Response to Grace's Blog 11: Pablo Neruda and "The Heights of Macchu Picchu"

Just as clarification, are you saying that Macchu Picchu was built with a capitalistic view or a communistic view? To me it sounds like the elite of Macchu Picchu were like the businesses of a capitalist economy where businesses earn high profits and the people get very low wages. The people suffered for the satisfaction of the elites and were kept in a low position in society. It makes sense that because Neruda was communist that he would be saddened over the treatment of the lower classes during that time and encourage a more communistic view to the readers as an alternative to the harsh treatment in a capitalistic society. If the natives had lived in a time with a more communistic view then there would hopefully not be such a large gap between the elites and the lower classes.

Blog 11: The Changing of Women's Roles

The documentary we watched last week about the changing roles of women in Latin America was very interesting to me.  I never realized how much the women of Latin America really sacrificed and dealt with in order to gain a better life for themselves and their family.  Especially the elite women of society.  To me it didn't really make sense at first that they were the ones protesting in the streets because it was the poor women who really wanted and truly needed the change, but the fact that any women at all were able to make such a difference at that time blew me away.

There was one part of the documentary that angered me a bit though.  It was when Pinochet's wife created a movement to encourage women to go back to their traditional roles in the home.  I believe myself to be a modern woman, and I don't judge anyone who becomes a stay-at-home mom, but I just believe that everyone should have a choice of what they want to do and shouldn't be pressured to be one thing or the other.  Women of the time had made so many strides toward changing their traditional roles in society and this movement threatened to push everything back to the way it was.

My real question is why did Pinochet's wife want to encourage women to go back to the traditional roles in Latin American society?  To me it would make more sense that she would encourage women to gain their own sense of power being a powerful women herself.  Does anyone have any ideas?

Response to Caitlin's Blog #10 Who Should Own the Art

I like the point you make.  It doesn't really make sense to have Mexican Art that was made in Mexico owned by a Michigan University.  The people of Mexico deserve the chance to see the artwork of their ancestors and see how their culture came about.  Important pieces of art deserved to be displayed were it will be appreciated.  But at the same time, if art work from different places did not travel itself, how would culture spread and change.  If you had to travel to Mexico anytime you wanted to see Mexican art, you wouldn't get to experience it as much because traveling is expensive.  The internet does make it easier to see art in other places, but seeing it in real life is a much different experience than on a computer screen.  If I were to have my perfect world, I would make large pieces of historic art circulate throughout the entire world so everyone could have the opportunity to experience it.  Preservation of old art makes that hard in todays society, but hopefully that can someday happen.

Blog 10: Hypocrisy in America

Sorry guys, this week is going to be a little bit of a rant.  Thinking back on past history classes, I got a bit of an impression that the U.S. involved themselves in places they had no place being.  After hearing all the different ways they were involved with Latin American countries really makes me see the point that they U.S. were hypocrites, and probably still are though I have no specific proof or examples.

Reading about the military dictatorship in Chile and how the people were executed and tortured based on their beliefs was really heartbreaking for me.  Families were destroyed and torn apart because members went "missing" and were never seen again.  The kind of pain of not knowing is something no one should go through.  It really upset me to know that the U.S. secretly backed the military takeover and supported the over turn of the democratic government.  I can't even fathom having an entire class of people almost systematically exterminated for no other reason than the military disagreed with them.  If something like that happened today, I would hope my government would go and try to stop it, yet the U.S. was the one to support the military and did nothing to stop the massacre.  The same situation happened over and over again in Latin America with the U.S.'s fear of communism leading them to overturn democratic governments in favor of militant dictatorships that would do whatever the U.S. asked.

We say that the U.S. stands for democracy and all humans have equal rights, yet we don't fight for those same principles in other countries.  How different would the world be if the U.S. had supported the democratic governments of Latin America instead of placing dictatorships in place.  In class on Friday we discussed the idea that the U.S. may have purposely kept the Latin American countries in poverty, and on some points I do believe that.  Whether it was completely intentional or not, I don't know, but the U.S. did take measures that would benefit them and keep Latin America in poverty.  By imposing embargo's and other restrictions on trade with Latin America, it kept them from expanding becoming more competitive on the world markets, and the U.S. could keep their power and security.  What do you guys think? Did the U.S. act to keep Latin America powerless?  Are/were our government officials hypocrites?

Response to Lauren's Blog 9: When Someone Says Freedom...

I really liked the point you made here! Everything that we have learned about the relationships between the U.S. and Latin American countries lately have led me to see the U.S. as hypocrites and childish. The government continually made decisions that benefited the rich foreign companies in other countries over doing what is right for the people. No one is allowed to tell the U.S. what to do, but we can go and involve ourselves in everyone else's business.

I was really intrigued by your point that the U.S. tried to turn the world against Cuba and practically ignore their existence. I came across this picture yesterday, on twitter of all places, and it made me think of this point. 

 Overall the caption of it is "George Washington Dunking on Communism" and you see China's communist leader being dunked on and Abraham Lincoln boxing out Joseph Stalin in the background. The U.S. classifies Cuba as communist, so why wasn't Fidel Castro put in the picture? The Soviet Union has ended years ago, but Joseph Stalin was in the picture. It just adds the point that American curriculum basically ignores the huge part Cuba plays in recent history.

Blog 9: Connections to the Past

So a lot of what we have been discussing in class lately has had to do with Cuba, and as many of you would suspect, I have made many connections.

A major thing I could make connections to was with how the level of education raised significantly in Cuba.  Before my Dad's family immigrated to the U.S. in 1971, my grandmother was a school principle with a masters degree from the University of Santa Clara.

Personally, I never realized how remarkable that really was.  If you think about what life was like in the U.S. during that time, there weren't that many women who went to college and got degrees, but she was able to do it in Cuba while the country was changing rapidly due to revolution.  Unfortunately the degree didn't transfer over to the U.S. at the time, but she was an educated woman and became a successful employee of the State of Michigan.

Another big connection I made was to the different Agrarian Reforms that reduced the amount of land a person could own.  Many of the different stories about Cuba that I have heard have dealt with my grandfathers family farm.  Recently he visited Cuba for the first time in almost two decades, and an observation that he made was that the farm had gotten much smaller since he last visited.  While I don't know how big the farm was at it's largest, it really drove home the reality about what was being done there.

Not many people realize how intertwined the United States and Cuba's history is in the last 100 years.  From "helping" free Cuba from Spain, to the repeated attempts on Castro's life, Cuban and American governments have been and still are entangled.  Cubans have also changed American culture in many ways where large groups of immigrants settled.  In places like Miami, New York, and even Lansing, the culture of the people leaves its mark forever.

Response to Caitlin's Blog #8 Assassinations

This is a very interesting story.  I am also surprised at the humanity of the assassins and how they avoided shooting into a group of children in order to kill Pancho Villa.  When you think of almost all other assassinations the shooting was done in very public places in front of many people.  Some examples I can think of off the top of my head are JFK, President Lincoln, and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  All three assassinations were done in very public places were innocent people could be injured, and some were.  But on the other hand, I can see why the assassins didn't shoot into the group of children to get to Villa.  For the first part, children are seen as innocent and not worthy of such harsh cruelty, which saves them from some cruel acts.  Another option is that the men lived in the town and had connections to the children.  Information didn't travel anywhere near as fast as it does today, so in order to catch Villa off guard, they had to be ready at a moments notice to get the chance at taking his life.  That would make it much more likely that the men were from that town and thus didn't want to shoot at their children or people that they knew.  Overall, I think there are many different things that could have kept the men from shooting Villa when they first had the chance, and unfortunately we will never know the complete truth.

Blog 8: The Countryside: Past or Present?

Something that seemed really interesting to me in our last discussion in class about the story "The South" was the idea of the countryside representing the past and the city representing the present.  Borges makes note throughout the story that "The South," or the countryside, makes up the past.  While Juan Dahlmann is traveling to his house in the country he watches as the city slowly fades away until he is in the countryside where the gaucho lives and the way of life there is very different.  He see's different things in nature that he doesn't normally see and it captivates him.  Growing crops was a way of life in the countryside where it isn't in the city, and that fact he knows nothing about it forces him to think of it in an unfamiliar way.  One of the greatest reminders that emphasize that the countryside is in the past is the use of physical violence to solve disputes.  In the cities, things are settled more diplomatically with the outside forces making decisions, but the countryside is forced to settle disputes however they can best do that, and physical violence was most often chosen.  Juan confronts the men that were taunting him verbally, and they in turn challenge him with physical violence.  It wasn't in Juan's way of thinking to immediately start with physical violence, but it is for the men from the countryside.  Violence and brute force are connected with the past because they were old ways of maintaining control and keeping order, but in the current time people had been perceived to have moved forward with a non-violent way of solving problems.

The idea of the country being stuck in the past brought up the reminder that many believe it still is today.  Farming is considered by a large amount of people as the old way of life, along with the ways of the cowboys.  While the farming industry has modernized by leaps and bounds, it is still given the stereotypical assumption that it is backwards and stuck in the past.  My big question is why that is.  Why does the countryside get the idea that it is the past while the city is the present?