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Brazil offers new handout to the poor: Culture

By Andrew Downie
February 5, 2014

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Like millions of other residents of Sao Paulo, Telma Rodrigues spends a large part of her waking hours going to and from work. She hates the commute, and not just because public transportation is packed, slow and inefficient. She finds it boring.

Now there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and it has nothing to do with new bus lanes or subway lines. As of last weekend, the government will give people such as Rodrigues a new “cultural coupon” worth $20 a month — enough, the 26-year-old said, to buy a book to enliven her daily ride. The money, loaded on a magnetic card, is designated only for purposes broadly termed cultural — although that category could include dance lessons and visits to the circus in addition to books and movie tickets.

In a country battling poverty on an epic scale, the initiative has won widespread praise as a worthy and yet relatively cheap project. But it has provoked questions. Is it the state’s job to fund culture? How will poor Brazilians use the money? How do you, or even should you, convince people that their money will be better spent on Jules Verne rather than Justin Bieber?

“What we’d really like is that they try new things,” Culture Minister Marta Suplicy said in a telephone interview. “We want people to go to the theater they wanted to go to, to the museum they wanted to go to, to buy the book they wanted to read.”

Although it has made significant advances in recent years, the South American nation is still relatively isolated and many of the poorest Brazilians are unsophisticated in their tastes. They pick up an average of four books a year, including textbooks, and finish only two of them, a study published last year by the Sao Paulo state government showed.

Almost all of Brazil’s 5,570 municipalities have a local library, but only one in four has a bookshop, theater or museum, and only one in nine boasts a cinema, according to the government’s statistics bureau. When asked what they most like to do in their spare time, 85 percent of Brazilians answered “watch television.”

(www.washingtonpost.com. Adaptado.)

Que argumentos a Ministra da Cultura apresenta para se defender das críticas?