Viva la Revolución: on Latin America
ERIC HOBSBAWM
In an extract from his memoir, Interesting Times, reproduced in this wide-ranging collection of political reportage and historical essays, Eric Hobsbawm acknowledged that it was easy to become a Latin America expert in the 1960s. The revolution in Cuba created enormous interest in Europe – the first piece is an account of his visit to Havana in 1960 – but cheap air travel was equally instrumental in allowing Hobsbawm to become “an intermittent Marxist visitor”, an artful self-identification implicitly distinguishing him from mere revolutionary tourists. For a historian whose world view was shaped by his childhood in Vienna of the 1920s and Berlin during the rise of Hitler, Latin America could easily have been dismissed as a peripheral irrelevance. Instead, the collision between the modern and the archaic – half-hourly flights between Rio and São Paulo but few railways or roads – opened new perspectives on global history.
What struck Hobsbawm on his first extended visit to South America in 1963 was the vast migration taking place from the countryside to the cities. The population of Recife, Brazil, had more than doubled in just over 20 years. He was horrified by the conditions in the burgeoning shanty towns where people seemed like “refugees fleeing an earthquake”.
