No se vende

When it became known in Manila that the Philippine Islands had been ceded to the United States for $20 million, there were angry comments: No se vende un pueblo como se vende un saco de patatas. (You don’t sell a nation like a sack of potatoes).

In fact the Islands were not "sold". The Americans demanded that the Archipelago be turned over to them, which Spain, having lost the war and being threatened with a renewal of the war, could not resist. But $20 million were paid to "compensate" for installations and improvements.

Installations, like buildings, could of course be paid for. But how do you "compensate" for "improvements" if those were of a cultural kind? How much, for instance, should be paid for the enormous advance in education?

How pay for the cultural evolution that made possible the development of a person like Rizal" Or the del Pilars? Or the Lunas? Or Apolinario Mabini?

Recently much printer’s ink was used concerning a small canvas by Juan Luna described as "priceless" by Malacañang and bought for P50 million, using money that belonged to the government workers’ pension fund. Where did Juan Luna learn to paint?

Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo won the first and second prizes in an international art competition in Europe. They had studied painting there. But they had learned the basics of the art in Manila. There is a letter from Resurreccion Hidalgo to Rizal in Manila telling him that the art classes in Madrid were far inferior to those in Manila.

When Rizal was in exile in Dapitan he sculpted a bust of a dead Spanish Jesuit whom he had known when he was a student. That was Father Jose Ignacio Guerrico, one of the pioneers of the mission of Tamontaca in southern Mindanao. The bust was so good, so lifelike, that after Rizal’s death it was brought to the International Exposition in St. Louis as an example of Philippine art. There it was awarded a gold medal.

That was the state of culture that had been attained in the Philippines when the country changed hands and became (as the Filipino poet Cecilio Apostol said at the time) nuevamente ilota (once again enslaved). We were in fact not enslaved. We were "benevolently assimilated", and only three decades later, in 1935, we became a self-governing commonwealth.