We're finally back on the beaten path. We are seeing more yachts, and only rarely now have an anchorage to ourselves. The Kuna villages are getting larger and less traditional, and they are more accustomed to cruising boats. We've even run into a few Kuna who speak a little English; although Americans are in the minority among cruisers here, most cruisers speak English pretty well.
Caledonia, our first stop, is the smallest and most traditional Kuna community we have visited. Nearly all the buildings are simple wood and bamboo huts with palm-frond roofs, arranged in family compounds with a kitchen hut (an open fire for cooking, a few shelves for foodstuffs), a sleeping hut, and a small outhouse hanging over the water. The dirt streets of the village are swept clean. The women wear mola blouses, cover their heads with scarfs, wear bright beaded jewelry on their arms and legs. The men paddle or sail their dugout canoes to go fishing or farming; as far as we could tell, there is only one outboard motor in the whole village. The short dirt airstrip sees one flight a day to Panama City -- that is, if the tiny plane isn't filled up from its previous stops, in which case would-be passengers must wait until the next day. While we were there, Kuna were constantly dropping by. Sometimes it was a canoe full of women wanting to sell molas, or men wanting to sell fish, but frequently we had visitors who just wanted to chat, to ask questions, and stare at us and our boat. In town, a great cloud of children flocked around us, following us from place to place, and women darted out from behind bamboo walls to wave molas hopefully in our direction.
As primitive as Caledonia is, it's still far more integrated into the modern world than the Wareo villages we saw along the Rio Macareo in Venezuela. Not only is there no air service to these villages, we didn't see a plane pass overhead the whole time we were there. Caledonia has two phone booths, the Wareo none. Boats from Colombia come to Caledonia nearly daily to buy coconuts and bananas, and the Kuna can spend their small earnings in the little store on the island. The Wareo have no money at all, but barter for goods. All but a few Kuna villages have schools, and most people (other than the older women) speak Spanish fluently in addition to their own Kuna language. Most of the Wareo we met spoke only a rough Spanish, like ours, a few nouns and verbs. We particularly noticed that most of the Kuna, even the old people, have all their teeth. Nearly all the Wareo over 25 have large gaps in their smiles, but as those with children asked for toothbrushes and toothpaste, hopefully the younger generation will grow up with healthy teeth.
Playon Chico's population is nearly triple that of Caledonia. It's a village in transition; some women dress traditionally, others, particularly the younger ones, don't. Power lines down the main street distribute electricity from a generator, and gas stoves are used for cooking. We saw many cinderblock buildings: churches, stores, a school, and even a cinema. (now playing: Mulan, and Pearl Harbor.) The buildings that people lived in, however, appeared to all be bamboo huts, although several had roofs of corrugated tin instead of palm fronds. We were invited into a couple, both of which were basically one very large room with rudimentary walls here and there. Both beds and hammocks are used for sleeping, and furniture ranges from rough-cut wooden slabs to the kind of molded plastic chairs and tables you might find at K-Mart. The airstrip is long and paved, and several aircraft of various size arrive and depart each day. Our anchorage at Snug Harbor was a long paddle from the village, which perhaps explains why we had no mola-sellers stop by, but a few fishermen always hailed us on their way back home. Most wanted to sell the usual small lobsters and small fish, but one particular pair of wiry young men always had the most enormous reef crabs we have ever seen. We saw lots of traditional dugouts, but also two or three larger canoes pieced together from wood, with flat transoms for outboard motors. When we dinghied to the village for a visit, we attracted some attention, especially from the children, but not as much as we had in Caledonia.
Then we anchored for a few days near a pair of towns, Nargana and Corazon de Jesus, which sit on neighboring islets connected by a bridge. The people of these villages have moved even further from the traditional Kuna way of life. From the water, the towns look like any third-world waterfront, crowded ramshackle cinderblock houses, power lines strung haphazardly across poles and walls, television aerials (fastened to tall bamboo poles!) poking up at odd angles, an occasional bamboo wall or thatch roof. The outhouses are all corrugated tin, instead of bamboo and wood. Many houses are ordinary cinderblock houses that wouldn't look out of place anywhere else in the Caribbean, or a combination of cinderblock and bamboo (sort of weird), and at least some of the houses not on the shoreline have some sort of indoor plumbing. Interestingly, although the other two villages we visited have water piped in from the mainland, at least some of the people here go up the nearby Rio Diablo with jugs to collect freshwater and wash laundry. We ate lunch in a restaurant(!) while waiting for fresh bread to come out of the oven at a nearby bakery. Nearly all of the women we saw were in modern dress, and many had long hair -- in traditional Kuna culture, a girl's long hair is cut when she reaches puberty, to show that she is ready to marry. But Kuna culture has taken a back seat to mainstream religion here. Many houses had crosses and Christian-themed paintings on the walls, and we were told there are Catholic, Mormon, and several types of Protestant churches in town. We saw more boats with outboard motors than traditional dugout canoes, and only one of them (selling bananas) approached our boat while we were anchored there. But the most striking difference between Nargana and the other towns was that when we strolled down the dirt road by the central plaza, no children came running. We saw one or two peek through a doorway and call, "Hola," but the streets were mostly empty. In Caledonia the children fished along the shore and ran to surround us, in Playon Chico they did cartwheels in the street and waved as we passed, but where were the children of Nargana? When one man invited us into his house, we discovered the answer: they were all watching television.
We spent some time in Nargana talking with Federico, who (like Julio in Caledonia) collects boat cards and likes to talk with visiting cruisers. He speaks a little English, learned from the cruisers. He is originally from Ustupu, a more traditional village, but married a woman from Nargana and moved there. He doesn't like the move away from Kuna culture, that the women don't make molas, that the children don't respect their history, that they throw trash in the street and are rude to strangers. He says he tries to teach his children the things he learned from his grandparents. (But when they were there, what were they doing? Watching television.)
Today, February 21, is the anniversary of the Kuna Revolution. As I was told (in Spanish, so I probably have the details wrong), in 1925 the Panamanian government tried to forcibly assimilate the Kuna. They were to forget their native dress, their language, their culture, and become like the other Panamanians. The Panamanian police force came into several towns, including Playon Chico, where it just so happened that an American anthropologist named Richard O. March was studying the Kuna. The Kuna appealed to March, who naturally didn't want to see the culture he was studying vanish, and he appealed to the American embassy. In those days Panama was strongly tied to the United States,the economic and political legacy of the Canal and the first Canal treaty, and although the United States did not yet have the global influence it eventually acquired, it could still throw its weight around in the Americas. Some Kuna men were taken to Florida, under pretext of a medical study, and trained in the use of firearms; an American ship blockaded Colon to prevent reinforcements from reaching the San Blas islands. The Panamanian policemen were massacred, and the government yielded. The Kuna won the right to self-government in their strip of Panama, a region called the Comarca de San Blas, or Kuna Yala. The government can't do anything in the area without local approval.
But the government, according to several of the Kuna we spoke with, doesn't really care about the people of the San Blas. They feel ignored by Panama, dependent on the coconut trade to Colombia and what they can get by selling molas to middlemen who sell them in tourist stores in Panama City and Cartagena. They are poor, and they don't like being poor. They see yachties zip around in dinghies with outboard motors, drinking cold drinks, grilling steaks pulled from the freezer. As visitors, naturally we want to see the picturesque indigenous culture, the bamboo huts and dugout canoes. But it seems a little ridiculous and patronizing to expect them to paddle when they could get there a lot faster and easier using outboards. So even though they won their revolution in 1925, Panama (or really, America; or really, the Global Economy) will win in the end. Eventually every home in the San Blas will have a refrigerator and a television. Mola-making will be a craft for the tourist trade, no longer the everyday activity of women. The only people who will speak the Kuna language will be a few old people. Kuna culture may survive, if the children learn their history along with their modern schoolwork. Unless they are too busy watching television.