BRAZIL: Plain Speaker

When Hernane Tavares de Sá accepted a scholarship to visit the U.S. in 1942, he said: “I will consider my trip really useful if I can help make Brazil known and understood by the North American public.” Handsome Author Tavares never returned to his job as professor of biology at the University of São Paulo. Discovering that “in Latin American matters, the ignorance of the North American is astonishing,” he set about the job of informing the U.S., at least about Brazil. In five years he has visited 38 states, lectured at 75 U.S. universities and colleges.

In his first book, The Brazilians: People of Tomorrow (John Day; $3), published last week in Manhattan, Dr. Tavares gives a plain, tough appraisal of his country that is bound to wound Brazilian sensibilities. Tavares is a descendant of the famous 17th Century colonial commander, Albuquerque Maranhão. Not many Brazilians without such background would have dared to point out so boldly that:

¶ Two in three Brazilians are illiterate, “a high figure even for Latin America.”

¶ Rio de Janeiro, with a population of 2,000,000, has only one public high school. (There are a hundred-odd others, but they are privately owned, and run for a profit that averages 30% a year.)

¶ In Rio one baby in six dies in its first year.

¶ A third of the rural population has malaria, a fifth hookworm. In Rio and São Paulo the prevalence of syphilis and tuberculosis is even higher.

¶ All Brazil graduates but 300 nurses a year.

¶ The family is the most pervasive institution in Brazilian life. Yet many a husband is accustomed to seek sexual and social relations outside the home—the poor and middle-class at the clublike bordellos, the rich man with his mistress. Divorce is not recognized.

¶ “Rio is the world’s most beautiful city and the worst thing that ever happened to Brazilians—the largest city in the world that is unabashedly and with deep conviction a playground.” Dr. Tavares can hardly wait till the capital is moved to the west, and officials can really buckle down to business.

In spite of his chastening criticism, Dr. Tavares loves and believes in Brazil. “Brazil is the one thing I believe in,” he says. He tells his readers of the west, where a League of Nations commission once said a population of 900,000,000 could support itself; of Volta Redonda, South America’s biggest steel mill, and of the continent’s fastest growing industrial city at São Paulo. Drawing on the studies of Brazil’s social anthropologist, Gilberto Freyre, he shows that “there is less racial discrimination in Brazil than in any other country in the world.” By inheritance, says Tavares, the Brazilians, with a rich land, a million unclaimed opportunities, and a unique cultural, religious & racial unity, are destined to be “the people of tomorrow.”