A little more than two hours from Recife we reach João Pessoa which is the capital of the small state of Paraíba. It’s a pleasant little yellowstucco city. The new quarters radiate along streets laid out like spokes of a wheel from a circular pond bordered with palms. The beach, studded with vast banyantrees, each tree a thicket by itself, opens in a halfmoon on a Nilegreen lagoon protected by a distant black reef where the surf spumes. Beyond the ocean is deepest indigo to the horizon. Jangadas skim back and forth in the fresh trade wind. Skinny sunblackened men wade with shrimpnets in the shallows. The waiter who serves us a beer under the trees points out that the impressivelooking promontory to the south of the lagoon is the easternmost point of Brazil, less than 35° west of Greenwich.
Leaving town down a cobbled hill we have a lovely view of a little port on the river, rusty small steamboats, ancient sailingships and a great stretch of salt marshes behind. We speed along the straight cement road which leads to Campina Grande, the most important town in Paraíba. It is too far out of our way; so we turn north on a dirt road so as to drive through Sapé.
Sapé is reputed to be one of the centers of Julião’s Ligas Camponêsas. Julião is a landowner from Pernambuco who at one time had pretentions towards literature. Under the influence of Communist activists he has organized peasant leagues which are said to receive arms and guerrilla warfare training through agents of Fidel Castro. Their program is for the tenants to take over the land by force. It is quiet this morning. We did see one man with a rifle; and walls and buildings occasionally decorated with the hammer and sickle, and with VIVA CASTRO in brightblue paint.
His illwishers tell the story on Julião that when the peasants took him at his word and started to occupy his own estate he called in the Army to protect it. Could be; but it seems a little too pat.
What, you ask yourself, would you do in their place?
It’s a hilly country with small patches of decent land, a little like the Piedmont region of North Carolina. We pass extensive plantations of pineapple, packingsheds with stacks of crates ready for shipment. Doug tells me that there’s an active pineapplegrowers’ cooperative in Sapé. They are trying to enlarge their export market to include the United States. Now their pineapples go to Europe or the Argentine.
Overpopulated. We pass through too many dusty little stone villages. The crumbling adobe huts have a company town look. People are poor all right. If I had to live there I’d feel rebellious too. But even driving through, it becomes fairly obvious that redistribution of the land won’t solve the problem. There’s not enough good land to go around. In North Carolina the solution was textile mills. Here it might be small industry. It might be resettlement on virgin lands to the west. Cutting the throats of the landlords isn’t going to help.
It’s so much easier to appeal to envy, hatred and malice than to work out rational solutions: therein lies the success of the Communist play for power.
The landlords in the Northeast are no bargain either. Many of them would rather die than give their tenants a break. The basic trouble is that there’s not enough to go around. I was told the story of a man in Pernambuco who personally beat up one of his tenants for planting banana trees round his hut. I suppose the landlord thought that if the tenant had a few bananas to eat he wouldn’t cut cane at the going rate. Still, if the politicians would only give them a chance the pineapplegrowers’ cooperative might well do more to raise the standard of living around Sapé than the peasant leagues.
We cross into Rio Grande do Norte. Now the land is really poor but there are less people on it. The long rolling hills are shaped a little like the great green hills of Normandy, but they are sandy and arid. Scraggly vegetation under a flaming sun. In the valleys we see traces of abandoned sugar plantations. Here and there the stump of a brick chimney rises among the ruins of an old refinery. Even where there’s still cultivation the cane has a starved look. There is a great deal of it. From one rise we look out into the shimmer of sunlight on enormous canefields, blue like the shimmer on a lake.
The first sign of Natal, the state capital, is a row of old U.S. radio masts left over from World War II sticking up from the top of a hill. Then there are military hangars, nicely painted airport buildings on a vast empty expanse of concrete landingstrips. We are driving on a hardtop road that is unmistakably American. To the right, bluffs jut into the misty blue ocean over great spuming purple rocks. The seabreeze is suddenly cool. The large seedylooking gray building is a hospital. Visiting Americans put up there, Doug Elleby says, by arrangement with the nuns, because the hotel is so horrible.
We stop off at the hotel in the center of town. An unappetizing dump. A few discouraged looking customers sit sweating in the lobby. Gin and tonic is available in the bar but no sandwiches. We’ve had no lunch. It’s three in the afternoon and we are ravenous. All we can get to eat is some dried up strips of Dutch cheese. No bread.
A gentleman from the state government appears to take me to the guesthouse. Brazilian friends in Rio have arranged for the governor to take me along on a tour of the state starting tomorrow. I say goodby to my American escorts.
Aluísio Alves, a man of thirtynine who is present governor of Rio Grande do Norte, is, so it has been explained to me, one of the young men with a passion for social service who represent a new breed of Brazilian politician. It is this new breed of politician that will give the Communists a hard time.
He was born in Angicos, a little hamlet in the longstaple cotton region in the center of the state. He studied in Natal and took his law degree at the University of Alagoas in Maceió, an ancient city on the coast a hundred or so miles south of Recife. At twentyone, while still a student, he was elected federal deputy, one of the youngest on record. In Rio he became national secretary of the Democratic Union and a friend of Carlos Lacerda’s. Along with Lacerda he was one of the founders of the Tribuna da Imprensa which he edited during Lacerda’s exile. Since then there have been political differences between the two, particularly since Alves was elected governor of his home state in 1960 with Social Democrat backing.
On the way to the guesthouse I got the notion that — although possibly for political reasons the Alves administration was keeping Americans at arm’s length — the American troops had left not too unpleasant memories behind them in Natal.
At the guesthouse I was ushered into a princely pink bedroom hung with mirrors and festooned with plush that looked out through shuttered windows on a garden on one side and an airy terrace on the other. In Brazil it’s always a feast or a famine. The shower in the bathroom not only worked, but the water was hot. A shower was a godsend after all that dust. We’d arrived with half the state of Paraíba caked on our necks. I lunched in solitary splendor at a great oval table set as if for a state banquet.
Afterwards I was driven to the seat of government which the present incumbent has renamed Palacio da Esperanza (the Palace of Hope). Governor Alves is a showman. From the beginning of his campaign for the governorship he has used the green flag of hope as a trademark.
A green flag fluttered over the building and the official cars parked outside had green flags. Aluísio Alves makes a great play for the young. The government palace was as full of teenagers as Washington, D.C. during the Easter vacation. The central stairway swarmed with boys and girls. They chattered in the anterooms. There were so many youthful committees packed into the governor’s office that you could hardly see his desk.