Question of symbols IV (final) The Tempest

Big the storm that does not dare to clear.

On the ground are the most severe trunks.

Good faith

In distant November 1611, the first performance of The Tempest, a play by William Shakespeare, took place in London. Over the years, the characters in the play have become symbols of diverse significance.

The days that run, just as stormy, put us in the place of defining our identities. In any case, it is very dangerous to walk around the world without knowing who we are and who we are going with. believe me.

Around the year 1900, the Uruguayan author José Enrique Rodó identified Ariel, a character from the Shakespearean play, as a symbol of spirituality and culture that our peoples in America should achieve.

By then the Uruguayan intellectual opposed the Greco-Latin values, advocated by the Spanish empire, to the Anglo-Saxon materialism that blew from the north. His essay Ariel, inaugurated at the dawn of the 20th century an ideological current that promoted among young people the virtues of study, culture and work.

Although Arielism became a way of opposing the vulgar invading materialism of North American imperialism, it is also true that it did so from the narrow framework of educated and aristocratic minorities, as various authors point out.

“I have been inspired (…) by the need to maintain in our towns what is fundamental in its collective character_ Rodó writes to the Cuban intellectual Enrique José Varona_ against all absorbing and invasive aspirations (…)”

It was in 1971 when the Cuban poet and essayist Roberto Fernández Retamar freed Calibán – another of the Shakespearean characters – from the low instincts with which they had characterized him, to recognize in him the rebellion and insurgency that would identify the peoples that grew to the south. of the Rio Grande.

Since The Tempest, a symbolic work by the brilliant English playwright, can be located on one of the many Caribbean islands -many allude to the Bahamas- it must be inspired by one of the shipwrecks reported in the days when the Spanish empires, British, Portuguese and Dutch disputed the American lands. So it is legitimate to appropriate the fate of their characters.

Perhaps for this reason, and insofar as they concern the historical evolution of our letters and the social projects that they inspire, the importance of knowing how to identify ourselves among the many characters in the play transcends. Knowing, of course, that our stage is much bigger and more complex than the tables of a theater, and that once on the scene we will never be just simple actors, responsible for a virtuoso representation of the different characters.

In reality, we will be those severe or suffering, enterprising or domesticated, submissive or redeeming beings that the history of our peoples provides us with, so that we can contribute to building it from the bottom of all time and for all time.

From the oppressive atmosphere that for more than 3 decades, neoliberalism extends over the bled Latin American economies, to the virulent colonization of our identities, the crisis of values ​​puts an end to the dream of an unredeemed America. The growing emigration of our young people to the promised land is an expression of the uprooting and abandonment that the economic and cultural hegemony of the empire takes on our peoples.

A dream that many idealize as the great opportunity for everyone, with that coarse seal imposed by consumerist vanity and pseudoculture when they are accompanied by uncriticism and ignorance of the lack of future of the imperial proposal.

An article by Ernesto Estévez Rams, recently published in the Granma newspaper, explains, based on data taken from Forbes magazine, that only 728 people, of the so-called billionaires in the United States, had more wealth than 50% of the households in That country. Those who know how to interpret the statistics provided by the North American specialized magazine will be able to recognize where imperial benefits lead.

From the denaturing or demonization of our legitimate heroes, going through the contemporary invasion of symbolic buildings, or the tiresome narrative of the supermen who tell us, all symbols of a decadent society, it is time to build the imaginary that our peoples must oppose to the dirty war they suffer.

For Cubans, the so-called “black propaganda” that in the 1980s was one of the external factors that contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, is the same that is done to us. Built from defamation, falsehood and adulteration of events and history, as Juan Nicolas Padrón points out in Cubaperiodistas, we have to face it from the culture.

In times of storms, naivety and delay increase the damage. It will then be the Caliban rebels, armed with science and the most audacious tools of our time, who will curb the voracious appetite of the invaders. On that day, the people will sing the song of all with their poets.

I come from a time of plagues and droughts

But through blood and sweat the harvest was made.


Post Views: twenty

Question of symbols IV (final) The Tempest – TV Yumurí