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

by Eduardo Galeano

  (100)

  1959: Havana

  “We have only won the right to begin,”

  says Fidel, who rides into town on top of a tank, direct from the Sierra Maestra. To a surging crowd he explains that all this, while it might look like a conclusion, is no more than a beginning.

  Half of Cuba’s land is uncultivated. According to the statistics, last year was the most prosperous in the island’s history; but the campesinos, who can’t read statistics or anything else, haven’t noticed. From now on, a different cock will crow, with agrarian reform and a literacy campaign, as in the sierra, the most urgent tasks. But before that, the dismantling of an army of butchers. The worst torturers go up against a wall. The aptly named “Bonebreaker” faints each time the firing squad takes aim. They have to bind him to a post.

  (91)

  1960: Brasília

  A City, or Delirium in the Midst of Nothing

  Brazil lifts the curtain on its new capital. Suddenly, Brasília is born at the center of a cross traced on the red dust of the desert, very far from the coast, very far from everything, out at the end of the world—or perhaps its beginning.

  The city has been built at a dizzying speed. For three years this was an anthill where workers and technicians labored shoulder to shoulder, night and day, sharing jobs, food, and shelter. But when Brasilia is finished, the fleeting illusion of brotherhood is finished, too. Doors slam: This city is not for servants. Brasília locks out those who raised it with their own hands. Their place is piled together in shacks that blossom by God’s grace on the outskirts of town.

  This is the government’s city, house of power. No people in its plazas, no paths to walk on. Brasília is on the moon: white, luminous, floating way up, high above Brazil, shielded from its dirt and its follies.

  Oscar Niemeyer, architect of its palaces, did not dream of it that way. When the great inaugural fiesta occurs, Niemeyer does not appear on the podium.

  (69 and 315)

  1960: Rio de Janeiro

  Niemeyer

  He hates right angles and capitalism. Against capitalism there’s not much he can do; but against the right angle, that oppressor, constrictor of space, his architecture triumphs. It’s free and sensual and light as clouds.

  Niemeyer imagines human habitations in the form of a woman’s body, a sinuous shoreline, or a tropical fruit. Also in the form of a mountain, if the mountain breaks up into beautiful curves against the sky, as do the mountains of Rio de Janeiro, designed by God on that day when God thought he was Niemeyer.

  (315)

  1960: Rio de Janeiro

  Guimaraes Rosa

  Daring and undulating, too, is the language of Guimaraes Rosa, who builds houses with words.

  Works warm with passion are created by this formal gentleman, metronomically punctual, incapable of crossing a street against the light. Tragedy blows ferociously through the stories and novels of the smiling career diplomat. When he writes he violates all literary rules, this bourgeois conservative who dreams of entering the Academy.

  1960: Artemisa

  Thousands and Thousands of Machetes

  wave in the air, brushing, rubbing, colliding, clashing, providing a background of battle-music for Fidel’s speech—or, rather, for the song he is singing from the platform. Here, on the eastern end of the island, he explains to sugar workers why his government has expropriated Texaco Oil.

  Cuba reacts to each successive blow with neither trepidation nor deference. The State Department refuses to accept the agrarian reform: Cuba divides the U.S.-owned estates among campesinos. Eisenhower sends planes to set fire to canefields and threatens not to buy Cuban sugar: Cuba breaks the commercial monopoly and exchanges sugar for oil with the Soviet Union. U.S. oil companies refuse to refine Soviet oil: Cuba nationalizes them.

  Every discourse is a course. For hours and hours Fidel reasons and asks, teaches and learns, defends and accuses, while Cuba gropes forward, each step a search for the way.

  (91)

  1961: Santo Domingo

  In the Year Thirty-One of the Trujillo Era

  The paperweight on his desk, lying amid gilt cupids and dancing girls, is a porcelain baseball glove. Surrounded by busts of Trujillo and photos of Trujillo, Trujillo scans the latest lists of conspirators submitted by his spies. With a disdainful flick of the wrist he crosses out names, men and women who will not wake up tomorrow, while his torturers wrench new names from prisoners who scream in the Ozama fortress.

  The lists give Trujillo cause for sad reflection. Leading the conspirators arrayed against him are the U.S. ambassador and the archbishop primate of the Indies, who only yesterday shared his government. Now Empire and Church are repudiating their faithful son, who has become unpresentable in the eyes of the world, and whose prodigal hand they now reject. Such ingratitude from the authors of capitalist development in the Dominican Republic hurts him deeply. Nevertheless, among all the decorations that hang from his breast, his belly, and the walls, Trujillo still loves best the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Gregory, which he received from the Vatican, and the little medal which, many years ago, recognized his services to the U.S. Marines.

  Until death he will be the Sentinel of the West, despite all the grief, this man who has dubbed himself Benefactor of the Fatherland, Savior of the Fatherland, Father of the Fatherland, Restorer of Financial Independence, Champion of World Peace, Protector of Culture, First Anticommunist of the Americas, Outstanding and Most Illustrious Generalísimo.

  (60, 63, and 101)

  1961: Santo Domingo

  The Defunctísimo

  leaves as his bequest an entire country—in addition to nine thousand six hundred neckties, two thousand suits, three hundred and fifty uniforms, and six hundred pairs of shoes in his closets in Santo Domingo, and five hundred and thirty million dollars in his private Swiss bank accounts.

  Rafael Leónidas Trujillo has fallen in an ambush, bullets tattooing his car. His son, Ramfis, flies in from Paris to take charge of the legacy, the burial, and vengeance.

  Colleague and buddy of Porfirio Rubirosa, Ramfis Trujillo has acquired a certain notoriety since a recent cultural mission to Hollywood. There, he presented Mercedes Benzes and chinchilla coats to Kim Novak and Zsa Zsa Cabor in the name of the hungry but generous Dominican people.

  (60, 63, and 101)

  1961: Bay of Pigs

  Against the Wind,

  against death, moving ahead, never back, the Cuban revolution remains scandalously alive no more than eight minutes’ flying time from Miami.

  To put an end to this effrontery, the CIA organizes an invasion to be launched from the United States, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Somoza II sees the expeditionary force off at the pier. In the Cuban Liberation Army, machine-tooled, oiled, and greased by the CIA, soldiers and policemen from the Batista dictatorship cohabit with displaced inheritors of sugar plantations, banks, newspapers, gambling casinos, brothels, and political parties.

  “Bring me back some hairs from Castro’s beard!” Somoza instructs them.

  U.S. planes, camouflaged and decorated with the star of the Cuban Air Force, enter Cuban skies. These planes, flying low, strafe the people who greet them, then bomb the cities. After this softening-up operation, the invaders land haplessly in the swamps of the Bay of Pigs.

  Meanwhile, President Kennedy golfs in Virginia. He has issued the invasion order, but it was Eisenhower who had set the plan in motion, Eisenhower who gave it the green light at the same desk where he approved the invasion of Guatemala. Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, assured him it would be as simple to do away with Fidel as it was with Arbenz. A matter of a couple of weeks, give or take a day or two; even the same CIA team to take charge of it. Same men, same bases. The landing of the liberators would unleash popular insurrection on this island under the boot of red tyranny. U.S. intelligence operatives report exactly that. The people of Cuba, fed up with forming queues, await the signal to rise.

  (415 and 469)

&nb
sp; 1961: Playa Girón

  The Second U.S. Military Defeat in Latin America

  It takes Cuba only three days to finish off the invaders. Among the dead are four U.S. pilots. The seven ships of the invasion fleet, escorted by the United States Navy, flee or sink in the Bay of Pigs.

  President Kennedy assumes full responsibility for this CIA fiasco.

  The Agency believed, as always, in the reports of its local spies, whom it paid to say what it was desperate to hear; and, as always, it confused geography with a military map unrelated to people or to history. The marshes the CIA chose for the landing had been the most miserable spot in all Cuba, a kingdom of crocodiles and mosquitos—that is, until the revolution. Then human enthusiasm had transformed these quagmires, peppering them with schools, hospitals, and roads.

  The people here are the first to face the bullets of the invaders who have come to save them.

  (88, 435, and 469)

  1961: Havana

  Portrait of the Past

  The invaders—hangers-on and hangmen, young millionaires, veterans of a thousand crimes—answer the journalists’ questions. No one assumes responsibility for Playa Girón; no one assumes responsibility for anything. They were all cooks.

  Ramón Calvino, famous torturer of the Batista regime, suffers total amnesia when confronted by the women he had beaten, kicked and raped, who identify and revile him. Father Ismael de Lugo, chaplain of the assault brigade, seeks shelter beneath the Virgin’s cloak. He had fought on Franco’s side in the Spanish war—on the Virgin’s advice, he says—and joined the invasion force to keep the Virgin from having to suffer any more the spectacle of communism. Father Lugo invokes the tycoon Virgin, owner of some bank or nationalized plantation, who thinks and feels like the other twelve hundred prisoners: that right is the right of property and inheritance; freedom, the freedom of enterprise; the model society, a business corporation; exemplary democracy, a shareholders’ meeting.

  All the invaders have been educated in the ethics of impunity. None admit to having killed anybody; but then, like them, poverty doesn’t exactly sign its name to its crimes either. Some journalists question them about social injustice, but they wash their hands of it, the system washes its hands. After all, children in Cuba—in all of Latin America—who die soon after birth, die of gastroenteritis, not capitalism.

  (397)

  1961: Washington

  Who Invaded Cuba? A Dialogue in the U.S. Senate

  SENATOR CAPEHART: How many [planes] did we have?

  ALLEN DULLES (director of the CIA): How many did the Cubans have?

  SENATOR SPARKMAN: No, the Americans had how many?

  DULLES: Well, these are Cubans.

  SPARKMAN: The rebels.

  DULLES: We do not call them rebels.

  CAPEHART: I mean, the revolutionary forces.

  SPARKMAN: When he said how many did we have, that is what we are referring to, anti-Castro forces.

  RICHARD M. BISSELL (deputy director of the CIA): We started out, sir, with sixteen B-26s …

  (108)

  1961: Havana

  María de la Cruz

  Soon after the invasion, a vast crowd assembles in the plaza to hear Fidel announce that the prisoners will be exchanged for children’s medicines. Then he gives out diplomas to forty thousand campesinos who have learned to read and write.

  An old woman insists on mounting the platform, insists so energetically that finally they bring her up. She flaps vainly at the too-high microphone, until Fidel hands it down to her.

  “I wanted to meet you, Fidel. I wanted to tell you …”

  “Look, you’ll make me blush.”

  But the old woman, all wrinkles and little bones, isn’t about to be put off. She says she’s finally learned to read and write at the age of a hundred and six. She introduces herself. Her Christian name is María de la Cruz, because she was born on the day that the Holy Cross was invented; her surname is Semanat, after the sugar plantation on which she was born a slave, the daughter of slaves, granddaughter of slaves. In those days the masters sent blacks who tried to get an education to the pillory, María de la Cruz explains, because blacks were supposed to be machines that went into action at the sound of a bell, to the rhythm of whips, and that was why she took so long to learn.

  María de la Cruz takes over the platform. After speaking, she sings. After singing, she dances. It’s been more than a century since María de la Cruz began dancing. Dancing she emerged from her mother’s belly and dancing she journeyed through pain and horror until she arrived here, where she should have been long ago. Now no one can stop her.

  (298)

  1961: Punta del Este

  Latrine Diplomacy

  After the fiasco of the military landing in Cuba, the United States changes its tune, announcing a massive landing of dollars in Latin America.

  To isolate Cuba’s bearded ones, President Kennedy floods Latin America with a torrent of donations, loans, investments.

  “Cuba is the hen that laid your golden eggs,” Che Guevara tells the Pan-American Conference at Punta del Este, calling this proposed program of bribery an enormous joke on Latin America.

  So that nothing should change, the rhetoric of change is unleashed. The conference’s official reports run to half a million pages, not one of which neglects to mention “revolution,” “agrarian reform,” or “development.” While the United States knocks down the prices of Latin American products, it promises latrines for the poor, for Indians, for blacks—no machinery, no equipment, just latrines.

  “For the technical gentlemen,” says Che, “planning amounts to the planning of latrines. If we took them seriously, Cuba could be … a paradise of the latrine!”

  (213)

  1961: Escuinapa

  The Tale Spinner

  Once he saddled and mounted a tiger, thinking it was a burro. Another time he belted his pants with a live snake—only noticing because it had no buckle. Everyone believes him when he explains that no plane can land unless grains of corn are thrown on the runway, or when he describes the terrible bloodbath the day the train went mad and started running sideways. “I never lie,” lies Wily Humbug.

  Wily, a shrimp fisherman in the Escuinapa estuaries, is a typical loose tongue in this region. He is of that splendid Latin American breed of tale spinners, magicians of crackerbarrel talk that’s always spoken, never written down.

  At seventy, his eyes still dance. He even laughed at Death, who came one night to seek him out.

  “Toc toc toc,” Death knocked.

  “Come in,” Wily coaxed from his bed. “I was expecting you.”

  But when he tried to take her pants down, Death fled in panic.

  (309)

  1961: São Salvador de Bahia

  Amado

  While Wily Humbug scares off death in Mexico, in Brazil novelist Jorge Amado invents a captain who scares off solitude. According to Amado, this captain defies hurricanes and will-o’-the-wisps, bestrides seaquakes and black whirlpools, while treating his barrio neighbors to drinks prepared from the recipes of an old Hong Kong sea-wolf.

  When the captain is shipwrecked off the coast of Peru, his neighbors are shipwrecked too. It wrings their hearts, timid retired officials that they are, sick with boredom and rheumatism, to see a mountain of ice advancing toward the ship, off the port bow, on the foggy North Sea; or the monsoon blowing furiously on the Sea of Bengal. All shiver with pleasure as the captain evokes once again the Arab beauty who bit juicy grapes as she danced on the sands of Alexandria, wearing nothing but a white flower in her navel.

  The captain has never left Brazil, nor set foot on any kind of boat, because the sea makes him sick. He sits in the living room of his house and the house sails off, drifting farther than Marco Polo or Columbus or the astronauts ever dreamed.

  (19)

  1962: Cosalá

  One Plus One Is One

  Hitched to the same post, overloaded with dry wood, they look at each other. He, amorousl
y; she, dizzily. As the male and the female burro consider and reconsider each other, devout women cross the plaza, heading toward church, wrapped up in prayer. Because it’s Good Friday they chant mournful Masses for Our Lord Jesus Christ as they go by, all in black: black mantillas, black stockings, black gloves. They become frantic when the two burros, breaking their bonds, romp over to enjoy themselves right there, in the plaza, facing the church, rumps to city hall.

  Screams resound across Mexico. The mayor of Cosalá, José Antonio Ochoa, emerges onto the balcony, lets out a shriek, and covers his eyes. He promptly orders the rebellious burros shot. They fall dead, hooked together in love.

  (308 and 329)

  1962: Villa de Jesús María

  One Plus One Is All

  In another mountain village not far away, the Cora Indians don masks and paint their naked bodies. As on every Good Friday, they give things new names while the fiesta lasts—passion of Christ, magic deer-hunt, murder of the god Sun, that crime from which human life on earth began.

  “Let him die, let him kill, let him beget.”

  At the foot of the cross, dancing lovers offer themselves, embrace, enter one another, while the clown dancers skip about imitating them. Everyone joins in love-play, caressing, tickling, teasing. Everyone eats as they play: Fruits become projectiles, eggs bombs, and this great banquet ends in a war of hurled tortillas and showering honey. The Cora Indians enjoy themselves like lunatics, dancing, loving, eating in homage to the first agonies of the dying Christ. From the cross he smiles his thanks.

  (46)

  1963: Bayamo

  Hurricane Flora

  pounds Cuba for more than a week. The longest hurricane in the nation’s history attacks, retreats, then returns as if realizing it had forgotten to smash a few last things. Everything spins around this giant, furious snake which twists and strikes suddenly, where least expected.