Paul Glassman’s Costa Rica Guide
PASSPORT PRESS Eleventh Edition Copyright © 2003 by Paul Glassman
All rights reserved. The reproduction of any part of this book without the author’s written permission is strictly prohibited.
Costa Rica - Order FREE Travel Brochure!
4
A Mystery of
National Character
"The Switzerland of Central America" . . . "more teachers than policemen" . . . "peaceful and idealistic" . . . "no sharp class distinctions" . . . Costa Rica sometimes sounds like an earthly version of heaven, where all live in peace, and the cares of a less civilized age have been transcended.
No nation could live up to such a billing, however, and the facts bear sorting out. The relative lack of beggars and street urchins indicates that in at least this Central American country, there is a minimal social justice. Citizens do, indeed, respect authority and national institutions, rather than fear them.
Not Quite Switzerland
But there are also elements of more fallible societies. Most Costa Ricans are moderately poor, though poverty is buffered by social services. The bloodiest war in the nation's history occurred only 40 years ago, political exiles have attempted, unsuccessfully, to invade and stir general uprising, and terrorist incidents, attributed to foreigners, have occasionally taken place. There is no army, but the police forces are organized along military lines. As in other parts of Latin America (and in many "advanced" countries), though to a much lesser degree, corruption is part of the way things work.
Still, in its usual state of social peace, in its profession of and adherence to democratic values, Costa Rica is more like nations in North America or Europe than its seething neighbors. It is the social democracy, rather than the Switzerland, of Latin America. That it is so is the primary mystery of the place to many first-time visitors.
Sort of Latin
There are no easy explanations, no easy descriptions of this regional anomaly. Costa Ricans are Latins, like most of their neighbors to the north and south. But they are a paler shade of Latin. Literally this is so, for though Costa Ricans come in all colors and mixtures of European, native American and African, the European strain predominates. But also in their ways, Costa Ricans are just like their neighbors, only—to turn an ethnic punch-line around—less so. Costa Ricans profess the sanctity of the family as much as other Latins, and social life centers on the home, but the family is not quite the unassailable bastion of elsewhere. Catholicism is ingrained in national life, but public displays of religious fervor are relatively restrained. A Costa Rican male will maintain as strongly as any Latin that sex is a major occupation or preoccupation, but unbridled machismo is not the norm.
Why are the Costa Ricans a little bit different? Relative prosperity, inevitably, has something to do with it. But a few American nations have had fortune and circumstances comparable to those of Costa Rica. Argentina comes to mind immediately as a country that is fairly well off, even more European-descended than Costa Rica, and mostly middle class. Yet Argentines as a whole are volatile and ultra-nationalistic, and so fractious in their political expression that many consider dictatorship a necessity to sort themselves out. Costa Ricans are nothing of the sort.
Historical Explanations
Costa Ricans themselves usually find the explanation in their history. The national myth that informs the way Costa Rica looks at itself arises out of the hardships of the colonial period. In that time, all were small farmers, equally poor and equally proud; all had to labor to sustain themselves. There were no slaves, no social classes, no wealth for anyone to accumulate, nor differences of race or privilege. No man could hold himself to be the better of another. Colonial Costa Rica was a natural democracy.
The national myth is, indeed, only a myth today. Costa Ricans are no longer equally poor. Opportunities to advance did finally present themselves in the era of coffee expansion, and there were no barriers to getting ahead other than those of talent and will. Most Costa Ricans now aspire to be part of the middle class, and a few are wealthy. But they still uphold equality of opportunity, independence, self-reliance and hard work, concepts converted from everyday facts of colonial life into generally accepted values. The heritage of social tensions of other Latin American countries—race against race, class against class—is not ingrained, if not entirely missing. Individually, and as a nation, Costa Ricans erect few barriers against each other, and against outsiders.
Not everything about the Costa Rican character, however, is unique, different, or even positive. Some of the shadings of variation from neighboring lands are rather delicate, and easily over-emphasized. Nobody who visits Costa Rica has any doubts about what region of the world he is in. Attitudes about time are relaxed, bureaucracy is stifling, and logic sometimes follows a non-western course. But few fail to notice, as well, a fresh air of difference.
Being a Tico
To themselves, and to those who know them, Costa Ricans are Ticos. The nickname derives from the way they speak. Diminutives are common in the language of Latin America. A moment becomes a "little moment," a momentito, to indicate "in a little while." But in Costa Rica, the word is momentico, and the peculiar ending is applied to the people who use it.
Like their Spanish language, which was locked away for centuries from the outside world by mountains, jungles and seas, Costa Ricans are gracious, courteous, traditional, even a bit archaic. The retreta—that circling of boys and girls in the central square on weekend evenings, with shy glances that could, just could, lead to romance—hung on in Costa Rica even as it was disappearing from elsewhere in Latin America and Spain. Now, dating is the norm. But old-fashioned prudishness survives in public. Movies, for one, are heavily censored.
The sense of tradition and what is proper extends to marriage, of course. Most couples are married in church, and the common-law unions that elsewhere in Latin America may outnumber legal marriages are in Costa Rica the small minority. Marriage is usually life-long. Divorce is technically legal, but scandalous. If a marriage fails, the family stays together, though a husband sometimes spends his nights away from home. And even in successful marriages, the sexual wanderings of men are said to be tolerated, while women's are limited by social pressures and home duties; though how this can be is, of course, a great statistical mystery.
Religion as Tradition
The overwhelming majority of Costa Ricans is Catholic. The government contributes money to the Church, and religious education is part of the public-school curriculum, though technically optional. Catholicism is somewhat taken for granted. Men especially are lax in their practice, and for many persons, baptisms, weddings and funerals are the only occasions for seeing the inside of a church. Religious holidays dot the calendar, and the saints' days of the towns and villages are regularly celebrated. But mystical devotion that transcends the hardships of everyday life is simply not part of the Costa Rican national experience. Fiesta processions pale before those of other Latin American countries. The country is short of priests, and most of the clergy is Spanish, Italian, Irish or American, rather than Costa Rican.
For many years, the missionary Protestant evangelism that had spread to Latin America from the United States had little impact in Costa Rica. Sudden modernization, disruption of isolated village life, prolonged warfare, natural disasters, and the hopeless poverty that elsewhere loosened ties with the traditional church exist to a lesser degree or not at all in Costa Rica. Some Protestant sects made their headquarters in San José not because Costa Rica was a fertile field, but because of its central location for their Caribbean and Central American efforts, and because life in San José is pleasant.
But in recent years, as Costa Rica has become a more mobile society, where jobs and residences change more than once in a lifetime, the bastions of Catholicism have begun to yield. Protestantism has now spread well beyond the West Indians who were the first to establish a non-Catholic foothold in Costa Rica. Evangelical churches are found in all the major towns, and in lowland areas that have received migrants from the Central Valley.
The Altar of Politics
Civic pride is said to be the second great religion of many Costa Ricans. The fiestas cívicas—the year-end celebrations—bring out more parades, floats, dancing, puppeteers and music than any church commemoration. And national elections—when the peaceful governmental tradition is most evident—are the occasion for the largest celebrations. Costa Ricans are conscious that their national traditions and values differ from those of their neighbors, and are protective of their separateness. To outsiders, they may be Latin Americans. And a Guatemalan or a Honduran, when outside his homeland, may allow himself to be called a Central American. But a Costa Rican is always a Costa Rican.
Culture Counts
Education and culture are national icons. A sense of what is proper and of the importance of being a well-mannered person are part of the way people live, not merely lessons taught in school. The high rates of literacy and school attendance are facts of life sometimes repeated ad nauseam. Culture in the highbrow sense is a near-mania.
The reason why is one of Costa Rica's mysteries. Only 150 years ago, as the coffee era began, Costa Ricans were just emerging from the era of barefoot, dirt-poor, ignorant backwardness. Not only was there no widespread literacy at the time, there was no national culture, no music, nothing but hard work to survive. Costa Rica's present love of the finer things traces back to the frontier days not at all, except, perhaps, as overcompensation, an obsession with what was once out of reach, and with being a people worthy of relative prosperity.
And how the Costa Ricans have tried to catch up! Long before oil sheiks gave out contracts to raise universities in the desert, Costa Rica invested coffee wealth in crash programs to expand primary education. When opera companies invited from afar had no place to perform, the coffee growers taxed themselves to finance the construction of a national theater to rival any hall in Latin America. When local folk traditions were found to be somewhat pale or even non-existent, the dances and music that were imported with the annexation of Guanacaste province were adopted by all Costa Ricans; the punto guanacasteco, performed to the accompaniment of guitar and the xylophone-like gourd marimba, became the national dance, and the national folk music became what was played on the quijongo, ocarina and chirimía, wind instruments of pre-Columbian origin. Most recently, when President Figueres cast his glance about, and saw that classical music was good, but that Costa Ricans were not adept, he arranged for the importation, whole, of a national orchestra and music school, to be staffed, eventually, by national counterparts in training.
Unlike some notorious opera houses that stand empty in jungles and deserts, the imported elements in the case of Costa Rica were brought to fertile ground, and have taken root. A respectable literature includes novels of social realism about exploitation on the banana plantations, and of costumbrismo, depicting the everyday happenings and ways of the cities and small towns. Modern and classical composers are appreciated on a broad scale. The best of the visual artists, such as engraver Francisco Amighetti Ruiz, have reached audiences outside of Costa Rica.
Strangely, for a people that has grabbed
hold of its destiny and managed it fairly well, Costa Ricans have a strain
of fatalism. This is said to come from their Hispanic heritage, and the
churchly lessons of submission and obedience. It also comes out of hundreds
of years of poverty that could not be transcended until relatively recently.
The values of working hard and bettering oneself predominate, but these
don't necessarily go along with planning ahead and being prudent. Costa
Ricans are poor savers, and some big-ticket public investments were financed
by foreign loans that are now burdensome. But with a sense of limited control
over the future, and a past of deprivation, they are consumers par excellence.
Those who can afford it, and those who can't, eat, drink and dress well,
buy all the consumer gadgets they can get their hands on, and enjoy life
while they can.
Africans
Two minority groups—blacks and Indians—maintain ways different from those of the vast majority of Costa Ricans.
Blacks were present in early colonial Costa Rica in small numbers as slaves, but those who survived the harsh conditions and ill treatment of that era merged into the general population. A later generation of blacks arrived in Costa Rica at the close of the nineteenth century, from Jamaica and elsewhere in the West Indies, to construct the railroad from San José to the Atlantic, and remained to labor on the banana plantations established by Minor Keith.
The newcomers were not welcomed with open arms. Blacks were confined to the coast by a prohibition against spending a night in the Central Valley. But in the lowlands they prospered, taking the best jobs on the plantations, and in commerce in the port of Limón. When Panama disease forced the relocation of the banana industry to the Pacific lowlands in the thirties, many blacks became small farmers, or labored on cacao plantations.
The 30,000 blacks in the country today more and more consider
themselves Costa Ricans. All legal discrimination ended with the constitution
of 1949. Most blacks who attended school since that time learned Spanish
as well as English. Bilingualism has earned some good jobs in commerce and
the travel industry in the Central Valley, though, as Protestants, they stand
apart from other Costa Ricans.
Indigenous Costa Ricans
Indians, or native Americans, are Costa Rica's forgotten minority. Their numbers are few—20,000, perhaps even less—and they live in small groups away from the centers of population.
The original Indian tribes of Costa Rica fragmented and regrouped as a result of war, disease, and exile. The Indians of today range from those whose ways are indistinguishable from those of other Costa Ricans, to jungle groups who have only recently made contact with the outside world.
The Indians of the Talamanca group live in the forested valleys north of the Talamanca mountain range, and in the adjacent Caribbean lowlands. Their ancestors were forced into the area from central Costa Rica and from the Caribbean coast, and there they have remained, except for some who have migrated to the Pacific region. Two tribes survive, the Cabécar and the Bribri, composed of the remnants of a number of pre-Conquest tribes.
For many years, the Talamancan Indians were ruled only nominally from San José, through a native king. As banana operations pushed into their territory, many Talamancans came into regular contact with outsiders; but some of the inland groups remain steadfastly isolated and hostile even to Indians not of their own clan.
The most traditional Talamancan clans are dominated by women, and maintain peculiar customs that include relocating a corpse after a year's burial, isolation of a woman at birth, and native healing rituals.
The Borucas of the southern Pacific coastal area, near Panama, still live largely where they did before the Conquest. Aside from working their land communally, they live like other rural Costa Ricans. But by their racial heritage, their particular devotion to the celebration of the Immaculate Conception, and through pre-Columbian ritual that survives as superstition, the Borucas maintain a separate identity.
Other Indian groups are the Chorotegas of the Nicoya peninsula, who lost the use of their separate language years ago, and are almost indistinguishable from the mestizo, or mixed-blood, Costa Ricans of the area; and a few Guatusos, who live in the northern border lowlands east of the Guanacaste mountains.
Costa Rica Guide—Order Now! Paul Glassman's Home Page Table of Contents