Nicaragua
Muravchik, Joshua
BOOK REVIEWS NICARAGUA: A REVOLUTION IN THE FAMILY Shirley Christian/Random House/$19.95 Joshua Muravchik Although Nicaragua has been the most important foreign policy issue for the United...
...This presumably is one of the reasons why debate about U.S...
...During the last six weeks of fighting, Christian writes, the Panamanian cover was discarded and an additional million pounds of materiel was flown directly from Cuba to Costa Rica...
...D'Escoto and O'Neill symbolize an essential ingredient in the Sandinistas' spectacular rise from a band numbering in the hundreds as late as 1977 to Nicaragua's absolute rulers in 1979...
...That ingredient was their audacious, relentless, and carefully calculated use of deception, which relied for its success on North American ignorance of Nicaragua's past and present...
...So I thought, if the United States and [former Venezuelan president] Carlos Andres Perez are backing this revolution, how can it be wrong...
...as were, for the most part, wage increases...
...But with the publication of this book, there is much less room to disagree about the nature of the Sandinista movement or the direction in which it is determined to take Nicaragua.he direction in which it is determined to take Nicaragua...
...We are saying that Marxism-Leninism is the scientific doctrine that guides our revolution, the instrument of analysis of our Vanguard for understanding [the revolution's] historic process and for carrying out the revolution...
...Thus while the Catholic hierarchy has been a center of resistance to Sandinista rule, a pro-Sandinista "People's Church" has been promoted by the regime...
...Thus, Christian says, "the Sandinista agricultural program concentrated on the ideological formation of peasants and small landowners and their acceptance of the FSLN view of things...
...Reverend Harper confirmed to me several years later that the member churches had decided there was no compelling reason to continue support for the Permanent Commission after the fall of Somoza, but said there had never been a formal pledge for additional financial aid...
...Humberto and his brother Daniel, bear in mind, are the two paramount leaders of the Terceristas...
...Obviously, if there were no insurgency, these cruel steps would serve no purpose...
...What, after all, does their nationalism consist of...
...To confront a tradition of more than 1,979 years in a direct manner, in these moments, less than five months after the triumph, would carry us into political conflicts and we would lose influence among our people," it said...
...embrace of the new government once it took power...
...Although they may not bring liberty, the Sandinistas do succeed in bringing a measure of "justice" or social improvements to the people they rule...
...Nonetheless, according to the document, Sandinista policy on Christmas did not aim "to reinforce a tradition, particularly a religious one," but rather "to transform it" by attempting to give it "a different, fundamentally political, content...
...On the other hand, the Sandinistas use the insurgency as an excuse for repressive measures that have little relation to it...
...Now Shirley Christian, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who covered Nicaragua for the Miami Herald and has since moved on to the New York Times, has written a book which should help to dispel much of the ignorance...
...This is no doubt true in part...
...A regime had fallen, a new government was coming in...
...Within six weeks after the Sandinistas seized power, Christian writes, "Nicaraguan children of secondary school age were leaving regularly in groups of a hundred or more to study on the Isle of Youth, where Cuban authorities created two schools- for 1,200 Nicaraguan students...
...we are anti-Yankee, we are against the bourgeoisie, we are inspired by the historic traditions of our people, we are inspired by sandinismo, which is the most beautiful tradition of this people, developed by Carlos Fonseca, we are guided by the scientific doctrine of the revolution, by Marxism-Leninism...
...I thought that we were going to have a free society, with a free press, with elections, with a very good legal system in which the Supreme Court was going to have power for the first time...
...Christian quotes from an interview she held with Ramiro Gurdian, leader of a group of private growers at odds with the Sandinista regime: I asked Gurdian what he, as someone not politically involved at the time, had expected when the new government took power in mid-1979...
...Something of the nature of the World Council and the reasons why the Sandinistas welcome its brand of ecumenism is illustrated by an anecdote Christian tells about Nicaragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights, the highly respected independent body that fought against human rights violations under Somoza and later under the Sandinistas: In April 1979, before the fall of Somoza, Gonzalez [then head of the Permanent Commission] had gone to Geneva to the headquarters of the World Council of Churches and been received "with smiles and abrazos" by the Reverend Charles R. Harper, Jr., head of the Human Rights Resources Offices on Latin America...
...The Christian component in the Sandinista revolution consists of little more than the Sandinistas' willingness to accept the support of those Christians, many of them non-Nicaraguans, who are willing to subordinate religion to the Communist political program of the Sandinistas...
...Instead, guided by ideology, the Sandinistas used the land to create state farms and state-guided cooperatives...
...Their nationalism consists of little more than anti-Yanquism, hardly a unique sentiment in Latin America, but one which in this case flows less from national pride than from their Leninist analysis that tells them that the United States is the bastion of world "imperialism...
...Not of attachment to Nicaraguan traditions...
...economic aid had been delivered, according to Christian's figures...
...The country was in an economic state of chaos, exhaustion...
...They preferred to see the war continue...
...Embassy because, in a country where anti-Americanism and xenophobia had previously been almost nonexistent, the Sandinista comandantes and their propaganda organs were suddenly making the United States the main culprit for everything that they found wrong with the world...
...This mixture of deception and ignorance constituted a fertile medium for the growth of numerous myths about Nicaragua...
...At one critical juncture, House Speaker Tip O'Neill told the national press corps several times that he was determined to leave this problem in the hands of "the Con-tradora...
...Although it was not said publicly at the time, the first Cuban military and security advisers also arrived...
...Who knows what the Speaker thought "the Contradora" was...
...As for the initial U.S...
...Indeed, U.S...
...I mean, they are respectable people, and they must know, I thought, what is going on...
...During the latter stages of its uprising against the National Guard, a large component of the FSLN's fighters were not Nicaraguans at all, but "internationalists," foreign revolutionaries who flocked to Nicaragua to take part in a battle which they and their FSLN hosts regarded as transnational...
...The Sandinistas and their supporters frequently recite stunning statistics of the dead and injured in the 1979 civil war and attribute the bloodshed to Somoza's National Guard, which did, in fact, often use disproportionate and indiscriminate force...
...No quick settlement could be reached, however, largely because the Sandinistas would not agree to any compromise formula that would have compelled them to share real power with other anti-Somocistas in post-Somoza Nicaragua...
...The nervous government reacted to the lure of the Contra by putting more and more emphasis -on individual ownership rather than setting up new state farms and cooperatives, but agrarian reform officials made clear that the trend toward granting individual ownership was a temporary measure to be terminated once the insurgency had ended...
...he just knew what it wasn't...
...News stories at the time occasionally traced the flow back to Panama, and questions were raised about the effect this might have on the Panama Canal treaties...
...policies toward Nicaragua in the period leading up to Somoza's overthrow were feckless and guided too often by wishful thinking...
...The Sandinistas are nationalists first, and Communists, if at all, only second...
...aid to revolutionary Nicaragua, but eventually the strong evidence of significant Sandinista aid to guerrillas in El Salvador did...
...There is simply no longer any excuse for the kind of voluble ignorance typified by Tip...
...policy toward Nicaragua there is, as in all situations, room for people of good will to disagree...
...But the most important purpose served by Sandinista social programs is to reinforce the power of the regime...
...The FSLN comprises three factions, one of which, the "Terceristas," were not Communists, but some kind of democratic socialists...
...Without sandinismo we cannot be Marxist-Leninists, and sandinismo without Marxism-Leninism cannot be revolutionary...
...This policy required a lot of turning the other cheek on the part of the U.S...
...Shirley Christian's book may not be the last word on recent Nicaraguan history—no contemporaneous study ever is—but it will serve splendidly to make the crucial outlines of that history readily accessible to all North Americans who are interested in it...
...Here are some of the more important ones: Joshua Muravchik is a free-lance writer living in the Washington area, and the author of a forthcoming study of Western media coverage of the San-dinista revolution...
...In a psychological or cultural sense it is probably true, but in a political sense it is doubtful...
...The Sandinistas are most vociferous in proclaiming their determination to forge a "new Nicaragua" populated by "new men...
...Their press censorship restricts reporting not just on subjects related to the rebel war but on anything embarrassing to the Sandinistas, such as shortages of common commodities...
...The Sandinistas have recently taken to forcibly removing whole communities of their citizens from their native locales (in addition to the Miskitos and other tribes removed earlier), for purposes of counterinsurgency...
...Whether, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the larger problem with O'Neill is what he doesn't know about Nicaragua or what he knows for sure that just ain't so, is hard to say...
...According to the New York Times, the Speaker relies for his information about Central America on the Maryknoll order, the Catholic order that has been most manifestly and consistently supportive of the Sandinistas...
...They had wanted to use the Sandinistas to oust Somoza, hoping that somehow this would lead to a democratic Nicaragua...
...Revolutionary Nicaragua has become a magnet for a highly politicized kind of international ecumenical activism...
...But now Christian reveals that Panama was itself a cover, merely a transfer point for materiel whose origin was Cuba...
...support for the rebels, serves only to heighten Sandinista repression of the Nicaraguan people...
...This belief is what gives so much appeal to such bodies as the Contadora group, despite its manifest failure to make any useful contribution...
...It was hostility from the United States that has driven the Sandinistas into the arms of Cuba and the Communist world...
...diplomats on June 19, Somoza agreed to resign...
...In addition, "Cubans took a leading role in reorganizing the educational system in Nicaragua...
...As for U.S...
...Why did he believe this...
...They were flown into Costa Rica from Panama...
...This, it turns out, was all an elaborate bit of disinformation...
...Without help from Panamanian, Costa Rican, and Venezuelan leaders, the Sandinistas could not have seized power, and yet none of these other Latins wanted a Communist Nicaragua, and all were distressed to see what they had wrought...
...This Cuban aid does not mean that the country is ruled by foreigners...
...diplomacy came to naught in part because almost none of the Latins, Nicaraguans or others, would cooperate with the United States in resisting the Sandinista blueprint...
...It did the same for many democratic-minded Nicaraguans...
...She says that at least sixty flights made their way to "Costa Rica during Somoza's last seven months, all but a few originating in Cuba...
...sandinismo is the concrete expression of the historical development of the fight in Nicaragua...
...Because I saw so many other democratic countries supporting it, all the Andean Pact countries, Costa Rica, the United States, also La Prensa, the archbishop, the Church, Alfonso Robelo, Eden Pastora...
...But Gur-dian is right about the rest of the list...
...Just a sample of the many roles played by Cuba in the "new Nicaragua" will reinforce the point...
...naivete was nothing compared to that of other Latin leaders and even of Nicaraguans themselves...
...Others serve merely propaganda or public relations purposes...
...We had made a decision right at the beginning that you didn't have many options in dealing with a situation like this," he said later...
...In the preceding weeks, U.S...
...Educational reforms were directed toward indoctrination, as were the texts used in the much vaunted literacy campaign which, says Christian, left its graduates with "skills equivalent to only the first year or two of primary school, such as signing their names and reading a primer with a limited vocabulary...
...The most famous of these recruits was Eden Pastora, but when Pastora's backers proposed that he be added to the FSLN's nine-member national directorate, the proposal was rejected, according to some reports, on the express instructions of Castro...
...Cuba also provided 'technical aid' to FSLN radio and television and the national university, but most of the aid consisted of personnel∔professors, scriptwriters, programming experts...
...A glimpse of Sandinista attitudes is afforded by a secret document excerpted by Christian (alas without giving her source) in which the FSLN leadership explained to Sandinista cadres its decision during its first December in office not to try to eradicate Christmas...
...By November the State Department estimated that there were about two hundred Cubans performing military and security functions in Nicaragua, and Panamanian military information substantiated that...
...It provides a solid journalistic account of the overthrow of Anastasio Spmoza Debayle and of the first five years of Sandinista rule...
...When the Sandinistas came to power, for example, the vast holdings of land they expropriated from Somoza and others would have been sufficient in that thinly populated country to make available a significant parcel to every needy peasant...
...Christian writes: As the Contra movement grew through 1983 and 1984, it drew its rank and file from two sources in the northern mountains: peasants attracted by promises of land in their own names and small independent farmers who feared that their land would be confiscated or that they would be brought under state control in some other way, such as being forced into a state-run cooperative...
...diplomacy had aimed, albeit in vain, to dilute Sandinista power in the coming post-Somoza government in favor of the democratic opposition...
...Even today it is hoped that this more "moderate" wing will somehow assert itself and make possible a compromise solution to Nicaragua's internecine conflict...
...This line was put out by the Sandinistas themselves, reinforced by numerous categorical statements by Cuban spokesmen, and capped off by a pithy quotation allegedly spoken by Castro to the Sandinistas and repeated in numerous news stories and scholarly articles: "The best help I can give you is not to help you...
...But obviously it serves the regime's...
...Latin Americans are bound to have a better understanding of realities in Latin American countries than North Americans...
...Their hatred of Somoza, justified though it may have been, robbed them of their reason...
...If the revelation of D'Escoto's secret allegiance made his Maryknoll colleagues or superiors feel that they had been used, they have not let on, and relations between the order and the Sandinistas have been every bit as intimate as before...
...But I learned my lesson...
...policy has been so mired in ignorance...
...Given their Leninist convictions, repression comes naturally to them, and it is more plausible to believe that only the pressure presented by the insurgency and the need to minimize international support for it deters the Sandinistas from more thorough repression...
...Now Christian reveals that, in talks with U.S...
...The "contra" rebellion against Sandinista rule, and by extension U.S...
...but he coupled it with a series of pronouncements on international issues that were anti-United States, anti-Chinese, and pro-Soviet...
...Christian reports that Carlos Fonseca, the principal founder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), "spent much of 1957 in the Soviet Union and East Germany and wrote a booklet, A Nicaraguan in Moscow, that depicted the Soviet system as a future model for Latin America...
...Some social programs of the Sandinistas may be beneficial...
...A]fter being received by President Carter at the White House [a couple of months after the Sandinistas took power], [Daniel] Ortega went to the United Nations General Assembly in New York and delivered a plea for international aid to rebuild Nicaragua...
...BOOK REVIEWS NICARAGUA: A REVOLUTION IN THE FAMILY Shirley Christian/Random House/$19.95 Joshua Muravchik Although Nicaragua has been the most important foreign policy issue for the United States the last few years, few books have been written about it...
...The willingness to see their country suffer merely in order to aggrandize their own power is perhaps the truest measure of the Sandinistas' nationalism...
...Gonzalez left with $15,000 in assistance, part of what he understood to be a commitment for $43,000...
...Most likely he didn't care what it was...
...There is an important Christian component to the Sandinista revolution...
...Christian reports that "the first contingent [of Cuban personnel] arrived on July 25, [1979,] just eight days after Somoza fled...
...Former junta member Alfonso Robelo told Christian that "when he visited [Interior Minister] Tomas Borge, he had noted that the chief of Borge"s personal bodyguard detachment was a Cuban...
...Contadora is the name of the resort where representatives of Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, and Colombia first met to try to mediate Central American conflicts...
...The reason he was given, Gonzalez said, was that human rights was now guaranteed by the government in Nicaragua...
...The true colors of the "moderate" Terceristas are made devastatingly clear in a speech given to Sandinista army officers in 1981 by Humberto Ortega, of which Christian provides unex-purgated (and unauthorized) excerpts...
...They didn't know what was going on...
...Although in the case of the Indians, the Sandinistas still might fear that their tightknit tribal bonds make them dangerously impervious to state control...
...In fact the Sandinistas' nationalism is derivative of their Communism...
...When, two years after the Sandinistas' victory, their most prominent non-Communist leader, Eden Pastora, went into exile, he was tricked by some Panamanians into a secret meeting with Borge, who promptly took him to Cuba where he was kept for some time under a form of house arrest...
...Gurdian's inclusion of the United States on this list is not quite accurate, except as it applies to the U.S...
...response to the new regime, Christian writes that U.S...
...Hence the Sandinista anthem which proclaims the Yanqui the enemy not of Latin independence, but of "mankind...
...Ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo, a new appointee who was not associated with United States support for Somoza, began his work with the new regime with a positive attitude...
...None of this stanched the flow of U.S...
...Its unofficial headquarters, the "Valdivieso Center," is underwritten, Christian discovered, by the primarily Protestant and ideologically left World Council of Churches...
...And so it did for another month, during which the largest toll of death and destruction was taken...
...Whether this serves God's will is for Him to say...
...The facts Christian has collected will refute many of the myths...
...But, as Christian explains, "these factions had to do with strategies for reaching power, not methods of governing...
...You either took a positive position of trying to be helpful and trying to build a new relationship or you'd be sitting around wringing your hands forever...
...Our revolution has a profoundly anti-imperialist character, profoundly revolutionary, profoundly classist...
...But U.S...
...It is true that the Terceristas recruited non-Communists as combatants, but they were never admitted to the FSLN's top ranks...
...During the years when the Sandinistas were struggling to take power, the Maryknoll publishing house was headed by a secret FSLN member, Miguel D'Escoto, who has been Nicaragua's Foreign Minister since the Sandinistas' takeover...
...For that reason they are indissolubly united and for that reason our moral force is sandinismo, our political force is sandinismo, and our doctrine is Marxism-Leninism...
...Not, however, before $128 million in U.S...
...It is ruled by Nicaraguans, but Nicaraguans whose allegiance is not to the nation but to a cause higher than the nation...
...However fuzzy the Carter crowd was, they were hard-headed realists compared to the Latins...
...In May 1980, after ten months of Sandinista rule, Gonzalez went back to Geneva and was told that there would be no further payment to the Permanent Commission...
...It wasn't the anti-Sandinista "Contra," the destruction of which has become something of an obsession with O'Neill, who never before showed much interest in foreign policy issues...
...Among urban workers, the Sandinistas moved to create their own labor federation, under which "strikes are forbidden...
...The Sandinista revolution received little if any material aid from the Communist bloc, relying instead on weapons captured from the National Guard, purchased on the open market, or donated by democratic Latin governments...
...The Sandinistas' arms and supplies were entering Nicaragua largely through Costa Rica...
Vol. 18 • September 1985 • No. 9
