Galeano Repudiates His Book

Eduardo Galeano, the author of the extremely popular essay Open Veins of Latin America, has gone dotty and started emitting weird sounds about his only claim to greatness. For those who don’t know what Galeano’s book is about here are some quotes:

Along the way we have even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although the Haitians and the Cubans appeared in history as new people a century before the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the Plymouth coast. For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.

And more:

Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European–or later–United States– capital, and as such has accumulated on distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources.

And just one more:

The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations. Centuries passed, and Latin America perfected its role. We are no longer in the era of marvels when face surpassed fable and imagination was shamed by the trophies of conquest— the lodes of gold, the mountains of silver. But our region still works as a menial. It continues to exist at the service of others’ needs, as a source and reserve of oil and iron, of copper and meat, of fruit and coffee, the raw materials and foods destined for rich countries which profit more from consuming them than Latin America does from producing them.

Somebody has resumed the contents of Open Veins of Latin America as “We’re poor; it’s their fault.” I have to agree that the book definitely veers in that direction and is quite one-sided in its analysis of the causes of Latin American poverty. I have many quarrels with Galeano, including (as always, and believe me, I’m as tired of writing this as you are reading it) his unquestioning machismo and his hatred of the liberation of women through birth control.

Still, in spite of these issues, Open Veins of Latin America is a great book that provides a wealth of insights into Latin America for those who know nothing about the region. I always assign it in my Intro into Hispanic Civilization course because it’s great for initiating discussions.

Last week, the book’s author, who is now getting older and crabbier by the moment, said the book was badly written and he didn’t like it or agree with it any longer. It’s hard to be approaching the end of his life (Galeano is very sick) and knowing that, for the rest of the world, you are just this one book. So Galeano is acting out. I’m a literary critic, so for me paying attention to what an author has to say about her or his books would be a very outlandish thing to do. This debacle is an opportunity for people to (re)acquaint themselves with the book and discuss the issues it addresses.

In my own opinion, Galeano definitely gets a big part of the answer to why Latin American countries are so poor right. He explains why “it’s their fault” extremely well. The second part, which would be “and this is how it’s our fault, too” is absent from the essay but Galeano’s book is not a criminal code and is not supposed to be exhaustive.

You can read the essay HERE for free.