30 The Americas The Economist January 8th 2022
tion of players. Bans on imports in the
1980s and steep taxes ever since have
shaped its gaming culture in strange and
unique ways. In 1987 Sega, a Japanese con
sole manufacturer, teamed up with TecToy,
a Brazilian toy company. Together they
make a version of one of Sega’s consoles,
the Master System, which by 2016 had sold
a whopping 8m units, millions more than
any Sega console in the United States. Sega
consoles are now obsolete in most of the
world, but in Brazil they still sell.
Similarly Mr Rosa’s father, Luiz Paulo,
remembers buying pirated game cartridg
es smuggled in from Paraguay and playing
knockoff or unofficial versions of games.
“Bomba Patch”, an indie adaptation (or
“mod”) of “Pro Evolution Soccer”, a Japa
nese blockbuster, features Brazilian teams
and gets an update each year. Indie games
are currently experiencing a worldwide
comeback. In Brazil they never went away.
When, in the 2010s, a huge corruption
scandal implicated nearly every political
party in Brazil, it provided the perfect op
portunity for the world of games to collide
with that of politics, says Thiago Falcão of
the Federal University of Paraíba. And as
more people got mobile phones, the popu
lation of players grew. Today 96% of Brazil
ian gamers play some or all of the time on a
mobile device. Phones, in turn, lend them
selves to memelike games that can go viral
on messaging apps such as WhatsApp,
which is used by a whopping 120m Brazil
ians (or 56% of the population).
Satirical political games have appeared
in other countries, but such games are
more numerous and popular in Brazil than
anywhere else. And lately opportunities
for farce have abounded. In December a
former councillor and the mayor of a
town in the Amazon decided to settle their
differences by enacting a reallife version
of “Kandidatos”. They faced off in a boxing
ring before hundreds of paying spectators.
The mayor won, but is now being investigated for alleged use of public resources for
the event.
Mr Nunes says he made “Kandidatos” in
order to poke fun, not to serve a political
purpose. He usually turns in a blank ballot
in elections. But much of the satire in the
videogame world more generally skews
right. In one game, “Bolsomito 2K18,” re
leased during the campaign that resulted
in Mr Bolsonaro’s election, the president is
“an upstanding citizen who has had
enough of the spread of corruption and im
morality”. His avatar beats up black protes
ters and gay people. Prosecutors opened an
antidiscrimination investigation into its
creators. No charges were brought, but
Steam made the game harder to find.
Serious gamers tend to be male, white
and young. Many rejoice in immature, and
often fairly offensive, humour, in much
the same way as Mr Bolsonaro does. Before
he was a presidential candidate he ap
peared on variety shows where his willing
ness to be the butt of jokes endeared him to
ordinary folk. Isabela Kalil, an anthropolo
gist who interviewed more than 1,000
rightwing Brazilians in the runup to the
election in 2018, notes that “nerds, gamers,
hackers and haters” were among the first of
16 rightleaning categories to support him.
Once in office he rewarded them by lower
ing taxes on videogame consoles three
times, from 50% in 2019 to 20% now.
Leftwing politicians are catching on.
In 2020 Guilherme Boulos, then a candi
date for mayor of São Paulo, followed the
example of Alexandria OcasioCortez, a
Democratic congresswoman in the United
States, and livestreamed himself playing
“Among Us”, a multiplayer video game set
in outer space. Nearly half a million people
tuned in. The creators of “Políticos Memes
Kombat”, a game that is similar to “Kandi
datos”, decided to include Mr Boulos as one
of four new charactersin an update, due to
be launched intimefor the presidential
election this year.nIf only politics were this simpleCubaCrushing
disappointment
“I
f youwanttomakemoney in Cuba,
buy garlic,” says a farmer in Artemisa
province, in western Cuba. Garlic, known
as “white gold” for its value, is critical to
the unique sazón, or seasoning, of Cuban
food—which often has to be made with a
few ingredients imaginatively thrown to
gether. As with so many things on the com
munist island, however, it is in short sup
ply. A lack of fertiliser and pesticide makes
it especially hard to grow. And it is harvest
ed only once a year, in January.
Every year garlicsellers on the streets
of Havana peddle bulbs from backpacks, as
if selling fake luxury handbags or electron
ics. The price of garlic tends to boom
around November and December, before
more comes onto the (black) market. A
pensioner in one part of the capital com
plains that a bulb now costs 25 pesos ($1)
and 450g (1lb) costs 240 pesos, four times
the price in September.
Another way to get the bulbs is through
ajeros, or garlic resellers. They pay garlic
farmers $50,000100,000 to buy their
whole harvest and then resell it to a net
work of other resellers, who in turn sell to
smaller resellers and so on. Ajerokingpins
make so much cash from these transac
tions that banks, especially the small ones
out in the provinces, sometimes have to
close to the public while they process the
sacks of money being deposited. “You can
recognise the big resellers by their cars,”
sighs the farmer in Artemisa.
Profiting from garlic is nothing new. In
1986 Fidel Castro, then Cuba’s dictator, dis
covered that a garlic farmer was making
$50,000 a year—ten times a local surgeon’s
wage at the time—by privately selling what
he had left over after meeting his quota for
the state agriculture system. Outraged to
see that people were behaving like “capital
ists in disguise”, he closed the private
farmers’ markets where it was sold.
But the pandemic has exacerbated
shortages of basic goods in Cuba, along
with fertilisers, fungicide, seeds and sup
plies for animals. Thousands of rabbits
died last summer in an outbreak of hae
morrhagic disease. Pigs may be next; the
country is on high alert following an out
break of African swine fever in the Domin
ican Republic. Last year the government
mooted eating guinea pigs, a popular food
in parts of South America,but the idea was
largely ridiculed. Thenagain,Cubans can
not live by allium alone.nThe price of garlic is heady