THE FACES OF ANOTHER WORLD or A BULLED UP TO NEW ZEALAND

By Reinaldo Cedeño Pineda

The world is a hallucination.

It seems to some that it is there, to only a click; but out of Europe and New York, the world also has faces, unknown faces.

The sport and the culture appear as the new "discoverers". Discoveries like Christopher Colon, who "discovered" a continent populated by millions; but more nobles.

The new caravels are the screens, of computers or television channels.

In the world juniors one of athletics there was confusion between the whole press. Everything it is a way of saying, clear. The medal and the initials CAY....

What country was that one?

They say that some of them looked at the Himalayas, others towards Oceania … but the initials belonged to the Cayman Islands …

Ah! the Cayman Islands? The Caribbean?

Some of them continue thinking that the Caribbean is musical, palms and sex.

The jumping Kareen Street-Thompson discovered the Cayman islands (259 square kilometers) for the universal sport.

Then they remembered of 1976, when the whole legion of the caribbean won the races in the Olympic Games of Montreal.

The Hasley Crawford (Trinidad Tobago) was the most rapid man. The jamaican Donald Quarrie, came firstly in the double hectometer. And the cuban Alberto Juantorena won in 400 and 800 flat meters.

Kim Collins (Saint Kitts and Nevis) will be proclaimed a champion of the world in hundred flat meters, many years later.

It was an exotismo, almost.

An exploit was; though many people benefit from scholarships in the United States. And of step be of benefit to the universities that receive them.

An exploit, when four corredoras of the Bahamas constituted the women's fastest relief of the world.
Furthermore scandalous was that boxer superweighed in the Olympic Games of Atlanta 96.

Nobody is exempt. The cuban "we" end up by "discovering" with the fists Tonga, when that enormous and obese sportsman, eliminated one of ours.

And there half a world went away, to the map, to the internet, to discover in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to the whole kingdom in an island of 748 square kilometres.

Tonga entered to the olympic medals list with a historical medal of silver.

The sport and the culture, they are better ambassadors that the tie and the speeches.

In Sweden they re-discovered Saint Lucia. Not to the holy one, but to a country.

The fact happened in 1992, when Derek Walcott gained the Nobel Prize on literature.

The poet, dramatist and teacher put the name of his country in all the news of the planet.

Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Tonga and the Cayman Islands do not seem to stay to a click.

When, the australian Katty Freeman prepared to run in the return to the oval, I ran with her for Sydney's tracks 2000.

Her physicist was "strange"; her salient and stout jaw; deep her look. For her legs were running decades of discrimination and resistance.

On the Olympic gold having be hung, she opened a flag of her culture. She raised the flag for all of them and for all of us.

Some of them do not remember that in Australia, there are aborigines. They do not go out on the screens.

Geography brings the most recent recollection: world of athletics of Osaka, 2007. End of the drive of the bullet.
In the last attempt, a stout new zealander came up to 20 meters and 54 centimeters. Nobody more than she.

Valerie Vili is new zealand; but she does not descend from britishers: she is maorí, from the culture and the original race of these islands. And she walks proud to it be.

New Zealand was only a distant country until Jane Campion showed me the waves of the end of the world, and the excellence, with the film “The piano”. It is my favorite movie.

The people maorí was for me, a curiosity, the dances haka… until I saw “Rider of whales”.

The movie was basing on a book of the maorí Whiti Ihimaera. The grandfather Paka, chief of the village, worries for supporting the tradition and finds a leader whom man….

Nevertheless, will be his granddaughter who extracts the amulet of the sea and realizes the prophetic cavalcade on the whale. An enormous piragua thrown to the sea, it represents the bow between past and future ….

All that took to me up to the amazing history of Janet Frame, the writer that they were on the verge of practicing a difficult cerebral operation (lobotomy).

From Cuba up to New Zealand there is immensity. For Cuba, New Zealand is the limit.

Astonish, but even there were the cuban teachers with the program of literacy “Yo si puedo” (I yes can), praised by the UNESCO. They went away up to the peoples maoríes. I had wanted to be …

The people of islands have many coincidences; though the geography and the language separate them.

Already it was said by the Cuban poet Dulce Maria Loynaz: " An island is a geographical drama ". The drama of the water and of the distance.

In Valerie Vili's bullet I traveled up to Wellington and Auckland.

The world is a hallucination.