Thursday, November 8, 2007

Blog Review: El Güicho Crónico

I am gifted with a "genius radar." It is the ability to process as little as one paragraph of prose through an unpatented internal mechanism too complex to explain and not altogether understood by me, which, in a matter of seconds, provides me with the writer's IQ. Of course, we should never confuse IQ with utility. Hyperintelligent people are rarely useful to society. The smartest man who ever lived collected trolley car transfers and wrote the authoritative text on them, the greatest monument to misplaced scholarship since St. Thomas Aquinas calculated the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin. That much said, I believe I have discovered the greatest intellect in the Cuban-American blogosphere. No, it is not Val Prieto. A joke like that would make me an imbecile.

As it happens, the genius to whom I refer doesn't take himself too seriously, which is a good thing. In a country where someone who reads books is considered a little odd and one who writes books the oddest of the odd, it would hardly do to parade one's intellectual endowments without at least buttressing same with a considerable layer of regular guy bravado. This our genius does a little to excess, but then again he has a lot of genius to cover. In the autobiographical sketch appended to his blog, he reproduces the grateful exhalations of various women in flagrante delicto, a broad slice of humanity — German, Peruvian, French, Argentine, Brazilian, etc. — attesting to the universitality of his libido if not his genius. Do not be fooled: the genius lurks behind the jerk, who exists only to enable the genius to exist. This genius calls himself a "precocious retard," which, socially speaking, most geniuses are; but we believe he is just undercompensating.

This genius is not very prolific. He started his blog in September 2007 and has produced some 25 posts to date. Of course, the biggest fools in blogdom are the most prolix. Quantity can never supply the place of quality, though it is often mistaken for it by even bigger fools.

The name which this newest Cuban blogger goes by is El Güicho Crónico. I am going to refer you to my favorite post from El Güicho which provides the key to who we are as a people and what the future holds for us. Having read it, you will never see our country the same way again. Whether that is a good or bad thing, I will leave to your discretion.

http://guicho-cronico.blogspot.com/2007/10/blog-post.html

10 comments:

Vana said...

Thank you Manuel, I will check it out tomorrow, for alas I have no choice but to be off to labor today.

Anonymous said...

On my Dad's side...the French immigrants who gave birth to the fair city of Cienfuegos. On my Mom's side...from Santander and San Sebastian--Montaneses and Basques who settled in Havana.

bbl said...

I visited the site and loved his writings and still reading. The ethnicity of Cubans is certainly interesting. I can attestefy to that fact:
On my father's side I cannot deny a Scottish descendency and I cannot deny my last name. It is also ever present on my father's face. How they got to Cuba is a mystery that I've been working on for some time and it is still unresolved. On my mother's side: French and Spanish. I can trace the French back to the Haitian revolution of the 1890s when many French settlers fled Haiti and settled in Oriente.

Vana said...

Manuel:

Good blog, very historical, when you are a child you don't listen too closely when the elders speak of your ancestry, I lost a lot leaving Cuba alone in 1962, I know on my mom's side her grandfather was Gallego, there's an Italian in there somewhere, on my dad's side Gallego and Catalan, I met my Granmother's dad, he was still alive in the 50's I swear he must have been a hundred years old, at least he looked that old to me, he was Catalan, I wish I would have listen closely when I had the opportunity, now most of my family on my mother's side is dead.

Anonymous said...

Vana: If you have dates, names and places, and a little bit of time, you can research your way back to some of your anscestors. Church records are a good way to start.
BTW, thank you for your kind words a few months back when lil' Henry shut me out of Babalu (by "lil'" I mean his brain of course). Cheers!

Vana said...

Mamey:

You are so very welcome, I'm glad you are now one of us, and understand the idiocy of the Babalunians, and their lil' brains..lol..


I will try to do a search, thank you for your idea of investigating church records, hope it helps, for I will confess, my family was not very religious.

Güicho said...

Manuel, I owe you a lunch!

Anonymous said...

yes.. funny thread

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