The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

by Eduardo Galeano

  A mysterious resonance, a strange force, echoes in Buñuel’s films. Some long, deep roll of drums, perhaps the drums of his infancy in Calanda, make the earth tremble, even if the sound track registers no noise, and the world simulates silence and forgiveness.

  (70 and 71)

  1952: San Fernando Hill

  Sick unto Death

  is Colombia since Gaitán was murdered on that Bogotá street. In mountains and plains, frozen prairies and steamy valleys—everywhere—campesinos kill each other, poor against poor, all against all. A tornado of vendettas and vengeance allows Blackblood, the Claw, Tarzan, Tough Luck, the Roach, and other artists of butchery to excel at their chosen trade, but more ferocious crimes are committed by the forces of order. The Tolima Battalion kills fifteen hundred, not counting rapes or mutilations, in its sweep of the area from Pantamillo to San Fernando Hill. To leave no seed from which the future might grow, soldiers toss children aloft and run them through with bayonet or machete.

  “Don’t bring me stories,” say those who give the orders, “bring me ears.”

  Campesinos who manage to escape seek protection deep in the mountains, leaving their smoking shacks in cinders behind them. Before leaving, in a sad ceremony they kill the dog, because he makes noise.

  (217, 227, and 408)

  1952: La Paz

  El Illimani

  Though you can’t see him, he watches you. Hide where you like, he watches over you. No cranny escapes him. The capital of Bolivia belongs to him, although they don’t know it, the gentlemen who till last night thought themselves masters of these houses, these people.

  El Illimani, proud king, washes himself with mist. At his feet, the city begins its day. Campfires die out, the last machinegun volleys are heard. The yellow hats of miners overwhelm the military caps. An army that has never won against those outside nor lost against those within, collapses. People dance on any street corner. Handkerchiefs flutter, braids and multilayered skirts undulate to the beat of the cueca.

  In the absolute blueness of the sky gleams El Illimani’s crown of three peaks: From the snowy summits the gods contemplate the happiness of their children in arms, at the end of this endless foot-by-foot struggle through the back streets.

  (17, 172, and 473)

  1952: La Paz

  Drum of the People

  that beats and rolls and rolls again, vengeance of the Indian who sleeps in the yard like a dog and greets the master with bended knee: The army of the underdogs fought with homemade bombs and sticks of dynamite until, finally, the arsenal of the military fell into their hands.

  Víctor Paz Estenssoro promises that from this day Bolivia will be for all Bolivians. By the mines the workers fly the national flag at half-mast, where it will stay until the new president fulfills his promise to nationalize tin. In London they see it coming: As if by magic, the price of tin falls by two-thirds.

  On the Pairumani estate, Indians roast on a grill the prize bulls Patiño imported from Holland.

  Aramayo’s tennis courts, surfaced with brick dust from England, are turned into mule corrals.

  (17, 172, and 473)

  A Woman of the Bolivian Mines Gives the Recipe for a Homemade Bomb

  Look for a little milk can. Put the dynamite right in the middle, a capsule. Then, bits of iron, slag, a little dirt. Add glass and small nails. Then cover it up good. Like this, see? You light it right there and—shsss!—throw it. If you have a sling you can throw it farther. My husband can throw from here to six blocks away. For that you put in a longer wick.

  (268)

  1952: Cochabamba

  Cries of Mockery and Grievance

  All over the Bolivian countryside times are changing: a vast insurgency against the large estates and against fear. In the Cochabamba valley, the women too hurl their defiance, singing and dancing.

  At ceremonies of homage to the Christ of the Holy Cross, Quechua campesinos from the whole valley light candles, drink chicha, sing ballads, and cavort to the sound of accordions and charangos, around the Crucified One.

  The young girls implore Christ for a husband who won’t make them cry, for a mule loaded with corn, a white sheep and a black sheep, a sewing machine, or as many rings as their hands have fingers. Afterward they sing stridently, always in the Indian language, their protest. To Christ, to father, to boyfriend and to husband they promise love and service, at table as well as in bed, but they don’t want to be battered beasts of burden anymore.

  Singing, they shoot bullets of mockery at the bull’s eye of the naked macho, well ravaged by years and insects, who sleeps or pretends to sleep on the cross.

  (5)

  Shameless Verses Sung by Indian Women of Cochabamba to Jesus Christ

  Little Father, to your flock,

  “Daughter, daughter,” you keep saying.

  But how could you have fathered me

  When you haven’t got a cock?

  “Lazy, lazy,” you’re reproving,

  Little Father, Holy Cross,

  But limp and lazy—look at you:

  Standing up there, never moving.

  Little fox with tail all curls,

  Beady eyes on women spying,

  Little old man with mousey face

  And your nose so full of holes.

  You won’t put up with me unwed,

  You condemn me to bear kids,

  Dress and feed them while alive,

  Bury them proper when they’re dead.

  Will you send to me a mate

  Who would give me blows and kicks?

  Why must every budding rose

  Suffer the same wilted fate?

  (5)

  1952: Buenos Aires

  The Argentine People Feel Naked Without Her

  Long live cancer! wrote some hand on a wall in Buenos Aires. They hated her, they hate her, the well-fed—for being poor, a woman, and presumptuous. She challenged them in talk and offended them in life. Born to be a servant, or at best an actress in cheap melodramas, Evita refused to memorize her part.

  They loved her, they love her, the unloved—through her mouth they spoke their minds and their curses. Evita was the blonde fairy who embraced the leprous and ragged and gave peace to the despairing, a bottomless spring that gushed jobs and mattresses, shoes and sewing machines, false teeth and bridal trousseaux. The poor received these charities at a side door, while Evita wore stunning jewelry and mink coats in midsummer. Not that they begrudged her the luxury: They celebrated it. They felt not humiliated but avenged by her queenly attire.

  Before the body of Evita, surrounded by white carnations, people file by, weeping. Day after day, night after night, the line of torches: a procession two weeks long.

  Bankers, businessmen, and landowners sigh with relief. With Evita dead, President Perón is a knife without a cutting edge.

  (311 and 417)

  1952: On the High Seas

  Wanted: Charlie the Tramp

  Charles Chaplin sails for London. On the second day at sea, news reaches the ship that he won’t be able to return to the United States. The attorney general applies to his case a law aimed at foreigners suspected of communism, depravity, or insanity.

  Some years earlier Chaplin had been interrogated by officials of the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service:

  Are you of Jewish origin?

  Are you a Communist?

  Have you ever committed adultery?

  Senator Richard Nixon and the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper agree: Chaplin is a menace to our institutions. Outside theaters showing his films, the Legion of Decency and the American Legion picket with signs demanding: Chaplin, go to Russia.

  The FBI has for nearly thirty years been seeking proof that Chaplin is really a Jew named Israel Thonstein and that he works as a spy for Moscow. Their suspicions were aroused in 1923 when Pravda printed the comment: Chaplin is an actor of undoubted talent.

  (121 and 383)

  1952: London

  An Admirable Ghos
t

  named Buster Keaton has returned to the screen after long years of oblivion, thanks to Chaplin. Limelight opens in London, and in it for a few precious minutes Keaton teams up with Chaplin in an absurd double act that steals the show.

  This is the first time Keaton and Chaplin have worked together. They appear gray-haired and wrinkled, though with the same charm as in those moments long ago, when they made silence wittier than words.

  Chaplin and Keaton are still the best. They know that there is nothing more serious than laughter, an art demanding infinite work, and that as long as the world revolves, making others laugh is the most splendid of activities.

  (382 and 383)

  1953: Washington

  Newsreel

  The United States explodes the first H-bomb at Eniwetok.

  President Eisenhower names Charles Wilson secretary of defense. Wilson, an executive of General Motors, has recently declared: What’s good for General Motors is good for America.

  After a long trial, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are executed in the electric chair. The Rosenbergs, accused of spying for the Russians, deny guilt to the end.

  The American city of Moscow exhorts its Russian namesake to change its name. The authorities of this small city in Idaho claim the exclusive right to call themselves Muscovites, and ask that the Soviet capital be rebaptized to avoid any embarrassing associations.

  Half the citizens of the United States decisively support Senator McCarthy’s campaign against the Communist infiltration of democracy, according to opinion polls.

  One of the suspects McCarthy plans to interrogate, engineer Raymond Kaplan, commits suicide by throwing himself under a truck.

  The scientist Albert Einstein appeals to intellectuals to refuse to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and to be prepared for jail or economic ruin. Failing this, believes Einstein, the intellectuals deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them.

  (45)

  1953: Washington

  The Witch Hunt

  Incorrigible Albert Einstein, according to Senator McCarthy’s list, is America’s foremost fellow traveler. To get on the list, all you need to do is have black friends or oppose sending U.S. troops to Korea; but the case of Einstein is a much weightier one. McCarthy has proof to spare that this ungrateful Jew has a heart that tilts left and pumps red blood.

  The hearing room, where the fires of this Inquisition burn, becomes a celebrity circus. Einstein’s is not the only famous name that echoes here. For some time the Un-American Activities Committee has had its eye on Hollywood. The Committee demands names, and Hollywood names cause scandal. Those who won’t talk lose their jobs and find their careers ruined; or go to jail, like Dashiell Hammett; or lose their passports, like Lillian Hellman and Paul Robeson; or are expelled from the country, like Cedric Belfrage. Ronald Reagan, a minor leading man, brands the reds and pinks who don’t deserve to be saved from the furies of Armageddon. Another leading man, Robert Taylor, publicly repents having acted in a film in which Russians smile. Playwright Clifford Odets begs pardon for his ideas and betrays his old comrades. Actor José Ferrer and director Elia Kazan point their fingers at colleagues. To dissociate himself clearly from Communists, Kazan makes a film about the Mexican leader Emiliano Zapata in which Zapata is not the silent campesino who championed agrarian reform, but a charlatan who shoots off bullets and speeches in an unceasing diarrhea.

  (41, 219, and 467)

  1953: Washington

  Portrait of a Witch Hunter

  His raw material is collective fear. He rolls up his sleeves and goes to work. Skillful molder of this clay, Joseph McCarthy turns fear into panic and panic into hysteria.

  Feverishly he exhorts them to betray. He swears not to shut his mouth as long as his country is infected by the Marxist plague. For him all ambiguity has the ring of cowardice. First he accuses, then he investigates. He sells certainties to the vacillating and lashes out, knee to groin or knife to belly, at anyone who questions the right of private property or opposes war and business as usual.

  (395)

  1953: Seattle

  Robeson

  They bar him from traveling to Canada, or anywhere else. When some Canadians invite him to perform, Paul Robeson sings to them by telephone from Seattle, and by telephone he swears that he will stand firm as long as there is breath in his body.

  Robeson, grandson of slaves, believes that Africa is a source of pride and not a zoo run by Tarzan. A black with red ideas, friend of the yellows who are resisting the white invasion in Korea, he sings in the name of his insulted people and of all insulted peoples who by singing lift their heads; and he sings with a voice full of thundering heaven and quaking earth.

  (381)

  1953: Santiago de Cuba

  Fidel

  At dawn on July 26, a handful of youths attack the Moncada barracks. Armed with dignity and Cuban bravura and a few bird guns, they assault the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and half a century of colonization masquerading as a republic.

  A few die in battle, but more than seventy are finished off by the army after a week of torture. The torturers tear out the eyes of Abel Santamaría, among others.

  The rebel leader, taken prisoner, offers his defense plea. Fidel Castro has the look of a man who gives all of himself without asking anything in return. The judges listen to him in astonishment, missing not a word. His words are not, however, for the ones kissed by the gods; he speaks for the ones pissed on by the devils, and for them, and in their name, he explains what he has done.

  Fidel Castro claims the ancient right of rebellion against despotism: “This island will sink in the ocean before we will consent to be anybody’s slaves …”

  He tosses his head like a tree, accuses Batista and his officers of exchanging their uniforms for butchers’ aprons, and sets forth a program of revolution. In Cuba there could be food and work for all, and more to spare.

  “No, that is not inconceivable.”

  (90, 392, and 422)

  1953: Santiago de Cuba

  The Accused Turns Prosecutor and Announces: “History Will Absolve Me”

  What is inconceivable is that there should be men going to bed hungry while an inch of land remains unsown; what is inconceivable is that there should be children who die without medical care; that thirty percent of our campesinos cannot sign their names and ninety-nine percent don’t know the history of Cuba; that most families in our countryside should be living in worse conditions than the Indians Columbus found when he discovered the most beautiful land human eyes had ever seen …

  From such wretchedness it is only possible to free oneself by death; and in that the state does help them: to die. Ninety percent of rural children are devoured by parasites that enter from the soil through the toenails of their unshod feet.

  More than half of the best cultivated production lands are in foreign hands. In Oriente, the largest province, the lands of the United Fruit Company and the West Indian Company extend from the north coast to the south coast …

  Cuba continues to be a factory producing raw materials. Sugar is exported to import candies; leather exported to import shoes; iron exported to import plows …

  (90)

  1953: Boston

  United Fruit

  Throne of bananas, crown of bananas, a banana held like a scepter: Sam Zemurray, master of the lands and seas of the banana kingdom, did not believe it possible that his Guatemalan vassals could give him a headache. “The Indians are too ignorant for Marxism,” he used to say, and was applauded by his court at his royal palace in Boston, Massachusetts.

  Thanks to the successive decrees of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who governed surrounded by sycophants and spies, seas of slobber, forests of familiars; and of Jorge Ubico, who thought he was Napoleon but wasn’t, Guatemala has remained part of United Fruit’s vast dominion for half a century. In Guatemala United Fruit can seize whatever land it wants—enormous unused tracts—and owns the railroad
, the telephone, the telegraph, the ports, and the ships, not to speak of soldiers, politicians, and journalists.

  Sam Zemurray’s troubles began when president Juan José Arévalo forced the company to respect the union and its right to strike. From bad to worse: A new president, Jacobo Arbenz, introduces agrarian reform, seizes United Fruit’s uncultivated lands, begins dividing them among a hundred thousand families, and acts as if Guatemala were ruled by the landless, the letterless, the breadless, the less.

  (50 and 288)

  1953: Guatemala City

  Arbenz

  President Truman howled when workers on Guatemala’s banana plantations started to behave like people. Now President Eisenhower spits lightning over the expropriation of United Fruit.

  The government of the United States considers it an outrage that the government of Guatemala should take United Fruit’s account books seriously. Arbenz proposes to pay as indemnity only the value that the company itself had placed on its lands to defraud the tax laws. John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, demands twenty-five times that.

  Jacobo Arbenz, accused of conspiring with Communists, draws his inspiration not from Lenin but from Abraham Lincoln. His agrarian reform, an attempt to modernize Guatemalan capitalism, is less radical than the North American rural laws of almost a century ago.

  (81 and 416)

  1953: San Salvador

  Dictator Wanted

  Guatemalan General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, distinguished killer of Indians, has lived in exile since the fall of dictator Ubico. Now, Walter Turnbull comes to San Salvador to offer him a deal. Turnbull, representative of both United Fruit and the CIA, proposes that Ydígoras take charge of Guatemala. There is money available for such a project, if he promises to destroy the unions, restore United Fruit’s lands and privileges, and repay this loan to the last cent within a reasonable period. Ydígoras asks time to think it over, while making it clear he considers the conditions abusive.