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U.S. visitors who arrive for the first time in the southern metropolis of Sao Paulo (pop. 2,500,000), Latin America's greatest industrial city, get a startling impression that the great Brazilian tomorrow has already reached high noon in a virtual explosion of civic energy. From downtown hotel windows they can count a dozen or more new office buildings under construction amidst what is already one of the world's most impressive arrays of skyscrapers. Rio de Janeiro (pop. 2,600,000) is undergoing an apartment-house boom only less startling than Sao Paulo's office-building boom. And the Brazilians are building more than offices and apartments. Since war's end, Brazil's gross national product has increased at a rate of 6% a year, keeping well ahead of population growth (2.3% a year).
But despite Brazil's postwar manufacturing and building booms, the reality of today often mocks the vision of tomorrow. The malodorous, disease-ridden favelas (shantytowns) on Rio's hillsides are better indicators of the standard of living than the new apartment houses near by. Millions of rural Brazilians live in shacks, exist on a diet of beans, rice and manioc root, with a little jerked beef. Two out of three are illiterate.
For the vastness of the gap between the envisioned tomorrow, and the actual today, Brazilians sometimes blame nature: the rugged mountain ranges that block the seaboard from the interior, the tropical heat that saps men's energy in the coastal cities, including Rio. Racists (rare but not unknown in tolerant Brazil) put the blame on Brazil's racial potpourri. (It was 62% white, 27% brown and 11% black by the 1950 census, but a majority of Brazilian whites have at least a trace of Indian or Negro blood.) Often Brazilians blame the nation's Portuguese colonial masters. Complains a Rio newsman: "Brazil made Portugal rich, and Portugal left Brazil poor." But it is rather late for Brazilians to be blaming the Portuguese: Brazil has been an independent nation since its bloodless revolution of 1822.
The Lure of Luck. Part of Brazil's failure to live up to her potentialities and aspirations is certainly traceable to the national character. The Brazilians' apocalyptic vision of their nation's future is itself a hindrance to progress. It encourages the comfortable idea that the brilliant tomorrow will dawn inevitably, no matter what men do or fail to do today. The common expression, "God is a Brazilian," is half-humorous, but it is also half-serious.