"Author Changes His Mind on ’70s Manifesto"By Larry Rohter
For
more than 40 years, Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America”
has been the canonical anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist and
anti-American text in that region. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s populist
president, put a copy, which he had called “a monument
in our Latin American history,” in President Obama’s hands the first
time they met. But now Galeano, a 73-year-old Uruguayan writer, has
disavowed the book, saying that he was not qualified to tackle the
subject and that it was badly written. Predictably, his remarks have set
off a vigorous regional debate, with the right doing some “we told you
so” gloating, and the left clinging to a dogged defensiveness.
“ ‘Open
Veins’ tried to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t yet have
the necessary training or preparation,” Mr. Galeano said last month
while answering questions at a book fair in Brazil, where he was being
honored on the 43rd anniversary of the book’s publication. He added: “I
wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over. For me,
this prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden, and my physique
can’t tolerate it.”
“The Open Veins
of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent” was
written at the dawn of the 1970s, a decade when much of Latin America
was governed by repressive right-wing military dictatorships supported
by the United States. In this 300-page cri de coeur, Mr. Galeano argued
that the riches that first attracted European colonizers, like gold and
sugar, gave rise to a system of exploitation that led inexorably to “the
contemporary structure of plunder” that he held responsible for Latin
America’s chronic poverty and underdevelopment.
Mr.
Galeano, whose work includes soccer commentary, poetry, cartoons and
histories like “Memory of Fire,” wrote in “Open Veins”: “I know I can be
accused of sacrilege in writing about political economy in the style of
a novel about love or pirates. But I confess I get a pain from reading
valuable works by certain sociologists, political experts, economists
and historians who write in code.”
“Open
Veins” has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has
sold more than a million copies. In its heyday, its influence extended
throughout what was then called the third world, including Africa and
Asia, until the economic rise of China and India and Brazil seemed to
undercut parts of its thesis.
In the United States, “Open Veins” has been widely taught on university campuses since the 1970s, in courses ranging
from history and anthropology to economics and geography. But Mr.
Galeano’s unexpected takedown of his own work has left scholars
wondering how to deal with the book in class.
“If
I were teaching this in a course,” said Merilee Grindle, president of
the Latin American Studies Association and director of the David
Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, “I would take
his comments, add them in and use them to generate a far more
interesting discussion about how we see and interpret events at
different points in time.” And that seems to be exactly what many
professors plan to do.
Caroline S.
Conzelman, a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, said her first thought was that she wouldn’t change
how she used the book, “because it still captures the essence of the
emotional memory of being colonized.” But now, she said: “I will have
them read what he says about it. It’s good for students to see that
writers can think critically about their own work and go back and revise
what they meant.”
Michael Yates, the editorial director of Monthly Review Press,
Mr. Galeano’s American publisher, dismissed the entire discussion as
“nothing but a tempest in a teapot.” “Open Veins” is Monthly Review’s
best-selling book — it surged, if briefly, into Amazon’s Top 10
list within hours of Mr. Obama’s receiving a copy — and Mr. Yates said
he saw no reason to make any changes: “Please! The book is an entity
independent of the writer and anything he might think now.”
Precisely
why Mr. Galeano chose to renounce his book now is unclear. Through his
American agent, Susan Bergholz, he declined to elaborate. She said he
had gradually grown “horrified by the prose and the phraseology” of
“Open Veins.”
Mr. Yates said Mr.
Galeano might simply be following in the tracks of the novelist John Dos
Passos, a radical as a young man “who became a conservative when he got
older.” On Spanish- and Portuguese-language websites, others have
suggested that Mr. Galeano, who in recent years has had both a heart
attack and cancer, might simply be off his game intellectually.
In
his remarks in Brazil, Mr. Galeano acknowledged that the left sometimes
“commits grave errors” when it is in power, which has been taken in
Latin America as a criticism of Cuba under the Castro brothers and of
the erratic stewardship of Venezuela under Mr. Chávez, who died last
year. But Mr. Galeano described himself as still very much a man of the
left, and on other occasions he has praised the experiments in social
democracy underway for the last decade in his own country, as well as in
Brazil and Chile.
“Reality has
changed a lot, and I have changed a lot,” he said in Brazil, adding:
“Reality is much more complex precisely because the human condition is
diverse. Some political sectors close to me thought such diversity was a
heresy. Even today, there are some survivors of this type who think
that all diversity is a threat. Fortunately, it is not.”
Still,
Mr. Galeano has caught many admirers by surprise, including the Chilean
novelist Isabel Allende, who wrote a foreword for the English-language
edition of “Open Veins.” In it, she describes how she “devoured” the
book as a young woman “with such emotion that I had to read it again a
couple more times to absorb all its meaning” and took it into exile
after Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power.
“I
had dinner with him less than a year ago, and to me, he was the same
man, passionate and talkative and interesting and funny,” she said of
Mr. Galeano in a telephone interview from California, where she now
lives. “He may have changed, and I didn’t notice it, but I don’t think
so.”
In the mid-1990s, three
advocates of free-market policies — the Colombian writer and diplomat
Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the exiled Cuban author Carlos Alberto Montaner
and the Peruvian journalist and author Álvaro Vargas Llosa — reacted to
Mr. Galeano with a polemic of their own, “Guide to the Perfect Latin
American Idiot.” They dismissed “Open Veins” as “the idiot’s bible,” and
reduced its thesis to a single sentence: “We’re poor; it’s their
fault.”
Mr. Montaner responded to Mr. Galeano’s recent remarks with a blog post titled “Galeano Corrects Himself and the Idiots Lose Their Bible.” In Brazil, Rodrigo Constantino,
the author of “The Caviar Left,” took an even harsher tone, blaming Mr.
Galeano’s analysis and prescription for many of Latin America’s ills.
“He should feel really guilty for the damage he caused,” he wrote on his
blog.
But Mr. Galeano continues to
have defenders. In a discussion on the website of the Spanish newspaper
El País, one participant noted that in a world dominated by Apple,
Samsung, Siemens, Panasonic, Sony and Airbus, Mr. Galeano’s lament that
“the goddess of technology does not speak Spanish” seems even more
prescient than in 1971.
And on his Facebook page, Camilo Egaña,
a Cuban émigré who is the host of “Mirador Mundial” on CNN en Español,
remembered meeting Mr. Galeano in Havana in the 1980s and hearing him
tell a story about a man taking his son to the ocean for the first time.
“In the face of that interminable blue, the child said to the man,
‘Daddy, help me to see,’ ” Mr. Egaña recalled.
“That is what Galeano has done with his book, 43 years after it having been published,” Mr. Egaña concluded. “Thank you.”
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