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Lusa - Business News - Portugal: Country had deceptive reputation as being cheap in 1950s - New Yorker
Lisbon,April.18,2024(Lusa)- Portugal had a "deceptive reputation" for cheap living in the 1950s, according to the American writer Mary McCarthy, during her trip to the country, reported in the article "Letter from Portugal", published in The New Yorker magazine in 1955. The bribery and corruption of high-ranking officials, facilitated by the bureaucracy and corporatism of the dictatorship, the detachment from reality of the upper classes, the 'nouveau riche' from the business world of World War II, and the recent focus on the "tourist trade" did not escape the writer and journalist, who travelled through the country between January and April 1954. One of McCarthy's first gestures, at the end of her first days in Portugal, was to write to her friend Hannah Arendt, the author of "The Origins of Totalitarianism", who had lived in Lisbon in 1941 on her journey to New York to escape Nazism. This letter was included in the volume of correspondence between the two, "Between Friends", published in 1995. The writer summarised for Arendt much of what she detailed in the article published by the New Yorker in the issue from 28 January to 5 February 1955. The letter to Arendt talks about an unexpected winter of snow in Lisbon, and the "strange mixture of prosperity and poverty". The Avenida-Baixa-Chiado axis in the capital reminded McCarthy of "a small America", in contrast to the rest of the country, because of the cars, neon adverts, household appliances and imported products displayed in shop windows. "Portugal has a misleading reputation as a country where life is cheap," reads the New Yorker article. "From our point of view", food, clothes, transport "are cheap, but if you want to buy something imported (a pressure cooker, an electric cooker, a radio), or something made in a modern factory, it's very expensive, compared to prices in any other country." "Who buys things from the shops in the downtown Chiado district?" asked Mary McCarthy, without finding an answer. "The foreigners," said the Portuguese; "the nouveau riche," replied almost everyone. The writer finally met a high-ranking official who had given his wife a pressure cooker for the maid to use and "see how it worked." The difficulties and problems didn't concern "the big officials, the rich Portuguese or the foreigners" who lived "in villas in Sintra, Estoril or Praia da Rocha", wrote McCarthy. The gulf that separated the classes was "so great" that it seemed "to have formed a shield over the rich, making them apathetic and indifferent", the writer assured. "'It's not that they're bad. They just don't think,'" explained a Portuguese social worker. "'They're not used to thinking' [about others]." Mary McCarthy spoke of the nouveau riche that filled the pastry shops of Chiado, resulting from the tungsten business and the waves of refugees that passed through the country during World War II, as well as the new "jovial bureaucrats" who were "selling Portugal to the tourist trade and fighting [...] for appropriations to build hotels." "Oppositionists say that [much of the money] went into the pockets of government bureaucrats, and that these bureaucrats" continued "to profit through bribery". Economic conditioning, which limited sectors and initiative, stipulated prices and profit margins, reminiscent of Soviet plans, was yet another source of bureaucracy and corruption. Mary McCarthy's trip to Portugal also gave rise to a second text, "Mister Rodriguez of Lisbon", published in August 1955 in Harper's Magazine, which was later combined with that of the New Yorker in the volume of essays "On the contrary", in 1961. This article on the Estado Novo's (Salazar regime) housing policy, associated with urban expansion plans, recounts a visit by the high-ranking official "Mr Rodrigues" to Lisbon's low-income neighbourhoods. Mary McCarthy did not miss the irony of the complex web that regulated access to housing, reserved mainly for civil servants, in different types according to income, place in the hierarchy, number and sex of children. "Mister Rodriguez" showed the writer his own house, one of those destined for top officials: "Furnished according to the highest taste of the Portuguese bourgeoisie, it had a huge crystal chandelier in a small living room", full of carved furniture and oriental carpets. Mary McCarthy's work was first published in Portugal by Ulisseia in 1963 with the publication of "The Group", a novel that was reissued by D. Quixote in 2010. This was followed by "A gente com quem ela anda" (Estúdios Cor, 1967), "Vietname" (Bertrand, 1967) and "As alamedas da academia" (Portugália, 1970). "Carta de Portugal" (Letter from Portugal) was published in 1990 by the Serralves Foundation, in the catalogue of the exhibition dedicated to the work of the American photographer Neal Slavin made in the country in 1968, which still bore witness to the reality encountered by McCarthy 14 years earlier. MAG/AYLS // AYLS Lusa Agency : LUSA Date : 2024-04-19 11:13:00
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