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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, exchange handmade friendship bracelets with language.
Today we are continuing with the theme of cakes in South America as means of messaging.
Picture the scene: you’re in Brazil during the military dictatorship of 1964-1985. You’ve clipped a cake recipe from the newspaper, and you’re making the cake, but it’s very confusing - then in comes out all flat and tastes absolutely disgusting! Look, it’s not your fault; it’s not meant to be a cake. It’s a message.
On with the show.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: My name is Crystian Cruz, and I am a graphic designer, researcher, I used to work as a director of magazines and newspapers in Brazil, and I'm doing a PhD about censorship, how it affects creative work, deep diving into a period that we remember from Brazil, from the dictatorship, from the 1960s to the 1980s.
HZ: From 1964 to 1985, Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship, but the passing of Institutional Act number 5 in 1968 made censorship official, of TV, music, theatre, films - and the press.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Usually how they would proceed, before having a censor working in the newsroom, they would just make a phone call, and they wouldn't even identify themselves. They would usually start the sentence by saying "By superior order," that was like the starting line. They would just say, "Yeah, by superior order, you can't say anything about the bank assault from today." Or "You can't say anything about the kidnapping that happened in Sao Paolo two days ago." And the funny fact is that most of the cases, the newspaper didn't know about it. And the first time they heard about that was through the censors because they'll say, “What? Which bank robbery?” And then they would investigate. But then of course it'd be in vain because they would investigate, but they couldn't print it. So even like the economic recession: Brazil was thriving in the late 1960s, but then in the early 1970s, they started to have economic recession. And the first time that the newspapers heard about it was by some of those phone calls. Cause they got a message that would say, "You can't say anything about recession" and they'd say, "What? What is going on? We don't know anything about it."
HZ: For example, the papers were forbidden to report on a meningitis epidemic in the early 1970s which killed thousands of children.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: The whole thing started with a report from the government, from the minister of health; they created this report about the meningitis crisis. They gave it to the reporters and said, "You can't say anything about that." And then they started to go say, “Oay, if we can’t publish anything, what can we do? We don't know how many people are getting killed by this.” So they decided to go to every hospital and try to identify the cause of death for each person that was killed by meningitis. So they go to morgues, they go to cemeteries. And in those cases they would know how many people got killed by meningitis. So they started to create their own reports and that's how they come up with some news about it. Of course you can't say anything about the report itself. But they didn't say that they are prohibited to say anything about any private investigation from the newspaper. But yeah, that was a really big deal with meningitis. And up to now, people don't have a clue about how bad it was.
HZ: It seems like a very short termist way for the government to behave, because if you don't tell people about it, more people will get it, and then more people will know about it.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Yeah, I think that was the strategy from the current government with COVID. And back then we didn't have access to information as it happened nowadays. I think that's the biggest difference. We didn't have social media. We didn't even have cell phones. We didn't have anything at all. So the only way to get information would be through newspapers and magazines. So that's how they managed to somehow control the public opinion.
HZ: Oddly, by making sure certain information wasn’t printed, the regime inadvertently managed to ensure the documentation of that information. They’d phone up the publication, someone in the newsroom would jot down whatever it was they weren’t supposed to publish, so even though these news stories didn’t make it to print then, all these years later there’s still a lot of handwritten records of them.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: And also because everything is recorded. So that's how you get access to that nowadays, because it was a military coup, and the military, they love to create documents. They're not worried about framing themselves. They're more worried about legitimizing themselves. And a good way to do that is to produce documents.
HZ: So they kept a record of all these sort of devious things they were doing? That's unusual, isn't it?
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Really unusual; because that was the thing, they wanted to legitimize themself. The way to look official is actually to produce a document. They had stamps all over the document. They tried to use the language in a formal way, like a lawyer would say. And the thing is that the readers would never know. An entire generation, I'd say my parents' generation, they never knew what was going on, because you couldn't say anything about corruption, criminality; it was only allowed to be published content when the policemen killed a bad guy.
HZ: So under the military dictatorship, were all the papers being censored?
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Yes. They would - and the thing is there are a few newspapers that of course got more attention from the government. And then what they did do for a few ones is that they would have a censor that would be working along with the journalists in the newsroom. So that's how bad it was.
HZ: Yes, the publications that refused to self-censor got a censor sitting in the newsroom reading everything before the paper was distributed, every issue, every day. This caused a number of problems: the papers and magazines would be delayed or prevented from going to press, which could be a big financial hit. And in those days, doing layouts wasn’t quick, and nor was redoing layouts. The other problem was, nobody knew exactly what was supposed to be censored.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Those values, they were never written. Or with every different censor, they had to figure out which kind of topics should be avoided, but there was no such thing as a list of censored content. And that's why it made so hard for all the parts involved to deal with that. Because imagine if you are in a newsroom, you would be good if they did actually have the list of censor topics, because they would never go into that, but they didn't provide such lists.
HZ: So you could try to guess what might be censored, and not waste your time writing it; or you could write it and the censor would have to decide whether or not to let it through, based on what they thought the government would want censored - because the censors also did not have guidelines about what to veto.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: And that's the thing: we're talking about humans after all. That's the thing. It doesn't matter how much you do, if you create a system to do it; at the end, it is only humans. So everybody has a different interpretation. So that's why sometimes one word was censored in one specific newspaper, but in another magazine, for instance, it wasn't. And then I think that how arbitrary it is, why sometimes one word is allowed, and another word or in a specific different contexts, it gets flagged.
HZ: I wonder whether, in some ways, it was a brilliant move by the regime not to write down what was supposed to be censored, because then maybe the censors would play it extra cautious and censor more stuff. And you could just turn anything into something that had to be censored.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: That's true. Because if they do print out a list of words, they would have to explain why the word was censored.
HZ: What would they put in place of the censored pieces?
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Of course, the first rule is that they couldn't say that they had been under censorship. So all the censored content, they would just have to drop it, no questions asked, then they would have to come up with new content; but sometimes they didn't have enough time to do it. And then it comes to the second problem: you can't leave white spaces. Because they did that for a while, most of the newspapers, and then they would be flagged by the regime to say, “Actually, you're trying to warn your readers there's something going on, so you can't do that at all.”
HZ: And thus, newspapers came up with creative ways to fill the gaps left by news stories that had been censored. One of the biggest newspapers, Estado de Sao Paolo, had more than 1100 pieces known to have been pulled during the regime. To replace them, they printed poems - initially just whatever some of the journalists were into; and eventually, excerpts of an epic poem.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: 'Os Lusíadas', from Camões, which is one of the all time favorite poems from Portugal, was written in the 1500s. And also there was the backstory that the poem was talking about censorship in Portugal back then. That was the underlying message anyway. They copied 650 different parts of the poem. And then they sent to the linotype press, cause they would be printing linotype in that period, and then just left it there. So then every time their content was censored, they would just simply replace it by some parts of the poem. Some poems would be there in full, sometimes it would be the same poem twice in the same edition of the newspaper. And sometimes it would just stop right in the middle. Because, of course they're always just trying to cover up the space they have left. So of course it was a strategic way to denounce censorship by reputation. But also it wasn't a way to just get rid of the blank spaces. Of course they wanted to get the message out that they have been under censorship, but also they're trying to avoid to get in trouble.
HZ: The same publisher used a different tactic in the evening edition, Jornal da Tarde: they would fill the blank spaces with recipes, often for popular kinds of cake.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Most of them would replace it close to news or about political matters or anything like that, to say, “Why this recipe is not in the proper section for recipes?” So imagine the mess that was every edition of the newspaper, on a daily basis.
HZ: Also a mess were the recipes themselves. Some stopped halfway through the instructions. Some appeared multiple times on the same page, some featured improbable ingredients, like a kilo of salt for one cake. Whereas the Estado de Sao Paolo planned the poetry, the Jornal da Tarde would just invent recipes on the spot.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: And most of them were invented by the linotype operator. Some of the content was censored at the very beginning, but some of them were censored at the very end of the process. So they were just about to print out the new edition and then they had to stop the machines and say, “No, that's content was not approved, so we have to replace it at the very last moment.” So that guy would have to come up with some recipes.
HZ: That’s a lot of pressure on a linotype printer - not just having to deal with very late changes to the paper, but mentally having to bake a cake too.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: And then the thing is, they didn't work at all, because the guy had just made it up. And then also, a lot of readers would call the editor-in-chief and say, "I tried the cake recipe and it didn't work."
HZ: The papers might have been trying to signal to the readers: “All is not right here! Look at this, the same recipe is printed several times in this one edition of the paper, and if you make it, you’ll get this disgusting cake. That’s not just salt you’re tasting, it’s the taste of censorship! It’s a bake for help!” But occasionally the papers would send a message to the regime, by putting officials’ names into the recipe.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Since they are kind of creating fake content, I think somehow they're trying to have fun, of course, any way they could, but they're trying to tease the military in all different ways they could find. One of the most notorious politicians back then was called Jarbas Passarinho. There is this Brazilian dish, frango a passarinho, chicken a passarinho, is a particular style of Brazilian food and they would put it up that recipe to talk about that guy. On that particular week, something happened to him. So just to tease that politician, they would say, okay, let's put his name on the recipe. They didn't put his first name, but then of course it was him. They were talking about him.
They're targeting that politician, they want him to be aware that they are against their actions. And then they'll say, yeah, let's do something to provoke him. Or by provoking him, you're provoking the regime itself. But then again, they would say, “What is the problem? It's a common dish in Brazil! Why can't we print out the recipe?”
HZ: Another stealth messaging tactic was the fake weather report.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: The very first day of the institutional act number five, which was the law that enacted censorship officially in 1968, there was a newspaper called Jornal do Brasil that decided to make a silent act of dissent and protest at the same time. So they decided to put in the weather forecast, it was like in the top corner, on the front page, they decided to make one that say that the next day, we have a dark times, suffocating temperature. The air isn't breathable. And then, the next day was nothing like that. It was just like a clear day. And in that case, I think it was a good message for the staff, rather than the readers itself. Because most of the readers, they wouldn't pick up that. But I think that was a really good message for the staff to say, okay, let's put a statement over there to say that we are against that regime and that censorship.
HZ: Do you know if they did the fake weather often?
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: No, there was one time only; I assume that it didn't take long for the regime to realize that they did this act of protest. It was not something that would be worth it to do that quite often, because they might get in trouble easily. And the actual effects of that act wouldn't go along for much people anyway; most of the readers wouldn't pick it up.
HZ: But generally they weren't using the fake text to send messages? Generally it was just to be in the least amount of trouble, and the readers would just be like, “Well, this is strange,” but not necessarily interpret it as what it was?
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: But there was one specific case that was hilarious as well, from Veja magazine, the leading magazine back then. When they had the military coup in Chile with Pinochet, they got the order that they couldn't say a word about it. So what they decided to do was to actually create an entirely fake section for readers' letters, talking about Chile, how are things in Chile? And sometimes they would just say, “No, the country is long, it's thin and long,” like talking about the geography of the country and talk about other things that were not related at all. Let's say, yeah, we are now in spring, the flowers are coming out. And so, so they'll talk about things that were such a unusual in the magazine that the next week the readers would complain or just some of them would write letters and say, "I got it. Something's going on." They didn't know it was about the coup in Chile, because most of them, they didn't know, they didn’t hear about the coup anywhere. But they did know that something was going on. So they did have to think about that on a daily basis, trying to figure out different ways of denouncing what was going on. So eventually they had to be really creative to find a way to say something, but without saying it.
HZ: It wasn’t just the press being censored - the regime would sometimes censor books. But somehow, even a dictatorship didn’t manage to do whatever they wanted.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: A few cases, I've found some books that they want to censor the entire book, but they couldn't because the regime itself created some new laws, and that law by itself didn't allow them to censor that book. One example, for instance, there was a doctor that was writing a book about the drug LSD. And he was talking about the chemical effects of the drug. He was not talking about, if you get high, what is going on? He was not talking about that at all. It was the medical consequences. They are not supposed to censor medical books. But they wanted to, because that could be grabbing attention to some people that will figure out that this drug might have some effects that for them might be interesting.
HZ: So they hired a legal advisor to evaluate the process.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: And I could see the entire correspondence between the minister of justice and the legal advisor. And then the letter he wrote back saying, "Okay, yes, if you want to censor this, you could, because the law that you created, actually, you could censor anything. But in practice, you decided not to censor medical books. So if you do, you're going to open a precedent that anybody can complain about in the future." So that's why, in the end, they decided not to censor their book. And I could see that document even went to the president of Brazil back then; you can see all these stamps of ‘TOP SECRET’ on the top of the document, because you could see how high it would get for those matters - which I think is hilarious, in a sense, that they created the law and they are trying to bypass the law they created.
HZ: How long does a TOP SECRET stamp last for? Are you going to get in trouble now for telling us about what's on the top secret document?
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Yeah! And also they decided to censor books related to sex. That was like the main goal for censoring books. They always had this big umbrella of morality and good manners. That's how they justified all their actions. And then again, we’re talking about how vague it might be: because when you talk about what is morality, what is good manners, it might vary from one person to another, it might vary from one year to another - so let's say the regime lasted for 21 years. So again, if you talk about something in the very beginning, ten years later, the morality and manners values, they might change. In the 1970s, they would just say, okay, in general lines, the book is trying to promote free sex, or at the time they used to say like free love. So you can't do that at all.
HZ: Sometimes the author or publisher could just get rid of a few words or sentences or pages and the book would be allowed through. Sometimes they’d merely change the title and resubmit it, which, if they were rumbled, might get the publisher in trouble, either before or after printing.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: The worst part is when they publish the books, and then later on somebody, usually it'd be the wife of a military, that would look at the book and say, “Oh, this content is horrific. You can't publish this book at all.” So what they did do then is retrieve all the books from the bookstores. And then imagine the financial loss again, when you have to take out all the books from the bookstores and eventually the publishers, they wouldn't print it again. I did buy a few of the books that are supposedly to be censored or being retrieved from bookstores but they're still there.
HZ: Did you find anything particularly juicy in them?
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Oh yeah, of course! The funny fact is that sometimes it will be even the pictures, even the cover itself, the artwork for the cover: so all those sex related books, for instance, there was like a golden rule that you couldn't show the nipples, both of them. If you show one, it is the limit. So it's really easy to find books when the artwork for the cover would have a woman covering one breast but not the other one. Or she will be covering both, just like pretending to show it but not showing that. And I could find some books that the artwork had changed actually, they had to collect from the bookstores, print a new cover and then send it again to the bookstores. Some they would just crop the image, they'll just anything at all to minimize the problems they have to face, the financial loss.
HZ: Draw a coat on. Could you show men's nipples in pairs?
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Yeah, you could. And then if you think of - this is a topic for the present, when you look at an Instagram for instance. So it didn't change over the last 50 years or so. There was a specific case, it was kind of a book/newspaper/magazine, some of those foreign editions they used to do in the 1960s. One of the articles would have indigenous woman. And then of course she was naked, because she didn't wear any clothes at all. And in that case you did have the marker from the censor, say, okay, this is flagged because she's naked. But then on the side note, there was something say, okay, no, she's indigenous person, so that's alright. So you shouldn't be censoring this because then we might get in trouble, because we can see pictures of them on the news. So the people are used for like a value that is somehow accepted. But in other cases, it wouldn't.
HZ: Right. If it's on the news, it's not sexy.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Yes.
HZ: And they censored soap operas as well, didn't they?
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Yes. That was a big deal as well back then because soap operas are such a hit in Brazil, even the present we have like these four or five in a row every night. For soap operas, usually the process will be to censor the first 10 episodes, they would read in full and they would be really picky at the beginning to say, okay, you can do this, or that's alright; but they would even come to some such cases, they would say that you should kill one of the characters. So they would have to just figure out something to get rid of him. Sometimes they would get him killed in a car accident or something to get him out of the plot in a way that wouldn't be that hard for the storytelling. Sometimes they would flag some content to say, okay, the plot is alright, if that character doesn't go having an affair, for instance. If something happened that didn't please the military, they would just say, if you continue on that, we will raise the parental rating for everyone, and then it will have to be at 10pm instead of 8pm. And that would be a huge financial loss, because the sponsors, the advertisers, they wouldn't go for 10pm. So they would try their best and they will usually cooperate to say, “Okay, yeah, what do you want? Do you want me to drop the line? Deal. Do you want me to kill that character? Deal.” They wouldn’t to try to confront the regime at all.
HZ: The regime should have a co-writer credit.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: They should actually.
HZ: Although the censors were often operating without any specific rules imposed by the regime, Crystian did find in the national archive some training documents about censoring movies. Specifically, kung fu movies.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: What is the problem about kung fu movies? According to them, they were associated with Mao Tse Tung. When you look at kung fu, it has nothing to do with that. But for them, they even had images over there to say, when they are posing in that particular way, they’re trying to transmit some ideas. They were not at all. They’re international movies, they are not even made in Brazil, so it's not addressed to the Brazilian community. So I think that in that matter, they are way off the charts in trying to figure out how relevant it was to Brazil, and it wasn't. And that was pages and pages of the document, trying to make them censor the kung fu movies.
HZ: The fragility of the regime thinking, “Oh, maybe these kung fu films will bring us down!”
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: And what I realized by doing my research is that actually, that guy itself, he would also be worried about getting fired. And then he’s just trying to play by the book and say, “Okay, if they say that kung fu is bad, kung fu is bad. I don't want to get in trouble, I'm not sure they're going to pick on that or not, but just in case, let's avoid it.” So that's how they operated as well; they were trying to just prevent themselves to get in trouble.
HZ: I don't want to feel sorry for the censors, but it does seem like a real headfuck to have to constantly figure out what the lines are.
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Yeah. Most especially when they will have to work in the newsroom, they wouldn't be treated very well, of course. Sometimes they wouldn't give them food. They wouldn't give them water at all. They just had to sit in the corner. There was a specific case for a newspaper called O Pasquim, which was like a satirical newspaper, that was the most famous one back then. And that newspaper, they did have for a while, a censor, she loved to drink rum. They dropped a bottle of rum on her table, and then she drank it. She drank the whole bottle of rum, and then she allowed so much content that used to be censored normally, and then the next morning she was fired.
HZ: Oh!
CRYSTIAN CRUZ: Yeah, I would say that it's not trying to humanize them, but yeah, I reckon it wouldn't be easy to be in their shoes as well. So, yeah, it's almost like both sides are trying to do their best, playing by the rules. And of course both sides would be trying to trick the rules. They're just trying of course not to get in trouble. Because again, you're talking about something that, for most of those journalists, it might be their entire career. 21 years, it is a long period of time. You have to face the consequence for years and years. You didn't know how much you would last. So they would have to be really careful about how to do it.
HZ: You heard from Crystian Cruz. He is a designer and researcher, and is about to finish his PhD on censorship - good luck Crystian! The handle for his project on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook is @censurativa.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
metachrosis, noun, zoology: the ability of some animals, eg chameleons, to change colour.
Try using metachrosis in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with music by Martin Austwick. Thanks to Emerson Lehmann and Bruno Porto, because after the last episode about the protest cakes, a listener named Emerson tweeted me to say, “Did you know about Brazilian newspapers under the military dictatorship running fake cake recipes?” I did not! And then Bruno said, “Well if you want to know more, I know just the person, Crystian Cruz,” who, lucky for me, was willing to talk about it - and this is how this episode came about. Crowd-sourced! Thank you very much.
If like them you want to tell me more cakey protests, please, tweet me @allusionistshow, which is also the show’s handle on Instagram and Facebook.
And if you’re looking for all the episodes and extra information about them and transcripts and the full dictionary entry for the randomly selected words, and a lexicon of every word the show has covered, you can find all these things at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
