"Many years ago, when I was young and still believed that the world could be shaped according to our best intentions and hopes, someone gave me a book with a yellow cover that I devoured in two days with such emotion that I had to read it again a couple more times to absorb all its meaning: Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano…There is one other aspect of Eduardo Galeano that fascinates me. This man who has so much knowledge and who has-by studying the clues and the signs-developed a sense of foretelling, is an optimist. At the end of Century of the Wind, the third volume of Memory of Fire, after 600 pages proving the genocide, the cruelty, the abuse, and exploitation exerted upon the people of Latin America, after a patient recount of everything that has been stolen and continues to be stolen from the continent, he writes: “The tree of life knows that, whatever happens, the warm music spinning around it will never stop. However much death may come, however much blood may flow, the music will dance men and women as long as the air breaths them and the land plows and loves them." This breath of hope is what moves me the most in Galeano's work."