Nelson Mandela

Your dignified behavior

As you were a light

With great endeavor

Is followed, Great Knight

Image: http://www.cbc.ca

A l'aéroport

La Havane en imagination

Design in Urbanization

Urbanization through design

Learn French

 

 

French by Poetry and Music

http://www.aralmagro-newpoetry.com

 

Education against Halo Effect

The United States is a democratic country whose government is elected in the ballot by constituents, and where public agencies are merely set, not to guarantee its staff’s prosperity, but to help people, ultimately constituents, avoiding bias or hallo effect.

The halo effect or halo error is a cognitive bias leading to think that a person and what he or she can do is determined by who he or she is; that the person or his or her origin determines behavior and personality.

Halo effect is when thinking that all Muslins are terrorists; that all Cubans speak lout; that all flowers have nice fragrance.

Education for all and race interaction is the best way to avoid bias or halo effect.

                                                                                                                                            

Ruego a la Virgen de los Cubanos (francés y español)

 

Vierge

Sainte Marie

Toute si miséricorde

Pour nous viens et prie

De nous voir en concorde

Pour que se dissipe cette colère

Qui nous entrave d’aimer,

Là, où il n’y a qu’une terre

De nous tous le lieu sacré

 

Oh, Vierge Reine

Aide-nous, pécheurs

Pour que pousse la Fleur

Dans une terre sans haine

 

                                                                  Vierge Marie, Toute Sainte

Mère de notre Très-Haut

Prie que périsse la crainte

Qui nous fait tous des rivaux

 

Santa Maria, Madre del Urgido

Ruega por los cubanos

                                                                      Con lágrimas te lo pido

                                                                  Para volver a ser hermanos           

Amantísima de vientre divino

Donde llevaste al Señor

La puerta y el camino

Y semilla de amor

 

Purísima Santa Maria

Más que pecadores

Somos sufridos todavía

De la separación y los dolores

 

Protégenos con tu prodigioso manto

Que queremos ser felices

Y recobrar sin más llanto

Nuestras dignas raíces

 

 

 

 

 

 

Banderas

Banderas

 

Hay una bandera tricolor

Como la suya todo el mundo

La veo hermosa, con esplendor

Que amo con amor profundo

 

La bandera de la estrella solitaria

De historia aguerrida

Y la de cincuenta con gloria

Que también es la mía querida

 

 

All for all

Tears of melancholy, lacking relief,

Pour fields and cities like rain

While few for joy and reign

Drive all of us into grief!
 

From the East to the South

From the North to the West

Thousand with empty the mouth

While few our time do waste!
 

No wonder, fire, blood and dust

The dawn of gray decorate

While few together must,

Make, amen, peace our fate!

 

Le commencement atypique des Etats-Unis

Le commencement atypique des Etats-Unis

ou l’imposition de la culture européenne

à travers la souffrance d’autrui.

 

Quand les européens arrivèrent dans un territoire qu’ils dirent être un nouveau monde destiné pour celui dont l’image et ressemblance était le même que le créateur, l’homme blanc, ils trouvèrent des habitants autochtones qui n’avaient aucune notion de la propriété, le commerce et  la démarcation territoriale. La plupart des ces immigrants européens étaient des pauvres, des condamnés ou des boucaniers.

La colonisation d’Amérique commença par l’usurpation du pays indien par une sorte de destinée manifeste et la démarcation du territoire en propriétés privées, en plus de l’imposition d’une institution qui garantirait ces propriétés privées de plus en plus répandues: L’Etat.

Et cet Etat en garantit l’établissement de la servitude, un system de production dont l’homme noir, dit l’image et ressemblance du Satan, un être sans âme humaine, était le plus important moyen productif alors que ce system inhumain de servitude était déjà presque sur le point d’être aboli dans la plupart des pays.

Parcellement, un autre system de servitude qui n’était pas si cruel fut établi par contrat synallagmatique, un contrat établissant qu’un immigrant européen était lié volontairement au labour pour un certain temps, jusqu’à ce qu’il ou qu’elle paye sa dette de transportation et d’avitaillement.

Ainsi, par l’établissement d’une culture, le colonisateur blanc s’imposa à travers l’agonie de l’indien, de l’homme noir et d’autre homme blanc par contrat de servitude volontaire! Mais, par 1775, des colonisateurs qui étaient nés en Amérique s’opposèrent à ce que l’Angleterre continue à s’enrichir par ce nouveau système de production à travers un system tributaire obligatoire sans représentation juridique.  Cependant, après la Révolution Américaine, le system de production basé sur la servitude des hommes noirs et le travail par contrat de servitude volontaire des immigrants blancs, dont plus du cinquante pour cent  de la population blanche d’alors, continua, mais plus agressive par l’expansionniste stimulé par « La Destinée Manifeste » jusqu’à ce qu’un pays de treize Etats devint un Empire de presque 50 Etats avant la Guerre de Sécession Américaine.

Beaucoup d’hommes blancs qui étaient venus en Amérique à travers le contrat de servitude volontaire qui ne purent pas profiter de l’expansionniste vers l’Ouest,  joignirent l’Armée de l’Union  d’Abraham Lincoln, avec des hommes noirs libres qui étaient venus vers le Nord  à travers « La Voie Clandestine du Chemin de Fer » (Underground Railroad) pour échapper à l’esclavage sudiste.

 Le system de production esclavagiste n’existe plus au Etats-Unis comme partie de sa culture, bien qu’on y trouve des traits envers illégaux immigrants; cependant, des formes d’immigration similaire au contrat synallagmatique volontaire persistent pour payer bon marché des immigrants notamment de l’Amérique du Sud et Central, y compris le Caraïbe, et de l’Asie.

A call made on September 11, 2001

A call made on September 11, 2001 apparently

from my house, in Massachusetts that hurt my life.

 

On October 2001, when I saw my Verizon telephone bill, I was horrified as among the sending calls there was one made from my house to Sao Tome & Prince on September 11, 2001 at 1.00 am.

Living in Massachusetts from which the planes that hit the World Trade Center in New York took off, being a Cuban political refugee, and knowing that Cuba was listed among the countries that, it was said, dealt with terrorist people and movements, I went to the FBI Agency in Boston. If I had not paid attention to that call and had not gone the FBI, today I would be in jail as I would not have been able to explain about that call!

Apparently, no investigation was performed on this issue; however, some times after I informed the FBI about the call, the treatment I received in Copley Plaza Hotel, where I was a house person, was horrible. Due to that treatment, I hurt my back and my right knee, and I scarcely had 40 hours weekly. I was obliged to receive Psychological therapy in Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health. Moreover, I could not continue to teach French language at Cambridge Center for Adult Education where I had a part time job as French Instructor.

In 2006, I went to Miami to attend my son’s wedding during my vacations. Two weeks later, when I was back to the Hotel, coworkers were surprised seeing me because I had been put out of the pay roll. They were convinced that I would not be back!

Any employer would have reluctantly as an employee a person under investigation on a sensitive case. This year, Dr. Michael A. Grodin advised me to join Cuban community in Miami due to my emotive symptoms.

I went to Miami in 2007 and began working full time as a parking lot attendant at Lanier Parking Solutions, and part time at Downtown Athletic Club. The revenue I was having was enough for my daily life and for saving as my main goal in Miami, along with recovering from emotive symptoms, was to attend graduate studies at Florida International University and I applied fora Florida Educator's temporary certificate to teach French and English (endorsement) in High School, K-12. Currently,I have the status of Eligibility to teach in High School.

I am Bachelor in French Linguistics and in ESOL

Since 2008, I have been trying to become Master in French language. So far, it has been impossible. Despite having come to Miami with more than 50 college academic credits and of 3.8 CPA, I had to go through two Graduate Admission Tests _GRE & TOEFL_ despite the fact that GRE test is not required for a Master in Education. Furthermore, while I paid $10.00 for an Official Transcript from Bunker Hill Community College, I had to pay $ 480.00 for an Official Transcript from Havana University.

I have had restrictions to attend graduate program in FIU and difficulties to have a vacancy to teach French in High School, but also to have financing help from Florida Work Force following a program set by Florida Department of Economic Opportunity to help unemployed individuals to find a job by reorientation through a short technical career. In addition, I had restrictions to finish my short Graphic Design technical career at The English Center of Miami despite the fact that I had Federal Financial Aid.

When a person having two Bachelor Degrees, having written several books in French language, one of them already published in Canada, and being able to communicate in English, French and English, lives under a severe poverty, it’s to be concerned about! My editor may thing how it is possible!

Something similar that frustrated my life happened years ago in Cuba. In i967, I worked as a guide-translator to a French photographer, Pierre Golendorf, for three months every day. We took breakfast, lunch and dinner together along with my French translating service to him. Months after, the event during which I worked with him ended, he was sent to a prison by a Cuban tribunal for being, according to a former Cuban counterintelligence agent, a CIA agent. From that time on, I could not improve my life!

It’s a coincidence with the event concerning the call made to Sao Tome & Prince on September 11, 2001 that has prevented me from improving my life_ for 12 years I have been unable to buy a car, neither a house! But some knows that “where there is intelligence there is no coincidence!”

Three weeks ago, as I am currently a Visual Arts student at Miami International University of Art and Design, I was performing photo experimentation using camera flash in my small apartment at Arena Square Building at night. Somebody might have thought I was doing something sensitively suspicious due to the flash light of my camera as I felt that “a task force operative” was set!

By these days my school’s flat drive where I had only photo assignments disappeared from my bookshelf by the door. One of these assignments consisted in taking pictures from the kitchen window where we see an old black guy wearing a black jacket, sited in a chair on the sidewalk by the shoes repair store, smoking and drinking can beers in a paper bags. Some days later, the guy, who used to sit there, did not come anymore. I was concerned! Two weeks later, he came back; but the shoemaker did not allow him to take any chair. The black old man was not wearing his black jacket anymore. I found my flash drive behind the refrigerator!

My apartment might be on camera surveillance, and through camera the light of the flash might seem like an explosive device.

This entire ordeal confirms how the call made on September 11, 2001 has affected my life, and my literary creation, making me be the poorest published American Poet of all times, as if I am American citizen, I am an American poet no matter my books are in French language.

Sadly, where I live now, I feel like being in a jail, mainly because I used to remain there several days without going out. Where I would go as a do not have a single extra dollar to buy a cup of coffee or a color pencil for my Visual Art career for which I was granted scholarship.

I live like in a cell. Nowadays, Intelligence Agencies, like the CIA, have cells abroad. What about Cuba. I was living in Over Town reluctantly. Shootings occur frequently.

Why I’m living there? Last June, living in 227 NE 2^nd St. # 10, I found a pink used paper saying that Arena Square Building was offering low income apartment for rent. As I was already out of money, I rent the apartment. I never knew who threw the Arena Square promotion through the bottom of the door. It was someone who wants me to be there, in Over Town. I’m very concerned because my engaged fiancée, a French national, is visiting me next week for a week. Her house in France has a piscine. She would remain with me in Over Town, in poverty. The point is that she a French beautiful colored woman and I do not have money to pay a bodyguard!

Angel R. Almagro

Rien sans Toi

 

Viens avec moi

Parce que mon cœur

Souffre sans toi!

Et ne fais qu’il meurt

Sans cette joie

Que par bonheur

Il trouve en toi

 

Mujer simple mujer

 

 

Mujer simple mujer

 

Como dijo el pequeño gran poeta

Yo también siempre te adoro

Porque sin ser yo ni siquiera profeta

Presagio que tú siempre serás mi tesoro

 

Eres lo más bello que he conocido

A pesar de tantas bellas flores

Con tanto colorido

Y agradables olores

 

El color y aroma de tu piel


 A canela y albahaca extrañas

Que te acompaña el sabor a miel

De tus puras entrañas

De mujer simple mujer

Hechizan tanto mi fuero

Que por tanto amor y placer

Por ti vivo y muero

 

Fue sabio el Creador

A semejanza de una diosa

Te creó con tanto candor

Tan bella y preciosa (©)

 

 

Resurrection

 

 

Today, Sunday of Glory

Is a new awakening

 

As Jesus has come from agony

To save our soul from sin

 

His crucifixion became our Gospel

To guide our path to pureness

Alas, there is sin which does spell

Our soul towards darkness

 

A traditional society. First Part

 

 

Nowadays we live within a mechanic or organic society.

Talking about organic societies is enough for you to understand what a mechanic society is.

After you have worked during a 48-hour week, you are paid. Many workers allow employers to deposit their wages directly to the bank. Afterward, you may buy something online, or you can pay your bills either online or allow the bank where you have your money deposited to pay your bills. It may happen that you do not see any of your money in cash. That’s a feature of an organic society.

That’s why when we are facing financial crises, employment increases. That’s also the reason why certain people might be able to defraud the Finance System, the Medicare, the Social Security & the Internal Revenue System when they are able to penetrate them using electronic comunication or artificial intelligence.

This crime may happen likely within an organic society where theft identity is also a common activity, while it is improbable to happen in a mechanic society like Cuba, Venezuela, China, India, and others. When a financial fraud occurs in such countries, members of the government or related people are involved. Besides, financial frauds and crises may not disrupt the mechanic society, at least so faster than it may occur in an organic society. Cuba is an example of a mechanic society which stands disruptively despite the fact that it has been living under financial and productive crises affecting the whole population for years.

 

                                                                                                                                    

Amor inmenso

 

Es tan grande la inmensidad

De este amor por vos

Que es como con la profundidad

De los mares y océanos

Donde soy capaz de ir

Si lo quieres mejor

Sin miedo a morir

Para encontrarte una flor

As it is said that a Pope is Saint Peter’s successor, only God shall have the power to determine his fate. Besides, the weaker and age-older a Pope is, the more blessed and loved he is!

So, morally, a Pope should not have the right to resign.

Is it enough! If the Inquisition had deteriorated the Church culturally, sex scandals on children, along with internal double-dealings, have done so morally, breaking down its dogmas and perspectives. Thus, as everything has inside the germs of its own destruction, we are assisting to a new era for the Catholic Church with the election of  a Jesuit as a Pope, a Pope who prone to be by the poors, for whom Jesus created His church.

So, we must conclude saying that the humanity is being changing through its main current powerful structures: the Catholic religion & the Laissez-faire capitalism.

Note: Laissez-faire capitalism is when you invest your capital regardless of the inflation or overproduction leading to commercial surplus you may create.

It has been the US Laissez-faire capitalism that has made China its creditor! It has been this Laissez-faire that has encouraged wealthy Americans to export and invest their capital in foreign countries impoverishing their own land, and creating joblessness!

What happened in Ancient Rome it’s happening in America!

Note: a sociological approach states that every phenomenon, process or matter conveys in itself the root of its own destruction. However, it states as well that knowing the conditions, causes and environment that stimulate this change or destruction, it may be prevented or retarded.

 

Angel R. Almagro

Au delà d'une Aventure

This is a synopsis of a work out of ethnographic (anthropologic) research that I’ve been carrying out for years.

In 1919 some French Nationals came to Cuba to create the Cuban Aviation Company using six planes of French Farman Company, two F-60 planes, called the “Goliath”, and four F-40 planes. These latter F-40 planes had participated in the WWI. The French nationals mentioned above were members of an aerial brigade that combated Germans planes and were engaged in bombing raids with these F-40 warplanes. During that war, three of these French military pilots, Lucien Coupet, Léon Coupet, and Camille Jousse, were engaged in the Battle of Verdun. It was the greatest and lengthiest but bloodiest battle that had ever taken place in earth. It lasted from the 21th of February 1916 through the 19^th of December 1916.

         Leon Coupet and Camille Jousse were wounded twice during the war. Later, Leon was also wounded when he combated as artilleryman from an F-40 warplane. His brother Lucien was the pilot of it. During the combat, the plane was reached by the German artillery and brought down while it was returning from a bombing raid in the German city of Treves. Both brothers were taken as war prisoners, while Leon was, however, in state of coma as a result of their plane crashing in German soil.

When WWI ended due to the Armistice, these French people were part of a crew who were considered dead as they had lost contact with Paris while they were performing the first long distance flight in history from Paris to Dakar with the Farman giant plane “Goliath”. The Goliath plane had crashed in a shore of a beach where they spent two weeks without food and water under the sun of Sahara desert. Actually, Leon, who was a plane technician, made an alembic from the wreckage of the crashed plane to make drinkable the salty seawater. During that time, lost in the desert, they ate what they could preserve from the Goliath along with the crabs they captured.

        The Goliath’s crew decided to reach Mauritania by foot. The footway by the desert was hard because one of these exhausted former soldiers had thrown away the above-knee prosthesis of his right leg. His leg had been amputated because of war wounds.
The French comrades were found by a Moor and his black slave who took them to Mauritania, the nearest population. From there,

they went to Dakar in Senegal by train. They returned to Paris by ship where they were received as heroes.

        Sometime later, the six Goliath Planes of Farman Company were being used as a commercial airline from Paris to London until a Cuban millionaire bought them to create an international commercial airline in Cuba. Then, the Coupet brothers and Camille Jousse, along with other former war combatants were sent to Cuba with two Goliath F-60 and four F-40 planes to create the mentioned commercial aviation.

In Cuba, the French Nationals remained a little more than a year, and the most important location where they stayed was the aerodrome of Colombia in Havana, which became a real aeronautic fair due to the presence of the French planes. For these French people, after the battles of WWI and the testing flight of the “Goliath” to Dakar, their stay in Cuba was like an adventure which took place under relaxing and warming atmosphere with plenty of affection and happiness.

 

A Cuban woman, who was the person in charge to cook for these French pilots, was the most important woman in that aerodrome of Columbia. Her name was Genevieve. She was married to the owner of a little restaurant located within the aerodrome where the French pilots and other technicians used to eat. The owner of that little restaurant was a black Cuban, and Genevieve was a beautiful woman of mixed race; they had two sons. They were blacks.

      While the small planes F-40 were used for short aerial flights in Havana and in other close cities, the Goliath was being prepared to fly from Havana to Santiago with passengers and correspondence. During the first flight to Santiago without passengers due to the bad weather, the Goliath had an emergency landing between two sugar cane plantations. When the weather was better, they managed to take off.

 

Leon and Genevieve fell in love since the first they saw one each other. As a result of that loving intimate relation, a girl was born. She was not black. Unfortunately, she was born on September 4th of 1921 after the French nationals had left from Cuba. She never met her father. Maybe, Leon never knew that he was the father of Rosa, Genevieve's daughter, one of my sons’ grand-mother.

The most beautiful part of that event was the romantic relation between Leon and Genevieve. They had never loved so intesively in their lives in a so short time, they believed it was an eternity, as they loved so much each other.

 

Was Leon so ashamed toward Gustavo, then Genevieve's husband, that he never came back?

When you read the novel or see the film, you would know!

Angel R. Almagro