Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

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If Club Waikiki awoke Troy to the elitism of Peruvian surf culture, Rio de Janeiro introduced him to the frenetic surf energy of Latin America’s largest nation. He arrived in Brazil in late May 1964, just weeks after the Brazilian armed forces overthrew, with American support, the democratically elected government of João Goulart. Troy had come far from his white-collar Australian roots. “[D]ressed in jeans, tattered shirt, locally made riding boots [ . . . ], long blonde [sic] hair, unshaven, suntanned, humping a bed-roll and cloth hammock and food sack, I cut quite a figure,” he wrote his parents from the bush.²⁴ Troy unwittingly became a minor celebrity after riding the waves of Rio’s world-famous coast. He appeared on the front page of Brazilian newspapers, was interviewed for Brazilian television, and was consulted by the Brazilian lifesaving ser vices. Troy undertook his Latin American travels at a time when military rule was becoming firmly ensconced across the continent. Just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Latin America in 1964 was deeply enmeshed in the Cold War. In Brazil, Troy expressed no interest in politics—at least he did not comment on the military regime in his letters home—but in Paraguay, where he traveled briefly after leaving São Paulo, Troy was impressed. The country was then living under the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship. Stroessner came to power in 1954 following a military coup d’état, and he ruled the corrupt (and, for much of the time, U.S.-backed) Paraguayan state—one of the worst human rights violators in South America—until 1989. Troy recognized that Stroessner was a “dictator,” though he considered him a “popular” one, and “the country has made remarkable progress” under his rule, he told his parents in August 1964. The evidence cited by Troy illustrates the extent to which tourists hailing from the industrialized West often conflate material trappings that remind them of home with “progress” in the nations they are visiting. There were, Troy wrote of Paraguay under Stroessner, “machined fence posts, town indicators, mile signs[,] and direction indicators.”²⁵