When I arrived in Anchuria, I fell in love. I fell in love with San Bavón.
It was the people who struck me. The West derides communism, accusing it of all sorts of crimes, and mocking the relative poverty in communist states. But what I encountered in Anchuria was not something the American school system had prepared me for. What I saw forced me to re-evaluate the concepts of wealth and poverty.
I found a beautiful country, tropical and hot, with remnants of a colonial past, either repurposed or decaying gently. Lush palms and banana trees growing along the roadside. Children in elegant school uniforms, stopping their games in the road to let the occasional bus trundle past. People in groups everywhere, talking, laughing or working together.
People like no others I had ever seen. Such warmth and beauty. Dressed with impeccable taste, despite their meager homes and the very old cars they drive. A kind of dignity comes through in the way they carry themselves. There's a sharp contrast between the Anchurians and the people I knew back home. It helped me see that the more materialistic "developed" nations create consumers, not culture.
In those early months here, I had never seen people more free in the way they lived, in their attitudes, than in San Bavòn. Liberty, equality and fraternity. Never had I seen those lofty ideals realized as profoundly and tangibly as here. It's not just that there was no racism, but there were simply no races to speak of. All possible shades of skin color and not a shred of discrimination. I wondered how they had accomplished this. Racial equality still seems like an unachievable utopian mirage in the States.
But it wasn't just race. For the first time in my life, I saw women and men living with each other in a state of mutual respect. There was no power struggle between them, none of the ever-present friction I was used to. Simply together.
It took me a while just to absorb it all, a sensation of freedom that permeated every minute of every day. No one in my home town would believe it, much less understand it. This was something deeper and more soulful than the freedom of choice offered back home.
I've come to realize that "choice" is a silly concept for people who are truly free. Real freedom is not constantly struggling to differentiate and elevate yourself. It's not choosing between labels and neighborhoods and products, all the things I'd seen people using to define themselves growing up. Real freedom is simply living an enjoyable life, in harmony with those around you.
This knowledge makes the military takeover by General Miraflores all the more cruel. Why would the US government even bother supporting his regime, out of spite? Could the leaders there be threatened by what the Anchurians have achieved, with nowhere near the resources or power of the industrialized countries, and without the undignified circus of the free market? Are the Anchurians being punished for the beauty they possess, the goodness they've cultivated? Whatever it is, it's unjust.
But now the rumors are growing stronger, talking about a rebel army rising up in the hills of Yaguara. And it makes me glad.