Days and Nights of love and War by Eduardo Galeano

DAYS AND NIGHTS OF LOVE AND WAR

by Eduardo Galeano
translated by Judith Brister

New Foreword by Sandra Cisneros

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ISBN:
1-58367-023-8
$16.00 paper

ISBN:
1-58367-022-X
$32.00 cloth

178 pp.
November 2000

Latin America/
Politics

Illustration:
Annie Silverman

also by
Eduardo Galeano:
OPEN VEINS OF
LATIN AMERICA

But I Prefer the Radiance of People (p.59)

· 1 ·
"Traitor," I said. I showed him the clipping from a Cuban paper. There he was, dressed as a pitcher, playing baseball. I remember that he laughed, we laughed. I don't know whether or not he answered me. The conversation jumped, like a ping-pong ball, from one subject to the next.

"I don't want every Cuban to wish he were a Rockefeller," he said.

Socialism had meaning to the extent that it purified people, moved them beyond egoism, saved them from competition and greed.

He told me that when he was president of the central bank he had signed the bills with the word "Che" to poke fun, and he told me that money, that shit-awful fetish, should be ugly.

Che Guevara gave himself away, like everyone does, through his eyes. I remember that clean, morning-fresh look: the look of people who believe.

· 2 ·
Chatting with him, you couldn't forget that this man had come to Cuba after a long pilgrimage throughout Latin America. He had been in the whirlwind of the Bolivian revolution and in the death throes of the Guatemalan revolution—and not as a tourist. He had loaded bananas in Central America and taken snapshots in Mexican plazas to earn his living, and he had risked his life by throwing himself into the "Granma" adventure.

He was not a man to sit behind a desk. That feline tension so noticeable when I interviewed him in mid-1964 had to explode sooner or later.

His was the unusual case of someone who abandons a revolution which he and a handful of crazy people had already made, to throw himself into beginning another one. He lived not for triumph, but for struggle—the ever necessary struggle for human dignity.

· 3 ·
Three years later, my eyes were glued to the front page of the papers. The agency photos showed his motionless body from all angles. General Barrientos' dictatorship displayed its great trophy to the world.

For a long time I looked at his smile—ironic and tender at the same time—and bits of that 1964 dialogue came to my mind. Definitions of the world ("Some people possess the truth, but the matter of life is possessed by others"), of revolution ("Cuba will never be a showcase of socialism, but rather a living example"), and of himself ("I have been mistaken often, but I believe…").

I thought, "He has failed. He is dead." And I thought, "He will never fail. He will never die," and with my eyes fixed on the face of that Jesus Christ of the Río de la Plata I longed to congratulate him.

* * *
The System (p.75)

A half-million Uruguayans outside their country. A million Paraguayans, half a million Chileans. The boats depart full of young people fleeing from prison, the grave, or hunger. To be alive is a risk; to think, a sin; to eat, a miracle.

But how many people are in exile within the borders of their own country? What statistic records those condemned to resignation and silence? Is not the crime of hope worse than the crime of the people?

The dictatorship is an infamous pattern: a machine that makes you deaf and dumb, incapable of hearing, impotent when you speak and blind to that which you are not allowed to observe.

The first person killed by torture triggered a national scandal in Brazil in 1964. The tenth person to die of torture barely made the papers. Number fifty was accepted as "normal."

The machine teaches you to accept horror as you accept the cold of winter.

* * *
The Man Who Knew How to Keep Quiet (p.102)

Juan Rulfo said what he had to say in a few pages, all bone and meat, with no fat, and then he kept quiet.

In 1974, in Buenos Aires, Rulfo told me he didn't have time to write as he'd like to, due to his workload as a civil servant. In order to have time he needed a leave of absence, and you had to ask doctors for the leave. And you can't, Rulfo explained, go to the doctor and explain, "I feel sad," because doctors don't give leaves for that.

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