Bruce Douglas Reeves, Author

  • HOME
  • Bio
  • Books
  • Excerpts
  • Stories
  • Blog

Ukraine: Optimism vs. Reality

1/28/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
            The news from Ukraine is still grim, as Russian-supported rebels in the eastern part of the country continue fighting.  Crimea to the south already has detached itself from Ukraine.  And yet, in October 2013, as I explored the country, most Ukrainians we spoke with were optimistic about their future, despite economic hardship and lingering corruption twenty-one years after independence from the Soviet Union. 

            The road ahead, they all admitted, was not going to be smooth, but they believed that with time they would emerge as a functioning democratic nation with a stable and growing economy.  Sometimes, it was hard for me to understand how they could believe this so passionately. 

Looking from our hotel room window, sitting in a basement café, walking through morning crowds, we were struck that most people in Kiev dressed in black.  Mostly, the clothes were of cheap fabrics and not well made, despite the elegant designer clothes displayed in some shop windows.  The large men we saw standing in small groups near expensive black automobiles, however, wore pricy leather coats.  In smaller cities, we noticed many thirty year-old Russian Lada cars, usually decorated with dents and rust.  In Kiev, we saw foreign imports, Mercedes, Porches, and BMWs, for the powerful few, but most people crowded onto the cheap buses and subway trains (only 3 hryvnia a ride, about twenty cents).  Despite all this, we often were told that “Ukrainians are optimists.” 

Life, they admitted, isn’t easy, but “we’ve been through so much that we are used to coping.  We know that life will get better.  It just takes time.”

Independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 created hope for the future, but also enormous hardship.  The change was especially hard for men, women told us.  Suddenly, many of them had no jobs and couldn’t support their families.  Women, able to adjust to change better than their men, stepped in, taking any available jobs, frequently becoming the major providers in their households. This drove the men to drink more than ever.  We saw posters urging men to say no to drink, but the campaign didn’t seem to be working.  The average Ukrainian male died before he reached sixty. 

  Working women were visible everywhere, often in low level jobs or selling whatever they had managed to scrounge together.  For generations, the babushka has been a symbol of both Russia and Ukraine: the middle-aged or older woman who does whatever she can to keep herself and her family alive.  We saw them sweeping leaves in parks; sitting guard in museum galleries; peddling fruit or vegetables; selling beer, vodka, cigarettes, and lottery tickets; collecting tickets; scrubbing floors.  

Younger women, savvy about technology, fluent in foreign languages, and flexible enough to cope with a changing world, were moving beyond old stereotypes and seemed able to find better paying jobs.  Young women, as well as young men, worked in the hotels, banks, and high-end stores, but many older Ukrainian men shuffling along on the streets and selling trinkets at small tables seemed to be suffering from shattered morale.

“This is a serious problem,” a woman told me.  “Women do more and men do less.”

Unless, I suspected, they managed to become part of the mafia-like groups that seemed to lurk everywhere. 

            After centuries of being controlled by other countries—Poland, Russia, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Nazis, and the Soviets—Ukraine seemed to be able at last to determine its own future, if it could overcome economic stagnation and the corruption that came with it.  Maybe the Western nations should have given it more aid, just the Marshall Plan after World War Two helped Europe to rebuild. 

            The Ukraine was so desirable because of the rich black soil that made it the bread basket of Europe.  The land fed whatever country occupied it and much of Europe beyond.  World War Two was notoriously hard on the Soviet Union, including the Ukraine. At least twenty-eight million Soviet soldiers and civilians died during what they still call The Great Patriotic War.  Every Ukrainian town and city boasts at least one monument honoring those who died fighting the Nazis.  Many cities in Ukraine were devastated by battles and bombs.  The economy never really recovered—a situation aggravated by Soviet central planning. 

            Finally, the collapse of the USSR gave the party heads in Ukraine the chance to declare independence.  However, the privatization of businesses and industries that followed meant that a few individuals acquired the major assets of the country.  The rich got richer, the rest got leftovers.

            In spite of all that they’ve suffered, people told us that they were hopeful about the future. 

            “We see progress,” they said, “however slow it may be.”

Maybe an old woman we met outside a small chapel near the waterfront in Yalta best symbolized this spirit.  When we peered through the open door into the ornate Orthodox chapel, she rushed out, showing her single tooth and gums in a smile and asking in simple English where we were from.  When we said America, she grinned even more broadly. 

“Amerrrica!” she shouted.  “New Yorrrk!”

And she told us that once upon a time she had danced at Radio City Music Hall.  Did she expect us to believe that she’d been a Rockette in her youth?  Well, why not?  Attractive young women often made their way to America.  But she had returned to her homeland and seemed to be cheerfully accepting her present life.  Her husband was dead, her children were gone, but she insisted that life was good and would get better. 

I think about her, from time to time, and wonder how she is doing and whether or not she still feels so optimistic.


0 Comments

Cuba and the World's Sweet Tooth

1/18/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
At last, after decades, relations between Cuba and the United States are healing.  When I visited the island, I discovered a diverse, complex society, one that had long become accustomed to “making do” with what it had.  It also was committed to undoing and repairing the mistakes of the past.  The rural areas, I thought, were particularly revealing.  Through its history, Cuba has been largely agricultural, all too often producing what foreign markets demanded.

             One memorable day, we drove from Havana to the Sierra del Rosario Reserva de la Biosfera – a newly protected ecological area.  En route, we passed once luxurious mansions that had been owned by officials in Batista’s government, Mafia lords, and foreign businessmen.  Eventually, we came to mango orchards, coffee plantations, hillsides of hibiscus, and sugar cane plantations.  Although much smaller than it once was, the sugar cane industry still employed more than 300,000 people.

             Passing through rich farmlands, we came to the colonial town of Remedios.  At one time, Remedios boasted 72 sugar mills, but most had closed because of the reduced market for cane sugar.  The town was founded in 1513 by a Spanish grandee, Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa.   He turned the native people into slaves, but the riches from sugar transformed little Remedios into a showplace of elegant colonial architecture. 

             Another day, we visited the remains of the vast Iznaga Sugar Cane Plantation, which in the 17th and 18th centuries was virtually an independent empire.  From a central tower, Spanish overseers made sure that employees and slaves were always working.  For  three centuries, vast plantations such as this produced sugar for the world.   Because so much land was dedicated to this one crop, much of the food needed by the Cubans had to be imported. 

            The United States became a guaranteed market for cane sugar.  Money flowed in and out of Cuba, eventually much of it through the Mafia, and Havana became a corrupt playground for rich Americans.  Very little of the money reached the Cuban people.  After Batista was overthrown in 1959, an effort was made to end the dependency on sugar cane, but the U.S. embargo – known as the “blockade” in Cuba – drove the country to rely on sugar exports again.  This time, it was the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block who bought the sugar and sent food, fuel, and other necessities to the island.  When the Soviet Union and Eastern Block collapsed in 1989, their economic support of Cuba also collapsed.

            We visited a sugar cooperative in the famous Valley of Sugar Cane Mills.  Because of the drastically reduced demand for cane sugar, they were trying to diversify, raising cattle, pigs, goats, bananas, vegetables, and rice.  Many sugar cane fields were being changed to food production.  Much rice still was being imported from China and Vietnam, but Cuba aimed to become self-sufficient.  

             Life remains difficult in these rural areas.  Passing mile after mile of farms and sugar cane fields, we had to maneuver around antique tractors and farm machines, old trucks, carts and horse-drawn wagons, even bicycles.  Many farmers used oxen for plowing.  Because of the fuel shortage, animals often were used for farming. 

             Cuba is a potentially rich land blessed by nature, but also a country dominated by foreign powers for most of its history.  When we looked beyond the bright flowers and the lively rhythms of the salsa music, it was easy see the suffering this had caused.  Now, as new economic opportunities are introduced, the possibilities are almost endless. 

             I have to wonder, though, if all the changes will be positive.
  Will those meandering roads that crisscross the island’s lush countryside sprout billboards where none have ever stood?  Will factories pollute the blue skies and sparkling waters?  Will the Cubans and the rest of the world work together to improve life on the island for everyone, without destroying its natural beauty and vast potential?  Will the heart and soul of Cuba survive the transformation now beginning? 


 

 


0 Comments

Books, Politics, and Censorship

1/9/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Don’t say this.  Don’t show that.  Respect the truth--our truth, my truth—or else!  These days, with the internet and the social media, as well as television and traditional publishing, we seem to be in each other’s faces all the time.  Many people don’t agree about whether or not this is a good thing, but some folks out there get very upset when ideas they don’t like pop up where the world can see or hear them. 

Freedom of speech is an irrelevant concept, as far as these angry individuals are concerned.  Of course, this isn’t new.  Intolerance has been around for millennia.  Now, however, these individuals feel they have the right to eliminate those who dare disagree with them.  Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and other dictatorships had their methods of eliminating open disagreement, but today anybody might decide that you should die because you’re a danger to his—or her—beliefs. 

Will they succeed in stopping free expression?  Even the Nazis and the Communists eventually failed. 
 
The Communists were still in power
.  The year: 1988.  The place: the territory and city of Kaliningrad, named for a buddy of Joe Stalin.  My wife and I were exploring the bleak, gray remains of several centuries – none bleaker or grayer than those produced by the Soviet Union. 

Kaliningrad, Konigsberg under the Prussians and Germans, is Russia’s only Baltic port that never freezes over.  For decades part of the USSR, it’s separated geographically from the rest of Russia.  After World War Two, the German survivors were driven out by the Soviets and the German language replaced with Russian.  Much of the old city was destroyed and replaced with typical monstrosities of Soviet architecture.  Even the Prussian Royal Palace was displaced by the later abandoned House of Soviets, a huge structure of remarkable hideousness.

The middle-aged woman showing us around Kaliningrad shuffled gloomily from site to site, giving us the official explanations.  Then, as we said goodbye, I handed her the fat paperback copy that I’d just finished reading of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic The Gulag Archipelago, about the Siberian prison camps of the USSR.

“For you,” I said, putting the dog-eared paperback into her hand.

“For me?” she cried, clutching the volume to her chest, then quickly lowering it discreetly, almost hiding it.  “Oh my!  Solzhenitsyn!  For me!” 

All books by Solzhenitsyn were forbidden in the Soviet Union, even in this outlying territory of Kaliningrad, but I hadn’t anticipated such an emotional response for the gift of a well-used paperback – and in English translation, at that.

Almost in tears, the woman hugged us and said goodbye as we boarded the boat that would carry us on the rest of our journey.  I still see her, in that shapeless patterned dress, long gray sweater, and down-at-the-heel shoes, standing on the dock as we pulled away, holding the hefty paperback as if it were box filled with rare treasures. 

Today, it’s hard to imagine the excitement a physical book could create, the thrill of  holding in one’s own hands a volume that was yours, that you could read, share, annotate, love.  I wouldn’t have been able to pass on a Kindle to that sad woman, even if it had existed in 1988.  It’s a different world, today, connected in different ways.  Maybe it’s better, now, as words fly across the globe in many different formats.  Tweets, blogs, Facebook posts, emails, text messages, and more keep us constantly, relentlessly, joined together. 

In some ways, it may be more difficult these days for dictators to ban literature and ideas that they don’t like, but governments, religious leaders, and giant corporations still are busy “protecting” us from all truths but theirs.  Where this evolution may take us is frightening to think about. 

Words have great power, as that woman on the dock in Kaliningrad knew.  If words are free and able to communicate ideas, emotions, hopes, dreams, fears, ambitions, the entire spectrum of the human mind, maybe we’ll be okay.  Maybe.  

 


0 Comments

Pushcart Prize Nominations

1/5/2015

0 Comments

 
 Three of my stories published in magazines during 2014 have been nominated by the magazine editors for the Pushcart Prize, which has been called “the most honored literary project in America.”  Each year, it publishes its choices of the year’s best from the world’s small presses.

 The stories are:

o          “Maggie in Love,” published in THE LONG STORY magazine
            #32, 2014.


o          “The Prettiest Girls in Roseburg,” published in the LOST COAST
              REVIEW, Vol. 5, No. 4, Summer 2014.


o          “The Wedding Party,” published in the CCLaP WEEKENDER,
            August 8, 2014.


 Other stories that I also  published during 2014, are:

 
o          “The Semi-Detached Relationship,” published in CRACK
            THE SPINE magazine, March 2014 and reprinted in THE BEST OF
            CRACK THE SPINE anthology, Summer 2014.


o          “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Son,” published in THE
            CLACKAMAS REVIEW, August 2014.


o          “Mama Supermarket,” published in the CCLaP WEEKENDER, 
            November 7, 2014.


 

 

0 Comments

Havana: Art, Music, and Life

1/1/2015

0 Comments

 
PictureBusy plaza in Old Havana, Cuba
            After more than fifty years, the artificial wall barricading Cuba is coming down.  We will be able to visit and discover this island’s remarkable history and culture. 
      I remember when, shortly after the success of the revolution against the dictator Batista and his Mafia cronies, the young Fidel Castro came to the United States, eager to make friends.  He even appeared on the popular television program Person to Person, chatting with Edward R. Morrow about his ideals, dreams, and hopes for his country.  The young bearded leader showed surprising charm and humor, but perhaps not enough awareness of what he was up against.  What would have happened if the U.S.  had been willing to help and work with the new Cuba?
      When I was there during an earlier, if brief, thaw in relations between the U.S. and Cuba, I found an exciting, diverse society, despite the economic hardship.  There was a lot more to see than old Detroit cars.  The three weeks I was there, I saw almost no other tourists.
      One day, I wandered through an art fair in a park a short walk from old Havana.  Acrylic Coke bottles brazenly alternating with inverted Havana Club bottles, suggesting endless Cuba Libre drinks, was just one of the paintings, drawings, and handicrafts being hawked there.  Some of the art was angry, some of it flirted with kitsch, some of it was merely skillful, but much of it was exciting. 
        Detouring around a Latinized version of Van Gogh’s demented sunflowers, I found myself in front of a small canvas of decaying Vedado district mansions.  A fragrant breeze drifting up from the river brought complicated musical threads from a band nearby.  Turning toward the throbbing Latin beat, I found myself staring at a sultry Mona Lisa painted in lush Cuban hues, silvery bombs raining from the sky behind her enigmatic brown-skinned beauty.
        Havana: an old, partially crumbling city, a hot and humid city in which bare skin is fashionable, a city rich with music and art.  Hot and tired after exploring the art fair, I was ready for a cooling drink.  In Havana, it’s always time for a refreshing mojito and where else to indulge but at the roof bar of the Ambos Mundo hotel, where Ernest Hemingway stayed before he bought his villa out on the bay? 
       I navigated the streams of pedestrians of all shapes and colors that flooded the uneven sidewalks and streets, most of them part of a couple, family group, or cluster of friends: fingers clasped, arms entwined, hands on shoulders, waists, hips.  These are people who make physical contact easily and take pleasure in showing off their bodies with short shorts, tiny skirts, tank tops, and clinging tee shirts. 

      The beat of an Afro-Cuban band drew me into a crowd swaying and clapping hands on the Cathedral Plaza.  A buxom black woman in a white, ruffled, multi-layered costume was dancing with heavy-footed fervor, a fat cigar wedged between gold teeth.  Her bare feet slapped the paving stones, her buttocks gyrated, her dark hands pummeled the air as her shoulders, elbows, and white-turbaned head moved to the strenuous rhythms.  Later I learned that she was an incarnation of a Santeria priestess, a Cuban adaptation of a Yoruba West African ritual, magnificent and life-affirming.  
      Maneuvering past faded colonial buildings, I reached the Ambos Mundo.  The roof bar already was busy with people drinking and swaying to the music a small band.  You can’t walk anywhere in Havana without hearing the beat of salsa rhythms along the streets and plazas, in restaurants and hotels, from balconies and open windows.  I pushed up to the bar for my mojito.  The white-shirted young bartender already had set up a row of tall glasses, sugar, mint, and lime juice waiting for ice, soda water, rum, and eager hands. 
        As I sipped the mojito, one of the Cubans leaned over:  “While you’re here, don’t miss the Bienal, artists from all over Latin America, Africa, the tropics, many developing countries.  Their work is exciting, very political.”
       “Can art be political?” I asked.
       “How can it not be?  Everything is political.”
      Splintered bits of Havana’s skyline vibrated in the fading light behind him. 
       The next day, I wandered through the Bienal exhibits in the high-ceilinged rooms of the Art Center deep in the old town.  A local man saw me pondering an aggressive arrangement of radio and television parts, mannequin limbs, weapons, and fake blood.
        “You don’t like it?” he asked.
        “I don’t understand it.”
       “It’s not so difficult.  For centuries, the peoples of the Third World have lived with oppression and war.  Even to survive has been a battle.  This is reflected in their art.  Our art.”
      My new acquaintance suggested lunch.  Together, we walked down a side street, passing a yellow sign with large black letters on a wall:  “La Verdad sobre el BLOQUEO debe ser conocida.”  He translated for me:  “Roughly, it is ‘The truth about the blockade must be known.”
      “Blockade?”
      “It is what we Cubans call the U.S. Embargo.”
      “And what is the truth?”
      “It also called is ‘genocide’ here.”
      “I see.”

      At the little café, an old man with a guitar appeared in the open doorway as we ate a blockade “salad” of canned corn and canned peas.  He was followed by a skinny youth shaking a pair of castanets, both of them singing.  Their complicated salsa rhythms filled the café. 
       “Music,” said my companion.  “One way we survive.”
      Outside, as we left the restaurant, I saw red letters on a bare wall:  “Viva Fidel!”
      Looking up, I discovered at an open window a caramel-skinned girl not more than nine or ten in a white dress with a red bow in her black hair, swaying and dancing to the music pouring into the street, a joyous smile on her round, brown face.

      This was Havana, Cuba, a part of the world that at last I was beginning to know and understand.  It wasn’t what I expected, but it was amazing and wonderful and I wanted to experience more.  I still do.

 


Click HERE to go to BOOKS page
0 Comments

    Author


          I've been writing at least since age seven, making up stories before that, and exploring the world almost as long as I can remember.  This blog is mostly about writing and traveling -- for me the perfect life. 
          Please Bookmark my blog, so you won't miss any posts.
          My most recent book is DELPHINE, winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize.        Recently, my first novel, THE NIGHT ACTION, has been republished by Automat Press as an e-book, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other sources.  CLICK here to buy THE NIGHT ACTION e-book.

    Archives

    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014

    Click HERE to buy DELPHINE
    Click Here to buy new e-edition of THE NIGHT ACTION

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed