Sublime

À opposé des Cortez et des Pizarro, qui lâchent aussitôt leurs troupes sanguinaires, massacrent ou réduisent en esclavage la population, uniquement préoccupés de piller sans pitié et le plus vite possible le pays, ce découvreur plus humain et qui voit beaucoup plus loin n’a en vue qu’une pénétration pacifique. Dès le début il s’est efforcé

Under the appointed mainland officials served elected Puerto Rican ones, less powerful but much cannier about local affairs. Chief among these was Luis Muñoz Marín, the leader of the island’s dominant party, who towered over the political scene from the 1940s through the 1960s. John Gunther deemed him “the most important living Puerto Rican.”

Of how his head continued to recite his poems of love even after it had been severed from his body, and how he picked up his speaking head, as casually as a modern-day motorcyclist might pick up his helmet, and walked up the steps into the Jama Masjid, and then, equally casually, went straight to heaven.

“From then on their life fell apart fast, the way white lives can in the tropics. People would find them crawling around on the floor, drunk on Dzama rum, high on whatever chemicals they’d ingested. Outlaw types camped out at their bungalow on Finoana Beach: drug dealers, burnt-out mercenaries, gunrunners working between South Africa and Eastern