New Capital

And in one year of work We've gone from hut to palace . . . Brasilia! New destiny!

Six hundred miles northwest of overcrowded Rio de Janeiro, in airy hills 4.000 ft. high on the edge of Brazil's vast jungles, forty city planners sat at a dinner table spread with snowy linen, and one of them recited an impromptu toast to progress in building Brazil's new capital. A year before, when they landed at the site, they found just one adobe hut. There now, nearly complete, stands a six-story hotel. 500 houses, and famed Architect Oscar Niemeyer's flowing, two-story Presidential Palace, resting on 20 arched concrete columns. Chugging ahead night and day on a cost-be-damned basis, hundreds of bulldozers move 65,300 cubic yds. of earth every 24 hours, hurrying to completion the airplane-shaped city designed by Architect Lucio Costa, 55.

The first national capital built from scratch since India's New Delhi 30 years ago. Brasilia will not be ready until 1961. But on April 21, 1960. President Juscelino Kubitschek will transfer his government to Brasilia. He wants to rule from there for the last nine months of his term.

Old Dream. The dream of a new capital to replace old Rio precedes Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822. But it is uniquely Kubitschek's accomplishment, for until he set up the government-owned Novacap corporation to do the job. Brasilia was all talk. "We must occupy our country, march to the west, turn our backs to the sea, and stop staring fixedly at the ocean--as if thinking of departing," says Kubitschek.

To finance the $345 million city he authorized Novacap to speculate in Brasilia's residential land. He begged U.S. Ambassador Ellis Briggs for a Brasilia loan as a "personal favor," got $10 million from the Export-Import Bank.

While Kubitschek spent for its future greatness, Brazil suffered. The treasury deficit rose $240 million in the first eight months of the year. The cruzeiro hit a low of 96.5 to the dollar last month; living costs rose 20% yearly.

New Warning. Snorted Rio's respected Correio da Manha: "The title of President Kubitschek should be changed to Pharaoh of Brasilia." Cried onetime Finance Minister Eugenio Gudin: "A crime! Those factors of production wasted on the dream of a new capital will be missed."

Brasilia's advocates acknowledge the immediacy of the criticism, reply that in the long run the future capital will have an opposite effect; i.e., by focusing Brazil's attention and energy on its vast, unexploited interior, the city will enrich the nation. Says President Kubitschek: "The hour has come--the start of a new era for our country."

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