View over Caracas from the Avila Mountain
Latin America was always a storehouse of delights and, despite some recent emergencies, the region gloriously remains so to this day—richer, more self-confident and more open than ever before in its history. As an interested visitor you don’t have to master Spanish (or Portuguese) irregular verbs. Most of the region’s licensed murderers, torturers and terrorists have now fled—though a futile drug war does persist in Mexico and Central America.
Latin America is a region of natural extremes. Stand at the broad mouth of the Amazon—where there is an island the size of Switzerland between the south and the north banks—and you will see a greater amount of water in one day than passes under Tower Bridge in a year. Flying in to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, one lands in an airport 4068m above sea level, with flight attendants hovering with oxygen masks to help those with breathing problems cope with the thin air. You often have to go down from the airport through the clouds to get to the city. Travel west of La Paz across the continent and you arrive in Rio de Janeiro, the only city in the world where you can bathe on an oceanside beach at one minute, and be watching butterflies the size of tea plates beside the waterfalls in the Tijuca forest park 15 minutes later. For a few pounds you can take a shared taxi from Santiago de Chile to the Argentine city of Mendoza over the High Andes under the shadow of Aconcagua, at nearly 7000 metres the loftiest mountain in the whole of the Americas. Leave Santiago at lunchtime and be in Mendoza for tea.
Christopher Columbus, on his first voyage to the continent in October 1492, was cautious in his reporting. Back in Spain, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had set him up with ships and cash to find the riches of the orient. His job was to work out a quick route to China: he wanted to go back and tell them he had achieved that. As he was sailing west along the coast of Cuba, it is said, he told his sailors they should testify they had indeed been to Cathay. He added that they should keep to the script or it would go badly for them.
For centuries after Columbus’s day the Spanish and Portuguese colonists tried to keep these new-found lands and their gold, silver and precious stones to themselves and out of the hands of English Protestant interlopers. In reality, so many diamonds were being dug out of Brazil in the 18th century that the king of Portugal decreed that no more should be sent back to Lisbon, as the present supplies were already ruining the market.
Mystery persisted about Latin America after the sun set on the first discoverers and when the United States arrogated to itself the protectorate that Europeans had once claimed for themselves. In 1823 US President James Monroe issued a doctrine declaring that his country was bidding against Europe for power in Latin America. Few other governments took any notice of Washington’s opinion at the time.
Having once grown rapidly, US dominance is today waning fast, as the rude self-confidence of the locals increases by the minute. The delights of Latin America are open for anyone interested enough to read about it and go there. Richard Gott, Nick Caistor and Grace Livingstone are among many skilful authors writing the region’s history. At the same time, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese are among the world’s easiest languages if you set your mind to them.
Since I first set foot there 50 years ago, the region has kept me spellbound. My landfall was totally magical. Labouring as a young whippersnapper on the foreign desk of the Financial Times, I received an invitation—that no one else seemed to want—to Port of Spain, then in its last months as the capital of the crown colony of Trinidad and Tobago. The occasion for my introduction to the western hemisphere, to calypso and to the voice of the Mighty Sparrow, the country’s pre-eminent calypsonian, was the inauguration of the brand new, exotic Trinidad Hilton hotel.
I was fascinated by what I saw of West Indian society, but the coast of Venezuela lay temptingly over on the southern horizon. Hardened by excruciating months as an au pair in Madrid and Guadalajara, a course at the University of Salamanca and an Oxford degree in French and Spanish, I winkled grudging permission out of my elders and betters that I could go on for a few days to Caracas. The proviso was that I’d be back at my desk in London by Monday.
It was dark as the British West Indian Airways plane completed its short hop from Trinidad and dumped us passengers at Maiquetía airport beside the Caribbean Sea at the foot of some great mountains. It was as though we were landing on the deck of a gigantic aircraft carrier. With a fistful of bolivar coins in my pocket—they were solid silver in the early 1960s—I hailed a taxi to take me up the smooth, wide motorway, through its two tunnels to the twinkling lights of the Venezuelan capital in the heights above.
I had never been to an oil state before, never to a country with real silver coinage. Countries such as Venezuela had been making fabulous money selling barrelfuls of oil for seven US dollars, a small fraction of today’s price. The cash had financed not just the motorway and its tunnels but new skyscrapers in Caracas and a mountain-side hotel, the Humboldt, at the top of a cable railway overlooking the capital. The Guri dam, destined to be the world’s biggest, was rising in the eastern jungles. The city centre was splendid and the middle class lived in luxury, alongside squalid conditions for the poor—that is, those who had no possibility of getting any handle on the black gold.
The oil business was run by European and US managers in western companies. Lest anyone had any misapprehensions about international realities, the British embassy was housed in the upper floors of a tall building which bore the large logo of an oil company, visible from far away.
Many of the city’s new projects had been ordered in the previous decade by Colonel Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the president, unpopularly known as PJ. He was the sort of right-wing, corrupt military dictator—such as the Somozas in Nicaragua, Stroessner in Paraguay, Pinochet in Chile and the Argentine, Uruguayan and Brazilian generals—to whom over the decades Washington has been fatally attracted.
The Venezuelans chased the podgy caudillo away in 1958: he went off with a large case-full of high denomination banknotes. The civilian governments who followed him modelled themselves on European social democrats, but were unwilling or unable to control a great new concentration of oil wealth which left half the population in indigence. But PJ’s fall was the beginning of the end for the old order of free-spending and authoritarian military dictators supported by foreign governments and companies. To the fury of the foreign oil companies who knew their margins would be squeezed, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Counties (OPEC) came into being under the leadership of Venezuela and Iraq in 1960 and it has gone from strength to strength ever since.
The battles in the region are no longer the stereotypical struggles between dictators and guerrillas, nor is it a simple case of left versus right. Nowadays, Latin America’s politics are more outward-looking, focusing on the region’s place on the world stage, as individual states tend to collaborate more closely with each other. This was markedly pointed out at the end of June this year when a group of right-wing landowners in Paraguay helped remove from power the legally elected—though rather inept—president. The heads of Paraguay’s neighbours rose up in protest against the leader of the movement to oust the president. The feeling in South America is that the new regime should be drummed out of MERCOSUR and UNASUR, the rough local equivalents of the European Union.
The discriminating traveller should never forget Paraguay, ignored by many but fascinating in its isolation. Known by one of its greatest writers, Augusto Roa Bastos, as “an island surrounded by land,” it is a republic where the culture of the pre-Colombian peoples is strong and no politician can aspire to office without being fluent in the principal aboriginal language, Guaraní.
If Paraguay remains a niche tourist destination, the same cannot be said of Brazil. Once a laughing stock of hyper-inflation and weak government, Brazil is a darling of world stock exchanges. It is expected to continue to grow strongly under President Dilma Rousseff, who aims to secure Brazil’s place on the world stage by gaining a permanent place on the UN Security Council.
Throughout the two centuries since their country ceased to be a colony of Portugal, the Brazilians have had a supreme confidence in their future as the most influential state in Latin America. In the 1960s, the military coined the phrase “Ninguem segura o Brasil”: “No one can hold Brazil back.” Politics has been rightfully purged of incompetent generals, but the phrase has stuck. The road network designed to allow the army quick access to any part of the country from Amazonia to the outskirts of the Andes is a welcome inheritance. What could be more wonderful than zooming across the massive state of Minas Gerais (General Mines) on good roads for hours before arriving on the baroque and rococo of the mountainside city of Ouro Preto (Black Gold)? Or pushing on for hours more to Diamantina, the least spoiled of Brazil’s colonial cities whose mines were responsible for much of the embarras de richesse of so many of those uncomfortably wealthy Portuguese monarchs.
And you don’t have to go far out of Rio itself to catch a glimpse of imperial splendours in the emperors’ summer palace in Petrópolis, all gold leaf and green velvet.
One never expected majesty out of the long dreary lines of builders’ dwellings which went up as Brazil prepared to create its new capital city in 1960. But it has come. Today, after a half-century of existence, Brasília has acquired an attractive patina, if not of age then at least of use. Its main avenues are now lined with buildings of striking modernity—notably the spiky but inspiring cathedral—and shaded by productive mango trees. Born in sublimely beautiful Rio in 1907, its creator is Oscar Niemeyer. He is Brazil’s—and, I would venture, the world’s—greatest living architect. Widowed after his first wife Annita died after 76 years of marriage, Niemeyer married a year later in his hundredth year. His second bride was Vera, a slip of a girl at 72. He has seven great-great-grandchildren.
Brazilian bounciness under President Dilma, the daughter of an immigrant from Bulgaria, and her predecessor Lula, a former metal worker, has been striking. Thanks to the discovery of offshore oil, many Brazilians think that their country will eventually join OPEC and an even brighter new financial dawn will break. Meanwhile there is the 2014 football World Cup to look forward to.
Bounciness is not a description that comes to mind about Cuba. But it should do. With Europeans conscious of the unremitting pressure on it from its large northern neighbour, returning journalists are constantly quizzed about the future of the island when former President Fidel Castro and his younger brother Raúl, both in their eighties, go to their eternal reward. Should we go to Cuba while there’s time to see Havana without some new incrustation of McDonald's and Coca-Cola hoardings? What will happen during the transition? The worries are misplaced, and are not anyway for visitors. They must not forget the fun and enjoyment available in Havana.
On my last visits to the city I observed plenty: the splendid coffee, the good mojitos (rum cocktails) and fine food. To finish with a few tips for anyone planning a trip this year, I would recommend two restaurants in a narrow but boisterous thoroughfare in Habana Vieja, the old city. One, at the seaward end of the harbour entrance, near the two fortresses which guarded in vain against the British invasion of 1762, is El Lucero at Number 2. It is state-owned and run professionally by Jorgito, in his forties, charming and efficient, and clearly as happy as a sandboy. A couple of hundred metres away at Number 215 Calle Cuba is the Cuba-Italia, an elegant paladar, or state-licensed, restaurant of great charm. It is run by Veraly, Jorgito’s sister-in-law with the help of her daughter.
Then there is the Pachanga in Miramar—low lighting, sophisticated, just the thing for a James Bond remake. And don’t forget the quiet Bar Baco in the Parque Central, the Central Square. It’s in the international wing of the Fine Arts Museum which has an amazing collection of 18th century British paintings.
You don’t expect Gainsboroughs, Romneys and Reynolds in Havana. But Latin America is full of surprises.
