The Giant at the Bridge

(See Cover)

Nature made you a giant,

A beautiful, powerful, indomitable colossus,

And your future will match this great ness.

--Brazilian National Anthem

Brazilians speak fondly of their country as the Land of Tomorrow, the Land of Promise. In their hearts they feel that nature has endowed Brazil with endless resources, that one fine day Brazil will be as populous, powerful and prosperous as the U.S.--if not more so.

The Brazilian dream is made of more than dream stuff. Brazil is indeed a giant. In population (57 million) it nearly matches all the other nine republics of South America put together. In area (3,287,842 sq. mi.) it is the world's biggest republic, big as the U.S. with a second Texas thrown in. In such big cities as Sao Paulo (see opposite page), the fastest-growing major metropolis, a new breed of Brazilian businessmen is changing the face of the land with a zeal unmatched in all of Latin America.

Brazil's headaches and growing pains are proportionately huge; the country is racked by inflation, is desperately short of development capital and pitifully dependent on its one big export, coffee. As the finance ministers of Latin America gathered last week for the inter-American economic conference (see below), Brazil was an almost perfect case history of the economic ills besetting most of Latin America.

But in Brazil there was one big difference: the first stirring of new hope in a new leader, a man who symbolizes a break with a troubled past and a promise of a brighter today--President Joao Cafe Filho.

So Little Time. For most of the past quarter-century, Brazil's public life was dominated by the towering figure of Getulio Vargas, a man of flawed greatness who ruled at times as a dictator, at times as a constitutional President, but at all times as the enigmatic, subtle boss of what was essentially a one-man team. Vargas, more than most of his countrymen, dreamed the big dream of Brazil's future, but in the end he failed to cope with the urgent problems of the present. Last August, in the midst of a shattering political crisis, after a group of top-ranking generals had warned him that he must resign for the country's good, tragic Getulio Vargas put a bullet through his heart. That was the time for Vice President Joao Cafe Filho (which translates as John Coffee Jr.) to step forward.

A man of strikingly different character from Vargas, Cafe Filho is far more concerned with the problems of today than the projects of the future, utterly lacking in any taste for the intricate maneuvers and favoritism of partisan politics. Instead of trying to hold all the administrative strings in his own hands, he has brought teamwork into the government, delegating real authority to his ministers and giving them firm support. Instead of trying to cure Brazil's economic ailments with painkilling expedients, he has adopted a bitter-medicine program of "disinflation" and austerity.

Barred by the constitution from succeeding himself. Cafe Filho has only 14 more months (the remainder of Vargas' term) to apply his remedies. "I am perfectly aware of the time limitation I am up against," he said recently. "And I do not pretend to be a miracle man. What I am trying to do is apply common sense to this job. I am not running for President: I am already President. I do not need to court popularity or votes."

Cafe Filho has already shown a magnificent disregard for personal popularity. Determined to plug all possible dollar-exchange leaks, he angered federal Senators and Deputies by canceling their highly prized privilege of bringing a new car into the country every few years. Determined to hold down expenditures, he vetoed a bill to raise the pay of government doctors, stuck to his decision, though the doctors threatened a nationwide strike.

Last week, in keeping with his austerity program, he dismayed the capital bureaucracy and the foreign diplomatic corps by announcing that the government would remain in steaming Rio during this year's hot season (mid-December through mid-March) instead of moving to the 26-mile-distant city of Petropolis, up in the cool mountains, as Brazilian chiefs of state have done since the days of Emperor (1822-31) Pedro I. "This government has no time for a vacation," Cafe Filho explained.

Tubful for the Dry Day. In a country where moneymaking opportunities knock incessantly at a successful politician's door, Cafe Filho has conspicuously neglected to get rich. At 55, he has no savings to speak of. no income except his salary.* Instead of moving into the ornate presidential suite in Catete Palace, he continues to live, as he has since 1944, in a middleclass, three-bedroom apartment on Rio's Copacabana Avenue. Three bedrooms are none too many: the President, his wife Jandira and their only son Eduardo, 11, share the place with Jan-dira's mother and sister, both widows.

Like many another building in Rio, the apartment house has running water only every other day, so the President of Brazil has to keep his bathtub filled as a reservoir for the dry days. Says Cafe Filho: "It was a tremendous disappointment for my neighbors when they realized that living under the same roof as the President did not mean they were going to get water every day."

For outside eyes, Cafe Filho is a careful dresser with a preference for dark blue pin-stripe suits, grey ties and white silk shirts. At home he likes to lounge around in pajamas, reading, sipping coffee and chain-smoking strong Brazilian cigarettes (Hollywoods). Younger-looking than most men of his age, he still takes an occasional early-morning dip in the Atlantic surf on Copacabana beach. Despite his extensive reading, he is less educated, less cultured than Vargas was--but he promises to make a better President.

An Eater of Cangulo. By an odd quirk of politics, the man who succeeded Vargas had spent most of his political life opposing him. Getulio Dornelles Vargas was the son of a cattle-rich general from Rio Grande do Sul. Joao Fernandes de Campos Cafe Filho was the son of a low-rung civil servant in the state of Rio Grande de Norte's finance department. In those days an imaginary social-economic boundary divided the state capital of Natal (turn-of-the-century pop. 16,000) into two distinct dietary sections. On the lower ground, near the sea, lived the cangulei-ros, the poorer people who ate a cheap fish called the cangulo; on the higher ground lived the more prosperous xarias', who could afford to eat a more succulent fish called the xareu. The part-Indian Cafes were canguleiros.

Early in life, Joao Cafe Filho was exposed to influences that were to set him apart from most of his countrymen. Brazil is a Roman Catholic nation, but Joao's parents were devout members of the flock of the Rev. William Porter, a Presbyterian missionary from the U.S. Cafe Filho was baptized in a Presbyterian chapel,* learned to read and write in the free elementary school maintained by Porter and his wife. Joao's first teachers were Henrietta and Evangeline Green, daughters of the U.S. vice consul in Natal.

At the Porter school, Joao shared a bench with three other Natal boys. One of them is now a federal Senator, another the president of an insurance company, the third, Manuel Leopoldino, is a streetcar motorman in Rio. A fortnight ago, Leopoldino, wearing his navy blue motor-man's uniform, went to visit the President at Catete Palace. Cafe Filho recognized him at once, embraced him warmly. "Can I help you in any way, Manuel?" he asked. "No thanks, Joao," said the motorman. "I just wanted to see you. I like my job. It's steady work. Another five years and I'll retire with a pension." Mused Cafe Filho after Leopoldino departed: "Of the four of us boys, Manuel is the happiest. He has a steady job and no worries. I do not have a steady job, and I have plenty of worries. Maybe after my term is up, I'll apply for a job as a streetcar motorman. After steering the car of state, I should find it easy to drive a streetcar."

Go North, Young Man. At 13, Joao finished up at the Porter school, went on to Natal's public high school. Recalls one of his old teachers: "He was a restless, unruly, rebellious boy with a strong dislike for study. I never dreamed he would amount to anything." Restless Joao never finished high school.

While still in his teens, Cafe Filho began contributing angry, something-must-be-done articles on the plight of the poor to local newspapers. At 22 he started a shoestring paper of his own, O Jornal do Norte. Other papers in northeast Brazil were soon reprinting his fire-eating denunciations of corruption. One day a Natal politician whom he had brickbatted came in and laid a large banknote on his desk; Cafe Filho scornfully touched a match to the bill, used it to light a cigarette. At 27 Cafe Filho ran for the federal Chamber of Deputies. He got a majority, but his opponent contested the election, and the Chamber cynically threw out Cafe Filho's claim. Advised an elderly Deputy: "Go back home, young man; Rio is no place for you."

Natal, it turned out, was no place for him either. After a gang of hired toughs wrecked his newspaper office, the police threatened to jail him as a troublemaker. He skipped town, but his avoidance of the Natal jail was only temporary. As editor of a newspaper in the city of Recife, he wrote a front-page manifesto, denouncing Brazil's President Artur Bernardes as a "bloody dictator." Warned that he was about to be arrested for sedition, he fled back to Natal, where the police welcomed him with open handcuffs and locked him up for 72 days.

Flight to Argentina. In 1930 Getulio Vargas ran for President and got a majority of the votes. When the government tried to annul the election, Gauchos of Vargas' home state marched on Rio. Cafe Filho, fired by Vargas' eloquent talk of reform, joined the Vargas partisans in northeastern Brazil, took part in the successful seizure of Natal. Appointed police chief of his home town, with headquarters right next to the customs house, he soon noted the daily visits of a customs official's attractive daughter, Jandira Fernandes de Oliveira. In September 1931 he and Jandira got married.

Elected a federal Deputy in 1934, Cafe Filho, who had already turned against Vargas, became his roughest congressional critic. When Vargas set up an outright dictatorship in 1937, Cafe Filho fled to Argentina. As the price of a promise that he would not be molested if he returned to Brazil, Cafe Filho had to agree to refrain from all political activities. He got a job with a bus company, and spent the following seven years as a white-collar worker in Rio.

After the army deposed Vargas, in 1945, Cafe Filho re-entered politics, won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, took up his old role of caustic, lone-wolf critic. He drew more fan mail than any other Deputy. Said Getulio Vargas, planning his own political comeback, "Cafe Filho is the most effective man in Congress. I wish he were on my side."

Fox & Box. Vargas was determined to run for President in 1950. So was the flamboyant Adhemar de Barros, multimillionaire ex-governor of Sao Paulo. Shortly before the election, the two made a deal. Adhemar agreed to withdraw from the race and back Vargas. Vargas agreed to 1) accept a member of Adhemar's party, the social Progressive Party, as his vice-presidential running mate, and 2) support Adhemar in the 1955 presidential election. For the Vice President slot, Vargas foxily insisted on Cafe Filho, a nominal P.S.P. member. He reasoned that his old enemy would be less troublesome to him as a boxed-in Vice President than as a freewheeling Deputy.

As Vice President, Cafe Filho took no part in policymaking. His only task was presiding over the Senate, and that was not enough to keep him busy. He traveled widely in Latin America, Europe and the Near East. When in Rio, he opened his office door three days a week to anybody who wanted to see him--a practice that he still keeps up, though his crowded schedule now allows only one such public audience a week (TIME, Nov. 8). In four years he received more than 40,000 callers.

Last summer the attempted assassination of an anti-Vargas newspaper editor led to the exposure of what Brazilians came to call "the sea of mud"--the vast disorder and corruption engulfing the Vargas administration. When the military told Vargas to resign, he stubbornly refused. Cafe Filho, unspotted by the sea of mud, made Vargas a remarkable offer: in order to avert violence, the two of them should resign together and call for completely new elections. Vargas still said no. "Listen to reason, Getulio," said CafeeFilho. "I will be the loser. You will still have your ranch, your money, a chance to make a comeback. I'll be without a job and without a cruzeiro." Vargas gave him the same answer he had given the generals: "Only dead will I leave my post."

The old man meant it. On the morning of Aug. 24, an excited newspaperman rapped on Cafe Filho's door to tell him that he was the new President of Brazil.

Political Threat. Caf Filho had been a champion of the poor all his political life, but when he became President, the conservative parties supported him, the left-of-center parties opposed him. Part of the explanation of this surface paradox lay in Cafe Filho's opposition to Vargas, who was distrusted by the conservatives, followed blindly by the non-Communist left-wing groups. Another reason was that Cafe Filho is a liberal as to ends, a conservative as to means.

Six weeks after he took over, Cafe Filho faced a political threat: October's congressional election. He held aloof from the electioneering, even though the success or failure of his administration obviously depended on his getting right-center majorities in both the Senate and the Chamber. He got them. His main political problem now is to keep both of the two main conservative parties on his side. Cafe Filho (never a member of either party) appears to be unworried about that problem. "My problems are economic," he said recently, "because Brazil's problems are economic."

Monkeys & Skyscrapers. One problem Brazil does not suffer from is any lack of natural resources. Vast stretches of the interior are trackless jungle where jaguars and howler monkeys will long outnumber human inhabitants, but some three-fourths of the nation's total area can ul timately be used as cropland or pasture. According to a recent study by U.S. experts, Brazil is not only capable of feeding her own fast-growing population abundantly, but is potentially one of the world's great exporters of foodstuffs. In hydroelectric potential (21 million kw.) Brazil is nearly as well-endowed as the U.S. A quarter of the world's known iron-ore deposits lie in Brazil, along with sizable reserves of manganese, chrome, nickel, bauxite and phosphates--and geological exploration of the sparsely settled interior has barely begun.

U.S. visitors who arrive for the first time in the southern metropolis of Sao Paulo (pop. 2,500,000), Latin America's greatest industrial city, get a startling impression that the great Brazilian tomorrow has already reached high noon in a virtual explosion of civic energy. From downtown hotel windows they can count a dozen or more new office buildings under construction amidst what is already one of the world's most impressive arrays of skyscrapers. Rio de Janeiro (pop. 2,600,000) is undergoing an apartment-house boom only less startling than Sao Paulo's office-building boom. And the Brazilians are building more than offices and apartments. Since war's end, Brazil's gross national product has increased at a rate of 6% a year, keeping well ahead of population growth (2.3% a year).

But despite Brazil's postwar manufacturing and building booms, the reality of today often mocks the vision of tomorrow. The malodorous, disease-ridden favelas (shantytowns) on Rio's hillsides are better indicators of the standard of living than the new apartment houses near by. Millions of rural Brazilians live in shacks, exist on a diet of beans, rice and manioc root, with a little jerked beef. Two out of three are illiterate.

For the vastness of the gap between the envisioned tomorrow, and the actual today, Brazilians sometimes blame nature: the rugged mountain ranges that block the seaboard from the interior, the tropical heat that saps men's energy in the coastal cities, including Rio. Racists (rare but not unknown in tolerant Brazil) put the blame on Brazil's racial potpourri. (It was 62% white, 27% brown and 11% black by the 1950 census, but a majority of Brazilian whites have at least a trace of Indian or Negro blood.) Often Brazilians blame the nation's Portuguese colonial masters. Complains a Rio newsman: "Brazil made Portugal rich, and Portugal left Brazil poor." But it is rather late for Brazilians to be blaming the Portuguese: Brazil has been an independent nation since its bloodless revolution of 1822.

The Lure of Luck. Part of Brazil's failure to live up to her potentialities and aspirations is certainly traceable to the national character. The Brazilians' apocalyptic vision of their nation's future is itself a hindrance to progress. It encourages the comfortable idea that the brilliant tomorrow will dawn inevitably, no matter what men do or fail to do today. The common expression, "God is a Brazilian," is half-humorous, but it is also half-serious.

The vision of greatness, coupled with the frustration of failing to realize greatness, has somehow fortified the Brazilians' nationalistic reluctance to let foreign investors and experts share freely in the development of their natural resources. No. 1 horrible example of nationalism defeating national interest is the legislation excluding foreign capital from oil exploitation. Geologists have estimated that oil-bearing formations underlie more than 750,000 sq. mi. of Brazilian territory, but the government-controlled oil monopoly, Petrobras, lacks the capital and technical skills to undertake large-scale exploration. So far, Brazilians have found two small fields, which between them produce 4,000 bbls. a day--about 2% of consumption. Result: last year Brazil had to spend $220 million of her hard-earned foreign exchange for imported oil products. At present, in the midst of a desperate dollar shortage, oil imports drain away $20 million a month--more than all other dollar imports put together.

One Wobbly Leg. President Cafe Filho is well aware that all his problems did not originate with the Vargas regime. Even before Vargas, Brazil had embarked on the slow, painful transition from an agricultural economy based on production for export to a diversified economy based on production for domestic use. The pattern of Brazil's economic past is a series of wonderful one-product export booms, invariably followed by abysmal busts. First came a 16th century boom in a red dyewood called pau-braza (literally, ember wood), which gave Brazil its name. In the 17th century Brazil became for a time the world's greatest exporter of sugar. Then came the gold rush; while it lasted, Brazil produced more than 40% of all the gold mined in the 18th century. The advent of the automotive age gave Brazil a great rubber boom, but Brazil now imports rubber from Malaya.

Before the rubber boom had run its course, Brazil became the world's No. 1 exporter of coffee. Coffee is still the mainstay of the economy, accounting for two-thirds of export income. "Brazil walks on one leg," said a Vargas Finance Minister, "and the leg is coffee." Dependence on a single product makes Brazil vulnerable to exchange crises every time the price slides. Not only is the one leg wobbly: it might some day wither altogether and go the way of dyewood, sugar, gold and rubber. Competition from the other coffee countries and from cheap-labor plantations in Africa is increasing. World overproduction is a constant threat. And there is always the nightmarish possibility that some diabolically clever chemist may wreck the market altogether by discovering a cheap, palatable synthetic substitute for instant coffee.

White Magic. Brazil's top men are convinced that the way out, the economic road to the wealth and eminence Brazilians envision for their nation, is industrialization. The postwar manufacturing boom is only a beginning. Before industrial growth can proceed much further, as Cafe Filho and his economic advisers see it, the administration will have to slow galloping inflation to a walk. Because of inflation, much of Brazil's short supply of investment capital runs into real-estate speculation, or takes flight into dollar hoards. Too little capital is available for what Cafe Filho's Finance Minister calls "the two main bottlenecks in the Brazilian economy": railroads and electric power.

Inflation inhibits foreign investment in Brazil, and lessens the country's eligibility for loans or direct aid from Washington. It has also had a disastrous effect on Brazilian workers. The real wages of many workers in Rio shrank within the past five years, as beef soared from 9 cruzeiros a kilogram in 1950 to 46 today, butter from 34 to no. One of the odder symptoms of mass discontent is the mushroom growth of umbanda or espiritismo, a white-magic religious cult with elaborate African rituals. There were 75,000 registered espiri-tistas in Rio in 1949, 124,000 in 1950; today there are some 400,000, and the national total runs into millions.

The Professor's Prospects. To harness runaway inflation, Cafe Filho tabbed as his Finance Minister one of the nation's top economists: urbane Eugenio Gudin, 68, professor at the University of Brazil. To Gudin's way of thinking, nationalism ranks with inflation as an obstacle to Brazil's healthy economic growth. But for the time being, the administration can do little about nationalism except refrain from encouraging it. The administration's common-sense policy on the Petrobras oil law is to let it stand until nationalistic sentiment subsides, and get as much foreign participation in oil development as the law's loopholes permit. Explains Cafe Filho laconically: "The problem now is not to change the law, but to interpret it."

To slow inflation, Gudin called for cruzeiro-pinching by the government, curbs on bank credit and tax reform. The two preceding Finance Ministers also drew up disinflationary programs, but inflation kept right on. What makes Gudin's prospects sounder is that President Cafe Filho is backing him up. Getulio Vargas failed to back up his men, Horacio Lafer and Oswaldo Aranha. While Lafer was tightening credit, the Bank of Brazil was loosening it; while Aranha was trying to curb prices, Vargas decreed a 100% increase in minimum wages.

Because the economy was still shaking from the inflationary impact of the minimum wage decree when Gudin became Finance Minister, he was unable to halt the cruzeiro's slide right away. His immediate aim is to slow down the rate of in flation from the recent 2% a month to a mild 6% a year.

On the Road to Tomorrow. Even more important for Brazil in the long run than Cafe Filho's economic program is the educational effect of his own character and his new kind of administration. Besides providing a conspicuous personal example of candor and integrity, Cafe Filho is giving Brazil a government that is opposed to nationalism and favoritism, that is trying to work out the country's problems instead of conjuring them away. Said a member of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies: "Cafe Filho is setting a much-needed example. He is proving that an honest man with common sense can be more useful to this country than a glamorous personality."

With little more than a year ahead of him, Cafe Filho cannot be expected to cover much distance. "I do not expect my administration to go down as a milestone in the history of Brazil," he said recently. "I shall be fully satisfied if it is remembered as a bridge to better times." And if Cafe Filho can hold the world's biggest republic in the direction he has set, his administration will indeed deserve to be written down as a serviceable bridge along the road to Brazil's splendid tomorrow.

*And pronounces (approximately) as Zho-wahn Kah-Jay Feel-yo. *'Six hundred thousand cruzeiros a year--$8,500 at the current free rate. *But after he became President, his first non-military caller was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Rio.

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