What if Rizal had lived?

New York—Two world figures died recently, who were as different as night and day. Vaclav Havel, playwright, Czech dissident, and key figure in the bloodless transition from Communist state to a democratic nation, and Kim Jong-Il, dictator of North Korea, shuffled off their mortal coils recently, but in conditions vastly different from each other. The 69-year-old Kim passed away due to heart failure, while on his luxuriously appointed private train, still very much in control of arguably the most repressive state on the planet. The 75-year-old Havel, in contrast, died at his countryside home, after a long battle with cancer—an esteemed and beloved private citizen.

TV news showed grieving citizens of both countries, though in terms of sheer theatricality, it was hard to beat the spectacle of the North Korean masses weeping convulsively, wringing their hands, and beating themselves—a kind of Biblical lamentation one would associate with Job. It’s a comparison I make half-facetiously, as from all accounts, to be an ordinary North Korean you’d have to have the patience and fortitude of Job. Undoubtedly, rivers of crocodile tears flowed for the benefit of the ever-watchful guardians of the police state. (I imagine individuals being berated, or worse, for shedding less copiously than expected: “You there! Only a bucket of tears? You call that grieving? Five years of hard labor!”) Undoubtedly, some of the grief was genuine. Undoubtedly, some of the weeping was out of joy, a sense of good riddance that the man, known as Dear Leader—indeed, his leadership, if it can be called that, cost his people dearly— had died, a leader who fed his million-plus strong army even as he let his people starve. North Korea is a country where Stalinist paranoia and murderousness has fused successfully with Orwellian surveillance.

With his bad hair, elevator shoes, and oversized glasses, Kim Jong-Il seemed nothing more than a pudgy cartoonish figure. Yet, he almost always outfoxed the paladins of Western democracies by playing brinksmanship masterfully, to gain much-needed aid and other concessions, all the while building a nuclear state even as his government professed to want to engage in de-nuclearization.

Where Kim Jong-Il took over from his father as the head of a Communist regime, Havel was thrust into the public limelight through his writing and his activism against the Soviet-backed Communist state. A founder of Charter 77, the longest-surviving human-rights organization behind the Iron Curtain, Havel had the moral authority and intellectual gravitas that endeared him to his compatriots, even if at times they criticized his behavior. He was independent Czechoslovakia’s, and the subsequent Czech Republic’s, first president. The playwright who preferred blue jeans to suits and who symbolized the Velvet Revolution resisted what must have been the powerful urge to hold on to power. The man had a genuine commitment to democracy, the complete opposite of Kim Jong-Il.

With the 115^th anniversary of Rizal’s martyrdom upon us, I wondered what sort of head of state the Masonic author of two incendiary novels would have made, had he eluded the implacable hatred of the Manila friars and the executioner’s bullet, and had he been allowed in 1896 to proceed to Cuba via Barcelona, where he would have been a physician behind Spanish lines, in the conflict with the Cuban freedom fighters. (It is intriguing to think of what José Marti, the Cuban revolutionary and poet, would have made of Rizal had the former not died in 1895.) He might have been led a relatively idyllic life in Dapitan with Josephine Bracken, but possessed of a healthy ego, Rizal wanted to be back at center stage, to make history rather than be a passive witness to it.

He would have been repatriated to the Philippines, sometime in late 1898, just before the war with the United States had gotten underway. Rizal, because of his cult-like status, would have been unquestionably thrust onto the national stage. How would he have fared? Would he have sided with Aguinaldo and the Malolos government, or would he have sought to play the role of mediator between the nationalists and the American occupiers? With the capture of Aguinaldo and the surrender of many of the field commanders, would the good doctor have, like Apolinario Mabini and Artemio Ricarte, refused to pledge allegiance to the United States? (Ricarte was an enthusiastic admirer of Rizal and once proposed renaming the Philippines after his hero.) Or would Rizal have tried to balance realpolitik with the aspirations for an independent state? As president or prime minister, what policies would Rizal have adopted? Would he have been the fire-breathing Elías or the reform-minded Ibarra of the Noli, or even the now older, disillusioned, bitter but fabulously wealthy Ibarra of the Fili, willing to kill innocents in order to exact his pound of flesh?

His view of the emerging colossus that was the United States would not have been as complicated as his relationship to Mother Spain, and thus more realistic. In his essay The Philippines a Century Hence, he had intuited that the U.S. might cast its eyes across the Pacific and consider possessing Las Islas Filipinas. Seeing the machinations of the U.S. representatives first-hand, he would have had no illusions that the American Eagle harbored only benign motives.

We will never know of course how Rizal would have acted, what enacted, had he been in a position of power. He may have believed the Yankee promises of eventual independence but he surely would have, if not openly then secretly, lamented the passing of an age that had made him what he was.

Copyright L. H.Francia 2011