review

Friday

I'm heading toward the Interior, with plans to stay overnight in Las Uvas and catch some of Saturday's Carnival action in Penonome. The diablo rojo from Perejil to the bus terminal in Albrook is delayed by a Via España traffic jam, and then the congestion gets really heavy as we approach the terminal.

There are more people in the terminal at one time than I have ever seen. I buy a ticket for the Anton bus, and the guy in the terminal says to get in line and board the bus that's loading when I get to the front. (Usually a ticket is assigned to a particular bus, which means, for example, if you buy a ticket and then decide to go have lunch at one of the terminal's many fast food outlets, you'll mess up the system and make a bus driver very unhappy.)

At the terminal, the Panamanian Family Planning Association (APLAFA) is passing out leaflets urging people to take their precautions to avoid contracting AIDS, and the joint US-Panamanian program to eliminate screw worm flies was passing out leaflets urging people to check their pets and farm animals and treat any wounds with the free larvacide they're distributing.

The bus I board has its windows open. As in, no air conditioning. The air conditioning or lack thereof is no big deal for me, but I generally find buses with open windows annoying because people throw trash out those windows. Such is the etiology of dengue fever, and a major impediment to the development of the nation's tourism industry.

We pull out, into a massive traffic jam, at 5:12 p.m. The most direct route between the terminal and the bridge is under construction. We have to do the snail crawl past the airport, make the turn in front of what used to be the Albrook Air Force Station front gate, then do the bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go past the Port of Balboa, the old Canal Zone Clubhouse, the Balboa Union Church and the new Arnulfo Arias monument (that garish work of Colombian socialist realism with a plaque that describes Arnulfo's stripping of all Panamanians of Afro-Antillean, Asian or Middle Eastern descent of their citizenship as a "defense of the Spanish language"), then turn toward Amador and the bridge approach. Traffic barely moves on the bridge as well. We hit the west bank of the canal at 5:48. When we pass a broken down car near the old Rodman commissary the crawl picks up a bit, and when we pass a distraught woman whose little car has been crumpled from behind by a tailgating luxury SUV, the traffic clears.

The background sound on the bus's sound system is pulsating rhythms overlaid with frenetic DJ's shouting "¡arriba, arriba!" and manic laugh tracks. It's the seasonal variation from the usual cumbia you get on the bus to the Interior.

Unlike in previous years, there are not a lot of police along the Pan-American Highway.

The crowds are beginning to gather in Capira, the main party headquarters for Panama Oeste, but this bus isn't stopping to load or discharge any passengers there. As we’re a semi-express bus for this run, we start to make good time. Some of the minutes lost in traffic jams are made up with some hair-raising driving on the curvaceous Cerro Campana.

I don't see any trash being thrown out the windows. In fact, I see people stowing their empty soft drink cans in their bags, to be disposed of other than on the side of the road. Progress on the national cultural front!

I get to Las Uvas a little after 7:00.

Saturday

I am advised that Penonome Water Carnival festivities get underway at noon. It's inaccurate. The action doesn't get really cooking until later in the day.

In any case, I decide not to set out for Penonome until early in the afternoon. Being outdoors for the most intense hours of the tropical sun is one bit of foolishness this fulo will pass.

I am passed by a half-dozen buses before a mini-bus plying the El Valle - Penonome route picks me up.

I get off the bus, take a peek at the culecos in downtown Penonome, decide not to jam into that packed crowd, and head past the new Arias Brothers (Arnulfo and Harmodio) Museum, which is closed but guarded by cops and razor wire, toward the river where the Water Carnival is to take place. On the road to the Water Carnival, everyone is searched and frisked by police. They're looking for weapons and drugs, but not checking ID to catch illegal aliens and fugitives as is the case at other Carnival locales.

The crowd is just beginning to gather, with many of the early arrivals taking the opportunity to take a swim.

I check out the souse that one of the vendors is selling. She has her Health Ministry certification and uses reasonable food handling techniques --- the food is kept in an ice chest and her hands don't touch it. It's Interior-style souse, rather than the West Indian-derived stuff to which I am accustomed. That is, not much in the way of hot pepper, but a few flecks of green stuff that seems like parsley to me.

The police are present at the river, as are lifeguards and an aid station from the SINAPROC disaster relief agency. The lifeguards don't have to pull anyone out of the water, but they do warn some boys about crowding onto a little dock that the queens will use shortly, and the aid station treats a few people who took too much sun, and a girl who sprained her ankle jumping into water that was shallower than she thought.

The police are not interfering with underage beer drinking taking place before them. A young cigarette vendor is also doing a lot of business with minors. But hey, Mireya Moscoso and Education Minister Doris Rosas de Mata have brought Philip Morris into the public schools to tell kids that smoking's a grown-up thing to do --- this government wants kids to smoke, and when the eventual day of reckoning comes for the resulting upsurge in smoking, a different administration will have to worry about the increased health care costs.

A local band, composed mostly of public employees, gets the party going with some impressively tight Afro-Cuban music.

It's hot. I get someone to watch my glasses and camera and take a plunge into the river.

Nina Campines and her band take to the stage, regaling the growing crowd with cumbia and tamborito tunes. They're good, and the crowd responds accordingly.

A drunk teenager throws an empty beer can into the river, and a sober adult tells him to his face that it was an ugly display. This is not especially meant to change the litterer's behavior, but to make a point to the complaining adult's younger kids. This event, you see, is a family affair. Lots of people are here with their children. There are plenty of babies and toddlers, mothers watching their somewhat older kids more closely than the lifeguards, and a few families with members of three generations attending together. There are a few exceptions, but family values dominate at this place on this afternoon.

The queens are starting to arrange themselves on their floats, but I'm getting well cooked by now. I wander over to the culecos for that skin-cooling drench.

I grab some meat on a stick. I figure that the stuff the guy was brushing on the beef was the hot sauce, erroneously. It was sweet, and good enough. Normally, this Colon buay prefers the picante.

With the sun starting to get low in the western sky and my skin feeling a little tight, I head back toward the downtown area. On the way to the bus stop, a crowd of police has gathered, and in the midst of it a crying teenage girl points out a laughing teenage boy and accuses him of assaulting her. He may be laughing, but his hands are cuffed behind him and his weekend of partying appears to be over.

Sunday

I head back to the city from the farm in Las Uvas in the morning. Due to a larger than planned dose of sun the day before, which doesn't have me in pain but despite the moisturizers has my skin feeling slightly tight and looking reddish, I plan to miss the mid-day sun at the Antillean Fair in the city.

The bus back to the capital is not crowded, and the traffic on our side of the road is not heavy. The westbound lane is very congested and few Transito cops are to be seen along the route. I get off the bus in El Chorrillo and take a cab the rest of the way to the office in Perejil. I spend the next few hours perusing the day's papers, checking my email at the Internet cafe down the street and lounging around reading science fiction and drinking tea with sugar and lime juice. The cat who hangs out around the Muchachas Guias building in which our office is located puts in an appearance and registers his demand to be fed. I split a 25¢ order of Pio Pio chicken livers with him.

Sometime after 2 pm I board the Via España bus, get off just before it turns toward Albrook at Plaza Cinco de Mayo, and walk the block and a half to the Museo Afroantillano, on whose grounds the 23rd Antillean Fair is being held.

I arrived in time for the Jovenes de la Iglesia Mision Cristiana. It's a reggae and rap act without the ganja flavor or the gangsta attitude. These kids are not Panama's first Christian rappers --- the most prominent of that genre is Nando Boom --- but they're talented and they have worked hard to tighten up their act, so it's reasonable to expect that in years to come some of them will turn pro and make their names on the national scene.

As the youngsters leave the stage, I make my rounds of the museum grounds, in search of food and friends, not necessarily in that order.

At the food tent I run into William Donadio, the tailor of Colon, who's writing another book, in Spanish, about his hometown. William is in search of some rice and beans with poroto rather than guandu as the featured legume, and notes the prevalence of fried fish at this year's event. And indeed, it's like a West Indian fish fry, one that's missing several of the Antillean favorites, particularly on the beverage side. As in no saril or isinglass.

In any case, it's hot out and that, combined with the previous day's dosage of sun, has largely suppressed my appetite. I sample some souse, cool off with one of John "Raspao" Catón's famous and Masonically correct raspado especial snow cones and make my first of several visits to the beer and soda tent. (Soft drinks for me this afternoon.)

There is a larger crowd at the fair's Panama Centennial version than in the last couple of years. Most notably, a lot of people have come down from the States to participate. A couple of men, a New Yorker and a Californian, notice my Panama News t-shirt and enquire about my identity and the paper, tell me that they are regular readers and encourage me to continue. There are a bunch of African-American youngsters, some of them looking slightly bewildered, who are being introduced to their Panamanian roots by grandparents, aunts and uncles.

This is a largely middle aged crowd, with lots of senior citizens and many of the youngsters on hand having been brought by older members of their extended families. In recent years the Antillean Fair hasn't attracted a lot of people between the ages of 15 and 30, and trend continues. Where are Panama's West Indian youth? For the most part, celebrating away from their elders, especially in Las Tablas, where the country's most popular reggae and hip hop acts are playing.

The next act, however, is another juvenile group, Los Chiquitines. Three girls and two boys, ranging in age from about 8 to about 15, cover Shakira tunes and other Latin American pop hits. It's hard to say how far and in which direction young talent will develop, but for the moment the Arab-Colombian diva need not worry about being displaced from this quarter.

The printed fair schedules have all been passed out, but a little rummaging in the trash yields me a slightly soiled one that serves my purposes. The agenda is not followed too closely.

Next up, out of order according to the printed schedule, is Leslie George's calypso band, Grupo Amistad. Year after year, Leslie is the Antillean Fair's most reliable and beloved feature. In my first years in Panama I got to know him as a calypsonian, and a few years back was surprised to hear him perform beautifully in the gospel genre. I mentioned that to a friend, who told me that she had never heard Leslie George do calypso or gospel, but knows him as Panama's best opera tenor.

We are regaled with classics of Panamanian calypso. "My demanding wife, she wants to destroy my life" --- of course she does, if she suspects you're doing the "Veranillo push-push" on the sly.

Now comes the SAMAAP queen, Darlene I, and her court. (Let us distinguish Darlene from Nidya I, La Panameñisima Reina Negra. Just as many Panama City institutions have their own queens, some of them white, and the official Carnival Commission has a queen selected in a light-skinned-only competition, the Sociedad de Amigos del Museo Afroantillano de Panama has its own foxy black queen.) Darlene and her princesses are escorted by the quadrille dance group, a dozen or so youths who work out on Saturday afternoon in the Girl Scouts' big downstairs room, below and behind The Panama News office.

The two eldest young men in the quadrille group are dressed in pegged black pants with black suspenders and hats and white shirts, in the Sunday-best style of their ancestors who came to Panama from the islands to build the railroad and canal and establish the banana plantations. The younger boys and the girl dancers are decked out in dashikis and French Caribbean-style dresses in matching bright green-dominated print fabrics, while Her Majesty and her court wear dresses and headwear in the Martinican fashion that Antillean women brought to Panama in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They all treat the crowd to a classic West Indian-style promenade in front of the stage.

Next come West African-style poly-rhythms by the Achante Percussion Ensemble, with Queen Darlene and the young men in black and white moving their dance routine onto the stage. It's an impressive display of grace and talent all the way around.

By this time the sun is down and most of my energy is drained. I hop onto an Avenida Peru bus and head back to Perejil.

Monday

A couple of days of dashing hither and yonder, mingling in large crowds and occasionally taking too much sun have incited the germs to multiply and celebrate a Carnival of their own in my body. I'm not feeling well on Carnival Monday. There's a low fever, an upset tummy, some body aches and some tender and slightly swollen lymph nodes and glands.

However, there is some business to attend this afternoon, with a rendezvous at the McDonald's on Via España, more or less at the epicenter of Panama City's Carnival celebrations. A little after 1 pm I head out on foot for my meeting.

In years past, traffic through the Carnival area has been suspended for the duration of the four-day and five-night affair. This year, however, cars move along Via España until 3 pm. There are several side effects to this decision.

First, that part of Carnival that involves splashing in the culecos during the mid-day sun is effectively cancelled. The crowds don't gather until the traffic is detoured, and the vendors lose several hours of sales.

Second, the security cordon goes down while the traffic is flowing. Shortly the police will be searching for weapons and drugs, and reviewing ID in an attempt to round up fugitives and illegal aliens. But while the cars go through Via España, people coming and going on wheels can import their guns, knives and other implements of destruction into the Carnival area and secrete them for mischief to come.

I am carrying a chacara full of notebooks, computer discs, reading glasses and a cell phone. I am not searched when I enter the Carnival area, a little after 1 o'clock.

I'm early for my meeting, so I take the opportunity to review the set-up.

There are ample portable toilets. They stink, and they are situated very close to food and beverage vendors' stands. Other food vendors are assigned spots right on top of sewer grates. These people paid a minimum of $150 to the city government, $25 more to the Bella Vista Junta Comunal, plus fees for health inspections, security and other services. They're getting the royal shaft.

The prices of beer, soft drinks, meat on a stick and so on have not been jacked up for Carnival. There are more vendors than in past Carnivals and this keeps prices and profit margins down.

There is plenty of confetti, but no trash. The men and women in the yellow jumpsuits, the streetsweepers and garbage collectors of the municipal waste department, are doing a good job.

It's quiet. Vendors are not allowed to have their own sound systems this year. That eliminates some obnoxious competitions, but it also gives the Carnival Commission, the government IPAT tourism agency and the corporate sponsors of the other stages control over which kind of music gets played when. At this time of the day during past carnivals, there was music, water and partying in the streets. Not so this year.

I meet the people I need to meet, and we head out to an apartment just outside the Carnival area to see if The Panama News templates that have been frozen in a computer since late in January can be extracted. The verdict on that is not immediately apparent.

I head back to Perejil on foot, by way of the Carnival area.

Now it's almost 3 pm, and the police are searching and checking ID. A tall policeman looks at my cedula and waves me through, as a black teenager in hip hop duds gets the pervasive frisk job. A young man with lots of tattoos and multiple pierces in odd places sits on the sidewalk a few feet down Via Veneto, observing the action.

But wait --- a policewoman at the scene doesn't think I should go on my way unsearched. Fine. I begin to show the contents of my chacara, and my pockets. I haven't opened my reading glasses case (which is big enough to conceal a knife or a small disassembled pistol) when she begins to frisk me. She gets her hands right in my crotch and feels my juevos, which are a bit sore with this particular bug that I have.

The guy down the sidewalk cracks up. One of the policewoman's male colleagues gives her a strange sidelong glance. This is a gaffe. The custom is that male officers frisk males and female officers frisk females.

I do not register an objection, nor do I emit any indecent groans or otherwise make fun of the policewoman. I will not file a complaint. It's not a sexual assault, but at most a minor error on the side of safety. No harm, no foul.

Tuesday

I'm still slightly under the weather on this day, so I decide to skip the parades and catch the night's concert at the main stage behind the Hotel El Panama.

I get there around 9 pm, with fireworks bursting overhead and Nenito Vargas and Los Plumas Negras playing.

This is a large throng packed in front of the stage, an bigger one than those that I have encountered in past years. It's an overwhelmingly local crowd, mostly of dark skin and modest economic means. Most of the capital's rich people have headed to the Interior, as have a lot of the tourists. However, there are a fair number of foreign visitors on hand, not only North Americans but also Europeans and Latin Americans. I see American flag headwear, Puerto Rican flag t-shirts and a few little Dominican flags waving in front of the stage. The Panamanian flag is harder to find.

Green-fatigued cops are circulating in the crowd, which as far as I can see is well behaved. Earlier in the day, during the parade, some maleante threw a full beer can at tonight's principal act, Dominican merengue singer Eddie Herrera, opening a bloody little gash in his head. The police hustled a suspect off to jail.

Panama's most successful cumbia band is the brother-sister act, Samy and Sandra Sandoval, but the Plumas Negras give them a good run for their money. In its modern style cumbia instrumentals center around the accordion and a battery of percussion instruments, with the electric guitar, bass, keyboards and horn sections playing secondary roles if any at all. If you can sing "ahúa" in key, with the right inflection, you may be qualified to do the background vocals. The bandleader might be a lead singer (like a Sandra Sandoval) or an accordion player (as in Samy Sandoval). In this case, Nenito Vargas does both the accordion and the lead vocals. His status as bandleader is debatable, however, given that the rest of the group hired him after the death of its long-time leader Víctor Vergara a few years ago.

There are a fair number of senior citizens in the crowd, and they're having a great time. Cumbia is the music of their youth --- and also something that's appreciated by contemporary Panamanian youth, who are also getting into the performance.

Nenito climbs down into the crowd, and by the end of his performance is up on one of the TV camera towers. It would have been a fitting climax to the night's entertainment.

However, there are royal visits and two more acts to come, and that's not counting the final procession and the burial of the sardine. I plan to skip the latter two scenes and get at least part of a good night's sleep when the music's over.

Dominican-American rapper Magic Juan comes onstage in a bathrobe, slippers, shorts and an undershirt. His rap is bilingual and the older folks in the crowd mostly can't relate.

Magic Juan only does a couple of numbers before making way for Queen Milena Saldaña and her court, who mount the stage accompanied by a barrage of fireworks and a murga.

Then Bella Vista city council member Julio Crespo, a MOLIRENA member who this year as during the last two heads the Carnival Commission, comes to the microphone and gives a little political speech. "Mireya delivers again," the representante declares.

Well, OK. Does the representative of a junior partner in the Arnulfista-led government, a man who was appointed to head the Carnival Commission as the Moscoso administration's specific snub to Panama City's PRD mayor, want to talk about the politics of Carnival? Let's do so.

Do Crespo and his committee deliver for Panama? Do they deliver for the dark-skinned majority in attendance? Do they deliver for Panama's musicians? Do they really?

In any other year, ending the Carnival Tuesday concert with two foreign acts would be OK. Last year Samy and Sandra were the penultimate performers, followed by Dominican merengue star Sergio Vargas. It was a great show, and most appropriate.

However, this is the Carnival of Panama's CENTENNIAL YEAR as a republic. The Centennial Commission's logo is prominently displayed onstage. The MCs repeatedly remind the crowd that the Centennial Commission and a long list of government ministries are sponsoring the festivities.

And this past New Year's, the Centennial Commission, headed by the blue-eyed horse killer who would be Panama's president, withdrew its funding from a concert because one of the performers was Rubén Blades. Now Panama's most-honored musician hasn't been charged with pedophilia or busted for drugs or shown up on the list of some Hollywood madam's clients. No, Alemán's objection is that the entertainer supports the PRD's Martín Torrijos for president in 2004. The Centennial Commission, which everbody is told is helping to fund this event, has let everyone know that it will not fund any event at which Blades appears.

And thus Julio Crespo stands before the people as the local representative of political censorship of the arts. Blades won a Grammy for his "Mundo" CD only a few days ago, but just as Crespo's committee had refused to meet with Panama's Black Queen and carefully avoided any mention of Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, it won't consider the most appropriate act to close out Panama City's Centennial Carnival. Nor will it consider Rómulo Castro, the author of the Grammy-winning "La Rosa de los Vientos," and his band El Grupo Tuira, because Castro's militantly PRD. Nor Luis Arteaga, Los Rabanes, nor the other acts featured in the La Rosa de los Vientos album playing Panama City's Carnival Tuesday gig. Panama's vibrant rap scene, whose most internationally known figures are El General and Nando Boom, is likewise overlooked in favor of a Dominican. We can argue about whether jazz is appropriate for Carnival, and especially the final acts on a Carnival Tuesday, but in any case Grupo Nega, Danilo Pérez, Dino Nugent and the rest of the the Panamanian jazz scene are passed over as well.

Mireya Moscoso, José Miguel Alemán and Julio Crespo deliver their political censorship, and a Centennial Carnival that should highlight Panamanian music's leading lights instead closes with two Dominican acts. You want to talk about politics on the Carnival Tuesday stage, Julio Crespo? Well, then, let's talk about politics --- shame on you for your part in this insult to Panamanian culture, Julio Crespo.

But let us not take this out on Eddie Herrera. His music is very popular in Panama because a lot of Panamanians appreciate good music. On this night people sing along to "Carolina," and particularly to his big hit "Te Amo." Moreover, at about half past midnight, Herrera does something that Crespo's committee had been reluctant to do --- he has both the Carnival Commission's official white queen and court and Panama City's black queen and princesses onstage together. The predominantly dark-skinned audience loves it, especially when they get to compare the respective royals' lewd "El Caballito" dance moves.

One of the little Dominican flags in the crowd makes its way into Eddie Herrera's hands, and the merengue singer takes the opportunity to congratulate Panama on its centennial in the name of the Dominican Republic's community of musicians. Does Julio Crespo sense a gaffe? He's back onstage in seconds, waving a large Panamanian flag.

The concert ends a little after 1 am with Sergio Vargas and Magic Juan joining Eddie Herrera for the final numbers, and with a blaze of pyrotechnics.

I don't see or hear anything, because it's happening under cover of the fireworks display, but at about this time some vile maleante opens fire on the Via España Carnival revelers with a pistol that has been smuggled past the cops. Eight people are wounded.

Wednesday

The Catholic Church detests Carnival, but it only happens in Catholic places. (Do New Orleans and Mobile count as Catholic? Let us say at least that the Mardi Gras tradition has its roots in French Catholic Louisiana culture.) What Carnival is all about is a partying frenzy before Lent. Only Catholic countries take Lent seriously enough for Carnival to make sense

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent.

In Panama City this year, it's also the beginning of the city's clean-up campaign.

By the time I rouse myself from sleep, the trash is gone from Via España and the street and sidewalks there are being hosed down. Two foxy young street sweepers are making their way up my street. The mayor and his minions are having their own quiet final word about the Centennial Carnival.

On the TV news, other sides of the story are being told. The highway death toll is 18, with six drownings and one death from a horse riding mishap. None of those shot on Via España are in danger of losing their lives, and a suspect is in custody. While violence was down at most of the country's Carnival celebrations, over the long weekend there was a wave of robberies, break-ins, drunken altercations and domestic violence away from the party scenes. Immigration authorities are holding about 30 illegal aliens from Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua who were arrested on their way to the festivities in Chepo, Panama City and Capira. There were a few drug busts, none of them major. The hotels and car rental agencies are counting a lot of money made serving the more than 20,000 foreign tourists. A lot of the Via España vendors are counting losses. Other small-time entrepreneurs plan to buy school supplies with their shares of the profits from this year's increased Carnival tourism.

Most of us had a wonderful time.

Also in this section:
Cool Internet Sites
Notes on Carnival 2003