By: Ciro Bianchi Ross
ciro@jrebelde.cip.cu
Editor's note: El Bobo (The Dimwit), a Cuban colloquialiam, isn't meant to be demeaning or insulting, but sweetly endearing. Liborio is a graphic image of a Cuban peasant. Loquito means Little Crazy one.
CARTOON CAPTION
A lost profession:
But didn’t you earn a living before, telling fortunes?
Yes sonny, but I had to leave it since the people already knew what was going to happen.
http://www.jrebelde.cubaweb.cu/2005/julio-septiembre/jul-10/elbobo.html
A CubaNews translation by Ana Portela
Edited by Walter Lippmann
To the beat of the son, the enjoyable soap opera by Maité Vera now broadcast on Cubavision, brings El Bobo to mind. He appears so unexpectedly and disappears so rapidly that, perhaps, many TV viewers don’t notice. But there he is, in a chance scene, on the sidelines, quiet, protected by a rare character of ingenuity and with a little Cuban flag in hand clearly referring to his patriotism.
El Bobo, together with Liborio by Ricardo de la Torriente and El Loquito by René de la Nuez, is one of the most memorable personalities of Cuban humor. Liborio, although mocking, is passive; he reflects an image of the resigned Cuban in face of a reality suffered but does not rebel against it and remains, mostly, as a spectator of his own tragedy. Not El Bobo. As El Loquito during the Batista tyranny, El Bobo is a subtle combatant that is scathing against the Machado dictatorship.
It was a personage full of life, witty and sly humor. He needed just a gesture, an expression, a look to achieve a quick and wordless relationship of complicity between him and the reader, Juan David wrote. He pointed out that: “The people - so battered with disillusionment and disbelief – first saw El Bobo like a patriot who lived in an unreal world and laughed at him. Later, they understood his game and laughed with him”.
A personage such as him, of course, was not “bobo” (dimwitted). He acted it. Made believe. Let himself drop and with modesty and simplicity said what the sharp and smart feared to do.
In a sketch from March 1933, El Bobo was at a poolside. His Ahijado (godchild) who, together with El Professor (the Professor), were his most constant counterparts, said to him:
— I can see, padrino [godfather], that you do a lot of things: you swim, you go underwater, you do the breaststroke …
— Yes sonny, except jump in – he responded.
It was this wisdom that his creator, Eduardo Abela, draughtsman and painter, knew how to instill that allowed El Bobo to sidetrack the Machado censorship, almost always.
SCHEMER AND CRYPTIC
El Bobo saw the light of day in La Semana newspaper, in 1926, the first year of the Machado government. Until his disappearance in 1934, he walked the news pages in the Diario de la Marina and El País.
Abela explained his creation as his own concept of Cuban psychology. The expressions of the personage were as undefined as scheming, somewhat cryptic. His face, the artist confessed, was the backside of a woman. In some of the early cartoons, Abela parodied persons who lived in his the city where he was born, San Antonio de los Baños, according to Adelaida de Juan referring to an early version of Bobo, not completely defined. In her book, Hacerse el bobo de Abela (1978), she explains that it was evident the artist was moved to paint a face with jowls, a plump body that was, somewhat, a self-caricature.
If this was the case with his external image, there was much of Abela’s psychology in El Bobo, who moved, thought and felt as if the creator had endowed him with nerves and viscera, David stresses. Although the painter traveled the world, he maintained the Cuban idiosyncrasies of those who lived in the countryside, skeptical as only they could be, people who didn’t give in and who answered one question with another. “The personality he gave El Bobo was a spiritual question, his personage had a human context capable of interpreting the grief of the people and opening up space for hope”.
But this civic activism appeared in El Bobo with time. At the beginning, its sole function was humor, with strong sexual references. That is why his cartoons dealt with the “fruta bomba” (this is the name given in Havana only for the papaya because papaya also refers to the female sexual organ) Here he waters it, nails it with a hoe that will grow incredibly, sets it in flight like a comet or buries himself in it. In other cartoons El Bobo is a peeping Tom and in still others he ties bells to the wrists of the Ahijado – who is really his son although he passes him off as the son of El Profesor.
During this first period, Doctor De Juan explains, Ablea bravely takes the picaresque to the printed page, avoiding all vulgarity. There will be another period where mischief coexists with political and social concerns and a third one where El Bobo will exclusively deal with the advances and backward movements of the anti-Machado struggles.
KEYS
How did he manage? Abela’s personages, Carpentier wrote, were a synthesis of characteristics more than portraits. His drawing, always agile, never stresses the evident because – this author states – he worked with the suggestive. He used symbols (Martí, the flag …), keys, images of popular speech. One of his cartoons reads: ”The teachers know how to inspire the men of tomorrow, with love and respect for the President of the Republic”, and the drawing shows El Profesor handing out hoes to the students. Another reads “ten boxcars filled with guavas have been sent North”, and these boxcars display signs: “The retired teachers are paid punctually”; “Public freedom is guaranteed”; “The people are with me”.
El Bobo had a scarf around his neck and it means that he didn't’t swallow the lies of the government. The candle he held or offered to Saint Christopher or Saint Rita, defender of the impossible as a symbol of hope. Sometimes he inventd a mechanical man. “It’s really simple, to make the machine you invented speak”; they say and he responds: “Don’t believe it, can you manage all I go through to have him say nonsense”. In yet another he is in front of a piano. “I didn’t know Godfather, that to play, you had to jump up and down, the Ahijado says. He answers: “Sonny, there are so many keys that cannot be played …!”
El Bobo survived the fall of Machado. He recalled Céspedes who takes over the presidency, that the Revolution has triumphed and he would know that the formula in Grau’s government would be made by the pharmacist (Guiteras). But he was bitter, disillusioned with the results of the anti-Machado revolt. He sent for a nickel of ideology in the drug store; there wasn’t any so he asked for five cents worth of survival. They gave him a parasol that the druggists was the best thing for maintaining equilibrium.
That’s were El Bobo got to. He died fighting. In 1941 Abela wanted to revive him but he had died with the epoch. A personage and an attitude wiped out.
In 1929, a two-part drawing showed El Bobo, with his straw hat in his hands, watching a woman going up the stairs. A thief points a gun at him and, although he lifts his hands in sign of surrender, the hat doesn’t fall from his belly. In 1941, Abela used the drawing again and again of the peeping Tom, El Bobo, watching a woman go up the stairs and he is again held up. But this time, when he raises his hands his hat falls to the floor. Eduardo Abela realizes that his personage has lost his flair and decided to withdraw him to prevent El Bobo from deteriorating.
