The Death of the Shadow

Recently my sister gave me an article written in a weekly magazine that the El Convento Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico printed back in 1963. The little magazine was titled The San Juan Diary published once a week. It was chock full of ads (more ads than print copy!) primarily advertising for entertainers, restaurants, cocktail bars, cigarettes, booze, and local venues for a wide variety of attractions playing throughout 1960’s San Juan.

My family lived in Puerto Rico from 1960 to 1964—my dad was in the US Navy and was stationed there. I was a little kid, with one sister in high school and the other 3 years ahead of me. Although we lived on the US Naval base, we were all rather familiar with the theatre life of the city. My mother was an actress and performed in numerous plays at the local Tapia theatre in downtown San Juan. My oldest sister too was following in my mother’s thespian footsteps. This is the reason this sort of magazine survived through the years (over 60 of them!) and ended up in little brother’s hands (there is an article on Cuba in this issue that was of interest because I am writing my own article on Puerto Rico’s Caribbean neighbour).

Looking through this 60-year-old magazine I was struck by its rather cavalier impression. Why I would think ads about entertainment, booze, and cigarettes were cavalier also struck me as odd. I cannot easily explain this, but there was a feeling of freedom surging through me, an excitement of a time when no one was excessively worried about taking risks, particularly little ones. People found this variety of human activity appealing, and exhilarating. There were ads of black entertainers performing at some trendy bar in downtown San Juan (in 1963!), ads of exotic bands playing here and there, and ads about fashionable restaurants where you could dance and dine under the stars in their open-air venues until the sun came up. I know, very subtle things, but you would not find such things in a modern magazine, you just wouldn’t. It was visceral, exotic, and erotic.

It got me thinking about the human condition in “developed” countries (I do not think you can make the same assessments commenting on countries where its population is shot at every day). What is this current, almost fanatical, obsession with “safety”? I don’t mean only physical safety, although we certainly can start this discussion there.