Sometime in 1986, I did a reading with Eduardo Galeano and Mauricio Rosencof in New York City. The dictatorship of Uruguay had recently ended, but the pain of those memories was still raw and the civil wars raging in Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua) gave the evening both urgency and an air of hope that events in Central American would eventually lead to revolutionary outcomes.

Galeano had escaped military rule in Uruguay and fled to Argentina, only to flee again to Spain when the military junta overthrew the government of Isabel Perón in March 1976. Rosencof, aside from being a poet and playwright, was one of the three top leaders of the MLN, the urban guerrilla movement known as the Tupamaros. He was not as fortunate as Galeano: he had been captured by the military, imprisoned, tortured savagely by his captors, and spent eleven of thirteen years in solitary confinement.

He shared with the audience that while in prison he would smuggle poems out written on cigarette paper tucked into dirty T-shirts his family would collect, wash and return to him clean. He called them his “poemas de la camiseta” (t-shirt poems) and he read many of them that evening. They were short, sharp, and devastating.