Ali Primera (1941-1985): The Arab-Latino Venezuelan"revolutionary" strumming his guitar in his corpulent middle age, who died an unglamorous death by car accident
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Article modified and expanded from my posting: No Basta Rezar: Bring it on, Now!
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Ali Primera is the author of the Communist revolutionary song No Basta Rezar from Venezuela, with the recurring refrain:
No, no, no basta rezarHacen falta muchas cosasPara conseguir la paz------------------------No, no, it's not enough to prayThere are so many things leftTo achieve peace
The song is beautiful, melodious, rhythmic, and singable.
But it is the clever hook of "revolutionaries" to entrap the common folk, the peasants, the working class, the poor, and the otherwise discontented, into an emotional refrain, as they (these clever leaders - guitar strumming singer/songwriters, student leaders, subversive employees, artists and intellectuals) hurl them into a bloody annihilation.
The singer of this song is Ely Rafael Primera Rossell, better known as Ali Primera - Ali coming from his Arab (Muslim) grandparents.
As a side-line, all these revolutionary - annihilatory - leaders have some traumatic background, for which they seem to be exhuming revenge. Primera's father died when Primera was only three during a prison shoot-out where he was an official.
Primera was supported by his industrious mother, and even as he helped along, he was able to finish school, and went to the Central University of Venezuela.
That's when things started cooking. He joined the Communist Party, and started his protest song career.
This article explains precisely why I started this post: It was through these beautiful melodies written by talented songwriters, that Latin American revolutions caught on like a straw house on fire:
The Nueva Canción (New Song) cultural movement emerged in the 1960s. Inspired by the success of the Cuban Revolution, and seeking to counter the perceived cultural colonialism of the United States, Nueva Canción composers sought to transform their societies in favour of the marginalised masses. They revived local folk music forms which, having been widely suppressed during the colonial period, carried profound associations of resistance to elite rule. They wrote lyrics that highlighted the everyday lives and struggles of the rural and urban poor.
Song as protest - to round up and incite the illiterate, the masses, the poor, the etc.
The Latin American "revolutionary" period was long and vicious, and the most engaged countries still haven't recovered.
This of course led me to thinking what revolutionary songs were there in the Ethiopian Communist Revolution, which dragged in the Mengistu Haile Mariam era, the vicious Marxist/Leninist ruler of the Ethiopian Communist period (and Mengistu who is another offspring of trauma, whose mother died when he was eight, and who most likely never knew his father). This period was as vicious, and as bloody, as the one across the ocean. But what were its songs? Sure there were some, but none that were iconic.
Perhaps it is a cultural thing. Ethiopians, with their Orthodox Christianity psyche, and their thousands of years of fierce, cohesive independence, are not easy to penetrate. Or perhaps the Ethiopian Communist literati didn't pick up on this scheme of luring the masses through sweet melodies.
All I know are of the slogans, now on view on YouTube, chanted by mammoth crowds unanimously raising their urban fists demanding rights for the peasants, who nonetheless were left to their own devices in their far-away fields.
In any case, the Communist mantra is much less ingrained in the Ethiopian mind. But every time I find information about some intellectualized Latin American, whether Mexican or Guatemalan, I realize that they have never discarded that revolutionary drug.
El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido, sing the Chilean 1970s "revolutionary" singers Quilapayun, now performing in European concert fields, to young French, or German, or Dutch men and women who grind their teeth to get that revolutionary feeling from these authenticized ambassadors of war.
De pie, cantarque vamos a triunfar.Avanzan yabanderas de unidad.Y tú vendrásmarchando junto a míy así verástu canto y tu bandera florecer,la luzde un rojo amaneceranuncia yala vida que vendrá.------------------------Stand up, singsince were going to triumph.The flags of unity aremarching forward, now.And you will comeMarching next to meand you will seeyour song and your flag flourishingthe lightof a red dawnannounces thenthe life that will come
"March next to me" command these old Latino men, decades after they destroyed their own countries. "and you will see your song and your flag flourishing."
No, No, No Basta Rezar they urge. Keep on with the good fight. You deserve better! You deserve a revolution! Prayer wont do.
The Ethiopian psyche hasn't been so contaminated. The ones that are at no-return, those leaders, instigators, and killers, are long gone (or long dead).
But those that ran off are dangerous members of Western societies (and where else are they going to run to, who else would accept them with the generous "immigrants - immigrant criminals - are welcome" but Toronto, Montreal, New York, Paris, London, Washington, Philadelphia?). And their lucha, their fisted struggle, continues from their inner-city coffee house-headquarters, collecting grant monies for their "humanitarian" causes, as they subversively disrupt the peace and quiet, the politics, of the land they fled, the land from which they were kicked out.
Still they have much less chance than the harmony-laced syrups of the Latin American subversives in convincing their brothers and sisters. The old guard Latin American revolutionaries continue to bewitch its newer generations, seducing them into revolutionary fervor, demanding a perfectionism whose only condition is that what is here now, with the flowers, the birds, the babies, and all the rest, be annihilated so as to bring on that paradise on earth. No Basta Rezar! Bring it on, now!