Harsh Times by Mario Vargas Llosa

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp.

By Allan Barra

If Harsh Times, by the 85-year-old Peruvian born novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, was published under the name of an unknown writer, it would be hailed as the work of a fresh, invigorating new talent. 

The novel is about the history of Guatemala in the 20th century, and if your knowledge of that subject is skimpy, you’re in good company.   Before the title page there’s a quote from the most celebrated leader of the western world, Winston Churchill: “I’ve never heard of this bloody place Guatemala until I was in my 79th year.”  Thus, the former prime minister first heard of the Central American country in 1953, just as the events -- CIA-backed     purges of (alleged) Communist insurgents, invasions by U.S. Marines, and bloody government coups -- in Harsh Times were coming to a boil. 

The history of Guatemala in Harsh Times begins with two 19th century Jewish immigrants to the United States. Edward L. Bernays, whose uncle, Sigmund Freud was the father of psychoanalysis, while his nephew “styled himself a sort of father of public relations, and if he didn’t create the profession, he did take it (at Guatemala’s expense) to unanticipated heights, making it the central political social and economic weapon of the 20th century.” The title of Bernays’s hugely influential book, Propaganda (1928), is indicative his impact on the century. 

Bernays’s protégée, Sam Zemurray, nicknamed “The Banana Man,” founded the Central American empire, the United Fruit Company --  La Frutera --  “a company which, by the beginning of the 1950s, extended its reach into Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Columbia, and a number of Caribbean Islands, generating more dollars than the vast majority of firms in the United States or in the rest of the world.”

Zemurray not only made bananas a staple of our diet, but inspired the term “Banana Republic,” which is what Guatemala and other countries became known as as the power of United Fruit spread. (My daughter informs me you can see a parody of  Sam’s story on Drunk History’s New Orleans episode with the Banana Man played by Thomas Middleditch.)

Zemurray, like the hero of an Ayn Rand novel, made a fortune while “creating thousands of jobs, laying down railroads, opening ports, and connecting barbarism with civilization.” (He was also responsible for bringing the Brazilian bombshell Carmen Miranda, “The Chiquita Banana Girl,” to Hollywood.) On the debit side was the ruthless suppression of  unions, the segregation and degradation of thousands of Indians, and the company’s  far-reaching grip  on government policy – Central Americans referred to La Frutera as “the Octopus.” Long after Zemurray left Guatemala, his creation continued its under-the-table influence. 

Time and again, the concepts of free elections and fair labor practices would emerge, only to be suppressed by “communism” – that is, the illusion of communism raised by CIA-backed regimes each time democracy threatened the status quo.  After one on-site inspection, Bernays assured the board of directors in Boston, “The danger that Guatemala should turn communist and become a beachhead for a Soviet infiltration of Central America that would pose a threat to the Panama Canal is remote and for the moment, I would say, inexistent … Few people in Guatemala know what Marxism and communism are, even among the stray elements calling themselves communists … The danger isn’t real, but it is convenient for us that people believe it exists, above all in the United States.”

Harsh Times isn’t about the struggle between capitalism and communism.  It’s about how capitalism can be used to bludgeon a nascent democracy. The danger to the ruling class wasn’t communism but democracy, which could be called communism whenever the captains of United Fruit feared that workers were gaining power and, worse, they’d have to start paying taxes. 

With each new coup, Guatemala reverts into a madhouse of greed and stupidity where bad policies are ruthlessly reapplied with no memory of their previous failures. Soon after his rise to power, a president creates the National Committee of Defense Against Communism whose director, in a previous administration, had been “an assassin and torturer who led the secret police … whose name alone brought chills to Guatemalans of a certain age.”  It was as if “colonial times had returned, when the inquisition returned religious orthodoxy through blood and fire.” Public and even private libraries “were purged of Marxist manuals, anti-Catholic and pornographic books.” (Just to be sure, this included all books written in French.)  Always, “if there weren’t enough real communists, make up more, invent them” to supply more grist to the mills of the North American press.

“How was it possible,” the author asks rhetorically, “that newspapers and magazines as prestigious as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and the Chicago Tribune could invent something as fantastical as communism in Guatemala?”

Was history, one character wonders, “nothing more than this fantastical repudiation of reality? The conversion into myth and fiction of real, concrete events?  Was that the history we read and studied?  The heroes we admired? A mass of lies made truth through vast conspiracies of the powerful …?” 

Harsh Times is at once a nonfiction novel and a withering political satire.  The names and events are all real; only some of the dialogue is fiction, though many of the actual events are as bizarre as those which occur in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which Harsh Times sometimes seems a complement to. (The United Fruit Company plays an important role in both novels.) 

Vargas Llosa chronicles 120 years of futility. Sam Zemurray finally retires to New Orleans, taking no responsibility for the octopus that lived on.  “Miss Guatemala,” the mistress of a president who has more influence over him than his wife, moves to Washington, DC, a dowager pleased that “Donald Trump is in the White House, doing the things that have to be done.” (p. 283)  A CIA agent who “couldn’t look more like a gringo if he tried” (p. 116) known as Mike  (and later, by the Guatemalans as “the man whose name wasn’t Mike”) glides in and out of the story like a recurring ghost, taking no responsibility for the chaos he helps engineer.

The U.S. sponsors a coup against a communist (i.e., “liberal”) president, real life democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz.  “The victory was fleeting, pointless, and counterproductive. It helped foment anti-Americanism in Latin America all over again …” (p. 287) For more than three generations “Young people killed and were killed for another impossible dream …”  

******

This may or may not be Vargas Llosa’s last novel, but at age 85, it’s probably appropriate to assess his career achievement. 

The golden age of Latin American literature began for most readers with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967); without it, the boom might have gone undiscovered for decades, hidden from the outside world like the masts of the lost Spanish galleon at the beginning of Marquez’s great novel.  And it might have taken the non-Spanish speaking world longer to discover Solitude if not for Vargas Llosa’s appreciation, The Story of a Deicide (published in 1971). 

Vargas Llosa never produced a novel as epochal as One Hundred Years of Solitude, certainly the most influential and widely known work of fiction by a Latin American writer. But, MVL’s oeuvre displays a greater range of styles and themes -- from Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) to Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), which surely ranks with Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One as the funniest novels written since World War II, to Harsh Times.

Yet, his greatest contribution may be as a writer of nonfiction.  In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James wrote, that his true strength “is undoubtedly the essay.  His collected essays … make the perfect pocket book for getting up to speed with how the bright, baby-boom students of Latin America won their way towards a solid concept of liberal democracy.” 

Though he has been harshly by man of his contemporaries for denouncing Marxism, MVL  has never been a conservative; his moral and philosophical beacon has always been Camus, exemplified by his declaration in The Language of Passion, “Literature is an absolute necessity so that civilization continues to exist, renewing and preserving in us the best of what is human so that we do not retreat into the savagery of isolationism.”

More than any other writer of his time, more than Octavio Paz or V.S. Naipaul, Mario Vargas Llosa has been the clearest and strongest international man of letters since Camus and Orwell, and has given the current state of disintegrating democracy its  last public intellectual. 

Allen Barra writes about books and film for Truthdig, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Salon, and the New Republic. He has been cited by the National Arts and Journalism Awards for  literary and film criticism.