Fausto Zapata: The Question Mark

Fausto Zapata: The Question Mark

Como sigo siendo un nulo para este Underwood inalambrico, solo puedo esperar que la buena suerte nos acompanie y que

recibas este mensaje para reabrir el dialogo que recordamos

con tanto afecto. Cada vez que hemos regresado a Washington

continuamos en contacto con el antiguo ocupante de Los Pinos por lo menos por telefono. Un fuerte abrazo,

Wendy y Henry

De Cura Animarum: Fr Ed Tomlinson Announces His Intention to Resign ...

De Cura Animarum: Fr Ed Tomlinson Announces His Intention to Resign ...: After consultation with the Bishop of Rochester, and with his blessing, I can now publically announce that it is my intention to resign as...

De Cura Animarum: Fr Ed Tomlinson Announces His Intention to Resign from the C of E to Join Ordinariate

Are you the same Ed Tomlinson of Latin American fame?

Remember, somos muy pocos y hacemos bastante falta. There

is, of course, a whole new batch of young people interested in the region--but I still believe that we 'old hands' from the wire services and the NYT along with a small group of brethren from the academy have the necessary 'Fingerspitzgefuehl' as Tad Szulc used to say, for an 'in depth' understanding--and the necessary empathy. Which requires a love for literature and the arts--because it is through their culture that Latin Americans best communicate.

Cheers,

Henry Raymont

De Cura Animarum: Fr Ed Tomlinson Announces His Intention to Resign from the C of E to Join Ordinariate

De Cura Animarum: Fr Ed Tomlinson Announces His Intention to Resign from the C of E to Join Ordinariate

Are you the same Ed Tomlinson of Latin American fame?

Remember, somos muy pocos y hacemos bastante falta. There

is, of course, a whole new batch of young people interested in the region--but I still believe that we 'old hands' from the wire services and the NYT along with a small group of brethren from the academy have the necessary 'Fingerspitzgefuehl' as Tad Szulc used to say, for an 'in depth' understanding--and the necessary empathy. Which requires a love for literature and the arts--because it is through their culture that Latin Americans best communicate.

Cheers,

Henry Raymont

From my friend Oppy........helping me sell my book......

Posted on Thursday, 11.11.10

• THE OPPENHEIMER REPORT

Region ignoring Venezuela coup threats

 

BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER

AOPPENHEIMER@MIAMIHERALD.COM

What a sham! While the Venezuelan military announces it will not accept an opposition victory in the 2012 elections, thousands of people are dying in Mexico's drug wars and Haiti is suffering from a deadly cholera epidemic, the Organization of American States -- supposedly in charge of addressing the region's biggest problems -- is nowhere to be seen.

FULLY IMMERSED

Well, actually, let me correct that: An official Nov. 9 OAS statement informs us that the Washington-based 34-country organization's Permanent Council is fully immersed in a special session aimed at resolving a ``disagreement'' between Nicaragua and Costa Rica exacerbated by a demarcation error in a Google map of the border between the two countries.

The Google error, which has since been recognized and corrected by the Internet search giant, apparently prompted Nicaragua to dredge a portion of a border river claimed by Costa Rica. An act of ``aggression,'' charged Costa Rica, and sent armed police, but, as far as we know, not a single shot has been fired in the dispute.

Meantime, arguably much more dramatic events are taking place all over the region.

Earlier this week, Maj. Gen. Henry Rangel Silva, head of the Venezuelan armed forces Operational Strategic Command, was quoted by the Caracas daily Ultimas Noticias as saying that ``a hypothetical opposition government in 2012 would amount to selling away the country, and that's not going to be accepted by the National Armed Force.''

Days earlier, President Hugo Chávez, who got fewer votes than the opposition in Venezuela's recent legislative elections, had warned that if an opposition candidate wins in 2012, there will be a ``violent revolution'' in Venezuela. Opposition leaders denounced Chávez's and Rangel Silva's statements as unconstitutional, and as pre-announcements of a self-coup.

In Mexico, more than 30,000 people have died in the war on drugs over the past four years. Many public figures, including former presidents Vicente Fox and Ernesto Zedillo, are calling for reassessment of regional anti-drug strategies.

In earthquake-battered Haiti, nearly 600 people have died and 9,123 have been hospitalized in recent weeks as a cholera epidemic sweeps the nation. The death toll is expected to keep rising.

``I have been watching the OAS for half a century, and there have been moments of great significance and moments of absolute silliness. This is certainly one of the latter,'' says Henry Raymont, a former New York Times correspondent and author of Troubled Neighbors, a book on U.S.-Latin American relations.

Where is the OAS? I asked OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza. To his credit, while stating that the OAS is very active in Haiti and has a duty to try to solve the Nicaragua-Costa Rica dispute, he didn't stay silent on the Venezuelan military's threat.

`UNACCEPTABLE'

Referring to Rangel Silva's statements, he told me that ``the fact that an army commander threatens with an a priori insubordination is unacceptable. Venezuela's ruling civilian authority should correct that.''

Insulza added that ``I have recently denounced an intended coup in Ecuador because an armed [police] corps rose against the democratically-elected civilian authority. It would be inconsistent to remain silent when another armed corps threatens with an insubordination against a hypothetical future civilian authority.''

Asked what he is going to do about Venezuela's military threat, Insulza said that for the OAS to move on the issue, it would have to be raised by a member country. ``I hope that a member country will bring it up at the Permanent Council,'' he said.

My opinion: Insulza is right on this one. He can't do much unless member countries officially raise issues at the OAS. That hasn't happened yet: El Salvador, which chairs the Permanent Council, and the region's biggest countries are ignoring their OAS commitments to collectively defend democracy in the region.

And, to be fair, the OAS is not the only regional group to be looking the other way at the region's major problems. The Union of South American Nations, UNASUR, is even more nonexistent than the OAS. Its frequent summits are most often nothing but political tourism.

If OAS member countries don't denounce Venezuela's Chávez-backed military threat to ignore the results of the 2012 election, their claims to defend multilateralism and regional diplomacy will continue sounding like a joke.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/11/1919823/region-ignoring-venezuela-coup.html#ixzz14ySASuUs

Dear Anne Midgette

It is barely 6am, my Wendy is fast asleep and Placido's timely adieu has fired me up.  In Spanish we say 'ya era hora'.  First, to establish my bona fides:  I first heard Placido as a very young singer in a Verdi Requiem conducted by Pablo Casals at the Festival in Puerto Rico.  He was superb.  Then, on an assignment in Asuncion, Paraguay, when I was the NYT's  South American correspondent I spent a sleepless night in a hotel room watching a broadcast of his Lohengrin.  Again, quite extraordinary.  I also applaud his efforts to promote young singers--though that, as we learned in Marlboro, VT., sometimes is as problematic as it may be helpful--good for some, terrible for others.

Now,  I grew up in Buenos Aires and became a newspaperman at 17--some (las malas lenguas) say I took a job with the United Press in order to attend the rehearsals at the Teatro Colon.  Indeed, I made some that would profoundly influence my life:  Fritz Busch, Erich Kleiber, Emanuel List, Salvatore Baccaloni, Rose Bampton, Elsa Cavelti, but, above all, Willy Kapell.  The latter spent four weeks in BA in the 1940's and we must have watched every movie in town.  The fact that Newsweek published my cables about his success at the Colon opened the door to my adding occasional (frequent) pieces on artists to the daily U.P. report to the US (B.A. was Latin American HQs).

When I was transferred to Washington back in 1949 two things struck me:  the only symphony orchestra of the nation's capital, known as National Symphony had a fourth-rate conductor named Howard Mitchell (Alexander Schneider of the Budapest String Quartet would exclaim, 'look how well he wears his tuxedo') and an atrocious home known as Constitution Hall owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution--the outfit that prevented Marion Anderson from singing there.  (tell that to the kids who doubt that the country hasn't made much progress).

Last but not least, I asked somebody yesterday to forward to you a suggestion (an opportunity):  the board should audition Julien Salemkour.  He is currently the assistant conductor at the Berlin Staatsoper with Daniel Barenboim.  Had he been in Chicago he would have become an international star the night he took over from Daniel when the latter was hospitalized with a bad fever 15 minutes before a concert, a celebration of a Mozart Year that was to be televised world-wide.  Julien kept the same program which included accompanying Quastoff and Dorothea Roschmann, playing and conducting a Mozart concerto, as well as a symphony and an overture.  

I mentioned Busch.  During a quick tour of Scandinavia (UP) in 1949 I stopped over in Stockholm where the conductor's son, Hans Busch, a stage director, had staged a Barber of Seville--in Swedish.
Can you imagine the recitativo secco sung in a Scandinavian language?  I was rolling in the aisle--and
wrote a story that was published in Buenos Aires as part of that unfailing formula 'local boy makes good'.  Lest you wonder, we old agency hands were past masters at finding a 'local angle'.

Postlude:  That first year in the States (1948-49) I worked the overnight (graveyard) shift at the UP in New York and attended Columbia U during the day. (Jewish families were sticklers about degrees).
Sure enough, it did not exactly build up my muscles.  So one day I get a phone call--in Spanish with an atrocious German accent:  "Henry, es tu amiiiigo Hans...."  A week later, having secured a leave of absence from the UP, I was on my way to Bloomington, Indiana, to be his assistant at the Opera Workshop.  There I got my degree--and a dose of Americana that greatly helped me understand US politics by the time I came back to the Washington bureau--and was given the Latin beat, that included Puerto Rico (we had a big client, El Mundo, whose owner loved music) so guess where I went every time the weather got blustery.;.....to develop client relations, of course.  And, by the way, to visit Don Pau.

Abrazos,

Onkel Heinz

Winnicott--Joe Goldstein's guru

DONALD WOODS WINNICOTT

(1896-1971)

Donald Woods Winnicott was born into a prosperous middle-class family in Plymouth, England, in 1896. Deciding to become a doctor, he began to study medicine in Cambridge but broke off to serve as probationer surgeon on a British destroyer in World War One. He completed his medical studies in 1920 and in 1923, the same year as his first marriage, got a post as physician at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital in London. Also in 1923, Winnicott entered into a personal analysis with Freud's English translator, James Strachey. In 1927 Winnicott was accepted for training by the British Psycho-Analytical Society, qualified as an adult analyst in 1934 and as a child analyst in 1935. He was still working at the children's hospital and commented later that "at that time no other analyst was also a paediatrician so for two or three decades I was an isolated phenomenon." The treatment of psychically disturbed children and their mothers gave him experience on which he would later build his most original theories. And the short time he could spend on each case led to his development of "therapeutic consultations." (See below, Innovations in clinical practice.)

Another child analyst, Melanie Klein, moved to London in 1926 and soon had many followers: Winnicott had further analysis with one of them, Joan Rivière. The Kleinians' belief in the paramount importance, for psychic health, of the first year of a child's life, was shared by Winnicott. But this view diverged somewhat from that of Freud and his daughter Anna (herself a child analyst!) who both came to London in 1938, refugees from the Nazis in Austria. A split within the British Psycho-Analytical Society was threatened between the orthodox Freudians and the Kleinians; but by the end of World War Two in 1945 a typically British compromise established three more or less amicable groups: the Freudians, the Kleinians and a "Middle" group, to which Winnicott belonged.

However, for Winnicott the war years were more important for the opportunities they gave him to work with seriously disturbed children who had been evacuated from London and other big cities, and separated from their family. His experience as a psychiatric consultant to the Government Evacuation Scheme provided an impetus towards new thinking about the significance of the mother's role. He also became aware of the fact that therapy was more than a case of "making the right interpretation at the right moment" and of the importance of what he called "management". His second marriage, in 1951, was to Clare Britton, the psychiatric social worker with whom he had collaborated during the war years.

After the war Winnicott was physician in charge of the Child Department of the Institute of Psychoanalysis for 25 years; he was president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society for 2 terms; a member of UNESCO and WHO study groups, and lectured widely and wrote as well as having a private practice. He continued to work at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital into the 1960's.

He died in 1971 following the last of a series of heart attacks and was cremated in London.