The Mineiros man one of Brazil’s smoothest political machines. They are a stubborn and clannish people with a sharp eye for the main chance; a man has to fight hard for a living among those scraggly hills. In the period of confusion and recrimination that followed Getúlio Vargas’s melodramatic suicide the Socialist Democratic party of Minas brought forth Dr. Kubitschek as their candidate for the presidency of Brazil. He was a new man, a progressive technician with his face towards the west, a doctor of medicine who was free from political entanglements. He was elected by an honest majority: Brasília was one of the planks in his platform.
“We have seen the success of our own new capital,” said Kubitschek and his friends. “Here’s our chance to build a federal capital that will unite the whole nation.”
People had made a lot of money out of the rise in real estate values in Belo Horizonte. The knowledge that their whole state lay athwart the lines of communication between Brasília and the sea heightened the enthusiasm of the leading Mineiros for the project. Kubitschek became their man with a mission. He would go down in history as the President who finally achieved the century old ambition for a new capital.
Two years before Kubitschek’s inauguration as President the Brazilian Congress had appointed a commission to choose the best site in the federal rectangle. This commission contracted with the firm of Donald J. Belcher & Associates of Ithaca, N.Y., for a survey. A group of American engineers and geologists, most of them from Cornell, recommended five possible locations that offered the climate, the water supply, the drainage, the subsoil necessary for the foundation of a large city. The Brazilian commission chose the present site of Brasília as the best.
When the problem of city planning and architecture arose President Kubitschek could think only of Niemeyer. His name has been associated with Kubitschek’s for years. It was Oscar Niemeyer’s design for the resort suburb of Pampulha, which Kubitschek promoted while he was mayor of Belo Horizonte, that made him the best known of the young Brazilian architects.
The novel style of these buildings raised a storm. Kubitschek stood by his architect and stubbornly invited him to design a municipal theater. Even the fact that Niemeyer calls himself a Communist while Kubitschek usually defends private enterprise did not interfere with their collaboration. When the President offered Niemeyer the post of Supervisor of Construction at Brasília at a salary which amounted to only a few hundred dollars a month, Niemeyer is said to have turned down wellpaying contracts with private interests to take the job. “Niemeyer,” Brazilians will tell you, “is the soul of Kubitschek.”
Brazilian politicians are notoriously easy of access. In those days it wasn’t too hard for an American to get an interview with President Kubitschek, particularly if the American were a journalist and the subject was Brasília.
I was taken to see him at eight o’clock in the morning at the Larangeiras Palace in Rio. It was raining hard out of a sagging gray sky; chilly; Rio was having one of its rare touches of winter. This palace which Kubitschek chose for his official residence was built early in the century by a family that owned docks in Santos during the great coffee boom. Parisian architects and decorators decked it out with all the pomp they could dream up as a background for the patriarchal Brazilian capitalism of that day. There were marble columns and salmoncolored hangings. Gilt cupids crawled around the edges of the mirrors. There were massive overmantles, plush sofas, and oriental rugs. A gilded grand piano stood out on the parquet floor under an enormous chandelier. The gray light streaky with rain poured through the tall windows, glittered in the crystals, and made the huge drawingroom seem unbelievably empty.
When President Kubitschek came walking with a short springy stride, keeping step with his chief of protocol, he looked almost as out of place as his visitors amid these Frenchified splendors. There was a certain small town look about the way he wore his clothes which was not unattractive to an American. He held himself well. He was taller than I had expected, a sallow man with large prominent eyes. Even before we sat down on the sofa he came right to the point.
“You are going to Brasília?” He pronounced the name with a special sort of fervor. He started right away to explain that Brasília was not a luxury; it was a necessity. If Brazil were to go on progressing at the rate it had been progressing during the past ten years the center of population must move westward and northward; the nation needed a crossroads.
The President talked clearly and ardently. Occasionally he stopped to allow the friend who had accompanied me to translate a difficult phrase into English. As he talked he sketched out a map of Brazil so clearly I could almost see it on the wall behind the gilded piano. Sixtyfive million people. Twenty states and four territories. Roughly half the land area of South America and most of it empty. He described how the riversystems of the Amazon basin bound Brazil on the north, more fresh water pouring out through equatorial rainforests than in all the other rivers of the world put together, thousands of kilometers navigable by ocean steamers. Still the only practical communication between Belém, the old Portuguese city which was the port of entry of the Amazon region, and the rest of the country was by air.
“The construction of Brasília is already forcing us to build roads,” he said. Communication with São Paulo and the south was already open. The highway from Rio was just about finished. The Belém-Brasília road now under construction was being built through regions that weren’t even mapped. Already they were cutting through forests of trees forty meters high. His gesture gave an inkling of the slow fall of an enormous tree. I explained I had met Sayão ten years before. He nodded enthusiastically.
Subsidiary roads, he went on, would link that highway with the Atlantic coast. With his hand he indicated the eastward bulge towards Africa. With his forefinger he drew a line along the string of isolated coastal cities running southeast from Natal and Fortaleza to Bahia and Rio and São Paulo and down into the temperate regions of Rio Grande do Sul that border on Uruguay and the Argentine.
Along the coast, he explained, the country averaged twenty-five inhabitants to the square kilometer. Brazil, socially and economically, was still only a long narrow seaside strip like Chile. “Inland we only have half an inhabitant,” he said with a wry smile.
He turned to look me full in the face. “During your pioneer days,” he said, “you North Americans always had the Pacific Ocean for a goal to lure you on across the mountains. That’s why you populated your part of the continent so quickly. Our way west has been barred by impenetrable forests and by the Andes. Brasília will constitute a goal, a place to head for on the high plateau. Building Brasília means roads. A movement of population into the fine farmlands of the interior is already going on. As soon as I was inaugurated President, I gave the word to start construction. The Brazilian people demand a new capital. Brasília is the great goal of my administration.”
The President was dropping into a political oration. I could half imagine the crowded hall, the wardheelers leading the applause of the crowd, the flash of the cameras, the busy pencils of the notetaking journalists.
He caught himself suddenly and asked for comprehension by a broad deprecatory sweep of his hands. There was a pause. The director of protocol cleared his throat. It was time to leave. We rose for the formalities of leavetaking.
Dr. Israél filled in the rest of the story. Construction started in the spring of 1956, when the President appointed him head of Novacap, the government corporation more or less modeled on TVA which was set up by Congress to put through the work.