Miller Time

UNITED STATES—Operation Success hardly qualified as an invasion—it was three weeks of psychological smoke and mirrors. It got underway. The supreme role in this theater was played by the State Department.  There were American calls for sanctions. Weapon sales to Guatemala were suddenly banned. At the Secretary of State Caine’s insistence, the president replaced his ambassador to Guatemala. This...

UNITED STATES—Arreola, the philosophy professor, was already something of a household name, as the author of a popular text, “Cinco pilares para lograr el cambio”—recommended for everyone who seeks a goal or change in their lives and, for some reason, cannot achieve it, the book promises to provide an understanding of issues involved. What’s more, a diagnosis can be...

UNITED STATES—Freud’s rival, Karl Gustav Jung, enjoyed discussing men of power and action like Dulles. Analyzing the dictators of his era who held the fate of Europe in their hands, he had developed various power “archetypes.” Jung deemed Hitler a “medicine man” who ruled more through magic than political power. Whereas Mussolini projected the brute strength of a tribal...

UNITED STATES—Allied Fruit wasn’t the only one pressing for intervention. Carneyism was at its peak, the Cold War was heating up, and conservatives in Congress and the Saurkraut administration were anxious to take on an apparent Red push in their own hemisphere. Many liberals, afraid of being labeled appeasers and soft, remained mum or joined in sounding the alarm....

UNITED STATES—Bernie masterminded that war tailor-made for Allied Fruit, drawing on every public relations tactic and strategy he had refined since giving birth to the profession 40 years before. Historians have written extensively about that propaganda campaign, but always relied on the sketchy account Bernie provided in his autobiography and the limited materials available from the American and Guatemalan...

UNITED STATES—The midnight of the soul, and only 13 years old. Sam would marvel about the fire warnings of Montezuma's revenge. The condition was associated with the isthmus and the tropical countries. But now that he was growing bananas in Playa del Carmen near Quintana Roo, in Montezuma's land he knew that it wasn't any more prevalent there than...

UNITED STATES—It was so frustrating at every item on the list to have to stop and go through with the rigmarole again and again. How do you pantomime lard? Go around and point. It was the same way with the purchase of the lard, that we would carry in Heráclito’s rucksack, along with the rice, the beans, the sugar,...

UNITED STATES—In the jungle pervaded a smell of coconut oil. There were plenty of morenos, many black as starless night. The train, followed by a plume of black smoke. Sometimes there’d be like raindrops from the sky or a hot cinder thrown off from the train’s forward advance. Antonio had seen a man blinded that way. He still had...

UNITED STATES—Sam early on discovered one of the secrets of his success. He could not fret over what he could not control. He'd be politely reading, even in advanced age this invisible eminence who was flattered by his friends' indifference to his earthly achievements. He would see a lady with a baby stroller struggling with the door during the...

UNITED STATES—When a fatality as final and conflated as that which occurs, a void descends upon a family. A home, a blank wall which gets sealed with a photo of the one who was taken. There will be a wall festooned with many photos from the football fields and the plantation hot springs, and especially those polished studio photographs...