Fragment of the autobiography of the renowned Barranquilla economist, which is also a review of the history of Colombia and Jewish culture.
© Courtesy of the publisher
The autobiography of the former member of the board of Banco de la República, Salomón Kalmanovitz.
Colombia in the 1930s was still enjoying the coffee boom that began after the Thousand Days War, to which was added the industrialization unleashed in the previous decade. The civil wars of the 19th century and the conservative hegemony of 50 years (1880-1930) had kept the country in deep economic backwardness, particularly during the confessional governments of La Regeneración. (We recommend reading Salomón Kalmanovitz’s columns in El Espectador).
Miguel Antonio Caro was the conservative ideologue of the period, and he was particularly repugnant to Protestantism: he argued that England and the United States were libertine and degenerate societies. There was also a change in the political regime in 1930, when the isolation of Western cultural currents ended, driven by conservative hegemony, although they had timidly begun to open up the economy to Europe and the United States since 1910.
In August 1930 a progressive liberal government was installed: it granted labor rights, distanced itself from the Catholic Church and introduced tariff protection. President Olaya Herrera faced the Great Depression with an increase in public spending that allowed him to quickly overcome it. After a slight contraction in 1931 and 1932, the economy experienced remarkable growth that lasted until after World War II.
Barranquilla had emerged from nowhere in the mid-19th century, as a commercial center, fed by people arriving from the arid coastal plains, from the interior of the country and by Syrian-Lebanese, German, Italian, Sephardic Jewish and Eastern European migrants. It did not have an established oligarchy like the one that commanded the cities of the mountains and the high plateau of Bogota, which gave rise to a less stratified society, more democratic, if you will, where the tú or vos were not used, but the simple your. With all these migrants and a cultural dynamic different from that of the interior of the country, in 1910 it was already the first port in Colombia and the third city in population and industry.
However, around 1930 the city was experiencing the end of the primacy of its port. The Panama Canal had been in operation since 1918, which gave wings to the port of Buenaventura, which already in 1935 surpassed the Golden Gate of Colombia in volume of trade. The brake on port activity also slowed down its commercial and industrial boom, although the economic agents, including my father, were not aware of the adverse economic change that was looming over the city.
The growth of Barranquilla was very fast: in 1921 it had 70,000 inhabitants, in 1938 it reached 152,000 and in 1951 it had almost doubled its number again, not so much because it offered many opportunities, but because of the conditions of great poverty that prevailed in the rural area. The country and the city that surrounded it, characterized by a great concentration of land in the hands of cattle ranchers. In any case, the poverty of the big city with the opportunities for progress offered by informality was better than the absolute poverty and submission of the countryside.
The city assumed its chaotic character with its squatter neighborhoods and its crowded shopping center, its unpaved streets, which is why they called it “the Sandy One”, except for the city center and the northern neighborhoods, ordered by an American engineer, Karl C. Parrish. Barranquilla was a young and open city in the first decades of the 20th century. Its ruling class had emerged from commerce and industry, although there were absentee ranchers who set up their homes in the city and who were represented by the Conservative Party.
I remember a huge house that looked like a palace, belonging to the Marulanda family, well-known landowners from Gran Magdalena, which was near the Metro Theater. The arrival of Syrian-Lebanese immigrants -who were called Turks because they arrived with passports from the Ottoman Empire-, of Spanish refugees from the Civil War and of Europeans fleeing fascism, including us Jews, encouraged manufacturing and trade. Thus, a fairly cosmopolitan, liberal and tolerant society was built.
The Lebanese who arrived were Catholics for the most part and integrated more easily into local society than the Jews, who had to put up with the name of murderers of God, and other messages of hate that came from those who sympathized with the fascist axis that was erecting in the Europe of the thirties and in Franco’s Spain. Many descendants of the Lebanese entered politics successfully, unlike us who felt like foreigners, despite being born in the country, even in the second and third generation.
Still, there was a tendency among immigrants to segregate around their clubs and schools, including the Lebanese, German and Italian clubs and, for the Jews, an Ashkenazi and a Sephardic club, which at one point merged into the Israeli Philanthropic Center, although the synagogues were kept separate, given the difference in the rites of each community.
The Hebrew School, in particular, was an institution that had an open admissions policy, respectful of the religion of non-Jews, which allowed for greater integration with local society. Around 1940 it was believed that there were 6,000 Jews in Colombia, of which a thousand had settled in Barranquilla. In the twenties, Parrish demarcated square blocks in the style of North American suburbs in the El Prado urbanization, organized around two tree-lined boulevards in roundabouts; his houses had front gardens planted with grass, bushes and leafy rattan trees.
For the children of the North Americans, who worked with the oil companies and other businesses, a school was founded that replicated a curriculum from their country, the Parrish School, which adjoined the Country Club’s golf courses. The children of wealthy families who aspired to the North American standard of living and who frequented Miami to do their shopping also studied there.
* Published with permission from Penguin Random House Editorial Group.