Two Wings and a Lady

Cuba y Puerto Rico son

De un pájaro las dos alas

It’s a famous quote from a poem by Lola Rodríguez de Tió, and can be translated roughly as “Cuba and Puerto Rico are two wings of the same bird.”

Well if true, it may be that the wings of the bird are flying in completely different directions.

From the video below, it seems that the Cuban wing is set to soar. Raúl Castro has had to face the inevitable: the economy, supported all those years by the Iron Curtain buying Cuba’s sugar at inflated prices, was broke. The fields—five million acres of them—were overrun with a weed called marabú (marabou.) Nor is it just a weed—it’s highly invasive and thorny. If you attack it with a machete—pretty much the only thing at hand in lightly mechanized Cuba—you’ll end up bloody at the end of the day.

The buildings are falling down in Havana, and the state workers, who are supposed to repair the houses, are backlogged and slow to respond. How slow? One woman interviewed has waited 16 years with her ceiling propped up with four-by-fours. She worries that the roof will collapse every time it rains.

Seventy percent of the food has to be imported; supplies in the state-run shops are scant. Doctors make twenty-five dollars a month; one doctor interviewed makes a better living selling copper tubing on the side.

And so, you say, how can the wing be flapping skyward?

Well, Cuba’s economy grew 3% last year, and is expected to grow about the same this year as well. Sure, it’s not quite the 3.6% that Castro wanted, but it’s not far off.

And by allowing 181 jobs to be done by licensed private individuals, the government has at last introduced some incentive to work. In the past, there was a saying, “the government pretends to pay us; we pretend to work.” Now, there’s the beginning of an independent, free market economy.

And let’s face it, where was Miami before the Cubans arrived?

My friend Harry has a story. In those days when Harry was selling shoes, he entered a small shop, got tossed out, and went to a café. Still burning with the humiliation, he overheard a conversation among the boys—a group of middle-aged guys who were complaining: the damned Cubans had come and taken all the jobs away in Puerto Rico. Harry turned to address them.

“If the Cubans are working and you are not, it’s because they are NOT sitting in cafés drinking beer at 10 o’clock in the morning. They came with nothing and got a bike and sold what they could sell and now they have multinational corporations and live in gated communities. Oh, and I’m not Cuban but Puerto Rican….”

Which will explain why the Puerto Rican wing seems to be plummeting.

La producción propia es la tarea urgente contra la dependencia de fondos federales en Puerto Rico

That’s one of the headlines in today’s El Nuevo Día. Economists are urging us—as they have for all the twenty odd years I’ve lived here, to create jobs to avoid dependency on federal funds.

And on the double, since 24,200 fewer people are working here on the island than last year. Granted, that may not be a problem, since we are also shrinking in population, but government (the largest employer on the island) is reporting 20,600 fewer jobs this year than last.

Here’s Caribbean Business Report on the subject:

Puerto Rico’s population was pegged at 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census, down from the 3,808,610 registered in the 2000 Census. It marked the first time the island population had declined between census counts. The 2010 Census also showed there were 4.7 million Puerto Ricans living in the states, marking the first time more Puerto Ricans lived stateside than on the island. Only one state, Michigan, registered a drop in population in the 2010 Census, dipping 0.6 percent.

It’s happened before—in the Great Depression, droves of Puerto Ricans left, primarily workers who would man the factories of the (then) industrialized North East. Who’s leaving now?

Young professionals.

Which is why the article in Caribbean Business Report ends thus:

The population drop of nearly 83,000 over the last 10 years and the continuing exodus raises the prospect of less federal funding for Puerto Rico, increased pressure on the financially ailing public-pension system and a dramatically aging population with fewer financial resources.

Yes and no.

I’m sitting in a terrific local business, Poet’s Passage, run by a great lady, and named in fact, Lady. She explained this curious fact by noting that her father’s family came from Australia via Scotland, where they were all lords and ladies. (Tactfully, I never inquired as to the exact circumstances of the move to Australia).

And Lady has been here since 11AM—busy getting her sister store adjoining the café ready for an activity tonight. Which means that she will be here until the wee hours of the morning.

“There’s money in poetry,” she told me once, “and I sat down with the board of directors of WesternBank and convinced them—I’d made a great business plan. And in six years of business, I’ve never missed a payment.”

She’s less person than dynamo, raising the emotional temperature by several degrees every time she comes into the café. She kisses everyone; she calls out, “Hi, Marc!” from fifty feet away. She’s home-schooling her child or she’s painting one of her poems onto a piece of canvas or she’s busy telling a customer about poetry night, every Tuesday night at 7 PM. She admits it privately—some of the poetry heard there may not last in the canon of Puerto Rican / Latin American literature, but that’s not the point. She’s seen poets grow, as she has; she’s seen self-esteem bloom. It’s a space, a necessary space.

An embracing space. How embracing? The gentleman at the table two doors down is busy working at his computer. He also serves me coffee—and very good it is—when he’s working. How many other workers choose to hang out at their workplace when not on the job? (I except bars….)

Lady dropped out of high school to help in the family business. But it hasn’t stopped her. “Who’s your favorite female poet of the 20^th century,” she once asked me, and we went on to talk about Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore—an army of great poets. I was sweating to hold up my end of the conversation. 

The only resource Puerto Rico has is an amazing human potential. And looking at Lady charge into her café, greet the customers, kiss the staff, give the order to clean the bathrooms, and then take a dirty plate off the table while kissing the customer—I’m convinced.

The two wings can soar upward again.

When the Criminals Wear Three-Piece Suits

Great news, Readers—only one in four houses in the United States is underwater!

That’s only 13 million mortgages. However, if you count the number of people who have not paid off 20% of the mortgage, the figure goes to 43.6% or 22 million homeowners. (If you don’t have sufficient equity, you can’t sell the house, so you’re essentially stuck with it….)

Look, as a group, bankers have never been easy to love. And when people make stupid decisions about money, the first group they point the finger at are bankers, who tend to make good decisions about money.

And it’s also the case the banker of years past was a different breed. He lived in the community, he knew everyone in town, he knew whose marriage was shaky, whose kid had a major illness, who didn’t have money now but had an elderly uncle who did. All of those things have financial implications. Sure, he answered first to his shareholders—what company doesn’t—but he also answered to his community. And he could be proud: the bank grew the town, funded the businesses that paid the workers who went out and bought food and clothes and a house and a car.

Somehow, that world drifted away. Twenty years ago, I lobbied the bank hard—at one point I was calling Luis, the guy in charge of our putative mortgage, three times a day—to get the mortgage. Luis, punctilious to a fault, wanted to see everything from income tax forms for the previous three years to several months of paystubs to a letter assuring that I was employed and had no disciplinary action taken against me.

Ten years later, I was sitting in front of my computer, blinking in wonder at an advertisement—“YOU qualify for a $700,000 mortgage with no down payment! Instant authorization guaranteed!”

And it was true. People who should NEVER have gotten a mortgage got one, and it was no problem for the bank because they were going to sell the mortgage before the first payment was due, so hey—no problem!

And let’s be clear—everybody knew about this problem. I found out about the impending doom to come while sitting in a Jacuzzi with my brother-in-law. Right—he worked as an assistant / advisor to a congressman, but that’s hardly a miniscule esoteric group.

So the world had changed and banks had merged so much that bankers had lost connection to their community, and if Citibank or JPMorgan failed the entire Western Civilization would be wiped out. Which nearly happened, and the damage, though not cataclysmic, was still huge.

Well, three years ago, Congress passed a law, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was the most extensive reform of the financial industry since the Great Depression. Dodd-Frank put tighter controls and regulations—all serious and sensible things designed to combat a reoccurrence of the whole mess. And guess what? The New York Times this morning revealed that the banks are back in Washington, and virtually writing legislation that would roll back significant parts of Dodd / Frank.

Here’s the Times on the subject:

In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)

All of this, of course, doesn’t come without a price, which the Times points out, in the paragraph below:

And as its lobbying campaign steps up, the financial industry has doubled its already considerable giving to political causes. The lawmakers who this month supported the bills championed by Wall Street received twice as much in contributions from financial institutions compared with those who opposed them, according to an analysis of campaign finance records performed by MapLight, a nonprofit group.

Of course, some high-minded congressmen had scruples; check this out:

“I won’t dispute for one second the problems of a system that demands immense amount of fund-raisers by its legislators,” said Representative Jim Himes, a third-term Democrat of Connecticut, who supported the recent industry-backed bills and leads the party’s fund-raising effort in the House. A member of the Financial Services Committee and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, he is one of the top recipients of Wall Street donations. “It’s appalling, it’s disgusting, it’s wasteful and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It’s unfortunately the world we live in.”

Wow—gotta feel sorry for Himes, and what our wicked world has done to him!

Or not—since it seems other people are living in other worlds. The Internet has decided to drift off somewhere so I can’t tell you the number—but there are millions of houses in foreclosure. Oh, and does anybody remember the little scandal of 2010, when the banks were foreclosing on the wrong properties, were robosigning documents, were engaging in various forms of fraud?

Eric Holder, our Secretary of Justice, came out in March saying that some banks were too big to jail. People howled, and he stepped back; an aide told Congress recently that she “didn’t think that he (Holder) meant that.” But what is true is that not one of those guys who got us into this mess has been jailed.

The bastards are back in business. The rest of us are still stunned, still struggling to get back on our feet, still rubbing our eyes and wondering what hit us.

Oh, and the bastards own Congress….. 

Odyssey

It was a day when the Puerto Rican Goddess chose her theme with typical exuberance.

“Our great grandfather came to Puerto Rico from the Canary Islands as a very young man without a penny. He collected wood in the fields, and then went and stood by the side of the road. Took anything anybody would give him for the wood. He saved and saved, never spending any money on anything, but buying land. He ended up a very rich man, and bought one of the first cars in a town west of here. Then he realized: he could travel for less on the públicos—the public cars. So he sold the car back to the dealer.”

A story a friend, Carlos, told me at the café. We were talking families, and how for the generation of the Great Depression it’s agony to shell out a dime they don’t need to spend.

Now, of course, they can afford all the help they need. But Carlos’s parents are still living frugally, still wanting to pass something on to their children, still worried that they’ll run through their money and be a burden.

“Your mother always wanted to go to Europe,” said Carlos’s father, when Carlos, having reviewed his father’s finances, told him just how well he had done.

They hadn’t, of course. They had stayed home and worked and gotten places their parents hadn’t—both Carlos’s parents went to the States and got Master’s Degrees, both worked, both believed passionately in getting ahead.

No time for Europe.

Oh, and no money, either.

There were similar stories in my family. Franny’s family were eccentrics, Jack came from salt-of-the-earth Norwegian immigrants. No money there, although there is a hospital ward that my grandmother had donated somewhere in Chicago. And she hadn’t had a car until she was shamed into it by hearing a rumor that the Newhouses were too poor to buy one. So she bought a Cadillac, drove it to church, drove it back, had the tires taken off, and kept it on cinder blocks in the front yard.

And like Carlos’s parents, Jack had been a big believer of getting ahead, making progress, going somewhere and making a life that was better than the person’s who had given you that life.

And then giving a hand to somebody less fortunate—but as hardworking—as you.

Which is why Jack had called up his old friend at the Urban League, sometime in the late 80’s.

He’d gotten it into his head that parents needed to read to their kids.

Well, he certainly did.

There’s a photo of me, somewhere, with Jack lying down on the couch, and me sitting on a pillow above his head. He’s holding the book that we both are reading.

So Jack had teamed up with his old buddy, and they were busy on a project involving filming parents reading a book, visible to the viewer, to their kids. At least that’s how I remember it. And since that had been Jack’s project-of-the-moment when he died, we had asked for donations to the program in lieu of flowers.

As a writer, Jack respected conciseness. He tended, however, to use the telephone as an instrument to explore what he thought. He would call his friend at the Urban League, get the voice mail, and then leave one, two or even three lengthy, pontificating messages. The Urban League guy wrote a warm tribute to Jack after he died, and finally confessed that most of the time, he had only listened to the concluding message.

Right—so it seemed to be a day organized around some simple themes: poverty, getting ahead, hard work and giving back. Which had been as the well the theme of the remarkable documentary I had seen the night before.

On the flimsiest of excuses, I had written an old high school classmate, Emily Auerbach, now a distinguished professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We hadn’t been close, but we knew each other. I was a cellist, she an oboist—we shared a lot of Shostakovich Fifth together.

Franny had mentioned her, once or twice, over the years and had attended some of her lectures. And she’s no lightweight. Margaret Drabble writes about Searching for Jane Austen, “Emily Auerbach's approach to Jane Austen is lively, engaging, and thoroughly modern. Like Austen, Auerbach wears her wide learning lightly and imparts a great deal of information in a most enjoyable manner.”

Right, Margaret Drabble—the heaviest of guns….

But I have, as you know, until the end of February 2013 to get my message out. You can have a good, comfortable death at the time and place of your choice. You don’t need to rot away in a nursing home. You can die at home with the cat on your bed on a spring afternoon—just as Franny did.

So it was time to call in whatever artillery seemed at hand. I tracked down Emily—not hard to do—and sent her an email.

Some time elapsed. She replied, apologizing for the delay. My email talking about the book I had written about the death of my mother had arrived…

…on the day Emily had buried her mother.

So it was one of those times that an email couldn’t do it. Time to phone. I did, stammered out an apology, and then began to watch the documentary for which Emily had sent me a link.

I’m happy to say that while I’ve been occupying myself with the daily trot and writing blog posts, some of my high school classmates are actually doing some real work. And no, not on Austen—which I’ve not read, but will—but on the south side of Madison. In a library—The Irwin A. and Robert D. Goodman Library. Didn’t know the library, but did recognize the building behind it.

The Madison Urban League.

Emily, it seems, never knew poverty, as I—knock on wood—have not. But her parents did, and were only able to escape it through the help of a remarkable institution, Berea College, which was free. So her parents, like Carlos’s and mine, had gone onward and upward, and now Emily was reaching out and giving a hand.

Or a handout. Or homework she had assigned and graded.

It’s called the Odyssey Project, and it’s a free, yearlong, fully accredited university course with the intention of getting people who never would have dreamed of going to the university…

…into the university.

And out, with a degree.

More than a degree. A changed life, or rather, lives. Because nothing happens in a vacuum. You’re a kid, and you watch your mother go from homelessness to university graduate. You think that doesn’t have an effect? Especially when she calls you on your skipping classes in high school.

She’s not big on subtlety, the Puerto Rican Goddess. She paints with a pretty big brush. Sometimes that’s best, I think. Sometimes the message really is simple. You can change lives. You can get ahead. If you’re sitting pretty now, stand up, look below you, reach down and give a hand.

Raf swears that there’s something unique about Wisconsin—its efficiency, its earnestness, its almost naïve belief that institutions and systems can work, and can get better. I scoff at the idea.

Until I see an old classmate in a room with thirty poor people on whom, as a colleague says, “she just won’t give up. She won’t let anyone slip away.”

And Raf passes the Kleenex to dry my tears.   

Dust Bowl Days

It’s a curiously haunting photo, this newly released image from Life Magazine—or is it?

It could be just me—the dust bowl was an unspoken, unacknowledged force in my childhood.

It marked Jack. Born in 1909, he was 20 when the Great Depression hit. He took a year off school, and went out to North Dakota.

No money.

The stories got told. Feeding the newborn lambs: he would sit in one room next to a partly barricaded door. He’d grab the first lamb, feed it with a bottle, and then toss it over the barricade into the other room. Then grab another.

Why? Where was the ewe?

He needed wood for the wood-burning stove. And there was none. He hit on the idea of chopping down telephone poles….

He baked his own bread, and was a bit ashamed of having to. He was caught in the act by a cowboy, visiting, looking for coffee if not a free meal. So Jack threw a towel over the dough, talked to the cowboy. At last, the cowboy spotted the rising dough. “Christ, son, you gotta knead that dough!” shouted the cowboy. Threw off the towel, punched down the dough, and started kneading away.

The stories carried the message—life is grim. You can lose everything overnight. Only the tough survive, and sometimes not even then.

And another message—implicit, not stated. You got it easy. You weren’t there in that cold dark house with the damn lambs puling and needing to be fed and the wind attacking the house and coming through the cracks in the walls and wondering…

…am I ever gonna get out of this place?

Ever get back to the university?

Ever make anything of my life?

“He didn’t think he’d make it,” Franny once said of him in those years. And he couldn’t quite believe that he did.

And what of this family, in the photo above? Here’s the caption:

"Farmer John Barnett and his family are 'Okies' who stuck to their land near Woodward. They have 21 dairy cattle which yield a scant seven gallons per milking. Mrs. Barnett takes care of a vegetable garden that is always blowing away. The children, Delphaline, 17 (top), Lincoln, 11 (right), and Leonard, 9, do plenty of chores. On Sundays the Barnetts eat jack rabbit." Oklahoma, 1942. (Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Oh. It almost raises more questions than answers. Seven gallons of milk from 21 cattle? That’s a third of a gallon per cow. And that garden—blowing away. Couldn’t she mulch it? Or was it so infernally dry, and so fiercely windy, that nothing could be done?

The jack rabbit—the only meat that they could eat? Here in Puerto Rico there are chickens everywhere in the country. Why no chickens there?

They stuck to their land—why? Nowhere to go? Obstinacy? Didn’t believe it was any better anywhere else?

Mostly, though, it’s the faces that haunt. Barnett—strong and tough and lean. Life has beaten him—does he know it? Can’t look into the camera, and yet his eyes are lifted—as if wishing to see out. His wife, also looking down, is she as submissive as she appears? Does she really acquiesce, as she sees her garden—that is, the food for her family—blow away? What woman would not be full of rage—rage at a man who had taken her to this barren place, who had put her and her children is this position? Rage at a man who had failed to do what a man was supposed to do: support his family.

Each of the children now—so different. Delphaline—and what’s the story behind the name? And yet she looks out at the camera, apparently untroubled, a typical girl. She has none of the tight-lipped, compressed look of her mother.

Lincoln, who I assumed was the youngest. But he appears, instead, the shyest. And then Leonard! That look—wry, innocent, savvy, questioning, impish…what? What is he thinking, as he sits in front of his broken father? Is there some life in him that has been snuffed out of his father?

A photo captures a moment. But life goes on. Jack went on, made a life for himself, got the hell out of North Dakota.

And also didn’t.