Volume 25, Number 14 · September 28, 1978
Is Brazil on the Brink of Democracy?
By Harry Maurer
We sat, a painter friend and I, at a corner table in a cafe in Leblon, the most fashionable of Rio's beachfront neighborhoods. Since we were talking politics, we whispered when the waiter came around; after three months in Brazil it had become second nature for me. The painter, a small, stocky man in his fifties, was apologizing for the cafe and its clientele, mostly pretty young people with dark tans. He would have liked to take me to the cafes that flourished in Leblon and Ipanema during the good years, the years before the 1964 coup. Back then, he said, artists and writers and students would begin to gather at midnight to argue politics until dawn. But those cafes were closed now. Many of the people who had frequented them were dead, or in exile, or no longer interested in politics.
Feature, 5849 words
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