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

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Wind of Snow

The Creator did not make the Indians: he sang them, he danced them.

Through songs and dances the Creator is now announcing that this old and dying earth will soon be demolished by the greenish whirlwind of a new earth. The prophet Wovoka brought word of it from the other world. In the new earth, buffalos will be revived, dead Indians will be reborn, and a ferocious flood will drown the whites. Not one of the usurpers will survive.

The prophet Wovoka’s dances and songs come out of the West, cross the Rocky Mountains, and spread throughout the prairies. The Sioux, who were the most numerous and powerful of the tribes in these regions, celebrate the annunciation of paradise, the end of hunger and exile. They dance and sing from dawn to the depth of every night.

Four days after Christmas, the thunder of gunfire interrupts the ceremonies in the Sioux camp at Wounded Knee. The soldiers riddle women, children, and the few men with bullets like so many buffalos. The blizzard strikes the dead and freezes them on the smow.

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Prophetic Song of the Sioux

A thunder-being nation I am, I have said .

A thunder-being nation I am, I have said .

You shall live .

You shall live .

You shall live .

You shall live.

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Balmaceda

José Manuel Balmaceda wanted to promote national industry, to live and dress by ourselves, intuiting that the nitrate era would pass leaving Chile nothing but remorse. He wanted to apply stimulants and protections similar to those that the United States, England, France, and Germany had practiced in their industrial infancy. He raised the workers’ wages and sowed the country with public schools. He gave Chile’s long body a spine of railways and roads. In his years as president, sacred British capital ran a grave risk of profanation. Balmaceda wanted to nationalize the railways and put an end to the usury of banks and the voracity of the nitrate companies.

Balmaceda wanted much and could do plenty; but the enormous budget that John Thomas North devoted to buying consciences and twisting justice could do more. The press let loose its thunder against the Caesar drunk with power, despotic enemy of freedom, hostile to foreign enterprises, and the clamor of bishops and parliamentarians was no less deafening. A military rising broke out like an echo, and then the blood of the people flowed.

The South American Journal announces the triumph of the coup d’état: Chile will return to the good times of yesterday. The banker Eduardo Matte also celebrates it: We are the masters of Chile, we owners of the capital and of the soil. All else is an influenceable and saleable mass.

Balmaceda shoots himself.

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The Other America

For ten years José Martí has been living in the United States. There is much that he admires in this multifarious and vigorous country, where no one is afraid of anything new; but he also denounces in his articles the imperial ambitions of the young nation, the glorification of avarice into a divine right, and the atrocious racism that exterminates Indians, humiliates blacks, and looks down on Latins.

South of the Rio Grande, says Martí, there is another America, our America, land that stammers, that does not recognize its full likeness either in the European or in the North American mirror. It is the Hispanic American fatherland, he says, which reclaims Cuba to complete itself, while in the north they claim it to devour it. One America’s interests don’t coincide with the other’s. Does political and economic union with the United States suit Hispanic America? Martí asks. And he replies: Two condors, or two lambs, unite without so much danger as a condor and a lamb. Last year the first Pan-American conference was held in Washington and now Martí sits in on the continuation of the dialog as delegate of Uruguay. Whoever says economic union, says political union. The people that buys gives the orders. The people that sells, serves … The people that wants to die sells to one people alone, and the people that wants to save itself, sells to more than one … The people that wants to be free distributes its business among equally strong peoples. If either is to be given preference, prefer the one that needs less to the one that is less disdainful …

Martí has dedicated his life to that other America: he wants to revive everything in it that has been killed from the conquest onward, and wants to reveal it and make it rebel, because its hidden and betrayed identity will not be revealed until it loosens its bonds.

What fault can my great mother America throw in my face?

Son of Europeans but son of America, Cuban patriot of the great fatherland, Matrí feels flowing in his veins the blood of the sorely wounded peoples who were born of palm or corn seeds and who called the Milky Way road of the soul and the moon sun of night or sun asleep. So he writes, replying to Sarmiento, who is enamored of what is foreign: This is no battle between civilization and barbarism, but between false learning and nature.

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The Thinking Begins to Be Ours, Believes José Martí

… To know is to resolve. Knowing the country, and governing it according to our knowledge, is the only way to free it from tyrannies. The European university must yield to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas till now, must be put at our fingertips, even though that of the Greek Archons is not taught. Our Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours. It is more necessary for us. National politicians must replace exotic politicians. Let the world be grafted onto our republics; but the trunk must be that of our republics. And let the defeated pedant keep quiet; for there is no fatherland in which man can take more pride than our wounded American republics …

We were a mask, with trousers from England, Parisian vest, jacket from North America, and cap from Spain …We were epaulettes and togas, in countries that came into the world with sandaled feet and banded hair … Neither the European book, nor the Yanqui book, has provided the key to the Hispanic American enigma …

The peoples stand and greet one another. “What are we like?” they ask; and they tell one another what they are like. When a problem arises in Cojímar, they don’t go to Danzig for the solution. The frock coats are still French, but the thinking begins to be American …

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34 Cantarranas Street. Instant Photography

The hooded gunner bends and takes aim. The victim, a highborn gentleman of Guanajuato, does not smile or blink or breathe. There is no escape. Behind him the curtain has fallen, leafy landscape of painted plaster, and the stage-prop staircase leads nowhere. Surrounded by paper flowers and cardboard columns and balustrades, the solemn personage rests his hand on the arm of a chair and with dignity confronts the cannon-mouth of the bellows camera.

All Guanajuato has itself shot in the studio at 34 Cantarranas Street. Romualdo García photographs gentlemen of the uppermost crust and their wives and children, boys who look like dwarves wrapped in large vests with pocket watches, and girls austere as grandmothers crushed by beribboned silken bonnets. He photographs plump friars and soldiers in full dress uniform, the first-communioned and the newly wed; and also some poor people who come from afar and give what they don’t have just to pose, bountifully hairdressed and ironed, wearing their best clothes, before the camera of the Mexican artist who won a prize in Paris.