Oscar Niemeyer: 101, Fecund & Going Strong

Never was a medal so justified as the one just received by the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who in December completed no less than 101 years, still working. The Brazilian Labour Minister travelled to Neimeyer’s professional studio in Río de Janeiro to hand over the order of merit Getulio Vargas.

Militant Communist and exiled to Paris during the Brazilian dictatorship, Niemeyer’s work is marked “by the political and by the defence of workers”, says the official citation about this thinker. Friend of Fidel Castro, he praises President Lula and defends without any reservation Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. The creator of tens of futuristic buildings throughout the world, he still comes every day to his office at Copacabana to supervise the projects he designs and his collaborators develop.

To the world, Niemeyer will always be associated with Brasilia, the modern capital of the country created out of nothing. But for the inhabitants of Río, he is one of their most illustrious residents and there are few who do not know where the architect lives. Many tourist guides even point to his window while passing through Ipanema, the neighbourhood where it is possible to see the artist dining in some restaurant, tucking into fish accompanied by his brand new wife, Vera Lúcia Cabreira of 62 years.

Brand new because Niemeyer married Cabreira, his secretary for more than two decades, on the eve of turning 99, with the resulting commotion. His first wife, Annita Baldo, died in 2004 after 76 years of marriage. Another record, despite that he has always been recognised to be a womaniser. Niemeyer only had a daughter, Ana Maria, but his descendants have been more numerous: four grandchildren, 13 great grandchildren and 7 great great grandchildren.

His links with Río are also remembered at each carnival, as the architect, a great lover of samba, is author of the city’s popular sambadrome, constructed in 1984. And also visible from Río is the spectacular UFO designed by the Río resident for the neighbouring city of Niterói, in the heart of the Bay of Guanabara, the seat of the Museum of Contemporary Art. In Niterói, which already counts six of his creation, his latest was inaugurated this month: a 600 square metre community centre emerging above the red bricks of the Palacio favela.

This is Neimeyer’s second work in the slum. The first was the house of Amaro, his driver.

Source: La Vanguardia

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Brazil Starts To Cast A Long Shadow

With the United States’ political, though not military, influence declining in Latin America, Brazil is aggressively moving in to fill the partial vacuum, presenting both opportunities and inherent risks for the progressive governments of the region.

Brazil, slightly smaller in size than the USA, is branching out in new economic, security and foreign policy directions in President Lula da Silva’s second and final term in office. Lula remains a hugely popular President, more popular than when he came to office in 2003, and no other Brazilian head of state has matched his approval ratings in about 20 years. This despite his cautious centrist policies that neither threaten the bourgeoisie nor empower the social movements on the back of which he climbed to office.

Brazil’s economy is in better shape than ever before: inflation is under control, consumer spending is still growing, the currency remains strong, employment levels are at an historic high and the country has billions in foreign exchange reserves. Its vast Amazonian resources are propelling a new security doctrine that will have consequences for the dominant Western powers and his neighbours.

Integration:

Brazil is an unlikely actor in Latin American economic integration. Its state and private business houses trample all over Latin America, swamping other markets with manufactured goods and hoovering up oil, gas and other natural resources. It is in disputes with Bolivia over gas, with Ecuador over debt repayments and crooked Brazilian companies, with Paraguay over electricity and Brazilian soya landlords and with Argentina with the latter’s 51/2 years of trade imbalance.

That has not stopped Lula from working to integrate the Latin American market. Lula has ambitious plans for a Brazil-Peru motorway that will connect his country to Bolivia and Chile and link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans with an overland route. It plans a Manaos-Manta (Ecuador) corridor, again with access to the sea. He has been working to put more wind into the sails of the regional trade groupings such as Mercosur.

There are agreements with Nicaragua to promote ethanol, oil exploration with Bolivia and Cuba’s recently discovered oil deposits could not have been far from Lula’s thoughts when he delivered a rousing welcome to Raul Castro. Brazil and Venezuela have agreed on a joint refinery in Recife and the two countries are linked with a new $1.2-bn bridge over the Orinoco built by Venezuela.

Brazil’s economic integration model is driven by its appetite for profits and has little in common with the Venezuelan ALBA model of integrating the popular economies of the region to benefit people rather than private capital. As both approaches to regional integration set in, countries like Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay which lack Venezuela’s economic clout and political drive will find themselves negotiating between the contrasting models and hedge their bets.

Foreign Policy:

Lula has been active in foreign policy like almost no other Brazilian leader before, looking to integrate the Latin American market, building a web of alliances in and outside Latin America, developing a strong voice in international trade talks and supporting progressive governments even as he tries to squeeze them of their resources. In 2007 Lula did 32 international visits, travelling to 29 countries at an average of one every ten days. In 2008, it was 21 visits abroad to 27 countries and in 2009 he is to make at least 50 of these. In the years ahead, Brazil will make more alliances of the type it strikes with India and South Africa in defending common trade interests against the West and use Russia and China as economic levers to balance imperial U.S. demands.

Towards the end of 2008, Brazil hosted an unprecedented gathering of 28 Latin American and Caribbean heads of state, unprecedented in that Cuba was brought in from the cold and the USA, Spain and Portugal were shut out of it. The meeting would have been worthwhile even if only to bring Cuba into the Group of Rio, Lula said at the end of the conference. He has supported Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in the latter’s difficult moments, saying the problem in Venezuela is that there is too much democracy rather than too little. Bolivia, Paraguay and Ecuador are safer with a Brazil led by Lula though that has not prevented him from giving them a rough time.

Security:

Brazil fears the West covets its Amazonian resources of water, forests and anything else which might lie under or overground, masking it with environmental concern like that of the former Norwegian premier, Gro Harlem Brundtland, who suggested an international ecological institution to oversee the protection of the Amazon. To this, Brazilian General Sotero Vaz’s riposte was that his country would defend the Amazon with guerrilla warfare. In 2005, a Brazilian military delegation visited Vietnam to learn from its experience.

The country’s National Defence Strategy stretching out till 2030 says it will counteract any attempt at limiting its sovereignty over the Amazon, possibly by a country or an alliance of nations with superior military capabilities. General Cláudio Barbosa de Figueiredo, head of the Amazon’s military command, said his country would adopt a doctrine of asymmetrical warfare as part of a national resistance. The security doctrine says threats rather than goodwill characterise the world and foresees its land borders and sea routes as bridgeheads for a putative invasion.

Brazil plans to concentrate on nuclear, space and cybernetics to prepare for future threats. At the end of 2008, it signed a nuclear and military deal with France. It is also upgrading its navy, including having its own nuclear submarine, to protect its sea traffic. New civilian and military nuclear deals with Russia are likely before Lula leaves office.

Lula’s defence strategy envisions creating a domestic arms industry that would provide most of Brazil’s defence needs. For this, it will invest in upgrading its skill and knowledge base and create a military-business-university axis. The final components are creating rapid deployment capabilities and national mobilisation of a reserve army, including possible compulsory call up for national defence.

The security doctrine compels Brazil to seek allies in Latin America from among the progressive governments, providing them a measure of protection while at the same time neutralising their opposition to Brazil’s own backyard imperialism. As Venezuela is the other country with rapidly developing space capabilities, a Caracas-Brasilia alliance is on the cards. But whereas Chavez speaks of a “socialist satellite” programme for the benefit of the poor, Lula’s orbit is that of strategic and economic interests. In this context, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and other countries which swing to the Left will seek to ally more closely among themselves to be able to better negotiate this Latin American behemoth and also ally with in facing up to Washington.

A Centre-Right government might follow that of Lula’s and it can never be ruled out that the Brazilian national bourgeoisie might capitulate to Washington. It appears though that Lula has forged a certain consensus among the Brazilian elite that will outlast him. Lula will be judged as Latin America’s quiet man who nevertheless swished a big, cleft stick.

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Leonardo Boff : Is It Possible To Be Happy In An Unhappy World?

[Leonardo Boff is a Brazilian theologian of the Liberation Theology school and academic whom the Catholic hierarchy led by the current Pope has sought to silence time and again for his support for the poor and for his condemnation of religious terrorism]

We cannot cease from asking how to be happy in an unhappy world. More than half of the world population is suffering, living below poverty levels. There are earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods and drought.

In Brazil, only 5,000 families control 46% of the national riches. Worldwide, 1,125 multi-millionaires have wealth equal to or greater than that of countries with 59% of the humanity. Global warming raises the spectre of grave threats against the stability of the planet and the future of humanity. Is it possible to be happy in this scenario? We can only be happy together with others…

It is important to recognise that these contradictions do not invalidate the search for happiness. The search is permanent, even if its results are minimal. This obliges us to engage in a critical, and not naïve, discourse about the opportunities for possible happiness.

In past reflections on the same theme, we emphasised the fact that sustainable happiness is only that which springs from the related characteristic of being human, and following on, to learn to look for the proper measure of the contradictions of the human condition.

Happy is he who comes to accept life as it is, writing on the crooked lines. Deepening the question, we can now reflect on what it is to be and feel happy. Pedro Demo, in my opinion one of the best among the Brazilian intelligentsia among us, best studied the Dialectics of Happiness (Three Volumes, 2001). He distinguished between two times of happiness: vertical and horizontal times.

The vertical is the intense moment, ecstatic and profoundly felt: the first loving relationship, having passed through a difficult course, the birth of the first child. The person is happy. It is a powerful moment, deeply felt, but fleeting.

The horizontal is that which is stretched out from day to day like the routine, with its limitations. Managing the limits wisely, knowing how to negotiate the contradictions, getting the best out of each situation: this is what makes a person happy.

Maybe marriage serves as an illustration. It all starts with infatuation, passion and the idealisation of eternal love, which seeks to live together. This is the experience of being happy. But, with the passing of time, intense love gives way to routine and the reproduction of the same type of relationship with its natural entropy. In this situation, normal in a relationship of two, one has to learn to speak, to tolerate, to sacrifice and to cultivate the tenderness without which love exhausted ends up as indifference. Here is where a person can be happy or unhappy.

Inventiveness and practical wisdom are necessary to be happy over a period of time. Invention is the capacity to break the routine: visiting a friend, going to the theatre, inventing a programme. Practical wisdom is knowing how to face up to questions, accepting limits with lightness of spirit, knowing how to rhyme dolor (sadness) with amor (love). Not to do this is to be unhappy all life long.

Feeling happy is momentary. Being happy is an extended state. The latter endures because it is recreated and nourished. Someone can be happy being unhappy, for instance, having an intense (momentary) moment of happiness like meeting up with a brother who has escaped death just as one can be happy (as in a state) without being happy (as in a moment), for instance without something spectacular happening.

Happiness shares our incompleteness. It is never full and complete. I make mine the brilliant metaphor of Pedro Demo, “happiness shares the logic of the flower: there is no separating the beauty of its fragility with its opening”.

Source: CubaDebate

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Why Brazil's Lula Is No Radical

Ricardo Gebrim, a lawyer and activist of the Movimiento de los Sin Tierra (MST), Brazil, told Mexicans late last year why President Lula was proving such a disappointment for those who had invested hope in him:

“He (Lula) thinks he can effect changes without getting into a confrontation with the dominant sectors, as if it were possible to break free of economic subordination without touching on the essentials. But the current situation no longer allows that. He then offers compensatory measures, social programmes for the poorest. Bankers and industrialists have gained even more than with the past governments. The bourgeois is very happy but the popular sectors are frustrated.

“Here (in Brazil) capitalism is much more developed; our bourgeois has a history of domination, an enormous capacity for appropriation. The power that the media and the political parties have does not allow for a political figure to challenge the bases which sustain the dominant project.

“The PT (Workers Party) was the grand political instrument in Brazil shaped during the rise of the popular struggle toward the end of the Seventies and the Eighties. Lula had great talent, as leader of the metallurgical workers who started a big fight with a great force of attraction. The imagining of hopes around a government of Lula persisted for 20-25 years; a full political generation that grew up thinking structural transformation would start the day Lula won.

“But in those years the leadership of the PT also changed and the ideas of radical transformation were substituted by more immediate ideas. Lula’s government thus kept the same political economy as that of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s: no changes were effected on the agrarian questions, the right of the workers, and it even maintained policies which took away the rights and derecognised groups engaged in struggles. That was where the great disappointment came for the popular sectors in popular struggle.

“Workers live in the same condition as in the rest of the world: precarious work, loss of union organisation, divisions. One part is in Lula’s government… others have broken the CUT (trade union centre)… Organisations keep growing (in the agricultural sector)… But the fight for land is every time more difficult and Lula’s government has not taken a single significant step for agrarian reform… all right, one has to say that Lula’s government is not repressive.

“As with every trauma, the disappointment with Lula set in a certain paralysis among the Left. One section went on as if it nothing were the matter and lowered their expectations, considering the rest as utopians. With others love for Lula changed to hate. We are not in the extremes. We understand we are not going to achieve our objectives choosing a candidate. We need an autonomous organisation, fighting with greater intensity each time, united not around a leader or an electoral platform but around a political programme, with conscience, with clear ideas. A popular project for Brazil.

“The MST’s political expression is the Consulta Electoral, a political organisation drawn from popular struggle, principally urban, with peasant activists as well, with a clear principle: that it is not a hegemonic political management, that it preserves the autonomy of the movements, with a common strategy, with a common movement.

“At this moment, when the Brazilians are feeling disappointed, we are not going on the electoral path. But the conquest of the state is certainly in our sights. Only before that, we want to construct popular power, the structure. We have to generate strength, advertise, agitate, construct conditions for other moments in history.”

Published in La Jornada, Mexico, on Dec 19, 2007 Link:
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/12/19/index.php?section=politica&article=008n1pol

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