Procedure Against the Black Menace
The condemned are Haitian blacks who work in the Dominican Republic. This military exorcism, planned to the last detail by General Trujillo, lasts a day and a half. In the sugar region, the soldiers shut up Haitian day-laborers in corrals—herds of men, women, and children—and finish them off then and there with machetes; or bind their hands and feet and drive them at bayonet point into the sea.
Trujillo, who powders his face several times a day, wants the Dominician Republic white.
(101, 177, and 286)
1937: Washington
Newsreel
Two weeks later, the government of Haiti conveys to the government of the Dominican Republic its concern about the recent events at the border. The government of the Dominican Republic promises an exhaustive investigation.
In the name of continental security, the government of the United States proposes to President Trujillo that he pay an indemnity to avoid possible friction in the zone. After prolonged negotiation Trujillo recognizes the death of eighteen thousand Haitians on Dominican territory. According to him, the figure of twenty-five thousand victims, put forward by some sources, reflects the intention to manipulate the events dishonestly. Trujillo agrees to pay the government of Haiti, by way of indemnity, $522,000, or twenty-nine dollars for every officially recognized death.
The White House congratulates itself on an agreement reached within the framework of established inter-American treaties and procedures. Secretary of State Cordell Hull declares in Washington that President Trujillo is one of the greatest men in Central America and in most of South America.
The indemnity duly paid in cash, the presidents of the Dominican Republic and Haiti embrace each other at the border.
(101)
1937: Rio de Janeiro
Procedure Against the Red Menace
The president of Brazil, Getulio Vargas, has no alternative but to set up a dictatorship. A drumroll of press and radio reports discloses the sinister Cohen Plan, obliging Vargas to suppress Parliament and the electoral process. The Fatherland is not about to sit back and succumb to the advance of Moscow’s hordes. The Cohen Plan, which the government has discovered in some cellar, gives the full details—tactics and strategy—of the Communist plot against Brazil.
The plan is called “Cohen” due to a stenographic error. The originator of the plan, Captain Olympio Mourão Filho, actually baptized it the Kun Plan, having based it on documents from the brief Hungarian revolution headed by Béla Kun.
But the name is secondary. Captain Mourão Filho gets a well-earned promotion to major.
(43)
1937: Cariri Valley
The Crime of Community
From planes, they bomb and machinegun them. On the ground, they cut their throats, burn them alive, crucify them. Forty years after it wiped out the community of Canudos, the Brazilian army does the same to Caldeirão, verdant island in the northeast, and for the same crime—denying the principle of private property.
In Caldeirão nothing belonged to anyone: neither textile looms, nor brick ovens, nor the sea of cornfields around the village, nor the snowy immensity of cotton fields beyond. The owners were everyone and no one, and there were no naked or hungry. The needy had formed this community at the call of the Holy Cross of the Desert, which saintly José Lourenço, desert pilgrim, had carried there on his shoulder. The Virgin Mary had chosen both the spot for the cross and the holy man to bring it. Where he stuck in the cross, water flowed continuously.
According to the newspapers of distant cities, this squalid holy man is the prosperous sultan of a harem of eleven thousand virgins; and if that were not enough, also an agent of Moscow with a concealed arsenal in his granaries.
Of the community of Caldeirão nothing and no one is left. The colt Trancelim, which only the holy man mounted, flees into the stony mountains. In vain it seeks some shrub offering shade under this infernal sun.
(3)
1937: Rio de Janeiro
Monteiro Lobato
The censors ban The Oil Scandal by Monteiro Lobato. The book offends the oil trust and its technicians, hired or purchased, who claim that Brazil has no oil.
The author has ruined himself trying to create a Brazilian oil company. Before that, he failed in the publishing business, when he had the crazy idea of selling books not only in bookstores, but also in pharmacies, bazaars, and newsstands.
Monteiro Lobato was born not to publish books but to write them. His forte is telling tales to children. On the Benteveo Amarillo farm a pig of small intelligence is the Marquis of Rabicó and an ear of corn becomes a distinguished viscount who can read the Bible in Latin and talk in English to Leghorn chickens. The Marquis casts a warm eye on Emilia, the rag doll, who chatters on nonstop, because she started so late in life and has so much chatter stored up.
(252)
1937: Madrid
Hemingway
The reports of Ernest Hemingway describe the war that is raging a step from his hotel in this capital besieged by Franco’s soldiers and Hitler’s airplanes.
Why has Hemingway gone to lonely Spain? He is not exactly a militant like the ones who have come from all parts of the world to join the International Brigades. What Hemingway reveals in his writings is something else—the desperate search for dignity among men. And dignity is the only thing that is not rationed in these trenches of the Spanish republic.
(220 and 312)
1937: Mexico City
The Bolero
Mexico’s Ministry of Public Education prohibits the boleros of Agustín Lara in schools, because their obscene, immoral, and degenerate lyrics might corrupt children.
Lara exalts the Lost Woman, in whose eyes are seen sun-drunk palm trees; he beseeches love from the Decadent One, in whose pupils boredom spreads like a peacock’s tail; he dreams of the sumptuous bed of the silky-skinned Courtesan; with sublime ecstasy he deposits roses at the feet of the Sinful One, and covers the Shameful Whore with incense and jewels in exchange for the honey of her mouth.
(299)
1937: Mexico City
Cantinflas
For laughter, the people flock into the suburban tents, poor little makeshift theaters, where all the footlights shine on Cantinflas.
“There are moments in life that are truly momentary,” says Cantinflas, with his pencil mustache and baggy pants, reeling off his spiel at top speed. His fusillade of nonsense apes the rhetoric of half-baked intellectuals and politicians, doctors of verbal diarrhea who say nothing, who pursue a point with endless phrases, never catching up to it. In these lands, the economy suffers from monetary inflation; politics and culture from verbal inflation.
(205)
1937: Mexico City
Cárdenas
Mexico does not wash its hands of the war in Spain. Lázaro Cárdenas—rare president, friend of silence and enemy of verbosity—not only proclaims his solidarity, but practices it, sending arms to the republican front across the sea, and receiving orphaned children by the shipload.
Cárdenas listens as he governs. He gets around and listens. From town to town he goes, hearing complaints with infinite patience, and never promising more than is possible. A man of his word, he talks little. Until Cárdenas, the art of governing in Mexico consisted of moving the tongue; but when he says yes or no, people believe it. Last summer he announced an agrarian reform program and since then has not stopped allocating lands to native communities.
He is cordially hated by those for whom the revolution is a business. They say that Cárdenas keeps quiet because, spending so much time among the Indians, he has forgotten Spanish, and that one of these days he will appear in a loincloth and feathers.
(45, 78, and 201)
1938: Anenecuilco
Nicolás, Son of Zapata
Earlier than anyone else, harder than anyone else, the campesinos of Anenecuilco have fought for the land; but after so much time and bloodshed, little has changed in the community where Emilia
no Zapata was born and rose in rebellion.
A bunch of papers, eaten by moths and centuries, lie at the heart of the struggle. These documents, with the seal of the viceroy on them, prove that this community is the owner of its own land. Emiliano Zapata left them in the hands of one of his soldiers, Pancho Franco: “If you lose them, compadre, you’ll dry up hanging from a branch.”
And, indeed, on several occasions, Pancho Franco has saved the papers and his life by a hair.
Anenecuilco’s best friend is President Lázaro Cárdenas, who has visited, listened to the campesinos, and recognized and amplified their rights. Its worst enemy is deputy Nicolás Zapata, Emiliano’s eldest son, who has taken possession of the richest lands and aims to get the rest too.
(468)
1938: Mexico City
The Nationalization of Oil
North of Tampico, Mexico’s petroleum belongs to Standard Oil; to the south, Shell. Mexico pays dearly for its own oil, which Europe and the United States buy cheap. These companies have been looting the subsoil and robbing Mexico of taxes and salaries for thirty years—until one fine day Cárdenas decides that Mexico is the owner of Mexican oil.
Since that day, nobody can sleep a wink. The challenge wakes up the country. In never-ending demonstrations, enormous crowds stream into the streets carrying coffins for Standard and Shell on their backs. To a marimba beat and the tolling of bells, workers occupy wells and refineries. But the companies reply in kind: all the foreign technicians, those masters of mystery, are withdrawn. No one is left to tend the indecipherable instrument panels of management. The national flag flutters over silent towers. The drills are halted, the pipelines emptied, the fires extinguished. It is war: war against the Latin American tradition of impotence, the colonial custom of don’t know, no can do.
(45, 201, 234, and 321)
1938: Mexico City
Showdown
Standard Oil demands an immediate invasion of Mexico.
If a single soldier shows up at the border, Cárdenas warns, he will order the wells set on fire. President Roosevelt whistles and looks the other way, but the British Crown, adopting the fury of Shell, announces it will not buy one more drop of Mexican oil. France concurs. Other countries join the blockade. Mexico can’t find anyone to sell it a spare part, and the ships disappear from its ports.
Still, Cárdenas won’t get off the mule. He looks for customers in the prohibited areas—Red Russia, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy—while the abandoned installations revive bit by bit. The Mexican workers mend, improvise, invent, getting by on pure enthusiasm, and so the magic of creation begins to make dignity possible.
(45, 201, 234, and 321)
1938: Coyoacán
Trotsky
Every morning he is surprised to find himself alive. Although his house has guardtowers and electrified wire fences, Leon Trotsky knows it to be a futile fortress. The creator of the Red Army is grateful to Mexico for giving him refuge, but even more grateful to fate. “See, Natasha?” he says to his wife each morning. “Last night they didn’t kill us, and yet you’re complaining.”
Since Lenin’s death, Stalin has liquidated, one after another, the men who had made the Russian revolution—to save it, says Stalin; to take it over, says Trotsky, a man marked for death.
Stubbornly, Trotsky continues to believe in socialism, fouled as it is by human mud; for when all is said, who can deny that Christianity is much more than the Inquisition?
(132)
1938: The Hinterland
The Cangaceiros
operate on a modest scale and never without motive. They don’t rob towns with more than two churches, and kill only by specific order or for a vengeance sworn by kissing a dagger. They work in the burned lands of the desert, far from the sea and the salty breath of its dragons. They cross the lonely stretches of northeast Brazil, on horse or on foot, their half-moon sombreros dripping with decorations. They rarely linger anywhere. They neither raise their children nor bury their parents. They have made a pact with Heaven and Hell not to shelter their bodies from bullets or knives simply for the sake of dying a natural death; and sooner or later these hazardous, hazarded lives, a thousand times lauded in the couplets of blind singers, come to very bad ends: God will say, God will give, high road, long road—the epic of wandering bandits who go from fight to fight, without time for their sweat to go cold.
(136, 348, and 353)
1938: Angica
The Cangaceiro Hunters
To throw their enemies off the scent, the cangaceiros imitate the noises and tracks of animals or use trick soles with heel and toe reversed. But those who know, know. A good tracker recognizes the passage of humans through this dying landscape from what he sees, a broken branch or a stone out of place, and what he smells. The cangaceiros are crazy about perfume. They douse themselves by the liter, and this weakness betrays them.
Following tracks and scents, the hunters reach the hideout of Chief Lampião; and behind them the troops, so close they hear Lampião arguing with his wife. Seated on a stone at the entrance to a cave, María Bonita curses him, while smoking one cigarette after another; from within, he makes sad replies. The soldiers mount their machineguns and await the command to fire.
A light drizzle falls.
(52, 348, 352, and 353)
1939: São Salvador de Bahia
The Women of the Gods
Ruth Landes, North American anthropologist, comes to Brazil to learn about the lives of blacks in a country without racism. In Rio de Janeiro, Minister Osvaldo Aranha receives her. He explains that the government proposes to clean up the Brazilian race, soiled as it is by black blood, because black blood is to blame for national backwardness.
From Rio, Ruth goes to Bahia. In this city, where the sugar- and slave-rich viceroy once had his throne, blacks are an ample majority, and whether it’s religion, music, or food, black is what is worthwhile here. Nevertheless, all Bahians, including blacks, think white skin is proof of good quality. No, not everyone. Ruth discovers pride of blackness in the women of the African temples.
There it is nearly always women, black priestesses, who receive in their bodies the gods from Africa. Resplendent and round as cannonballs, they offer their capacious bodies as homes where it is pleasant to visit, to linger. While the gods enter them, dance in them, from the hands of these possessed priestesses the people get encouragement and solace, and from their mouths hear the voices of fate.
The black priestesses of Bahia accept lovers, not husbands. What matrimony gives in prestige, it takes away in freedom and happiness. None of them is interested in formal marriage before priest or judge. None wants to be a handcuffed wife, a Mrs. Someone-or-other. Heads erect, with languid swings, the priestesses move like queens of Creation, condemning their men to the incomparable torment of jealousy of the gods.
(253)
Exú
An earthquake of drums disturbs Rio de Janeiro’s sleep. From the backwoods, by firelight, Exú mocks the rich, sending against them his deadly curses. Perfidious avenger of the have-nots, he lights up the night and darkens the day. If he throws a stone into a thicket, the thicket bleeds.
The god of the poor is also a devil. He has two heads: one, Jesus of Nazareth; the other, Satan of Hell. In Bahia he is a pesky messenger from the other world, a little second-class god; but in the slums of Rio he is the powerful master of midnight. Capable of caress or crime, Exú can save or kill, sometimes both at once.
He comes from the bowels of the earth, entering violently, destructively, through the soles of unshod feet. He is lent body and voice by men and women who dance with rats in shacks perilously suspended over the void, people whom Exú redeems with such craziness that they roll on the ground laughing themselves to death.
(255)
María Padilha
She is both Exú and one of his women, mirror and lover: María Padilha, the most whorish of the female devils with whom Exú likes to roll in the bonfires.
She is not h
ard to recognize when she enters the body. María Padilha shrieks, howls insults, laughs crudely, and at the end of a trance demands expensive drinks and imported cigarettes. She has to be treated like a great lady and passionately implored before she will deign to use her well-known influence with the most important gods and devils.
María Padilha doesn’t enter just any body. To manifest herself in this world, she chooses the women of the Rio slums who make a livelihood selling themselves for small change. Thus do the despised become worthy of devotion. Hired flesh mounts to the center of the altar. The garbage of the night shines brighter than the sun.
1939: Rio de Janeiro
The Samba
Brazil is Brazilian and so is God, proclaims Ari Barroso in the very patriotic and danceable music that is becoming the heart of Rio’s carnival.
But the tastier samba lyrics offered at the carnival, far from exalting the virtues of this tropical paradise, perversely eulogize the bohemian life and the misdeeds of free souls, damn poverty and the police, and scorn work. Work is for idiots, because anyone can see that the bricklayer can never enter what his hands erect.
The samba, black rhythm, offspring of the chants that convoke the black gods of the slums, now dominates the carnivals, even if in respectable homes it is still scorned. It invites distrust because it is black and poor and born in the refuges of people hunted by the police. But the samba quickens the feet and caresses the soul and there is no disregarding it once it strikes up. The universe breathes to the rhythms of the samba until Ash Wednesday in a fiesta that turns every proletarian into a king, every paralytic into an athlete, and every bore into a beautiful madman.