18th January 1998

Columbus’ legacy to the Pope and Castro

A circle is closed next week when the long awaited trip of the Pope to Castro’s Cuba finally takes place. Nearly 507 years after Catholic Spain started the rape of the continent with a historic voyage that began from here, the Church in a new guise leads the charge to usurp the last outpost of Latin dictatorship and render it a member of the continent-wide family of democracies.

Five hundred and seven years from Columbus to Castro is a long time to wait for democracy to arrive, especially when measured against the much earlier rapid progress of its northern cousins in the United States and Canada. And for that we have no one to thank but Catholic Spain and Catholic Portugal.

North America was settled by pilgrims, idealists, political and religious refugees. They wanted to create a New World and democracy became the chosen instrument. It was flawed of course. It did not protect the Indians and it did not involve the slaves, but it laid the basis for economic advance first and social and political reform later.

The Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors were not fleeing persecution. They were adventurers and mercenaries. They lived under the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation. They really did not question it, and authoritarianism and feudalism were second nature. They were not interested in development of society. They were only there to conquer and pillage, to extract the mineral and agricultural wealth as fast as they could and ship it home. “The bloody trail of the conquest”, as its earliest reporter, the Friar Bartolome de las Casas, put it.

The high Indian civilizations, the Incas and the Aztecs (the Mayans were already in decline for other, still disputed, reasons) were destroyed mercilessly. To re-read Prescott’s great accounts is to understand brutal ignorance at its worst. No wonder that modern day Peru is so race-ridden, corrupt and feudal, with the Indians of the Andes treated worse than the blacks in South Africa ever were. If Mexico is somewhat better-since the Indians were part and parcel of the western world’s first twentieth century revolution in the early years of the century - the recent massacre in its southern province of Chiapas shows how skin deep respect for Indian life and culture can still be.

Not only was political evolution suffocated at birth for the best part of four-and-a-half centuries, so was economic development. The Counter-Reformation state banned and restricted enterprise in the private sector. It licensed certain entrepreneurs to develop state monopolies. It favoured state mercantilism. Individual inventiveness and endeavour were stifled.

Here were two side-by-side continents, equally endowed by nature. One prospered, the other crawled on its belly. Only after the upheavals of the Second World War, step by difficult step did Latin America start to shed its alliance of church and state and engage the engine of economic growth; and not too far behind followed democracy.

Three countries, which lacked mineral wealth and a large Indian population, managed to escape the worst ravages of the conquistadors.

Chile was one, protected by desert in the north, the high ridge of the Andes to the east, and Antarctica to the south. Farms were settled and bereft of Indian workers, run on their own by individual families. Trade was mainly with England, not Spain. Democracy arrived 170 years ago, before even France and Italy.

Only American influence much later at the time of Nixon and Kissinger who were obsessed by supposed communist influence, stymied this telling record of achievement. Fearful of the leftist Salvador Allende winning the election, discrete but telling support was offered to a military coup. But the notions of law, fairplay and decency were too deeply embedded for the Pinochet dictatorship’s writ to run forever. Nine years ago Chile returned to its democratic roots.

Costa Rica, too was poor and had a small Indian population and was far from Guatemala, the Spanish Central American capital. Farmers could not grow rich on the backs of the Indians. There was no powerful elite. Today, Costa Rica claims its place as one of the most stable and long-lasting, least militaristic, democracies in the world. Third, there was Uruguay which has long pioneered a benign distribution of income.

Venezuela in contrast, is mainstream Latin America with a highly skewed distribution of income, albeit more advanced than the average. It has been democratic since 1958 and, until recently, has maintained a good record of avoiding political violence. Nevertheless, recent events have shown how much deeper the roots of democratic life have to penetrate to give real stability.

Venezuela’s near neighbours, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia, are in a much worse state. The feudal system, with the might of the landowners central to it, still maintains, even in the democratic age, a disproportionate influence on decision making. Class differences appear unbridgeable. Even if the army is off stage in Brazil and Ecuador, in Colombia its role is ever more political with an undiminished capacity for savage acts of violence.

Could Colombus, the tenacious, but cold-blooded, sailor ever have guessed at what a difficult course he had set for his new “discovery”. Can the Pope, rekindling the religious flame in Castro’s Marxist Cuba and emphasizing the virtues of democracy, ensure for the future a more selfless Catholicism that convinces these still archaic societies that the Indians, the poor, the underprivileged are owed a debt with half a millennium’s worth of accumulated interest?

Highly educated people have less sex: survey findings

The most highly educated Americans have sex less often than their less-educated counterparts, according to a new study that also shows the average American has sex about once a week.

“Americans who have attended graduate school may have money and smarts, but they report being the least sexually active group in the population,” said the report in next month’s “American Demographics” by researchers John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey.

The survey found people who had attended graduate school had sex an average of 50 times a year, compared with 56 times a year for college graduates and 58 for high school graduates.

For the overall population, the average was 58 times a year, or a little more than once a week.

The survey of 10,000 people, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, had other surprises.

Only about one adult in 20 had sex at least three times a week, while one in five had no sexual activity over the previous year.

Married people had more sex (71 times a year) than those who were single, widowed or divorced. And while wealthier people had more sexual activity, the difference was not as great as might be expected: those with incomes over 75,000 dollars had sex an average of 60 times a year, just slightly above average, and no more than those earning 35,000 to 40,000 dollars.

People who work long hours have more active sex lives, as do those with small children, the survey found.

And the most sexually active groups tend to watch more television, have a preference for jazz music and be on the political left. But those who attend religious services once a week have less frequent sex.

Among age groups, the most sexually active was the 18 to 24 group, having sex an average of 100 times a year. That drops to 87 times a year for those 25 to 34, with steady declines throughout aging. Those 75 and older reported having sex nine times a year.

The survey found a five percent increase in sexual activity in 1996, which the researchers said “seems to run contrary to a number of trends, including the aging of the US population, longer work weeks and the growing presence of distractions like the Internet.”

The authors noted that “the more sex a person has, the more likely he or she is to report having a happy life and a happy marriage. The connection is stronger among women than men ... contrary to popular stereotypes.”

Meanwhile two lesbian couples Thursday became the first to come together as legal couples, as the Netherlands began legal unions between homosexuals. A law allowing same-sex legal partnerships came into effect on January 1, but due to an obligatory 14-day waiting period, actual unions only began Thursday.

The first couples to tie the knot exchanged vows in front of mayors at Katscheveere, near the Belgium border, and Amsterdam. (AFP)

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