Book Review & Critical Analysis: Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco & Sugar by Fernando Ortiz

Cuban Counterpoint:

Tobacco & Sugar

by Fernando Ortiz

      If you mention Cuba, the first thing most people will think of is revolution, politics, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara. The second thing would probably be music and dancing. After that, I’m guessing another strong association with that Caribbean island nation would be cigars. There might be a few other general associations like beaches, palm trees, jungles, Ernest Hemingway, and rum. Somewhere in there you might also find sugarcane. This is significant for Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz since the titular essay of his book Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco & Sugar is about defining his country’s national identity through its most prevalent economic industries.

While Fernando Ortiz is considered to have been Cuba’s premier anthropologist to date, the titular essay really isn’t a work of social science. The point of it is to compare and contrast Cuba’s sugar and tobacco industries in order to define the national character of the Cuban people. From the start it is clear that he believes tobacco to be the ultimate symbol of Cubanismo and that he has a less favorable view of the sugarcane industry even though it has been the backbone of Cuba’s economy for at least two centuries.

His argument is provocative. Tobacco is a native plant to Cuban soil and its cultivation and use was a part of the Taino and Arawak indigenous people’s culture before the arrival of European colonialists. Tobacco is grown in dry riverbeds called “vegas” and even though some cigars are manufactured using machinery, those of the highest quality are hand-rolled. Thus, making a good cigar is a craft or an art form, as he puts it, more than an industrially produced commodity. Cuban cigars are also a source of national pride because they are popular worldwide and considered to be the gold standard of smokes by connoisseurs. That is why if you tell someone you have a box of habanas or puro cubanos they know by association that it is a box of the best cigars you can buy. Even cigars from neighboring countries like the Dominican Republic or Jamaica don’t compare. The use of the words “habanas” and “cubanos” to mean cigars proves semantically just how closely people outside the country associate cigars with Cuba.

Sugar, on the other hand, is just sugar. While the quality of tobacco can range from putrid to a champagne-like elegance, there is little to no difference once sugar crystals have been processed and granulated into the white powder we find in any grocery store around the world. Sugar that comes from sugarcane is also indistinguishable from that produced by sugar beets. People generally don’t associate sugar with any particular nation the way tobacco is strongly associated with Cuba. Sugarcane was also imported by colonialists and is therefore, not native to the Caribbean. Sugarcane cultivation and the manufacture of processed sugar is also the primary reason so many slaves were imported into Cuba. This is a source of shame to Ortiz who also uses this as a chance to take a swipe at capitalism since it requires that laborers, be they slaves, indentured servants, or wage laborers, get treated as commodities for production rather than as human beings. You could easily counter this claim by arguing that communism does the same thing. Thus that problem probably has more to do with the technology of industrialization than it does with whatever politico-economic system that utilizes it.

So as it stands according to Fernando Ortiz, tobacco is far superior to sugar when it comes to symbolically defining Cuba’s national identity.

I’ll be honest at this point. I have no emotional investment in this subject. I have no ancestral ties to Cuba, but I find the history and culture of the nation endlessly fascinating. I do appreciate sweet foods, but I gave up smoking long ago when I became wise enough to admit that I am afraid of getting cancer. So the argument over whether tobacco or sugar is more suitable for defining Cuba’s identity is of no importance to me. I could weigh the pros and cons of Ortiz’s reasoning, but I don’t feel its necessary to expend my mental energy on the matter. It reminds me of John Milton’s rhetorical argument that the moon is superior to the sun. But Milton’s essay on that matter is a great work of art. I’d say that Fernando Ortiz’s essay is a great work of art too. It is fascinating to read from beginning to end and, even if you don’t agree with his opinion, or even care all that much, it does say a lot about Cuban history and society. It certainly serves as a good introduction to anybody who wants to learn about tobacco or sugar cultivation and how it relates to Cuban culture.

Some of the ideas might be outdated though. Ortiz argues that tobacco is masculine and sugar is feminine in a way that relies on traditional gender stereotypes. Even considering those stereotypes, I find his reasoning on that point to be vague and insufficient to make his case. And his attempt at defining national character leads in the direction of essentializing in a way that would get labeled problematic by hyper-sensitive social theorists today. I have some problems with the concept of “essentializing” to beging with, but this is not the place to take that up. The use of outdated words like “Negro” “retarded”, and “Mongoloid” will also be jarring to some, but this essay was written in the 1940s when those words were considered neutral terminologies. Any offense you might naively take will also be undercut by that fact that Ortiz was a strong proponent of racial equality and the bulk of his work was done to document the cultural practices and patterns Afro-Cuban people. Hopefully someday more of his works will be translated into English.

The following essay in the book is of some interest up to a point. Ortiz examines the cultural uses of tobacco in pre- and post-contact indigenous societies. Although he starts by examining the practices of the Taino, Arawak, and Carib peoples, the scope extends farther into what we now call North, Central, and South America. The cultural uses of tobacco fall into four main categories being the social, the medicinal, the ritual/spiritual/religious/shamanistic, and the individual/leisure uses. He examines the history of how tobacco was ingested and the paraphernalia used as well as the social etiquette and praxis. He also examines whether or not tobacco was the only substance used in these ways. Various other writers have labeled tobacco and nicotine with contradictory terms like “stimulant”, “depressant” amd “hallucinogen”. Thus he analyzes evidence from colonial, missionary, archaeological, and pharmacological sources to figure out if some naive scholars in the past, not paying careful attention to details, mistakenly designated plants other than tobacco as tobacco. A lot of the essay is also devoted to disputes amongst anthropologists and archaeologists over what tools and paraphernalia were used for ingesting tobacco smoke and snuff. I feel like those debates are of more interest to specialists in this field and not so much for the general reader. His arguments aren’t hard to follow though and if you want to learn about the reasoning process and problem-solving methodologies in the social sciences, this is an accessible place to look.

The remaining essays are about the history of sugarcane cultivation and the effects of the Industrial Revolution on mass production and consumption of sugar. Again, these essays are well-researched and easy to follow, however, they feel more like filler than anything substantially related to the supposed main theme of the book which is Cuba and the importance of tobacco and sugarcane to its culture and economy. These filler essays stand on their own but stray too far outside the subject of Cuban national identity to be worthwhile in the larger context of the book. If you are solely interested in the subject of Cuban culture, you might want to consider reading the titular essay only and skipping the rest of the book. If you’re interested in the history of tobacco and sugar from a global perspective than the whole book will be of value. I fall into the former category, not the latter, so reading a lot of this felt like a chore even though all the essays are well-written.

Cuban Counterpoint was written at the end of World War II when the post-colonial era was taking off. Cuba was politically turbulent at the time, but it was also at the peak of its pre-Revolution cultural development. At that time the island nation was asserting itself internationally as a tourist destination and a producer of goods for international trade. In this context you can see how the subject of national identity and character could be of importance to a social scientist like Fernando Ortiz, especially considering his high academic stature then and now. Still, the book feels a bit dated. The negative health effects of smoking tobacco have caused it to be associated more with lung cancer than Cuba. Processed sugar is now associated with obesity, tooth decay, and other diseases. The tobacco and sugar industries plus communism should have made outsiders’ perceptions of Cuba inherently bad yet the country’s reputation is still alluring. Maybe it’s time for Cuba to choose a new symbol to redefine its national character. I’d choose their music to be a symbol of that identity if it were up to me (it’s not). Who couldn’t be enticed by those beautiful curvaceous women in tight skirts and stilleto heels defying the laws of gravity while dancing to mambo, rumba, charanga, salsa, cha cha cha, or Latin jazz. And if this book is dated, it still can evoke fantasies of sipping rum in a shack on a beach, palm trees swaying in the wind while clear waved waters wash ashore as you relax with a burning puro, its tip dipped in honey, while the silvery blue smoke you exhale disperses in the Caribbean breeze. If we lived in a just world, cigar smoke wouldn’t be harmful. But we don’t. Your dreams, however, won’t hurt you. Let those dreams keep you alive. 

 

Book Review & Interpretive Analysis: Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch

by William S. Burroughs

      The 1950s were a time of repression, or at least that’s what popular media would have you believe. Married couples on television shows had separate beds in those rare instances when bedrooms were allowed to be shown. When people got shot in the movies they didn’t bleed. Elvis Presley could only be shown on TV from the waist up. Interracial social relationships of any kind were forbidden while lynchings were common in the South. But they would never put that on the evening news. Politics were a taboo subject. Simply saying you disagreed with certain politicians could get you labeled a communist and your career could be ruined even if you weren’t actually a communist. Any discussions about sexuality of any sort were censored either by law or by choice. The use of narcotics was hidden from public view and Cold War era paranoia about the nuclear bomb was rampant and even encouraged by the government through the spread of propaganda.

But all this was going on fifty years after the publication of Ulysses. The ideas of Freud and Nietzsche were no longer new. People were aware that a chthonic, underground world existed and there was a whole lot more going on in America just beyond the surface of what was socially acceptible. But things were bubbling up to the surface. One of them was the Beat Generation, a new manifestation of the bohemian tradition in which poets and criminals listened to jazz, experimented with drugs and free love, and lived the life they wanted according to their own rules. Out of this counter culture came the gay, heroin addicted author William S. Burroughs, who may or may not have accidentally shot his wife in Mexico City, and his ground breaking novel Naked Lunch. The title says a lot because it is a work that reveals the hidden and the suppressed without restraint in all its naked glory. But glorious it isn’t, and in fact most would say it is a literary expression of all that is vile and repulsive.

Burroughs started out writing short pieces that were like bursts or explosions of verbiage depicting the underworld life he was familiar with. Some are like vignettes or prose poems. Sometimes they are almost like stories. But Burroughs couldn’t get his life together enough to put a whole novel together so Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin pieced some of these into a montage that came to be known as Naked Lunch.

The book begins with descriptions of heroin addiction and the lifestyle that accompanies it. The unpleasant tactile sensations and smells of filth, grime, slime, stickiness, and bodily fluids are ever present. Insects and other vermin are more numerous than people. The difference between people and vermin is hard to distinguish at times. Also the boundaries between the body and all the rotten mess is permeable and sometimes hard to identify. The reader is immediately plunged into a pool of sewage.

And as far as ugly creatures go, some of the ugliest are the Mugwumps. These are humanoid beings straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting that are half insect and half man. They secrete a substance that is addicting to some other creatures that suck it off their skin. This may be a metaphor for the relationship between the drug pusher and their buyers with a gay element thrown in. If that creepy image is what Burroughs meant to represent, you might say he isn’t comfortable with fitting into either category. The term “mugwump” by the way, refers to a constituent of voters in the 19^th century at the end of the Reconstruction era. They were disgusted with both the Democrats and Republicans and insisted on voting according to a candidates policies and moral character rather than partisan alliance. The word itself is derived from an Algonquin word meaning “superior man” or “boss”. It’s hard to tell if a political statement is intended here, but the concept of Mugwumps as a voting bloc would fit in with the passages later in the novel that satirize American political parties, none of which are made to sound appealing from Burroughs’ point of view.

As the passages take on more form, we are introduced to the recurring character of Dr. Benway, the sleazy surgeon who massages a patient’s heart with a toilet plunger while dropping cigarette ashes into the incision. He gives an unnamed narrator a tour through his hospital where he performs arbitrary operations of no medical value whatsoever. The tour ends with a visit to a locked ward where patients have been reduced to a vegetative state of idiocy because of Dr. Benway’s experiments with behavior control. The passage ends when inmates of a psychiatric ward break out, have a riot, and do all kinds of foul and disgusting things to each other and the people on the street. In another scenario, Dr. Benway does surgery on a stage in front of an audience as if he is a practitioner of the performing arts just as much as he is of the medical arts. The term “operating theater” actually goes back to the Renaissance when surgeries were performed for educational purposes in front of an audienc. But Dr. Benway’s arbitrary and pointless surgery is interrupted by what we might call a heckler with a scalpel.

Dr. Benway is the crux of a lot of Burroughs’ writings post-Naked Lunch. He is an agent of control whose medical practices serve two purposes. One is mind and behavior control, although he usually fails in this by either destroying his patients or unwittingly causing outbreaks of chaos. The other is art. Dr. Benway performs surgery for surgery’s sake the way artists creates art for art’s sake. He is amoral, unethical, has no interest in helping his patients and his surgeries make no sense from a rational point of view, but he does them because that’s all he can do. He doesn’t know how to do anything else. He is just an agent, an elementary force who acts out of inner necessity. You can say a lot of artists, especially in the modern era, do the same, channeling what they do, letting the artistic process guide their hands rather than creating with definite intention.

Dr. Benway makes a further appearance near the end of the book when he brings Carl Peterson, another recurring character in Burroughs’ works, into his office to run some tests designed to uncover any hidden traces of homosexuality in the ex-soldier. Carl struggles to repress any evidence of an affair he had with another man while in the military. Here again we have the element of control and chaos because Dr. Benway represents the attempted institutional control over sexual behavior while Carl Peterson’s sexual orientation is something outside the scope of psychiatric domination. For lovers of obscure literary references, the passage ends with Carl trying and failing to approach a green door; the term “green door” is a military terminology meaning “top secret” or “highly classified”. Carl wants to open the door and reveal his sexual secret but he is unable to because he is a rat caught in Dr. Benway’s maze. The theme of control through repression is on full display here.

On the other side of the control through repression theme is the continual outbreaks of sex and violence that permeate the novel. The riot resulting from patients’ escaping from Dr. Benway’s psychiatric hospital has already been mentioned, but other passages have things like “Hassan’s Rumpus Room”, where a surreal, unresrticted orgy takes place, and the film introduced by Slashtubitch is shown. (I’ve read this book several times and still have no idea who Slashtubitch is supposed to be. Hassan is possibly Hassan I Sabbah, another recurring character in later works) The film is pornographic and shows a love making scene between Mary and Johnny involving the use of the Steely Dan dildo. And yes, the rock band Steely Dan did lift their name from Naked Lunch. The film ends with Mary hanging Johnny who ejaculates when he dies. Burroughs is obsessed with this image since it appears ad nauseum in almost every book he ever wrote. Mary then eats his face reminscent of the way a female praying mantis eats the head of the male after sexual intercourse, something that also preoccupied the Surrealist pioneer Andre Breton. Here we have another recurring theme in Burroughs’ works, that of the female as a destructive force of control. His portrayal of women is unapologetically misogynist and his obsessive, hyper-masculine writings about guns and exotic weaponry can be interpreted as a defense against what he perceives to be the controlling instincts of women.

One other interesting chapter is that of “The Talking Asshole”. A man discovers that his asshole can talk. At first the novelty of this amuses people and he becomes famous, but then his asshole takes over his life and he turns into nothing more than a giant asshole that never shuts up. This is obviously a satire of people who “talk out their ass”, be they politicians, drunks, college students, or other varieties of know-it-alls who don’t know what they’re talking about. The internet is bursting with these types and in the days of Fox News and the Trump presidency, the Talking Asshole rings more true than ever. In the twisted mind of Burroughs, there is also an element of opiate addiction in this passage since the asshole starts out by being amusing and then grows so large it consumes the man’s entire life. Kind of like heroin addiction. What Burroughs is getting at is that talking, especially bullshitting, can be an addiction like anything else. This comes back to Dr. Benway who is characterized as a control addict with the commentary added that control serves no purpose other than control in the same way that heroin addiction serves no other purpose than addiction. Burroughs may be projecting his own problems onto the world, but when elements of his problems correspond to reality, it feels like a revelation.

On the surface, a lot of Naked Lunch appears to be little more than obscene drivel. It’s true that some parts are nothing but surreal imagery, nonsense, and literary diarrhea. By the way, this was written before Burroughs began using the cut up technique so anything that confuses you is done on purpose; it is meant to be disorienting. But then the passages about control are those that are most clearly written and those are surrounded by other passages of explosive violence and chaos. The explosive nature of those passages serves to illustrate the results of repression. Burroughs’ obsessions with guns, orgasms, orgies, defecation, dismemberment, hangings, and all other outbursts of violence can be seen as the repression of his homosexuality and drug addiction coming undone and bursting out into plain sight. The repressive nature of American society creates a pressure cooker leading to explosions of everything we aren’t supposed to see. The more American society tries to repress the underground cultures of sexual expression, drug use, and criminality, the more those cultures try to undo their repression and the result is the rise of counter cultures concerned with free expression of desires and artistic projects like the novel that is Naked Lunch.

This novel doesn’t represent Burroughs’ best writing. What makes it so great is that it introduces so many themes that pre-occupied him in his later years when he went in the direction of more science-fiction type books. It is also a lot more accessible than his later works, at least for the first time reader. Even if you don’t understand everything written or struggle to put it together as a whole, it still has a strong impact that will stay with you for years to come. Even after 70 years, the wild and untamed nature of this legendary book can still blow your hair back the other way. Burroughs’ ability to write great sentences that create imagery is first rate as well. The language he uses is like a mixture of surrealist poetry and bare bones, pulp crime novel directness. In fact, during the obscenity trial in which the government tried to censor and ban this book, one of the things that saved it was the lyrical use of vocabulary that sometimes captured snippets of haunting beauty.

Finally, I’d like to address a couple stray thoughts. The first is that of the racism depicted in the book. Some people have complained about it, but I feel they are misreading what Burroughs is saying. The racist comments are sick, but you have to consider the context and who is making them. They entirely come from the mouths of police, bureaucrats, rednecks, and other boorish kinds of people. If you understand the author, you know that he despises these kinds of people. Their offensive racist humor is depicted here as more shit and garbage flowing through the sewer world being portrayed. He isn’t celebrating the world he is writing about; he is showing us how terrible it all is.

The other stray thought is related to some obscure details regarding Burroughs’ wife Joan, the one he shot in Mexico City. In one paragraph, and without any context, Willy Jr. gets angry because the unnamed narrator eats his sugar skull on the Day Of the Dead. Then the narrator says that after he moved to Tangier, someone told him that his wife had died. Those in the know will recognize the reference to the unwanted son Burroughs had with his wife and his move, minus his wife, from Mexico to Tangier. Another subtle reference to Joan comes when Carl Peterson is in Dr. Benway’s office being accosted about his gay tendencies. Dr. Benway says that sometimes gay men get married and the result is...here Dr. Benway’s speech trails off with the implication that gay men who marry women sometimes murder their wives. It is fair to consider that William S. Burroughs is arguable one of the most autobiographical authors in history, something that becomes clear if you know his biography and understand how to decode his writings. But if this is so, why are there so few references to the killing of his wife as some critics have said? The answer is that they are there all over the place. He hides it in plain sight and if you understand how psychological displacement operates, you can see it more clearly.

Naked Lunch is an ancestral work that rides on the coattails of Freud and James Joyce. Freud said that being a member of society means suppressing the selfish desires of the individual where they get left to fester as the id, sometimes breaking into consciousness in the form of dreams. James Joyce in Ulysses used stream of consciousness writing to turn away from the public and go inwards to portray the inner workings and linguistic free associations of the human mind with no restrictions on what that might be including any bodily functions or disturbing thoughts. Naked Lunch is an expression of the id, the inner landscape, the unconscious, and everything we aren’t supposed to see in public. William S. Burroughs ingested elements of human society, disgested them in the inner workings of his mind, and then expressed them in the dream state of writing without holding anything back. It’s too easy to say it’s all a projection of his inner landscape onto the world because what he projects is a product of what he experienced in the world. He reminds us that vomit and feces started out as food. In this way, Naked Lunch is like shitting on a plate and serving it to you as a meal as to remind us of what we do that we wish to hide. Hell isn’t in some dimension we go to when we die. It is in the hidden recesses of our minds and all around us wherever we go and in whoever we meet. You are a part of it, like it or not.

 

Book Review: Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba by Tom Gjelten

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Tom Gjelten

      Who doesn’t like an occasional pina colada or a cuba libre? Well actually I don’t drink cuba libres because coca cola rots both your stomach and your teeth while making you obese. But I love a good mai tai or a mojito. Shots of dark rum are good too especially when you want an instant mental vacation in the tropics which is happens often if you live in a dismal, freezing cold climate like upstate New York with its grey skies and five foot mountains of lake effect snow on a weekly basis every winter. Why not just fly down to the Caribbean for a break, you might ask. Because it’s the 21^st century and working on a teacher’s salary makes it nearly impossible, that’s why. And to be honest a bottle of rum is just plain more affordable. You must know all these great cocktails might not even be possible if it weren’t for the Bacardi rum company. It’s not just that the Bacardis made drinkable rum available to the masses, but it’s also true because the family business saved the company’s brand from the Cuban Revolution. They didn’t just fight for the legal right to their own name and product though; the Bacardis also fought for freedom and justice in their homeland of Cuba in political conflicts dating back to the early 19^th century. Journalist Tom Gjelten tells the whole story in Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba.

The Bacardi family were Catalans who immigrated to Cuba while it was still a colony under the Spanish crown. They settled in Santiago de Cuba on the southeast coast of the island. Sugarcane farming and the production of granulated sugar were the backbone of the fledgling economy at the time. Industrial sugar production yields a byproduct which we now know as molasses. This byproduct is what is distilled to make rum. This drink was basically swill they made by sugar mills to sell to sailors, unskilled laborers, and other drunks in order to make some extra profits and keep the proletariat too inebriated to think about rising above their station.

Rum production turned a corner when the Bacardi family business entered the liquor market. Under the guidance of Emilio Bacardi, they developed a method of distillation that made rum more palatable to the middle and upper classes. Emilio Bacardi was also an intellectual who wrote poetry and kept extensive historical records of happenings in Santiago de Cuba. Researchers are still referencing his works today. He was also a liberal in the sense of free market economics as it was practiced in the 19^th century and a philanthropist with progressive ideas on politics and social issues. The Bacardi family were prominent in using their wealth to build infrastructure in Santiago de Cuba, financing schools, hospitals, and charity funds for the poor. They were deeply involved in Cuba’s Wars of Independence and supported the abolition of slavery on humanitarian grounds.

During the 20^th century, Bacardi’s aggressive international marketing and advertising campaigns made them the one brand that people most associated with Cuba aside from some cigar manufacturers like Cohiba and Romeo y Julieta. They also helped promote the image of Havana as a sophisticated hang out in the tropics with first rate nightclubs, opulent hotels, casinos, high end restaurants, and pristine beaches lined with palm trees. Part of their marketing strategy involved pampering tourists by keeping them drunk.

By the time the Cuban Revolution complicated the Bacardis’ privileged position in Cuba, Pepin Bosch was in charge of operations. Being the progressives that they were, the Bacardi corporation supported and funded Fidel Castro as he led his peasant army out of the Sierra Maestra in Oriente Province to seize Havana and conquer the island nation. This decision came back to bite them when Castro and Che Guevara nationalized all the rum factories. Even worse, Guevara, who knew little about economics and even less about rum production, tried to change the company’s method of making rum. Pepin Bosch, along with thousands of other Cubans, fled to Miami, leaving the factory in Santago de Cuba in the hands of a less experienced relative.

Castro failed when he attempted to sell post-Revolution manufactured Bacardi rum internationally due to Pepin Bosch’s shrewd maneuvering around international trademark law. Cuba was allowed to manufacture Bacardi rum, but were unable to sell it outside the country. Castro and company eventually began producing rum under the label of Havana Club which became one of the only sources of export product revenue that Cuba could obtain after the fall of communism. Meanwhile, Bacardi set up shop in Puerto Rico and has been associated with that island ever since. The company has also been involved in American politics and lobbying, guiding the the government’s hands into their deep trouser pockets since the 1970s So if you wonder why the United States have had some odd policies regarding Cuba in the past several decades, be aware that Bacardi Inc. has a lot to do with it.

Tom Gjelten has an obviously favorable view of the Bacardi corporation and the nation of Cuba in general. It is also obvious that he is strongly biased against the Castro regime. With all political opinions aside, this book is valuable in portraying Cuban history and society from multiple levels. He demonstrates that the Bacardis have been so deeply enmeshed in the development and historical events of Cuba that the history of the family and the company is impossible to tell without relating it to the evolution of the country itself. By reading this, you learn the most important parts of Cuban history. By approaching the subject from an angle of business and industry, Gjelten also offers a sharp critique of a nation that got derailed by a political movement that went wrong. You also learn a bit about the Cuban exile community in the U.S. and how they have shaped international relations. Finally you get some insight into how corporate branding can play a role in international perceptions of a sovereign country and whether those perceptions are accurate or not. Gjelten thoroughly vindicates the Bacardi family business, but then again, I haven’t heard of any books written as detractions of them either, so this book stands alone as a unique take on Cuba, business, and economics.

The other benefit of this book is its readability. Gjelten juggles passages about history, business, culture, industry, and biography. You may not be enthusiastic about all the fine details of industrial rum manufacturing, but you can be sure that when those parts of the history come up, he won’t dwell on the subject too long and eventually he will move on to something of more interest to you. In this way, Gjelten creates hooks for a wide ranging audience with varied interests and puts you in the company of details and ideas you might not otherwise pursue out of general interest. This is good for the flexibility of the reader’s mind.

From the start, the history of the Bacardi family business is a typical one like so many stories we hear of immigrants arriving in the New World with virtually nothing who built up a fortune through hard work, brainpower, and dedication. But Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba shows that this story is not always unique to the United States. It also shows how the small empire built on a foundation of enterprise and good intentions can be little more than a sand castle being washed away by the waves of the Caribbean Sea. Pepin Bosch had the foresight to build Bacardi castles all over the world so that when the hurricane came, the family didn’t lose everything. Tom Gjelten also informs you as to why there is a bat on the labels of Bacardi rum bottles. The reason for that is more mundane than you might expect.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Yage Letters by William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg

The Yage Letters

by William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg

      William S. Burroughs wasn’t doing so well in the 1950s. While Naked Lunch and its accompanying obscenity trials put him on the international literary stage, he was also dealing with heroin addiction, alcoholism, and mental illness. He did some time in jail, got peripherally involved in a murder case, and had a son he didn’t want with the woman he married even though he was gay. He ended up shooting the woman and being a lousy father to William Burroughs Jr. So when he wrote The Yage Letters with a passage by Allen Ginsberg, he wasn’t in the best state of mind.

This slim volume is made up of correspondences Burroughs made with Ginsberg soon after he shot his wife Joan, fled from Mexico, and went traveling in South America. He wanted to find the drug yage which is now more commonly known as ayahuasca. His main interest in yage derived from a rumor that it made telepathy possible. Reading between the lines gives a sense that he hoped it would help him to cure his heroin addiction or, at the very least, escape from reality.

The overriding sense of absolute misery is present from the beginning of the book. Burroughs is racist and unfairly judgmental of everybody he encounters as he makes his way through Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Other than the man who gives him yage, who may or may not be a legitimate shaman, he encounters researchers and scholars, government bureaucrats, corrupt police, and gay prostitutes. Burroughs can legitimately be criticized for being an asshole in these pages, but you have to admit he didn’t exactly associate with the best and the brightest members of Latin American society. His assessments of the countries he visits are based on his association with marginal people like petty criminals and police who abuse their power. If you think that corrupt police and bureaucrats aren’t a major problem in developing nations then I’d be more than certain that you’ve never set foot in a third world country. The shaman who gives him yage isn’t of high moral standards either since he is more concerned with collecting money for alcohol than he is for administering the drug. Burroughs suggests that he may even be a fraud. And as for the universities, let’s just say that not every researcher in the world is actually interesting to talk to. especially if they’ve gotten so deeply into their rabbit holes that they forget how to relate to other people.

The subjective mind of Burroughs lays like a thick coating of mud, sewage, and vomit over everything he sees. He was struggling with a lot of problems when he wrote this, one of which was a crippling low self-esteem. To make matters worse, dealing with addiction, mental illness, and the guilt of accidentally killing someone by wandering around foreign countries, getting drunk, and taking hallucinogenic drugs isn’t one of the most effective ways of coping with your problems. More than anything, this isn’t a book about South America or the drug experience; it is the details of a man in crisis. After all the racism and disillusionment, he does say one thing to redeem himself while traveling in Peru. Burroughs says he admires the Latin American people for their laid back, easy going approach to life, even believing that their cultural style should be the default for most humans. Maybe such a statement is too little too late, but it does drive home the point that all his nasty comments about the people there are nothing but projections from his own warped perceptions.

And there really isn’t much about taking yage in this book. He tries it once with the alcoholic shaman and not much happens except that he sees blue spots in his eyes and vomits excessively. Telepathy never happens. The one passage written by Allen Ginsberg describes the psychedelic experience under yage, but to be honest if I didn’t know that beforehand, I wouldn’t have known what the hell he was writing about. This book doesn’t do a good job of making me want to try ayahuasca.

But the crafting of the language is so good. Like in Junky, Burroughs writes in short, clear, direct sentences that paint a much bigger picture than what is presented on the surface. He writes the kind of simple sentences that Hemingway tried to write but failed. If there is anything worth recommending about this book, it is the prose itself more than the content, although I will say the content is interesting if you want to pick apart the mind of a deeply troubled man who is so lost in his wretched mind that he can’t see the world with clear eyes. It’s like he is wearing shit colored glasses.

The Yage Letters is a minor work of literature by any standard. It’s probably of little interest to anybody outside the counter-culture literary scene. That’s probably for the best. I wouldn’t judge the works of William S. Burroughs on this book alone. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he had regretted writing it when in the later years of his life.