ON THE EYE
31
row. Events are on the march! Beaten, yes, but our hearts are
light, our hearts victorious. We are on the eve
of-tomorrow.
. . . Before our eyes the Western Hemisphere spread out its
strange landscapes, the sunlight rippling over everything.... At
Martinique we found one more concentration camp, a hot one,
guarded by great black children and run by crooked police. We
found out about the political economy of the Antilles. A few
families, millionaires in sugar and rum, owned Martinique and
kept it in a moderate slavery-which will last as long as it is
allowed to last-perhaps for a rather long time, because the primi·
tive peoples are a problem.-All of a sudden we found ourselves
strangely free (liberty was unbelievable!) at Trujillo City in the
Dominican Republic. It was a neat little capital, modestly lit, full
of flags and agile young girls dressed in rose and neon blue, who
had every conceivable variety of Eurafrican and Polynesian physi–
ognomy. There were also comradely Spanish refugees, about
whom we could only wonder how, and on what, they lived....
I arrived at Havana during the battle for Leningrad. The
beauty of Havana, its sensual joy, fed by electricity-what a relief
after the blackened cities of Europe. Here I found unexpected
friends. But I was haunted by the thought of Leningrad, by visual
images of a place where I had lived more than ten years, splendid
and grim years, but years that became darker and darker as we
descended the slope, as they began to kill my friends.... I had
arrived at Petrograd at the end of another voyage, across another
age,
in
1919, having been released from prison, and having left
Barcelona in a state of insurrection to join a vaster insurrection.
I travelled sixteen months, fourteen of them in prison, while the
revolution rose towards its crest; Zinoviev welcomed me to a
besieged, frozen and starving city that was in the process of win·
ning a miraculous battle for the future. In 1933 I had to leave that
city on the way from one prison to another; I was being secretly
transferred to the G.P.U.'s inner prison at Moscow-because unre–
mittingly and without fear, we had denounced the Thermidorians
who were leading our revolution into the abyss; This abyss was
not at all a metaphor; we are in it right now. And there will be
no other salvation for Russia than in a revolutionary resurrection.
This resurrection is almost certain, but how much will it cost?
... The airplane teaches us a new vision of the world, a lyrical
