THE BITE OF POLITICS

Guayaquil, as seen from the Santa Ana hill in 2009

By noon time that faithful April day, there was, according to the press, a mass of approximately two hundred thousand people filling the streets from the International Airport to the San Francisco Square in down town Guayaquil. This was, supposedly, the greatest political mass gathering that had ever taken place in the country. The candidate arrived at the San Francisco Square at about one in the afternoon, and, only a few minutes after his arrival he was speaking from “a balcony” to this great mass of people who cheered the man almost in ecstasies.

The Ecuadorian people, just like other peoples in the Latin American countries and in the third world in general, has traditionally been captivated by demagogue politicians who promise redemption at no cost, and so it has fallen victim of its own electoral mistakes. Worse than anything, these mistakes are repeated to the point of absurdity, and unlike what should be expected, no lessons are learned from those mistakes. This was the case with Velasco Ibarra.

The candidate’s speech centered on the idea of considering “voiding the Rio de Janeiro Protocol” (“the Rio Protocol”), a treaty between Peru and Ecuador signed in 1942, and ratified by the congresses of both countries the same year, in which Ecuador was obligated to resign the ownership of almost one hundred thousand miles of its territory in the Eastern Amazonian Jungle, in exchange for the withdrawal of Peruvian military forces that in 1941 had invaded the Ecuadorian Southern Provinces of Loja and El Oro and threatened to take over the city of Guayaquil. The treaty was signed on January 29 of 1942, at the time when WW II was at its peak in Europe and The Pacific.

The loss of such a big chunk of the national territory was considered by most Ecuadorians as the biggest affront to the national pride. We, as school children, were taught to hate the Rio Protocol and to hate Peru and the Peruvians “who had stolen our territory”, we grew up with this idea in mind, so, it was only understandable that the sole idea of denouncing the Protocol and eventually recovering the “stolen territory” would lift the hearts and minds of most Ecuadorians and would place them behind the man who was talking about reversing history and returning our pride.

As a lawyer and as a politician knowledgeable of international Law, he must have known that the Rio Protocol could not be nullified unilaterally, however, as a demagogue that he was, he knew the Ecuadorians would like his idea, and he knew that promoting it would bring the votes he needed to be elected. His speech was one hour long, people were so emotional that they started to cry and intensely cheered and applauded to the man in the balcony. My friends and I, who had been standing critically at first, and curiously later on, little by little started to listen with more attention to the speaker, then we began to get emotional and nodded approvingly to some of his remarks, but, by mid speech, we were all applauding and cheering for the guy. Velasco was a combination of sorcerer and alchemist. He knew how to mix his ideas to hypnotize and convince people. He was elected by a landslide in 1960. The sum of the votes of all the other candidates did not reach one half of the votes he finally obtained. It was a landslide!

Making the biggest political mistake of my life, I ended up voting for him but was promptly disenchanted with his widely corrupt administration which came to a sudden end when a military coup deposed him, confirming that the guy was an unbeatable candidate but a terrible president. I wasted my first vote as a citizen when I helped elect as a President to a man who did not deserve my vote, a man whom at his age, was pathetically tricked by his political associates into allowing them to steal the country blind. I learned a great political lesson and matured politically, because I never again voted based on my emotions but on a cold analysis of the merits of each candidate and his/her programs, regardless of their party affiliation

The courtship from my communist schoolmates continued for another year to no avail. Finally they gave up and decided that I was a “reactionary” and that it wasn’t worth continuing to try and hire me as their party’s member.

The last two years of high School I returned to my high standards, As always, I excelled at math and Physics, I loved and was very good at History and Literature, I was good at Biology and at Organic Chemistry, I finished my Fifth year of High School with an A average.

Sometime during the year 1960 my brother Pepe got married and could not continue to support our household, my brother Pancho was never a real help but a dead weight in our place. Soon after, At the age of 18, my brother Pancho married a woman 2 years his senior when he had no job and no place to live. To make things even worse, my mom started to suspect that my dad had not been that faithful while she was away in Guayaquil, and decided she would return to Pallatanga, so we had to reorganize our lives without her. I rented a room in a boarding house and my little brother Guido went to live with my sister Florcita who had already delivered a baby boy. I took over the responsibility of paying for my little brother’s education at the Mercantil High School, a reputed school from which young adults came out with a diploma as “bookkeepers”, the same school my older brother Pepe had attended and allowed him to start working at the early age of 17.

Considering myself a “guardian” for my little brother, I went one day to his school to find out how he was doing, only to find he had not attended school for the last three months, and therefore, he was by then considered a dropout. This is in spite of the fact that this 14 year old boy was leaving his place every day at 7 AM, with the school bag on his back, and was returning at 1:30 PM, just as if he was punctually attending school. Only God knows what he was doing during those long hours, out of his place and out of the school.

Needless to say, I missed my mom and I missed living as a family, but the circumstances were such that did not allow us to continue living together. I had matured enough to feel as an adult. By this time, I had made my mind and I wanted to become a professional, I knew I had the brain, and I sure had the will, now it was only a matter of “keep on trucking” to reach the goal I had set for myself. In May 1962 I visited mom in Pallatanga and I promised her that I will study hard; that “I will be second to none” and that when I’m done, I will take her to live with me and that she will be able to see the fruits of her hard work through me. Little did I know that a few years later, when I was just starting to be in a position to make my promise a reality, she would suddenly pass away, the victim of her high blood pressure and her weakened heart.

In my next posting: A UNIVERSITY STUDENT

EXPOSED TO POLITICS

The Bolivar Square, the site where I studied many nights for my quarterly and final tests when I was in Night School in the early 60's


The school I was attending, as I have said before, was a school for adults, and I was only a kid, a little kid in the middle of grownups with all the virtues and vices inherent to their ages and social status, but, in all honesty, most of them were fine people, hard working guys and gals who were elongating their days to attend secondary school and be able to improve their possibilities in the future, through education. They were all men and women of a lower middle class group, they were all conscious that they were individuals who could in one way or another, transform their lives for the better though their own personal effort and that was I admired the most in these people.

Many of these students were prime targets for political motivation, they were fertile ground for political activists, members of the communist Party, who were talking about “the need for a revolution to transform the unjust Ecuadorian society into a society where everybody would be treated with justice and equality”, a rhetoric that sounded like music to the ears of many of my classmates. These were the times when the Cuban revolution headed by Fidel Castro was in vogue, the bearded guerrilla leader had just deposed Fulgencio Batista, a corrupt dictator, after a bloody guerrilla war in the Cuban Sierra Maestra, and he, as a subservient pawn of the soviets, was adamant to spread the revolution through Latin America, where he saw fertile ground for his ideas and methods. Little did we know that over fifty years later, Castro and his brother, who have perpetuated themselves as the bosses in Cuba, have converted that beautiful island into a mass prison from which nine of every ten people would like to leave but are not allowed to.

Fidel Castro was just what the communist leaders in the Kremlin needed to make a nice and easy beach landing in Latin America, where until then, their political advances had been limited to a small intellectual elite and a few blue collar workers; therefore, the USSR was generously funding the political activities of the promoters of a revolution “Cuba and Fidel style”. Young members of the Communist party, who were our classmates, were openly dedicated to recruiting new party members in our school; prime targets were students with good academic records. The bite they used was the possibility of obtaining a scholarship for the Patrice Lumumba University, in Moscow, founded by the Kremlin in the late fifties (honoring the Congo guerrilla leader who was killed by the Belgium Army in the late 50’s), specifically to provide communist indoctrination (disguised as education) to young Latin American and other third world countries’ students who, when returned to their homelands, will be in charge of spreading Communism.

Many of my schoolmates were caught in this net and went to Moscow after graduating from high school. It wasn’t until after several years, when these young men and women returned from Moscow and were unable to find a decently paid job in the market, that they realized they had been used and abused by the communist party and the Kremlin, but, by then, they had been so much indoctrinated that they had no choice but to remain, in one way or another, as agents of their patrons in Moscow and Havana.

In many occasions I was personally and politely invited by Vicente Riofrio, a classmate of mine and member of the communist party, to attend meetings of the Communist Youth. He insisted that I would not be obligated to join but would be welcome to listen to political dissertations from well known political figures, including legislators and labor leaders, adding that it would be good for me to get involved in the national political process. I declined the invitations very politely in every occasion by saying that my full time job and my full time school schedule were taking all my available time and I, therefore, would not be able to seriously dedicate my time to other activities. I was sometimes inclined to accept his invitations, but, just as I felt about smoking pot, I always got away from it untouched.

The year 1960 was one of a tremendous political activity in the country, the presidential elections were taking place in June of that year and, the best known political leader of the previous 30 years in Ecuadorian politics, Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra was one of the candidates. He was a brand name in the Ecuadorian political processes; he had been president already three times, in 1937, 1944 and in 1952. In only one occasion he completed the term for which he was elected, the other two he had been deposed by the military once the disenchanted masses pulled their support for their leader. A highly controversial political leader, he was a populist and had a tremendous capacity to gather multitudes around him, thanks to his highly demagogic political speeches through which he would offer solutions for every need of the people, including building bridges where there were no rivers, only to fail delivering once he got to power. This time, he was coming back from self exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he used to fly away when deposed. His political motto was “allow me to speak from a balcony in every town”. Those were the times when TV did not exist in Ecuador, so what he meant with his motto was: “with my speeches from a balcony in every town I visit, I will convince the masses to vote for me”, and, much to the disgrace of the country, he was right, he always convinced the masses to vote for him and he was elected.

Velasco Ibarra was returning from exile to Guayaquil, his political stronghold, where his political sponsors and financiers were preparing a massive welcome to their leader. I was personally against this candidate in spite of him being almost a political idol for my father, because I was convinced that his previous three administrations had been a calamity for the country.

I had planned to attend this mass meeting as a passive bystander, only to be able to criticize the meeting itself and the candidate´s speech and demagoguery thereon, in discussions with my classmates and friends. Far from my intention was to go there and cheer for this man who I had already decided I was not going to vote for. At 18, I was a young man very much interested in the whole political process going on in the country, and wanted to be an active participant in the political campaign in those days, together with classmates that were much older than me, and who were veterans of past political campaigns, but also, as a result of the influence my father had on my formation as an individual and as a citizen. I wanted to be an active player in this process, and, as such, I thought I should listen, analyze and discuss every possible alternative before I made up my mind as to who to vote for in the upcoming presidential and congressional elections

With this idea in mind, we decided (together with a couple of other students in my class), to attend the mass meeting welcoming Velasco Ibarra.


In my next posting: THE BITE OF POLITICS

A NOT SO GOOD SALESMAN

This is the City Hall building of Guayaquil, a jewel of 19th century architecture.



The year 1959 went by quickly. My school performance was only OK, I still did not do very well in Inorganic Chemistry (my brain was almost locked to this kind of science), but I passed it anyway, and, by May 1960, I started my Fifth year of high school. Soon I was going to be 18, I felt that I really was a man by age and responsibilities, and, at the end of that year, my year end resolution was that I was going to return to my high academic standards as had been the case until 1957. I was going to really take studying seriously. I had disappointed my mom in the first place by flunking my fourth year in high school, I had no excuses and neither I tried to find one, but more than anything else, I disappointed myself, I couldn’t live with the fact that I flunked, I still don’t feel comfortable when I have to talk about it, I still feel ashamed of it, I still feel like I shouldn’t have done it that bad, I could have done it better if I had just taken this matter a bit more seriously, but I didn’t. I feel like I still have a nail in my shoe. Maybe after I have made my confession in this memoir I may feel a little better about it. I hope so, anyway. The fact of the matter is that the years 1958 and 1959 where, perhaps, the years I matured the most in many ways, but mainly in the way I got to see and perceive the world around me and my own role in the context. I did mature in these two years, perhaps not in all ways, but in many ways that have come to be very important in my life.

In May 1961 I was promoted from the position of collector, to the position of book salesman in the book store. It was an honor that I appreciated but that proved not to be what I expected in terms of pay and peace of mind. As a salesman, I had to dress up with a suit and tie (which was expensive, to begin with), but it also proved to me that among my many limitations, I did not have the capacity to convince people to buy the books I was selling, at least not to the upper and mid class people of Guayaquil. At the end of my first quarter as a book salesman, I had made commissions on sales about one half worth of what I was making as a collector, while I had doubled my expenses. After two quarters as a books salesman I came to the conclusion that “selling was not my line of business;” I was just not the type of person who could make a living from selling things, at least not selling books, period. But, since I had to make enough money to survive, and after trying almost everything else, I decided that I was not going to sell books in Guayaquil, but that I would have to find a different market to sell in, and so I found one. It was Manabí, a mostly rural province north of Guayaquil, with a predominantly coffee-growing peasants’ population with little access to the civilized world of Guayaquil and Quito, the two largest cities in the country.

I found it much easier to sell my encyclopedias to the Manabí peasants for two reasons, (1) During harvesting times, a lot of manabas (as we called the people from Manabí) had much more money than they could handle; and (2) I didn’t need that much selling academic knowledge to sell them my 20-volume UTHEA encyclopedias (much like the better known Encyclopedia Britannica). I basically just needed to show them my fancy brochures with the colored pictures and make good use of my street smart techniques. My selling strategy consisted of visiting the largest coffee-producing farmers in their homes, at harvesting times, and asking them to allow me to show and discuss my brochures with their entire families. I didn’t have much of a problem convincing these noble but quasi naïve people to let me in and have a chat with them. They would receive me in the ample living rooms of their well ventilated wooden houses where the first thing I noticed was there was no library, and therefore no books to be seen. After the introductory conversation which would normally be about the family, the harvest, the weather, and so on, I’d start my speech by congratulating the head of the household for his nice home, the beautiful furniture, and making a note that “an important member of this community, like you, must have some sort of library in your living room, with books to show your education and knowledge of the world, books which would be a mine of knowledge the young ones in the family could dig into” and added “your friends and other members of the community would surely be impressed by this show of sapience”. The argument was almost infallible. I’d show how nice the encyclopedia would look in their ample living areas by propping up the large brochure on the dining table as all the members of the family nodded and marveled at each one of my points. In less than one hour, typically, I would be closing the sale and therefore making a commission of about 500 Sucres (equal or better than a one month’s salary as a collector). I did that with four or five families in each town, and by the end of my two to three-week tour of Manabí, I had made enough money to keep me going for the rest of the year. I used to feel a little ashamed of my sales strategy afterwards, but my full pockets immensely contributed to reduce my remorse.

On one occasion, I went to the small city of Bahia de Caraques (“Bahia”) where at the end of two days’ work I had sold zero encyclopedias (my great friends, the Salames, from Bahia, would not believe this). Continuing with my book selling tour, I decided to go to the city of Chone, about 30 miles away and connected to Bahia by an old railway, with one single-bus type railcar running back and forth. When I went to the so-called train station, I asked the guy in the ticket booth about the rail car schedule and the tickets’ cost. He answered “There is a car scheduled to leave at 8 AM, but you can come and buy the ticket at 9 AM, the car may actually leave between 9:30 and 10.” Confusing as it was, I insisted in getting the ticket in advance and he said “it’s five Sucres for the first class ticket and two Sucres for the second class ticket.” “Fine,” I said, “please give a first class ticket,” and paid the man for it. Finally, the rail car took off at about 10:30 AM, and it was full. I noticed that all the passengers sat in the same car with no visible division or noticeable differences between seats. I started wondering if I had made a mistake paying for first class, but about 20 minutes later as we approached a hilly area, the car started to slow down and finally it came to a full stop. For about five minutes the driver tried to get his car to get over the hill, to no avail, at which point he shouted “all second class passengers, please get down to push the car!” All of a sudden, I was the only passenger left in the car, while everybody else got down and started pushing the car. Five minutes later, pushed by about 20 people, the car made it over the hill and started running on its own. This was the first and only one time in my life that I have traveled first class while paying my own ticket.

Three book selling tours to Manabí when I was on School holidays were enough to provide me with cash for almost two years sustenance. As a result, I ended up having more than enough time to study. The income I made allowed me to save enough money to buy new cloths, pay for all my expenses and finance my first year at Architecture School in 1963.

In my next posting: EXPOSED TO POLITICS

MY FIRST REAL SEXUAL EXPERIENCE

As the trio left the stage the audience applauded not very enthusiastically. Soon, the main part of the show started, it was a striptease, which was what the audience mostly waited for. I was feeling a bit nervous but thrilled at the same time; I thought to myself, “Hey, this is real grown-up men’s stuff!” I had a beer on the table and drank it in less than five minutes. In no time, my friends had ordered a second round for me, which I also downed. I must have started to show evident signs of being lightheaded when a very good looking girl in her early twenties sat beside me; she must have been about 5’5”, with long, lustrous black locks and brown saucer eyes. Her lips were stained with a fire engine red, which shone with the flashing lights in the room. She was wearing a short, sequined blue dress with a plunging neckline that showed off her full, C-cup sized breasts. The girl started to call me “sweetheart” and kept getting closer and closer to me while I quietly shied away from her until there was no more room in the seat to go any farther.

At this point, I decided that I better start “cooperating” and I gathered all my “macho bravery” or whatever you may call it, and grabbed her right hand and kissed it. She returned my show of affection with a kiss on my neck, leaving a red mark on it and sending an electric shock throughout my whole body. She kept rubbing my hands and kissing me while trying to start a conversation that I was far from able to maintain as my mind was drifting, wondering about where this would all end up. She kept asking me to hug and kiss her in return, which I was glad to oblige, while my friends were happily dancing with their chosen partners all over the dancing floor and once in a while they looked over at me and smiled.

A good half an hour must have passed and my friends stopped dancing and brought their dancing partners to the table, they were sweaty and wanted to take a break while at the same time they asked me to go out on the floor and dance with my newfound “friend,” who had continued the courtship with me. I didn’t know how to dance, I must have looked like a broom's stick trying to go around her, but I managed to "dance" to a couple of songs any way and went back to my seat where my friends were having a ball with the girls and kept on drinking beer.

Benancio Flores, the leader of our group, “el flaco” (the skinny one) as we used to call him, evidently the one with the most experience in this business asked my girl to go dancing with him, which she did. I felt kind of jealous when I noticed he was whispering in her ear. I had no clue what he was telling her, but I kept wondering why he had to dance and talk to her, when he had his own partner to dance with. Eventually, my girl came back and sat right back where she had been before, next to me and took my hand again. I felt my hand was sweaty and I didn't know whether I should tell her of my jealous feelings or just continue to play her game. I did the latter. She asked me to head to dance floor again, and while there, I asked her what kind of conversation she had had with my friend. “Nothing important,” she said, “I know you are a little jealous, but, honey, you don’t have to, it is you that I like and it is with you that I’d like to go to bed with tonight.” I was really stuck in a complicated situation here, because I wanted to do it, I mean, the girl was extremely attractive, but, at the same time I was really afraid of having a sexual encounter with a woman I knew was a prostitute. More importantly, I had no money, and I confessed that to her. “Don’t worry,” she purred, “I’ll do it for free. I’ll do it because I like you, I really want to have it with you" and continued, "I promise you, you are going to like it.” The discussion went on for about fifteen minutes until I felt that my flesh was stronger than my brain, and conceded. A few minutes later we were heading to a room in the back of the place, a room with a queen size bed I had never seen with so much anxiety and fear at the same time in my whole life.

It was my first experience with an adult woman, and it was the glory. I felt like I’d discovered a continent, like I indeed was a grown-up man now. We did it twice in less than one hour and I felt exhausted but I wanted more “horizontal mambo dancing” but the girl told me she was exhausted, and much to my regret I had to shower , get dressed. and leave the room. What I did not know until after I left the place was that my much older friends had been watching the whole time through a peephole. They had, in fact, paid the girl to do it graciously with me because they told her I was a debutante and they wanted to see how I performed. The bastards laughed so hard their sides split as we taxied our way back to our places. I didn’t care. I even dared to laugh with them after that fateful night in the winter of 1959 at the Villa Ivonne. I was only 17. Even then I knew that sometimes it’s important to laugh at yourself.

In my next posting: A NOT SO GOOD SALESMAN

IN THE WORLD OF YOUNG ADULTS

The "Tower of the Clock" an icon of the city. This was a donation of the city of Seville to the city of Guayaquil in the early 1930's




I was a collector for Editorial Gonzalez Porto for three years in a row, perhaps the most productive years in my life in what regards to learning street smartness and knowing the good, the bad and the ugly among all the people I dealt with. It also helped me getting familiar with almost every street, every corner of the city of Guayaquil, the city I love as much as the village I was born in, the city I feel so proud of considering my home town, even though these days I only spend a few months at. These were the three years of transition from being a child to becoming an adult at the age of 18. These are also the three years I slowed down in my progress of my academic education.

I entered the Borja Lavayen Night High School, almost at the same time I changed jobs from the bakery to the book store. I was the youngest student in the whole school, even though I was registered in the fourth level (out of six). All the other students were 18 or older, some as old as forty and even fifty plus, simply because this was a school for full time working people over 18. My adult classmates “adopted me” almost as their pet, because of my age and because I was so little. Many of my classmates were married and had children children, and most of them were role models to follow, but among the single ones, who were the vast majority, there were those who were not the ideal role models for me. Some of them had already started drinking, a very few of them had already tried and liked pot, and most of them were in partying and women. They were in their early twenties, these were the students I interrelated mostly with. I tried beer a few times but I just didn’t like it. Once they tried to have me smoke pot and I flatly refused it and I never did, but among the things I really started to like were the partying and womanizing, as a result, my performance as a student dropped. The first year I flunked, I just did not concentrate enough in Inorganic Chemistry and I got a very low score, though in most other subjects I did OK, and as always, I excelled in math and physics. In those days however, if you flunked in one subject, you flunked the whole academic year, which was preposterous to me then, and it continues to be today, but that was the way it was.

One of our classmates was this fifty year old blind guy. His name was Jorge Bravo Landin. He had all classes tape recorded and took notes in the Braille writing system. Interestingly enough, he was a good student and was an extremely likable person. He used to sing with a very nice voice, played piano, accordion and guitar, so we use to take him partying and playing serenades to our girl friends after classes. He enjoyed our company as much as we enjoyed his’, in spite of the tricks we used to play on him, jokingly abusing his handicapped condition.

One day, long after classes (ended at 11PM), we took him with us for a serenade to the girl friend of one of the students in our group. That night he played his guitar and sang a series of romantic boleros for about fifteen minutes, much to the enjoyment of our group, and I’m sure, of the young girl who was listening to the serenade behind the Venetian window of her bedroom. Before George Bravo sang the last song, we decided to hide behind the columns of the house nearby and pretend we were gone. Our blind friend, started calling us to take him to the nearby parked taxi, to no one’s response, this went on for about five minutes until the poor guy got really nervous and began to call our names in high voice for help and in a combination of pleading and threatening he said “Come on guys, don’t do this to me, please!”, and added “ if you don’t show up right away I won’t ever sing and play again for you in your entire f… lives, you bunch of bastards”. Soon after we all came back, embraced him and apologized for our bad taste joke. It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes and George was loudly laughing with us. George was the oldest and youngest student in our group at the same time. The following year he got married to a nice looking lady who used to sing with him at a catholic church nearby. The following year they had their first child and were the happiest couple in the whole world.

George Bravo was a great classmate and a great role model for me. His handicapped condition did not prevent him from pursuing and reaching his goals. He wanted to become a Lawyer, and he did become one. About ten years later, as a lawyer, he dedicated a great deal of his time to help the abused and dispossessed ones, of which there were, and there still are, many in our country. I learned from Jorge Bravo a great and life time enduring lesson: You can be happy and can help other people be happy regardless of your physical condition. Jorge Bravo was my hero then, and remains one of my heroes today, fifty years afterward.

After a short period of school holidays, we resumed classes in May 1959. I was getting terribly bored in my classes because, other than Inorganic Chemistry, I had approved all subjects the previous school year, but I had to start from zero this new school year anyway. I was almost 17 then and was making enough money in my job to afford certain “luxuries” as inviting my girl friend to the movies on Sundays and then take her to an ice cream parlor to chat before taking her back to her place, or taking a weekend at the beach with my friends and schoolmates once in a while. Of course, as a group we always checked in at the “Beaches Hotel” as we jokingly used to say (sleeping out there, on the beach). It was really fun, especially because most of our girl friends would join us on Saturday nights to party until late in the night. Then we slept until the sun started to burn our semi nude bodies and early beach goers began to walk and get noisy around us.

Other than the above, the school year went by uneventfully, except that I started to take Judo classes in the evenings, right after the regularly scheduled classes. Later on also took on basket ball, a sporting activity that I was neither especially prepared for (I’m only 5”6”) nor I liked it very much. I excelled in neither of the two and quit doing both of them after a while.

It was by midyear this year that my classmates Biacino Laprea (21), Fidencio Flores (25), Ballardo Arellano (24) and Florentino Di Capua (22), invited me one nigh to have fun at a night club. All four of them worked as “banana quality control officers” in one of the largest banana exporting companies in town. Their job was to make sure the banana fruit going through the rubber conveyors up from the shipping yards to the vessels’ refrigerated warehouses was in top condition for the two week navigation to the US and European ports where they were bound to, or just plainly reject it to be trucked away from the port for selling at a very cheap price for local consumption. My classmates made lots of money, not only because their salaries were good, but also because they used to take bribes from the banana producers who wanted to have their fruit well rated and shipped to go overseas.

This was going to be my first time ever to be in a night club. The place, “La Villa Ivonne” was located at Calicuchima Ave. and 9th St., in the South West outskirts of Guayaquil. We arrived at about 11:30 PM and the place was full, but we found good seats and a small table. At about midnight show started, with a trio of “bolero singers” with two guitar players and a crooner, playing old “Los Panchos” music. The guitar players did very well; the singer was OK.


In my next posting: MY FIRST SEXUAL EXPERIENCE WITH AN ADULT WOMAN

GETTING TO KNOW IMPORTANT PEOPLES’ VIRTUES AND VICES

The City Hall and the Pichincha Street in the late 1940's, about 20 years before the Robles Plaza administration


I felt miserable, I started to cry, I was looking for help, or at least for sympathy, and began to ask the people around if they´ve seen any one taking my bike. Nobody had seen anything or pretended to have not. I suspect, up to this day, that my bike was stolen by the very people I was asking if they had seen the thief to have taken it. They just seemed not to care; their answers to my desperate queries for help were fake, totally artificial. These guys were what we used to call “smugglers”, selling their goods on the floor of the walkway, right off the bank’s office. They use to sell goods which were smuggled from the vessels anchored in the river nearby.

It took me a while to recover from the shock of having lost my only and most valuable asset, I saw no point in trying to find it, it was like looking for a pin in a hay stack. I went back to the bookstore and told my story to my boss, I must have cried, I don’t remember, but what I do remember is that my boss told me: “don’t worry, Rafael, we will buy a bike for you, which they did. The following day I was driving again a brand new bike (not as nice as my own, though), and that allowed me to put aside the pain and the frustration of having lost my bike. I paid my debt; I never fell past due on any of the 12, 120 Sucre monthly notes due on the first bike. That was the beginning of a lesson I got in my life regarding how to keep my credit clean.

It was by this time that I was assigned the collection of the notes due by the Guayaquil mayor Mr. Luis Robles Plaza. Robles were a gentleman by all means. The first time I went to see him I was not allowed to get into his office. The men in charge of the door just did not think a minor should be allowed to enter this high office, after all, this was the most important office in the city, and a child (in their minds) just had no business in there. After several tries, one day I was waiting at the main gate of the majestic 19th century City Hall building, hoping to see the Mayor as he was coming in and just before he took the elevator. “Mr. Mayor”, I said, while I sneaked in front of him as he was about to enter the building; “My name is Rafael Romero and I’m the person in charge of collecting a bill from you, would you please allow me to come in”, his answer was quick, “well, of course my boy” he said as he rubbed his right hand on my head, you can come in to my office today and you can come in my office any time you have to”. I said “thank you very much Mr. Mayor, and with all respect, could you please tell the guards at the main entrance what you´ve just said to me, please?”, I must have looked pathetic, because he turned to the guards at the entrance, and started to talk to them and to the elevator man right in from of him: “listen to me very carefully, all of you, it is my order that this young kid has my permission to come into the building and into my office every time he needs to do so” and added, “am I making myself understood?”, everybody said at once, with a subservient tone: “yes Mr. Alcalde (“Mayor”), so it will be”, and they all looked down to me with a mix of admiration and respect, which they kept for the following two years. Ever since, the mayor’s office doors were wide open to me.

Mayor Robles must have been a very honest officer, because in many occasions I came to see him, he did not have the money to pay his $150 due note. When that was the case, he always deepen his hand in his right pocket and handed me a 10 Sucre bill saying “I’m sorry I don’t have the money to pay your note my boy, come back next week, will you?”, and sure enough, he would honor his word and his credit the following week. This happened at least every other month, much to my benefit, because, at the end, I pocketed the 10 Sucre bill, on top of the commission on the note´s collection. While I was clearly benefitted from Mayor Robles’ way to handle his credit, I learned a lesson I will never forget. Don’t you be afraid of talking to any one if you are exercising your right to ask, but do it with respect!

I had quite a few customers who were like a Swiss watch paying their bills, among them a young lawyer by the name of Alejandro Ponce Henriquez, whom I came to see again many years later when I became a member of the Guayaquil Country Club where he has always been a gentleman, a very respected member of the Board of Trustees and a great golfer. I also knew Judge Leopold Carrera Calvo, a man who always had his check ready on the day of the note’s maturity. I have to mention Mr. Raul Baca Carbo, who at the time, just a young engineer with an office right across the City Hall Building, but who, many years later became for several times the Speaker of the National Congress and a Minister of Natural Resources. I met many others like the above, whose names I have forgotten but whose high respect for their credit became one of the several things I came to admire, and later on to imitate in my life as a professional and as an executive.

But, there were the others, those whose respect for their credit was less valuable than toilet paper, among them a lawyer who has been reputed for over five decades as the highest ranking and most expensive criminalist lawyer in the country, a man who came to be the country’s VP, a guy whose speech in front of the masses as well as in his classes of Law at the U of G is always about justice, honor, honesty and respect for ones’ honor and people’s virtues; a man who tried (and thank God failed) many times to become the head of the Supreme Court of Justice. This very same guy never paid even one of his thirty six past due notes for the books he bought. Not only he didn’t pay his notes, he was so absurdly dishonest that he kept me going to his office week after week, month after month, year after year, just to say “I’m sorry boy, I have no money today, come back next week on Wednesday” only to repeat the story the next Wednesday. I just wonder how can a man reach so high and still be so dishonest, I guess this guy really was prime raw material to be a real politician in Ecuador, a country where up to these days, corruption and dishonesty are almost pre requisites to be a successful politician or to hold high government offices.

In my next posting: KNOWING THE WORLD OF YOUNG ADULTS