Twenty years ago I was in a cafe in Rio de Janeiro, eating breakfast and looking at the morning paper.
In those days, you couldn’t get the English language newspapers until much later in the day in Rio; neither was the internet much use as a news source.
So I was drinking some strong Brazilian coffee (“hot as Hell, black as the devil, sweet as sin”) and picking my way slowly through the Portuguese-language O Globo.
But there was nothing hard to interpret in the pictures of people dancing on the top of the Berlin Wall. Nor was the headline hard to translate: O Triumfo do Capitalismo! The Triumph of Capitalism.
It’s hard for people today, especially people too young to have known the Cold War for themselves, to know just how much that story meant to my generation.
The Cold War had shaped our lives.
Our childhoods were marked by its progress and its crises. The space race between the USSR and the US held us entranced; we watched the countdowns for the early astronauts for hours and hours on the grainy, flickering black and white TVs of the era. More than once, we lived through the tension and the worry as Russian space successes were followed by big, public American flops: rockets blew up on the launching pad, keeled over a few seconds after taking off, even as Russian success followed success with metronomic regularity. My father took me out one night to see the first American satellite on its orbit. In the fifth grade, we cowered under our desks as frightened teachers and other adults tried to prepare us for nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Vietnam War divided our generation and to this day shapes us for good and ill.
In the background was always Berlin, and the Wall. I can dimly remember when the Wall went up; it took several days, and the escapes continued even as the Communists pushed construction to the finish. Later, the occasional escape attempts and the brutal response of the East German border guards seemed to encapsulate everything we had learned to think about the Cold War.
Now Berliners could move freely through their city; now the Evil Empire was melting away.
But as I sat at my cafe table in Rio, studying the news and feeling the heat of the day already gathering around me, I felt a tug at my shirt.
I looked up from the news and down to my side; there was a small child standing there, hungry and dirty. She was begging for a few coins, or for something to eat.
The Triumph of Capitalism?
It seemed to me then, and it still seems to me now, that we have a long way to go.