James N. Green

“Who Is the Macho Who Wants to Kill Me?” Male Homosexuality, Revolutionary Masculinity, and the Brazilian Armed Struggle of the 1960s and 1970s

In early 1972, Chaim and Mário, members of a small Brazilian revolutionary group, were sentenced to several years in prison for subversive activities.1 Like many other radical leftwing organizations, the group collapsed in the early 1970s during the systematic government campaign to track down and eliminate armed resistance to the military regime. While serving time in Tiradentes Prison in São Paulo, Chaim and Mário shared the same cell. Rumors spread among the political prisoners of the different revolutionary organizations held in that prison that the pair was having sex together. “They were immediately isolated, as if they had behaved improperly,” recalled Ivan Seixas some 30 years later. At the time Seixas was also serving a sentence for his involvement in armed struggle. “They were treated as if they were sick,” added Antônio Roberto Espinosa, another political inmate and former revolutionary leader imprisoned in the same cellblock during the early 1970s.2 At first, Chaim and Mário denied the rumors of their ongoing affair, but they then decided to admit openly that they were having a relationship and let the other political prisoners confront the news. The unwillingness of the couple to hide their sexual relations provoked an intense discussion among the different groups, which maintained a semblance of discipline, organizational structure, and internal cohesion during their incarceration. To many of the imprisoned guerrilla fighters and other revolutionaries, Chaim and Mário’s bla-

Exile and the Politics of Exclusion in Latin America

Political exile, a major political practice in all Latin American countries throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is still an underresearched topic. While ubiquitous and fascinating, until recently it has been conceived as somewhat marginal to the development of these societies and has been studied in the framework of traditional concepts and concerns in history and the social sciences. Accordingly, one can find numerous biographical monographs that mention exile as a formative political experience, from notorious cases such as those of Bolívar or Perón to those of less renowned individuals whose aggregate testimonies build up a collective story of communities of exiles and expatriates. Not surprisingly, the early testimonial literature on the recent wave of political exiles documented the experiences of Brazilians who were forced to leave their country in the aftermath of the 1964 coup d’état (Cavalcanti and Ramos, 1976) and marked a trend that was to persist for the next two decades. The number of such biographies and testimonies has burgeoned in the past generation and includes such insightful works as Oliveira Costa et al. (1980), Gómez (1999), Rollemberg (1999), Ulanovsky (2001), Guelar, Jarach, and Ruiz (2002), Trigo (2003), Bernetti and Giardinelli (2003), and Roca (2005). These biographical accounts and testimonies of exiles and expatriates contribute important building blocks toward a reconstruction of the collective experience of exile. They also point to the ubiquity and profound impact of the phenomenon, which resulted from political exclusion and persecution by the military dictatorships of the 1960s to 1980s. And yet most of these testimonies do not provide a systematic analysis of the role of exile in Latin American politics and societies and do little to explain the recurrence of exile and its transformations over time. At the same time, recent years have witnessed the proliferation of literary analysis and criticism focusing on the universal meaning of the experience of exile, both imposed and self-imposed. This literature is mainly anchored in twentieth-century writings reflecting the pronounced impact of the political repression and military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s (Da Cunha-Giabbai,

New Views on the History of Latin American Communism

Communists and Marxists in general tend to emphasize historical processes when they analyze social phenomena. Yet, when Marxist intellectuals approach the study of the history of the communist movement there is a marked tendency for them to ignore Marxist categories and abandon a critical attitude toward the subject of their reflections. When writing their own history, these scholars fall back on a messianic and utopian communist tradition that ends up taking precedence over the critical tradition inherent in Marxism. This messianic narrative, as well as an understandable human difficulty in reflecting on oneself with the same rigor as is applied to other political and social phenomena, has created extremely idealistic historical communist narratives in which the “correct” line or the “ideological level” of a communist party or of one of its leaders determines political success or failure in advancing or delaying a socialist future. Marxist categories often deteriorate into vulgarized epithets (with the term “petty-bourgeois” being the favorite means of discounting or criticizing any opposing person or idea within the communist movement) identifying ideological “deviations” without any analysis of the way these class origins and structures actually operated. In many cases the history of communist parties and revolutionary movements has been told by focusing primarily on the actions, successes, and failures of the leaderships’ political lines and their ideological elaboration. This historiographic tradition, with roots in Bolshevik polemics, has pervaded communist histories for decades. In capitalist countries—both on the periphery and in the metropolis—Marxist intellectuals of various communist currents became professional historians as political and ideological crises diverted them from a life of revolutionary militancy toward distanced reflection from within the academic world. Considering the tremendous number of professional historians who developed intellectually within the framework of communist parties or Marxist revolutionary movements, it is surprising that the twentieth century produced so few critical historical works on communism. This is particularly noteworthy given the importance of this subject and the rich and sophisticated historical tools that these intellectuals developed in analyzing other political and social phenomena. The historiography on communists in capitalist countries has been overwhelmingly shaped by cold-war dichotomies. Inspired either by an a priori

Brazil: The Troubled Rise of a Global Power by Michael Reid (review)

Starting in the late 1870s, the laborers increasingly went to work for coffee planters. They also became debtors through habilitaciones—advances on their labor or crops. This became a form of debt peonage. Most of the coffee was grown initially not on progressive plantations but on small plots by self-exploiting peasants who had debts to repay. The “planters” acted more as merchants and processors than as agriculturalists.

Envisioning Brazil: A Guide to Brazilian Studies in the United States (review)

essay, João Trajano Sento-Sé explores the Western canon and Brazilian identity. Santuza Cambraia Naves takes an original look at popular music from bossa nova to tropicália. Helena Bomeny off ers a fascinating look at the relationship between some of Brazil’s most notable writers and intellectuals and their relationship to the Vargas regime (especially the role of Gustavo Capanema). Th e noted writer Silviano Santiago’s short piece is a rather idiosyncratic rumination on literacy and literature in Brazil. Dain Borges, the sole U.S. scholar in this section, has an excellent chapter on “the relevance of Machado de Assis.” Like most edited collections, the fourteen essays in this volume are of varying quality and depth, although most of them are very fi ne contributions, especially to our understanding of intellectuals and ideas in Brazil in the twentieth century. Th e diverse disciplines of contributors also refl ects the breadth and quality of scholars working on Brazil today in Brazilian academia. On a fi nal note, it would have been helpful if the editors had provided the reader with some background on how this volume was constructed, how the contributors were selected, and to what extent they collaborated on producing a coherent series of essays.

Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (review)

numbers published by the Cuban government. Thus, it does accept them on the one hand, and dismisses them on the other, with the overall determination that, all things considered, the communist island’s macroeconomic performance drops to the lowest in the three-country comparison (see p. 661). (The upward bias in communist-system statistics is well known, and has recently been illustrated by Alwyn Young for China, in NBER Working Paper No. 7830.) One of the book’s problems is that statistics end in 1993–94 (although a few pages of the text are devoted to updating). The economic systems have been recently tested in different and still severe ways since the Mexican crisis at the end of 1994. It would have been more rewarding to ask which system has best withstood the recent turbulence, and more up-to-date in terms of the ongoing debate in the region concerning globalism. A strong point of the volume is that it offers a compendium of economic and social statistics for the three countries that is difficult to find in one place. Although the book cannot compete with the economic treatises dealing with each of the economies individually, its scope and succintness in treating economic and social history make it recommendable to those who would like a bird’s eye view of these aspects for any of the countries (Costa Rica in 100 pages, Cuba in 200, and Chile in 132). In addition, the bibliographies compiled are quite comprehensive (30 pages). Even though historians will probably eschew the many indicators and clusters of the latter part of the book, and will ponder the convergence between the policies of Costa Rica and Chile in the 1980s and 1990s, there is much that they can profit from this book. Yet the volume remains mostly one for specialists in economics, sociology and political science.