Prose (45 page)

There were elections. The official candidate was one of the generals of the
“golpe preventivo”
that had helped ensure Kubitschek's taking power, Henrique Lott. The other candidate was the ex-Governor of the State of São Paulo, Jânio Quadros, a young politician (a few months younger than President Kennedy) whose career had been meteoric. From history teacher, he had gone up all the steps of the political ladder—from alderman to presidential candidate—never having finished one term in office. (In Brazil a man cannot run for one office while holding another, so Quadros resigned regularly from each of his offices.)

Quadros was elected by a tremendous majority, the biggest election ever held in Brazil. The people wanted a change, wanted law, wanted austerity, even—to escape from the spiralling inflation and the long years of the Vargas regime and its successor. There was an atmosphere of hope and pride. In the first seven months of his presidency, Quadros appeared to be fulfilling his electoral promises, and already the country felt the effects of his administration.

Known as a difficult and temperamental man, he had already “renounced” once during his candidacy but had become reconciled to the parties backing him.

Brazil was hopeful when Quadros entered office in 1961, and at first all went well. As he had in São Paulo, Quadros ordered investigations into graft, fired superfluous government employees, and began reform and development programs. Congressional leaders became disturbed, however, when Quadros began sounding them out about the possibility of his being granted additional powers. Late in August, Lacerda made the sensational revelation that he had been asked to join a Quadros plot to close down Congress entirely.

On the morning of August 25, Quadros readied a resignation letter that, like the one supposed to have been left by Vargas seven years earlier, claimed devotion to Brazil and hinted at threats from mysterious foreign powers. Debate still rages over whether Quadros actually meant to resign or whether he was merely making a dramatic play for more power. In any case, the resignation was submitted and accepted by Congress. The country was stunned by the news that the president had “renounced” and on the following day he was on his way to England.

The Vice-President was João (“Jango”) Goulart, a protégé of Vargas since the days of Vargas's exile in the south and head of the labor “syndicates” since the days of Vargas. He was in China at the time of Quadros's defection and suspected by the military heads of being red. They vetoed his return to take over the presidency, and for a week things were at a standstill: would Goulart be president, or wouldn't he? Rio Grande do Sul, as always, was the war-like state (and its governor was Goulart's brother-in-law), for its “native son.” It prepared for civil war under the slogans of “Legality,” and “upholding the constitution.” The army officers in the north obviously did not want civil war, but they were afraid of Goulart's leftist politics. Finally, the crisis was again solved by the “spirit of compromise” (the very expression, like “land of unfulfilled promise,” is almost a red flag to a Brazilian at present). The Congress voted a change to “
parlamentarismo,
” that is, Goulart would be allowed to take office as president, but his powers would be curbed by having a prime minister—a system copied more or less after that of West Germany. The new cabinet was chosen. (It was immediately called the “bifocal government.”) The country returned to a Parliament, the system responsible for the greatness of the Empire, some say, and, say others, responsible for its fall.

It is still too early to foresee the results of the change.

Chapter 10

The United States and Brazil have many things in common besides both being in the Western Hemisphere and sharing the name of Amerigo Vespucci. It is time we got to know and appreciate each other better; time that the United States gave more to Brazil than loans and those less attractive features of our culture that are thought to be “Americanizing” the world. The United States and Brazil have more in common than coffee and Coca-Cola, although we now have a great deal of both of those.

We are both big countries and very much aware of our size. Perhaps number, gigantism, the “biggest” this or that, mean too much to us. Culturally, too, although we have such different traditions, there are similarities. Both the U.S. and Brazil remained rather cautiously imitative for two hundred years or more, and both have suffered from (let us face it) inferiority-feelings at different periods in our histories. But we laugh at the same jokes, enjoy the same movies, and have almost the same legends of the “frontier,” Indian chiefs, gold-rushes, pioneers, hunters, and savage beasts. Americans and Brazilians are equally quick to sympathy, on the side of the under-dog, hospitable, and kind; both have a sense of national destiny, of great things ahead, and the word “democracy” can still move us deeply.

By a combination of good luck and good mangagement, the U.S. has solved many of the administrative and economic problems of capitalistic democracy earlier than Brazil has. But we should not let that blind us to the many valuable things in the Brazilian “way of life.” Brazil is coping with her Indian problem at least as well as, if not better than, we are ours. And certainly the social and racial problems left over from the days of slavery are being solved more gracefully, and with less suffering, in Brazil than in any other part of the world today. We may never be able to solve our race problem in the Brazilian way, but at least we should be able to think about it calmly.

In personal relations, their less guilt-ridden moral code and their franker attitude towards sex and marriage seem more adult than ours, and preventive of the miseries of prolonged adolescence and over-romanticism. The Brazilian lack of aggressiveness, willingness to compromise, live and let live, love and let love, and their acute sense of the ridiculous in public and private pretentiousness, are all qualities that we could use more of. Their enjoyment of life has not yet been spoiled by the craze for making money; they have not yet added up the hard sum of so much money, so much pay. Although this may come as the inevitable price of further industrialization, perhaps the Brazilians will somehow be able to make it less harsh and driving than we have done.

There are no earthquakes in Brazil, and no hurricanes. There is plenty of space. There is no death penalty. Brazil has no real enemies, has had no real war for almost a hundred years, and never has had a war of conquest. Brazil has no atomic bombs, and so far has never expressed any desire for them. Although the army has helped put an occasional president in or out of power, there has never been a military dictatorship, nor does the military show signs of craving one,—this was clearly demonstrated once more in the last governmental crisis.

Perhaps because of the lack of a middle-class, because the country has been divided between the very few rich and the many poor for so long, it is more democratic, in the popular sense of the word, than many other countries. There is little or no awareness of the insidious degrees of class feeling humanity is capable of. It is perfectly true that an enterprising young man or woman, in the arts or the professions, can pass from one extreme of society to the other without self-consciousness or condescension on the part of any one. Also, although there are proud old aristocratic families, they have never been of such great wealth and grandeur over long periods of time that they can consider themselves natural autocrats. No one is
that
rich in Brazil. There have been too many political ups and downs; too many families were ruined by the emancipation. There are no vast fortunes, no industries that circle the globe, no “oil for the lamps of China.”

The
“Integralistas,”
Brazil's one proto-fascist party, existed only briefly twenty years ago. There are communists and nationalists [ … ].

There have been short-lived slogans like “The petroleum is ours” (
o Petroleo é nosso
)—even if there is not believed to be much petroleum in the country. The anti-American nationalist is almost always one of two types. Like the few “
racistas
” or anti-semites in Brazil, the first comes usually from the class of the “nouveau riche” and is very rarely a native Brazilian but a recent or first-generation immigrant. (Most of the new fortunes in the country have been made by immigrants.) His business has been granted privileges and strong government protection. Naturally he is afraid of foreign competion, particularly American large-scale competition and particularly if his own product is inferior or producing unfairly big profits. The other type of anti-American nationalist is, as is usual everywhere, the man who feels he must blame all his troubles on others: Jews, Negroes, or another nation. In political office such men can stir up anti-American feeling among the poor and ignorant. But since to most of the very poor and ignorant in Brazil, America means almost nothing, a land as remote as Atlantis, the blame is more apt to be put on a local politician. And it should be remembered that in both World Wars the Brazilian government was on the side of the Allies.

*   *   *

It is hard, almost impossible for the very rich to understand the poor,—something that Americans, with all their good intentions, often don't seem to realize. National poverty can produce the same symptoms and reactions everywhere, China or Brazil. Anything a foreigner questions in Brazil, from inefficiency to dirt, from unpainted public buildings to city-manners, from bad transportation to infant mortality—before blaming it on climate, laziness, or national character in general, he should first ask himself “Can this be traced back to simple poverty?” Nine times out of ten it can.

And yet it is not just money that Brazil needs,—far from it. As Eugênio Gudin, Brazil's most highly respected economist, and Finance Minister under President Dutra, said recently in a fine article in
O Globo,
Rio's widely circulated afternoon paper:

“The principal cause of Brazil's economic underdevelopment resides in the great scarcity, on all levels, of men prepared for the task of increasing national productivity, from engineers,
entrepreneurs,
and administrators of high calibre, to skilled workmen … Our chief goal, therefore, should be the formation of nuclei of educated men …

“For this we need … to import hundreds of technicians and teachers, and to send thousands of students to foreign countries, not only in the fields of the sciences but also in the various branches of engineering and industrial techniques…”

[Gudin] blames the present inflation and sad state of affairs in great part on the building of Brasília and the wild government waste & spending of the Kubitschek era. The United States helped build Brasília, just as we helped [
text breaks off
]

Large loans to an extravagant corrupt Federal government for vague areas of activity do no good. The only practical way to help Brazil is by helping the “educated nuclei,” and the industries and developments that will actually increase the country's income.

There is no problem in Brazil that good government, good administration, could not resolve. This fact alone makes Brazil unique among the nations of the world. Under a good government, industrial and material progress would undoubtedly take place at a tremendous rate—all the essentials are there.

But before we condemn Brazil for not having achieved good government as yet—we should distinguish between “progress,” “culture,” and “civilization,” all very different things. The idea of “civilization” has never been especially connected with that of good government. If one had to choose: Is “bad” government so much worse than “good” government that leads to large-scale wars? Is an occasional assassination (although Brazil has actually had very few of them), or an almost-bloodless revolution, any worse than the death of thousands of innocent soldiers? Brazil has a considerable body of both sophisticated and still-living folk-culture. It has many qualities of character and society that go only with high civilization. While I am not making any exaggerated cultural or social claims for Brazil—still, the Greeks got along with bad governments, and so did the Italians of the Renaissance—and no one thinks much the worse of them for it today.

Obviously barring some world-wide disaster, Brazil is going to push and be pushed into industrialization. For the time being however, it is still one country where human-man, poor as he may be, is still more important than producing-man or consuming-man or political-man.

Everyone who visits Brazil agrees that ordinary, average Brazilians are a wonderful people: cheerful, sweet-tempered, witty, and patient—incredibly patient. To see them standing in line for hours, literally for hours, in lines folded back on themselves two or three times the length of a city block,—only to get aboard a broken-down, recklessly-driven bus and return to their tiny suburban houses, where, these days, as like as not, the street has not been repaired, nor the garbage collected, and there may even be no water—is to wonder at their patience. It seems that there should be a revolution every month or so. They have never had the government they deserve, and one wonders how long it will be before they get it.

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