Past, present, and future: Interview with Eduardo Galeano
by JORGE MAJFUD
Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano (left) shaking hand with late President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela PHOTO/BBC
J. M.: Okay, more to the point, could you sum up cruelty in an image, in a situation that you have experienced?
E. G.: It happened to me years ago, in a truck that was crossing the upper Paraná. Except for me, everyone was from that area. Nobody spoke. We were packed closely together, in the bed of the truck, bouncing around. Next to me, a very poor woman, with a baby in her arms. The baby was burning with fever, crying. The woman just said that she needed a doctor, that somewhere there had to be a doctor. And finally we arrived somewhere, I don’t know how many hours had gone by, the baby hadn’t cried for a long time. I helped that woman get off the truck. When I picked up the baby, I saw that the baby was dead. The killer who had committed this cruelty was an entire system of power, neither in prison nor traveling around on rickety old trucks.
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J. M.: Are we witnessing the end of capitalism, of a paradigm based on consumerism and financial success, or is this simply one more crisis which will end up strengthening the system itself, the same hegemonic culture?
E. G.: I frequently receive invitations to attend the burial of capitalism. We know quite well, however, that this system — which privatizes its profits but kindly socializes its losses and, as if that weren’t enough, tries to convince us that that is philanthropy — will live more than seven lives. To a great degree, capitalism feeds off the discrediting of its alternatives. The word socialism, for example, has been emptied of meaning, by the bureaucracy that used it in the name of the people and by the social democracy that in its name modernized capitalism’s look. We know that this capitalist system is managing quite well to survive the catastrophes that it unleashes. We don’t know, on the other hand, how many lives its main victim — the planet we inhabit, squeezed to the last drop — will be able to live. Where will we move, when the planet is left without water, without land, without air? The company Lunar International is already selling plots of land on the moon. At the end of 2008, the Russian multimillionaire Roman Abramovich made a gift of a little plot to his fiancée.
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J. M.: Can we compare the appearance of the Internet with the revolution produced by the printing press in the 15th century?
E. G.: I have no idea, but it is important to remember that the printing press was not born in the 15th century. The Chinese had invented it two centuries earlier. In reality, the three inventions that made the Renaissance possible were all Chinese inventions: the printing press, the compass, and gunpowder. I don’t know if education has improved today, but before we used to learn a universal history reduced to the history of Europe. From the Middle East, nothing or almost nothing. Not a word about China, nothing about India. And about Africa, we only knew what professor Tarzan taught us, and he was never there. And about the American past, about the pre-Colombian world, some little folkloric thing, a few colored feathers . . . and ciao.
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Eduardo Galeano ruptured the veins of imperialism in Latin America
by MARK FRIED and SHARMINI PERIES
Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer, poet and cultural critic of our time, died on Monday at age seventy-four. This evokes my memory of the fifth Summit of the Americas in 2009 that was held in Port of Spain, where Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in a very hopeful mood gave the newly elected President of the United States Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. President Obama was making his first diplomatic visit to the region.
This act really resonated with me, as I worked for President Chávez for several years, and this is the first of many books that President Chávez had given me. Eduardo Galeano’s book, Open Veins of Latin America. Perhaps the book made a difference to Barack Obama. As I begin this interview, President Obama lifted Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terror.
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Memories of an afternoon with the late Eduardo Galeano
Galeano was an iconic literary and intellectual figure of the Latin American Left, but his work has a global footprint. Arguably among the most influential books of the second half of the 20th century, his landmark 1971 Open Veins of Latin America has been translated into more than a dozen languages and sold over a million copies. It stands with Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, and Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers, as part of the pantheon of anti-colonialism and Third Worldism. Hamid Dabashi calls Galeano a “creative voice of an alternative historiography, a mode of subaltern thinking and writing before a number of Bengali historians made the term globally popular.”
Open Veins of Latin America was banned under the murderous military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay alike, and Galeano himself was driven into exile under his country’s regime during the 1970s. In 2009 the book made international headlines—and saw a major surge in sales—when Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez personally presented Barack Obama with a copy.
But while Open Veins was Galeano’s best-known work, his magnum opus was a trilogy titled Memory of Fire. My friend Scott Sherman captures it beautifully:
Unquestionably Galeano’s masterwork, Memory of Fire is a kind of secret history of the Americas, told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes that resurrected the lives of campesinos and slaves, dictators and scoundrels, poets and visionaries. Memoirs, novels, bits of poetry, folklore, forgotten travel books, ecclesiastical histories, revisionist monographs, Amnesty Inrnational reports — all of these sources constituted the raw material of Galeano’s sprawling mosaic.
Indeed, Galeano “rivals such masters of the fable as Kafka,” the literary critic Michael Dirda once wrote.
by DANNY POSTEL
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