Since that day in Cuba, other countries have set off on different roads on the experiment of change: perpetuation of the existing order of things is perpetuation of the crime. The bronze eagle of the Maine, thrown down on the day the Cuban Revolution triumphed, now lies abandoned, its wings broken, in a doorway in the old town in Havana. If the future turns out to be a Pandora's box, the conservative has reason to shout, 'I have been betrayed.' And the ideologists of impotence, the slaves who look at themselves with the master's eyes, are not slow to join in the outcry. In a sense the right wing is correct in identifying itself with tranquility and order it is an order of daily humiliation for the majority, but an order nonetheless it is a tranquility in which injustice continues to be unjust and hunger to be hungry. This systematic violence is not apparent but is real and constantly increasing: its holocausts are not made known in the sensational press but in Food and Agricultural Organization statistics. The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret every year, without making a sound, three Hirsohima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.

The strength of the imperialist system as a whole rests on the necessary inequality of its parts. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.

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. But the winners happen to have won thanks to our losing: the history of Latin America's underdevelopment is, as someone had said, is an integral part of world capitalism's development. For those who see history as a competition, Latin America's backwardness and poverty are merely the result of its failure.

Eduardo galeano open veins