Chavez's Perfect Gift to Obama

Chavez's Perfect Gift to Obama

 

by Richard Gott

 

Published on Monday, April 20, 2009

by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/apr/20/hugo-chavez-barack-obama

 

Some surprise has been expressed in the Anglo-Saxon

world that Hugo Chavez should have presented a book to

Barack Obama by Eduardo Galeano. Ignorance can be the

only defence, the very fault that the Venezuelan

president had earlier accused his US counterpart of

suffering from. For Galeano is one of the most

well-known and celebrated writers in Latin America, up

there with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and his huge output

of fact and fiction, as well as his journalism, has

been published all over the continent. His books have

been continuously in print since the 1960s, read

voraciously by successive generations.

 

It was a brilliant idea of Chavez's to give Galeano's

Open Veins of Latin America to Obama, since this book,

first published in 1971, encapsulates a radical version

of the history of Latin America with which most Latin

Americans are familiar. Its subtitle, Five Centuries of

the Pillage of a Continent, gives a flavour of its

contents, which discuss the way in which Latin America

has been dominated and exploited by its European

invaders (and later by US corporations) for hundreds of

years. Written in short episodes, sometimes just

paragraphs, it is very characteristic of Galeano's

highly original style, comparable in some ways to that

of the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, who has a similar

capacity to write about history and current affairs in

a language that is both poetic and passionate. The late

Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski might be mentioned in

the same breath.

 

Some resistance to Galeano's writings in the mainstream

conservative culture of the US may have been caused by

the fact that his books were published by the socialist

Monthly Review press and translated by Cedric Belfrage,

a British-born journalist who emigrated to work in

Hollywood and became a member of the US Communist

party. Belfrage was deported back to England in 1955,

in the waning years of the McCarthy era, before

establishing himself as a Spanish translator in Mexico,

where he translated many of Galeano's books.

 

Galeano was born in Montevideo in Uruguay in 1940 and

became the editor in the 1960s of Marcha, Latin

America's best and most influential political and

cultural weekly. Galeano took refuge in Buenos Aires in

1973, after a military coup in Uruguay closed down his

magazine, and founded a comparable review, Crisis, in

Argentina, chronicling the events of the dramatic

Peronist years between 1973 and 1976, when another coup

sent him into exile in Spain. Galeano then expanded his

Open Veins into a three-volume cultural and political

history of Latin America, titled Memories of Fire, with

thoughts and reflections on the events of almost every

year throughout the continent.

 

Chavez will certainly have read Obama's own

biographical writings and will know that Obama is an

intelligent and creative writer himself. He would also

have guessed that Obama would enjoy and appreciate the

writings of Galeano as he seeks to recast US policy

towards Latin America. As a North American, unfamiliar

with the Latin American passion for soccer, Obama might

also benefit from reading Galeano's Football in Sun and

Shadow, a wonderful account of the history of the game,

published in 1995. The book was written largely to

convince leftwing intellectuals (and Cubans obsessed

with baseball), some of whom had a supercilious

attitude towards the game, of its political and

cultural significance. Galeano celebrated soccer's

broad appeal to the great mass of the people of Latin

America, an aspect of the southern continent's culture

that North Americans ignore at their peril.

 

(c) 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited

 

Richard Gott is a writer and historian. He worked for many years at the

Guardian as a leader-writer, foreign correspondent and as the features editor

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