, más que la casa fue el paraje lo que le fascinó, al recordarle vivamente el lugar desde el que algunos años antes, en oriente, como un Sandokán en Mompracem, veía la Isla de Sumatra; en una de las cartas que desde allá envió a Eandi, denomina Isla Negra a Sumatra.
De tanto divagar y elucubrar acerca de éstas y otras cosas, y de consultar una y otra fuente de información e imaginación, no nos dimos cuenta hasta mediados de noviembre de que el año 2005 tocaba a su fin. Ésto transformó todo el asunto en una urgencia. Porque el 2005 es el año de Julio Verne!. Era necesario pues, escribir y publicar, en lo que restaba de año, ésto que ahora el sufrido lector está leyendo.
Revelaremos pues, para terminar, qué queremos decir con ésto. Señoras y señores: sumándonos a los homenajes rendidos éste año a Julio Verne (en ocasión del Centenario 1828-1905/ 2005), vamos a dar a conocer el nombre original de la bella figura de madera que Pablo Neruda, cuando la sacó de la caja en la que había cruzado los mares para llegar a su destino en Isla Negra, rebautizócon el nombre María Celeste. No nos vamos a extender en detalles relacionados con los métodos empleados para llevar a feliz término ésta holmesiana anti-investigación; el tiempo apremia y la contundente prueba gráfica que ofreceremos, habla por sí sola. La nerudiana figura de proa de una embarcación del Sena, que en la colección de Isla negra se llama María Celeste, llevó en Francia el nombre de una dama muy joven y bella -además de muy valerosa- que visitó un día en su casa de Amiens a Julio Verne para comunicarle que estaba dando la vuelta al mundo al igual que Phileas Fogg; pero muy segura de poder hacerlo sola y en menos de ochenta días. Y, puesto que efectivamente lo logró, se hizo famosísima en su tiempo; aunque hoy ya casi nadie recuerde su extraordinaria aventura. Con su nombre se bautizaron locomotoras, barcos, coches y otros medios de transporte: Nellie Bly. Éste nombre, tomado de una canción del popularísimo autor de Oh, Susana, cuyo nombre tampoco recuerdan muchos, fue el nom de plume de Elisabeth Cochrane; jovencísima periodista del New York World, el famoso diario de Joseph Pulitzer. Su nombre de familia hace pensar que Nellie Bly pudiese tener un parentesco con Lord Cochrane, pero no es así. Por cierto, Julio Verne nombra a -nuestro- Lord Cochrane en el capítulo III de El Archipiélago en Llamas, publicada junto a La Estrella del Sur. Pero eso corresponde a otra historia, que nada tiene que ver con la que ya estamos terminando de relatar.
El regreso de Nellie Bly a New York, el 25 de enero de 1890, fue celebrado en Broadway apoteósicamente. No era para menos: Nellie había tardado 72 días, 6 horas, 11 minutos y 14 segundos en dar la vuelta al mundo!!.
La espectacular noticia llegó por cable a Amiens ese mismo día; y le fue comunicada de inmediato a Julio Verne.
En Francia, un artista, cuyo nombre hoy ya no se conoce, talló magistralmente, en madera de encino de Amiens, un bellísimo mascarón de proa para una embarcación fluvial francesa, en homenaje a esa joven, casi una niña; y a Julio Verne.
La figura tallada a imágen y semejanza de Nellie Bly, resultó de un parecido asombroso. Muchos años después, en un lejano país, la figura lloraría; porque todo aquello que le dió fama un día, cayó en el olvido. Y porque el barco fluvial cuya proa ornó, desapareció del río para siempre. Y, sobre todo, porque allí, en el otro extremo del mundo, aunque muy querida y admirada, la llamaban -quizá también para siempre- con un nombre que no era el suyo: María Celeste.
Por eso lloras, Nellie Bly!
© Enrique Robertson.
Diciembre de 2005.
NOTAS
(1) Publicada posteriormente en forma de libro por Editorial Nascimento.
(2) Prof. Alain Sicard. Gran estudioso de la obra y amigo de Neruda. Poitiers, Francia.
(3) Manuel Solimano, `el gran cacciatore'; genovés chileno, gran amigo de Neruda.
(4) Sarita Vial. Poetisa y periodista. Autora de Pablo Neruda en Valparaíso, gran amiga del vate.
(*) ...yo me nutría de Salgari y Julio Verne en Puerto Saavedra (P.Neruda, entrevista BBC Londres).
Principales Obras consultadas:
- Obras Completas de Pablo Neruda. Tomos I -V. (a cargo y con notas del Prof.Hernán Loyola).
- Las Furias y las Penas. Tomos I y II. David Schidlowsky.
- Obras Completas de Julio Verne.
- Mi pequeña historia de Pablo Neruda, Arturo Aldunate Phillips Santiago, Editorial Universitaria, 1979
Ésto no debe hacernos pensar que Pablo Neruda asegurase lo contrario; o que pretendiese hacer creer que él poseía en su colección, la mascarona de proa de aquel navío. Nada de eso. En los párrafos citados anteriormente queda clarísimo que descubrió esa muñeca de madera en una parisina Brocanterie del mercado de las pulgas; y que pensó -o puede que así se lo dijese el comerciante que se la vendió- que había ornado en tiempos pasados la proa de una embarcación fluvial del Sena, una nave desaparecida para siempre. Tal vez fuese eso lo que más le interesó. Las naves de río tienen importancia en la biografía del poeta; a bordo de una de ellas descubrió el mar.
Desde Carahue a Puerto Saavedra navegó Neruda antes de ser Neruda; y después también.
Eran embarcaciones que carecían de mascarones; pero tenían ojos. El Saturno, por ejemplo, devoraba con sus ojos de proa, al flacuchento y soñador adolescente que esperaba ansioso en el muelle, unas cartas que quizá viniesen a bordo. Y si no era el Saturno, era el Cautín; o el Naguilán; o la Estrella del Sur. Pero el Saturno fue el que le hipnotizó con sus ojos. Por eso nunca lo olvidó, aunque no haya muchas pruebas de ello. Después del terremoto de 1939, la navegación fluvial por el río Imperial, desde Carahue a Puerto Saavedra, se redujo a un mínimo; y luego desapareció con todas sus naves. Incluso El Estrella del Sur desapareció; de nada le valió que llevase el nombre de una novela que Neftalí Reyes o Pablo Neruda leyó un verano en Puerto Saavedra*: La Estrella del Sur, de Julio Verne.
Volvamos a lo que nos ocupaba: al mascarón llamado María Celeste. Sarita Vial y Alain Sicard coinciden en señalar que esa figura de madera descubierta en París, debió llegar a Isla Negra en los primeros años de la década del sesenta. Alain Sicard, amabilísimo como siempre, confirma lo dicho por Neruda en Una casa en la arena y responde a nuestra pregunta acerca de "aquel coche suyo" diciéndonos que era su Renault cuatro cuatro de entonces, nada lujoso pero cómodo para ese tipo de menesteres. Sarita(4), por su parte y con su sin par simpatía, nos cuenta que, orgullosísimo, Pablo Neruda le presentó a la recién llegada María Celeste en Isla Negra, que de inmediato ocupó un especial lugar en su casa. Nadie sabe cómo se llamó en Francia la muñeca de oscura madera, y de ojos de porcelana que a veces lloran. El hecho es que Neruda la bautizó -o rebautizó- María Celeste en Isla Negra.Sin que ello signifique que el desguazado barco de cuya proa se la desmontó para que, después de quizá qué peripecias, fuese a dar al mercado de las pulgas de París y desde allí a Chile, haya tenido que llamarse también María Celeste. Tampoco la figura de su colección que (¿después de haberse llamado María Celeste?) lleva el nombre de Jenny Lind,perteneció al barco que llevó ese nombre; el poeta se tomó la poética libertad de llamarla así, aunque poco parecido tenía con la famosa sopranista; de la que Hans Christian Andersen se enamoró perdidamente. La auténtica figura de proa, hecha a imágen y semejanza de Jenny Lind, el ruiseñor de Suecia, existe. Sí; existe y está a buen recaudo en un Museo que no es el de Isla Negra. Neruda debía saberlo; pero, como poeta, tenía licencia para bautizar o rebautizar sus juguetes, casas, amores, etc., tal y como se le diese la lúdica y poética gana. Creemos, por ejemplo, no equivocarnos al decir que si bautizó Isla Negra a Isla Negra, fué porque cuando visitó el lugar por primera vez, más que la casa fue el paraje lo que le fascinó, al recordarle vivamente el lugar desde el que algunos años antes, en oriente, como un Sandokán en Mompracem, veía la Isla de Sumatra; en una de las cartas que desde allá envió a Eandi, denomina Isla Negra a Sumatra.
De tanto divagar y elucubrar acerca de éstas y otras cosas, y de consultar una y otra fuente de información e imaginación, no nos dimos cuenta hasta mediados de noviembre de que el año 2005 tocaba a su fin. Ésto transformó todo el asunto en una urgencia. Porque el 2005 es el año de Julio Verne!. Era necesario pues, escribir y publicar, en lo que restaba de año, ésto que ahora el sufrido lector está leyendo.
Revelaremos pues, para terminar, qué queremos decir con ésto. Señoras y señores: sumándonos a los homenajes rendidos éste año a Julio Verne (en ocasión del Centenario 1828-1905/ 2005), vamos a dar a conocer el nombre original de la bella figura de madera que Pablo Neruda, cuando la sacó de la caja en la que había cruzado los mares para llegar a su destino en Isla Negra, rebautizócon el nombre María Celeste. No nos vamos a extender en detalles relacionados con los métodos empleados para llevar a feliz término ésta holmesiana anti-investigación; el tiempo apremia y la contundente prueba gráfica que ofreceremos, habla por sí sola. La nerudiana figura de proa de una embarcación del Sena, que en la colección de Isla negra se llama María Celeste, llevó en Francia el nombre de una dama muy joven y bella -además de muy valerosa- que visitó un día en su casa de Amiens a Julio Verne para comunicarle que estaba dando la vuelta al mundo al igual que Phileas Fogg; pero muy segura de poder hacerlo sola y en menos de ochenta días. Y, puesto que efectivamente lo logró, se hizo famosísima en su tiempo; aunque hoy ya casi nadie recuerde su extraordinaria aventura. Con su nombre se bautizaron locomotoras, barcos, coches y otros medios de transporte: Nellie Bly. Éste nombre, tomado de una canción del popularísimo autor de Oh, Susana, cuyo nombre tampoco recuerdan muchos, fue el nom de plume de Elisabeth Cochrane; jovencísima periodista del New York World, el famoso diario de Joseph Pulitzer. Su nombre de familia hace pensar que Nellie Bly pudiese tener un parentesco con Lord Cochrane, pero no es así. Por cierto, Julio Verne nombra a -nuestro- Lord Cochrane en el capítulo III de El Archipiélago en Llamas, publicada junto a La Estrella del Sur. Pero eso corresponde a otra historia, que nada tiene que ver con la que ya estamos terminando de relatar.
El regreso de Nellie Bly a New York, el 25 de enero de 1890, fue celebrado en Broadway apoteósicamente. No era para menos: Nellie había tardado 72 días, 6 horas, 11 minutos y 14 segundos en dar la vuelta al mundo!!.
La espectacular noticia llegó por cable a Amiens ese mismo día; y le fue comunicada de inmediato a Julio Verne.
En Francia, un artista, cuyo nombre hoy ya no se conoce, talló magistralmente, en madera de encino de Amiens, un bellísimo mascarón de proa para una embarcación fluvial francesa, en homenaje a esa joven, casi una niña; y a Julio Verne.
La figura tallada a imágen y semejanza de Nellie Bly, resultó de un parecido asombroso. Muchos años después, en un lejano país, la figura lloraría; porque todo aquello que le dió fama un día, cayó en el olvido. Y porque el barco fluvial cuya proa ornó, desapareció del río para siempre. Y, sobre todo, porque allí, en el otro extremo del mundo, aunque muy querida y admirada, la llamaban -quizá también para siempre- con un nombre que no era el suyo: María Celeste.
Por eso lloras, Nellie Bly!
© Enrique Robertson.
Diciembre de 2005.
NOTAS
(1) Publicada posteriormente en forma de libro por Editorial Nascimento.
(2) Prof. Alain Sicard. Gran estudioso de la obra y amigo de Neruda. Poitiers, Francia.
(3) Manuel Solimano, `el gran cacciatore'; genovés chileno, gran amigo de Neruda.
(4) Sarita Vial. Poetisa y periodista. Autora de Pablo Neruda en Valparaíso, gran amiga del vate.
(*) ...yo me nutría de Salgari y Julio Verne en Puerto Saavedra (P.Neruda, entrevista BBC Londres).
Principales Obras consultadas:
- Obras Completas de Pablo Neruda. Tomos I -V. (a cargo y con notas del Prof.Hernán Loyola).
- Las Furias y las Penas. Tomos I y II. David Schidlowsky.
- Obras Completas de Julio Verne.
- Mi pequeña historia de Pablo Neruda, Arturo Aldunate Phillips Santiago, Editorial Universitaria, 1979
Rescatado desde web.archive.org, 2018.
Originalmente en: http://espanol.agonia.net/index.php/article/155333/index.html
Originalmente en: http://espanol.agonia.net/index.php/article/155333/index.html
JMH.
sábado, 17 de febrero de 2018
Rostros de Coronel
Postal Carlos Brandt, siglo XIX. Circulada en correos 1908.
Este blog está dedicado a la publicación de fotografías de los habitantes de Coronel y su propósito es mantener vivo su recuerdo. En muchos casos las fotografías obtenidas y publicadas sólo significarán rostros de personas cuyos nombres desconozco, al respecto, espero contar con el apoyo de mis lectores para identificarlos, eso ayudará a recordarlos y traerlos de vuelta desde la niebla del olvido.
Si dispone de fotografías de los antiguos habitantes de la ciudad y desea publicarlas en el blog, por favor agregue un comentario. Muchas gracias.
http://rostrosdecoronel.blogspot.cl/
domingo, 24 de diciembre de 2017
lunes, 20 de noviembre de 2017
Historia de la frutilla araucana en Europa
http://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.cl/2017/11/la-frutilla-araucana-y-las-modernas.html
sábado, 8 de julio de 2017
The American Energy Superpower
Barco de Transporte de gas licuado. Foto: ISTOCK PHOTO
Estados Unidos de Norteamérica está produciendo suficiente petróleo, gas natural y carbón para sus necesidades internas e incluso para exportar, sin dejar de lado las soluciones "verdes" de las energías renovables y centrales atómicas. La economía de USA está creciendo a pasos agigantados por lo que no considera someterse a las limitaciones de tratados y acuerdos que pongan obstáculos a su bonanza energética.
https://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-american-energy-superpower.html
viernes, 1 de abril de 2016
Euforia y Riesgos de las Primeras Fronteras
Son viajes que se hacen a una edad en la que uno se siente poderoso y eterno. Y los ronda cierta intensidad que puede nublar el equilibrio entre la confianza en el universo y el sentido de alerta contra el machismo asesino de este continente. Contra la atrocidad. Esos viajes, los de esa edad, atraviesan fronteras de transición, fronteras que chocan con otras menos literales y que, a veces, no se pueden atravesar. Una delgada línea, que no siempre es roja, que no siempre es clara, que puede ser invisible y ocultar una trampa mortal.
http://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2016/04/euforia-y-riesgos-de-las-primeras.html
viernes, 18 de marzo de 2016
Mal Entendiendo la Economía China
Reuters
http://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2016/03/mal-entendiendo-la-economia-china.html
lunes, 7 de marzo de 2016
1491
¿Cuántos habitantes tenía América a la llegada de Colón? ¿Qué cultivaban en la tierra los americanos? ¿En qué forma intervenían el medio ambiente? En lo que sigue. Charles C. Mann, nos sumerge en el universo americano antes de la llegada de Colón, esa realidad aún no sorprendida por la enfermedades traídas desde Europa y el impacto en los ecosistemas del Nuevo Mundo.
CHARLES C. MANN, an Atlanticcontributing editor, has been writing for the magazine since 1984. His recent books include 1491, based on his March 2002 cover story, and1493.
http://apuntesdemillalonco.blogspot.com/2016/03/1491.html
miércoles, 17 de febrero de 2016
sábado, 7 de noviembre de 2015
Cocinando cultura
Hace 6.000 años, el territorio que hoy es Coronel estaba cubierto por el mar. Transcurría la transgresión marina Flandriense que ocupó todo el espacio donde hoy reposan las ciudades de Talcahuano, Concepción, extensas zonas de Chiguayante río Bío Bío arriba, San Pedro y todas las zonas bajas del litoral regional.
http://cocinandocultura.blogspot.cl/2015/11/6000-anos-no-es-nada.html
Dibujo: Edmundo Toloza
http://cocinandocultura.blogspot.cl/2015/11/6000-anos-no-es-nada.html
jueves, 23 de julio de 2015
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