Rios Montt Verdict Day. Sanchez statements. Verdict at 4PM Central today

[Catherina]

74. You're welcome with hugs. About Otto Rene Castillo, Guatemalan communist poet and revolutionary

I feel a thread coming for the martyred revolutionary musicians of Latin American coming soon I'd never heard of Castillo before and wanted to look him up first thing in the morning.


Otto Rene Castillo



Otto Rene Castillo, born 1936, was a Guatemalan revolutionary, a guerilla fighter, and a poet. Following the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew the democratic Arbenz government, Castillo went into exile in El Salvador, where he met Roque Dalton and other writers who helped him publish his early works. When the dictator Armas died in 1957 he returned to Guatemala and in 1959 went to the German Democratic Republic to study, where he received a Masters degree. Castillo returned to Guatemala in 1964 and became active in the Workers Party, founded the Experimental Theater of the Capital City Municipality, and wrote and published numerous poems. That same year, he was arrested but managed to escape, going into exile once again, this time in Europe. Later that year he went back to Guatemala secretly and joined one of the armed guerilla movements operating in the Zacapa mountains. In 1967, Castillo and other revolutionary fighters were captured; he, along with his comrades and some local campesinos, were brutally tortured and then burned alive.

Works:
http://vimeo.com/39080625

Apolitical Intellectuals

One day
the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the simplest
of our people.

They will be asked
what they did
when their nation died out
slowly,
like a sweet fire
small and alone.

No one will ask them
about their dress,
their long siestas
after lunch,
no one will want to know
about their sterile combats
with "the idea
of the nothing"
no one will care about
their higher financial learning.

They won't be questioned
on Greek mythology,
or regarding their self-disgust
when someone within them
begins to die
the coward's death.

They'll be asked nothing
about their absurd
justifications,
born in the shadow
of the total lie.

On that day
the simple men will come.

Those who had no place
in the books and poems
of the apolitical intellectuals,
but daily delivered
their bread and milk,
their tortillas and eggs,
those who drove their cars,
who cared for their dogs and gardens
and worked for them,
and they'll ask:

"What did you do when the poor
suffered, when tenderness
and life
burned out of them?"

Apolitical intellectuals
of my sweet country,
you will not be able to answer.

A vulture of silence
will eat your gut.

Your own misery
will pick at your soul.

And you will be mute in your shame.

--Otto Rene Castillo

Also Satisfaction

Also Before the Scales, Tomorrow


http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/castillo/

There's a more detailed biography here

Even Beneath This Bitterness

At the bottom of the night
the footsteps descend and retreat.
Shadows surround them.
Streets, drunks. Buildings.
Someone running away from himself.
A broken bottle, bleeding.
A widowed paper sailing around a corner.
A freethinker pissing on the grass,
where tomorrow the well-dressed children
will play

beneath the dew.

Far away something screams, dark metal, genital.
Asphalt and blind stones, sleeping air,
darkness, cold, police, cold, more police.
Streets, whores, drunks, buildings.
Police again, soldiers, again police.
The statistics say: for every 80,000 officers of the law
there is one doctor in Guatemala.

Then understand the misery of my country,
and my pain and everyone's pain.
If when I say: Bread!

they say

shut up!
and when I say: Liberty!

they say

Die!
But I don't shut up and I don't die.
I live
and fight, maddening
those who rule my country.

For if I live
I fight,
and if I fight
I contribute to the dawn.
And so victory is born
even in the bitterest hours.

― Otto René Castillo



Report of an Injustice
[P align="right"]“For the past few days the personal belongings of Mrs.
Damiana Murcia widow of Garcia, 77 years of age, have
been out in the rain where they were thrown from her
humble living quarters located at 15 “C” Street, between
3rd and 4th, Zone 1.”

(Radio newspaper “Diario Minuto”
first edition, Wednesday, June 10, 1964.)[/P align="right"]

Perhaps you can't believe it,
but here,
before my eyes,
an old woman,
Damiana Murcia widow of Garcia,
77 years of ashes,
under the rain,
beside her furniture,
broken, stained, old,
receives
on the curve of her back
all the monstrous injustice
of your system, and mine.
For being poor,
the judges of the rich
ordered eviction.
Perhaps you no longer
understand that word.
How noble the world
you live in!
Little by little
the bitterest words
lose their cruelty there.
And every day,
like the dawn,
new words emerge
all full of love
and tenderness for man.

Eviction,
how to explain it?

You know,
here when you can't pay the rent
the authorities of the rich
come and throw your things
in the street.
And you're left without roof
for the height of your dreams.
That's what it means, the word
eviction: loneliness
open to the sky, to
the eye that judges, misery.

This is the free world, they say.
What luck that you
no longer know
these liberties!

Damiana Murcia widow of Garcia
is very small,

you know,

and must be very cold.

How great her loneliness!

You can't believe
how these injustices hurt.

They are the norm among us.
The abnormal is tenderness
and the hate of poverty.
And so today more than ever
I love your world,

I understand it,

I glorify

its cosmic pride.

And I ask myself:
Why do the old
suffer among us so,
if age comes to us all
one day?
But the worst of it all

is the habit.

Man loses his humanity,
The enormous pain of another
is no longer his concern

and he eats
and he laughs

and he forgets everything.

I don't want these things
for my country.
I don't want these things
for anyone.
I don't want these things
for anyone in the world.

And I say I

because pain
should carry
an indelible aura

This is the free world, they say.

Look at me.
And tell your friends
my laughter
has turned grotesque
in the middle of my face.

Tell them I love their world.
They should make it beautiful.
And I'm very glad
they no longer know
injustices

so deep and painful.

― Otto René Castillo