A Counterfeit Gringo's Take on Third World Poverty, Cultural Stagnation and Terrorism

By Marc Rangel

Though born an expatriate U.S. citizen in Nicaragua, the authors hometown has an English name, Bluefields, and was the former capital of the onetime British protectorate called Mosquitia. Added to this exotic background, during his boyhood in the 1930s Nicaragua was under U.S. Marine Occupation and the countrys entire Caribbean region was, in effect, an Anglo-American enclave, which led to his latino friends nicknaming him a gringo hechizo, or Counterfeit Gringo. This dual heritage, with its intimate experiencing of both American and Third World lifestyles, is what makes his comments on the current cultural clash between the Western and non-Western worlds, as outlined in these three brief works, an unique assessment of this most challenging and dangerous international conflict.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 9, 2003
• ISBN: 9781477163177

Marc Rangel

Marc Rangel was born an expatriate U.S. citizen in Central America. At the time, Nicaragua was at the tail end of its Occupation by the U.S. Marines (1912 to 1933), and its entire Caribbean Coast was the remnant of a 250-year-old British protectorate known as Mosquitia, that was annexed by Nicaragua in 1894. Since “coming home” to the U.S. in 1950, he has lived in New York, where he has been a freelance writer; editor at several national magazines, including Us; editor at United Feature Syndicate (UFS) and later Special Assignments Correspondent in the U.S. and abroad; among other similar jobs. The Splendid Prize is one of a quartet of New York novels he has written.

Book preview

A Counterfeit

Gringo’s Take on

Third World Poverty,

Cultural Stagnation

and Terrorism

____________________________________

Marc Rangel

Copyright © 2005 by Marc Rangel.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage

and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the

copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

19179

CONTENTS

Foreword

A Counterfeit Gringo’s

Enchanted Childhood

Cross-Cultural Animosities

My Foray Into Foreign

Spanishland

Somoza’s Savvy Dictatorship

The Sandinista Usurpers

and Fidel’s Fantasy

Mankind’s Murky

Beginnings

The Western Miracle

of Revolutionary

Social Evolution

Unique America and the

Modern World

The Miskito Example of A

Defiant Arrested Culture

Other Arrested and/or

Crippled Cultures

The Tragic Legacy

of Africa’s Tribocultocracy

The Tragifarcical

Islamic World

The Enigmatic Islamic

Future: Cultural Sanity or

Jihadist Suicide?

AUTHOR’S NOTE

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST:

THE KINGS OF

MOSQUITIA (1640—1894)

Foreword

THE PALACE OF

THE MISKITO KING

IT ALL BEGAN WITH

OLDMAN I …

REFLECTIONS OF

A COUNTERFEIT GRINGO

GROWING UP IN

BLUEFIELDS:

AN OUTSIDER ON THE

INSIDE TRACK

THE PRINCE AND

THE DICTATOR

AFTERWORD:

POSTSCRIPT:

A CLOSING RANGELIAN

PROFESSIONAL

SAMPLER

Islamic Octocenturism

Historical Background of

Islamic Octocenturism

Islam as A Stagnant

Religion

The Indecisive Euro-

American Muslim Diaspora

The Hazards of Dealing with

One Billion Religious

Eccentrics

Islam’s Complaint Re U.S.

Support for Israel

Rebutting Islam’s Litany of

Anti-Muslim Complaints

The Vital Question: Can

Islam Save Itself from

Self-Destruction?

Islam’s Moment of Truth:

Reformation or Continued

Stagnation?

THIS SLENDER VOLUME IS DEDICATED IN FOND MEMORY TO MY WISE AND COURAGEOUS MOTHER, EMELINA EVERNIA ALGECIRAS, WHO WAS ALWAYS MY BIGGEST FAN. AND ALSO IN MEMORY OF BARNEY NIETSCHMANN, A LIFETIME FRIEND, ALLY AND ADOPTEE OF THE MISKITO PEOPLE, WHOM HE BOTH TRULY ADMIRED AND RESPECTED.

A

COUNTERFEIT

GRINGO’S TAKE

ON CULTURAL

STAGNATION

AS THE CAUSE

OF THIRD

WORLD

POVERTY

Foreword

SINCE THE TERRORIST attacks of 9/11/01, much has been written about the theory that terrorism is the obvious reaction of the world’s poor peoples against the callous American and other Western capitalists who exploit them. Among many other such pieces, there was a moving Op-Ed article in The New York Times by former Democratic Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, in which he suggested that helping to feed and otherwise lend a helping hand to the world’s poor might lower their anti-Western anger.

I do not doubt the sincerity of Senator McGovern and many of his compassionate fellow theorists, although there are others with personal anti-American agendas who have simply latched on to the parade for reasons of their own and who have no interest at all in helping the poor, whoever they may be.

But whether sincere or cynical, the problem with this theory is that, like most such solutions envisioned by intellectuals, political activists or the usual anonymous concerned citizens, they are dreamed up by people in academia or penthouses or country homes, or even in noisy newsrooms, who have no real knowledge of the true reasons for Third World poverty or other such endemic problems.

Or, worse yet, they may be aware of the reality, which they deliberately choose to ignore for reasons of that most fatal of social blind spots—political correctness. That is, not wanting to offend anyone by pointing out their obvious errors or failures, or even deliberate criminal behavior such as official corruption or contempt for human rights.

In short, to know the reality of life in the Third World requires more than research in a sterile academic atmosphere, or periodic whirlwind visits to specific trouble spots that happen to be in the news. To truly understand a foreign culture or a people, one must either have been born in it or spent years there—living among them and getting to really know and understand them.

To my great good fortune, I’m one of the lucky few Americans to have had such an experience.

A Counterfeit Gringo’s

Enchanted Childhood

WHEN I WAS growing up in Central America as an expatriate-born U.S. citizen in an unique multicultural environment, my latino friends kiddingly called me a gringo hechizo, which can be roughly translated as a Counterfeit Gringo.

They meant me no harm and were not being unkind. It was merely their way of noting my unusual background. A birthright I owed to my Mexican-American engineer father, who had been imported by a local American import-export-manufacturing firm to supervise the equipment in their shoe factory in Nicaragua, and had fallen in love with my enchanting Cuban/Anglo-Miskito mother in one of those rare romances that are the stuff of popular fiction and the movies.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, the Caribbean port-city of Bluefields, where I was born and lived until the age of 17, was an unusual sort of real-life Shangri-la that would later serve me well in my multifaceted career as a writer-journalist-media maven in New York, by equipping me with a bi-and multicultural approach to sociopolitical issues as well as a multidimensional take on international relations. And, in particular, regarding today’s volatile confrontations between the progressive societies of the Western world and the teeming masses of what the British historian Arnold Toynbee so kindly called the Arrested Societies, now generally known as the Third World.

But to get back to my childhood, Bluefields was the provincial capital of Nicaragua’s Department (or State) of Zelaya, which then consisted of the republic’s entire Caribbean coastal region and covered roughly one-third of the national territory. This huge area had been the last remnant of the British protectorate called the Kingdom of Mosquitia (pronounced mos-KEE-sha) in British history books. It was established in 1640, during the reign of Charles I, at which time it extended from what is today mid-Honduras as far south as mid-Panama, and totaled some 75,000 square miles.

Mosquitia’s recorded history began as a late 16th-Century alliance of convenience between British and Dutch pirates and the local Miskito Indians. (Bluefields is the Anglicized version of Blauveldt, the name of the Dutch buccaneer who first established a settlement in the area as his personal hideout.) The Miskitos, who were fierce warriors and the only Central American tribe that was never conquered by the Spanish conquistadores, quickly formed an anti-Spanish alliance with the British pirates who were preying on the vulnerable Spanish galleons during the Elizabethan period, and their contribution to the British cause proved so valuable, both as warriors and skilled seamen, that this led to the 1640 creation of the kingdom as a British protectorate.

Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick and a favorite of Charles I, was entrusted with this important and daring mission, which he skillfully handled, leaving the selected Miskito chief installed as King Oldman I and shipping off the newly crowned king’s favorate son to London for his royal education.

During its heyday, Mosquitia was the stomping ground of such famous British pirates as the legendary Welshman, Sir Henry Morgan, and Sir Francis Drake and William Dampiere, who were known to have sailed up the San Juan river with their Miskito allies to attack Spanish settlements and garrisons in the neighboring province of Nicaragua. And on two occasions these raids were large enough for the pirates to sack and burn the city of Granada, one of the oldest Spanish cities in North America, established in 1524 on the northeastern shore of Lake Nicaragua (whose Indian name was Cocibolca).

Another famous Britisher to visit Mosquitia as a young ensign, was the later Admiral, Lord Horatio Nelson, who took part in a naval attack on Fort El Castillo, that guarded the entrance to Lake Nicaragua and the gateway to Granada, at the head of the San Juan river. This minor battle in which the British squadron failed in its effort to capture the fort, created the legend of Nicaragua’s most celebrated heroine, Rafaela Herrera.

According to the songs and numerous poems written in her honor, the teenaged Rafaela was the daughter of the fort’s commandant, who, when her father was mortally wounded in mid-battle and his men were about to surrender, ran to a nearby cannon, demanded that it be aimed at the British lead frigate’s mainmast—and then lit the fuse herself. A lucky shot that splintered the mast and spread confusion among the British crew, revived the defenders’ courage and emboldened them to eventually beat off the attack when reinforcements belatedly arrived from Granada.

Meanwhile, the scrappy Anglo-Miskito kingdom, whose population over the next 250 years of almost constant warfare with its Spanish-speaking neighbors of the Captaincy-General of Central America expanded to include a substantial influx of English, Irish, Scots and Welsh immigrants from the British Isles, also later attracted immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany in the 19th century.

These immigrants, only a few of whom brought their wives and families with them, readily entered into liaisons or marriage with the comely Miskito women, giving rise to all manner of hyphenated relationships at all social levels. To which already polyglot mixture were later added in the early Twenties smaller communities of Palestinians (called Turks by the locals), East Indians and Chinese, who mainly functioned as storekeepers or ran restaurants.

However, back in 1894, Washington, which was then interested in the possibility of building a Trans-Isthmian canal across southern Nicaragua via the conveniently large Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan river that flowed through Mosquitia to the Atlantic, balked at Britain’s suggestion of a joint project. And when London insisted, Washington simply prodded Nicaragua’s dictatorial President, General Jose Santos Zelaya, into invading and annexing Mosquitia. And as a warning to London, then busy with one of its many imperial wars, to keep hands off, Washington sent two destroyers to ensure that the two British gunboats that patrolled Mosquitia’s coastal waters would not interfere.

And so, in this typical 19th-Century maneuver between the Big Powers, Mosquitia lost its independence, although the British, to their credit, did gain a measure of semi-independence for their Miskito allies, by convincing Washington and the Zelaya government to allot the northern one-third of Mosquitia, up to the border of Honduras (whose abutting southeastern region, also called La Mosquitia, is still largely populated by Miskitos), as an autonomous Miskito territory. This special arrangement was guaranteed by a document called the Harrison-Altamirano Treaty.

Then, later, at the height of America’s Dollar Diplomacy period, Washington ordered the U.S. Marine Occupation of Nicaragua, ostensibly to ensure payment of large debts to American banks that had been incurred by a series of ineffectual or corrupt Nicaraguan governments.

This Marine Occupation lasted 21 years, from 1912 to 1933. And it was in this period of American domination that I came along, surfacing in the rarefied environment of multicultural and trilingual Bluefields, with its exotic mix of multiethnic mixed marriages between Anglo-Miskito-Irish-Scots-Welsh-Swedish-German families and Miskito-black-Turkish-Hindu-Chinese families, and other similar variations.

In addition, there were the conventional communities of Spanish-speaking post-annexation immigrants from what locals called Spanish Nicaragua, and blacks primarily from Jamaica, who had been imported by Anglo-Miskito landowners and entrepreneurs to work on their coconut and banana plantations and other enterprises. And, of course, there was the American business community, plus the Marines, and their respective families.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, given its unusual circumstances, the social environment of Bluefields was totally democratic and non-racist. Because of its unique history, unlike the rest of the Americas, slavery of either Indians or blacks had never occurred in Mosquitia, and members of all the various ethnic communities mingled freely and openly wherever they came in contact with one another. There was no caste system per se, but what did exist was what we might in our currently fashionable social gobbledygook call an integrated hierarchical cultural system.

At the top of this socioeconomic pyramid were the local founding families, which were Brito-Miskitos with historical connections to the vanished kingdom, and the mixed descendants of the later Swedish, Norwegian and German immigrants from the early 19th Century, who were primarily urban landowners and absentee banana and coconut plantation owners, as well as coastal shipping entrepreneurs and owners of other businesses.

This latter group also included several black and Miskito-black urban landowners and businessmen, because besides money and property, the only other requirements of upper-class status were education and good breeding—especially impeccable table manners, about which they were absolutely fanatical. If you had all these required qualities, then you belonged, regardless of race.

The local middle class followed pretty much the same rules on a lesser scale, economically speaking. And the smaller foreign communities, mostly Americans as well as the Arabs, East Indians and Chinese, mingled freely with everybody, while having their separate social clubs, to which the locals of all races were welcome, depending, again, on their respective social status.

I confess, however, that I was unaware of these various social ramifications at the time. This whole concept of Bluefields as a sort of unique test-tube environment with its own self-generated democratic multiethnic and multicultural society that functioned with such flawless perfection, became apparent to me only after I came home to America. Which occurred in 1950, when I moved to New York, where I’ve lived ever since.

Coming back to Bluefields, however, as I was to realize in that later epiphany in New York, beneath the social surface there had been far more to my test-tube hometown than I was aware of at the time. As a sickly kid until about the age of 10, I’d developed a fondness for reading as a substitute for the fun-and-games of childhood that were denied me by my frailty.

One of my pet pastimes was getting lost in the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica at the home of an American friend of my family’s, accompanied by the nearby Webster’s dictionary to decipher the unfamiliar words.

This sophisticated reading experience resulted in giving me a dual-personality approach to life. On one level, I was the loquacious wisecracking semi-invalid kid who joked with my school chums to mask my disappointment as I