Eduardo Galeano - The Memory of Fire Trilogy - Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

The Spanish poet José Zorrilla has purchased in the port of Campeche a shipment of Indians to sell in Cuba. He was all set to embark when yellow fever killed his capitalist partner Cipriano de las Cagigas in Havana, and now the author of “Don Juan Tenorio” consoles himself writing verses on a coffee plantation.

(222 and 273)

Sugar Hands

Soon the city of Havana will be staging its floral games. The intellectuals of the Literary Society propose a great central motif. They want the literary competition to be on the theme of asking Spain for sixty thousand new slaves. The poets will thus support the black importation project, which already enjoys the patronage of the newspaper Diario de La Marina and the legal blessing of the attorney general.

Hands are needed for sugar. Blacks smuggled in via the Mariel, Cojímar, and Batabanó beaches are scarce and expensive. Three sugar mill owners have drawn up the project, because Cuba lies exhausted and desolate, imploring the Spanish authorities to hear her cries of woe and provide her with blacks , meek and loyal slaves to whom Cuba owes her economic prosperity. It will be easy, they insist, to bring them from Africa. They will run joyfully to the Spanish ships, when they see them arriving.

(222 and 240)

Sugar Language

The window grills of Havana homes are adorned with iron spirals and the columns with plaster curlicues; the doorways with lacy woodwork; the stained-glass windows with peacock feathers. The talk of doctors and monks gleams with arabesques. Poets reach for unheard-of rhymes and prose writers for the most reverberant adjectives. Orators strive to make their points, their restless and fugitive points; a point peeks out from behind an adverb or a parenthesis and the orator throws more and more words at it; the speech stretches out trying to catch it, but the point keeps fleeing; and the chase continues ad infinitum.

Account books, on the other hand, speak the rough language of reality. In sugar mills throughout Cuba, they register the birth or purchase of every black slave as the acquisition of merchandise, calculating depreciation at three percent annually. A man’s illness is equivalent to the faultiness of a valve and the end of a life is like the loss of a head of cattle: The killed cattle are bulls. We lost the ceiba sow. The Negro Domingo Mondongo has died.

(222)

Grays Against Blues

Near the city of Washington the first battle of the Civil War is fought. A big audience has turned out, in carriages or on horseback, to see the show. The blood hardly begins to flow when horses bolt and the crowd stampedes, howling with panic. Soon the capital’s streets are filled with the mutilated and dying.

Two opposing countries had previously shared the map, the flag, and the name of the United States. A Southern newspaper reported the election of Abraham Lincoln in its “News from Abroad” section. Within months the Southern states formed a separate nation and war broke out.

Lincoln, the new president, embodies the ideals of the North. He has proclaimed in his campaign that it is impossible to continue half slave and half free, and has promised farms instead of plantations and higher tariffs against the competition of European industry.

North and South: two spaces, two periods. In the North, factories that already produce more than fields; tireless inventors creating the electric telegraph, the sewing machine, and the reaper; new cities sprouting on all sides, a million inhabitants in New York and wharves too small for the ships filled with desperate Europeans seeking a new country. In the South, pride of ancestry and nostalgia, fields of tobacco, enormous cotton plantations: four million black slaves producing raw materials for Lancashire textile mills; gentlemen fighting duels over the tainted honor of a sister or the fair name of a family; ladies airing themselves in carriages through the flowering country-side and fainting on the verandahs of their palaces at dusk.

(70)

The Pencil of War

His back against a wall, legs crossed on the ground, a young soldier looks without seeing. Several months’ growth of beard flattens the open collar of his tunic. A soldier’s hand strokes the head of a dog sleeping on his knees.

John Geyser, recruit from Pennsylvania, sketches himself and his comrades while the war kills. His pencil freezes them for an instant on the way to the ditch excavated by cannon fire. Soldiers load rifles, or clean them, or eat the ration of army biscuit and bacon, or stare with sad eyes. Sadly, they look without seeing, or perhaps see beyond what they look at.

(69)

“The American Algeria”

is the new name for Mexico according to the Paris press. The army of Napoleon III attacks and conquers the capital and the chief cities.

In Rome, the pope jumps for joy. The government of Benito Juárez, dislodged by the invaders, was guilty of blasphemy against God and his properties in Mexico. Juárez had stripped the Church naked, despoiling it of its sacred tithes, of its estates vast as the sky, and of the State’s loving protection.

The Conservatives join the new conquistadors. Twenty thousand Mexican soldiers help the thirty thousand from France, who have just finished storming the Crimea, Algeria, and Senegal. Napoleon III takes over Mexico invoking the Latin spirit, Latin culture, and the Latin race, and in passing demands repayment of an immense and phantasmal loan.

Taking charge of the new colony is Maximilian of Austria, one of Europe’s many unemployed princes, accompanied by his stunning wife.

(15)

Marx

“Napoleon III will break his head on Mexico, if they don’t hang him first,” announces a wise and penurious prophet, who lives on what he can borrow in London.

While he corrects and polishes the drafts of a work that is going to change the world, Karl Marx does not miss a detail of what is happening in the world. In letters and articles he calls the third Napoleon an imperial Lazarillo de Tormes* and the invasion of Mexico an infamous enterprise. He also denounces England and Spain, who would like to share with France the territory of Mexico as war booty, and all the nation-thieving nations, accustomed to sending thousands and thousands of people to the slaughterhouse so that usurers and traders may extend the scope of their business.

Marx no longer believes that the imperial expansion of the most developed countries is a victory for progress over backwardness. Fifteen years ago, however, he did not disagree when Engels applauded the invasion of Mexico by the United States, believing that this would turn Mexican campesinos into proletarians and bring the bishops and feudal lords down from their pedestal.

(129 and 201)

* Anonymous Spanish picaresque novel of the sixteenth century.

Belzu

A flood of rebellious Indians has restored Belzu to power. Manuel Isidoro Belzu, “Grandpa Belzu,” avenger of the poor, scourge of doctors, returns to La Paz riding a human wave.

When he was in power a few years back, the capital of Bolivia was wherever he happened to be on the haunch of his horse; and the masters of the country, who attempted more than forty military coups, never succeeded in overthrowing him. Foreign merchants hated him, because Belzu barred the door to them and protected the Cocha-bamba artisans against the invasion of British-made ponchos. The pettifoggers of Chuquisaca, in whose veins run ink or water, were terrified of him. Also conspiring against him were the masters of the mines, who could never dictate a decree to him.