Latin American society presented through a blend of intimate portraits, autobiography and micro-histories
On 1 April 1964, there was an anti-communist coup d’état in Brazil. Rubem [who was a communist activist] went underground, in the strict sense: he hid. For the anti-communists in uniform, and for those in civilian dress too, he was a ‘subversive’. Some of his friends scattered around the world. One of them, Pedro Celso Cavalcanti, went to Chile, and there – thanks to Polish contacts – he got himself a scholarship to study at Warsaw University.
One day Rubem got a message from Pedro, who had spoken to a bigwig in Warsaw, and this important person had promised to take in one more comrade.
The bigwig was Adam Schaff, a leading ideologue for the Polish United Workers’ Party, Marxist philosopher and Warsaw University professor. What a stroke of luck!
People from the Communist Party helped Rubem to get the right documents, and his father paid for a ticket to Paris. Only there did Rubem apply for a Polish visa – on a separate page, so there would be no evidence of contact with the communist world in his passport.
Rubem was thrilled by Warsaw, especially the opportunity to study humanities at the university. He became familiar with some new names: Leszek Kołakowski, Bronisław Baczko, Zygmunt Bauman and Jerzy Szacki. These brilliant men’s lectures were attended by crowds of students and prompted lively debate. This Poland was wonderful!
The indigence of the Gomułka era made no impression on Rubem – he had seen greater poverty in Brazil.
For the first time in his life he felt as if he had landed at the heart of History. And that he – coming from a country with no History (which wasn’t true, of course) – had become part of it. He soon found his way around the city, still partly destroyed following the war. He lived on the site of the former ghetto.
One day, at a class on Marxism, Schaff introduced the new students. ‘These are our comrades from Brazil,’ he said. A chill wafted through the room. Rubem couldn’t understand why the Polish students took such a dim view of their Brazilian colleagues, sorry, comrades; they pretty much shunned them.
‘It took me a while to realise that Schaff, our protector, who was open and loyal toward us Brazilians, was for our Polish fellow students the embodiment of the system, its intellectual face, of course. He could prove anything. He said that culture only makes sense within Marxism. He liked arguments. We found all this very pleasing.’
The historian Marcin Kula, then a student of history and sociology, remembers that Rubem and several other Brazilian refugees hovered between philosophy and sociology at the university, where revisionist thinking was flourishing, and the Main School of Planning and Statistics (SGPiS), where the lecturers included Ignacy Sachs and Michał Kalecki, who were left-wing economists, but at the same time were far from Party dogmatism.
‘It was a time when many people were losing their illusions about Gomułka, so our friends from Brazil were hearing a lot of complaints about socialism every day of the week,’ recalls Kula.
The breakthrough in relations between the Polish students and ‘our comrades from Brazil’ came on the day when Rubem and Pedro gave a lecture about communists in Latin America, which was both critical and witty. That broke the ice – now the Polish students were open to the experience of the Brazilian communists and started making friends with them.
‘The Comrades from Brazil’ began to look toward the ‘commandos’, the student dissidents who for some time had been causing trouble at lectures (from their company Rubem remembers the names Adam Michnik, Seweryn Blumsztajn and Irena Lasota). They visited Jacek Kuroń shortly after he came out of prison for jointly writing the critical ‘Open Letter to the Party’.
The student rebellion of March 1968 was just around the corner.
For Rubem and his comrades, the March earthquake had a prelude of a completely different nature than for all the others, nothing to do with anti-semitism, or the fight for freedom of speech and culture. Schaff invited him and several other Brazilians to his home. The young idealists from the antipodes were amazed by the large apartment – beautiful, with old furniture, truly bourgeois splendour. At some point Schaff rang a little bell and into the sitting room came a housemaid.
‘That was a shock!’ another person who was present that night told me. ‘Servants at the home of a Communist Party ideologue! That bell didn’t just ring for Schaff’s housemaid, but for us too. And it never stopped ringing in our heads.’
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Latin American society presented through a blend of intimate portraits, autobiography and micro-histories
Translation rights: Joanna Dąbrowska, j.dabrowska@wydawnictwoliterackie.pl
Artur Domosławski draws on over 20 years’ experience reporting from Latin America to present a comprehensive examination of the region’s recent history, covering countries including Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela.
The book has two main narrative lines. The first chronicles the social struggles of grassroots movements through personal stories and portraits of individuals. Those include national leaders and activists, as well as people in remote regions who are fighting for their land, the environment and their own human rights, against threats from big business. These personal accounts make the narrative very accessible and absorbing.
The second thread is partly autobiographical, as Domosławski compares societies in Latin America with those of his native eastern Europe. He contrasts anti-communist sentiment among Polish democrats with the radically left-wing ideals of their Latin American counterparts, Polish admiration of the USA with Latin American resentment after decades of American intervention, and eastern European faith in the free market with Latin American scepticism toward capitalism’s false promises. He also compares right-wing populist movements in both regions, and explores how differing experiences have shaped contrasting understandings of concepts including socialism, capitalism, imperialism and anti-communism.
Throughout, colourful micro-stories headed ‘Minor Revolutions’ and ‘The Past that Refuses to Go Away’ break up the narrative in an entertaining and informative way. The former include events such as Argentina’s pro-choice victory and the legalisation of cannabis in Uruguay, while the latter cover attempts to settle scores with anti-communist dictatorships, collective memory, and how history repeats itself. These multiple perspectives give Revolution Never Ends an original tone, taking it beyond purely journalistic reporting.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Selected samples
She climbed her first peaks in a headscarf at a time when women in the mountains were treated by climbers as an additional backpack. It was with her that female alpinism began! She gained recognition in a spectacular way. The path was considered a crossing for madmen. Especially since the tragic accident in 1929, preserved … Continue reading “Halina”
First, Marysia, a student of an exclusive private school in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, dies under the wheels of a train. Her teacher, Elżbieta, tries to find out what really happened. She starts a private investigation only soon to perish herself. But her body disappears, and the only people who have seen anything are Gniewomir, a … Continue reading “Wound”
A young girl, Regina Wieczorek, was found dead on the beach. She was nineteen years old and had no enemies. Fortunately, the culprit was quickly found. At least, that’s what the militia think. Meanwhile, one day in November, Jan Kowalski appears at the police station. He claims to have killed not only Regina but also … Continue reading “Penance”
The year is 1922. A dangerous time of breakthrough. In the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, Bolshevik gangs sow terror, leaving behind the corpses of men and disgraced women. A ruthless secret intelligence race takes place between the Lviv-Warsaw-Free City of Gdańsk line. Lviv investigator Edward Popielski, called Łysy (“Hairless”), receives an offer … Continue reading “A Girl with Four Fingers”
This question is closely related to the next one, namely: if any goal exists, does life lead us to that goal in an orderly manner? In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that, combined together, do not form a whole? To understand how the concept of providence … Continue reading “Order and Love”
The work of Józef Łobodowski (1909-1988) – a remarkable poet, prose writer, and translator, who spent most of his life in exile – is slowly being revived in Poland. Łobodowski’s brilliant three- volume novel, composed on an epic scale, concerns the fate of families and orphans unmoored by the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war and … Continue reading “Ukrainian Trilogy: Thickets, The Settlement, The Way Back”
