Biography of Garifuna Painter Cruz Bermudez, Tela Honduras former United Fruit Employee

Garifuna painter Cruz Bermudez of Tela, Honduras and His Painting of Miami, Tela

By Wendy Griffin (2013)

Cruz Bermudez is the painter of Dr. James Loucky’s (Profesor of Anthropology at Western Washington University) painting of Miami, a Garifuna community to the west of Tela, Honduras.  Cruz Bermudez lives in Tela.  He was around 62 years old when he painted the painting in 2013.  I bought it from him at the Garifuna Day Celebration  (12 April) in Limon, Honduras 10-12 April 2013 where he had  the only painting exhibit at the Celebration. Thousands of Garifunas came, the Honduran President Pepe Lobo and his full cabinet of Minister including Luis Green, the first and last Minister of SEDINAFRO, and the full leadership of the Garifuna organization ODECO, came as did Catholic priests to celebrate a mass, and the Honduran media and a Columbian Congressman who is known to fight for Afro-Latin American and Indian rights who was a guest speaker.  See the article on Garifuna Day celebration on this blog for more information on that celebration in Limon.

 

A short summary of Cruz Bermudez’s life is in the book Los Garifunas de Honduras (2005) in the back under Anexo dos: Garifunas Destacados (page 302), and there is also a summary of his brother Gil Bermudez’s life who was also a Garifuna painter (page 302). There is a photo of Gil Bermudez in the book, next to one of his paintings. There is another painting of Gil Bermudez and also a painting by Cruz Bermudez in the book Los Garifunas de Honduras. The painting by Cruz a bird with a red breast who had caught a fish, Cruz said the owner said the painting is now in Rome, Italy. There is not a photo of Cruz Bermudez, although I have tried on two occassions to take the photos because in bright sunlight or the wrong shadows, Garifunas are so dark that you can not see their faces, and my photos of Cruz did not show up well enough to be printed in black and white, which requires strong constrast.  Cruz has a copy of Los Garifunas de Honduras and commented that he thought that I included very little information on the banana companies and their effects on the Garifunas. That was one of the things that got me to start researching the Truxillo Railroad for their 100th anniversary this year in 2014.

 

I had done an article on Cruz Bermudez’s life and work for the newspaper Honduras This Week, and a separate one on Gil Bermudez, both of which were published and on the Internet until May 2013, when the newspaper disappeared off the Internet. I had over time done interviews with all the painters who used to sell in the Garifuna Museum in Tela, both Ladinos and Garifunas as a way to help promote the Museum and the Garifuna painters. The visit of Harvard profesor Dr. Pashington Obeng to Honduras with his cousin Tete Cobbah a videographer was directly related to Reading about Garifuna artists in Honduras, specifically those of the Tela área, on the Internet in Honduras This Week and getting a grant to come and study them. They did meet with Cruz Bermudez in the Tela área and Celso Guillen in the Guadelupe are west of Trujillo, as well as meeting me, Garifuna buyeis like Yaya, the Garifuna Emergency Committee and Kike Guiterrez of Jovenes del Futuro and the young people he worked with. They did a video on Kike Guiterrz and his group which they showed to Kofi Annan, the UN General Secretary and a paisano from Ghana.

 

  I did another interivew of Cruz Bermudez in his home in Tela in 2012 and also at the Garifuna Day Celebration in Limon  in 2013, the second as  part of the interivews for the oral history of the Truxillo Railroad period and the first  because I was somewhat involved with the Encaribe Spanish language encyclopedia Project and I was interviewing them to get them included during the second round of articles which, however, were never requested.   

 

Cruz and Gil Bermudez’s family

 

Their father and their father’s mother their grandmother were from the Garifuna community of Limon, Colon. Their father had the opportunity to study high school in Trujillo at the recently founded Institute Departamental Espiritu del Siglo, which as the name indicates was the only high school in the whole department of Colon which is similar in size to the WashingtonState Pacific Coast, and was also the high school that served the Mosquitia, which however had no elementary schools at that time. Trujillo, Colon had a high school becuase the Truxillo Railroad a subsidiary of the United Fruit (now Chiquita) was headquartered in nearby Puerto Castilla but in the 1932-1934 period the Honduran government passed a law which required all Blacks who were not Hondurans (including Belizean Garifunas) to leave Honduras, and physically rounded them up and deported this.

 

The United FruitCompany pointed out that it needed highly qualified people to work in the technical aspects of the railroad and shipping, and there was no high school on the whole Honduran north coast (not even San Pedro Sula which did not even have a public elementary school until 7 years after the Cuyamel Fruit Company and later United Fruit began working in Cortes), so the Honduran government started a high school in Truxillo,which included a teacher training or Normal School section within the high school.   In Tegucigalpa many of the university professors were able to become university professors in the 1960’s and into the 1980’s because their parents had worked for the banana companies and were able to send their children to high schools which the banana companies insisted on, and in the case of La Lima, helped provide. Most older Garifuna teachers and all the Garifuna Departmental school superintendants I have met graduated from the high school of the IDES in Trujillo.

 

After graduating from high school, which put him in the top1 % of educated Hondurans at the time, Cruz Bermudez’s father moved to Tela to work for the Tela Railroad, another United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) subsidiary. At that time the port of Tela was controlled by the Tela Railroad Company and that is where they had their administrative offices, now the El Porvenir bread Company Factory.  The town was divided into Tela vieja, where the Hispanic workers lived, and Tela nueva, the later entirely created by the Tela Railroad Company.  In Tela nueva there were the executive housing of the White workers for the Tela Railroad Company, now the hotel Villas Telamar, which had then and still has a fence around the whole compound, Access to a private beach, and guards with guns to keep undesirable people out. 

 

Across the Street from the executive housing now part of Villas Telamar were the wooden houses of the “empleados de confianza” who were the higher educated employees of the Tela Railroad and in most cases Black. These wooden houses were set up so that there were two families sharing one common kitchen and each with separate sleeping quarters.  These houses were owned by the Railroad Company and if one lost their job, they also became immediately homeless.  In spite of the fact that their consession expresively  prohibited the United Fruit from importing Black labor, and the 1934 law which said Blacks could not come into  Honduras even as tourists which was not repealed until 1949, most of Cruz’s neighbors when he grew up in Tela nueva in the Company house where he still lives and has his gallery “El Aura”were Black English speakers. 

 

Cruz’s father was a mechanic for the Tela Railroad and maybe at times a timekeeper, and Cruz also had worked for the Tela Railroad as a timekeeper.  Cruz’s brother Gil said he got his start in painting painting numbers on the box cars of the Tela Railroad which were made of mahoghany still in the 1980’s when I rode in one of the passenger cars. Another Tela painter Napoleon Villalta Crespo, who is of the Spanish origin merchant family Crespo from Trujillo, but his family also moved to Tela to work with the Tela Railroad, had supplemented his income as a painter of pictures by painting the interior and exterior of the wooden houses/cabins in Villa  Telamar.

 

Timekeeper was one of the most respected Jobs in the Honduran banana companies, and still today in Honduran Spanish the Word for timekeeper is just “timekeeper”. Mechanic was also a priviledged higher level job. When Zoe Laboriel’s father’s spirit or gubida came down at the dugu in his honor he introduced himself by saying “I was the first Black mechanic in Puerto Castilla for the Company.” (The Truxillo Railroad has been closed since 1945, but in Trujillo in 2014, the older Garifunas still call it “la compañía” in Spanish and “la Company” in Garifuna).

 

Cruz said there was some problem with his father recognizing him for a time, so for four years,from about the time he was 8 to being 12 years old, he lived in Limon with his grandmother. So that is why he speaks good Garifuna, and has a Deep appreciation of the Garifuna culture, which is not true of many of the Garifunas who grew up in banana towns. The fact that much of the Garifuna leadership grew up in Coyoles Central (the headquarters of the Standard Fruit Company in Yoro near Olanchito), and in La Ceiba, probably influences why they have never been strong supporters of bilingual intercultural education among the Garifunas, even if they were in charge of it.

 

Sometime after the 1954 General Strike which affected the Tela Railroad and the Standard Railraod, the Tela made a decisión to close its headquarters on the coast and move inland to La Lima outside of San Pedro Sula. The old Tela airport which had been built to serve the banana Company was abandoned and is now mostly used by taxis as a short cut to go to the Garifuna village of San Juan. The nine hole golf course remained, as has the golf course in la Ceiba, although Ihave not only never met a Honduran who played golf, but I have never Heard of one. The dock was abandoned and the Tela railroad shipped their bananas out of Puerto Cortes,which is a modern shipping port. The tela also mechanized three quarters of its Jobs after the 1954 strike in retaliation. The type of banana was changed from Gros Miche to Cavendish, which required being shipped in boxes which was done away from the coast, instead of hauling the stems onto the ships, the Garifuna’s main job, known as “yardero” (people who worked in the shipyard or wharf).  These changes caused Jobs held by Black men (and many of Black women) to disappear, so that most of the Black English speakers immigrated away and in nearby Garifuna villages like San Juan, there is a 75% immigration of people from there who now live in the US. The new big fancy houses, built by the Garifunas in the States for their retirement are usually lived in by their relatives until their return, and those inthe States pay them something to keep upwith the weeds,the repairs and paint,the wáter and light bills, caring for elderly realtives, etc.

 

Before 1865, Tolupan or Jicaque Indians had used the port as an entry for contraband goods with

The British, and the área had not been conquered by the Spanish government.  After signing treaties with the American and British governments prohibitting sales of arms to Honduran indians, and a peace treaty with the Miskito Indians and the British left the north Coastdue to the 1859 treaty to “return” the Bay Islands and the Mosquitia, the Jicaque Indians had no choice but to become part of the Honduran state. A Spanish Jesuit missionary Manuel Subirana was sent among them to “reducir al poblado”, the same old colonial policy, and between 1860 and 1865 he had managed to get some Jicaques to settle in Tela and to plant bananas, as opposed to plantains, which the Jicaques were very fond of a variety called guineos sambos in Honduras which grow wild along honduran rivers in Yoro and in the Mosquitia along the Rio Platano (which has a Pech name Waraská and also a Nahua name). Subirana got them a land title to Tela, but he died in 1865.  He apparantly got them a land title specifically in Tela so that they could used to haul goods to the interior for the Ladinos of Honduras, not because these jicaques who were specifically from the mountains of Yoro wanted to live on the Coast.

 

In 1865, Manuel Subirana died, probably related to exhaustion of trying to help measure 20 land titles for the Jicaques of which two were for the Pech.  Also the wars of Olancho (1860-1865) ended and 600 Olancho families were exiled to Yoro which also included Atlantida at that point. So the Ladinos began to enslave the jicaques of Tela to haul zarzaparrilla, thought to cure syphyllis, and they all ran away, some to Montaña de la Flor, in Francisco Morazon department, which is the only community where Tol is still spoken. The enslaving of Jicaques and of Payas existed even during the time of Manuel Subirana who complains in his letters of jicaques being taken away to haul zarzaparrilla in towns that he had founded, and the whole town of Conquire, Olancho which he tried to get a land title for the Ladinos took away the whole population to forcé them to work for them.   By the 1887 census there were Garifunas (called morenos) in the Tela área.     

 

In the period 1887-1912 Tela and the Laguna de micos área  (west of Tela including Miami where the painting is done, rio Tinto, Tournabe, San Juan, now the área around Miami and towards Tournabe is the Tela Bay resort área) was a signficant área of export of bananas by independent producers, including Garifunas, including Garifuna women who are the main agricutlturalists among the Garifunas. According to Herman Alvarez a Garifuna painter whose family has lived in the San Juan área at least since the beginning of the 20th century, recruiters used tocome to San Juan to recruit laborers for building the Panama canal, and some Garifuna men went, so when the Tela railroad got their concession to the built the Tela Railroad in 1913, the Garifuna men were just returning from having finished the Panama Canal.  The Garifuna men did notusually accept to work as “campeños” to cut weeds with a machete andwear rubber boots, and if someone did, they made fun of him as being an “indio”.  The Garifuna men did a lot of other tasks like cutting mahoghany to clear the fields, help lay track, and especially work on the dock, the “yarderos”.  Herman Alvarez’s father worked as a sailor for United Fruit, including dying in the US, and he paid for herman to attend the English language school in Tela, The Holy Spirit School of the Episcopal Church, because there was no Spanish language primary school in San Juan for another 5 or 6 years until after herman Alvarez had started school.  Cruz and Gil went to Spanish language high schools in Tela.  The Holy Spirit School and the Episcopal church are still in Tela nueva, close to the Villa Telamar complex, and the houses of the Black English speakers in Barrio la Curva where Cruz Lives.  For a number of years, it was prohibited to teach in English in Honduras,during the time of the idea that either we would expel the Black English speaker sor ifthey had rights to be in Honduras,then we would “españolizarlos”.  Not even Honduran Spanish nor the culture of the Ladinos of Honduras has much in common with Spain.

 

When the Tela Railroad built their dock, they built it right where some Garifunas were already living.  First the Honduran government said, that the Garífunas in Tela had to fence their land,which they did not do because they were poor. Then they said they had topay land taxes, which they did not do because they were poor. So the government seized their lands for not complying with the laws and not paying their taxes,and so the Garifunas in the Tela areamoved to the outside áreas like San Juan, Triumfo de la Cruz (the Garifuna village shown in Garifuna in Peril), La Ensenada (the site of the resort shown in Garifuna in Peril)and to the west to Tournabe. The Garifunas from these outlying áreas used to walk into Tela commonly such as to go to high school. There are no high schools in the outlying villages. Triumfo de la Cruz, the hometown of the star of Garifuna in Perilis huge, there were 25 elementary school teachers needed for the elementary school in Triumfo de la Cruz (this name comes from the planting of the Spanish flg with the cros son it  there during the Spanish conquest).   

 

When the Tela Railroad left Tela, they allowed the workers to buy the houses where they had always lived. Cruz bought the house where his father lived and where he and his brothers had grown up, and the father lived there until he died.  Most of the people who owned those wooden houses where the company’s mano de obra calificada lived, sold the land and the hosues,and people who had money tore the oldhouses down and built nice cinder blockhouses.  Cruz’s house is the only one left in the oldstyle of the banana Company employee houses. Cruz knows he could sell the landfor a lot but chooses to remain there.

 

Although he owns the house, he says he had the house for him and his brothers.  Right now his brother Gil is living with a White American woman who is a retiree and who liked to Paint. But it is a rented house which she pays for from her Social Security and when she dies he will have nothing. All of Cruz’s family is talented either musically or artisticly. Another brother also paints andsells in his gallery, and another brother teaches music at CURLA, the university in La Ceiba. He believes he is related to the most famous Garifuna male composer Victor Bermudez who was from Cusuna, iriona, Colon, and was a brakeman for the Truxillo Railroad.  Profesor Angel Batiz says the death of Victor Bermudez’s mother for whom he wrote a song when she died, was the beginning of the Golden Age of Garifuna music, as he travelled all along the line of the Truxillo Railroad which passed through at least 7 large Garifuna villages and he taught people all along the line the songs that he wrote, and people kept them alive by singing them.  Cruz said “Los Bermudez son una sola raza” so he believes Victor Bermudez would have been some sort of uncle. A Danish TV Company made a documentary about his life and his family, the same time they weremaking one on the life of Guillermo yuscaran (an American who retired to Honduras and paints and writes there) as did a Honduran TV channel.

 

After the Tela Railroad left Tela as its headquarters, it became a tourist destination, mainly for people from San Pedro Sula.  When the US began sending US soldiers to Palmerola Air base during the Contra War, the soldiers would go away for weekends to Tela.  This was the start of a scewed type of tourism. Little mestizo boys known as chiqueleros would sell gum to the soldiers and other tourists, and the soldiers would ask or the boys would volunteer information about helping them find girls like their sisters. This would lead to there being twoearly places with AIDS and Flor de Vietnam (penicillan resistant gonorhea) —Comayagua where Palmerola Air Base wasand is (Joint Task Force Bravo) and Tela. Comayagua currently has a significant gang problem, because some of the women who came to  Comayagua to be whores, they married the gringo soldiers and the women went to the US with the solider husband, but then the children left on their own were on the streets, and unprotected and filled with rage became gang members. The book DogBoy is the story of a Honduran boy left on the streets by a mother who immigrated to the States without him, and will not take him to the US even if contacted by Casa Alianza,because she is livingwith a Mexican who does not want to take care of someone else’s kid. The issue of AIDS orphans is significant in Garifuna communities and some other Honduran communities.

 

The girl in the movie El Espiritu de Mi Mama becomes pregnant by a US soldier during this time, asthe US military was doing joint exercises in the Honduran Mosquitia during this time related tothe Contra War against the Sandinistas. When I began to go to Tela in the 1990’s because the Garifuna Museum was there and the painters like Cruz, there was a signficant tourist trade of backpacker tourists.  People would fly into Mexico or Guatemala, travel by bus there, cross over to see Copan, go to Tela and see the beach and the Garifunas, and then go to La Ceiba to fly to the Bay Islands.  

 

These people were described by Bay islanders as Euro-trash. They were not the high end tourists Honduras dreamed of and still dream of. I have known a Garifuna Young man who died of AIDS sharing needles with these kind of tourists inTrujillo, before most Garifunas knew that sharing needles could cause AIDS.  Several of the Garifuna Young men who I knew who left Trujillo married to a foreigner married Europeans—Spanish, German. It always ended badly, including the Young man using drugs and ending back up in Honduras.

 

How Cruz Bermudez Began to Paint Commercially for Sale

 

During the time of the American soldier tourists, an American started a gallery called Galleria Eldon. He organized la Asociacion de Pintores Teleños.  There were both Ladinos and Garifunas in the Association.  Some were self taught (autodidactica) like Cruz Bermudez and Herman Alvarez and some had studied formally in the Honduran high school for Fine Arts (Escuela de Bellas Artes) in Tegucigalpa like Maxima Tomas and Napoleon Villalta Crespo. The American left Tela and Galeria Eldon closed.  Maxima Tomas, who was the Fine Arts teacher at a local high school, sold something that belonged to her and her brother to get money to start the Garifuna Museum.  It was nice and included the Museum with a pretty complete collection of Honduran crafts, an art gallery in which Ladino and Garifuna members could sell in, a bakery for Garifuna breads, a Garifuna food restaurant, a Garifuna craft shop.  We also tried to develop walkingtours in the nearby village of San Juan. I don’t know if it ever even broke even.  After Mitch, the Museum closed. (The land was owned by the Italian owner of Garifuna tours. Garifuna Tours had nothing Garifuna except the Garifuna men usually ran the motorboats and the touristsate lunch which they brought on the beaches of Miami.) Cruz Bermudez began selling from his house, which since it is almost across the street from Villa Telamar, has a significantflow of Canadians through it still last year.  He has a sign for his gallery, which most Honduran Garifunas refuse to put signs on their businesses, so if you are travelling by taxi you can see it. Other Tela painters do not sell with him, and now at over70 years old,  Napoleon Villalta Crespo is suffering from hunger because he lost his job of painting cabins for Villa Telamar,they said we have over 245 ofyour painting, we don’t’ need  more, so he has to do handyman jobs just to eat and does not h ve time to paint, even though he is an awesome painter.

National and International Recognition of Cruz Bermudez's work

Cruz won a placque last year in 2013 for his excellent work in promoting Tela area through his painting from the city of Tela. He was in a show of Pintores Autodidacitcas (Self Taught Painters) in Tegucigalpa at the Salon of the Central Bank and the Spanish language newspapers included information about him in their coverage of that exhibition. A Danish TV crew came and did a documentary about him and about American born painter and writer living in Santa Lucia, Honduras Guillermo Yuscarán.  Honduran TV did a documentary about Cruz and his talented family which included a music professor at CURLA and his brother Gil Bermudez who used to paint. He and his brother were included in the list of Distinguished Garifunas in the book Los Garifunas de Honduras.

 

Cruz Bermudez’s themes to Paint

 

In the Honduras This Week interview he said that he on purpose tried to paint the majority of the rainforest animals and the birds, usually waterbirds, that he knew in his childhood, to remember them.he has spent significant amount of money on cameras capable of photographing birds so that he can paint them later.  So he frequently went to the Micos Lagoon which is a very nice place for birdwatching with many waterbirds previously. Paintings of Miami are popular topics of Tela articles both of Garifunas and of the Ladinos who live in the area and paint.

 

So he painted this painting of Miami as he  remembered it, now that it is no longer that way. PROLANSATE has been against Garifunas fishing in the Micos Lagoon and actually shot at a Garifuna fisherman, killing a Garifuna young boy in the canoe. So Garifuna houses and canoes are no longer common in the Lagoon. The Garifuna restaurant owner Don Pancho who lived in San Juan until he died (photo on page 86 in Los Garifunas de Honduras) said he had 22 grandsons and not one of them knew how to fish.

 

A Garifuna Story of a Garifuna Painter in Honduras and US Ambassador Larry Palmer

To close I want to share a Garifuna story with you. Cruz Bermudez is a Garifuna painter in Tela, Honduras. His father worked as a mechanic and timekeeper for United Fruit and Cruz originally worked as timekeeper for United Fruit before they moved to La Lima. His brother Gil Bermudez who also paints got started painting by painting numbers on United Fruit company box cars. Several years ago, the US government sent a Black US Ambassador to Honduras Larry Palmer.  I don’t know what the Spanish speaking Hondurans made of this, but the Garifunas were excited and asked him to come to Limon which was a Garifuna community having land problems, the same ones in Sarah England’s book on Afro-Central Americans in New York.  So Larry Palmer the US Ambassador who dressed elegantly and wore an Afro hairstyle and had white hair from being older, went to Limon. There is only road going east from Trujillo where I live inTrujillo to the Garifuna villages along the coast and it is a dirt road and at that time it only went to a series of poor Garifuna communities and a few Ladino communities, as opposed to now that it is a major drug route. 

 

So Larry Palmer was coming back from the Garifuna event in Limon and he was driving the big fancy high wheeled sturdy cars that US officials use to drive dirt roads in Honduras. And so as he approaches the main paved road between Trujillo and La Ceiba the police stop him. They ask to see some ID, the car registration, etc.  He presents them and he asks if there is some problem. The police say, NO, it is just that since he was a Black man and he was driving such a nice car they figured it must have been stolen. 

 

When Cruz Bermudez heard the story, he has a son in Limon and goes to visit him there,   Cruz painted a portrait of the US  Amassador to Honduras Larry Palmer which he keeps in his private collection of paintings he will not sell, which also includes a huge painting of Haitians going by boat to Miami called Freedom. He says he painted the portrait as his way to thank Larry Palmer and remember him that he was willing to share with the Garifunas their experiences in Honduras, even being stopped for the crime of driving while Black. In Honduras, the power of the US Ambassador often equals or exceeds that of the Honduran president, so it was very exiciting to the Garifunas that he came and visited them and so he is still remembered in his painting and in their thoughts for that. Some US Ambassadors are in the news a lot, but I never actually heard anything else about Larry Palmer’s stay in Honduras. If you compare that to say the reputation of Negroponte as US Ambassador, the people connected with death squads, antiterrorist military training, killing of US priests by tossing them out of airplanes, being remembered and honored mostly because he spent time with people and listened to them and shared with them, is a vast improvement over many past US representatives to Honduras.  (Excerpted from a letter to President Obama written by Wendy Griffin in 2014).

 

Cruz has a private collection of paintings that he does not sell. One is a big as a whole wall in his gallery. It is called Freedom and is his representation of Haitian boat people in a sailboat trying to reach the US in a strong storm. He was offered $300 (L6,000) for it by an executive of a bank in Miami. He turned it down. He says, “I know I amrich. I own a paintingthat is worth L6,000,just because I like to look at it.” (morethan amonth’s salary for many people in Honduras.) The painting of Larry Palmer is also part of his private collection which he does not sell.

 

Cruz Bermudez’s family

About 14 years ago, he got together with a Ladina woman who is also a painter Maria Lopez, about 25 years younger than he is, and she helped him learn to be a better painter.  They have two primary school age children, aboy and a girl. He also has a grown son in Limon whose mother he never married, and that son is also a talented rap singer, probably in Spanish. His Wife particularly likes to paint Lenca Indians.