I'm Not Here to Give a Speech

by Gabriel García Márquez

  First, there is something that distinguishes it. In addition to writers, painters, musicians, sociologists, and historians, at this meeting there is a group of distinguished scientists. That is, we have dared to defy the feared collusion of sciences and arts; to mix in the same crucible those of us who still trust in the clairvoyance of omens and those who believe only in verifiable truths: the very ancient antagonism between inspiration and experience, between instinct and reason. Saint-John Perse, in his memorable Nobel Prize acceptance speech, defeated this false dilemma with a single sentence: ‘In the scientist as well as in the poet,’ he said, ‘disinterested thought must be honoured.’ Here, at least, let them not be considered as inimical brothers, for the questioning of both is the same over the same abyss.

  The idea that science concerns only scientists is as anti-scientific as it is anti-poetic to pretend that poetry concerns only poets. In that sense, the name of UNESCO — United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — limps through the world with a serious inaccuracy, taking as fact that the three are different when, in reality, all of them are a single thing. For culture is the totalizing power of creation: the social development of human intelligence. Or, as Jack Lang said without much ado: ‘Culture is everything.’ Welcome, then, welcome everyone to everyone’s house.

  I don’t dare to suggest anything more than a few reasons for reflection during these three days of spiritual retreats. I do dare to remind you, first of all, of something you perhaps remember all too well: any decision in the medium term made in these twilight times is a decision for the twenty-first century. And yet, we Latin Americans and people from the Caribbean approach it with the devastating sense that we’ve skipped the twentieth century: we’ve passed through it without having lived it. Half the world will celebrate the dawn of the year 2001 as the culmination of a millennium, while we are barely beginning to catch glimpses of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. The children in primary school today, preparing to govern our destinies in the coming century, are still condemned to counting on their fingers, like the accountants of remotest antiquity, while computers exist that are capable of performing a hundred thousand arithmetical operations a second. On the other hand, in one hundred years we have lost the best human virtues of the nineteenth century: fervent idealism and the primacy of feeling: the shock of love.

  At some point in the next millennium genetics will glimpse the eternity of human life as a real possibility, electronic intelligence will dream of the chimerical adventure of writing a new Iliad, and in their house on the moon there will be a pair of lovers from Ohio or Ukraine, overwhelmed by nostalgia, who will love each other in glass gardens in the earthlight. Latin America and the Caribbean, on the other hand, seem condemned to servitude to the present: telluric dread, political and social cataclysms, the immediate urgencies of daily life, dependencies of every kind, poverty and injustice, have not left us much time to assimilate the lessons of the past or to think about the future. The Argentine writer Rodolfo Terragno has synthesized this drama: ‘We use X-rays and transistors, cathode tubes and electronic memory, but we haven’t incorporated the foundations of contemporary culture into our own culture.’

  Fortunately, the determinant reserve of Latin America and the Caribbean is an energy capable of moving the world: the dangerous memory of our peoples. It is an immense cultural patrimony that antedates any raw material, a primary material of multiple character that accompanies every step of our lives. It is a culture of resistance expressed in the hiding places of language, in mulatta Virgins — our artisanal patron saints — true miracles of the people against the colonizing clerical power. It is a culture of solidarity expressed in the face of criminal excesses of untamed nature, or in the insurgency of peoples for the sake of their identity and sovereignty. It is a culture of protest in the indigenous faces on artisanal angels in our temples, or in the music of the perpetual snows that attempts to exorcize with nostalgia the silent powers of death. It is a culture of ordinary life expressed in the imagination of cooking, in styles of dress, in creative superstition, in the intimate liturgies of love. It is a culture of fiesta, of transgression, of mystery, which breaks the straitjacket of reality and at last reconciles reason and imagination, word and act, and actually demonstrates that there is no concept that sooner or later is not exceeded by life. This is the strength of our backwardness. An energy of novelty and beauty that belongs to us in its entirety and with which we ourselves are sufficient; it cannot be domesticated by imperial voracity, or by the brutality of the internal oppressor, or even by our own immemorial fears of translating into words our most cherished dreams. Even the revolution itself is a cultural work, the total expression of a creative vocation and a creative capability that justify and demand of all of us a profound confidence in the future.

  This would be something more than just another of the many meetings that occur every day in the world if we were able to catch even a glimpse of new forms of practical organization to channel the irresistible flood of creativity of our peoples, real exchange and solidarity among our creators, historical continuity, and a broader, deeper social usefulness for intellectual creation, the most mysterious and solitary of all human occupations. It would be, in brief, a decisive contribution to the political determination, which cannot be deferred, to leap over five alien centuries and enter, with a firm step and a thousand-year horizon, the imminent millennium.

  THE CATACLYSM OF DAMOCLES

  Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, Mexico, August 6, 1986

  One minute after the final explosion, more than half the human race will have died, the dust and smoke from the continents in flames will vanquish the sunlight, and absolute darkness will once again rule the world. A winter of orange rains and icy hurricanes will reverse the weather of the oceans and change the course of the rivers, whose fish will have died of thirst in the burning waters and whose birds will not find the sky. Perpetual snows will cover the Sahara Desert, vast Amazonia will disappear from the face of the planet, destroyed by hail, and the age of rock music and transplanted hearts will return to its glacial infancy. The few humans who may survive their terror, and those who had the privilege of safe refuge at three in the afternoon on the fateful Monday of the extreme catastrophe, will have saved their lives only to die afterwards because of the horror of their memories. Creation will have ended. In the final chaos of rains and eternal night, the only vestige of what life once was will be the cockroach.

  * * *

  —

  Honourable presidents, honourable prime ministers, friends:

  This is not a poor imitation of John’s delirium in his exile on Patmos, but the expected vision of a cosmic disaster that can occur at this very moment: the explosion — intentional or accidental — of only a tiny part of the nuclear arsenal that sleeps with one eye open in the weapons depositories of the great powers.

  This is true. Today, August 6, 1986, there are more than fifty thousand nuclear warheads in place in the world. In simple terms, this means that each human being, including children, sits on a barrel holding four tons of dynamite whose total explosion can eliminate every trace of life on Earth twelve times over. The power to annihilate of this colossal threat that hangs over our heads like a cataclysm of Damocles raises the theoretical possibility of devastating four other planets that circle the sun, affecting the equilibrium of the solar system. No science, no art, no industry has doubled its size as many times as the nuclear industry since its beginnings forty-one years ago, nor has any other creation of human ingenuity ever had as much power to determine the fate of the world.

  The only consolation in these terrifying simplifications — if they are of any use to us at all — is confirming that the preservation of human life on Earth continues to be cheaper than the nuclear plague, for merely by existing the awful Apocalypse held captive in the silos of death in the richest countries is squandering the possibilities of a better life for everyone.

 
In child welfare, for example, this is an elementary mathematical truth. In 1981, UNICEF calculated the cost of a programme to resolve the essential problems of the 500 million poorest children in the world. It included basic health care, elementary education, improvement of sanitary conditions, and a supply of potable water and food. All this seemed an impossible dream of $100 billion. However, that is barely the cost of a hundred B-1B strategic bombers, and less than the price of seven thousand cruise missiles, in whose production the government of the United States will invest $21,200 million.

  In health, for example: with the price of ten Nimitz atomic aircraft carriers of the fifteen the United States is going to manufacture before the year 2000, a preventive programme could be carried out that would protect, in those same fourteen years, more than 1 billion people against malaria and prevent the death — in Africa alone — of more than 14 million children.

  In nutrition, for example: last year there were in the world, according to the calculations of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, some 575 million hungry people. Their average indispensable caloric intake would cost less than 149 MX missiles of the 223 that will be in place in Western Europe. Twenty-seven of them would buy the agricultural machinery needed so that poor countries could acquire food self-sufficiency in the next four years. Further, that programme would not cost even a ninth of the Soviet military budget for 1982.

  In education, for example: with only two Trident nuclear submarines of the twenty-five the current government of the United States plans to manufacture, or with a similar quantity of the Typhoon submarines the Soviet Union is building, the fantasy of worldwide literacy could finally be attempted. And the construction of schools and the teacher training the Third World will need to meet additional educational demands in the next ten years could be paid for at the cost of 245 Trident II missiles, and there would still be 419 missiles left over for the same increase in education in the following fifteen years.

  Finally, it can be said that the cancellation of the foreign debt of the entire Third World, and its economic recovery for ten years, would cost little more than a sixth of the world’s military expenditures over the same period of time. All in all, faced with this enormous economic waste, the human waste is even sadder and more disturbing: the industry of war keeps in captivity the greatest impounding of learned people ever gathered together for any enterprise in human history. Our people, whose natural place isn’t there but here, at this table, and whose liberation is indispensable so they can help us to create, in the area of education and justice, the only thing that can save us from barbarism: a culture of peace.

  In spite of these dramatic certainties, the arms race does not concede a moment’s pause. Now, while we were having lunch, a new nuclear warhead was built. Tomorrow, when we awake, there will be nine more in the warehouses of death in the hemisphere of the wealthy. All in all, what just one of them costs would be enough — even if it were for only one Sunday in autumn — to perfume Niagara Falls with sandalwood.

  A great novelist of our time once wondered whether Earth wasn’t the hell of other planets. Perhaps it is much less: a hamlet without memory, left by the hands of its gods in the farthest suburb of the great universal homeland. But the growing suspicion is that it is the only place in the solar system where the prodigious adventure of life drags us without mercy to a disheartening conclusion: the arms race is contrary to intelligence.

  And not only human intelligence, but the intelligence of nature itself, whose purpose escapes even the clairvoyance of poetry. Since the appearance of visible life on Earth, 380 million years had to go by to make a rose with no other commitment than to be beautiful, and four geological eras for human beings — unlike their pithecanthropic great-grandfather — to be able to sing better than the birds and to die of love. It does no honour to human talent, in the golden age of science, to have conceived of the way in which so extravagant and huge a multi-millennial process can return to the nothingness it came from by the simple art of pressing a button.

  We are here to try to stop that from happening, joining our voices to the countless others that call for a world without armaments and a peace with justice. But even if it happens — even more so if it happens — our being here will not have been in vain. Millions and millions of millennia after the explosion, a triumphant salamander that will have again travelled the complete ladder of species will perhaps be crowned as the most beautiful woman of the new creation. It depends on us, men and women of science, men and women of arts and letters, men and women of intelligence and peace, it depends on all of us that the guests at that chimerical coronation do not attend their celebration with the same terror we feel today. With all modesty, but also with all the determination of my spirit, I propose that here and now we commit ourselves to conceiving and building an ark of memory capable of surviving the atomic flood. A bottle of shipwrecked sailors in space thrown into the oceans of time so that the new humanity will know through us what the cockroaches won’t tell them: that here life existed, that in it suffering prevailed and injustice predominated, but that we also knew love and were even capable of imagining happiness. And let them know, and let it be known for all time, the ones who were responsible for our disaster, and how deaf they became to our cries for peace so that this could be the best of all possible lives, and with what barbarous inventions and for the sake of what paltry interests they erased it from the universe.

  AN INDESTRUCTIBLE IDEA

  Havana, Cuba, December 4, 1986

  It all began with those two pylons at the entrance to this house. Two horrible pylons, like two giraffes of barbaric concrete, which a heartless bureaucrat ordered planted in the front garden without even warning the legitimate owners, and which sustain over our heads, at this very moment, a high-tension current of 110 million volts, enough to keep a million television sets turned on or to support 23,000 35-millimetre movie projectors. Alarmed at the news, President Fidel Castro came here six months ago, trying to see if there was some way to correct the injustice, and this was how we discovered that the house could shelter the dreams of the Foundation of the New Latin American Cinema.

  The pylons are still there, of course, more and more hateful as the house has been made more beautiful. We have tried to mask them with royal palms, with flowering branches, but their ugliness is so obvious that it prevails over every artifice. The only thing we can think of, as a final recourse to turn our defeat into victory, is to beg you to see them not as what they are but as a hopeless sculpture.

  Only after adopting it as the seat of the Foundation of the New Latin American Cinema did we learn that the story of this house did not begin or end with these pylons, and that a good deal of what is said about it is neither truth nor falsehood. It is cinema. Well, as you must have already surmised, it was here that Tomás Gutiérrez Alea filmed The Survivors, a film that, eight years after its completion and twenty-seven after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, is not one truth more in the history of the imagination nor one falsehood less in the history of Cuba, but part of this third reality between real life and pure invention which is the reality of cinema.

  And few houses could be as auspicious as this one for undertaking in it our final objective, which is nothing less than achieving the integration of Latin American cinema. That simple and that excessive. And no one could condemn us for the simplicity but only for the excess of our initial steps in this first year of life, which happens to be celebrated today, the day of Santa Bárbara, which, through the arts of sainthood or santería, is the original name of this house.

  Next week the Foundation of the New Latin American Cinema will receive from the Cuban state a grant for which we are eternally grateful, as much for its unprecedented generosity and timeliness as for the personal dedication devoted to it by the least-well-known film enthusiast in the world: Fidel Castro. I am referring to the International School of Film and Television, in San Antonio de los Baños, estab
lished to train professionals from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, using the best resources of current technology. The construction of the centre is complete only eight months after it was begun. Instructors from countries throughout the world have been appointed, students have been selected, and most of them are here with us now. Fernando Birri, the director of the school, who is not distinguished by his sense of unreality, described it not long ago in the presence of the Argentine president, Raúl Alfonsín — and not a muscle in his saint’s face twitched — as ‘the best school of film and television in the history of the world’.

  By its very nature, this will be the most important and ambitious of our initiatives, but it won’t be the only one, for the training of professionals without a job would be too expensive a method for encouraging unemployment. And so in this first year we have started to lay the foundation of a vast undertaking to promote the enrichment of the creative environment in Latin American film and television. The initial steps are these:

  We have coordinated with private producers in the production of two full-length features and three long documentaries, all of them under the leadership of Latin American filmmakers, and a package of five one-hour stories for television, realized by five film or television directors from various Latin American countries.

  At present we are holding meetings to assist young Latin American filmmakers who have not been able to carry out or complete their film or television projects.

  We have moved forward with negotiations to acquire a screening room in every country in Latin America, and perhaps in some European capitals as well, devoted to the permanent viewing and study of Latin American film from all periods.