Under Fire II
John Saul in Nicaragua
BY John Saul
Déjà vu. Nicaragua had too much the feel for me of Mozambique two or three years ago, on the way to the Nkomati Accord with South Africa: an inspiring struggle, a humane and vital revolution, being slowly bled to death. A Jesuit priest, now working in Nicaragua’s agrarian reform sector but also active in Chile before the coup, put the point to me with scalding simplicity. “In Chile,” he said, “the Americans made a mistake. They cut off the revolution too abruptly. They killed the revolution but, as we can see from recent developments there, they didn’t kill the dream. In Nicaragua they’re trying to kill the dream.”
Of course, the possibilities of Reagan attempting a quick kill remains. Nicaraguans are bracing themselves for a possible invasion, as well they should. But in the meantime the American-backed Contras are not merely, perhaps not even primarily, a military threat per se — though people are dying. They’re also part and parcel of the overall strategy of slow strangulation — attacking economic targets and disrupting normal economic life on the one hand, draining off scarce Sandanista resources — internal funds, foreign exchange, personnel — into the defence effort on the other. Such wrecking complements an all too familiar gamut of international economic pressures which have been brought into play as well: leaning on debts, boycotting exports and the like. It’s hard to know who wrote the textbook on this kind of economic warfare. South Africa or the United States; it does at least seem certain they have compared notes. (Ironically, just as this article was going to press, one such ‘text-book’ did surface, a ninety-page manual in Spanish entitled ‘Psychological Operation in Guerilla War’; apparently prepared by the CIA for its Nicaraguan hench-men, it urges, among other horrors, the (provoking of) riots or shootings, which lead to the killing of one or more persons who will be seen as martyrs’ and the hiring of professional criminals ‘to carry out specific selective jobs,’ including the ‘neutralization’ of Nicaraguan judges and the like. Reporting this, even a Globe and Mail editorial writer (October 18) felt moved to note that we should not ‘dismiss (Sandanista) concerns as imaginary!’ To put it mildly.) And the result in Nicaragua does begin to approximate that achieved by the South Africans in Mozambique, even if the process has not yet gone nearly so far: an economy in tatters, with lack of foreign exchange a severe constraint, a goods shortage, rising prices.
Needless to say, these developments hit the proverbial ‘man (and woman) in the street’ pretty hard. Such economic difficulties were the first thing many people wanted to talk about as I walked about Managua. Even when they could see the American-cum contra role in all of this, some people grumbled — not going over to the other side, it seemed, but a little less wholeheartedly enthusiastic about the revolution than before. Some of the blame for economic crisis must stick to socialism, so the Americans apparently calculate. Who’ll dare to raise their heads for another fifty years after we get through, who’ll dare to dream: this too seems part of the calculation. When I gave a public talk in Managua about South Africa’s war of aggression in Mozambique, Nicaraguans shook their heads; the parallels jumped off the page. I was sobered by one related fact: how little information flows from North to South, how much communication, even between two outposts of revolution, is filtered through the metropole. Small wonder that the full scope of South Africa’s war was so little known in Nicaragua. After all, how many North Americans knew there was a vicious war — with a sharp economic edge — going on in Mozambique until, out of the blue, earlier this year, there was a peace treaty!
We know rather more about Central America, but not enough. Or, more likely, we don’t care enough. I’m struck by the brutalization of debate about international affairs that has occurred in North America, a downward spiral from the high-water mark of moral discourse about such matters which characterized the immediate post-Vietnam period. Clearly, the various precedents of ‘gloves-off’ imperial assertion — Israel in the Middle east, South Africa in its own region, the U.K. in the Malvinas, the U.S. in Grenada and now in Central America — have taken their toll. Small wonder that the Los Angeles Games were so chillingly reminiscent of their 1936 Munich counterpart. And so obviously so. As one Toronto Star sports writer, not generally renowned for his deep political thinking, wondered aloud in his last column from L.A.: where is all the xenophobia going to be directed next?
Nicaragua is a prime candidate, of course, especially if the bleeding goes too slowly (and if some of Nicaragua’s allies continue to stand sufficiently firm). For when all is said and done, one came away from Nicaragua with the distinct impression that it would not go under quickly, despite the odds. There are too many good people, Nicaraguans and others (not least among the latter a very strong band of Canadians) doing good things there — in health, in education, in agricultural development, in so many other sectors. But it’s tough, make no mistake about that.
A Workshop
I was in Nicaragua for a reason. The Ministry of Agrarian Reform, in conjunction with the Jesuit-sponsored Instituto de Investigaciones Economicas y Sociales, had invited fifteen or twenty of us from various parts of the world to Managua for a workshop on ‘Problems of the Transition to Socialism in Small Peripheral Economies.’ For six days, from morn to midnight, we debated the issues with our Nicaraguan counterparts. All the ‘big questions’ were raised, though two in particular kept swimming to the surface. One of these might be labeled, if I may be forgiven an academicism, the ‘economics of socialism under siege.’ How to keep alive the long-term goal of a socialist restructuring of the economy while reeling under the blows of ruthless economic aggression? How to advance the interests of the desperately poor of the society, the workers and the peasants, while making sufficient short-term concessions to entrepreneurial elements and to keep at least some of them on-side politically and certain important sectors of the economy functioning?
Hard work, not merely for intellectuals cogitating such matters but, more importantly, for the practitioners of the transition. The hard work showed on the face of Jaime Wheelock of the nine commandants who lead the Nicaraguan revolution, when he came to talk with us at one of our evening sessions. The minister of agrarian reform, he was now spending most of his time back in military harness, organizing the defence against the contras in the Sixth Region. His face was grey with exhaustion, tired not merely from a few nights without sleep, but much more deeply, his face mirroring those of old friends among the Mozambican leadership when I’ve seen them in recent years as they lived the South African siege. It’s a bad time, a Friday evening after a hard week’s work, and Wheelock is in an almost elegiac mood. Perhaps he’s guying us, the intellectual observers of the passing scene, just a little bit when he says, ‘Transition to socialism? There’s no transition to socialism here. We’re surviving, that’s all. We’re living from Friday to Friday!’ But there’s realism in what he says too, a chilling realism.
No one stays downbeat for long in Nicaragua, though. There’s too much to do. Even in our workshop. Perhaps it was fortunate that our second major preoccupation offered more positive inspiration; let’s call it the question of the ‘democratization of every nook and cranny of the transformed society’. Historically, the practice has been much less inspiring as, all too often, socialist aspirations have collapsed in upon themselves, offering up a drab, authoritarian denouement to the high hopes with which the process began. There are reasons for this, not the least the kind of siege by the capitalist world that we’ve been talking about, a constant factor which has stalked all socialist experiments, putting them on the defensive and narrowing their possibilities. But such an explanation doesn’t make the reality any more comforting.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about the Nicaraguans is just how alert they themselves are to this problem. Not that in the struggle to democratize the revolution there is anything that Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick could be expected to comprehend. It may even be that the current electoral exercise is as much a tactical concession to firm up an international constituency as it is anything else. But speaking to our workshop the Sandinista Front's electoral organizers described how the election had taken on a very positive resonance for them. They had had to revitalize their grassroots organization quite dramatically to reach out to the people, for example. They also found themselves having to answer very tough questions from the opposition — and from the people generally; from such a process, the Front could only be expected to learn and to grow.
Pluralism is a risky business under fire, of course. Much of the opposition is pretty unscrupulous, not least the National Democratic Coordinator (CDN) of Arturo Cruz; with its own links to the contras, this group's escalating and largely arbitrary demands for more electoral space are both patently provocative and of self-evidently “made-in-Washington” provenance. And La Prensa, the opposition newspaper, is busily churning out a demagogic line of uniformly destructive criticism every day; indeed it seems to have nominated itself (or been nominated?) for the same kind of role played by The Gleaner in Manley's Jamaica and by El Mercurio in pre-coup Chile. Under such circumstances it is difficult for revolutionaries not to think back, precisely, to the Chilean precedent and to act to preempt the dangers involved. Yet La Prensa grinds on. The Independent Liberal Party, which is participating in the election, criticizes openly from the right. From another point of the spectrum (one hesitates to identify it as being to the left of the Front!) two different Communist parties and a Maoist one also level attacks. (This latter was, for me, a particularly genial aspect of pluralism in Nicaragua: the shrill certainties of such protagonists packaged up in their little groupuscules, rather than infecting the more open, and much more revolutionary, character of the Sandinista Front itself.)
Even more important, perhaps, was the glimpse I had of democratic life inside the Front. As I talked over lunch with one union leader, for example, it became apparent that there was no mere ‘transmission belt’ from the political leadership to his rank and file. He took the national imperatives — the imperatives of economic planning, defence, unity — which the Front represented seriously, but he took the needs and demands of the agricultural workers whom he represented equally seriously. He seemed well aware that the transition to socialism is poised on a knife edge, the demands of leadership (the need to give direction, thrust, strength to the revolution) in permanent tension with the need for mass action and for popular control (to breathe life into the revolution, to keep the leadership honest). Nor is this a tension, a contradiction, that can be resolved once and for all. It comes with the territory, it is the politics of the transition to socialism. My luncheon partner was living this ‘contradiction’ as creatively as could be imagined.
Our workshop took the theme of socialism and democracy seriously too, as seriously as our Nicaraguan hosts clearly intended us to do. Much was said of real interest, not glib, not judgemental, merely serious. I sensed that in this we were taking much of our inspiration from what was happening around us: the feeling of open creativity, despite the fact of being ‘under fire,’ was palpable in Nicaragua. I was to have my sense of this reinforced in the days after the workshop when I visited, among other locales, the Sandinistas’ cadre training school on the outskirts of Managua. I’d taught in the FRELIMO party school in Mozambique, so I was particularly eager to see what was happening here. And there were illuminating similarities.
Like FRELIMO, the Sandinistas are trying to give their cadres a theoretical grounding in the Marxist tradition as a necessary undergirding for their practice. As in the Mozambican case, the most readily available version of that tradition comes from Eastern Europe, yet, in this form, many of the strengths of the tradition lie twisted out of recognizable shape. Mozambicans have been aware of this and, as I know from first-hand experience, have struggled to find their own voice on the terrain of Marxism. I was delighted to meet Nicaraguans engaged in the same task, understaffed for this purpose as in so many other sectors, but striving to innovate. In this regard, I liked the quote I found prominently displayed on the wall of their school, a quote from the Nicaraguan writer and activist, Ricardo Morales Aviles, after whom the school had been named: “We have to study our history and our present reality as Marxists; we have to study Marxism as Nicaraguans!” I liked that quote. Siege aside, I liked what I saw in Nicaragua.
The Real Irresponsibility
Back in Canada I listen to Bruce Cockburn’s album, Stealing Fire. On in there are three magnificent songs inspired by his own visit to Central America last year. Their essence: “in the flash of this moment/you’re the best of what we are/ don’t let them stop you now / Nicaragua.” Not surprisingly, I find the songs more moving than ever in the wake of my visit. And I think back to when the album first came out, recalling a minor matter of the time, stuck in my brain ever since but with new resonance now. It concerned one of those songs, one entitled “If I had a rocket launcher.” The lyrics invoke, poetically and powerfully, some of the horrors of Central America’s suffering under the U.S. heel, such as a helicopter raid on a refugee village. The punch line: “If I had a rocket launcher… some sonofabitch would die!”
I thought it a powerful song when I first heard it, all the more so coming from Cockburn. He has always been a fantastic guitarist, a fine and sensitive musician. And as a lyricist he’s manifested, from the outset, an interesting political sensibility. Still he drifted out of the orbit of my interest when, a few years ago, his Christian preoccupations became a bit too heavy duty for my taste, taking on something of a “born-again” cast (albeit without the oft-attendant right-wing political overtones). For me he got a little mushy, all “god” and “peace” and “sensitivity.”
A matter of taste, self-evidently. But this background did make Cockburn’s gut response to American aggression in Central America all the more powerful — for its not being entirely predictable. I’d say, too, that his response is the appropriate one; if you care about human decency in Central America, “fight back” is the only answer. Yet it’s difficult for Canadians to wriggle their way far enough past the American smokescreen, largely duplicated in our own media, to see the truth of the situation, difficult for us to shake off the coils of our comfort long enough to see that some people have no choice but to fight for what they believe in. Here we return to that “minor matter” mentioned above. Because the kicker to this story is not so much Cockburn’s song as a review of the album written by Liam Lacey in The Globe and Mail those several months ago. He labelled the “rocket launcher” song “vile and irresponsible,” thereby offering, within the modest confines of the record review, a brief and sobering glimpse of what massive incomprehension Central Americans are up against in North America. You shoulda been there, Liam. Right on, Bruce. Stay angry.
