It’s a line from the 1929 poem Guantanamera “by” Cuban poet Joseíto Fernández. The poem was transformed into a song, with a tune also, after some judicial dispute, composed by Fernández, and sung in 1966 by the US singing group The Sandpipers, as well as a large array of other artists, both Hispanic and American Caucasian: The Weavers, Pete Seeger, Celia Cruz, and Fernández himself. Cruz published the song on no fewer than 241 separate records, collections or compendiums of her works.
“The most famous photograph in the world.” Entitled Guerrillero Heroico (By Alberto Korda, restored by Adam Cuerden - Minerva Auctions, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=139820026).
The exact “lyric” of the song is hard to trace, since, although the highest court in Cuba ruled in 1993 that the sole author of both the text and the music was Joseíto Fernández, who popularised it on Cuban radio and entered into a close collaboration and friendship with Pete Seeger when he wanted to popularise the song in the States, it is recognised that the text stems at least in part from an earlier poem by fellow Cuban José Martí. Seeger’s version intersperses lines from Martí’s œuvre between the Fernández’s verses, for instance. You can listen to a snippet of Fernández’s indubitably more authentically Cuban version here, and even buy it as a download for 99 cents: https://www.cubamusic.com/Store/Album/1100006/joseito-fernandez/guantanamera.
Be all that as it may, it was the Sandpipers’ version that I posted yesterday on this blog:
German football fans would adopt the song’s tune and make it into a chant lauding the German national manager Rudolph Völler: Ein Rudi Völler, es gibt nur ein Rudi Völler (one Rudi Völler, there’s only one Rudi Völler, which is grammatically incorrect: it should be es gibt nur einEN Rudi Völler, but that wouldn’t scan, not for a football crowd it wouldn’t).
Enough of the song itself. Allow me to turn to one of its sentiments: con los pobres de la tierra quiero yo mi suerte echar. The narrator in the song (who is not one of the singers, but in fact the producer of the recording, Tommy LiPuma) tells us it means with the poor people of this earth I wish to share my faith. That is a figurative translation from the original Central American Spanish. Echar means simply to throw, but more poetically to cast. From there, there exist a multitude of renderings, since the word is of widespread literal and figurative use in Spanish. The suerte that is hereby cast is luck, and, more poetically, chance, fate, destiny, lot. More prosaically, one might translate the line as I want to throw my lot in with the poor of this earth.
Romance and reality are generally regarded as quite distinct from each other. Poetry and song lyrics depart from the real world, the world of nine to five, gas bills and bringing up baby, and enter into a world apart, a world we enjoy visiting via cartoons and fairy tales, dreams and glitz, the movies and music. We relish the excursion into the land of fantasy, all too aware that, at some point, we need to return to mundanity, with a bump.
The fantasy series Game of Thrones has no basis in reality, is in itself an excursion into wild fantasy, and yet relies for much of its characterisation on the true story of the English Wars of the Roses. Yet Game of Thrones, while relying for its inspiration on factual history, manages to break away sufficiently from it to succeed in not simply being a parody of that history, or a retelling, or even a telling of that history. It succeeds in telling us about the Wars of the Roses, without mentioning the Wars of the Roses.
There is, on that model, a temptation to look for the moral tale, the truth, the message behind every story that is told, whether on a stage, a screen or in a song. A moral tale need not be based in fact but can be based on as much fact as is believable. Thus came about the songs of troubadours, who related the adventures of great heroes, whose names passed from history into legend, and sometimes even into myth.
This line is a short line. Much of the beauty of Martí’s and Fernández’s poetry lies in the simplicity of the words. However, the skill of the poet lies in his ability to express something profound in words that are unabashedly simple. For, the inquisitive must ask themselves: why should the poet want to throw in his lot with the poor people of this earth? Surely it evokes the question in the thinking reader: would I want to throw in my lot with the poor of this earth? When you read or hear that sentiment in Guantanamera, is it one that evokes a sense of empathy in you? Or do you reject it out of hand, as a sentiment to be dismissed, that in no way speaks to you? Like the fate of a fairy princess in a tale by the Brothers Grimm: sweet, and perhaps tragic, but of no consequence to the listener.
I cannot tell you what the line should evoke as thoughts in your mind. But I can tell you what they evoke in mine. The line predates the Cuban revolution by exactly 30 years. So, it is not therefore a product of that revolution. It is at least plausible that the revolution, however, was a product, at least in part, if not of the poetry itself, of the sentiments that underlay the poetry.
How did it come that an Argentinean with a speech habit that earned him the jocular nickname by which he would come to be known from pole to pole was moved to fight for change on the Caribbean island of Cuba? As a medical student travelling on his famous motorcycle road trips (2,800 and 5,000 miles) through South America in 1950, and again with his friend Alberto Granado in 1952, Che Guevara would be shocked, time and again, at the abject poverty of the people of the land whom he encountered along his travels, and at the insouciant superiority of those who commanded them: landowners, landlords, factory owners, fruit companies. Guevara’s involvement in the revolutions in Guatemala and Cuba stemmed directly from the indignation he felt at what he’d seen.
Oh, what turns fate makes in people’s lives of such similarity of origin, yet whose course differs in a single decision. Two medics, contemporaries of each other, triggering revolutions in the same corner of the world, the one, Che Guevara, rejecting the hegemony of the United States in Guatemala (whose presence there was invoked at the behest of the United Fruit Company) and favouring the people’s solution in communism; the other, François Duvalier, in Haiti two years previously, embracing the United States and proclaiming himself a bastion against Cuba’s communism, but 52 miles away between its Burned Point and Haiti’s Cape of Fools.
Les pauvres de cette terre, as one might dub them in Haiti, fared poorly under Duvalier, so poorly that the US eventually had to withdraw its aid support for the country, such an embarrassment it had become. President Richard Nixon would restore aid with Papa Doc’s death and the undemocratic succession of his son, Jean-Claude, but the 19-year-old Baby Doc had no more real interest in his people than had his superstitious and paranoid father. In many ways, the Cuban way proved the more benevolent to the nation ruled over. One might almost opine that Cuba’s lack of favour in the eyes of the US has been a downright blessing in spiritual terms, if not in material ones. In Haiti, the favour of the US was neither.
The Gospels tell us that it will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. What must I understand from that? Well, first, I shall not dabble in semantics as to whether a camel, with or without a rider, might easily or less easily have passed through some unknown or unmapped gate in the city of Jerusalem or anywhere else. If theologians wish to bandy words about and argue translations and read God’s law as if it were the law of some manipulative government of some arbitrarily established member of a supranational body of nation states, then go ahead; but I will tell you now, they lack sincerity and they lack truth and yo soy un hombre sincero, at least. Rich men don’t go to heaven.
Why not? Why don’t the rich go to heaven? Anyway, who are the rich? Are they millionaires? Or billionaires? Are you rich? Am I? People can comprehend tax bands and marginal and average rates of taxation. They can understand exemptions and zero-rate bands and surtaxes. They associate words like high tax band with rich, on benefits with poor. Beggars are poor. Factory workers are poor. Factory owners are rich. But people can only make these associations if they are aware of the financial situation of beggars, factory workers and owners, etc., and compare their situation to their own. Rich and poor are always relative terms; can a man properly define himself as poor if he has never known anyone but those who are in a situation similar to his own?
The musician Chet Atkins makes an interesting observation in his autobiography. He grew up in rural Tennessee in the 1930s and wrote in 1974:
“We were so poor and everybody around us was so poor that it was the forties before anyone even knew there had been a depression.”
I presume that Atkins was aware of the existence of those wealthier than himself, but the point he makes is that he and those around him were poor to such a degree that they had no conception that they were poorer that they would have been but for the Depression.
What about the contrary case: those who have no conception of poverty, who do not view themselves as privileged, because privilege is something that has been inbred within them. I have no particular insight into the two men, but an interesting case in point with which to conjure this idea would be Prince Harry and Prince William of the United Kingdom: I wouldn’t mind warranting that Prince Harry came more under the commoner influence of his lowly aristocratic mother, and Prince William more under the regal influence of his royal father, and this has led to a greater appreciation of the difficulties of others in the mind of the younger brother, with the older brother struggling somewhat to find empathy with those outside the circles of his own class. Whether it is or is not so is really of no consequence, because the general point is nonetheless made: there are some who are shielded to a greater extent from the realities that the poor face, and others who seek out such under-privilege and endeavour to bring their influence to bear on alleviating the difficulties of others.
What Jesus means, therefore, when saying that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God has far less to do with being rich in some absolute tax-band or legislative sense of the word. Nor, in the end, do I reckon that it has much to do with how one dispenses one’s riches, though it does have to do with the intention with which one does so. No, what the terms rich and poor mean in this sense is something that requires the reader to look outside of him or herself and to take a new view of the world (probably). Rich is he who possesses what he would not otherwise possess unless he had wittingly manipulated circumstances in order to procure a benefit for himself which he knows will thereby not inure to any other person.
Rich is not he who, through his specialisation, commands an exorbitant fee for the specialist work he is able to do. So, a patent lawyer is not rich simply because he is able to command a fee of 400 dollars per hour. Nor is a taco server in a carry-out restaurant poor because he commands a fee of 8 dollars per hour. Neither of them is at that point rich or poor, not even when their incomes are compared to each other, because income is not a measure of richness or poverty. Expenditure is.
Let us suppose our taco server has a wife, who takes in washing to supplement the husband’s meagre income. And let’s suppose they have three children, a boy of six, a girl of four and a babe in arms, who is suckling his mother. They live in a hovel in an unpaved street, but they get by. They have food on their table and their children are clean. They even have a surplus of five dollars a week, with which they purchase drugs.
Our patent lawyer accrues a weekly surplus in the order of 12,000 dollars a week. He puts 2,000 a week into an emergency fund, for unforeseen eventualities, spends all of the rest on himself and his wife, aside from the remaining 10,000 surplus, which he gives to a local charity, say, a school.
Now, I must ask you which of them is rich, and which of them is poor, and you must know that your judgment will define, supposing they both die now, which of them goes to heaven. The wiser among you will argue that you do not yet have enough information to be able to make that judgment; the very wise among you may even opine that it is a judgment that no one can properly make: only God in heaven above. And yet it is a judgment that many would find all too easy to make: that the taco server is poor, but won’t go to heaven; that the patent lawyer is rich, and will go to heaven. And then I would say to them that they hadn’t understood the rules of this game. And it is when I draw them back to those rules, that the determination of rich or poor will decide which, if any, goes to heaven, that the wisest of all will tumble to the realisation of what Jesus’s words meant all along: that being rich or poor has nothing to do with acquiring riches; it has to do with the manner in which they are acquired and the manner in which they are held and the manner in which they are disposed of.
The rich young man who asks Jesus how he can access the kingdom of God is told to dispose of all his riches. This makes him very sad, because he is a very wealthy man. We never find out whether he in fact does give away all his riches. But, if he does, he throws in his lot with the poor and, as a result may well gain access to the kingdom of God. That is not for me to say, however, because no man has a window into the conscience of another man. “The knowledge of even the wisest of all men, if communicated to us, will be to us nothing more than an opinion, as long as it is not experienced within our own selves. As long as we can not penetrate within the soul of Man, we can know little more about him but his corporeal form, but how could we penetrate within the soul of another as long as we do not know our own? Therefore the beginning of all real knowledge is the knowledge of Self, the knowledge of the Soul and not the vagaries of the brain.” (Franz Hartmann). In other words, don’t, please, don’t, take my word for any of this. Because knowledge comes only with experience:
“If you desire to investigate the divine mysteries of nature, investigate first your own mind, and ask yourself about the purity of your purpose: do you desire to put the good teachings which you may receive into practice for the benefit of humanity? Are you ready to renounce all selfish desires, which cloud your mind and hinder you to see the clear light of eternal truth? Are you willing to become an instrument for the manifestation of Divine Wisdom? Do you know what it means to become united with your own higher Self, to get rid of your elusive Self, to become one with the living universal power of Good and to die to your own shadowy insignificant terrestrial personality? Or do you merely desire to obtain great knowledge, so that your curiosity may be gratified, and that you may be proud of your science, and believe yourself to be superior to the rest of mankind?” (Idem.)
There, perhaps we have the clue to what is meant by the rich shall not enter the kingdom of God, by with the poor people of this earth I wish to share my faith: it is not the being of rich or poor that determines our relationships to each other or to our deity, however we define it. Even Jesus said, “There will be poor always.” It is not richness or poverty in material terms that concerns Jesus, it is richness and poverty in spiritual terms, in terms of the purity of our purpose.
No one can be led by the nose into the kingdom of God. They must find their own way and, if they think that purposefully alienating their entire property is a means to procure, as some quid pro quo, a free entrance ticket to the kingdom of God, then they must try their luck on that path. I cannot disabuse them of that.
What I do feel however, to return to where I started, is that casting one’s lot with that of the poor would be certain to have one consequence, if no other, and that is to level, to whatever degree, the differences that exist between the rich and the poor, or at least between me and those less well-off than me. Whether that purpose is pure or not remains to be answered.