Broke but Happy--He’s Free : Marcos’ Foe Home for First Christmas in 8 Years

Reynaldo Maclang is home for Christmas today--for the first time in eight years.

He had spent every Christmas Day since 1979 in jail, a prisoner of a dictatorship, a victim who, in his words, “was merely paying the ultimate price for standing by what you believe.”

“How do I feel?” Maclang asked on the eve of the first Christmas he will spend at home with his four children in nearly a decade. “I really have mixed feelings. I am very happy. I am a free man now.

“But, frankly, I’m broke. When we were in detention, I had no pressure to raise money to buy this and that. Now I do. And, really, it’s hard for everyone here now. I didn’t even have enough to buy Christmas presents for all the kids.”

Death Sentence

It was on Christmas Eve of 1979 that troops of former President Ferdinand E. Marcos burst into the Manila home where Maclang was living with his wife and four children. They arrested him for subversion, rebellion and plotting against Marcos and his wife, Imelda. They tried him, convicted him and sentenced him in 1984 to death by electric chair. He spent the next two years in prison waiting to die.

Last February, Maclang, along with his nation, was liberated. President Corazon Aquino freed him and hundreds of other political detainees two days after the coup d’etat that drove Marcos into exile and brought her government to power.

In the 10 months since his release, what has happened to Rey Maclang, the son of a poor electrician who was among the handful of lower-class street activists who fought Marcos’ rule long before the middle and upper classes joined the struggle, is, in the words of his friends, a pretty good gauge of the new Philippines of President Aquino.

Since his freedom, Maclang has been exploited by loan sharks as he tried to start a new business, a handbag factory. He has been victimized by thieves, who stole his goods after taking them on consignment.

Starts New Business

With the help of donations from friends and yet another usurious loan, Maclang started a janitorial business in September. The firm won a lucrative contract to service a bus company formerly owned by a Marcos crony and now sequestered by the Aquino government. The contract was supposed to begin in October. But, due to bureaucratic delays, strikes by leftist labor unions and general confusion in the new administration, the contract has yet to be implemented, and Maclang still has not received any return on the $6,000 capital investment that represents everything he owns or could borrow.

And, although he is free this Christmas, Maclang is, indeed, broke.

“But I have that feeling that Cory Aquino is really moving forward now,” Maclang said as he relaxed in his new, bare-bones janitorial office beside a suburban billiard hall on Christmas Eve. “And I do have hope. I believe the Christmas message she delivered today really is a possibility.

The president’s message was broadcast all Wednesday on radio stations nationwide. In between Christmas carols and holiday disco tunes, Aquino told her countrymen that her Christmas wish is “that life will be better for us all and, in particular, for those who have so little in life.”

Echoes of Hope

That note of hope was echoed in signs, billboards, speeches, military ceremonies and church services throughout the capital Wednesday.

“Peace and Recovery,” declared the yard-high red letters that stretched across the downtown post office--a message from the government that it hopes the first ever truce in the nation’s 17-year Communist insurgency will continue to silence the guns of civil war long after the Christmas season ends.

Hundreds of thousands of “Stars of Hope,” paper lanterns manufactured for their own profit by starving children on the impoverished island of Negros, were sold out everywhere in the city.

Even the 200,000-member Philippine armed forces celebrated the day by deploying units nationwide to distribute Christmas baskets of food, canned goods and toys. The chief of staff, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, personally parachuted from a helicopter gunship into a barrio southwest of Manila to distribute medicine to the sick.

Malls Crowded

Christmas shopping was brisker in Manila than in any recent year. Traffic was hopelessly snarled. City officials estimated that the capital’s population of 8.5 million swelled to 10 million this week, as families were reunited from rural provinces and from abroad. The city’s few modern shopping malls were jammed. In the upper class business district of Makati, Christmas shoppers emptied shelf after shelf, from the fruit compartments of supermarkets to the stereo sections of department stores.

In tens of thousands of neglected rural villages, though, most families had to share everything they had Wednesday night simply to muster a Christmas Eve dinner.

In one village of Northern Samar province so remote that it takes an hour by river boat to reach and so poor it only got fresh water wells this year, village official Jovencio Muncada said the 250 families who live there “will simply share whatever we have, maybe kill one chicken and pray together that next year will bring us more.”

That, President Aquino said, is her wish for 1987, as well. Her goal for next year, she announced in her Christmas message, is “to alleviate poverty and achieve economic prosperity.”

Age-Old Problems

Critics charged that the president’s words were merely seasonal platitudes, but Maclang, for one, was far more sympathetic.

“These problems with the rich controlling the economy and powerful landlords controlling the lives of tenant farmers--these are problems that go way back to when Jesus Christ was born,” Maclang said on Christmas Eve.

“I don’t think Cory Aquino can solve these problems alone, or, for that matter, in so short a period of time.”

So, despite his continuing personal financial crisis--flat-out bankruptcy paralleling that of a nation still $26 billion in debt--Maclang plans to spend Christmas Day today “just relaxing at home and tasting the gift of freedom for the first Christmas in so long. I will spend one full day not feeling any pressure whatsoever.”

Maclang also hopes to spend some of the day with his new wife, whom he married three days ago.

Left With 4 Children

Maclang’s first wife left him for another man while he was in prison. When he was released, he began raising his four children alone. Finally, he fell in love again and remarried. But he asked that his new wife’s name not be used.

“Her parents don’t approve of me,” said Maclang, who was charged with being a part of a subversive movement that set fires throughout Manila to destabilize the Marcos regime in the late 1970s. “They think I’m a terrorist.”

Maclang’s new wife thinks he is a hero. But even she concedes, “changing a society like this one will take some time. All most of us ever knew was Marcos, and to Marcos, Rey was a terrorist who should be sentenced to death. I hope, in time, my parents will understand.”

Just like the economy, Maclang added, such changes will take years--not months.

“I think we’re willing to wait quite a while more,” he said. “For at least now, there’s something we never had before. This Christmas, we have hope.”