THE KALAHARI DESERT: MERKATS AND BUSHMEN

To the north of South Africa, southern Botswana and Namibia stand reddish 70,000 kilometers of desert. It is the Kalahari Desert which means "great thirst." It is the territory of the Bushmen and meerkats.

Its climate ranges from 40 degrees Celsius in summer to freezing temperatures in winter. It has, of course, little wildlife, but in the short winter the river Okavango Delta forms a swamp where come to drink lions, leopards, buffaloes, rhinos, zebras and wild boar among many other animals. This impressive diversity of members of the wild kingdom disappears with the completion of the rains since immigrating in search of better pastures. But they always return the following winter. In areas of this vast desert wild melons grow like carpets and a cactus-like plant called Hoodia Gordonii is a fundamental part in the diet of the Bushmen and whose property has been recently discovered by western physicians to lose weight. In fact it is almost impossible to find a bushman obese.

The Kalahari is the land of the meerkat, a type of mongoose mind which sudden raise to fame after appearing timon a character in the film helm of Disney’s “The Lion King”. Interestingly the position to take on two legs raised and as they take turns keeping watch while the other group members hunt or dig with their curved claws. Meerkats have a complex organization with different roles depending on the position in the social scale.

The Kalahari is the land of the Bushmen an ancient genetic group who was the first homo sapiens-sapiens moved out of Africa into Asia Minor thousands of years ago. Those who stayed are tribes that are not related to what we know as black Africans; as a matter of fact they are related to the Tasmanians. The Tasmanians are a so-called lost tribes located on the island of Tasmania south of Australia. They are entirety extinguished. After hunting them like animals in 1836 when there were only 2000, were persuaded by George Robinson, a Christian missionary "friend" to be located on a small island north of Tasmania called Finders. They were forced to dress like Westerners and converting to Christianity. They could not adapt to this radical change in their ancestral customs were banned. Eleven years later only 47 Tasmanians survived. In 1865 the last male died and in 1876 the last Tasmanian woman. Her name was Truganini .

The Bushmen are very different to anything known even in Africa, although the term Bushman or man of the forest is a term coined by the Netherlands immigrants. Actually the correct term is San. The most peculiar is the language based on clicks where no fewer than 80 click using different lips, teeth and tongue. Some sound like a kiss, others are admitted, entering air into the mouth and other graduates taking air from the mouth. It is believed that they are also related to pygmies.

Since the arrival of Europeans the Bushmen have been decimated to the point that currently they are less than 65,000. In the eighties were discovered potential diamond deposits in the Kalahari Desert, so that the Bushmen have been evicted from their land, and give it in concession to the European company which operates the sites.

The Bushmen have organized in a group called “First People of the Kalahari” and have developed a struggle to maintain possession of their desert lands.

In 2006 the organization won a victory when Botswana’s high court ruled that the San or Bushmen were entitled to return to their lands and hunting without a license, as until now demanded the authorities to press the exit from the mine diamond area.

FIELD HOCKEY IN PANAMA

By: Felipe Argote

It is not required to the general public to follow in detail the national tournaments of dominoes, checkers, or poker. Neither it is necessary for everyone to know when are the national water polo tournaments, racing canoes or equestrian. Usually most of the population follows up the most popular sports like baseball, football and boxing. Otherwise, we are talking with a sports journalist. In this case ignorance is not a merit.

I have witnessed in recent weeks to confirm that, due to the common sense of the Panamanians, very few sports journalists who bother to investigate what happens in sports and many just read the news in the paper and discussed with generic arguments.

So it is a shame that more than a sports journalist insist on saying that Panama cannot play hockey just because ... I’ve never seen it. That is to want to make ignorance a talent.

For six years, I knew that at the Episcopal San Cristobal Institute made the first calls were to start the practice of a sport that is becoming more and more popular in Central and South America; the hockey. In the Caribbean is already one of the most popular sports because of its relationship with Europe which magnified the sport, which is considered originated in India and Pakistan and imported by the Europeans when they were colonies. In fact previously dominated Pakistan and India in international championships , but now they do Germany, Holland , England, Spain , Argentina , Australia and China. In Spain it is called grass hockey. If we had Brazil we have no almost all the finalist of the football World Cup finalists.

It is very likely; due to field hockey is a dynamic very similar to football, although both the technical as the rules differ in this popular sport. As in the United States soccer is not very popular, field hockey is viewed as a sport for women's eminently as they play that wild ice hockey, where players make a cover themselves from head to toe to withstand the hard knocks to the players.

I attended in Panama as a spectator at least two national championships in field hockey where I have seen teams of Coclé, Chiriquí, Colón and Panamá both women and men. Although they do not play as current world champions Germany and the Netherlands neither do the Panamanians football players, or any other sport.

Perhaps these writers should attend these sporting activities and not shocked by what they not know, only to return from the Central American and Caribbean Games to say, “The sport in Panama is a shame!” I have found that in the Games Central American and Caribbean neighboring countries like El Salvador and Costa Rica presented teams of field hockey and Panama was only with the same baseball and football teams! How bad we are! What a shame! Stupid.

ZAMINAMINA

 The news has spread like wildfire, especially on the web. Shakira plagiarized Wilfrido Vargas´song sung by the "Girls of Can" of Dominican Republican in the eighties called "The black man cannot", but known as Zaminamina.

The song, which is nothing less than the World Cup´anthem at of South Africa and it has become next to "Wave Your Flag" K`naan, in the most played tunes in almost every country in the world. Although Africans are more identified with the song of K`nan, even though this is Coca Cola promotion, because it is interpreted by the African Somali origin who always sings to his African roots, but he lives since thirteen in Canada.

Waka waka, as is known the song that plays Shakira, is not a creation of the Colombian performer and composer, but neither it is original performed by Wilfrido Vargas or the "Girls of Can ". It is a traditional African song, sung in Fang language, a variant of the Bantu. This language is spoken in part of Equatorial Guinea, South Gabon, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo and the islands of Sao Tome and Principe. In total the Fang language is spoken by a million people so waka waka sounds like a tongue twister for most Africans , more than 1.2 billion people who speak a language other than Fang.

Waka Waka is an action you or your but its conceptual translation Fang language would be something like you can. As always beckon twister, maybe this song is always so tacky. The letter in its original language is as follows:

Zamina mine hé hé

Waka Waka he he

Zamina ou mine

Zangalewa

Anawam ha ha

On the meaning in english some have posted the following:

"It does not hurt the coup, there is no fear, take off the dust, stand up and go back into the ring"

Totally made up. The true but not literal translation is:

Come ye eh eh

You do it he he

Who sent you?

Who called you?

Yes, is me

The song is definitely not original but neither is Shakira nor Wilfrido Vargas and can girls as we have said. It's a song generally used in the army of Cameroon, but also by the Boy Scouts in this central African country. Although it is traditional, made famous by a band called the Golden Sounds in the eighties, and became so famous that they changed the name of the band to Waka waka .

The original song has another part that does not appear in the version of Shakira but if the can girls of the eighties :

Yango hé hé

Yango hé hé

Zamina ou mine

Zangalewa

Anawam ha ha

It translates as follows:

I hoped I

I hoped I

Who sent you ?

Who called you ?

Yes, Is me

This song has been recorded by no less than ten bands.

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

From 6000 years ago were known and recovers the diamonds at Ban Rivers. Until the early nineteenth century it was considered that it was only possible to get them in commercial quantities in India and Brazil. But this changed dramatically in 1866 when a peasant named Erasmus Jacobs found a white stone on the bank of Orange River near Hopetown in South Africa. It was a diamond of 4.25 grams. Five years later he was found a similar stone on a hill called Colesberg Kopje near the first finding with the difference that was four times larger: 16.7 grams or 83.5 carats. This second finding determined the start of the call South African diamond fever.

Thousands of miners arrived as a marabunta to make the hill disappear by the effort of their muscles. But they didn’t stop, they continued to diamond digging and pulling up into a hole of 400 meters wide and 1097 meters deep. In 1914 when the mine closed, they had hand moved twenty tons of earth.

It is the deepest hole made by human hands. They only used picks, shovels, muscles and the greed of more than fifty thousand white adventurers from Europe mostly in search of diamonds to get rich suddenly.

The city was renamed Kimberly in honor of foreign minister of England in 1873 John Wodehouse, First Earl of Kimberley.

The term diamond comes from Greek and means unchanging, unbreakable. The Greeks knew from 3,000 years ago. They came from India where they were collected from the rivers Penner, Krishna and Godavari. In India were used as religious icons and a engraving tools for its hardness.

Humphry Davy was a British chemist, in 1813 found that the diamond is not nothing but cooked carbon at high pressure between 45-60 kilo bars and high temperatures of 900-1300 Celsius degrees. They are very special conditions that are only found in the mantle of the lithosphere and the place where a meteorite falls

Since its inception was a company owned and Cecil Rhodes who raised an empire by slave labor of Africans who never seized the benefits of diamond production. Rhodes´ company, De Beers still controls the diamonds market today and is the one that popularized the slogan "Diamonds are forever", declared the slogan of the twentieth century. Currently the company is controlled by the Oppenheimer family.

De Beers has been widely criticized for continuing for more than a century a policy that gives priority to increase their wealth over the people. They are accused of forcing the bushmen, those peaceful people of the Kalahari out of their ancient territory, to facilitate the company´s extraction and appropriation of diamonds from their territories. They are also accused of promoting the so-called blood diamonds encouraging coups and military uprisings to control diamond-mining centers .

Some famous English models such as Erin O'Connor and Lily Cole and supermodel Somali Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid have publicly renounced advertising campaigns for this company De Beers.

SOUTH AFRICA: FIRST HEART TRANSPLANT

By: Felipe Argote

Cape Town, South Africa. December 3, 1967. Denise Darvall, a 25 year old girl dies in a car accident. Nearby, Wshkansky Louise, a 53 year old white man was lying on a bed of the Groote Schuur hospital, terminally ill with a heart beyond repair, added to acute diabetes. At that time Dr. Christian Barnard, born in South Africa and graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1953, give him the news he had got a heart with the necessary conditions for transplantation. His assistant was Hamilton Naki, a black man who was hired as a gardener, but little by little for his great skill has become imperative for the surgeon assistant

The long operation was a success and became the first heart transplant of a human being. The patient said he felt much better with the heart of the girl Denise Darvall. Unfortunately the patient died 18 days later of pneumonia.

A month later, on January 2, 1968, underwent the second operation to transplant a healthy heart in the body of a terminally ill patient. This time the heart belonged to Clive Haupt, a black man who died in an accident. The recipient was Phillip Blaiberg, a white man. This time the patient spent over a year and a half with the heart implanted. It happened in South Africa in the middle of the racist policy of apartheid. Hamilton Naki would say many years later that if he were out in the photo that traveled the world with news of the success of the transplant he had been put in jail.

So it was in South Africa where was performed the first heart transplant in history and developed a white man and a black one. Both placed the heart of a black man in a white body and this survived.

Bernard married several times. His first wife was Louwtjie had two children: Dirdre and Andre. Andre committed suicide because his parents' divorce. He then married Barbara Zoellner of nineteen in 1984, when Barnard had turned 62. She left him a couple of years later to marry a Portuguese businessman. Barnard later married Evelyn Entleder 24 years when he passed 65. She left him too. Finally Karen married 24 years Setzkorn and had two daughters Armin and Lara. He gave birth to Lara at seventy-four years old.

Hamilton Naki, the black assistant to Bernard in the Groote Schuur hospital was for the official records of the hospital a gardener. Naki not only contributed directly to the transplant operations, he held the position of laboratory technician researched kidney transplants, heart and liver, by special permission, while his formal position was still a gardener. He trained a large number of young surgeons for over forty years. But his salary and position in the organizational chart was a gardener and that he received his retirement pay $286 a month.

Naki was born in 1926 in the Transkei, never finished elementary school, was one of the greatest surgeons in the world but always had to work anonymously with the complicity of the authorities of the hospital but was never paid fair. Those were the days of apartheid.

At the drop of the apartheid the whole truth was known. Hamilton retired in 1991 at the age of 65 years, then changed his truck to a mobile clinic where he served for free to the poor. In 2001 he was finally recognized its merits, after ten years of having retired with a salary of a gardener. During the act of recognizing the surgeon Christian Bernard testified that he was Naki who removed the heart of Denise Darvall, the night of December 3, 1967 with the launch of the first successful experience of heart transplantation. Technically, Haki was better than me said Christian Barnard

In 2003 he was given an honorary degree of doctor of medicine at the University of Cape Town and the National Order of Mapungubwe in Bronze. He lived in a shack without running water or electricity.

Christian Barnard died that year at the age of 82. Hamilton Naki died on May 29, 2005 at the age of 79.

MADIBA

By: Felipe Argote

Was born in a small village of 300 inhabitants called Qunu in Xhosa in the Transkei, which means "beyond the river" on June 18, 1918. Spent 27 years imprisoned by the racist regime that instituted apartheid in South Africa. But they never broke his spirit even though they offered freedom more than once in exchange for agreeing to withdraw into a Bantustan, a segregated area for blacks to live away from inhabited by whites.

He said that only come out of prison as a free man. In fact, in 1990 he came out after an agreement with then-President Frederick De Clerk to dismantle the racist regime. In 1994 he was the first president of the Republic of South Africa without apartheid.

Mandela graduated as lawyer in 1942. Two years later began his activism in the African National Congress, a peace movement that fought against the oppression of blacks. He was 24 years old. He quickly became one of the leaders of the youth league of the ANC. In 1952 he was the leader of youth when civil disobedience campaigns began. That same year he became the president of the ANC branch in the Transvaal at the very moment that deepened the repression against the black movement, with the arrest of 8,000 people, including Nelson Mandela. He was sentenced to remain confined for three years in Johannesburg banned to mobilize from anywhere in the country. In Johannesburg, Mandela opened the first black law firm in South Africa.

In 1955 he served his sentence and immediately starts a new campaign: The Freedom Charter. It was a document that promoted racial desegregation and freedom for blacks, as well as land reform and a fair distribution of wealth.

In 1960, the Sharpeville massacre happened. Police fired on a peaceful demonstration protesting against apartheid. They killed 69, including men, women and children. Mandela was imprisoned without trial and accused of treason, but was released in 1961. This killing marks a historical variant. From this slaughter fraction Mandela heads the ANC which is decided by the armed struggle they convinced that peaceful dialogue was useless for the racist regime. They organized "the spear of the nation," the armed wing of the "National Action Congress of All Africa" which he was the honorary secretary. In those days did not allow blacks people to the vote, it was prohibited interracial marriage, interracial parties were prohibited and the residence of blacks in white areas, among many other absurd measures.

In 1962 Mandela leaves the country for military training in other African countries where there were armed movements. Upon his return he was arrested and sentenced first to five years in prison and then to life imprisonment. In prison, he becomes the symbol of the struggle for freedom of the broad majority of South Africans men and women.

He was imprisoned until 1990 when he agrees with President Frederick De Clerk for the democratization process after the departure of Pieter Willem Botha, who suffered a stroke while enjoying the mandate.

With De Clerk he established the timetable for democratization. In 1994 Mandela was the first president of democratic South Africa and De Clerk his vice president. They then shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Despite the insistence to be reelected from many politicians who considered him the guarantor of stability, he refused to re-election in 1999 when his term ended.

Nelson Mandela has been married three times and had three daughters and three sons. In 1944 he married Evelyn Ntoko at the age of 26 years. With her he had a daughter who died at the age of infancy and three sons, Madibi who died in a car accident in 1969 and Makgatho who died of AIDS in 2005. At thirteen years of his first marriage he divorce from Evelyn. Then he married Winnie Madikizela in 1957 and they had two daughters Zenani and Zindziswa in 1958 and 1960 respectively while incarcerated. Winnie is undoubtedly the best known because she was high leader of the ANC. From Winnie Mandela he divorced in 1996, two years after being separated after a scandal involving Winnie and his bodyguard in the death of young blacks.

Finally he married Graca Machel in 1998. He was 80 years. Graca is the daughter of Samora Moises Machel, the historic leader of the Front for Liberation of Mozambique, FRELIMO, who won his country's decolonization and was its first president, and who was killed as is believed by an operation jointly developed by Pier Botha then president of South Africa and the Soviet ambassador in Mozambique, when the Soviet Union considered that Machel, who established a pro-Russian regime, was getting out of hand.

TOXIC ASSETS

By: Felipe Argote

The euphemism the specialists current linked to Austrian economics and finance, often uses to cover the actual terms are so discredited that sound bad no matter the language. If you read in a publication about bad debts and junk investments the reader will know it refers to properties with little chance of becoming liquid at book value.

So the ultra conservative trend experts coined the term toxic assets as verbal paint tried revamping the thousands of millions of dollars locked in properties that are now well below book value, explode like a balloon after the housing bubble that they created.

In September 1988 while in the presidency of George Bush exploded the last U.S. financial system crisis. The reason is none other than the minimal state supervision in financial transactions as a cornerstone of the neoliberal model, which made the merchants bank loans mortgage borrowers unable to pay.

The system was not all that complicated. It offered you established a payment mortgages to purchase homes beyond the payment capacity of cancellations by customers who were not the same throughout the course of the credit. For example, they offer you to pay a relatively low monthly payment the first five years and then a monthly increase for the fifth year, and then another increase from the tenth, arguing that even though today you can not pay the monthly, you would pay in the fifth and tenth. They assumed that the growth of the economy and growth in the debtor's income would have capacity to pay when they appropriate the increase. Of course, the fifth year, many could not afford the enhancement in the installment and lost their homes. Million borrowers became homeless.

Some commented that such sales unsuspecting high risk are not suitable for banks and is therefore suspect that they placed the noose around their own neck. Nope. The bank in turn sells the receivables in the form of bonds. The buyer at that time would have no apprehensions of getting the bonus because almost by definition is considered the safest investments are those backed by mortgages. So the banks sell the debt and recover the gain.

Of course, this end in a kind of Ponzi scheme in our area better known as a variety of pyramid.

The situation in September 2008, could not be scheduled less than frightening. The fall of Lehman Brothers puts the American economy to the edge with immediate effect in England first and then the rest of the developed world. Lehman Brothers is a financial giant created in 1844 by an immigrant from Bavaria, Germany. He called the company with his name H. Lehman but then with the inclusion of their children Emanuel and Mayer was named Lehman Brothers.

Then fell in line mortgage companies The Federal National Mortgage Association, popularly known as Fannie Mae and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, better known as Freddie Mac, and later the insurer AIG American International Group, Inc. (AIG). This one is the largest U.S. insurer.

It stuck in waist-crisis discussion of neoliberal conservatives was how the state should intervene to avert catastrophe. Here are again the toxic assets. It was proposed that the government, with taxpayers' money acquire the bank devalued properties. Their Republican political and theoretical training not even allowed to see the possibility of nationalizing these companies, the state with a share in the private sector was a sacrilege. But although it is not part of the manual, they wanted the government to get rid of their toxic assets buying them at their book value. Faced with this dilemma no one decides to take the step and the crisis got worse day by day. This was in the midst of the American elections. Even the Republican candidate John McCain stops his campaign and went to Washington to participate in the discussion of the crisis.

At the end it was England and Prime Minister Gordon Brown who decided to nationalize the failing firms instead of buying their toxic assets. United States imitated and took up to 80% of AIG making it a state enterprise. Nobody would have suspected three years before that a fundamentalist neoliberal government would take measures like these more like a Keynesian model to that of Hayek and his followers. The new Barack Obama administration acquires General Motors to buy 80% of its shares. Then buy lots of shares of companies as important as Citigroup, Chrysler, GMAC and others. The toxic assets are still there, but companies and dignitaries enjoyed a strong economic boost from the taxpayer, through the socialization of the losses of their companies

PLES THE LADY AND TAUNG THE CHILD

By: Felipe Argote

In times of the beginning of the World Cup, two residents of Johannes burg, South Africa for sure will attend the appointment to show up for the thousands of fans and athletes that will visit their country. They are Mrs Ples and the Taung child. Of course they should be very excited as they were millions of years waiting for a chance to showcase their country.

Mrs Ples is between 2.8 and three million years. This is the most complete skull found so far of Australopithecus africanus. It was discovered in the province of Gauteng, formerly known as Transvaal, in the Sterkfontein area, northeast of Johannesburg. Australupitecus comes from the Latin australis, southern, and Greek pithekos, monkey. The size of his brain was similar to today's so-called Great Apes, but the particular is that they are the first monkeys to move bipedal, which leads them to regard as a phase of pre-evolution of humans. It was discovered in 1947 by Dr Robert Broom, a Scotch who settled for life in South Africa. The name of Mrs Ples have given it first arises from the scientific designation of Plesiantropus transvaalensis or almost human of Transvaal

The Taung child is popularly known as an infant skull 2.3 million years found in Taung, South Africa north of Johannesburg on 1924. His teeth are milk and final teeth were emerging. It is believed that at the time of his death had the age of 3 years. Their discovery is assigned to Raynond Dart, a professor of neuroanatomy at the University of Johannesburg. Their finding gives rise to the modern science of paleontology. In principle, the scientific community refused to consider the discovery of Dart like a hominid close relative of humans. For its racist conception the scientist could not accept that humans emerge from Africa and thus placed the Taung child as an ancestor of chimpanzees. But the weight of the evidence of this and subsequent findings could not only confirm that humanity emerged from this continent. Unlike chimpanzees the bony ridge over the eyes of the Taung child is not separated from the front by a groove, and the canine teeth are much smaller. This puts it in the family of hominids or great apes in which humans are.

The racist British society, was so absorbed in their esteem low, they created one of the biggest fraud in the history of paleontology to support that early humans had emerged in England. Upon discovery of the Taung child in South Africa as the ancestor of humans it was the thesis generally accepted by the scientific community that the link between apes and humans was found in 1908 in Piltdown, England, by Charles Dawson, an amateur archaeologist and Smith Woodward, a famous paleontologist born in Cheshire, England. Woodward was secretary of the Paleontological Society and president of the Geological Society of London. He had been awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society, Lyell Medal and the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society, the Linnean Medal of the Linnean Society and the Clarke Medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales.

According to Dawson and Woodward they had found a skull, a tooth and jaw in Sussex in southern England in 1908. In 1953, forty-five years later, a dentist named A. T. Marson has ruled nothing less than the remains had been chemically treated to give the same pitch and the tooth was from a monkey, the skull was of a modern human and the jaw of a chimpanzee.

The respected members of the British scientific society with supine ignorance could not accept what we now take for granted: The first humans emerged in southern Africa.

The broad area where the fossils were located call Mrs Ples and the Taung child is in what has been declared the birthplace of humanity by UNESCO in the world heritage area that includes the Sterkfontein Caves and Wonder Cave and others where have found remains of at least 700 hominids. These hominids are the same group as the Australopithecus afererensis found in Ethiopia in 1974 in the area of the Afar tribe of which the most famous is Lucy, the most complete skeleton of an Australopithecus to confirm his walk erect. They are the ancestors of Homo habilis, whose remains are found primarily in Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia.

BIG RIVER

By: Felipe Argote

At eight grade of school I had the joy and sadness to read Mark Twin´s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I was delighted to discover that reading was a world that would give me great satisfaction in life, and gave me joys that I never imagined, but at the same time sadness because I discovered I had lost several years of my life thinking that reading was a torturous punishment to which teachers forced me in an effort to make me the most miserable guy in the world. I already had bad experiences when reading novels unbearable for my age as Platero and me, and others which teachers forced me to memorize characters and events but not to analyze, neither enjoy their content.

So when I read Mark Twin and the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and then The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn started my interest in reading that I kept until today.

Because of this I was so interesting to watch Rio Grande, the musical, at Teatro en Círculo, an adaptation of Mark Twin's novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Originally performed by Roger Miller and William Haupt, winner of seven Tony Awards, has been held in Panama under the production of Alida Gerbaud, under the direction of the prizewinner Bruce Quinn, with musical direction by Dino Nugent, and choreography by Barbara Berger at the Theatre in Circle. It was like to reconnect with the old heroes of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and many of his characters. I went back I ran into Tom and his great friend, the tramp Huckleberry Finn, with the slave Jim, the Widow Douglas and Judge Thatcher.

This staging of Bruce Quinn, Dino Nugent, and Barbara Berger surprised me greatly as the height at which the theater has been raised in Panama, especially musicals.

Best of the work without a doubt are the voices, with special mention to the singers Odette Versailles and Yaritza Maga soloists who make the scene in "The Crossing" in which a boat slip where the slaves chained return were caught after trying to escape. Very good was also the musical participation of Daniel Gallimore who plays the slave Jim in particular in the interpretation of "Free at Last". About the actions we should mention the prominent role of Arturo Montenegro Ludwik Tapia and who are presented as King and Duke, a pair of con men on the way that give the play a touch of Boudeville especially in the scene "The Royal Nonesuch."

The musical accompaniment of Dino Nugent is undoubtedly a high level. Accompanied by nine musicians clearly develops the scores that show a reflection of the elevation of the interpretative quality of our environment. The days in which we were happy with very little in theater are gone. This has been understood by producers and directors but also because they have greater professionalism of the actors, musicians, dancers and singers. Barbara Berger's choreography is a special demonstration of the high level of training and experience that accompanies her resume. The dances are simple but good quality interpretation, supported by the Academy of Dance Steps.

Definitely I can only recommend attendance to see Big River to both theater enthusiasts and those who like music, because it has a good level with only short slurred speech of the main protagonist and overacting in the interpretation of the character of Tom Sawyer.

Rio Grande: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, produced by Alida Gerbaud Fábregas keeps coming back until mid June at the Circle Theatre.