Word: brazil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After blowing hot and cold for months over a barter deal with Russia-Brazilian cocoa for Russian oil-Brazil decided last week to say no. The backout was a victory for anti-Red advisers of President Juscelino Kubitschek, led by Foreign Minister Francisco Negrão de Lima...
Aligned against Negrão de Lima was a faction that included Kubitschek's kitchen-cabinet foreign-affairs adviser, pudgy Augusto Frederico Schmidt. Schmidt's clique insisted that Brazil accept Russia's repeated offers of trade and aid, largely to lever the U.S. into greater generosity. Last October the government announced it was trading 20,000 bags of cocoa for 60,000 tons of Soviet crude. But the Russian oil turned out to be the same type of paraffin-heavy crude that Brazil is already forced to export for lack of refining capacity...
Spirits were abroad on New Year's Eve along the beaches around Rio de Janeiro. The five-mile crescent of Copacabana and the other Rio beaches blazed with the ritual candles of some 600,000 devotees of Brazil's fastest-growing cult: "spiritism." Altars were set up everywhere in the sand, heaped with fetishes and food offerings, bottles of beer and the rotgut alcohol known as cachaça. Around the altars, while drums pounded faster and faster, men, women and children danced and shouted, stomped and babbled. Yemanjá, goddess of the sea, was the special object...
Oxala & Ogun. The upsurge of spiritism in Roman Catholic (95%) Brazil is a phenomenon of the past decade, but its roots go deep. Slaves brought their gods from Africa, and many of them changed in their new country: among the Nagôs, Yemanjá was a river goddess who became a sea goddess on the journey across the water; Calunga, the Bantu sea god, became the god of death during the slave ship trip to Brazil. The spirit deities also merged with Catholic theology: Oxala is both the Lord of Creation and Christ, Yemanjá is also Our Lady...
...mediums and table-rapping in the books of Frenchman Allan Kardec, the Brazilian Spiritual Federation was founded 74 years ago, now claims 3,600 centers throughout the country. In the 1950 census some 900,000 Brazilians declared themselves spiritists, but best estimates are that about 10 million of Brazil's 61 million population now indulge in the cults. One, the Confederação Espirita da Umbanda, claims, in Rio alone, more than 1,000 centers, known as terreiros (earth places...