Big Fish

Delegates of Brazil's biggest political party gathered in Rio last week and noisily chose a presidential candidate for next October's election. The nominee Juscelino Kubitschek, 53, samba-dancing, spellbinding governor of the Texas-sized inland state of Minas Gerais. After the balloting (1,646 to 0, with 279 abstentions), Kubitschek's followers roared his longtime political theme song, Peixe Vivo (Living Fish), an old Portuguese ballad:

How can a living fish

Live without water?

How can I

Live without you?

Two years ago, slim, smiling Governor Kubitschek. son of a Polish immigrant, heard somebody say that the 1955 presidential election would be a lottery. Commented Kubitschek: "The governor of Minas Gerais holds a ticket." A year later the left-of-center Partido Social Democratico (P.S.D.) gave Kubitschek the task of touring Brazil and getting local P.S.D. leaders to agree on a 1955 presidential candidate in advance of the party's nominating convention. Kubitschek assiduously set about selling himself. A strong selling point was his record as an industrious builder of roads and hydroelectric plants during his four years as governor of Minas Gerais.

Sea of Mud. By last December, Kubitschek was running for President so energetically that Brazil's top-ranking military chiefs sent President Joao Cafe Filho a memorandum calling for "a solution to the problem of presidential succession on a basis of understanding and interparty cooperation." Translated from the officialese, the message meant that the generals and admirals wanted the right and center parties to put up a joint candidate to swamp Kubitschek.

The military's opposition to Kubitschek stemmed mainly from distrust of the late President Getulio Vargas, who committed suicide last August after the generals had warned him to resign in order to resolve a growing administrative scandal. The generals are determined that the next President of Brazil shall be, like Cafe Filho, a man unstained by the Vargas regime's mar de lama (sea of mud). As the military sees it, Kubitschek is linked to the old Vargas camp.

David & Goliath. After Cafe Filho got the memorandum from the generals, he showed it to Kubitschek, asked him to bow out in favor of some still-unchosen "national union" candidate. Juscelino said no. Late in January, Cafe Filho went on the air to press the national union idea.

Kubitschek is making shrewd use of this high-level opposition by posing as a courageous David pitted against a political Goliath. "They are not asking me for a political peace," he cried in a recent speech. "They want my capitulation . . . And that I will not give them."

Brazil called for emergency help from Washington last week. Because of lagging coffee exports, the country was desperately short of dollars. Fortnight ago. the government cut the minimum coffee-export price from 65.7-c- a lb. to 53.8-c---a measure that should eventually revive exports and bring in more dollars. Meanwhile, Brazil urgently needed a stopgap dollar loan. Heeding the call for help, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Henry Holland interrupted his visit to Cuba with Vice President Richard Nixon, flew to Rio. In less than 24 hours, Washington's Export-Import Bank announced a new $75 million credit to Brazil to finance essential imports from the U.S.

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