This paper contributes to the study of the economic history of argentine crises by analyzing the fiscal sustainability for the period 1865-2002. Fiscal deficits are sustainable if the current market value of debt equals to the discounted sum of expected future surpluses. It is found that Argentina never had "strong" fiscal sustainability. At most, it reached weak sustainability for some sub periods and no sustainability at all for 1950-1989. Interestingly, sustainability gets worse as the economy went from mostly open to relatively close.