| 'Revolutionaries are not infallible' … Eduardo Galeano Photograph: Ezequiel Scagnetti |
My hero:
Eduardo Galeano by Tariq Ali
My late friend and comrade Eduardo Galeano was a modern-day Simón Bolívar, trying to achieve with his pen what the liberator had attempted with the sword
17 April 2015
In Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, the eponymous antihero is confronted by his student, who is livid that the great man has recanted: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo’s response is calm: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” And he continues to work on his manuscript, which he then hands to his estranged pupil, who realises at the end of the play that what is really important has been achieved. The ideas will survive. My late friend and comrade, the Uruguayan journalist and historian Eduardo Galeano, who died this week, never recanted his beliefs in private or in public. Nor did he believe in heroes.