¡Gigantes!

Should the editor tilt at windmills as the website comes back online? Don’t be foolish – he doesn’t even own a horse

by Eric Jackson

Well, yeah, there’s this man and this funny story he wrote, but who really learns about Cervantes the man, and his times, in a Panamanian or a US school? There are some good teachers and some kids learn, but so much of the subject matter is taboo here.

The Man of La Mancha? You mean that for his adventures in The Netherlands, Don Quixote sailed up through the English Channel? Not so. Another sense of the Spanish word, a writer projecting himself onto a character. The man with the blemish. As in defect or scar. As in he was a wounded war veteran who had lost the use of his left arm and hand.

Cervantes’s time was after the 1492 expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain, but before the 1648 end of the Wars of The Reformation on the European continent by way of the Treaty of Westphalia. He fought in wars between a papal-sponsored Holy League and the North African reaches of the Ottoman Empire and was in the major naval battle of Lepanto. From then on Cervantes was often referred to as “El Manco de Lepanto,” the one-armed man from the Battle of Lepanto. After surviving his wounds, his military career continued with a series of assignments and landed him as a prisoner of war in North Africa for five years. Cervantes’s “day jobs included as a purchase for the navy, a tax collector and an accountant. He never made significant money from his writing.

But though a gifted writer who often had the patronage of wealthy nobles or clerics, creative people were not much rewarded, Cervantes was from an obscure and poor family and it wasn’t until he was an old man that he got a measure of wealth and fame from his Don Quixote stories. And what about his origins? Was his family of the “New Christians,” as in formerly Jewish converts? You could get in big trouble being a Jew in the Spanish realms in those times – that’s what the Spanish Inquisition was all about. In any case, there aren’t any reliable records of Cervantes’s religious ancestry but some scholars speculate

Wars between Catholics and Protestants on the European continent? Religious persecution by the Holy Inquisition or its rival imitators? The Peace of Westphalia, which the pope at the time hated, divided up Europe, recognizing Catholic and religiously tolerant parts of the Low Countries, and left the Americas out of the deal. That was more than 30 years after Cervantes died, but the continuation of the Wars of the Reformation and subsequent religious strife had much to do with what’s taught about Cervantes in Panama today.

The Gran Colombia of which Panama was a part was a battleground between Liberal and Conservatives for that last four-fifths of the 19th century and into the 20th, with one of the major issues between the two sides whether Catholicism would be the official state religion as the Conservatives wanted or to the contrary, there wouild be the secular government that Liberals advocated. (No wonder that The Great Liberator, the freemson Simón Bolívar, died in despair.)

Panama came to its independence on the heels of one of the worst Liberal-Conservative wars, the Thousand Days War. The separation was part Wall Street manipulation, part Conservative military coup, part Liberal acquiescence in change seen as necessary and inevitable, part US military intervention. In Panama it set up generations of conflicts over what came out of it.

One result of Panamanian independence, however, was that not only were we no longer part of Colombia, but most especially we were to be out of the religious warfare business. The new understanding was that Panama is mostly Catholic with some official relations between church and state, but that there is freedom of religion.

One of the unofficial corollaries drawn from Panama’s abstention from religious warfare was a de facto suppression of incitement, and of history teaching that might lead to incitement. So in our popular culture we get these tales of a crazy knight and his long-suffering aide, but very little understanding of the context.

Does it come through that Don Quixote was a towering pioneer giant of the novel? About that much there is general agreement.

But shorn of the historical backdrop, how many Panamanians take Cervantes’s work be what the writer said it was, satire about knights and chivalry? And of those, how many see the thinking of a jaded disabled veteran at a time when people were getting very tired of religious war but were still more than a generation away from a truce that would largely end it for a time?

See, it was SATIRE. And by decision of a benighted Panamanian supreme court, in a case brought over a salacious cartoon about then-president Mireya Moscoso published by Ubaldo Davis, the magistrates held that ALL satire is criminal defamation here. Panamanian culture is still dumbed down and suffering from that nonsense.

Does it extend to business and advertising? You probably do not want to live within the shadows of a windmill’s blades, but for a lot of people a house with a view of windmills in the distance would be an attraction. However, clever advertising references to windmills are limited by some anti-historical and anti-cultural taboos here.

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