Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations.
I remember that – you know, I didnt receive a formal education. I was educated in the Montevideo cafe, in the cafes of Montevideo. There, I received my first lessons in the art of telling stories, storytelling.
When a book is alive, really alive, you feel it. You put it to your ear here, and you feel it breathe, sometimes laugh, sometimes cry, just like a person, a little person.
There are some writers who feel they are elected by God. I am not. I am elected by the devil – this is clear.
In his life, a man can change wives, political parties or religions but he cannot change his favourite soccer team.
Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others.
Latin America is part of the world which was for many years condemned to the system of power where intimidation had more strength than the vote.
Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others – the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.
Schools teach ignorance.
Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More than one poor starving soul would like to know. In our countries, numbers live better than people. How many people prosper in times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?
The tree of life knows that, whatever happens, the warm music spinning around it will never stop. However much death may come, however much blood may flow, the music will dance men and women as long as the air breaths them and the land plows and loves them.
It is highly improbable that the bureaucrat will put his life on the line. It is absolutely impossible that he’ll put his job on the line.
The poet, distracted by politics, asks of poetry that it make itself useful like metal or flour, that it get ready to stain its face with coal dust and fight body to body.
I like Messi because he doesn’t think he is Messi.
Charity, vertical, humiliates. Solidarity, horizontal, helps.
The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day.
We Latins are known for jabbering on.
This work is a torture on the rump but a joy to the heart.
Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight.
We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We, the living are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people.