Jackson, Celebrating Colon

Colon, the place where I was born, gets a lot of disrespect.

The economically troubled, mostly black city at the canal’s northern end is the object of all manner of slurs, has been short-changed by national governments of various partisan hues and is warned against in so many of the tourist guidebooks.

Meanwhile, day after day, the Colon Free Zone is the engine that drives Panama’s commercial sector. Next door to that duty-free import-export zone, a mostly black workforce composed almost entirely of Colon residents defies all the cliches and makes the Manzanillo International Terminal the most efficient seaport in all of Latin America.

As the long centennial weekend began, I found myself back in Colon to catch the boxing action at Panama Al Brown Arena. There was a cruise ship tied up at the Port of Cristobal, but in a sad though typical demonstration of the lack of coordination between Panama’s sports scene and the tourism industry, it set sail a few hours too early for the passengers to catch Fight Night in Colon.

Over at the arena, however, there WERE plenty of tourists in evidence.

They were not geeky white retirees in garish Hawaiian shirts with cameras slung around their necks. Mostly they were black retirees from New York, true boxing fans, some of them with children or grandchildren along with them for this visit to their old home town.

I imagine that some of the visitors stayed with relatives here, but I hope that others stayed at the swank Melia Hotel into which the old US Army School of the Americas has been converted. Set on a peninsula on Gatun Lake, it’s a five-star attraction with the coolest pool in all the country, one that needs and deserves all the word-of-mouth good publicity that it can get.

(The moans and screams of the ghosts of torture victims that some construction workers claim to have heard while converting the old counter- insurgency school into a luxury hotel are apocryphal. Or maybe they’re not, but after the conversion the ghosts emigrated to Fort Benning, where their attention is more properly directed these days.)

Whether they stayed at the Melia, the Washington, the Meryland, with family or elsewhere, a number of the Americans who came back to their native Colon were on hand the following day for the first of the city’s centennial weekend parades. And what a joyous celebration that was!

The whole town turned out on Avenida Bolivar to cheer on the kids, even people who had no kids of their own. Who could have watched the proud honor roll contingents and doubted that Colon has a future? Who could have seen all the majorettes who never dropped their batons, and heard all the drummers who never missed a beat, and still believed all that song and dance about how people in Colon lack talent and discipline? Who could have witnessed the local citizenry’s perfect behavior in the near-absence of police and written Colon off as a nest of cutthroats, junkies and thieves?

So why would anyone want to come back to such a troubled city as Colon to celebrate? Because Colon is a cool place to be from. Because, with a little help from those who have left but not forgotten, and from well meaning outsiders, but most of all relying on the strength and ingenuity of its own population’s efforts, Colon’s best days are ahead of it.

Also in this section:
Bernal, Constituent assembly vs. the confusion mongers
Coronel, Doesn't Chávez get it?
Saum, The bitter part of bananas
Weisbrot, Top Gun fires blanks
Martínez-Piva, Trade obstacles in the Greater Caribbean
Jackson, Colon's a cool place to be from

opinion

A cool place to be from