Two AM at the Waldorf - Astoria. Can hardly signal the beginnings of a decent journal. But I am awake, thanks to having locked the door accidentally against Jay's return at 1:15 AM and to coffee, drafty air conditioning, too early a bedtime, and whatever else prevents an easy relapse into sleep.
The deeper motives of the journal writer must await later analysis one dull day. But Stephanie Neuman, who loves and respects her father, a good professor, thinks naturally that there is value in personal scribblings and said weeks ago "please go ahead," and I also mentioned the thought to Mike Nalbandian in Providence a week ago while drinking and talking of the confusion of my work and scholarship, and Mike said a hearty yes too.
Besides, I can think of things that should be in a journal, which happened today. Just half an hour ago, when Jay Hall's ring awakened me, and he asked whether I wanted to see the morning's paper, I asked whether the stock market went up. I have been following it out of an envious curiosity, having not a share. "I am holding $100 in my hot little hand," I told him. "Don't let it go all at once," he replied; "the market can't take it." Then I recited my theory, lately concocted, that by its nature the market could not pay people their due and that a man whose "investment of $5000 in 1950 was worth $20,000 today" could only consume in proportion if he was exceptional, say one of fifty, else the market would return to near where he picked it up. For twenty billions of added "riches" then, we must have only a billion or so of new consumption possibility. (The true figure, of course, may be half or twice or more this but many variables would determine it, which I suppose the economists to be little in control of.) Perhaps over ninety percent of those enriched by the market are foredoomed to being rich on paper after the one or two percent true increment (whatever the true part of the true GNP is that forms the market's substance) per annum is allowed for.
Strange how exotic the fabric of my rationalization in order to feel a little better that I am not riding high with "the others." Yet how many truths must come from the need for comfort - as many as the falsehoods and illusions?
Or is what Jay Hall did earlier in the day a better material for journals. He read with great interest (being himself mildly tempted for years with the buccaneering aspects of commercial research and consultation) my draft of a memorandum for John Ivey to issue on the new Center for Applied Social Research at New York University which I direct and a draft of brochure, a four-page folder, to be printed and distributed by the Center. He delightedly exclaimed at each and every instance wherein these documents prated the ideology of academia and the fairyland of the new generation of "research-minded" professors. He was brilliant. I urged him to write a secret analysis of these documents, exposing my every rhetorical trick, and said that I would countersign it, attesting to his validity, for posterity. There is as little truth and sincerity in these academic administrative expressions as in politics, or advertising, or bureaucratic intercommunications generally. Perhaps a journal is a place to confess and exonerate oneself from such duplicities, saving his mind, it not his soul. "I myself really know truth. This is not me'.
Nine Hours later than the last entry! The excess bodes ill for the Journal.
Jay Hall has had to return to Detroit for a midday meeting with Donner, GM's chairman of the Board. Donner is "Co-consul" of GM in charge of staff services, finance, external relations. He is a type of bookkeeper, probably made uneasy by Jay's political operations. Jay may have a serious problem of survival if Donner is unhappy. At the same time it is almost impossible to educate a person quickly on the operational code that Jay uses in conducting political activity on behalf of GM. The parts of a car or the columns of figures in an account sheet or the clauses of a purchase or sales agreements are so much more tangible and better known to the auto industrialist. So too with most businessmen. They must depend on politics and yet politics must remain peripheral to their interest and attention. How can Jay recite the lessons of a thousand hotel room conversations, of a hundred conventions and hundreds of campaigns. He can only be helped by doctrine and authoritative scientific principle (which is really doctrine and authoritative then he might say to Mr. Donner, " I have been doing A, D, F, H2 according to this twentieth century Machiavellian text for auto industry politics" and Donner would judge whether he had indeed being doing A, D, F, and H2 but not whether he should be in the business at all. But of course we have no such text either. The "not-so-vicious circle" works so that the anti-doctrine forces stymie the pro-text forces and the non-text situation fosters a greater anti-doctrinal condition.
Jay and I discussed the GE concept of a politicized management: "Politics is a function of management." Steve du Brul wants a report from Jay on this increasingly popular idea of Kordiner. So Steve told me on the phone a week ago. But Jay doesn't know whether it should be written, especially since he is in the middle of legislative struggles in Michigan and elsewhere. Steve seems to feel that Kordiner's theory will have managers committed to party. Party is no vehicle for the corporation, says Steve. (Jay told of his own latest maneuver in which he persuaded the pro-UAW-CIO Democrats on a legislative committee to oppose an auto-dealer bill prohibiting the auto companies form selling cars at a discount to their own employees. Jay told these men that a fringe benefit of the workers was at stake, and they responded by siding with their "natural enemies" against the small businessmen.) I had told Steve and Jay that I have a somewhat active file on the subject of business and politics and hoped to write an article on this question. When can I ever get to it ? I promised myself and Jim Shipton of GE's institute for the Study of Management at Ossining that it would be written at least a year ago. Many superficial articles and speeches have blossomed in the press since then; it has become a favorite topic. Bob Dahl wrote an academic article on the subject, asking for more research, a lengthy PROD-type article. Jay says, "Write what the interested folk can understand and it will be worthless; write a good piece of analysis and …" and I added, "They'll hate you and mistrust you". We agreed that the non-political businessman - the creatures of apathy, busyness, barbs of emasculating neo-liberals and labor unions - is rather a bad than a good citizen. How to make him intelligently political and gear his personal or corporate interest into the political order is yet another thing - very difficult, pluralism yes, but what kind ? The shenanigans of the millionaire Texas oil riggers in politics hurt - for example, Hunt with his $10 millions for MacArthur at the 1952 republican Convention. Should corporations be thought of as states, or city manager cities, how heuristically ?
Yesterday and today, Wednesday and Thursday, 1 PM to 1PM have been like too many other days in my life and so many lives. Pleasant and constructive, but not stirring or very constructive. A dozen letters of modest import, a dozen phone calls, a half-dozen errands, forty pages of reading de Latil's Thinking by Machine (a commonplace book, which, however, I should read in toto because it stimulates my mind in an orderly way on an important subject), many pleasant encounters with the children and Jill.
The girls are taking final examinations. Cathy is up and down; she is sleepless, her complexion is mottled, and she is impatient with her elders. She wonders why she studied so hard for a test that turned out to be so simple no special effort was necessary. I labored with a statistical concept in defense of studying for exams: in the long run the student who reviews will be paid off in better grades (adding always the consolation of Knowledge; it is good to know more anyway). I told her of training troops; how maddening it is to see a well-trained battalion to go into battle prepared to the smallest buckle, with snap in drill, and rifles that have polished bores, every man in fresh and dry socks, and then in a barrage half the troops are casualties before committed to the struggle; yet those left are as good as three poorly-trained ones. A well-trained army makes its superiority felt over the poorly-trained one. The lesson is one of the most important in life. I suppose it applies to all skills.
It is an instrumental lesson, the principle is utilitarian, not absolute, for absolute goods are to be studied for their own sakes. But who knows the dynamics of the pursuit of the good for its own sake. Is it a kind of intra-personal connection of goal and activity - self-satisfaction, not good, perhaps merely "selfish" until proven good by an objective criterion. Why is it good to know geometry, to know god, to know any of the types of good men are supposed to go after without ulterior motive ? Only, I suspect because we posit a standard of internal satisfaction or equilibrium or completeness to which good men ought to aspire. I doubt that we have two different types of good here - instrumental and absolute - whatever I told Cathy and whatever manmade language distinguishes. Rather two standards, and usually two time intervals (long and short) are at issue.
Vicky and Jessie carry their worries and hopes at the same time, like the African bearers of a stick and two bags. So they encounter examinations in a better state. The boys are still free of the year - end's curse.
We sat with Tom and Rosalie Frelinghuysen, our neighbors, from six to eight last evening, in our backyard, drinking gin and tonic. Tom showed me his almost completed model of the "Queen of the Three Rivers " that he will cast into bronze and turn into a fountain. The Queen is a three-faced negroid women of four legs, well conceived and executed. Three pairs of cupped hands will pour water, and water will flow over the single crown on all sides too.
He has gone far into abstraction, for he is usually quite visual or "realistic". He was pleased with my favorable opinion. We talked of the dearth of statuary and fountains in Princeton, and we thought that the Tiger ought to be buried in the tall grass and Tom's Queen or something else put on the green at the entrance to Palmer Square. Perhaps Tom's Queen should be placed in front of the Post Office. It is ridiculous that any small Italian town is likely to have several pretty and useful fountains and statues, while Princeton with its great wealth, abundance of water, and several public parks has nothing but some large columns of minor historical meaning and less artistic virtue. For all this, it is the busiest little city in the world; the weekly Town Topics is a heavy bundle of tracings of 30,000 people in rapid social motion.
A day at the desk, 9-12, 1-5, and now a few minutes before seeing the Japanese film, The Mistress, playing at the Garden. Jill will go, of course; I can never go to the movies alone, even though I scarcely utter a word while watching the screen.
I wrapped leather around the oars of the boat, the same old leather that cover old oars, one of which was broken by a boyfriend of Vicky.
Cathy and I played tennis before dinner. She is a natural athlete, with a very sturdy frame and extraordinary grace. She also has, I think, more than the ordinary determination and ability to concentrate on the play at hand. One month of the steady practice would put her in adult tennis company. By next year, with moderate practice, she should be able to play on the High School team. I rag her a little too much on the courts but that is a part of my method of teaching, pressure, personally involved criticism. It is not endearing, nor even dignified. It is a vice, but it is, I think, effective beyond the usual teaching, and I don't know that I could learn another more distant and unconcerned mode of instructing. I get this from my father, whose methods I dislike as a child. The only difference is that I may be a little more articulate and informed in my teaching, and I do not press as hard and openly with any except family and intimate students.
Estelle Warshow, my secretarial assistant, and I talked at length this afternoon about her job with me. I certainly felt impatient with her, not with much reason save that I do want someone who is interested in helping me lead my very complicated life and am willing and eager to help them with their own, but nearly everyone I have interviewed or hired seems to look upon working for me as a way of furthering their precious fantasies and ambitions. They are nice people; perhaps others wouldn't notice this trait. Perhaps I am too sensitive, too dependent upon the full devotion of others, too concerned with my own schemes also. Perhaps I am closely tied to scholarship and academia in my work, and these young people insist upon continuing their college nursing habits with me. In America I am afraid that professors, at least in the social sciences and humanities, are figures of indulgence, not of demands and deprivation. We are "means of self-fulfillment" (how the young unctuously purr the phrase, using it as if they were conferring sacraments upon themselves, instead of apologetically). So I must feel mean when I ask routine and unrelated work of my assistants. I should dust my desk, arrange my books, repair the office machines, keep an agenda, lend my car, sign their
requests for this and that, and never, never expect that a thing once said is to be remembered. The great expectations over the last several years have been Stevenson, so maddeningly difficult in some ways, but an honest-to-God worker and proud craftsman, and Ralph Cornuelle, intellectually brave beyond the call of duty, ready to serve his job, concerned with seeking a problem as his boss is seeing it. For those who would take me at my worst, how can my affection as an employer for these two men be explained? They are tough, original, independent men. I couldn't afford to keep Steve with me, and Ralph resigned to pursue his own well-defined course of life. Let me be clear about the others - Eileen Lanfeld, Ted Gurr, Estelle Warshow - they are clever and competent but they cannot identify with my problems. Esther Kissling could but she was not so competent. Stephanie Neuman has a flair for identification, and may be truly competent. Judith Pinch was only moderately competent and not simpatica ; it is amusing that she is doing so well in a well-paying post at the Woodrow Wilson foundation and was hired quickly when it was known she had been working for me. And the less said of Helen Weigel the better. As for the procession of the interviewed, case after case helped me arrive at my point: the young of today are trained not to identify with authorities, but only to accommodate to them. Jill agrees with my conclusions but in her own work career - brief periods now and then - tended to be interested neither in her "self-fulfillment" nor that of her employer.
Although these thoughts were coursing through my mind as I talked with Estelle, the theory of history was our subject and catching her in what I regard as a most annoying statement, so typical of historians, "As an historian, I am prejudiced against… etc.," smug acceptance of one's stupidities (how she would suffer if someone said "as a Christian, I am of course prejudiced against Jews"), I declared that history was nothing but a great catch basin of facts and the specialized historians, as most pride themselves with being, are proud owners of little bird baths of facts, and that to do anything of intellectual value, the historian must become something else - a psychologist, a power specialist, an economist, a sociologist, a theologian and here he would be judged by his abilities as a scientist. I know where that rot came from, namely, "History is not a science;" it is common among historians but Ed Morgan, her professor at Yale, liked to say so, and Ed is a good man who should know better.
Retiring to another line of defence, Estelle said that at any rate it wasn't a pure science like mathematics. I replied that mathematics was a branch of logic, founded upon premises of philosophy, like logic, and of course not a empirical science. It has less relation to physics and biology than these sciences have to sociology. None of these are "pure" for the word "pure" is an absurd pejorative. History remains the catch-basin, and the sciences of man, when they can find a catch-basin full enough, perform their operations within it. History gives case materials sociology. Otherwise it is a titillation of the senses and can be defended as a pastime, like picking pretty stones and shells along the ocean beach.
Poor Estelle! Why did I bait her like a wicked professor in a seminar. I suppose because she was so interested in showing me how bright she is (I know that and hired her therefore), rather than how she might help solve the problems I am hiring her to help me solve. She is full of learning too, so full she can't be talked to, overfull so that she incites one to humiliate her. She is going to study more history in the fall in New York, again a red flag. Why, if she is so eager to work for me, is she going to take another course in history; why not sociology or research methods or something to help us communicate? No, that is not "self-fulfillment." And she speaks proudly of her amassing of an education, confident that a professor must smile benignly and pat her on the head, little knowing how little of the professor there is this one. Anyone in America may now go to school until the Last Great Day! It is the new form of the same conspicuous waste Thorstein Veblen accused the American bourgeois female of. But at least their husbands paid. Now the state, and all, will pay so that the women of the country can spend their lives in schools, alongside a fair fraction of the men folk as well. The adoration of formal education, of course, is an ancient Jewish trait, but in this regard, no one can say where 'Jewish culture ends' and American culture begins.
Are these the two basic propositions of knowledge ?
1 Nature creates man, and man can only recreate his own nature.
Thus all science and art is an imitation of man by himself - the former in regular agreed patterns, the latter (art) less so.
Show how this is true of both pure and applied science and both natural and social science.
2 All knowledge is relative to man, and fact and value are on a continuum of agreement, not truth, among men.
Thus there are then as many truths as there are opinions or preferences, and a system can be built up from any preference man can have or imagine.
Compare: cybernetics
multiple geometries
dual physics
behavioral infinity (man differs in as many respects
as there are differences to be thought
of - anthropology)
my psychological essays on role, infancy, structure
of thought
Miami, Florida, Airport
Let most of three days go by and the journal faces a crisis of subject. Possible topics:
1. Ted Gurr is back from two weeks in the desk Navy, "character of Ted Gurr" as I thought of it in reading a memo from him, being driven to the airport, and a half-hour on Sunday.
2. My conversation with Sterling Spero, Dean of GPA, but this is treated rather squarely in a memo to John Ivey in my file.
3 The Saturday night cocktail party at June and Fred Yaeger's home across Nassau Street.
4 My talk with Aljian in New York City (Waldorf-Astoria) about Hawaiian Sugar Planter's Association interest in the bagasse-newsprint plan of the syndicate of MIDCO-De la Rosas-Rice Barton. But this was put into a memo for MIDCO as well.
5 Visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City with Jill, Jessie, Francisco Moreno and his wife.
6 Talk with Dr.Samuel Smith, a wonderful character suited to the unbelievably unprepossessing and shabby, but profitable, editorial office of Barnes and Noble in New York.
(I just noticed a little brown rabbit watching our plane lumbering by on the aprons of the Miami Airport. )
La Bodeghita del Medio (Cuba)
June 16, 1959
8:30 PM
A cluttered bottega, "authentic" as they say. The doorkeeper at the Vedado Hotel hardly gave me its name. I questioned him closely. The driver insisted I wouldn't like it, but I sent him away as soon as I saw it. Two guitarists and a castagnettist settled next to me and are playing Latin American songs, the castagnettist singing in a cracked but vigorous voice. They have poker faces, white, black, and in-between.
What I ate: small pieces of breast of lamb in heavy tomato sauce; a good mixed salad of cucumbers, avocados, tomatoes; fried bananas; rice; unsalted popovers; beer; rum.
I bought a round a rum, paid the cuenta gladly and went away. An imposing old church with a beautiful low building, housing the institutes of archaeology and international relations, is around the corner from the Botteghita. Indeed that area of old Havana is by far the most interesting in town.
I still have not decided what to say about the days on which I wrote nothing. I recall brief intellective flashes that would have been well suited to these pages, but they occurred at odd times and places - while solving another pressing problem of the University, while disciplining a child, while strolling to the movies with Jill, while too sleepy to move or while getting up from bed, while transferring from train to subway, while talking to Stephanie and other people, while riding cabs, while playing tennis. This is how I think. Of course, I do well when I am sitting and doing nothing but thinking or writing or reading (especially reading), but at least my mind keeps tossing ideas, generalizations, not strictly related observations under conditions of complete activism. I sometimes feel that I have obsessive anxiety - not at all, I think now - because these ideas keep interrupting even when I am most drastically and continuously concerned with a problem - or an action. The impulse to hypothesize is a cure for obsession (because I am in fact a worrier - I could be obsessed)! What of my preoccupations, however: for twenty years at least, my mind wanders from a conversation of less than a certain complexity or concern; I ignore questions, I cease to lend myself momentarily to a discussion of a decision. Sometimes this had annoyed people, but Jill, for instance, understands it, and the children are coming around. This is not vacancy - this is a liberty I take at social expense - I reserve the right to speculate right in the middle of something else, provided the something else isn't of too large an importance. (These last couple of hundred words were written while sitting on the toilet. [Perhaps they read that way!] Should this kind of detail be permitted! Gide never said anything like that. Some will say, rather precisely, "Gide was concerned with only the important truths about himself." Humbug! He wouldn't mention the detail because he would be frightened by it. Gide, for all his abstract honesty, only confessed his great sins because they are part of general literature, the cozy heritage of his co-intellectuals. He always was a stuffy academician at bottom. [At bottom, a pun, unintended, was Gide often constipated, I wonder.] He speaks deviously of his homosexuality, abstractly, loftily - no details - is this the way journals should be written? I must consider it. He had little to do with women and was spared speaking of that. [Though certainly I would not recommend the emulation of Casanova, who is boring.] )
(#7-8-9-10 et cetera of my listing of what I should say about the days will have to remain forever unlisted.)
Should I mention, for instance, that Jill became angry, with little reason admissible in court, at the Saturday cocktail party, because I was engaged in too interested a conversation with a beautiful aspiring portraitist of the impossible artistic name of Betty Jones (Vassar, 1957). She thought she perceived a lack of disinterestedness in my advice to the young woman - there was; but then, all the while afterwards, when I was dutifully supping in another room with six ladies alone, of the administrative branches of Princeton University and the like - the only gallant male! - Jill was somewhere else, thinking I was somewhere else, talking to the Vassar painter, and she was ready to carve up the two of us, or at least to deliver a few acidulous remarks calculated to dissolve us. At any rate, I was not so interested in the rather ordinary comportment of the girl, or of the company, and so refused Jill's invitation to stay at the party alone. But instead of walking home, we walked down to Lake Carnegie to empty our skiff of the afternoon's rain, and there by the trees, on the bank of the Lake, I made love to her, as we have so often done over many years, and the moments of our ease afterwards, feeling the cool breezes and sensing the dark soft ground beneath, were content.
At 11:02, after a cab ride, which was tense because of the shortness of time and the dense traffic in the new few blocks between the Hotel Vedado and the Embassy, I sat down with Ambassador Bonsal. He had known of my coming through a cable signed by Senator Green, and he was courteous and interested. I explained my hopes of occasioning some interest in an NYU-Cuban arrangement for research cooperation in social sciences and described my somewhat vague mission in connection with the bagasse-newsprint factory of Technica-Cubana at Cardenas. It was only on his wall map that I first learned the precise location of the mill. He said that relations between the Embassy and the new government were not close. He had had no official protest concerning the expropriation of an American interest in the mill, but he knew there was an interest involved. He called in Price, the assistant economic counsellor at the Embassy, and Price said he had heard that two engineers had come in three days ago, hoping to give some attention to deficiencies in the machinery and that they were particularly interested because their firm was owned two and one-half million dollars by the company. (This was later denied by the Interventor, Dr. Emiliano Ramos, who claimed that the only debut outstanding of any size was $25,000 to Bethlehem Steel Company and that this was an oversight). The Ambassador was polite, not curious, well-informed but apparently not compulsive in compiling information. He is appointed by the President from the career service. He asked me to call to him again before leaving Cuba…
At 7:30 in the evening, I drove off from the Havana Airport in a rented Chevrolet. The day had just turned to night. A heavy rain was falling. Traffic was heavy to Matanzas, with many buses. I stopped only at a semi-drive-in restaurant midway, called E1 Congo, where I ate some small inferior sausages, a hot cruller with a small piece of meat inside, and drank a rum with a beer chaser. (For some reason I have had a half dozen such "boiler-makers" in Cuba.) By 10:30 I was in the beach resort of Varadero and drove slowly around the settlement studying the likely-looking hotels. I finally selected an old-fashioned frame building, parked the car and climbed the long flight of wooden stairs. I asked an unkempt little man for the manager and was told that it was not a hotel but a private club, Club Nautico. He went away, came back in several minutes, and said I might stay the night. So I was given a big sparsely furnished room with windows looking out on the fine breezy calm sea. Not since Hawaii three years ago had I sensed the tropical air so closely.
After a few minutes, I decided I would see what the members looked like and descended to the basement bar where a hot political argument was progressing at one of the tables. I ordered a boiler-maker and waited. Soon the group arose to go but, with too much to drink, got no farther than the bar. A few remarks led to introductions. Byron Mojer, an American, a good looking rugged fellow, was attacking "Fidelismo" heatedly, and the Cuban manager of the club was as strongly defending the government. Byron's wife, the quiet bartender, a young Cuban with the face and physique that people sometimes call "typically American," and a young American broker who coached the club's fine rowing teams in the summer completed the group. I told them why I was there. Several had heard of De la Rosa and the factory. Byron, who worked for the Manufacturers' Trust Bank in New York City, was full of substantial criticism of the regime. His wife was dark, cheerful, attractively homely and well-built. She and Byron had met at Miami University while he was writing a master's thesis on the Cuban debt. Her father was a well-to-do farmer with plenty of labor troubles since the Revolution.
Strange how the arguments and facts repeat themselves from one part of the world to another. As in Hawaii, companies and people were being attacked for having great wealth that they created only at great cost - rice in swampland in Cuba, pineapples on the desert of Lanai. And full social investigation never precedes action. The agrarian reform is a political act - economics are secondary. Byron cited families whose elders had the foresight to hold their land intact, even though in reality two or three generations and a dozen families owned it. Yet because title was in one hand, the land was to be subdivided among his tenants. Gone the means of supporting families in the liberal professions, the arts, and, yes of course, dabbling, drinking, wasting. Then begins the circular reaction - the State must supply the means for these needed social functions - the bad with the good. More statism in education, arts, sciences, administration of all kinds. The death of the liberal, if "unfair," society. I have noted so many dozens of these instances of the circle of socialism that I marvel at the muteness of the social sciences. I turned in, happy and dizzy with drink. I vomited a little to dispel the dizziness. When that did not work, I took a cold shower. I felt better and slept. I wish I could cut my passions before they become uncomfortably excessive and immoral; all I can say in apology is that I do keep the excesses from hurting others usually. As another example, I gambled a little before dinner last night at the Hotel Nacional. I waited around the sparsely attended dice table to refresh my memory of the odds on different points. Then I plunged in, betting five dollars, running it to $40 or was it $80 before losing the point. This happened several times. I hate to pinch my winnings. So I lost $30 in short order. But think if I had made two more passes! Certainly I should then have pinched the pot. I should have played more carefully since I had so little to lose. I am the type of gambler, however, who feels he must rule the game and the other players, in this case four well-turned out gentlemen with string ties. I do not show it, but I am furious with fate. I have always been a poor sportsman in this sense; I am not willing to admit the intervention of fortune or the justice of defeat. I remember one time in northern Minnesota as a guest of a student, blazing away furiously at some elusive duck long after the others had gone into the farm kitchen of a Norwegian friend for lunch, wading far into the water and muck to do so. I couldn't stand the thought of their getting away from me. I later concealed my fury, but even so my friends must have thought that young professor to be a poor-sighted maniac. In recent years I have become "a better sport" in reality as well as appearances. I even take a certain pride in reciting all of my defeats in many spheres, not to glorify my victories but to amaze myself and possibly others with the fact that an active life encounters many times as many defeats as victories, and perhaps the man famous for his triumphs will have only a margin of several victories over those of the famous failures.
The last thoughts came in a sunny, cool room, at ease. So what? It's a vice of the romantic and uninitiated to expect scenes of beauty and moments of external, great stimulation to act on the mind as a tabula rasa so as to produce lofty, imaginative speculation and warming description. I wouldn't trust the juvenile accounts of the causes of creativity, with circumstance being taken as cause. The school girl hears of the English "Lake Poets" and is cast into a Poussin trance. It is the more likely that the major contribution of the hedge-hatch-hill-and-dell countryside was to confine the poet. As the Japanese commander said to his American prisoners, in the Bridge over the River Kwai: "Be happy in your work; you have nowhere else to go!"
RECORD OF MY TRIP TO THE CARIBBEAN - June 16-24, 1959
This is the morning of the 19th, following two busy days. I was supposed to have left yesterday for Kingston but now have cancelled that reservation and am going to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, on the 1:30 Delta Airlines plane.
The day before yesterday morning Francisco Beaza came to visit me at 10:30. He was preceded by a young woman named Lucilla, who had been invited to act as interpreter. Lucilla was a little late, Beaza quite late, and as I was pacing the lobby downstairs I was attracted by the sight of Lucilla before I knew who she was. It did not occur for a moment to me that she was to be the translator, because owing to the peculiarities of each nation's cosmetic habits I thought she had entered the hotel for immoral purposes, or at least was taking the air after a hard night's work. She had everything except a little poodle dog. She had erased her natural eyebrows and penciled in a weak, dark gray instead. Her hair was platinum. She was extremely thin and clothed in a sheath with a pair of pointy shoes. After she had paged me and we had met, I asked her what her work was. She checks on the final performance of advertisements placed in newspapers and over the air by her advertising company. Her English is not good but is adequate, and I was able to learn the meaning of a number of words in Spanish and in English from her and in the course of conversations with Beaza, who joined us shortly thereafter.
Since at 11 I had to meet the American Ambassador, we went our separate ways after a preliminary conversation and arranged to meet for lunch at the Vedado. Then I explained to Beaza what he had already heard to some extent from Moreno's letter, that I was interested in the possibility that a Civic Education Career or a Research Center in Social Science might be set up in Latin America or in Havana alone to cooperate with New York University. Beaza was attracted to the notion, particularly since I explained how closely tied in with development of Cuba would be the development of an intelligent, objective and systematic social science. Beaza directs a new organization for cultural cooperation among the Latin American states. His aim in the organization is apparently to propagate the principles of the Cuban revolution. He showed me a program of speeches and discussions to be held in the near future, discussing numerous aspects of the Cuban revolution. I advised that the program appeared excellent and that he might consider its publication when completed in English translation. I further added, after he
had described some of the journals and memoirs of the revolution that were being brought into complete manuscript form, that these too might find an interested audience in America. I offered, and he gladly accepted my gesture, to submit the manuscripts to two or three American publishers.
I also explained to Beaza some of the circumstances of the bagasse-newsprint problem in Cuba, that a Cuban, de la Rosas, had spent many years inventing what appeared to be the first and only successful process for manufacturing newsprint from bagasse but had left the country in disgust and will probably not return. At the same time great promises were being made by the new regime to save Cuba form foreign exploiters, to patronize things completely Cuban, to convert Cuba's rich agricultural resources into processed and manufactured products, and so forth. Yet production at Technica Cubana (the factory's name) had suffered since the departure of the de la Rosas, who had been unwilling to serve under the interventor appointed by the Castro group. Far from the new regime seizing upon the process seeking immediately to negotiate new factories at the same time, it has been the cause, perhaps a necessary cause, of the decline in the productivity of the single factory extant. Beaza and Lucilla were impressed by this argument and thought that I should see Jimenez or Oscar Pinos-Santos, both of them members of the new INRA (National Institute of Agrarian Reform) of which Castro himself is the president. The scope of INRA is very broad.
I agreed and we went out to the half-finished modernistic building in the new civic center of the Cuban government, where most of the important policies of the revolutionary regime was being made. We were unable to get in at first because the ring of bearded, capped, green-clad, and rifle-armed soldiers of the 26th of July Movement were guarding the structure. A meeting was going on of the several Cabinet ministers and we were asked to come back a little later. We did and were passed from one soldier to another till we reached a reception booth on the cold, wet concrete first floor of the building. There a rather confused cluster of people were trying to get in to see others or trying to keep persons from getting in. Just next to the booth marked "Recepciones" was a booth less frequented marded "Denuncias". In the Denucias booth a pretty young girl of café au lait complexion was at a typewriter receiving people who may have remembered deeds of injustice perpetrated by individuals under the Batista regime. Since she was not too fully occupied at that moment, she was also writing out admission slips and was finally able to escape the group at the reception desk and go upstairs to visit someone. After much talking back and forth on an intercom system that was a temporary substitute for a switchboard, the woman in charge of the Receptions ordered that passes be given us and we walked through the dark, dank concrete hall, took an elevator up to the fourth floor, and moved through numbers of people in groups of twos, threes, sevens or eights, and individually until we reached a small office where we talked with the secretary of Pinos-Santos. Pinos-Santos was nowhere to be found it turned our nor was Jimenez. The young lady was empowered with preparing Pinos-Santos' appointments and set me up for six o' clock yesterday afternoon. She was a pretty brunette, innocent appearing, of rich, white complexion and, one would be tempted to say, much over her head in the responsibilities of the office.
But this goes for so many people in the revolution. What the young can do, or rather, what fraud the old can get by with is never known until you have a revolution. Then everything seems odd, but the work gets done by the young. The oddness comes from the factor of age. One accepts old people who are capable of assuming their responsibilities, but not the young. It was the same during our war when we young officers were given responsibilities of tremendous scope, such as being governor of an island of several million inhabitants, or being in charge of a battalion of troops in one's early twenties, or being responsible for the provisioning of a city, or the control of a string of newspapers and radio stations. I've remarked sometimes when going back to the scenes of my former deeds or misdeeds how unshakeable, imposing, vastly important, complicated and ramified are all the operations of the august institutions, and of how highly qualified the numerous officials of these affairs appear to be, and yet looking back a few years it is nothing a twenty-three old lieutenant cannot manage. Therefore I was not as dismayed as perhaps a typical American businessman or official might be at the tender age of those who are determining the fate of Cuba. The only question is: Are they qualified? - and I doubt that that has much bearing with the passage of time.
From time to time throughout the hours we spent together Lucilla questioned me. She was baffled by my combination of altruistic and personal interests in the Cuban situation. She completely fails to distinguish among the degrees of self-involvement and interest that are possible. She couldn't understand why on the one hand I would propose an idea concerning the paper bagasse situation that obviously involved personal profit, directly or indirectly, and on the other hand would suggest an alternate resolution of the paper problem in Cuba that would probably not earn me a cent. I think most people would understand me similarly. She is particularly blind however because she thinks entirely in terms of capitalists and the exploited. She has a hardness of faith and temper, a suspiciousness - no matter how far mollified - that indicates possibly a communist and she is outspokenly "neutral" to the communist threat in Cuba. I think I worried her intellectually, perhaps physically, too. When I first asked for some translator to accompany me to the paper mill overnight, she wanted to come and yet was afraid of Cuban convention and also of her job. She didn't decide not to come until the last moment, long after I had asked her to find myself and had to make the beast of the situation. The lot of the liberated woman in the Latin States is not as easy one. One appreciates the easy countenance and naturalness of American women, I remarked to myself, as I passed them going through the hotel lobbies or in the elevators. Belgium, France, and, to a considerable extent, Italy have seemed to solve this problem nearly as well as the English, Germans, and Scandinavians. Giardinio Emanuel told me that the Philippine women were liberated in this sense too (I do not mean that they habitually travel around with men), but rather they were not fundamentally concerned but only instrumentally or rationalistically concerned over situations of this type. I must remember to send Lucilla a gift upon my return home.
And, of course, I must write Beaza soon, going over some of the things we discussed. He is a medium-sized dark man with a mildly ravaged complexion, who wears tinted, very heavy glasses, talks very little but very well, is not an aggressive, pushing person but nevertheless has ideas and works hard at them. I think he is competent in the traditional sense although he is not a new man of the Revolution or of the age because he was not had the training from early days in those respects.
This is now June 21, Sunday, at the Montego Beach Hotel.
To resume my account of the days in Cuba, the last three pages of the journal being written while aloft from Havana to Montego Bay. I shall begin to Valadero, where after several hours of sleep I rose at 5:30 and joined the group that drove down the peninsula to the lagoon where the rowing club was to do its early morning exercises, for the afternoon in Cuba is far too hot for strenuous rowing. The young Cubans work well, are intelligent, intent. They are small by contrast with the American crews, averaging on the format a boat perhaps 145 pounds as against 180 pounds in a typical American crew. But weight does not mean everything and the same boys have gone to the Olympics before.
I drove back to the club at seven, swam along the beautiful, wide beach, had breakfast with Mrs.Moger, Byron still being sound asleep from his drinking, which I understand took till 5 A.M., and then set out promptly, having settled an inconsequential bill, for Technica Cubana.
At Technica Cubana I had some difficulty being admitted. My reasons for admission were not good. I was very equivocal; I did not lie, but I did not tell all the truth, and I elaborated points of small importance and suppressed points of large importance. So I told them that in as much as I was going to discuss industrial development of Cuba with the influential Mr.Pinos-Santos at six that afternoon in Havana, I thought I must by all means be prepared for the conversation by seeing one of the most significant of industrial accomplishments of Cuba. The doorkeepers were friendly; the guard and the police had not too much faith in the present management of the factory. The guard told me that production was irregular and the attendance at the entrance indicated that the director of the plant was a communist. "Are you sure?", I asked guardedly but firmly. I then went into the personnel office at the entrance to the plant to wait there out of the heat in air conditioned comfort where the secretary and the personnel men sat too. They were friendly but guarded, and I spoke from their telephone to the secretary of Dr.Ramos. We discussed back and forth whether I should be allowed to see the plant without Dr.Ramos' express consent, and Dr.Ramos was unfortunately in Havana. I think I may have won at least an external tour of the plant against firm regulations, but unfortunately Dr.Ramos returned and sent a young man who superintended the machine shop to show me about.
Production difficulties there obviously were: many rolls of paper had wrinkles and had either to be discarded or reprocessed. Many rolls had been cut to remove the portions with wrinkles. The machine was running, but the sign board showed a zero for production yesterday and one hundred as a goal for today. Apparently zero, twenties, thirties, fifties, seventies are far more common than one hundred in the recent record of the plant. The paper looks fine, white, strong. I casually slipped pieces into my pocket as we went along, both of the poor and of the good paper. I was not sure that I would be allowed to take any if I asked. Certainly when I mentioned the matter of samples to Ramos' secretary, she did not respond at all well. The secrecy of the plant is justified in the main by the argument of protecting the process from foreign eyes. I believe the reason is a good and true one, although with the machinery builders and the de la Rosas and ourselves tied together in America there is a little doubt that we could build another plant. I mentioned nothing of this, of course, to the people there.
I asked to see Dr.Ramos before my tour ended, and my guide seemed to feel that it would be impossible, but I insisted, and sure enough Dr.Ramos saw me for almost two hours. I recognized Dr.Ramos in a glimpse because he looked like a professor: hair standing straight up in the air in a great bush, and a hurried yet thoughtful air about him, well dressed but not natty and yet not sharp or clumsy, and horn-rimmed glasses. He is an extremely charming person, a mind of first quality: he knows history and social science, but more than that, he knows the world and people, despite being Professor of Chemistry at Oriente University. He is also president of the institute for Technological Research in Havana, certainly a significant and useful development for Cuba. I spoke to Dr.Ramos, therefore, not only about the paper mill but about politics in general and about the possibility of alliance between his research institute and New York University's Engineering Division. Dr.Ramos admitted the production difficulties, but said they were minor, and also said that he was having many of the people trained to undertake better work. He showed me a copy of the new official gazette of the government, that had just begun to be printed this June 17 on bagasse paper, on flat bed presses, however. I learned later that only HOY, the communist paper and REVOLUCION, the Movement's original paper were now being printed from the bagasse newsprint rolls. EL MUNDO, they later told me, has printed on the bagasse newsprint from time to time, but is now working on Canadian paper and I saw all that set up with their paper warehouse with my own eyes later on. Dr.Ramos told me that the de la Rosas did not have to leave Cuba, that the government had owned about nine percent of the factory from an investment standpoint and certain Batista men and the de la Rosas had taken on far too great a share of the ownership. However, he said, the de la Rosas deserve and would receive royalties from the plant when I pressed him on the matter.
I said to him, "What would happen if we were to develop the financing of another plant of the same type in Cuba?"
"Fine," he said. He could staff it; it could be done. He would support it.
"How many Americans have left?", I asked.
He said, "Nineteen out of thirty-five have left."
I said, "Supposing that we were able to put together a combination of Cuban government, Cuban sugar planters, perhaps American sugar planters, perhaps other capital from America, and perhaps a U.S. government loan; would this be a way to start up a second factory?"
"Yes, indeed," he agreed.
Furthermore, the location of Technica Cubana was not the best; it was chosen after a number of other problems couldn't be solved, but he had in mind a better location along a beach where a string of sugar mills lay. I noticed by my way in the tour of the plant a large hill of bagasse awaiting consumption. I did not go into the pulping mill. I did see the Rice-Barton machines working in the paper manufacturing section. The floor of the mill looked somewhat untidy to me, but it may well be typical. Certainly the troubles were beyond normal. I was surprised to learn from several sources that then Rice-Barton engineers had come in and had left without more than two or three hours at the plant, but I suppose there wasn't much to be done but that. Then I asked Dr. Ramos whether it was true that a great deal of money was still owned American interests who worked down at the plant. He assured me not, saying that only $25,000 had originally been owing to the Bethlehem Steel Company, and that there were a few very minor deficits in addition.
We parted then on good terms, Dr. Ramos assuring me of his cooperation, both with respect to a relation between our universities and research interests and with respect to any development that we might promote in regard to bagasse paper mills. I do not believe that Dr. Ramos is a communist. He said, incidentally, thought this is not ever a sure indicator, that Cuba would be the last country in the world to become communist. I say that this is not much of an indication because a communist might well make the statement, and furthermore the statement isn't true, since some of the most unlikely places have become communist, beginning with the Soviet Union and ending with San Marino. I like the man. He probably has professorial vices, but he is very intelligent and anxious to move forward with Cuba's industrial development. He said de la Rosa was a difficult man, in the course of the conversation, and I had to agree, but he expressed no animosity, from which I gather that he meant principally that the old gentleman had to have the new situation completely under his control or not at all and that just wouldn't work in the new Cuba. Thereupon I drove back to Havana through the beautiful and rich countryside.
There is no reason why Cuba even with its six million inhabitants should not be one of the richest countries in the world. It is the poor management, and poor attitude on the part of the ruling classes, a present occupation with the sybaritic life, for actually the educated class in Cuba is not up to the standards of the intelligentsia of Western Europe or the American world. It's not all change. Cuba has great possibilities, of both economic and cultural development.
By six o' clock, without any difficulty at all, I was in Pinos-Santos' office, waiting to see him. He explained how little time we could spend together, and unlike most other Cubans I had talked to in and out of the government, I found that my explanation of my interest lacked effectiveness with him. Pinos-Santos is a rigidly politically character, a roughneck, fairly light in complexion but has the teeth and visage of the Southern Indian. I think everything in politics to Pinos-Santos [sic]. When I talked of economic development, of university research, of the possibilities of studying election processes in civic education, of the development of Cuban industry, he impatiently and heartily agreed, but would pursue no point for more than a moment. I saw how the cards lay and offered him a memorandum on the economic development and then a second memorandum on the poor planning and economic research. I'm certain that Pinos-Santos would do nothing to facilitate greater cooperation with the United States and nothing to destroy the essentially dynamic political impact of agrarian reform, with its abusive treatment of
the big interests, especially American. At any rate, there was an entree, a valuable one (not even the Ambassador or any Americans had met Pinos-Santos, and very few Cubans; as it happens, I perceived immediately that he was an outsider to the elite, not a professor like Ramos, but a real mass man come up. )
From Pinos-Santos' office I returned to the hotel, there to meet Carlos Achuga for dinner. He arrived promptly at eight. We had drinks at the hotel and then dinner at the Palacio de Crystal, a fancy, old-fashioned restaurant with Viennese or French decor, and completely empty on this night of driving rain except for two men at the bar and Achuga and myself. Thereupon we visited EL MUNDO, of which Achuga is the renowned reporter, for an hour or more, and then finished the night at the Mambo Club, a famous house of assignation, that doubles as an ordinary bar. Women can come and go, as well as stay. A humorous sidelight of the Mambo Club that night was that the rooms of the girls were flooded and they were charging their clients an extra fee to take them out to a nearby bed that had to be contracted for. There, surprisingly, we met young Souri, son of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who lives in Washington, with a young American, named Arms, long resident of Cuba, and Bostelman, Public Relations Adviser to the Cuban government in the United States. Bostelman's firm has been announced to the press in America as having a $72,000 a year contract which provides for a year's representation, but actually there's only a three month firm agreement and he has been in Cuba to try to extend it. He has been unsuccessful. Whereas he had met Castro originally, now he saw nobody and has lost control of the situation. That is the way things happen in the field, not by rejection outright, but by the run-around. At two A.M. Lechuga and I parted at my hotel. Our discussions were very interesting and good. He is firmly persuaded that the University of Havana or the government ought to enter into an agreement with New York University to do economic and other forms of research together and to engage in training programs. He is also interested in the bagasse newsprint business, for the publisher, a wealthy Cuban of Italian birth, I believe, is resident in New York and might manage to order the newsprint from the Tecnica Cubana that might be used for a month's experimentation on the fast presses of American newspapers. The EL MUNDO press is not very slow; however, our conversations with the pressmen indicated that there was trouble with the clarity of impressions from blotting but no breakage and the breakage
problem has been considerably reduced furthermore over the past few months.
Lechuga wants me to meet Roa and himself in Washington or New York next week, but I doubt if I can be back in time. Roa, besides being Secretary of State, is on leave as Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Havana. I'm going to send him a memorandum for a proposed agreement between the University of Havana and New York University that will emphasize possibilities for training in a class of planners and social science researchers in Cuba. One of the unexpected but thoroughly enjoyable aspects of these hours with Lechuga was a meeting with Jorge Marti, Assistant Director of EL MUNDO, a professor at the Social Sciences Faculty of Havana, and a man of great intelligence and charm. I mentioned PROD in my talks with Roa and Lechuga. They agreed that there was a need for such a journal, although perhaps at this time it was one of the less needed things on the Cuban scene. Besides it might appear to be political at first sight and nobody in a Revolution takes a second sight of such things. I did leave them with copies the following day, but I must write both of them at length when I return. Marti will help with our plans, too.
Lechuga told me that of the two dozen newspapers in Cuba only two were making money, REVOLUCION and an opposition newspaper, DIARIO DE LA MARINA. He described the fact that they both have taken sides, one pro and the other somewhat against the regime. He had the previous day argued for seven hours in a staff meeting on this point and had taken this position. It is of course a perilous position to take unless one becomes a whole-hearted supporter of the regime, and then what will happen if the Revolution falters or collapses? Lechuga has also been offered the Under-Secretaryship of State, but he is inclined not to accept since he is by temperament a newspaper man and an activist, whereas the post, in Cuba at least, is purely an administrative post that ties a man down and keeps him occupied with detail. Lechuga is a likeable and intelligent man. He has good judgment and a real liveliness and a heavy, impressive exterior.
I was supposed to leave Havana the next morning, and set up an appointment in the beginning of the morning with the Ambassador for 10:15. It was near a quarter to eleven when I arrived because my suit had to be send to be pressed and had been left in the wrong room. However, there was no serious loss and I had apologized for my tardiness and he slipped in another appointment before our meeting. Again Price came in, this time from the beginning, and I recounted to both of them my experiences and ideas about Cuba. I asked whether the large American interests had done anything besides complain, worry, and passively resist the so-called reforms. "Had they," I asked, fully knowing the answer, "Proposed some creative and imaginative solution, such as a policy unilaterally to sell out their lands over a period of time to their best workers, meanwhile stabilizing the whole system of production marketing and distribution in the paper industry." This would be the real way to provide agrarian reform and not through a government hopelessly committed to political objectives and full of prejudices. I'm not sure that the Ambassador caught onto the full, that is non-verbal, meaning of what I had to say.
When I returned to the hotel, just about to leave for the airport, I received a message that Renzo Sereno had arrived and was looking for me. Sure enough, he had just come in from Haiti, and we sat down and talked. As was customary with him, Renzo talked of many things, all of them interesting, but none of hem exactly to the point of the problem, namely, what did he find out of interest to my missions in Puerto Rico, and Haiti and all the world, should I manage to rearrange my trip. But I kept thinking in my absent-minded way while he talked and finally decided to stay in Cuba for another day to visit with him and talk about many things. Renzo then, in the course of the day and night, described his Haitian experiences, his conversation with Benetez and other Puerto Ricans, and then promised voluntarily that he would draw up a new memorandum that I had promised Lechuga. He thought that he could readily draw up a plan that would interest I.C.A. and the two universities. I agreed, very happy that he was taking on this task, though goodness knows what demands the world may make upon Renzo. How I wish I could speak Spanish, not to mention French and German, which he does. He engaged everyone, bartenders, clerks, salesgirls, croupiers, in entertaining Spanish conversations. So we swam that afternoon and rested a bit and then went out to the Nacional, where we gambled a little, drank a little, and then wandered over to the Capri Hotel, where we gambled a little more and talked with the manager of the Casino, a man named Dr. Caspian, who claims to live a triple life as newspaperman, novelist, and gambling manager. He professes to be an Italian from Rome, but has a very heavy accent of an East European, and has heavy lidded eyes, a short, squat physique, a blondness of hair and feature, and a slowness of movement. He wears heavy tinted glasses and said very little in the course of the evening. Considering the stereotype of the gambler, some of the Americans who wandered in the course of the evening probably thought that I looked more like the manager, with my Cuban white jacket and long cigar, than Dr. Caspian, with his undistinguished presence of a floorwalker at a second-rate department store. After plumbing a bit his neuroses of literary megolomania, "I know people so well from all over the world, through my long experience, and I am bored by everything, and know what they are thinking," he said. I bet he didn't know what I was thinking. As I say, we didn't talk too much of the time or we were moving about. The company of a couple of young women at the bar proved more attractive. They were, I suppose, the equivalent of B-girls in America. Renzo paid for the drinks. I left most of my money at home. They were a lot better educated and less demanding than our home-town products, I must say, and they were much more prettily dressed, of course, in this big hotel in Cuba. I was particularly impressed by one of the girls, who appeared to be beautiful. She had a fine tanned skin with a kind of pout about her lower face, and a flowered skirt or dress that stood out oddly but somehow effectively against the scarlet dark plush of the wall, tables, chandeliers of the gambling casino. Sereno won five dollars, to add to the $150 he had won in Puerto Rico. He was now ready for supper. He was a little annoyed too at a young Cuban who came in and moved with frenzy from one table to another, betting large sums at every table. What a horrible disturbance of character! We walked over to the Havana Hilton (it looks like Hilton everywhere) and Trader Vics, which is supposed to be owned by Vic from San Francisco. But there is absolutely nothing of Hawaii in the place. The food is mediocre; the decor tropical and pleasant, but again not particularly Hawaiian. We were served by a Chinese man who had never been in Hawaii however. It was in short the kind of place that revolts the true traveler.
Next morning I had to arrive at five A.M. to fly by Havana Airlines to Camaguay, thence by Pan American to Kingston. This worked out not at all because the runway had been flooded by the great rains, which were a part of the Caribbean hurricane then in progress, and only small craft were able to take off and land. I returned to the hotel and slept for two hours, then began again the tedious business of finding a seat going somewhere. At one point I was considering flying by Delta to New Orleans and Chicago to see the folks, to fly to Jamaica, to fly to Port Au Prince, to fly back to New York directly. The first thing that turned up was a flight to Montego Bay, Jamaica and I arrived here at about six in the evening. I was glad from the moment of landing. The hotel by the beach, called the Montego Beach, was beautiful. Its brown wood rattan furniture and doors and its boldly tiled floors were the best interiors I'd ever seen in the tropics or in tropical imitations. I swam immediately and had to undertake a rather mediocre dinner cooked in American style. After dinner I strolled down the road towards town in my dinner jacket and noticed nothing in the dark save a number of dark-skinned prostitutes who offered their services. I walked back to the hotel, talked to an intelligent cab driver about the Jamaican political and racial scene and then took a cab into town where I sat with a gin and tonic to watch the very good bands, both jazz and calypso, and marvelous dancers at the Embassy club. I returned before midnight, not without having to offer further kindly but no doubt mistaken excuses to half a dozen young women.
Aloft
Upon arising, I telephoned Hymie Benitez, Chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico, only to learn that he had scheduled a full morning of final budget meetings. I went to his office anyhow and spoke to Consuelo (Severa?), his office manager, who was most intelligent and helpful. Munoz and Benitez are no longer intimate and friendly. A growing opposition to Munoz is in fact manifest, even to my naive eyes. Consuelo put the Chancellor's office at my disposal and had alerted Professor Jansen, Director of the Social Science Research Center, to my arrival. He had also been called by the Puerto Rico Department of State. So I made other appointments and then visited with him for an hour. He is a somewhat sour individual who seems to feel he was cut out for greater things but is really the kind of person people cut out of things. He has been in Puerto Rico for ten years. Few Puerto Rican students are being trained in social science teaching and research. As soon as they are half-educated, they land good jobs with the government. The Social Science Research Center had close contact with Munoz, but lately the relation has cooled somewhat. I also met Reuben Hill, a friend of John Ivey from the University of North Carolina who is on leave to consult with the Center. (A peculiar and pleasant cloud formation 2,000 feet down. A pattern of interlocking squashed white puffs of whipping cream.)
At 10:30 I taxied to the Palacio, the Governor's residence. I gave the guard at the locked gate my card and asked to see the Governor. He raised his eyebrows in a friendly way and went in to inquire how to deal with me. Meanwhile two guards noting my appearance as an American - the straw, the plain olive-drab Ivy League cut of the suit, the elegant but not too fancy embroidered tie and white shirt, and the name - engaged in a brief very correct discussion of my name, probably Italian origin, presumable Latin affinity, and evinced a kind of quiet satisfaction about the situation, leading me to speculate broadly that the Puerto Ricans, whether or not experiencing personally New York or the Mainland, feel that a lingering cultural affinity is appropriate to Italian-Puerto Rican relations, a feeling abused more often than not as the Puerto Rican immigrants encounter the tough and hardpressed Americans of Italian origin in New York City, and hence a more than incidental satisfaction when an amicable and proper relationship does occur. I was ushered in to see the Governor's Secretary on the strength of my name, and was becoming acquainted from a zero position when the Governor's Special Assistant, Padilla, came in expressing cordial surprise at my presence, exclaiming that he had received a cable from Senator Theodore Green about my visit and had called numerous places to seek me out. (We are passing a tremendous thunderhead. I thought we would go through it, but it is on our right, a great 10,000-foot monster of white, casting flashes of lightning from limb to limb. It would have been rough in there.)
Padilla and I spent a delightful hour together. He is an architect, with a BA from Harvard and a year in Florence, among other experiences. He showed me through the Governor's Palacio room by room. (Poor Munoz contracted the flu in Washington and lies abed, signing a few papers. I could not wait for a day or two to see him but must someday. He is unquestionably, even if one may disagree with him, a great man of America.) Padilla and I strolled and talked, one moment looking out over the magnificent wall of the sixteenth century fort onto the sea, another moment criticizing "the bad paintings of good men" as Munoz puts it, one moment talking of the aesthetics of the Palacio - by all odds the best Governor's residence in America - and the next disagreeing over the precise formulation of Puerto Rico's appropriate relation to the U.S.A. Padilla, like the Governor, is for the commonwealth and one with even more independence of action, by having its own customs service (but still of course a free market with the U.S.A.). He spoke too of his fear that Puerto Rico as a State would be assimilated, over-Americanized. I replied, in what must to him have been a novel argument, that it was for closely related, "selfish" reasons that I thought Statehood desirable, just as in the case of Hawaii. I feel that the U.S.A. needs the assimilation of Puerto Rican ideas and culture as it does Hawaiian ones. Puerto Rico can be our Latin American face as Hawaii is our Asian face. With the Alaskans and Canucks, both French and British, facing to our Canadian North, the Mexican-Americans to our South, and our huge European interest across the ocean to the East, and with our Negroes South and Southeast to Latin America and Africa, we can penetrate and connect with the whole world except India and the Moslem World (but with Lebanon there). We have already a gigantic never-realized ideational potential to which Puerto Rico can add very much more. Why is it that so few American politicians or professors have directed themselves to means of bringing these valuable powers to bear in world politics. The less said of the State Department in this regard the better. They bespeak a narrow national clique as the sole American interest. They are most repressively and narrowly American, really defining Americanism as a species of mannerly, historically remote dilettantism. (I always remember late-comers, geniuses like my old friend Martin Herz of the post-World War II Foreign Service, and I am obliged to kiss the scholar-stone of qualifying generalizations.)
Padilla and I parted with the warmest of salutations. We hope to meet again. One of the Governor's cars, a tall black sedan with gadgets and buttons to control its windows, seats, speaking tubes - lugubriously mocked as "the coffin" by the staff - carried me to a luncheon meeting with Ramirez, Secretary and Legal Counsel to the Puerto Rican Industrial Development Board, the organization that has been so active over the past decade in bringing new industries to Puerto Rico and assisting the old. We ate at the Swiss Chalet, an excellent, if crowded, restaurant not far from his office, where he must have greeted fifteen diners at a dozen tables, not with a politician's gusto but with a "man-I-have-had-some-dealings-with" air.
I described our bagasse-newsprint group and its hopes to Ramirez. He was much impressed. He explained some of the advantages of Puerto Rico as a location for new business, and I in turn was impressed, particularly since I could see some things with my eyes. How favorably Puerto Rico compares with Cuba and Haiti, and in its drive and promise with Jamaica! The substance of these economic and industrial arguments are subjects of a separate technical paper to be done; however, in sum, Ramirez named three large Puerto Rican sugar interests who might deal with us, with one in particular, located in Boston, as a conservative but natural prospect. How Pat McGinnis will love to work on this! And Mike too, not to mention Eddie!
Ramirez appears to me to be highly intelligent, well-experienced, and decisive. I think it would be a pleasure to work with him. I hope that we can pull in the De la Rosas to full cooperation and go all out on the Puerto Rican or the Cuban business. The old gentleman is a bit erratic and contemptuous of everyone; I shall have to smooth his feathers as we go along. Fortunately I like him - he is not nasty, he is just a hardhead cantankerous bull, so I don't mind trying to work with him.
We parted at 2 : 30. I returned to La Concha, put on my swimming trunks and went into the pounding surf for a swim. Then I gathered a little pretty seaweed and some snails for Vicky. (They are alive. I hope they last the trip.) So here we are, cutting down through the pale dusk into the lights of Idlewild.
Was it in the Miami Herald that I read hurriedly the other day about the closing up of a giant ESSO oil operation in Peru. The loss projected may be about $180 millions. At the present world prices, the 500 odd wells would not be operated profitably. A whole model town will soon be deserted as the ramshackle Western towns of the gold rush became. Thousands of workers are presently being carried at full pay because of the original contract, at great loss to the company. An industrial disaster of the first order. Yet the public knows little if anything about it. What would happen if a U.S. Government operation collapsed so completely? Think of the press accounts, the investigations, the campaign issues and so forth. But ESSO will probably take the misfortune in stride. Strikingly this shows how economic matters, when kept economic, concern people less than when they are converted into political questions. It is better that material losses are narrowly contained, as here; the burden of politics is already heavy enough. Indeed, politics could never have made the harrowing decision but would have operated the fields until doomsday.
Some fundamental lessons of social theory may be taught from Caribbean culture. They would have to do with the race, economy, politics, and, above all and in all, with "Progress." Progress of the American colossus is the focus of Southern passions - rage, envy, self-mortification, turning upon themselves in all of these respects. With few exceptions the minds of Latin Americans are sick technologically and technocratically. They cannot function in the vast spheres of life called social and natural science. They can eat, make love, worship God, drive cars, compete athletically, converse well, be kind to children and ladies, fight well as individuals. In science and technology they are more like Indonesians, Africans, and Hindus than like Russians, Americans, Western Europeans, excepting Spain because Spain has the same mental sickness. Prevalent attitudes are:
1 "Unhappiness" of course may be one, though some of the unhappy people of the north are most productive and survive special kinds of unhappiness.
2 lack of self-confidence.
3 lack of understanding and comprehension.
4 distortions of perception of themselves, outer world, science, technology, etc.
5 fantasy (especially turning over the world in one stroke)
6 Perplexed and immobilized by racial problems. Too much is made of the difference with the U.S.A. in this respect. Are many Latin American whites consciously and unconsciously anti-Negro because they do not want to face prospect of equal commensalism, therefore equal commensalism and connubium? And do the Negroes resist change unconsciously because they will then be asked to compete openly and recognize openly race problems with whites? This may even go for many white and Negro Puerto Ricans (or for that matter with many U.S.A. whites and Negroes). Haiti is the most miserable example - there are almost no pure whites, and few mulattos, yet the mulattos run the country and hide themselves from the pure Negroes. For them to constitute a full ruling group, they would have to descend from their villas and mix, and their secret attitude would be made plain.
7 Ambivalence to U.S.A. They want U.S. help in a thousand ways, yet are anti-American. Castro is a fine example. One day he will make the ridiculous request, nay, demand, for $30 billions of U.S. aid, the next day will say he will brook not the slightest suggestion of U.S. "interference," and will not need anything from the U.S.A.
8 Lack of "feedback" in Southern action processes and policy. No automatic, semi-automatic, conscious or unconscious playback of intelligence after an action. Feedback is extremely important in a series of actions and policies. It makes constant adjustments in next action and next series of actions.
9 Causes of feedback dysfunction in action and public policy:
a Personality disorganization
b Technical incompetence
c Opposition obstacles
d Political commitment
e Administrative delay (part of b above)
Latin America, with certain nations as exceptions and with some nations at certain times as exceptions, and with many individuals as exceptions, has a feedback dysfunction sufficient to disrupt the normal routines of social action and prevent the accomplishment of desired changes.
So we can say that Central America and the Caribbean and other countries in Latin America as well and probably in the world:
1. Share a fundamental similarity of climate, crop, religions and a few other major things
2. But are very different in their politics, especially from a formal standpoint
3. But are also of a fundamentally similar psychological disposition
Everyone has gone to the twelve o'clock mass, except Carlo and Christopher, who have made a great boat out of all the cushions, pillows and blankets from the living room. Perhaps this is the moment to pull together some of the thoughts of the last several days.
Why, for instance, have I said nothing about Haiti, that miserable country of three million unemployables? The irony is its being the second oldest republic in the hemisphere, a fine recommendation for independence. To make matters worse, the despot Trujillo lives next door and has pulled his country up far beyond Haiti in the last generation. He now terrorizes the Haitians instead of they the Santo Domingans. Of course you cannot hate the non-existent leaders in a nasty way on many an occasion. I do not know enough about Santo Domingo to judge Trujillo and what might have been in place of Trujillo, but the little I know makes me somewhat reserved at casting the almost universal curse upon the man.
I understand that the Castelhaiti, where I stayed one night, has the only elevator, with the exception of a freight elevator, in all of Port Au Prince. The Castelhaiti is however a fine hotel, run by a family with a smidgen of Negro blood, a local family, productive of young painters and singers whom I saw, heard, and talked to. The youngsters ran the hotel with Papa somewhere in the background. The workmanship of the hotel was below the standards of foreigners, but there was an air of authenticity about the place that one misses in the Hilton's modern style. They say that the Haitians cannot cut a square corner to save their lives. Ambassador Grew told me that you rarely see a table, rectangular though it may be, in a rectangular room that fixed in relation to all corners to please the eye, at any rate, our eyes.
I arrived at the Castelhaiti in the company of a Swede, who suggested that we share the taxi to save money. I do not think we saved any money, because it is a dollar for one, a dollar each for two, and a dollar each for three. But this theory was plausible, that is, anywhere except Haiti. The Swede was a tall, thin man in his middle thirties, who had been sent out to the Caribbean to set up an office for a group of Swedish Pneumatic tool and pump companies. After surveying the Caribbean he thought he would live in Caracas with his family despite the high cost of living there. He found out some remarkable statistics about Haiti. Two thousand dollars was the annual import of automatic tools. A U.S. government man told me that he might pick up no more than a single hammer and screwdriver from all the homes along the longest street, walking from one end to the other. After taking possession of my room and bathing I descended for a walk into town, with the ultimate object of dinner. Almost immediately a young man of about fifteen attached himself to me; he claimed to be twenty, but then later admitted to be fifteen, and he was the first of what ultimately came to be a kind of troupe of followers, some dropping out, others tagging along as one proceeded through the streets. There are obviously not enough tourists to go around. The unoccupied population is the vast majority. It sits about its hovels languidly. The sight of our group moving along the unpaved streets must have been like that of Oscar Wilde walking through the streets of Tunis followed by a troupe of blackamoors as reported by someone. Two little boys at one point followed me for a block, calling for money in English, French and Creole. I turned to them kindly and said, "What will you do with the money," speaking French, "buy ice with it?" (Glace is the scraped ice with a dash of several flavors of cherry, raspberry, grape, and so forth that is sold everywhere, a wholly unnutritious concoction.) "Yes, yes," they piped up. "No, then," I replied, "it is very bad for you." Taken aback for a moment, they thought and then they shouted, "No, no, bananas, bananas." "Very good," I said, and I gave them each a nickel, whereupon they went hooting and shouting with great glee, probably to buy glace. My guides, pointing to all kinds of remarkable pleasures to be had in town, carried me forward along the unpaved streets, major streets, these were, of the republic, to places with the suspicious names of "The New Orleans" and "The Miami", which turned out to be bars and houses of prostitution, in each of which I had a couple of beers with one or two of my favorite followers plus occupants, male and female, of the houses and smoked a cigarette. Apparently there were number of houses of prostitution in Port Au Prince occupied by something like a dozen girls easily expansible upon the arrival of a fleet or the tourist season. The girls were almost all very dark and very little different from those outside the confines of the house. In a country so wretched of course this could be expected, and no doubt there was a great floating population of unorganized women available. Some of them I encountered, as we passed through the streets towards my ultimate destination, a place to have dinner. I suppose Port Au Prince is closest to the Caribbean and South Seas Islands of a generation ago. The restaurant was a case in point.
I finally hailed a cab which was immediately occupied by some others besides myself, and directed the driver to the Le Perchoir. He immediately denied that it existed; then when I insisted that it must, he said cantankerously that it was closed, and then when I further said, "Let's go to see," he pointed far up in the sky to the mountains and said, "There she is, and we can't get there or, if we can, it will cost you a fortune." I surmised that the car, whose motor was thumping alarmingly, could not climb the hill anyway, and then asked to be taken to Nobbe and Blondel, which I had heard was a German restaurant, "one of the best in the town." "Very well," he shouted angrily at me and drove vigorously around the block, ending up a few yards from where I had been. Here was Nobbe and Blondel. I paid him off, and he drove away swearing at everything, not particularly at me. The Haitians, on the one hand, give the impression of being very gentle people, but they seem to have wicked tempers and are justifiably angry at life.
I entered Nobbe and Blondel, gave a final good tip to my young primary companion and bid him good night, telling him firmly not to await me at the hotel, as is the custom, for I had much to do the next morning. He left, I was glad to observe, but others accumulated and I found I could not sit at the outermost table of the open air part of the restaurant because two prostitutes and three gentlemen demanded all manner of things from me. I thought I would never get to enjoy my dinner, so I moved farther towards the half-open interior of the restaurant. I was given a menu and began to suspect that I was dining on the inheritance from some German who had belonged to the Marines and had stayed behind in the early 1920's. There was to something called Beck's Beer, which I had never heard of, but which seemed to have been bottled in Germany. I wondered what long history of circumstances had guaranteed this perennial outlet for this German beer. I could picture some agreement between the original German and a countryman many years ago, which was preserved in and formed the basis for the advertising and publicity of the place down to the present. I imagined that every six months or so a ship would mysteriously disgorge the semi-annual shipment of Beck's Beer for Nobbe and Bondel. At a loss as to which of the fine German dishes pictured to order, I finally selected duck, German style, and from the formaldehyde was removed a particularly dry and tough animal which was put before me, surrounded by canned corn and greasy fried potatoes. All the while I enjoyed my feast the prostitutes moved back and forth on the streets like watchful leopards and when it came time to pay my check, I tried to do so surreptitiously. I dispatched one of the waiters to find a taxi for me and he did so, locating first the cab across the street and then the driver, a block away. The driver, I was glad to see, warmed up the motor and waited. At the moment when no one was near the entrance I stalked across the street, but truth to say, before I reached the car two men were holding the doors open, and one man was entering the front side with the driver. The two prostitutes had already described all of their virtues, all of their capabilities, and at least one or two others, male, were convinced that I should enjoy sights, experiences to be remembered if I would let the cab follow by their directions. Mastering for once that difficult combination of politeness, stinginess, and denial, I rode up to my hotel, accompanied only by the taxi cab driver and a silent companion, who had promised to be satisfied only with the ride.
The next morning I talked with several American officials, beginning with the Ambassador, a career man, stout, handsome, with a walrus moustache, a graduate of the University of California, who knew Central America well and played with a little peeled baton rather than smoke as we talked. Foreign investment in Haiti is a risky enterprise. Haitians are generous in giving concessions, monopoly concessions if necessary, on all sorts of things. But the duration of the concession may depend upon the government, and the number of revolutions for the past two generations comes close to one a year. The Clark brothers have managed to maintain a sugar mill; the West Indies Fruit Company has honestly and forcibly engaged very recently to produce and export bananas (these are the Taylor brothers, I believe). A Catholic religious order, whose name was unknown to all of the Americans I spoke to, is appealing to the Development Loan Fund for several million dollars to continue a sugar mill up in the Cap-Haitien area. They are represented by an ex-anti-Nazi German, named Grupe, who wanders about the Caribbean promoting various enterprises, and seems to work hard and capably at it. I saw some of the documents on the request of the religious group and they were certainly prepared in a better-than-average form for D.L.F. applications. I told an official there about the mild interest of our group in a bagasse paper mill in Haiti. They were of course interested, but at the same time prompt to point out all the easily observable deficiencies of the country as a place in which to put foreign capital. The labor supply would have to be trained from the very elemental skills to the top. Everything would have to be brought in, including all the construction equipment down to the wheelbarrow, a remarkable rarity in Haiti. They are badly needed here in Haiti and I shall look into the matter further to see whether we can either supplement their work or put in some kind of good word for it in Washington. The order is centered in Boston or somewhere in Massachusetts and had been previously active in China. They had been evicted and had then settled in Haiti. The American group in Haiti seems unusually competent: I speak of Green, Yoe, and Beboul. The young man who assists Beboul is competent too.
In Haiti I began to reflect on a new theory of race relations in Latin America. Most people hold that the United States has much to learn from Latin America in the solution of problems of race relations, particularly between Negroes and Caucasians. One of the few objections to this generally accepted theory was spoken by Bill Stokes of the University of Wisconsin one time. Bill claimed that race prejudice was as apparent in Latin America as in the North, but was simply denied. However Bill used as evidence crude figures of rates of occupational mobility and educational mobility in the two parts of the world. I objected at the time that even without race prejudice the Negroes, and to a lesser extent Mulattos, starting at lower rungs of the economic ladder and educational ladder, could not hope to climb to anything resembling equality under a randomly controlled political system. In fact, in America, where political and social planning is more carefully done than in Latin America, one would expect the rates to show less racial discrimination, as Bill himself pointed out to be the case. I'm not sure that it is so, but I would not be surprised to see America evidencing greater progress.
But lately I wondered whether race prejudice in the true sense, which combination of fears and hatreds and a determination to prevent maximum commercium, connubium, and commensalium of races, is not in fact found more in Latin America than in the United States. However race prejudice appears to be a much more subtle thing in the Caribbean. In Haiti, the very tiny proportion of mixed Negro and Caucasian people constitute a ruling group that is very little in evidence. The country is desperately poor and unorganized. For a ruling class to rule effectively it must come down out of the hills and out of its villas and engage with the population in the statement of goals and the achievement of these goals. Such has not happened in Haiti. One reason it may not have happened is that the lighter skinned Haitians dread more than anything further mingling with the blacks and therefore cannot carry out their functions as an elite. I asked myself, "If Haiti were rid of all mulattos and light skinned persons would not the blacks then finally be in a position to create from amongst themselves a truly integrated and effective elite?" I think I have observed the same thing in other countries. Partially it may be the reaction of the elite to what is known to be the situation in the United States, and to that extent you might say we are the cause of it all. It is unfortunately true that far from the Latin Americans taking the lead as the best examples of racial miscegenation in the world, in race relations, in international politics, they have let the Asians and the Africans direct the struggle. They have, I feel, been too concerned with covering up their own tracks and have been too anxious to appear in the salons of Washington as just like the North Americans, only somewhat more cultured and Hispanic. One of the reasons why so many may be fooled by the apparent difference in the race problem in the two Americas is that in the United States the racial struggle is fought in the open as much as beneath the surface. That is because the American elite wants to be and tends to be a responsible elite. This is particularly true of groups such as the Quakers and Jews who hold civic leadership to be one of the primary duties of man. It is a calling. For a party to be responsible it must recognize the problem; and it must appreciate that the racial question, in spite of all kinds of competing economic, political, and social issues, has to be dealt with on the political level in some fashion, or else it will nullify and foster a neglect of attempts at rationalistic social organization in non-demographic spheres of life. By remaining stagnant economically and socially, the South Americans can often feel completely free of the problem of race relations in their countries. I must inquire whether there is some good book on race relations in politics in South America and Central America. I believe none exist. Joaquin de la Roza incidentally mentioned yesterday that he thought the racial situation in Cuba was being made into a political issue for the first time by the Revolution. He felt that race relations had been generally good, in the sense that nobody was agitated about them and felt that over a period of time the whole Cuban population would be slightly darker, but that now the colored people of Cuba were being incited against the whites on grounds that feelings of racial superiority had helped imperialism and monopoly to sustain themselves against the downtrodden masses. Perhaps so, but perhaps this very fact may lead to the growth of a more responsible elite. Like so many truths in life, the truth of racial friction creates sorrow and unhappiness while it advances constructive social policy. Many a time I hate social truth for this very reason - social truths of all kinds - and it is only when in good health and full of confidence and highly rational and humane that one can believe that the exposure of social truth is a good step in the direction of the control and solution of social problems.
Permit me to say something about anti-Americanism in the Caribbean too before I finish this note, which has already taken me over an hour, and has seen everybody come back from church and poke their head in and say something or smile or otherwise distract me in the last five minutes. During the last year many have said that anti-Americanism has increased in the Caribbean, particularly as a result of the revolution in Cuba. Let us say that anti-Americanism has become more popular, because it has always existed, and that it has become more socially permissible to voice such sentiments. The sentiments of anti-Americanism belong to a whole variety of statement against foreigners, against minority groups, against hostile political movements, against superior and dominant interests. Among the ignorant and the learned alike who profess strongly this type of sentiment there is often to be found a lurking conviction of the magical operations of the enemy. The educated verbalize so fluently their resentment; they rationalize it so nicely that its underpinnings are not noted by most people, and the ignorant ones are dismissed when they, from time to time, emit more crude imagery in the process of describing their anti-Americanism or other hostilities directed at social groups. However, it seems to me that underlying most of the educated and the primitive sentiments is a kind of nightmare imagery that is rarely evaluated fully by either the target or the subject. I do believe that many Cubans almost literally have a hidden and subconscious vision of going to bed at night and being raped during the night by American interests. They will often not admit it, but they literally imagine that when the shades of night have fallen armored bank cars driven by Americans load the riches of Cuba into their vaults and drive away before dawn, and planes descend and ships slip silently into the harbors and load up with the sustenance that might otherwise make Cuba rich and carry it away. So that Cuba awakes every morning exhausted. Perhaps this dream is related to the common historical myth of the rape by unknown forces in the middle of the night. There is for example the ancient Sumerian legend of the goddess who rages through the land to find the person who raped her while she slept. There is a vampire myth of the drawing of the substances from one in deep slumber. If only we had reports of the dreams of the followers in the Populist movements about Wall Street, and profound analysis of many another movement along the same lines. Spanish rulers of today like to see a Jew or communist behind every criticism against the regime that is voiced in the American press when it comes out of Washington. We might begin with an enlarging of the theory contained in Lasswell's studies of the private motives of political leaders. We could undoubtedly get material from a number of analyses of anti-Semitism and of course the Zionist conspiracy belongs to the genus we are discussing.
Juan Linz came in last night and is spending the day with us prior to leaving for Spain next week. He will be gone a year or more, and then will come back in 1960 to teach at Columbia. He is full of talk and keen comment on many particulars of Spanish life and politics and on the literature of social science, which he follows like a hawk. He is a marvelous observer and an indefatigable worker. I only hope that he can put his mass of materials into understandable form. If so, we shall have a classic account of the Spanish regime today, and more than that, one of the latest works in elite analysis. He went to church with Jill a little while ago and seems to be retrieving his early Catholic background, although very strongly trained in the positivistic tradition. I think the saving of many positivistic social scientists might come from a perhaps more, perhaps less perfunctory observance of the dogma and rituals of the Catholic Church. At the moment, after several years of this, I feel the need less, but perhaps I shall again go back to the fount at a later date.
