Pete Seeger in Paraguay: The Walls Come Down by Mark Jacobs

It started slowly. Way too slowly for my comfort. I was worried the concert would flop. When Pete Seeger agreed to come to Paraguay under the auspices of the US government, he laid down just one condition: that there be a free concert open to everyone. I was the public affairs officer in the American embassy in the capital, Asunción. Working with municipal authorities, we chose the principal plaza in the city’s downtown as the venue for the concert Seeger stipulated. The Plaza de la Democracia was the right spot, so named after the fall from power just a few years earlier of Alfredo Stroessner, one of Latin America’s most enduring dictators. You couldn’t get any closer to the city’s heart.

People began trickling in. Pete was waiting patiently in a small trailer set up behind the stage as a dressing room. But I couldn’t bear the suspense. I paced. I wanted badly for it to work. As the day dropped and evening came on, the plaza began filling up with hundreds and then thousands of Asunceños ready to hear and see the American legend.

It was a miracle of happenstance that Pete was there, performing under the sponsorship of the American government. I played music with some local musicians, including a Brazilian, Tico DaCosta, married to a Paraguayan. One afternoon Tico handed me a piece of paper with a phone number scribbled on it. This is Pete Seeger’s number. Petey plays some of my songs. Call him up and see if he’ll come to Paraguay. (Tico may have been the only person who ever called the man ‘Petey.’)

I called. Seeger picked up. I introduced myself and invited him. Without hesitation, he said yes. I was stunned.

I was working at that time for the U.S. Information Agency. I called our headquarters in Washington and proposed that they fund a Pete Seeger trip to Paraguay. Before I hung up, I had a commitment. But the bureaucracy’s wheels did not turn fast enough to suit Pete. For a while, nothing seemed to be happening. Then I received a letter from him in the mail, a piece of homemade stationery featuring a maple leaf pressed on waxed paper. The letter was short. Are we going to do this or not?

This was in 1995. The Berlin Wall had gone down in 1989. So had Alfredo Stroessner. The Cold War was over, although nobody knew what to call the new international disorder. ‘Post-Cold War,’ people said, but that only stated the obvious. It was a definition by negation. The old shibboleths about the communist threat no longer applied. Still, one senior USIA officer told me later that he worried about Congressional reaction to our proposal to send a famous figure of resistance on tour abroad, a man who had been blacklisted as a communist during the McCarthy era.

Having received Pete’s letter, I made some noise, and the visit planning went forward expeditiously. I didn’t know what to expect. Neither, I think, did Pete. When I met him at the airport in Asunción, he looked sideways at me, saying matter-of-factly, “When I went overseas in the Sixties to play music, people like you were spying on me.”

Spying, maybe. Observing, definitely.

Pete came with his wife Toshi and his grandson Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, a fine musician who helped his grandfather carry the vocal load; Seeger was in his late ‘70s. They were courteous but reserved. Pete had his own sense of just how unusual his being there was. This was his only U.S. government gig ever. Pointing out that people like me had spied on him in the 1960s was his way of laying down a marker.

As planning on our end went forward, I had been briefly out of the country. When I came back to work, I learned that somehow the police band of the capital had been invited to perform with Seeger. Horror. That couldn’t happen. It fell to one of my cultural section staff members, a Paraguayan with strong diplomatic skills, to disinvite the cop musicians. Instead we called up folksingers, protest singers, musicians for whom performing without worrying about being bludgeoned by Stroessner’s police was still something of a novelty. Come play on a stage with Pete Seeger. They all said yes.

The concert was a smash. The plaza gradually filled up with rocking, swaying bodies. People got seriously into the music, the night, the novelty. Pete and Tao and the Paraguayan musicians took turns playing, and the audience responded with raucous enthusiasm. In addition to Spanish, Paraguayans speak a language of their own called Guaraní. Pete had quizzed me on the language and made a diligent effort to translate the chorus of one of his songs into Guaraní. The accent wasn’t bad, but I’m not sure it carried over the roar of the crowd.

At the end of the performance, all the musicians, Paraguayans and Americans alike, formed a line on the stage. They called me out to join them, and we sang “If I Had a Hammer” in Spanish. Everybody knew the song. It was one of a handful of lapidary moments in my foreign service career.

When the concert was over, I picked up Pete’s guitar and carried it back to the trailer. He seemed mellow and content. He told me, “Mark, I’m going to remember this as one of the three or four best concerts of my life.”

At that point it did not seem odd to me to be carrying Pete’s guitar for him. It didn’t seem like a big deal to him, either. In the three days we had spent together, the wariness I had noticed at the airport had worn away. I told my embassy colleagues not to expect to see me for the duration of the Seegers’ stay. From morning to night, I made myself available. He wanted to see the countryside. I took an embassy car and drove Toshi and him around to see the sights. We ate in out-of-the-way restaurants, and Pete asked a million questions.

The man I got to know was a mix of curiosity and unshakable opinions. He had a pretty good sense of the country’s history of repressive government. Once, when I went to pick him and Toshi up, he invited me to their room. He was watching the local news on television. As it happened, a particularly unctuous political hack, then serving as a government minister, was being interviewed. The man was overweight and looked unhealthy, conforming to the stereotype of a fat-cat politician. Pete didn’t have enough Spanish to follow the conversation, but he picked right up on the minister’s venality. “That man,” he told me censoriously, “needs to get more exercise.”

A few times that week we talked politics. That meant, usually, that I was on the receiving end of a catechism lesson. He spoke emphatically and at length about the injustice of jailing Mumia Abu-Jamal, the activist and former Black Panther, who was in prison for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer. Seeger was a man, after all, who refused to spend the money he earned from the Weavers’ 1963 cover of “Guantanamera.” The money was sitting in a bank account, he told me, until such time as the law permitted him to send it to Cuba.

But if he was unbending in his views, he was flexible and easy to work with, approving a packed schedule of performances and appearances in Asunción. Once, when he registered a mild complaint about something, I don’t remember what, Toshi told me, “Don’t forget, Pete’s never had a boss in his life.” He had requested a translator for the trip. Somehow, the request did not make it to us in the embassy, so I wound up serving as his de facto translator at most of the events and appearances he made.

The most difficult, and the most rewarding, of those interpreter gigs came at the home of then-U.S. Ambassador to Asunción Robert Service. Service invited a diverse group of embassy contacts to an evening performance in the gardens of the residence. A halcyon night of mild weather and a percolating sense of expectation. The embassy contacts were sophisticated professionals who knew exactly who Pete Seeger was.

Robert Service was the son of a famous foreign service officer. John Service had lost his career when he was accused of being one of those who “lost China” by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The son spoke in a level, eloquent voice about the evils of McCarthyism and the blacklist, as well as about going to see Pete Seeger perform when he, Service, was a college student.

Pete was in an expansive mood that night. Maybe, for him, the visit marked the final rounding of a circle. A government that had harassed him and other musicians like him in the 1950s, making it difficult or impossible for them to make a living, had now invited him to perform at an official diplomatic residence. I wish I had thought to ask him a few questions about what he felt, what he thought about the changes. And what about that rounded circle?

He spoke as much as he sang that night. I did my damnedest to render an accurate and feeling version of the remarks he made as he introduced every song that he and Tao sang. I can readily bring back the sense of contentment I experienced that night. Change was happening, and we were in on it. In fact, an opinion piece in the next day’s afternoon paper was headlined, “The Wall Finally Came Down, Last Night at the U.S. Embassy.”

Pete Seeger’s trip to Paraguay marked the end of an era. Throughout the Cold War, the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency employed what they called “cultural diplomacy” to help create a propitious environment for the advancement of foreign policy goals. Musicians, dancers, plastic artists, writers, and university people all went abroad under official sponsorship to present their work and engage in a dialogue with foreign audiences. Some of the less imaginative foreign service officers looked down on cultural diplomacy, seeing it as effete and ephemeral. For them, diplomacy was all about policy. More thoughtful individuals understood the value of Robert Creeley talking with Turkish academics, Duke Ellington playing for Russian audiences in the days of the Soviet Union, Spanish educators visiting the campuses of community colleges in the U.S. Some went a little farther, recognizing such encounters across cultures not for their utility but as a good in themselves.

By the time Pete went to Paraguay, there was persistent talk in Washington about getting rid of cultural diplomacy altogether. We had won the Cold War, hadn’t we? Why continue to spend money on frills? When a Congressman stood up in the House and railed against funding libraries overseas when his constituents’ libraries were woefully lacking, no one in a position of authority in the foreign affairs community challenged his faulty assumption. No one who might have had influence said what having those libraries accomplished, which had to do with that propitious environment for the advancement of policy. Throughout the 1990s, the cultural budget of USIA was relentlessly pared down, year by fiscal year. Because Joseph Duffey, President Clinton’s choice to head the agency, himself did not much believe in cultural diplomacy, he made a poor defender of the work.

The late Senator Jesse Helms thought it was high time to cash in the peace dividend we were due from our Cold War investment. One way to do so was by getting rid of USIA. He worked out a deal with then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that led in 1999 to the dismantling of the agency. The vestigial remains of cultural programs were transferred to the Department of State, where they were largely marginalized.

Pete Seeger was, I think, 79 when he came to Asunción. We worked him hard, and he delivered, performing at concerts, making appearances at schools, talking with anybody we thought it would be useful, or fun, to have a conversation with. The schedule of official events ended on a Friday. I had invited him and Toshi and Tao to come to our house that night to play music with my friends. As that last day wore on, however, I thought I was asking too much of him. He had a plane to catch early Saturday morning. And he was, well, 79. But when I offered him an out, Toshi responded with a firm ‘no.’ “He wants to do this,” she said.

Many Paraguayan houses have a quincho, a roof, usually thatched, over an outdoor party space. Our house had a big one. Pete Seeger’s last night in Paraguay was spent out under our quincho playing music and talking with musicians, only a couple of whom were professionals. He was amiable and respectful, if a bit reserved. He listened to some mediocre songs played in mediocre fashion. He played a few songs himself, told a few stories. In the meantime, Tao taught my kids “Solo le Pido a Dios,” by the Argentine León Gieco, which Seeger had covered.

After a while I quit worrying.

The next morning around seven I drove to the hotel where the Seegers were staying to take them to the airport. We had a small flatbed truck to carry the gear. I will not soon forget the vision of Pete strolling out of the hotel carrying his guitar. Insouciance. He jumped up onto the truck, ready to do his share of the loading. We made the flight in plenty of time.

Last year I bought a book of Pete Seeger stamps. The Seeger “forever” stamp is one of the USPS’s Music Icons series. The ultimate co-optation of dissent, I thought when I saw the image they had chosen.

Later, it occurred to me that putting a man like Seeger on a stamp involves a profound forgetting. A whitewash is performed, details disintegrate, simplicities emerge like a fairy tale from the unconscious, which has its reasons. Look at that stamp, and you probably won’t think about the cruel paranoia of the black list, the bloody, bitter passions of ideological contention, the aggressive know-nothingism of McCarthyism, the routinization of surveillance and intimidation. Thinking about songs that packed a punch, you may not have a clear idea of their target. A line is drawn, finally, between right and wrong. Deciding which side of that line you stand on is not cost-free. Seeger is an icon, all right. I for one do not wish to forget. Recently I had to send an important letter. I put a Seeger stamp on the envelope.