WELCOME, IAN SANTIAGO! | 2006-11-19
Ian, please forgive me for ignoring your comments for the moment, and concentrating on the flood of memories your name, genuine or not, brings back.
In the 1950s our friends in Cuba included one who became a friend of mine. He had pale skin, red hair, and fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. I went down there to Cuba when I was about ten or twelve years old and visited his family. I forget why.
But he happened to be in our house when Castro suddenly took over the Cuban government on January 1, 1959. A few months later, his brother, an aviator, was shot down trying to escape. Their crime was that they had set up businesses in Cuba that gave Cubans the highest standard of living they have ever had.
I wish I could give you his name, but his family is still in Columbia, SC. He escaped with his family to work on our brick plant. He was enormously grateful to us and we were the ones who really benefited from his work and intelligence.
That's how white folks work things out.
He was from Majorca and he could sing "The Horst Wessel Song" in Spanish. We would give each other the fascist salute when we saw each other, quite a thrill for a 18-year-old who was honored to be dealing with a real warrior. G. Gordon Liddy is right about one thing for sure, NOBODY could be counted on back then like the anti-Communist Cubans. One of my greatest advantages in intelligence was that they knew about me well before I started to work with them.
Once again, I have to apologize to Ian. Your NAME brings back a flood of memories, none of which you need to IDENTIFY with.
When I was in international aviation negotiations, the head of the Civil Aviation in Spain was Emilio O'Connor. He was black-haired, but nobody could mistake him for anything but a Northern European, a Basque, or a Finno-Ugrian. Brown Hispanic he definitely wasn't. He descended from some Catholic Irish aristocrats who were dispossessed in Ireland because they would not give up their Catholic faith, so they went to Spain.
And down in Saint Augustine, Florida, there are people with Spanish names who have been there since 1535, seventy years or so before my family got here. They are as Southern as I am, and that's pretty damned Southern. When blacks tried to use one of their motel swimming pools in 1963, they dropped an alligator in to keep them company.
"Hispanic" is about the nastiest insult anybody ever devised. Lots of blacks are named Whitaker, but nobody confuses me with them. They are not referred to as Anglo-Saxon. But "Hispanic" makes every white person with a Spanish name a colored person.
I don't LIKE that.