Redeemers (34 page)

Now, at the age of sixty-three, Paz seemed to have, on the personal level, everything he could wish for: romantic love, the affection of new and old friends, material stability, independence. In Europe especially, his books sold well. Some of them, especially
El laberinto
itself and
Libertad bajo palabra
, had become classics in Mexico. And he would have the time and enough concentration to write a major work centering around the poetess he saw as his poetic counterpart in certain essential ways: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, of the seventeenth century.

He would return to the 1930s in a polemic and guilt-ridden mode, fighting with his abandoned faith and an earlier version of himself. He published a new version of his Yucatán poem
Entre la piedra y la flor
, intense in its own way but stripped of what he now considered ideology and rhetoric. And the political stance of the magazine was strongly anti-Marxist and anti-Soviet, supporting the dissident writers of Eastern Europe (such as Kundera and Michnik) and contemporaries who, like himself, had turned against their Marxist past, though in varying degrees (Kolakowski, Furet, Besançon, Bell, Howe, Jean Daniel, Castoriadis, Enzensberger) as well as similar critics in the Spanish-speaking countries. Perhaps most offensive to Mexican leftist intellectuals was his promotion of the “new philosophers” of France (particularly Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann) who had rejected Sartre and championed Camus, coupled with invitations—some of which were accepted—to speak on Mexican television.

 

PAZ WAS
a man who lived in a constant state of exaltation. He looked like a lion with a full mane and that was how he behaved in his ideological quarrels. In his polemical persona, there was an echo of those dinner-table discussions in his Mixcoac childhood between his grandfather Ireneo and his father, Octavio. But now the positions had changed. He was sitting in his grandfather's chair and the young Mexicans, angry or idealist, who opposed his views assumed the role of his father or even, it might be said, his own role as a young pro-Bolshevik who had dreamed of being a hero or a martyr. He had returned to Mexico to rid himself of ambiguities but he encountered the greatest ambiguity of them all: the Revolution—in its avatar of the 1970s and '80s—had entranced the Generation of '68 and (perhaps even more) the succeeding generation. And it was neither liberal nor anarchist but strongly suffused with orthodox Marxism.

Paz would insist that his intense disagreements with the Mexican left stemmed from the fact that he was still a socialist: “perhaps the only rational solution to the crisis of the West.” His resignation as ambassador to India in 1968 had been an act of solidarity with rebellious youth and had been warmly received and recognized as such. But, as his present views became clearer, his claims were rejected. The young left especially did not believe him. Paz, not them, had changed.

And Paz had changed, but not to the extent of favoring capitalist values or even liberal democracy. His basic disillusionment was with the communist faith of his youth, and at least in Europe, many thinkers and writers and activists were moving in the same direction. There was the growing, active dissidence in Russia and the countries of the communist bloc, which Milan Kundera described as “kidnapped Europe.” In Western Europe, the various currents of “Eurocommunism” (which were not completely anti-Marxist), the transitions to democracy in Spain and Portugal, the positions of some thinkers in Germany and France (eventually even including Sartre) signaled the decline of Marxism. Dissident movements in the east involved more danger to participants' lives and freedom than the revolts in Berkeley or Paris. Young people opposing the Vietnamese War or capitalism in general had been killed or maimed by police in the United States or in Europe but the numbers were small (though not overseas in Vietnam) compared to an event like the Russian repression of the Czech uprising. But in Latin America—and even in Mexico—the dead were by no means few. The students and professors in Mexico could not ignore the fact that protest in Mexico had been met in 1968 with the mass slaughter of Tlatelolco and then the “mini-slaughter” of June 10, 1971. In 1973, the university students (and much of the world) were shocked by the military coup in Chile and the death of Salvador Allende. It was a death (and the obliteration of socialism in Chile followed by the Pinochet regime of torture and murder) that many young people felt as a personal assault. Here was threefold evidence for them that social revolution was the only viable path.

Paz's writings and public statements at the time showed an impatient quality. He was exasperated by what he considered the romanticized ignorance and blindness about the real conditions within the Russian and Chinese spheres (an ignorance and blindness that to a sensibility like Paz's was made all the worse because he himself had once shared them). He feared that the countries of Latin America were plunging downward, in a landslide of revolutionary violence that could lead either to consummately brutal military dictatorships or a totalitarianism of the left such as he saw developing in Cuba. The first alternative had already swept away political freedom in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina. Aside from Cuba, the second possibility was vested in guerrilla uprisings and was strongly present in Colombia, several countries of Central America, and partially in Venezuela. Neither result seemed impossible for Mexico. If the 1930s had not created a democratic space between the two extremes, the '70s should attempt it. Paz saw this revision of the scenario of the '30s as his dissident mission.

His young critics wanted exactly the opposite: to renew, revivify, and accomplish that scenario. Their largest contingent consisted of university students who—with the increased opportunities for education offered by the Echeverría government—had greatly increased in number and were becoming more and more radical. Echeverría was obsessed with washing away his considerable complicity in the slaughter of '68 and spent much effort in reaching out to academics and students (including a huge increment in subsidies to the public universities). Not without reason, he saw student discontent as a danger, a potential spark of revolution. And notwithstanding these efforts, a segment of students decided to emulate Che Guevara and joined guerrilla foci in the mountains of the state of Guerrero or turned to urban terrorism. Against them the government launched Mexico's own “dirty war,” much smaller in scope (and body count) than the repressions in Central America or the Southern Cone but still ferocious. Another segment of the young left joined numerous militant groups that supported workers' strikes, organized in factories, or established connections designed to assist the Guatemalan guerrillas, who were fighting perhaps the most savage among the savage armies of the region. Most of them eventually became affiliated with public universities or preparatory schools, a number of them created in the 1970s.

The influence of the Mexican Communist Party (the PCM) was also growing on the campuses, not only among professors and students but also the workers in the powerful university union. Like other parties and sects of the left more or less connected with Moscow or with Trotskyism, the PCM had been a marginal organization for decades, with some presence in public sector unions like the railwaymen and the teachers. But the public universities of the 1970s provided the PCM with an ideal growth environment.

While Marxism was going out of fashion among many European intellectuals, its influence was growing exponentially in Mexican universities. In Mexico it had been a doctrine favored by labor leaders (Vicente Lombardo Toledano), visual artists (Rivera, Kahlo, Siqueiros), romantic revolutionaries (like José Revueltas), and a few offbeat millionaires (such as Víctor Manuel Villaseñor and Ricardo J. Zevada). But its academic and intellectual legitimacy was recent, dating primarily from the 1960s, and owed much to the influence of Sartre and the immense and continuing prestige of the Cuban Revolution. The journals and cultural supplements that preceded
Plural
—the
Revista de la Universidad
and
La cultura en México,
among others—were supporters of the Cuban Revolution and continued to be so even after a case like the falsified “Confessions” of Heberto Padilla. Any criticism paled before the educational and social achievements of the Cuban Revolution and its gallant defiance of the U.S “Empire.”

New courses in Marxism appeared in many fields of study. The UAM, a new public university, included Marxism even in its curriculum for graphic design. A brilliant student in this field wrote his thesis on the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. His name was Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, and like many other young Mexicans, he would go to Cuba and Nicaragua to learn the techniques of guerrilla warfare. In 1983 he would disappear into the jungles of Chiapas, taking a guerrilla alias that many years later would become legendary: Subcomandante Marcos.

A publishing house was needed to supply the rising interest in Marxist literature. Siglo XXI Editores, under its director Arnaldo Orfila Reynal (originally an Argentine
arielista
who had directed, with great taste and discernment, the Fondo de Cultura Económica between 1947 and 1965) fulfilled that requirement, establishing a close connection in 1965 with the Casa de las Américas of Cuba. Mutually they intended to publish a systematic edition of all the fundamental Marxist works. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold of the works of Che Guevara or the writings of the Chilean Marta Harnecker, who had fled for her life to Cuba after the Pinochet-led coup.

Refugees from the Southern Cone were another factor contributing to the process of radicalization. Persecuted by the newly installed governments of Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina erected on the pillars of torture and extermination, profoundly angered at the United States for its patronage of the coup against Allende, many distinguished professors and other intellectuals entered the universities of Mexico. They were the new refugees, welcomed by Mexico as others had been. Finally, the new attitude of the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council created its own leftward-moving current. Many students who had studied with the Jesuits were especially impressed and moved by the decision of the order to move from its traditional role in educating the elite toward helping the Mexican poor.

For this Marxist universe, Octavio Paz was the great heretic. It was a status that deeply offended him and maintained him in a state of exaltation and constant readiness for combat. From the time he returned to Mexico, he would live with a drawn sword.

 

HIS MOST
frequent accusation against the left was that of “intellectual sterility.” He lamented what he termed its “strange idealism: reality at the service of the idea and the idea at the service of History.” He accused the left of a moral double standard, justifiably indignant and saddened by the crimes of Latin American right-wing dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile but inexplicably silent before conditions and events in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Cuba, or Albania. “The silence and docility of the factional writers,” he proclaimed, “is one of the causes of the intellectual stagnation and moral insensibility of the Latin-American left.”

Toward the end of 1977, one of the most distinguished representatives of the intellectual left felt himself slurred by Paz and published an article against the “new” Octavio Paz. He was the writer Carlos Monsiváis, a man of great learning, sharp-witted irony, and formidable influence among the young. He reproached Paz especially for a tendency toward “generalization and pontification.” In terms of specific content, he criticized Paz for being too soft on the PRI, the right, and imperialism and for disdaining the labor and popular movements of the left. And, he felt, Paz had a suspiciously favorable attitude toward Mexican religious traditionalism, and was trying to substitute the concept of class struggle for what Monsiváis considered the real Mexican issue of a struggle between “developed and underdeveloped” Mexico. Paz was asking Monsiváis for an inadmissible disconnection from ideology, Paz was obsessed with criticism of the state, and Paz refused to recognize “the epic force it took to build the People's Republic of China, the heroism that created the identity of the Vietnamese people, the sum of significances that the Cuban Revolution accumulated and is accumulating in Latin America—Criticism of the deformations of socialism must be accompanied by a combative defense of the conquests that cannot be abandoned.”

Paz replied with ferocity. “Monsiváis is not a man of ideas but of witticisms . . . his prose is marked by the three fatal ‘fu's': confused, profuse, and diffuse.” Paz claimed that Monsiváis had distorted and truncated his arguments, the better to hang the label of “rightist” upon him. It was Monsiváis who was “abstract.” Paz was calling upon the Mexican left to follow the model of the socialists in Spain or the
Movimiento al Socialismo
(the MAS) in Venezuela, who had renounced the dogma of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” To note the devotion of the Mexican people to the Virgin of Guadalupe did not mean that he, Paz himself, was a traditionalist. Wasn't Monsiváis aware of the various criticisms, published in
Plural
and
Vuelta
, against private sector bureaucracies, against the unions and other political and economic monopolies? Why hadn't he mentioned them? Obviously because his objective was to downgrade him, Paz:

 

He accuses me of being an authoritarian in the same paragraph in which he dares to impose upon me (as a condition for criticizing bureaucratic socialism) “the recognition of its great achievements.” Has he asked himself whether these “great achievements” are inscribed in the history of human liberation or that of oppression? . . . The analysis and denunciation of new forms of domination—in capitalist countries as well as “socialist” and the underdeveloped world—is the most urgent task of contemporary thought, not the defense of the “great achievements” of totalitarian empires.