Past & Present

Lamentable news from the torrid swamplands of Tabasco state in Mexico, where the ruins at La Venta of just about the most ancient civilization of meso-America is located. The L.A. Times reported:

Vandals have caused more than $20,000 (300,000 pesos) worth of damage to archaeological artifacts in the park and museum La Venta in Villahermosa, Tabasco.

Three people were arrested by police after they entered the park and performed religious rituals on a number of stones that date to Mexico’s Olmec culture. According to Milenio, 23 pieces were damaged by the vandals who used salt, oil and grape juice on the stones, some of which are more than 3,200 years old.

Many may not recognize the name of the Olmecs, or not be able to distinguish them from the jumble of names of indigenous civilizations of what is now Latin America. But you may recognize their most enduring artifact, which survives 3,000 years because it is made from stone and weighs dozens of tons. It is the colossal head, a replica of which from the National Museum of Anthropology is shown above. Does anyone remember that opening to the Simpsons TV show when that adorable family is heading for the couch and it turns out there’s a colossal head in the room?

Elections and natural disasters are the two causes that steer U.S. attention briefly to otherwised overlooked corners of the world. And so Ghana, which on Jan. 7 inaugurated a new president named John Atta Mills, earns some ink this week. Interesting enough was the coverage of the Washington Post  , but it stays in the present and contrasts Ghana’s functioning democracy with the breakdown in Kenya and the pathologies of Zimbabwe.

However, as a historian I was more tickled by the New York Times and the fact it looks back  into what the reporter Lydia Polgreen called the “iconic” role in Africa’s history that Ghana plays. Ghana, formerly the British-run Gold Coast, pioneered  nationalist (anti-colonial) revolution a half-century ago. Here was Polgreen’s well-wrought summary of that role:

AS the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence, in 1957 from Britain, Ghana was a beacon to black people everywhere. Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s visionary but autocratic post-independence leader, was an icon of anti-imperialism, laying out a Pan-African ideology that reverberates on the continent and beyond to this day.

But his rule did not last. Mr. Nkrumah bankrupted the nation and was overthrown in 1966. Ghana suffered through a decade of chaos until Mr. [Jerry John] Rawlings, then a little-known air force officer, seized power in a coup in 1979.

 The bulk of the article is a profile of Mr. Rawlings, who remains a player in Ghana politics by running the party of the new president. Not knowing anything of Mr. Rawlings, I’m ashamed to admit, I was struck by the description of him as a “vast slab” of a man because it reminded me that Idi Amin, the former dictator of Uganda, was also freakishly large.

Here is a map locating Ghana within Africa

The 1950s was the decade in which the U.S. stepped into the role of world superpower, and learned the hard way the limits of that power. The hot wars within the Cold War taught such lessons, but so too did the Cuban Revolution. It was this week that Fidel Castro and his guerrillas traveled triumphantly from their original base in the east of Cuba to Havana. The victory was triggered by the decision to flee by the dicatator Fulgencio Batista, who had recently lost the support by the U.S.

 Admirably but not surprisingly, the Miami Herald  is doing a deep examination of Cuba and the history of this revolution. Here is how they paint the moment of triumph in one of their stories:

At 12:35 a.m., Batista quit. At dawn, a plane with 44 people aboard, including Batista, took off for the Dominican Republic, triggering a mad scramble in Havana. Batista’s allies fled by plane or yacht as the news spread by shortwave radio. They were in mortal danger, and they knew it.

The fact the U.S. failed in its overt attempt at overthrow at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and then failed for decades after to topple Castro, highlighted the obstacles in fighting the Cold War. Castro’s own failures to bring an open society and political system is also ironic, given his pronouncements against Batista’s tyranny before the revolution. But Castro’s social reforms were significant and a revolution-sized improvement over life under Batista and colonizers before. That’s the side of Castro you won’t hear much about in the U.S., given that we still wage an impotent information war against him now 50s years on.