This time we
have a more “cultural” issue for you. Of course,
every issue of The Panama News has Arts, Review and Dining
sections, and we also regularly publish the Gallery & Museum Guide and a Calendar that lists a lot of cultural events. But this
time a larger portion of my own original work --- as distinct
from summaries of stories that appeared in other media --- is
concentrated on cultural phenomena.
The photo
above, a mola bikini that’s part of a display by the
University of Panama’s indigenous women, comes from my
visit to the National Handicrafts Fair at ATLAPA. In its 26th year the
fair, always a major showcase for Panamanian arts and crafts,
is more important than ever because this is Panama’s
centennial year and we’re drawing tourists in record
numbers. This pictorial feature is the lead story in this
issue.
I also caught a
classical concert at Florida State - Panama. The country’s
main English-language institution of higher education has been
going through some rough times, and is now in a period of
administrative transition. Thus a night of classical viola and piano duets takes on a bit more significance,
because it’s also about an embattled institution raising
its flag. I have heard the tales from the old faculty who were
forced out and from the new faculty who came in after FSU-
Panama’s transition from a branch of a US university that
mostly served US Armed Forces personnel and dependents to a
smaller school under a Panamanian charter that mostly serves
Panamanians who use English as a second language. I am
convinced that with a commitment to quality, English-language
higher education can flourish down here and that FSU has a good
chance to reverse its setbacks and be the institution through
which that happens. There are a lot of “ifs” involved
in the proposition, but it’s a challenge to which
Panama’s English-speaking community can and should rise,
rather than a cause for hopelessness and despair.
To tell you the
truth, however, I spent much of the past two weeks in the
Interior, tending my garden and drying mangos. Because
it’s the tail end of mango season, in this issue’s
Dining section I bring back an oldie, one of my medium-spicy chutney recipes. (Yes, I know --- picante
is in the palate of the beholder, so depending on your tastes
you may want to decrease or increase the aji chombo in the
recipe.)
In addition to
my regular diet of science fiction and history, I also took the
time to read some children’s literature, Pat
Alvarado’s new book. You will find my take on “The Little Rainbow Princess” in the Review
section.
From our
download logs, it’s apparent that most of The Panama News
readership skips over our little Spanish-language section, but
an increasing number of readers do turn to it. We rarely
publish the same things in both English and Spanish, which may
make us slightly less useful as a tool for people learning
either English or Spanish as a second language, but it does
reflect the reality that most of Panama’s English-speaking
community is bilingual, as are a lot of our readers in the US
and other places beyond Panama.
In the Spanish
section we don’t try to cover Panama as thoroughly as we
do in English, but generally concentrate on things that the
Panamanian mainstream media ignore. There are newspapers or
electronic media controlled by or aligned with the PRD, the
Arnulfistas, MOLIRENA and the Partido Popular. El Panama
America and La Critica are owned by the descendents of the late
President Harmodio Arias and lack the strong partisan
orientation that charactrerizes most of the other Panamanian
media. However, while El Panama America features an excellent
selection of opinion columnists from across most of the
political spectrum, it’s editorial line is fairly right-
wing. One important current in Latin American and Panamanian
thinking that doesn’t get much exposure in the Panamanian
mainstream is liberation theology, and for that reason a lot of
it gets into Las Noticias de Panamá, our Spanish-language
section. In this issue we have a long analysis of George W. Bush’s religious pronouncements and
symbolism and another column by the renowned radical
Brazilian theologian, Frei Betto.
Understand,
however, that there’s a strong conservative opposition to
the liberation theologists, and from time to time readers send
us clippings from the newspapers and websites of Tradition,
Family and Property (TFP), a right-wing international Catholic
organization based in Brazil. This is invariably copyrighted
stuff that we can’t run. However, it’s important for
Latin America watchers to be familiar with this point of view.
For one example, some of the hostile pronouncements of US
Representative Henry Hyde (R-Illinois) about Brazilian
President Lula da Silva appear to come from TFP. Whether or not
you agree the Catholic right, you need to know their arguments
to fully understand Latin America. For example, to get the
English-language counterpoint to some of the things that we run
in our Spanish section, you may want to visit TFP’s Lula
Watch at http://www.tfp.org/lulawatc
h/.
Meanwhile, in
our English-language Opinion section, the lead column is Miguel
Antonio Bernal’s take on a mainstream Honduran Catholic
cardinal’s lecture on political ethics. This column appeared in Spanish in
El Panama America, but it’s here in English translation
with Bernal’s blessing because it’s an important part
of the national debate that we try to follow and highlight for
our English-language readers.
This issue
isn’t just about culture and religion. My own Opinion
section column is about Panama City’s municipal politics, and half of the section has an
Afro-Caribbean flavor, with columns about America’s ties to Liberia, Caribbean regional economic integration and an
upcoming tourism development summit. (This paper pays a lot of
attention to the Caribbean because Panama has a long Caribbean
coast and because a large portion of Panama’s English-
speaking community and of our readers are of West Indian
ancestry.)
And yes, as
usual we have plenty of conflict, scandal and tragedy to
report. Although I really don’t enjoy reading or writing
about the sordid Marc Harris saga, it continues to generate newsworthy
new developments in several countries, which we follow in our
business section. But I always try to include the positive (not
the promises and spins, but the facts), which you may notice in
our News and Business briefs and elsewhere in this
newspaper.
As always, I
hope that the news in your life is positive and that by the
next issue we will find Panama and the world in at least a
slightly better condition.
Enjoy.
