Brazil on the Move

by John Dos Passos

  There have been a few small riots between Lacerda supporters and Brizola’s people. Brizola is in town. When he addresses a public meeting he has a military bodyguard. There have been new rumors of threats against Lacerda’s life.

  The minutes drag on. We three are alone in the dark empty street. It is obvious that the thought of personal danger never crosses Lacerda’s mind. While he chats cheerfully of one thing and another part of his brain is busy planning what he is going to say later tonight after dinner when he appears on TV. He grumbles a little about Brochado da Rocha, Goulart’s Prime Minister. As a lawyer in Rio Grande do Sul he had a good reputation, but as a politician he’s proved an absolute ninny. Though a man of moderate opinions Lacerda says he’s turned to putty in the hands of the Communists.

  After twenty minutes the American students appear. They are full of apologies, with bright shiny faces. Lacerda seems happy airing his American slang. He’s happy having the Americans there though he knows very well that this is one campaign when contact with an American is a liability. Nobody defends the Alliance for Progress. Yankeebaiting is the order of the day. Lacerda’s never been a man to give in before popular clamor. We all eat dinner at the yachtclub very much in the public eye. Afterwards he goes off to the television station to lash at his enemies in a twohour speech.

  One, Two, and Three, Cried the Count of Montecristo

  When Lacerda went on the air and called Brochado da Rocha the cheerful vivandière of the Goulart regime, that hitherto rather colorless politician blew his top. At the next cabinet meeting he threatened to resign as Prime Minister unless Lacerda were removed as Governor of Guanabara. He cried out passionately that he would not be able to look his children in the eye if he went home without some punishment for Lacerda. The leftwing press went into an uproar. However, military influences made themselves felt in Brasília. Brochado da Rocha had to be satisfied with a vote of censure on Lacerda by the council of ministers.

  Juscelino Kubitschek had been busy rebuilding his old coalition between Goulart’s party and his Social Democrats. His aim was seemingly to strengthen the right wing of the Labor Party and to wean the President away from Brizola and the Communist apparatus. Now he had to go flying to Brasília to apply the healing oil. He had already come out for a return of full powers to the presidency. Why not? He was planning to be President again himself. He could appeal with some authority to João Goulart not to let the situation get out of hand.

  Not long after, in a reshuffling of the Cabinet to bring it more in line with Goulart’s ambitions, Brochado da Rocha was forced out. He went home to his state capital at Pôrto Alegre and a few days later was taken with a cerebral hemorrhage and went to bed and died.

  The Communist-inspired press attacked Lacerda as a murderer. He was a Lucifer of reaction. He was plotting with American imperialists. Subsidized by American funds he had again brought about the death of an eminent Brazilian statesman. Vargas dead, Quadros ruined, and now Brochado da Rocha. The nation must be rid of this sinister influence.

  Postmortem

  In spite of the clamor the elections passed off in peace and quiet on October 7. Just before election day Lacerda obtained a two months’ leave of absence from his legislature to go to Europe to study European subway systems. If he could start the construction of a subway while his governorship lasted he would have accomplished one more benefit for his “marvelous city.” Already he could point out that the rate of new industrial investment in Guanabara had for the first time surpassed the rate in São Paulo.

  The governor needed a rest indeed. Weeks and weeks of working eighteen hours a day had broken down even his robust health. The cold which had troubled him for weeks went to the brink of pneumonia before his doctor put him to bed. Candidates friendly to his policies had to finish their campaigns with little help from their leader.

  The election returns, like those in similar elections held in the United States a month later, could be interpreted almost any way you wanted them. Communist-supported candidates won and anti-Communists won. The commentators however did point out that for Brazil it was a democratic victory. The forms of democracy were rigorously observed. There was no violence or intimidation at the polls and even very little talk of corruption. The turnout was large.

  On account of the proportional system of representation it took a very long time to count the votes. The number of candidates for office was everywhere staggering. This meant a scattering of the independent vote which was an advantage to politicians with wellorganized machines.

  In Guanabara, Lacerda’s enemy Brizola was elected deputy by the largest vote on record. Anti-Americanism paid off. Lacerda’s friends carried the state legislature but lost the vice governorship, which would mean difficulties for the governor during the rest of his term. The Alliance for Progress proved a liability.

  In Pernambuco, the northeastern state where such efforts had been made by the Catholic Church and by influences from the United States to undercut the Communist peasant leagues, Miguel Arraes, the Communist-supported candidate won the governorship by a small margin. His campaign was largely financed by Brazil’s second richest man, a manufacturer from São Paulo named Ermírio de Moraes. Moraes himself, who took the precaution of hiring every taxicab in the state capital of Recife to carry his voters to the polls on election day, went to the federal senate. These developments were a severe blow to Washington’s hopes for an Alliance for Progress in Brazil.

  However, in the key state of São Paulo the story was entirely different. Jânio Quadros tried for a political comeback and was defeated by his old enemy Adhemar de Barros, whose campaign was frankly directed against Communist and Castro influences. In President Goulart’s own state of Rio Grande do Sul the voters made a clean sweep of his brotherinlaw Brizola’s supporters. Menighetti, a conservative who had opposed Brizola’s seizure of the American public utilities, was elected by a large majority. When news came of Brizola’s election to the Chamber from Guanabara streamers appeared across the streets of Pôrto Alegre reading THANK YOU CARIO-CAS.

  The Unhão Nacional Democratico came out badly. For a while it looked as if the chief beneficiary of the 1962 elections might be Juscelino Kubitschek, who wasn’t running for any office at all. Certainly his position was improved as a contender for presidential nomination by the Social Democrats in 1965, but at the same time the figure of the present governor of Minas Gerais, Magelhães Pinto, began to loom as presidential timber. It is too early to say whether Lacerda has lost political prestige. This isn’t his first political reverse. Growing enthusiasm for his presidential candidacy in 1965 is reported from São Paulo. At fortyeight he is just reaching political maturity. His is the most compelling presence on Brazilian television. He somehow finds words every voter can understand to explain the difference between the reorganization of society under freedom and the Communist or Castro way. The direct approach, the straight talk, the burning dedication of the dark eyes behind the shellrimmed glasses still hold his audiences spellbound.

  Friends tell you laughingly about his European “vacation.” Not an idle moment. In Paris he spent his time negotiating a deal with a French concern to install a subway in Rio which is to be financed largely by French funds. In West Germany he contracted for a hospital. He is not known to have done any work during the week he spent in Sicily. On the steamboat back from Italy he whiled away his time preparing a volume of his speeches for publication, and translating a Broadway play, Come Blow Your Horn, which he had found amusing one night in New York, from English into Portuguese for production in Rio.

  VIII

  THE UNEASY NORTHEAST

  (meditations out of a traveler’s notebook)

  Boa Viajem, Recife, September 13, 1962

  The name of the beach means “pleasant journey.” It brings up a picture of people riding out from the city in the old days to wave to their friends tacking out from the harbor entrance on sailing ships into the onshore breeze. I don’t find the hotel as pleasant as it seemed
when I was there with my wife and daughter four years ago; rebuilt and modernized, it lacks the rustic air it had. Maybe it’s that my family has gone back to the States. There’s been an immense amount of building. The beach has taken on a standardized resort look.

  The fishermen have been chased away. Watching their jangadas was one of the real pleasures of our stay in Recife four years ago.

  The jangada is a boatshaped raft made of logs of various light woods. The fishermen push them out in the morning over the heavy surf. Using a lateentype sail they cruise far out into the ocean. They fish with casting nets and hook and line. They steer with a paddle and with moveable leeboards pushed down between the logs, like on the Kon-Tiki. They are awash most of the time. We never did get to go out on one but it was a constant pleasure to follow their skillful navigation, tacking back and forth into the wind; and then the return in the afternoon running before the wind through gaps in the black reef that gave its name to this capital city of the ancient sugar state of Pernambuco, and back through the surf onto the beach.

  The fishermen stored their gear in neatly made shelters of plaited palmleaves, up under the endlessly swaying rustling coconut palms. The catches they brought ashore in their deep baskets seemed pathetically small. These waters are not rich in fish.

  For bathing, the sea is as delicious as ever.

  Drying off in the mild late sun in the salt breeze that was almost cool—the season here is early spring: I’ve seen peach-trees in bloom—I felt a sudden gush of a very Portuguese state of mind: saudades. The Pequeno Dictionário Brasileiro da Língua Portuguêsa describes saudades, rather lyrically I thought, as “the sad and suave remembrance of persons or things distant or gone.”

  Four years ago we all enjoyed ourselves particularly on this beach. The surf was just right. The reef cuts the force of the waves.

  There are landcrabs if you watch for them. They have a ghostly way of being gone before you see them, set high off the ground on spiderlegs like harness racers.

  Gilberto Freyre was at his house in Apipucos. He played host for us for an entire day. It was like living a chapter of Casa Grande e Senzala. He look us out to lunch in the country at an ancient sugar plantation. The sugarmill wasn’t working any more, and the young couple who entertained us, pleasant as they were, were like young couples with artistic tastes you might meet anywhere in the world, but somehow Freyre managed to evoke the sugarmill and the people who’d lived there through the years. He made us feel its history and its folklore … in depth through the years.

  It was a day of semitropical beauty you could hardly believe: blue sky sprinkled, as if with confetti, with little halcyon clouds tinted with lavender and primrose and faintest brick color. The cane was a very lightgreen; the mangoes the very darkest green etched in black. In the shimmering sunlight every tree was a different green. There were sheep, and a duck-pond and geese, and cattle in a distant pasture. Country people on scrubby little horses passed along a country lane. Their straw hats, their clothes had a distinctive air. Even their dogs had a Pernambuco look.

  The lunch tasted incredibly good. We ate a great deal and drank a great deal. Afterwards Freyre produced a pair of guitar-players. They sang what is called a desafio, a challenge. One man makes up a couplet and sings it and the other caps it. In between they keep the guitar strings throbbing. The whole thing is extemporary. The couplets deal with everything from national politics to the private lives of people in the audience. Everybody is kidded. The guitarists kid each other. The audience applauds a successful crack. For the rest of the day wherever we went the guitarists went with us. They gave a great performance.

  In the afternoon we drove through farms and plantations on our way back to Freyre’s house. We drank plenty and talked plenty. We were on the crest of the wave. We dined at the house of a Recife politician. Again the food was much too good. The desafio was going great guns. Afterwards our tireless friends went on to a nightclub, but we, pleading our daughter’s tender years, went back to the Hotel Boa Viajem and to the salty night breeze rustling through the palms and the sound of the surf … Saudades.

  This time four years later, the weather’s threatening. The city of Recife has grown skyscrapers from every seam. It looks as if it had doubled in population. No place to park a car. The old town on the island has lost its quaint Dutch look. I miss old buildings I had remembered. If it weren’t that my friends the Ellebys put me up in their house made lively by their children, I’d be feeling depressed indeed.

  Among the Americans I find a good deal of gloom. The Alliance for Progress seems stalled. Among the Department of Agriculture people to be sure there’s talk of a real breakthrough in rainforest agriculture. If it’s true it’s the most exciting news since chloroquin. So much to be done … if it weren’t for the Communists.

  For the first time, in all my batting around Brazil, walking with a group of Americans at lunchtime into a restaurant, I see real hostility in the faces of the people at the other tables.

  The people who for want of a better word we call intellectuals are subject to obsessions the world over. The anti-McCarthyism of the collegiate and bureaucratic classes in the States became an obsession. In Brazil anti-Americanism may be becoming the current obsession of the intellectuals.

  In São Paulo, at the lawschool at the old university, I tried to have it out with a group of law students. Personally they couldn’t have been more cordial, but their prejudice stuck out like a sore thumb. First they brought up, as everybody does, our discrimination against Negroes in the South, but they seemed to see the point when I explained that three or four southern states constituted a small part of the population of the United States and that even there an effort was being made. (I might have added that the average southern Negro gets a whole lot better break than a workingman in Brazil.) Why was it, one young man who had been to Los Angeles, insisted, that everybody born north of the Rio Grande considered himself better than anybody born south of it. I pointed out that it was a natural human failing to think of your own group as being tops. The paulistas were famous for that. They laughed. They really had me when they began to ask questions about American writers. They knew Faulkner and Hemingway and Salinger and Cummings. Their questions showed thought and information. I kept thinking: suppose I were talking to a group of students back home; they wouldn’t even know whether Brazilians wrote Spanish or Portuguese. Perhaps it’s our ignorance that galls them so.

  It seemed strange to me that they never mentioned the Bay of Pigs. Politeness, maybe.

  I may be wrong, maybe I haven’t talked to enough of them; but I don’t seem to find anti-American prejudice among working people. If they know Americans at all they like them, perhaps because we tend to be more openhanded towards working people than the Brazilians. Better wages. The complaint of the housewives is that Americans spoil their maids. The North American idea that people who do manual work should for that very reason get a little better than fair and equal treatment has made little progress in the southern continent. Of course a lot of Brazilian working people vote the pro-Communist and anti-American tickets. They have to vote the way the labor bosses tell them to. It’s a question of bread and butter. They repeat the Communist slogans without paying much attention to them. If they read, they do believe to a certain extent what they read in Ultima Hora, but they don’t seem to feel the hatred the journalists feel who write in it. The working people are too busy trying to get a square meal, a roof over their heads, a few clothes for the children, and the price of a soccer game Sunday.

  Modern Communism, what in Brazil you might call the Fidel Castro mentality, is an obsession of the intellectuals. Politics is, after all, the ladder to success. In recent years university students here have given a great deal more time to politics than to study or technical training. Whether they were justified or not, student strikes have paralyzed higher education. Dedication to knowledge: scholarship is almost forgotten as a way of life. Many students, whether Communist or anti-Communist, throw al
l their energy into the political activities of the student organizations. Being a student has become a profession.

  The anti-Communists mostly have to work gratis. The Communists get paid in various ways; traveling expenses to meetings, travel to Cuba or the Soviet Union, board and lodging during indoctrination courses. If they write articles they are sure to get them published. A writer who doesn’t offend the Communists finds his books get a good press. There are Communist claques in the publishing houses and in the newspapers. It’s much easier to swim with the tide than against it.

  The last thing the young Brazilians who graduate from the university want to do is to engage in manual labor. We have a similar state of mind developing in the United States, but with us the old Protestant tradition of the nobility of work still has a certain strength. The career they look forward to is officeholding, and Communism looms ahead as the officeholder’s paradise. Even in opposition and illegality the Party offers careers to its adherents. The magic of the Marxist ideology turns careerism into altruism. The student leaders think of themselves as dedicated idealists.

  The Communists are struggling against imperialism and exploitation: how can an idealist oppose them? The Communist imperialism and Communist exploitation they read about in the newspapers doesn’t impress them. The Berlin wall; they shrug it off. The development of the demagoguery of revolution in Mexico should have proved a corrective, but the lesson has been lost.

  Of course the nationalists have a story, in Brazil as they did in Mexico. Though great sectors of industry are now wholly or partly in Brazilian hands, some foreign utilities are still owned abroad. Fear of nationalization has inhibited improvements or even decent maintenance. Investment is at a standstill. In Rio there are people who have been waiting twenty years for a telephone. In trying to protect their stockholders the foreign boards of directors have thrown the Brazilian consumer to the wolves. As a result both consumers and stockholders have lost out. The financial managers can’t seem to think of anything except how to get their companies bailed out by the American taxpayer when expropriation finally comes.