It is a sorry end to the history of American and European investment in South America, which produced so many engineering marvels in its day. It is a situation made to order for Communist propaganda.
With Goulart’s administration in charge of the federal government, Brazilian Communism seems to be entering its heyday. The tragic thing to me is that the Marxist theory has nothing to offer that can solve the country’s problems. The most pressing need is to grow enough food to feed the population. The world over, Marxism has failed to produce food. Brazil’s spreading frontier demands individual initiative. All Communism has to offer is increased power to a bureaucracy which has already proved its incompetence. With a government that can’t keep the employees from stealing the stamps off the letters in the postoffice, the rational thing you would think would be to call for less rather than more power for the politicians.
When you come to think of it, maybe the Communists and near Communists are no more powerful in Brazil than they are in the United States. There’s nothing in the history of Brazilian relations with the spreading Soviet power as disturbingly illogical as the behavior of various administrations in Washington. The Brazilian press suffers from none of the inhibitions against clear thinking that muddy the mental processes of the American liberals. The Rio and São Paulo newspapers are as vigorous and varied and scurrilous and satirical and generally rambunctious as the American newspapers used to be in their salad days before schools of journalism and the Newspaper Guild and the breakdown of competition. The best pens are in the anti-Communist camp. “How the hell,” I said to myself, “can we ask the Brazilians to follow our leadership when there isn’t any?”
In spite of the soothing roar of the surf on Pleasant Journey beach, none of these reflections made for sound sleeping.
Natal, the Governor’s Guesthouse, September 14
Doug Elleby drove me up from Recife in a jeep. At breakfast the Recife newspapers were full of Brochado da Rocha’s resignation as Prime Minister. The unions, which are under the direct control of President Goulart’s Ministry of Labor, are threatening a general strike if the congress doesn’t speed measures for a return to “presidentialism.” That’s a pitch of labor demagogy we haven’t yet quite reached in the United States.
Leaving Recife the first thing that struck me was the road. Four years ago nobody would have dreamed of trying to drive from Recife to Natal, even in a jeep. We skirt Olinda on a firstrate wellgraded highway. A glimpse of the faded tiled roofs and the belfries of the ancient Dutch capital makes me wish I had time for one more look at the beautiful Portuguese tilework and the fine arches of the old convents there. North of Olinda we drive through a beautiful rolling green country. The dark sculptured mango trees give the country a landscaped look. The houses are stucco on adobe with red and yellow tile roofs. They seem comfortable. This is oniongrowing country and fairly prosperous.
After an hour the trees grow smaller. The only cultivation is in the valleys. Fewer fruit trees and more sugar cane. After we cross the state line from Pernambuco into Paraíba we drive through a region of thorny underbrush interspersed with small gnarled trees. The road is graded but it hasn’t been black-topped yet. Parts are under construction. Eroding streams have taken deep bites out of the new raised causeways across bottomlands. Occasionally a washout almost cuts the road in two. No road for night driving.
A little more than two hours from Recife we reach João Pessoa which is the capital of the small state of Paraíba. It’s a pleasant little yellowstucco city. The new quarters radiate along streets laid out like spokes of a wheel from a circular pond bordered with palms. The beach, studded with vast banyantrees, each tree a thicket by itself, opens in a halfmoon on a Nilegreen lagoon protected by a distant black reef where the surf spumes. Beyond the ocean is deepest indigo to the horizon. Jangadas skim back and forth in the fresh trade wind. Skinny sunblackened men wade with shrimpnets in the shallows. The waiter who serves us a beer under the trees points out that the impressivelooking promontory to the south of the lagoon is the easternmost point of Brazil, less than 35° west of Greenwich.
Leaving town down a cobbled hill we have a lovely view of a little port on the river, rusty small steamboats, ancient sailingships and a great stretch of salt marshes behind. We speed along the straight cement road which leads to Campina Grande, the most important town in Paraíba. It is too far out of our way; so we turn north on a dirt road so as to drive through Sapé.
Sapé is reputed to be one of the centers of Julião’s Ligas Camponêsas. Julião is a landowner from Pernambuco who at one time had pretentions towards literature. Under the influence of Communist activists he has organized peasant leagues which are said to receive arms and guerrilla warfare training through agents of Fidel Castro. Their program is for the tenants to take over the land by force. It is quiet this morning. We did see one man with a rifle; and walls and buildings occasionally decorated with the hammer and sickle, and with VIVA CASTRO in brightblue paint.
His illwishers tell the story on Julião that when the peasants took him at his word and started to occupy his own estate he called in the Army to protect it. Could be; but it seems a little too pat.
What, you ask yourself, would you do in their place?
It’s a hilly country with small patches of decent land, a little like the Piedmont region of North Carolina. We pass extensive plantations of pineapple, packingsheds with stacks of crates ready for shipment. Doug tells me that there’s an active pineapplegrowers’ cooperative in Sapé. They are trying to enlarge their export market to include the United States. Now their pineapples go to Europe or the Argentine.
Overpopulated. We pass through too many dusty little stone villages. The crumbling adobe huts have a company town look. People are poor all right. If I had to live there I’d feel rebellious too. But even driving through, it becomes fairly obvious that redistribution of the land won’t solve the problem. There’s not enough good land to go around. In North Carolina the solution was textile mills. Here it might be small industry. It might be resettlement on virgin lands to the west. Cutting the throats of the landlords isn’t going to help.
It’s so much easier to appeal to envy, hatred and malice than to work out rational solutions: therein lies the success of the Communist play for power.
The landlords in the Northeast are no bargain either. Many of them would rather die than give their tenants a break. The basic trouble is that there’s not enough to go around. I was told the story of a man in Pernambuco who personally beat up one of his tenants for planting banana trees round his hut. I suppose the landlord thought that if the tenant had a few bananas to eat he wouldn’t cut cane at the going rate. Still, if the politicians would only give them a chance the pineapplegrowers’ cooperative might well do more to raise the standard of living around Sapé than the peasant leagues.
We cross into Rio Grande do Norte. Now the land is really poor but there are less people on it. The long rolling hills are shaped a little like the great green hills of Normandy, but they are sandy and arid. Scraggly vegetation under a flaming sun. In the valleys we see traces of abandoned sugar plantations. Here and there the stump of a brick chimney rises among the ruins of an old refinery. Even where there’s still cultivation the cane has a starved look. There is a great deal of it. From one rise we look out into the shimmer of sunlight on enormous canefields, blue like the shimmer on a lake.
The first sign of Natal, the state capital, is a row of old U.S. radio masts left over from World War II sticking up from the top of a hill. Then there are military hangars, nicely painted airport buildings on a vast empty expanse of concrete landingstrips. We are driving on a hardtop road that is unmistakably American. To the right, bluffs jut into the misty blue ocean over great spuming purple rocks. The seabreeze is suddenly cool. The large seedylooking gray building is a hospital. Visiting Americans put up there, Doug Elleby says, by arrangement with the nuns, because the hotel is so horrible.
We stop off at the hotel in the cent
er of town. An unappetizing dump. A few discouraged looking customers sit sweating in the lobby. Gin and tonic is available in the bar but no sandwiches. We’ve had no lunch. It’s three in the afternoon and we are ravenous. All we can get to eat is some dried up strips of Dutch cheese. No bread.
A gentleman from the state government appears to take me to the guesthouse. Brazilian friends in Rio have arranged for the governor to take me along on a tour of the state starting tomorrow. I say goodby to my American escorts.
Aluísio Alves, a man of thirtynine who is present governor of Rio Grande do Norte, is, so it has been explained to me, one of the young men with a passion for social service who represent a new breed of Brazilian politician. It is this new breed of politician that will give the Communists a hard time.
He was born in Angicos, a little hamlet in the longstaple cotton region in the center of the state. He studied in Natal and took his law degree at the University of Alagoas in Maceió, an ancient city on the coast a hundred or so miles south of Recife. At twentyone, while still a student, he was elected federal deputy, one of the youngest on record. In Rio he became national secretary of the Democratic Union and a friend of Carlos Lacerda’s. Along with Lacerda he was one of the founders of the Tribuna da Imprensa which he edited during Lacerda’s exile. Since then there have been political differences between the two, particularly since Alves was elected governor of his home state in 1960 with Social Democrat backing.
On the way to the guesthouse I got the notion that—although possibly for political reasons the Alves administration was keeping Americans at arm’s length—the American troops had left not too unpleasant memories behind them in Natal.
At the guesthouse I was ushered into a princely pink bedroom hung with mirrors and festooned with plush that looked out through shuttered windows on a garden on one side and an airy terrace on the other. In Brazil it’s always a feast or a famine. The shower in the bathroom not only worked, but the water was hot. A shower was a godsend after all that dust. We’d arrived with half the state of Paraíba caked on our necks. I lunched in solitary splendor at a great oval table set as if for a state banquet.
Afterwards I was driven to the seat of government which the present incumbent has renamed Palacio da Esperanza (the Palace of Hope). Governor Alves is a showman. From the beginning of his campaign for the governorship he has used the green flag of hope as a trademark.
A green flag fluttered over the building and the official cars parked outside had green flags. Aluísio Alves makes a great play for the young. The government palace was as full of teenagers as Washington, D.C. during the Easter vacation. The central stairway swarmed with boys and girls. They chattered in the anterooms. There were so many youthful committees packed into the governor’s office that you could hardly see his desk.
Aluísio Alves has, like so many Brazilians, the knack of looking younger than he is. He is a slender man with sunken cheeks. Except for his harassed air of a man in the middle of a political campaign he looks almost as youthful as the highschool kids all about him.
He has a brusque decisive manner. His Portuguese is so clear and sharp I can understand every word. In a flash he arranges an appointment with Bishop Sales whom I have asked to see. He tells off a young man from his secretariat to see that I get to the afternoon’s comicio. He himself is up to his neck in appointments. He explains that he is not up for election. He is campaigning for a favorable legislature. His term has three more years to run.
José Augusto who has been detailed as my guide is a student of law. Right in Natal he’s learned fluent English. He’s too young to have learned it from the Americans. He’s so younglooking I don’t like to ask his age. He has plans for the diplomatic service. Itamarití. No, his secretarial work doesn’t interfere with his studies. It is good practice. He’d like to go to the States, to perfect his English and to see. He almost got a fellowship but something went wrong. The man who was backing him died. He wishes it could be this year. Next year will be too late. He’ll be training for the foreign service. Already he has the suave diplomat’s manner, but under it you feel a somewhat steely personality. I’d bet that young man will go far.
The meeting was interesting. An enormous crowd packed a Y-shaped intersection of streets. Green bunting, signs, posters, campaign mottoes. Rockets sizzle up from the outskirts of the crowd to go bang overhead in the rosy sky of the swift twilight. Bats—or were they some kind of nighthawk?—flitter overhead. Night comes on fast.
The governor is giving account of his administration. He talks in front of a floodlit screen. When he needs to explain a point of finance he has the figures thrown on the screen from a slide. He’s explaining his budget to the public. He has a clear sharp way of putting things. While he does occasionally pull out the organ notes of the professional orator his story hangs together; the public servant accounting to his constituents.
Brazilian comicios, particularly in this mad campaign of ’62, never end. José Augusto says it’s time to dine. Gradually the chauffeur manages to back his car out of the crowd.
A full moon has risen above the Atlantic. Natal rises from the sea in ranks of stucco cubes, theatrically lit by the streetlights against a background of high black headlands. It is really beautiful in the moonlight. We eat at the aviation officers club, on a terrace overlooking an inlet. The place has the look of having been built by the Americans twenty years back. We are absolutely alone there except for a solitary figure at the bar inside.
The waiter produces elegantly broiled slices of a large fish I don’t catch the name of. Lime and Bacardi. (Exiled from Cuba, Bacardi rum is now produced in Recife.) After the long drive and the dust and the crowded governor’s palace and the jampacked comicio the stillness is delicious, the emptiness, the moonlit water.
The figure at the bar turns out to be a local poet. He’s been at the bar a long time. He weaves down the terrace to greet us. He hovers around the table. Talking, gesticulating, expostulating, there seem to be three or four of him. I get the feeling the place is crowded. He shows an amazing knowledge of North American writing. He loves Sherwood Anderson: Poor White, Winesburg, Ohio …
Poor Sherwood, I’m thinking, so many years dead. How he would have enjoyed this scene. The unfamiliar inlet between mysterious hills in the moonlight. The empty terrace, the puzzled waiter; José Augusto, who’s a proper young man, explaining apologetically that the gentleman really is a very good poet … How Sherwood Anderson would have enjoyed the scene and the drunken poet praising him.
We had to tear ourselves away in a hurry. My appointment with Bishop Sales was at nine and it suddenly transpired that his episcopal residence was not in Natal, but in a fishing village called Ponta Negra, fourteen kilometers away. Our suggestion to the chauffeur that we mustn’t keep the bishop waiting, caused him to tear off at such speed through the complicated moonlit streets of Natal and along a narrow bumpy road that skirted a great moonwashed beach that I really thought he’d be the end of us. It was only when I explained to him that it was not extreme unction I was seeking from the bishop but an interview, that he saw the point and slowed down.
Bishop Sales has a dark eager aquiline countenance with just a touch of Savonarola. His spare frame has a vigorous athletic look under the black cassock. He sits on a small hard chair in his bare little office, talking with his legs crossed in a rather unecclesiastical manner.
His program to combat Communism, he says right away, is only one of a dozen programs in various parts of Brazil. It is not a program of religious propaganda, he insists. He wants to awaken a sense of human dignity and of the duties of citizenship in a democracy.
In furtherance of this general aim, he conducts courses in reading and writing: alphabetization, he calls it, over the radio.
He wants a Christian labor movement that will be independent of politicians and Communists and also of employer influences. He wants trade unions that will really stand up for the rights and dignity of labor.
Like Aluísio Alves
his appeal is to the teenagers. Every week he invites a group of young people from interior towns and villages to spend three days at Ponta Negra for an indoctrination course. He furnishes them with small batterypowered radios to take home so that they can tune in on the lessons and lectures he broadcasts every day: alphabetization, hygiene, sanitation, simple information that people need in the back country. The young people tune in and explain the lessons to their parents.
He takes me into the next room, where a group of boys and girls, some of them so young they must still be in grade school, are peering at sentences written on a blackboard. Their faces shine when he addresses them. They are having fun, like boy or girl scouts in the States.
“See how they enjoy it,” he says eagerly when we go back to his office. He pours me a glass of coconut water.
“Communist propaganda succeeds,” he says, “because nobody has shown enough interest to talk to the people first. You see how they light up. They know I am interested in them.”
He went on to lament the fact that many great Brazilian capitalists were so shortsighted—out of a mistaken nationalism perhaps—as to back Communist agitators. He regretted too that the U. S. State Department wouldn’t subsidize any of the church programs for promoting the democratic faith. He needed all the help he could get. There was so much to be done.
The chauffeur drove us back to town at a snail’s pace when I told him I wanted to enjoy the sight of the beach and the rocky coast in the moonlight. The enormous bed at the government guesthouse couldn’t have been more comfortable. It had been a long day.