The story takes place during one of the most tumultuous periods in our national history—it is therefore a complex one, with a degree of subjectivity to its beginning and end. Today it is the stuff of literary lore—cunning trumps censure—and like many legendary accounts, it is polished now from all the reverent handling.
One version of this story has us begin in 1973, a year after Proclamation 1081 was announced, placing the entire country under martial law, to the relief of citizens desperate for discipline. Crime was on the wane; peace was prime. Manila mornings were bright under Ferdinand Marcos’ Bagong Lipunan, the reverent, mannerly new order keeping at bay the country’s negative elements: hippies and pinkoes looking to make trouble, godless and lawless and just plain gross. At night, the city curled up under curfew with a justified willingness; if you were out late at night, after all, weren’t you up to no good?
There was no opposition party to rock the boat, no independent judicial body to hamper the now free wheels of justice. Even the media muckrakers were in the sewers with the filth. Proper writers wrote for the government now, in proper consultancy positions, with the Army Office of Civil Relations making sure their work aligned with the Bagong Lipunan vision, from title to final full stop.
Which was exactly how state-allied editors found the poem “Prometheus Unbound”. Written by one Ruben Cuevas and published by Focus Magazine, it was the myth of Prometheus picked up where Percy Bysshe Shelley left off. His avian tormentors about him, the titan finally escapes from the chains that bind him. Prometheus the populist, triumphant in the freedom previously denied him as the patron of craftsmen, the giver of fire to mortals.
With a classic motif, a politically moderate subject, elaborate rhyming couplés, and iambs as martial as goose steps in the grandstand, “Prometheus Unbound” represented all that was estimable under Marcosian poetics, the literary equivalent of crew cut hair and home by 21:00.
His avian tormentors about him, [Prometheus] finally escapes from the chains that bind him. Prometheus the populist, triumphant in the freedom previously denied him as the patron of craftsmen, the giver of fire to mortals.
Sometime later, however, Focus staff were alerted to an alarming thing: “Prometheus Unbound” turned out to be an acrostic, in which the first letters of each line, when read downwards, spelled out a message different from that of the rest of the poem. The magazine’s editor-in-chief was summoned for a reprimand by the press secretary himself as some sources recall; the literary editor was promptly sacked. The identity of Ruben Cuevas was investigated. And men in uniform rushed from newsstand to newsstand, pulling any remaining copies of Focus, that Marcos-allied publication which now carried the opposition’s favorite slogan, chanted and printed alike at lighting rallies and on contraband manifestos, “Marcos Hitler Diktador Tuta”.
