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

He has lost his father and fourteen brothers in the war, and to the war he will return. In the thunder of cavalry, as clashing machetes advance into the mouths of cannons, Maceo charges ahead. He has won his promotions in combat, and certain white officers are not at all happy about a near-black being a major general.

Maceo fights for a real revolution. It’s not a matter of replacing the Spaniards, he says. Independence is not the final goal, but the first one. After that, Cuba has to be changed. As long as the people don’t command, the colony will not become a fatherland. The big Creole landowners are mistrustful, for good reasons, of this man who says there is nothing sacred about the right of property.

(262)

Guano

Pure shit were the hills that rose on these islands. For millennia, millions of birds had concluded their digestive process on the coast of southern Peru.

The Incas knew that this guano could revive any land, however dead it seemed; but Europe did not know the magical powers of the Peruvian fertilizer until Humboldt brought back the first samples.

Peru, which had gained worldwide prestige for silver and gold, perpetuated its glory thanks to the goodwill of the birds. Europeward sailed ships laden with malodorous guano, and returned bringing statues of pure Carrara marble to decorate Lima’s boulevards. Their holds were also filled with English clothing, which ruined the textile mills of the southern sierra, and Bordeaux wines which bankrupted the national vineyards of Moquequa. Entire houses arrived at Callao from London. From Paris were imported whole luxury hotels complete with chefs.

After forty years, the islands are exhausted. Peru has sold twelve million tons of guano, has spent twice as much, and now owes a candle to every saint.

(43, 44, and 289)

Saltpeter

No war breaks out over guano, of which little remains. It is saltpeter that throws the Chilean army into the conquest of the deserts, against the allied forces of Peru and Bolivia.

From the sterile Atacama and Tarapacá deserts comes the secret of the verdure of Europe’s valleys. In these solitudes there are only lizards hiding under stones and herds of mules carting to Pacific ports loads of saltpeter, a lumpy snow which will restore enthusiasm to weary European lands. Nothing throws a shadow in this world of nothing, unless it be the sparkling mountains of saltpeter drying forsakenly in the sun or the wretched workers, desert warriors with ragged flour sacks for uniforms, pickaxes for spears, and shovels for swords.

The saltpeter, or nitrate, turns out to be indispensable for the businesses of life and of death. Not only is it the most coveted of fertilizers, mixed with carbon and sulphur it becomes gunpowder. Agriculture and the prosperous industry of war need it.

(35 and 268)

The Chinese

Chile invades and devastates. With English uniforms and English weapons, the Chilean army levels the Lima beach towns of Chorrillos, Barranco, and Miraflores, leaving no stone on another. Peruvian officers send Indians into the slaughter and run off yelling, “Long live the fatherland!”

There are many Chinese, Chinese from Peru, fighting on the Chilean side. They are Chinese fugitives from the big estates, who now enter Lima singing the praises of the invading general Patricio Lynch, the Red Prince, the Savior.

Those Chinese were shanghaied a few years ago from the ports of Macao and Canton by English, Portuguese, and French merchants. Of every three, two reached Peru alive. In the port of Callao they were put up for sale. Lima newspapers advertised them fresh off the boat. Many were branded with hot irons. Railroads, cotton, sugar, guano, and coffee needed slave hands. On the guano islands the guards never took their eyes off them, because with the smallest negligence some Chinese kills himself by jumping into the sea.

The fall of Lima sets off chaos in all Peru. In the Cañete valley, blacks rise in rebellion. At the end of an Ash Wednesday carnival the hatred of centuries explodes. Ritual of humiliations: blacks, slaves until recently and still treated as such, avenge old scores killing Chinese, also slaves, with sticks and machetes.

(45 and 329)

In Defense of Indolence

Run out by the French police and mortified by the English winter, which makes one piss stalactites, Paul Lafargue writes in London a new indictment of the criminal system that makes man a miserable servant of the machine.

Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody of Christian ethics, writes Marx’s Cuban son-in-law. Like the monks, capitalism teaches workers that they were born into this vale of tears to toil and suffer; and induces them to deliver up their wives and children to the factories, which grind them up for twelve hours a day. Lafargue refuses to join in nauseating songs in honor of the god Progress, the eldest son of Work, and claims the right to indolence and a full enjoyment of human passions. Indolence is a gift of the gods. Even Christ preached it in the Sermon on the Mount. Some day, announces Lafargue, there will come an end to the torments of hunger and forced labor, more numerous than the locusts of the Bible, and then the earth will tremble with joy.

(177)

Billy the Kid

“I’m gonna give you a tip, doc.”

Until a minute ago, Billy the Kid was awaiting the gallows in a cell. Now he aims at the sheriff from the top of the stairs.

“I’m gettin tired, doc.”

The sheriff throws him the key to the handcuffs and when Billy bends down there is a burst of revolver fire. The sheriff topples with a bullet in his eye and his silver star in smithereens.

Billy is twenty-one and has twenty-one notches in the butt of his Colt, not counting a score of Apaches and Mexicans, who died unrecorded.

“ I wouldn’t do that if I was you, stranger.”

He began his career at twelve, when a bum insulted his mother, and he took off at full gallop, brandishing a razor that dripped blood.

(131 and 292)

Jesse James

Jesse and his lads, the “James Boys,” had fought with the slaver army of the South and later were the avenging angels of that conquered land. To satisfy their sense of honor they have plucked clean eleven banks, seven mail trains, and three stage coaches. Full of braggadocio, reluctantly, without taking the trouble to draw his gun, Jesse has sent sixteen fellowmen to the other world.

One Saturday night, in Saint Joseph, Missouri, his best friend shoots him in the back.

“You, baby, dry them tears and set ’em up all around. And see if they can get that garbage out of the way. I’ll tell you what he was. Know what he was? Stubbornest damn mule in Arizona.”

(292)

Twilight of the Cowboy

Half a century ago, the legendary wild horse of Oklahoma, amazed Washington Irving and inspired his pen. That untameable prince of the prairies, that long-maned white arrow, is now a meek beast of burden.

The cowboy, too, champion of the winning of the West, angel of justice or vengeful bandit, becomes a soldier or a peon observing regular hours. Barbed wire advances at a thousand kilometers a day and refrigerator trains cross the great prairies of the United States. Ballads and dime novels evoke the howls of coyotes and Indians, the good times of covered-wagon caravans, their creaking wooden axles greased with bacon; and Buffalo Bill is demonstrating that nostalgia can be turned into a very lucrative business. But the cowboy is another machine among the many that gin the cotton, thresh the wheat, or bale the hay.