Nicaragua
Colburn, Forrest D.
Jose Figueroa does not understand why the Plaza de Espafia supermarket sells frozen Minute Maid orange juice imported from the United States when a dozen poor Nicaraguans hawk bags of sweet...
...Arriving in 1972, he participated along with every other university student in Chile's political struggles, intellectually and ideologically excited by the vogue for radical change...
...The Ministry of the Interior received guidance and technical assistance from the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union, and in the decade of Sandinista rule Jose made seven or eight trips to the Soviet Union, as well as trips to Cuba, East Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria...
...For the poor, ideological debates have left no imprint...
...He is bewildered that Nicaragua now has only eight movie theaters, when on the eve of the country's revolution in 1979 there were a hundred and thirty-six...
...At least he did negotiate a generous severance agreement...
...Jose's memento is a thick, heavy winter coat he used to wear when in the Soviet Union, completely useless in Nicaragua's tropical heat...
...Jose was in East Berlin a month before the Wall collapsed...
...military's plan for invading Nicaragua and what was the Sandinistas' plan for defense from the invasion...
...Worse, Jose was ostracized by the new government...
...He was traveling in a military convoy in the Ukraine with Soviet army personnel and three other ranking Sandinistas, including Comandante de la RevoluciOn Tomas Borge, minister of the interior...
...At the conclusion of a long day of tense meetings, Jose suggested they, "break the ice and come over to his house for drinks...
...Jose does not say much of what he did, either in Managua or in Chontales, other than to say it was difficult and that mistakes were made...
...José continues to be loyal to his party, still Nicaragua's strongest political party, but he is no longer sure what it means to be a Sandinista...
...After a miserable, but improved, month in Havana, Jose returned to Managua, where he spent the last three of his eight months in the same body 182 • DISSENT Politics Abroad cast...
...Yet there is no doubt that he earnestly believed that what he was doing was right...
...aggression and continued revolutionary enthusiasm and discipline could not solve...
...But if Nicaragua is replete with organizations, including the country's twenty-three political parties, it is not clear to thoughtful Nicaraguans what to believe in other than self-interest...
...Now his memories are unsettling, disorienting, and bizarre...
...military personnel...
...After his fifteen months of incapacitation, Jose returned to the Ministry of Interior...
...Although José may rightfully feel a schism between himself and the "bourgeoisie," to the poor peasants who work for him and his brothers, there is no difference...
...His party's loss in the February 1990 elections was devastating and, again, disorienting...
...Jose Figueroa does not understand why the Plaza de Espafia supermarket sells frozen Minute Maid orange juice imported from the United States when a dozen poor Nicaraguans hawk bags of sweet oranges in the supermarket's parking lot...
...Grand meetings in Moscow have been replaced by harangues about the price of the odd steer...
...The timing of his departure suggests to him that he was ousted because of pressure from the U.S...
...With the coup d'etat he was arrested, jailed for four months, always fearful for his life...
...For two more years, Jose held on to his job as comandante at the Ministry of Interior, now called the Ministry of Governance...
...The ambassador claimed that there was no hospital in Nicaragua that could attend Jose given the gravity of his injuries...
...His mother taught elementary school and his father drove a tractor...
...He asks, "What does that mean...
...Jose is now doing just what he would have been doing if socialism, in the end a European political tradition, had never caught the political imagination of the most talented and socially responsible Nicaraguan youth...
...Aside from poverty, the legacy of the Sandinista Revolution is the political organization of every possible group with a shared interest...
...Shortly thereafter, Jose was ousted...
...Still, after two decades of commitment to what he views as the most noble and unselfish ideals of his generation, Jose has a rickety body, a memory of a dreadful accident and a dreary recovery in the most foreign of environments for a Nicaraguan, the death in combat of many of his friends and comrades, a consciousness of having done things that hurt others, political confusion, an impoverished country—and a brand new Mitsubishi Montero (I never asked how he came about the latter...
...Only the chaufeur and Jose survived...
...After a month he persuaded his nurse, through sign language, to find him something to read in Spanish: "a history of Soviet patriotic battles...
...In the final months of the insurrection, Jose fought in the north of Nicaragua, narrowly surviving a frightful ambush...
...To the poor majority of Nicaraguans, the Nicaraguan Revolution and its lingering tensions are often understandably interpreted as a feud among those families who own cars and rule Nicaragua...
...But work lost its glory and perceived importance...
...Even ex-members of the contra have organized themselves to get their entitlements from a fragile and bankrupt state...
...Jose's retort was, "Send me somewhere Spanish is spoken...
...And today Jose readily admits that it was not pleasant...
...In Nicaragua itself, a decade of Sandinista rule had revealed problems, even "contradictions," but nothing—it was argued within the Frente —that an end to U.S...
...In Managua itself, the only visible sign of the revolution is an immense, ugly, metal sculpture of a man holding a pick in one arm and a Soviet AK-47 assault rifle in the other...
...But Jose was left in a body cast from his toes to his armpits, with seventeen pins in his shattered bones...
...Classes remain pronounced in Nicaragua and definable in the simplest of terms: those who worry about food and those who do not...
...It is stunning how little remains materially from what was a passionate and all-consuming enterprise...
...Jose grew up in the provincial capital of Chontales, a dry region in the center of Nicaragua, known for its cattle and cowboys...
...He spoke no Russian, and no one spoke Spanish...
...Aside SPRING • 1994 • 181 Politics Abroad from its abject poverty, Nicaragua shows next to no sign of its traumatic revolution...
...An evening of excitement came in 1992 with the visit of a delegation of U.S...
...Indeed, given the logic of the paradigm dominant among young intellectuals of his generation in Latin America, what he did not only seemed right...
...From 1975 to 1977 he was publicly active, until his hidden Sandinista identity was "compromised...
...In 1982, during his second or third trip to the Soviet Union (he does not remember which), Jose suffered a horrible accident...
...After a few shots of Nicaragua's Flor de Calla rum, each side told its secrets: what was the U.S...
...Department of State...
...Within a year of his return to Nicaragua, he entered the outlawed FSLN...
...With the toppling of Anastasio Somoza in July of 1979, Jose entered the "police," the Ministry of the Interior, where he came to be third or fourth in rank, and one of the country's most powerful Sandinistas...
...The fall of the Wall, and all that came with it, was a surprise and profoundly disorienting...
...And Jose is confused when leaders of his party, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN), say that the party "remains revolutionary, but in the modern sense of the word...
...With Nicaragua now the poorest country in Latin America after Haiti, with unemployment at an estimated 60 percent, and with wages for the employed sorely depressed, the sculpture arouses only anger among those it pretends to inspire...
...There he worked with two of his brothers, who also held ranking positions...
...Their native province of Chontales experienced some of the worst, some say the worst, fighting between the Sandinistas and the counterrevolution, the contra as it was called then and the resistance as it is called now...
...So he keeps his boots clean and looks after his cattle...
...He went underground, spending most of the next two years smuggling arms from Panama to Nicaragua...
...But more than anything, it seems conspicuously out of place given the rapidity with which ideas about politics and economics have changed...
...were three Soviet officers...
...After cursing the ambassador for never visiting or calling him, Jose demanded to be moved, saying that if the ambassador did not move him, he would, on his own, one way or another, leave the hospital and find his way home...
...together they raised nine children...
...Ironically, Jose and his brothers now are committed to the most typical of occupations for folk from Chontales—raising cattle, trying to build up a ranch and a small slaughterhouse...
...For most of the years of the revolution, the entry to the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) was adorned with a huge slogan, "The Center of Happiness in Nicaragua...
...Whatever he did, it clearly weighs on him with an eerie solemnity...
...The other Nicaraguan (on his first trip outside of Nicaragua) in the vehicle was killed, as...
...Jose's past, and his present efforts to fit into the Nicaragua that has emerged out of what he helped create, are symptomatic for many in the country: the best decades of life are seen as having been spent futilely —even, sometimes, ridiculously— but nonetheless there are no regrets...
...But the Ministry was where coercion was dealt out to the perceived enemies of the revolution...
...it seemed historically inevitable...
...Shortly thereafter, Jose—still in his body cast—was on a hellish flight to Cuba...
...their clamor is for "them" to reach an agreement...
...The base of the sculpture proclaims, "Only the peasants and the workers will make it to the end...
...He returned to Havana to have the cast removed and to begin a rehabilitation program he describes as "pure torture...
...After four months he persuaded another nurse, again through sign language, to wheel his hospital bed to a telephone, where he called the Nicaraguan ambassador in Moscow...
...He recalls no sign of what was to befall a perceived success, a model...
...Those with the contra say soberly that he was hard (duro...
...Remorse is absent because the prevailing intellectual climate, so he believes, persuasively dictated the choices he made...
...Through his aptitude and sheer fortune, Jose won a scholarship to study in Chile during the turbulent years of Salvador Allende's effort to build socialism...
...184 • DISSENT SPRING • 1994 • 183...
...For four months Jose lay in an isolated hospital, immobile, cold, in pain, and without a single soul with whom to converse...
...He memorized the elephantine book...
...Like many talented young Nicaraguans of his generation, Jose entrusted twenty years of his life, his youth and more, to a politically charged set of ideals: revolution, equality, progress, and socialism...
...The vehicle Jose was traveling in fell behind, and was hit by a big truck hauling artillery...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
