6/25/2023 0 Comments Open veins of america![]() ![]() Poverty fueled the politics of outrage across the continent, the romanticism of Fidel Castro’s Cuba and a backlash of bloody repression. A coup in Uruguay sent the leftist Galeano fleeing to Argentina, where he stayed until a coup forced him to leave there too. ![]() In 1973, the year my English-language paperback was printed, Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende was ousted in a military coup and committed suicide in the presidential palace. The book was written during tumultuous times in Latin America. Then, at the Summit of the Americas last weekend, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave a copy to President Obama, and I dug out my musty edition to consider how much has changed since then - and how much has not. ![]() The reading list for my college core course at UC Santa Cruz in the early 1970s included a book by a young Uruguayan author, Eduardo Galeano, called “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.” The book, which excoriated Europe and the United States for their exploitation of the region, was pretty standard fare at a school where Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse was a visiting professor and Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton was a fellow student. ![]()
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