Word: monreale
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When Mullah Mohammed Omar announced on Feb. 26 that the big Buddhas were to be destroyed, Luis Monreal had a bright idea. Archaeologist, art historian and director of Fundació la Caixa , the cultural foundation in Barcelona sponsored by the Catalan savings bank of that name, Monreal decided to display a side of Afghanistan little known in Europe. In six months, a quarter of the time it normally takes to plan and mount an international exhibition, the Caixa Foundation, in tandem with the Guimet Museum of Asiatic Art in Paris, brought together 230 pieces from U.S. and European museums...
...Monreal wanted to call the exhibition "Afghanistan: The Forbidden History," but after the events of Sept. 11 - when some of the exhibits still had not arrived in Barcelona - his banker patrons asked for a less provocative title for security reasons. So the exhibition is called "Afghanistan: A Millenary History." Its success in Barcelona, with long lines some days, has drawn the interest of other museums. Monreal says there are negotiations with London's Royal Academy and a possibility of eventual travel...
...emanates from one large room where a cinema-size screen is showing continuously a 1-min., 45-sec. clip of the Bamiyan explosions - the great clouds of smoke and dust when, despite pleas to the Taliban from around the world, the giant Buddhas were blasted on March 11. Monreal says the muffled shouting is mainly Allah Akbar , Allah is Great...
...have to collect Julio Carranza, the young deputy director of the Communist Party's Center for American Studies, at his house. He has no gas for his car, and his neighborhood is blacked out. We enter another world when we sit down with him and Monreal in the gilded elegance of Havana's Ferminia Restaurant -- dollars only. Wolfing down real meat, the two thirtysomething economists paint glowing pictures of a wondrous second-generation Marxism where quasi-private enterprise pays for the nation's broad social safety...
...both systems: the benefits of socialism and the wealth of the free market. Cuba can succeed where Russia and Eastern Europe have failed. But even these experts have only the vaguest notions of how. "I think we can do it if there is more income for the state," says Monreal. The two envision less central planning but government control over the shape of the economy: a system encompassing private, cooperative and state ownership, all working to the common good. They talk of taxes, salary scales, redundant employment, monetary reform, but have no idea how they would really work...