NACLA Navigates Shoals of Change
Black left NACLA two years later and his crit- ical stance was taken up by a new recruit named Mark Fried. Fried, like Janet Shenk, started reading NACLA Report as an undergraduate. He was a...
...Shenk also came to respect the Washington groups...
...To get "real money" the group had to create an internal structure of accountability, and the board asked Armstrong to become the first executive director...
...There was enough clear-headedness and 'let's put in the hard work' to realize that NACLA's project-which ultimately is its ability to pass on information to a fairly large audience-that that project was much more important than any of our individual projects...
...We had never really talked about Cuba...
...The board, such as it was, gave me authority, acting as a volunteer, to reorganize the staff...
...Of course it was easier after the Berlin Wall Vol XXXVI, No 3 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 31NACLA: A 35 YEAR RETROSPECTIVE had fallen and Cuba's crisis had "1 UbecoIle obvious, but still, there had never been enough people on staff who thought they could get away with saying something at all critical of what was going on in Cuba without feeding the U.S...
...It was a messy process and I still feel bad about it...
...The crisis, painful though it was, gave birth to a more sustainable organization, and NACLA reemerged ready to do battle with the newly proclaimed New World Order of George Bush I...
...We're so glad you are doing it...
...So our language was just completely different...
...Well, he hedged, "sure there was a conflict, you have to make editorial decisions...
...Like everyone else on staff he was earning $16,000 a year...
...It was a ridiculous position because I had no authority to do anything and it didn't work...
...I knew the Washington world better than the other NACLA people...
...He was headed for Mexico and paid a visit to the NACLA office in August 1973...
...NACLA had had an official board of directors since its incorporation in the 1970s but it had mostly stayed out of the way of staff decision-making...
...But I also feel it was necessary for the survival of the organization...
...Our clearest line was: NACLA does not affiliate...
...Fried had become editor while NACLA's commitment to the Central American revolutions was still strong, and it was in that context-especially, as he assumed the editorship, the context of the FLMN's "final offensive"-that the tensions between solidarity and criticism made themselves felt...
...The Report was followed by another in October on U.S.-Cuba relations...
...The point, of course, was to leave NACLA's mission and politics intact, while creating a sounder financial footing...
...At the same time the solidarity movement that had supported NACLA through the 1980s, in the midst of ambiguous politics and endless negotiations, was beginning to burn itself out...
...In order to get to the next tier of foundation support in New York you had to demonstrate that you were doing something in Washington...
...There was a lot of back and forth on the staff and between staff and board-not all of it friendly-about what to do...
...There had been, in fact, a conscious decision not to cover Cuba...
...Steven Volk, interviewed September, 2002 32 . NAI EOTONTEAEIA NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 32NACLA: A 35 YEAR RETROSPECTIVE based groups like NACLA was enormous...
...The idea was to create a classical nonprofit organization with a real executive director and lines of authority...
...There was a great internal struggle that culminated in 1987 at the spring LASA conference," says Armstrong...
...The decision emerged, in Dart...
...Now the board began to feel that NACLA's fundraising needs required it to intervene in order to help create a C ) 0 0 0 Vol XX)(VI, No 3 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 33 structure that would make NACLA look more like other nonprofit organizations...
...In 1987 the Board decided to downsize and they asked Fried to become interim director...
...that can survive a lot of difficult times both financially and politically and be around to play a very active and important role wher;,issues like Central America come up...
...Through the following decade, the solidarity-criticism tension remained, was taken very seriously, and tended to be resolved with the attitude that honest EL FISG)N E criticism and analysis were the strongest, most reliable forms of solidarity...
...Further, many Naclistas remember a feeling on staff that if Cuba were to be covered seriously-no one favored a "fluff' piece-it would not only exacerbate divisions on staff but, no matter what the point of view of the coverage, alienate NACLA from at least some groups on the left...
...As editor," he says, "I felt no conflict between my role as solidarity activist and my role as editor...
...Without the fundraising work she had done we would not have been able to survive those critical years...
...The report found-no surprise from the vantage point of a decade later-that "despite the continuing achievements of the revolution...the blind optimism of past years is gone and the potential for upheaval is real...
...There was a bit of angst over collapsing income, falling subscriptions, a shrinking movement...
...And the fact that it's alive doesn't shatter the world but, I think, signals a lot in terms of the fact that you can have a group that is quite persistent in its views...
...We were trying to inform and motivate an activist audience...
...It was a function, thinks Armstrong, of NACLA's emergence into the "larger world" of policy debates during the Central America period...
...Fried's wishes resonated with at least a portion of the staff in the late 1980s, and so at the same time, Naclistas were choosing another sensitive context in which to make use of their critical facilities: coverage of Cuba...
...We are a magazine and we publish about anti-imperialism,' we would tell ourselves...
...And that we would try to do what we could to keep the organization alive...
...And I think NACLA would have benefitted from having had more contact with colleagues who came from a different point of view but with whom we shared values...
...It was always this latent struggle between continuing to speak to the community of the left, the community of the movement, and trying to find a way to articulate our message to the larger unconvinced but potentially sympathetic audience...
...In the midst of NACLA's most crucial-and successful-attempts at political outreach, the internal situation had reached crisis proportions...
...Fried, under whose editorship the issues were published, says: "When we decided to do it a number of the old NACLA crowd said 'Great...
...It all manifested itself in people not liking each other...
...Fried wanted to reach as wide a readership as possible and felt he could do that by publishing a provocative, well edited magazine in which authors on the left were encouraged to write freely and critically...
...All that is informed by your understanding of the situation...
...We have managed to be there...
...He was a 19-year-old student at Friends World College in 1973 when someone gave him a copy of NACLA's New Chile and he found it fascinating...
...We tried to do it and were never able to get it together...
...It could easily have gone the other way...
...So the easiest way to deal with it," says Steven Volk, "was not to deal with it...
...I wanted to put out a good magazine...
...Whether we knew it or not, this was a self-preservation model-and I think some of us actually did know it: If we go down that road and introduce the struggles about how you construct socialism into the heart of the organization, we were going to have real problems...
...Everyone was terribly overworked and underpaid," remembers Fried...
...The difference between the Washingtonbased Latin America groups and the New York"What I think is our most important achievement is that we stayed alive...
...In August 1990, NACLA published its first-ever report on Cuba, "Cuba Facing Change," a discussion of the difficulties facing the Revolution as the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were collapsing...
...that continues to change the staff without changing the fundamental project...
...The larger world caused us to reflect more on what we stood for, what we meant, what were the consistencies and inconsistencies of our position, although it was never talked about in those terms...
...But after I left, the money crunch became really grave and everyone began to see that something had to be done...
...That attitude traces itself to the internal debates of the late 1980s...
...Fried admired Black's approach to editing...
...from the lack of any consensus on how to cover the socialist island...
...The Board, dominated by former staff members, stepped in and demanded a reorganization...
...war effort...
...There were lots of things worth looking at critically," remembers Josh DeWind, "and there was always at least some support for the idea that criticism is a part of any revolutionary movement, but there was no consensus on how to do it and not strengthen the hands of anti-revolutionaries...
...That generally got us through, but not unbloodied...
...We looked around at the left and saw lots of conflict, lots of splitting and felt that if we could avoid some of those issues we could avoid the splitting and deal with the issues that we thought were most important for us as a magazine...
...I think Janet and I could both see what that might mean in terms of making NACLA more influential in the debates and at the same time increase the resources available to us so that we weren't always struggling, impoverished people just preaching to the choir...
...We could afford to be much more shrill and categorical in our analyses because we weren't trying to convince policymakers...
...And through discussions among ourselves we came to the conclusion that we really should say something...
...As these solidarity-criticism tensions were playing themselves out, NACLA was beginning to face up to its perennial financial problems, and beginning to connect those problems to the group's organizational structure...
...We had very little contact and very different modes of operation...
...This all left NACLA with some tricky waters to navigate...
...They laid off most of the staff and moved the office to smaller quarters...
...That was a revelation to me once I started taking the train to Washington in the course of the El Salvador work...
...We stayed there...
...The NACLA people he met impressed him as "serious folks," and he quickly became a regular reader of the magazine...
...We were still coming out of the period when Cuba was the beacon of socialism and the new society and all the rest...
...You have to decide what's important and what to address...
...The editor at the time, Martha Doggett, chose to leave and Fried became editor in the spring of 1988...
...It was painful and it completely burnt me out...
...Janet was particularly good at that...
...Some 13 years later, in 1986, he went to work for NACLA as a research associate with a responsibility for Central America...
...In our time," comments Bob Armstrong, "we tentatively began to question the unspoken taboo on Cuba...
...He spent a few months in Mexico then a year in Guatemala and later a year in Colombia, all as part of the curriculum of Friends World College...
...By 1990, the Sandinista elecL r l defleaL, Llte stalling oI revo- lutionary momentum in El Salvador, the collapse of the Soviet model and the deepening Cuban crisis all forced NACLA to take its critical role more seriously...
...Through his work with the Central America solidarity and human rights movements, Bob Armstrong had begun to collaborate with Washington-based groups like the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), and began to think that NACLA could learn something from these more traditionally structured groups...
...If we got into arguments about how to organize the left, we would get ourselves into trouble...
Vol. 36 • November 2002 • No. 3
