UNITED STATES—In the days and weeks after Gascón’s defeat, American reporters and government officials seemed to wake from a dream and questions bubbled up inside, tons of questions. Just who was Gascón? What did he stand for? Was he really a threat to the United States? How were Soviets involved, if at all? Where was the proof and whose interests were served? That’s always the question, it’s not what happened but how one profits from what happened afterwards. Did the taxpayers benefit or Allied Fruit, a perennial tax dodger. Some reporters who traveled on junkets to the isthmus, personally guided by Bernie Lukasey, felt both betrayed and dismayed. And after a few cups of aguardiente de caña, they felt bemused and betrayed. So, it was.
The willingness of the company to exaggerate the Communist’s importance and to create incidents and issues—coupled with the willingness of the American Press to amplify Allied Fruit’s cries of wolf throughout the United States—led not only to the collapse of the Gascón regime, but created such an environment in the United States that, when a real Communist threat did appear in Cuba three or four years later, the American public and some members of the press were unwilling to believe the truth.
There manifests the charm of money. Sam Delaney in the dark days that followed Sam Jr’s fireball death in a fighter plane in North Africa, he would get a heavy check through inter-company mail or the postal service, and the quantity was such that it would assuage the persistent hurt over his son’s death. The reverie of a little cashola was cause a forgetting of that never-ending tragedy, albeit briefly, and then the harsh outlines would return to quickly consume him with grief everlasting.
There are powers in this world as the merry-go-round goes round and round, the globe, the fanciful bar in the French Quarter. Round and round it went. There would bingers on the sidewalk to keep cars and trucks out. Graydon Miller’s political career had taken off by that time. Miller had successfully parlayed a post-office box on Crenshaw Blvd. into a seat on the city council. There he sat on the parks committee and community after-school programs. He got away with the post-office box to run for office when the veteran political hack was prevented from terms limits from occupying the seat for a fifth consecutive term. Miller knew the territory up and down, dry and dusty South Central dotted bright new commercial spaces that sprouted after the rights.
Miller knew the territory up and down from his time at 23rd St. and Estrella Ave, managing the old Victorian with rooms for rent, he knew how to deal with bickering and tenants stealing from the community refrigerator. This was helpful experience working on the council, and well as the ability to visit constituents at night and hear their gripes, hopes and dilemmas as the sun went down and the sidewalk was still warm. It was much better than having to dun the tenants in the old days, and know how hard it was for them, and still keep his hand open to receive something, anything to keep the boss from pasting an eviction notice on their door. Now and then he’d run into somebody from that time or those he knew at the census bureau. Other times the fledgling politician would gravitate to 28th Street connected to the sweetest and most fulfilling encounters of his lonely life occurred, where one woke to the sun-drenched morning, and one walked toward the San Pedro bus stop. And one would later extract memories as chocolates from a box of Russel Stover. It was so beautiful as it was, and had always been, so maligned and overlooked.
“Good times.”
Miller instituted an ambitious public works program to build bridges over heavily trafficked zones, and cut down on the high incidence of elders, women and children mowed down by speeding cars. He was the first to criminalize overzealous use of sirens in police, ambulances and firetrucks. At the time the Crenshaw News thought it eccentric enough to warrant a mildly funny cartoon about a bridge to nowhere. Eventually, the policy caught on and was adopted by Bakersfield and the Inland Empire. A woman named Urna from City Hall accompanied him on these jaunts and she had a knack of knowing how to crack a joke at just the right moment or, simply, to put Graydon in non-spastic mode.
After the Gringo-directed coup, Gascón was an emotional and physical wreck. The alcohol took a toll on the life-joy of his tall body. He flinched when trucks backfired in Guatemala City. Blinked in the blue terminal light. Before being allowed to board a plane to Mexico, he was stripped to his underwear. There was an element of the Guatemalan president’s fall from grace that reflected schoolyard treatment of a freak or weakling that had been singled out by the playground crowd, subjecting him to indignity and disrespectful mockery. What weighed on him the most was that he was a full-fledged accomplice in his punishment. Stripped to his undies he was paraded before a crew of reporters and the Sylvania flashbulbs went pop, POP, POP. It was a final humiliation by the psychological warriors saying, au revoir, sayonara loser. A detonation set off a hullaballoo in the Guatemala canine world. . . soon sirens would follow, onlookers. What the hell had happened.
The people in in the Athenium Café in downtown Guatemala City muttered sympathetically: “How pointless that cruelty.”
To be continued…
