'The Daybreak of a Movement'

The following are excerpts from an advance text of this afternoon's address by Carlos Fuentes:

Some time ago, I was travelling in the state of Morelos in Central Mexico, looking for the birthplace of Emiliano Zapata, the village of Anenecuilco.

I stopped on the way and asked a Campexino, a laborer of the fields, how far it was to that village.

He answered me: "If you had left at daybreak, you would be there now."

This man had an internal clock which marked the time of his own personality and of his own culture.

For the clocks of all men and women, of all civilizations, of all histories, are not set at the same hour.

One of the wonders of our menaced globe is the variety of its experiences, its memories and its desires.

Any attempt to impose a uniformed politics on this diversity is like a prelude to death.

Lech Walesa is a man who started out a day-break, (at the hour) when the history of Poland demanded that the people of Poland act to solve the problems that a repressive government and a hollow party no longer knew how to solve.

We in Latin America who have practiced solidarity with Solidarity salute Lech Walesa today.

The honor done to me by this great center of learning. Harvard University, is augmented by the circumstances in which I receive it.

I accept this honor as a citizen of Mexico, and as a writer from Latin America.

Let me speak to you as such.

As a Mexican first:

The daybreak of a movement of social and political renewal cannot be set by calendars other than those of the people involved.

With Walesa and Solidarity, it was the internal clock of the people of Poland that struck the morning hour.

So it has always been: with the people of my country during our revolutionary experience; with the people of Central America in the hour we are all living, and with the people of Massachusetts in 1776.

The dawn of a revolution reveals the total history of a community.

This is a self-knowledge that a society cannot be deprived of without grave consequences.

The Experience of Mexico

The Mexican Revolution was the object of constant harassment, pressures, menaces, boycotts and even a couple of armed interventions between 1910 and 1932.

It was extremely difficult for the United States Administrations of the time to deal with violent and rapid change on the southern border of your country.

Calvin Coolidge convened both Houses of Congress in 1927 and--talkative for once--denounced Mexico as the source of "Bolshevik" subversion in Central America.

We were the first domino.

But precisely because of its revolutionary policies (favoring agrarian reform, secular education collective bargaining and recovery of natural resources)--all of them opposed by the successive government in Washington, from Taft to Hoover--Mexico became a modern, contradictory self-knowing and self-questioning nation... A great statesman is a pragmatic idealist Franklin D. Roosevelt had the political imagination and the diplomatic will to respect Mexico when President Lazaro Cardenas, (in the culminating act of the Mexican Revolution,) expropriated the nation's oil resources in 1938.

Instead of menacing, sanctioning or invading, Roosevelt negotiated.

He did not try to beat history. He joined it.

Will no one in this country imitate him today?

The lessons applicable to the current situation in Latin America are inscribed in the history--the very difficult history--of Mexican-American relations.

Why have they not been learnt?

Against Intervention

In today's world, intervention evokes a fearful symmetry.

As the United States feels itself authorized to intervene in Central America to put out a fire in your front yard--I'm delighted that we have been promoted from the traditional status of back yard--then the Soviet Union also feels authorized to play the fireman in all of its front and back yards.

Intervention damages the fabric of a nation, the chance of its resurrected history, the wholeness of its cultural identity.

I have witnessed two such examples of wholesale corruption by intervention in my lifetime.

One was in Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1968. I was there then to support my friends the writers, the students and statesmen of the Prague Spring. I heard them give thanks, at least, for their few months of freedom as night fell once more upon them; the night of Kafka, where nothing is remembered but nothing is forgiven.

The other time was in Guatemala in 1964, when the democratically elected government was overthrown by a mercenary invasion openly backed with the CIA. The political process of reform and self-recognition in Guatemala was brutally interrupted to no one's benefit: Guatemala was condemned to a vicious circle of repression, that continues to this day...

Negotiations Before It Is Too Late

Before the United States has to negotiate with extreme cultural, nationalistic and internationalist pressures of both the left and the right in the remotest nations of this hemisphere--Chile and Argentina--in the largest nation--Brazil--and in the closest one--Mexico--it should rapidly, in its own interests as well as ours, negotiate in Central America and the Caribbean.

We consider in Mexico that each and every one of the points of conflict in the region can be solved diplomatically, through negotiations, before it is too late.

There is no fatality in politics that says: given a revolutionary movement in any country in the region, it will inevitably end up providing bases for the Soviet Union.

What happens between the daybreak of revolution in a marginal country and its imagined destiny as a Soviet base.

If nothing happens but harassment, blockades propaganda, pressures and invasions against the revolutionary country, then that prophecy will become self-fulfilling.

But if power with historical memory and diplomacy with historical imagination come into play, we, the United States and Latin America, might end up with something very different.

A Latin America of independent states building institutions of stability, renewing the culture of national identity, diversifying our economic interdependence and wearing down the dogmas of two musty 19th century philosophies.

And a United States giving the example of a tone in relations which is present, active, co-operative, respectful, aware of cultural differences and truly proper for a great power unafraid of ideological labels, capable of coexisting with diversity in Latin America as it has learnt to coexist with diversity in Black Africa.

Precisely 20 years ago, John F. Kennedy said at another commencement ceremony:

"If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity."

This, I think, is the greatest legacy of the sacrificed statesman whose death we all mourned.

Let us understand that legacy, by which death ceased to be an enigma and became, not a lament for what might have been, but a hope for what can be.

This can be...

What would be the quid pro quo?

Simply this: the respect of the United States, respect for the integrity and autonomy of all the states in the region, including normalization of relations with all of them.

The countries in the region should not be forced to seek solutions to their problems outside themselves.

The problems of Cuba are Cuban and shall be so once more when the United States understands that by refusing to talk to Cuba on Cuba, it not only weakens Cuba and the United States, but strengthens the Soviet Union.

The mistake of spurning Cuba's constant offers to negotiate whatever the United States wants to discuss frustrates the forces in Cuba desiring greater internal flexibility and international independence.

Is Fidel Castro some sort of superior Machiavelli whom no gringo negotiator can meet at a bargaining table without being bamboozled by him? I don't believe it...

Let us remember, let us imagine, let us reflect.

The United States can no longer go it alone in Central America and the Caribbean. It cannot, in today's world, practice the anachronistic policies of the "Big Stick."

It will only achieve, if it does so, what it cannot truly want.

Many of our countries are struggling to cease being banana republics.

They do not want to become balalaika republics.

Do not force them to choose between appealing to the Soviet Union or capitulating to the United States.

My plea is this one.

Do not practice negative overlordship in this hemisphere.

Practice positive leadership. Join the forces of change and patience and identity in Latin America.

The United States should use the new realities of re-distributed world power to its advantage. All the avenues I have been dealing with come together now to form a circle of possible harmony: the United States has true friends in this hemisphere; these friends must negotiate the situations that the United States, while participating in them, cannot possibly negotiate for itself, and the negotiating parties--from Mexico and Venezuela, Panama and Colombia, tomorrow perhaps our great Portuguese speaking sister, Brazil, perhaps the new Spanish democracy, re-establishing the continuum of our Iberian heritage, and expanding the Contadora group--have the intimate knowledge of the underlying cultural problems.

And they have the imagination for assuring the inevitable passage from the American sphere of influence, not to the Soviet sphere, but to our own Latin American authenticity in a pluralistic world.

*****

President Bok, Ladies and Gentlemen:

My friend Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, makes a plea for "the small cultures" from the wounded heart of Central Europe.

I have tried to echo it today from the convulsed heart of Latin America.

Politicians will disappear.

The United States and Latin America will remain.

What sort of neighbors will you have?

What sort of neighbors will we have?

That will depend on the quality of our memory and also of our imagination.

"If we had started out at daybreak, we would be there now."

Our times have not coincided.

Your daybreak came quickly.

Our night has been long.

But we can overcome the distance between our times if we can both recognize that the true duration of the human heart is in the present, this present in which we remember and we desire: this present where our past and our future are one.

Reality is not the product of an ideological phantasm.

It is the result of history.

And history is something we have created ourselves.

We are (thus) responsible for our history.

No one was present in the past.

No one has been present in the future.

But there is no living present without the imagination of a better world.

We both made the history of this Hemisphere.

We must both remember it.

We must both imagine it.

We need your memory and your imagination or ours shall never be complete.

You need our memory to redeem your past, and our imagination to complete your future.

We may be here on this Hemisphere for a long time.

Let us remember one another.

Let us respect one another.

Let us walk together outside the night of repression and hunger and intervention, even it for you the sun is at high noon and focus at a quarter to 12.