Alberto Dines (1932- )
A highly talented newsman from São Paulo. He was part of that relatively small Jewish community that made such a significant contribution to Brazilian culture. I first came across him when he published a first-class analysis of the coup of 1964. It was entitled Os idos de março, referring to the page of Roman history that Cold War Brazil was replicating (and which I was also studying).
We began a close friendship in Rio and the States.
One of his many accomplishments was a beautifully written book called Morte no paraíso. It was a biography of Stefan Zweig, the world famous Viennese writer who had fled the Nazis and found refuge in Brazil. Unfortunately, the change proved too difficult to assimilate, and Zweig took his life shortly after arriving, but not before publishing one of those many books saying Brazil was the country of the future (and always would be, said the skeptics).
Alberto and I spent time together in the States in Great Neck, New York, where the local school board had decided it was time to offer their students (and parents) an up-to-date seminar on “Brazil Today.” They recruited me to be the M.C. of an all-star review of Brazilian intellectuals.
It was during the military dictatorship in Brazil. Their embassy in Washington sent a spy to confirm I was a left-wing flunkie. I disarmed him by saying that I was an admirer of Senator Ruy Barbosa, the noted nineteenth and twentieth-century liberal.
Alberto was one among a cast of professors, poets and a female psychologist, all attempting to explain how those folks down in the tropics (and so far from Great Neck) were different, but not so different.
Although my Brazilian friends were ostensibly fluent in American, I had to interpolate an occasional word. For example, when my friend Dines referred to the “grand press” (“a imprensa grande”), it was better rendered as “the leading newspaper.”
One misogynist anthropologist was aggressive toward the female psychologist, and she tartly replied, showing that gender relations were changing in Brazil also.
Above all, my foreign friends were trying to explain what it was like to lose your civil liberties and see some of your friends tortured by the military and police. The good bourgeoisie of Great Neck listened patiently, but it was quite a stretch to understand what was happening oceans away.
I liked my time with Dines because before I went to Brazil I had never spent much time with journalists. I always chummed around with academics. But journalists proved to be smarter and brighter than many academics. And they write a hell of a lot better.
Alberto and I traded lots of gossip. He got his from fellow newsmen and I got mine from indiscreet friends in the U.S. Embassy. It was all fodder for my research on contemporary Brazilian politics—for that next book that was just around the corner.
The last time I saw Alberto he was standing in front of a fancy hotel in downtown São Paulo berating passerby about the follies of President Sarney. Alberto was quite a guy.
Further Readings
Dines, Alberto. Os idos de março e a queda em abril. Rio de Janeiro: J. Alvaro, 1964.
Dines, Alberto. Morte no paraíso: a tragédia de Stefan Zweig. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1981.
Dines, Alberto. Histórias do poder: 100 anos de política no Brasil. 1a ed. São Paulo, Brasil: Editora 34, 2000.
Alberto Dines was born in the city of Rio de Janeiro. He pursued a career in journalism and helped establish a subdivision of Folha de São Paulo in Rio de Janeiro. He also served as editor-in-chief of Jornal do Brasil, before losing his job in 1974 for criticizing the paper’s relations with corrupt government politics in Rio de Janeiro. He published many books, including Morte no paraíso: a tragédia de Stefan Zweig (1981), which was later adapted into a film called Lost Zweig in 2002. In 1996, he founded Observatório da imprensa, a site that analyzed the role of Brazilian mass media. A weekly television show and radio show, heavily influenced by the website, were soon created thereafter.