I thought I would post this for all of my ENC 1102 students. You should recognize it as the poem that Che recited to Fidel.
"The United Fruit Co."
When the trumpet sounded, everything
on earth was prepared
and Jehovah distributed the world
to Coca Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors and other entities:
The Fruit Company Inc.
reserved the juiciest for itself,
the central coast of my land,
the sweet waist of America.
It re-baptized the lands
"Banana Republics"
and on the sleeping dead,
on the restless heroes
who'd conquered greatness,
liberty and flags,
it founded a comic opera:
it alienated free wills,
gave crowns of Caesar as gifts,
unsheathed jealousy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies,
Trujillo flies, Tachos flies,
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, flies soppy
with humble blood and marmelade,
drunken flies that buzz
around common graves,
circus flies, learned flies
adept at tyranny.
The Company disembarks
among the blood-thirsty flies,
brim-filling their boats that slide
with the coffee and fruit treasure
of our submerged lands like trays.
Meanwhile, along the sugared up
abysms of the ports,
indians fall over, buried
in the morning mist:
a body rolls, a thing
without a name, a fallen number,
a bunch of dead fruit
spills into the pile of rot.
-Translated by Jack Hirschman from The Essential Neruda
Here is a link to an interview with Natalia Revuelta, who is still alive today and living in Cuba, still a strong supporter of her ex-lover. There is an interesting detail that you may pick up on from the daughter, Alina, that may have some relation to one of the stories in the text. Anyways, this is just some additional info I though you might find interesting.
2 comments:
oh cool thanx i was actually going to look for the poem. =oD
I don't know much about Che Guevara to say the least. I do know who he is and a couple of thing he has done. The poem doesn't look familiar but I really liked it. I love the whole flies symbolism, it describes everything perfectly. I also read the interview with Natalia Revuelta and wow.....I didn't know about this either. I read the whole thing and one of the most important parts of the interview that strike me the most was the part where natalia says "Family is what you have when you have nothing else" I believe this to be very true and accurate. There is no one or nothing more forgiving and supporting than your own family.
She had a tough life but she continued to move forward. She seems like a strong woman who is madly in love with her country and Castro. She supports him all the way. I agree what she says about living in the U.S. In the U.S. you don't know your neighbors name, or even see their faces for that matter. There is not that warmth you get when you are in your home country were everyone knows each other.
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