VOICES FROM NICARAGUA: 'We are revolutionaries, but our hopes are disappearing.'
Steif, William
Voices from Nicaragua 'We are revolutionaries, but our hopes are disappearing' BY WILLIAM STEIF Jaime Cuadra was the only man I saw wearing a tie in Nicaragua. In other ways he was more typical....
...For the Reagan Administration, the test is, "If you're not with us 100 per cent, you're against us...
...Unlike the Cuban private sector, which bailed out as fast as it could when Castro came to power, the Nicaraguan private sector has held its ground...
...The crowd was held at bay by La Prensa's armed guards, who wounded three demonstrators...
...Actually, the council legislates nothing...
...They are Marxists...
...Juan Agostin Rodriguez, the manager of a 400-member coffee co-op in Matagalpa, says, "There are no incentives for farmers, no incentives to create new jobs...
...Both the Miskitos and the West Indians hated Somoza and welcomed the revolution...
...He was and considers himself still to be a revolutionary, and he offers his scars as evidence...
...specifications...
...Last November, the State Department issued a "travel advisory" warning tourists against going to Nicaragua, turning off a few more dollars...
...Reports that the CIA is actively working to "destabilize" Nicaragua have been neither confirmed nor denied by U.S...
...sometimes the Sandinistas admit to errors...
...The Cuban teachers in our schools impose new ideas on our children...
...The revolution did not provide instant gratification...
...Not all of Somoza's National Guard escaped the country when the dictator fell, and several thousand were rounded up and jailed...
...But there is also more freedom of speech, of religion, of business, even of politics, in Nicaragua today than in many—and perhaps most—Latin American nations...
...In one distant suburb, Las Colinas, the Cubans have built a large embassy compound...
...I never thought it would be like this...
...Somoza freed Cuadra and the five other prisoners and offered $1 million in cash and safe conduct by air to Cuba to get the hostages back...
...Like other coffee growers, he worries about losing his land because the Sandinistas threaten any landowner who stays out of the country six months with confiscation...
...There's no chance for one, and most Nicaraguans wouldn't participate even if there were...
...It is trying to "isolate" Nicaragua, and was< intensely annoyed at France for selling the Sandinistas a couple of helicopters and a dozen trucks last January...
...El Nuevo Diario is private, but derives as much as 80 per cent of its income from government-sponsored ads...
...Skeptics question the figures, pointing out that a prime objective of the Sandinistas' literacy drive has been political indoctrination...
...To make ends meet, the twenty-one private radio stations often "rent" news program time to the Sandinistas...
...Nicaraguans can take complaints to local committees or to members of the armed forces, and get hearings and sometimes action if their complaints seem just...
...Cuadra adds: "Managua monopolizes our taxes just the way Somoza did before...
...That distresses our new troupe of Cold Warriors, who don't want to see a Marxist-tinged revolution succeed anywhere, even if it is leavened by that most American of philosophies, pragmatism...
...The worst thing Washington could do would be to let the United States be the scapegoat for our problems...
...Their numbers have been reinforced by 2,000 Cuban teachers and 1,000 Cuban health technicians...
...The Sandinistas look like Marxists, talk Marxism, strut like Cubans...
...embassy...
...they probably have brutalized some people in trying to turn around a nation that carries the burden of a half-century of brutalities...
...embassy argues in their behalf, saying they are on "private property...
...The Sandinistas are far from perfect, as they themselves will admit...
...Its attitude: If it looks like a duck, squawks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it is a duck...
...The government has a very difficult international situation," Baez says...
...His wife stayed in Nicaragua and cared for the finca...
...The Somocistas covered his head with a bag and tortured him with electric shocks, off and on, for ten days...
...Nicaragua is overwhelmingly agricultural...
...Nicaragua has lost the friendship of the Andean group, of El Salvador, Honduras, and Venezuela, and is beginning to lose traditional allies in Europe...
...Between July 10 and October 3, 1981, the government shut La Prensa five times for a total of eleven days...
...Yes, there have been changes...
...The Sandinistas also have dealt La Prensa a number of "reprimands," which the paper is forced to print, and have barred it from publishing some news items...
...About 800 Somocistas are rehearsing a coup in Florida and California, and the U.S...
...We don't know whether we're going to moderation or completely to totalitarianism...
...economy with glee and see the CIA and "the imperialists"—always American— behind every Nicaraguan problem...
...Though the Sandinistas, whose cabinet ministers include four Catholic priests, seem to be developing a far less oppressive government than some U.S...
...Their economy is staggering...
...Its commercial and industrial sectors are underdeveloped, much smaller than Cuba's at the time Castro came to power...
...soil...
...Roads have been resurfaced...
...it is a sounding board for the nine-member Sandinista directorate, which sets policy...
...Cuadra returned when Somoza was overthrown in July 1979, and is now president of the 7,000-member Matagalpa coffee growers' association, a private group...
...military action in Central America, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador, in Cuba, remains a "policy option...
...Somoza looted the treasury, leaving behind a $1.6 billion debt...
...That doesn't mean there will be a counterrevolution against the Sandinistas, Cuadra says...
...We loved each other like brothers...
...The Nicaraguan campesino tends to be better off, economically, than his Cuban counterpart was in 1959...
...They don't recognize our group because they have organized their own for coffee growers...
...He is a tough-minded anti-Communist, in the mold of Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas O. Enders...
...We're at a crossroads...
...New buses have been brought in from Mexico, Brazil, and Spain...
...We don't think we're going to win a war against the United States...
...Lawrence Pezzullo, U.S...
...The Reagan Administration seems to feel otherwise...
...There is no foreign exchange and the cordoba, officially pegged at ten to the dollar, sells at thirty for a dollar on the black market...
...Prices of sugar and cotton are down and meat exports fell from 1979's all-time peak of 79 million pounds to 19.5 million pounds in 1981...
...Downtown Managua was devastated by a 1972 earthquake, and Somoza did nothing in the way of reconstruction...
...ambassador in Managua from the time of Somoza's downfall, was pushed out last August...
...He concedes that the revolutionary era's neglect has been repaired...
...He lives better because, basically, Nicaragua is underpopulated and has rich soil and a benevolent climate...
...Two daily papers, Barricada and El Nuevo Diario, follow the government line slavishly...
...All of this is supported by a government bureaucracy of 70,000 people, up from 38,000 under Somoza...
...Hundreds, most of them ignorant men in the lower ranks, already have been tried and freed...
...Inflation is running at 50 per cent yearly...
...If we want to import things like fertilizers, they won't let us...
...allies in Latin America have, the Reagan Administration fears Nicaraguan neutralism in the superpower struggle and worries that Nicaraguan independence is infecting "dependable" neighboring nations, notably El Salvador and Guatemala...
...Nicaragua has just two small minority groups, the Miskito Indians and English-speaking West Indian blacks...
...The raiders, say the Sandinistas, have been aided by the Honduran army and probably by an exile Miskito leader, Stead-man Fagoth...
...last year's crop was about 1.3 million bags, up from 800,000 a decade ago...
...he is a Foreign Service professional highly respected by the Sandinistas...
...A more peculiar closing of La Prensa occurred in mid-January...
...Right after the revolution everyone was happy," says Cuadra...
...Just before Christmas, 1974, Somoza's national guard captured him...
...The United States would be the scapegoat if it mounted a blockade or an invasion like the Bay of Pigs...
...There's tremendous friction between the private sector and the government," says Baez...
...Examples of banned news: nothing on government increases in sugar and rice prices...
...The world price has been $142 a bag lately, but it is dropping...
...Three privately controlled radio stations openly oppose the government, and the Sandinista leaders show up each Friday night for public gripe sessions which are taped and run on television...
...What that really means is that the Reagan Administration doesn't want to give the Sandinista experiment a chance...
...But even the Sandinistas are learning that successful policy, foreign and domestic, can't be based on ideological litmus tests...
...Every effort I made to see Cuban officials failed...
...A mob of several hundred persons quickly appeared and threatened to destroy the newspaper's offices and the adjacent printing plant...
...We're caught in the rhetorical war between East and West;The Soviets want to put the United States in a trap in Central America...
...Reagan's Cold Warriors think they are practicing realpolitik in Central America, and especially in Nicaragua...
...they maintain a low profile...
...Somoza ran the country as if it were his personal plantation...
...their Marxist talk is offensive to many North Americans...
...Nicaragua's populace is far more homogeneous than Cuba's, too...
...I went to the hospital in Havana...
...now they want to be left alone...
...Those are the sentiments of Alvaro Jerez, secretary of Alfonso Robelo's centrist Nicaraguan Democratic Movement...
...The leading English-language bookstore closed last fall—no support from the U.S...
...Land reform is real, but the campesinos are not sure about 'Carlos Marx.' After fifty years of Somoza 'brutality,' some ask if the changes matter Three Soviet-sponsored bookstores have opened in Managua in the last year, all selling cheap Spanish-language paperbacks...
...Except for Managua, no city has more than 70,000 people...
...The report should be taken with a large dose of salt because there probably aren't 10,000 Miskitos along the entire Nicaraguan-Honduran border, because cross-border raiders are as likely to be bandits as politically motivated Somocistas, and because the Honduran military considers the Somocistas more of a headache than an ally...
...The government was supposed to export $680 million worth of goods in 1981 and exported $500 million worth...
...Coffee picking requires more skill than cane cutting, he says...
...nothing of an Associated Press dispatch reporting the jailing of a Nicaraguan air force officer in the United States...
...The directorate, in turn, leaves day-to-day matters in the hands of the three-member junta and the cabinet ministers, who tend to be independent...
...They want to keep the threat of military force hanging over the heads of the Sandinista leaders—and over the Cubans' heads...
...They think they are being "tough" by isolating the Sandinista regime, by forcing it into the arms of the Cubans and the Soviets...
...The third daily, La Prensa, is private and profitable...
...Campesinos I spoke to were all for confiscation of Somocistas' land but bitterly opposed to the seizure of their own...
...I was in bad shape," Cuadra recalls in an office at Matagalpa, eighty miles northeast of Managua...
...The United States, says Jerez, "should not go it alone...
...Ninety per cent of our members are small growers...
...The Sandinistas reply that expatriate farmers tend to "decapitalize" their farms, selling off machinery, cattle, and other goods and eventually abandoning the land...
...The Washington estimate of 4,500 "political prisoners" in Nicaragua is far too high and should be cut by at least three quarters...
...Priests serve in the cabinet, but the bishops are wary of the Sandinistas...
...The Sandinistas say illiteracy has fallen from 53.7 per cent of the population before the revolution to 12.9 per cent...
...On the outskirts, Managua is more like a normal city, with shopping centers, industrial and commercial strips leading toward the airport, plywood and tarpaper shacks, and, farther out, single-family homes of the middle class and the rich, looking as if they were transplanted from Orange County, California...
...A Soviet embassy with a staff of about twenty-five is nearby...
...Until his retirement early this year, William Steif covered national and international affairs for the Scripps-Howard newspapers...
...North and northeast of Siuna, along the Honduran border, are Miskito villages which the Sandinistas say are the targets of Somocista raids from the sanctuary of Honduras...
...There's also friction between the Sandinistas and many in the Church hierarchy, including Managua's archbishop...
...Cuadra, fifty-five, is a big-boned, dark-haired man who owns 302,000 coffee trees producing 4,000 hundred-pound bags of coffee each year on his finca, or farm...
...some are blocked off by soldiers and khaki-colored Soviet and East German trucks...
...As vice president of the Nicaraguan coffee growers association in the 1970s, he used his position as a cover to run guns and guerrillas to his country's northern mountains, where the Sandinistas fought dictator Anastasio Somoza...
...Late in 1981, half a dozen government-owned businesses, including a 1,000-worker textile plant, shut down...
...The United States has turned off all government-to-government aid, though a trickle still comes through private groups...
...I could see that in the nineteen months between my two visits to Nicaragua daily life had improved...
...They think "the key" to Nicaragua is Cuba, and the hand holding the key is the Soviet Union's...
...they tend to act in a superior manner...
...Over and over, Haig has suggested that U.S...
...Relations with the United States are at the lowest point...
...But there is deep disillusion in important sectors of the populace...
...The revolution is all rough edges...
...But the "economic situation is very bad," says Baez...
...that is no longer the trend, "so outside funds are being reduced, exports are down, and factories are closing," Baez says...
...Still, Rodriguez says the nationalized banks are "very conservative in giving credit and prefer to deal with government officials...
...Yet there is a good deal of freedom in Nicaragua, as La Prensa's daily appearance attests...
...Cubans are unpopular in the area and some have been forced to leave...
...They say we are counterrevolutionary...
...The Sandinistas at first moved heavy-handedly onto the Caribbean coast but have pulled back...
...We have the feeling our fate is being decided in Moscow and Washington," says William Baez, director of the Institute of Nicaraguan Development, which works to build the co-op movement...
...Then, on December 27, Sandinistas attacked the jail where he and five other political prisoners were being held and took hostages...
...La Prensa is as much an organ of the Church as Barricada and El Nuevo Diario are Marxist outlets...
...Most of the center looked like a ghost town...
...A Cuban construction team has built a four-wheel-drive road only as far as the village of Siuna, and still has 100 miles to go through swamps to reach Puerto Cabezas...
...In January, President Reagan finally nominated a replacement—another Foreign Service pro, Anthony Quainton, who has been director of the State Department's Office for Combatting Terrorism, a job which carries ambassadorial rank...
...The Reagan Administration thinks Nicaragua is "another Cuba," forgetting that Eisenhower Republicans and Kennedy Democrats a generation ago helped turn Cuba into a Soviet dependency...
...The closest analogy to the Reagan Administration's approach to the countries of Central America is Moscow's approach to the countries of the Eastern European bloc, specifically Poland...
...Now, the city's heart has been cleaned up, a "people's park" opened, and the shanties and sidewalk shops removed near the Casa de Gobierno, where the three-member Sandinista junta holds sway...
...A small plot of land can provide a fair living...
...Cuadra, a medium-sized grower, says it costs him $125 to produce a bag of coffee, but the nationalized Nicaraguan marketing organization, ENCAFE, pays him only $100 a bag...
...The Sandinistas' critics are often rough...
...The government is trying to ruin our association...
...Its daily circulation, about 75,000, is almost double that of the other two newspapers combined...
...The Sandinistas claim a literacy rate of almost 54 per cent, up from about 13 percent under Somoza...
...Over and over, throughout this fertile, mountainous country, the visitor hears complaints about two things: the dogma of "Carlos Marx" and the 5,000 Cubans working in Nicaragua...
...Now, says Cardenal, "you're gambling all the time" because press laws are "inexact and the Sandinistas can apply them as they want...
...A hiccup in Washington feels like an earthquake in Managua...
...Matagalpa Province produces half the coffee in this Alabama-sized nation...
...That accounts for a February news report, from a Washington Post correspondent in Managua, that the Sandinistas had "removed" 10,000 Miskitos from twenty border villages...
...Rodriguez also claims there is a labor shortage, though more than 5,000 coffee pickers live in and around Matagalpa...
...A $30 million loan to Nicaragua from the Inter-American Development Bank has been stalled indefinitely because of U.S...
...That assessment is somewhat unfair...
...Parents reject these ideas and force the Cubans to change or leave...
...That's the way the Reagan Administration—the President, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Assistant Secretary Enders, the National Security Council "experts"—act, too...
...pressure...
...Of that, $200 million went for debt service, $250 million for oil...
...They've taken from the rich and given nothing to the poor...
...It is surrounded by a high steel fence, topped by barbed wire...
...At least two dozen Indians have been killed in the raids, the Sandinistas maintain...
...In 1981, Nicaragua got $480 million in loans and donations...
...Only Land Rovers and Jeeps can get as far as Siuna...
...The others range from conservative to moderately leftist...
...He remained in Cuban exile five months, went to Moscow, Prague, Rome, Costa Rica, and finally to Canada, where he got a job as a Montreal school inspector...
...Barricada is the official daily of the Sandinista National Liberation Front— the FSLN—and it imitates Granma, Cuba's party paper...
...In the last eighteen months the Sandinista government has signed educational exchange agreements to send 600 students a year to Eastern Europe and 300 yearly to Cuba's Isle of Youth schools...
...The private sector's reluctance to embrace Marxism is compounded by the campesinos' innate conservatism...
...Matagalpa, a hilly city of 40,000 with dirt streets, is a center of disillusionment...
...He feels his nation is being "pinched" between Moscow and Havana on the Left, and the Reagan Administration on the Right...
...policy is simple-minded and paranoid, and could turn their country into "another Cuba...
...La Prensa, meanwhile, dredges up every tidbit it can to embarrass the Sandinistas...
...The United States refuses to enforce its law against training private armies on U.S...
...Most parties take part in the fiftymember Council of State, which is supposed to be a kind of legislature until the promised 1985 elections...
...Ninety-eight per cent of our people are Catholic...
...The United States should let the dynamics of the revolution continue, it should work with the Mexicans and Venezuelans and the European Community...
...The two leftist dailies report every downward blip of the U.S...
...officials...
...In addition, Washington continues to hint at a "blockade" of Nicaragua, which the Sandinistas quickly perceive as a threat of invasion...
...In some ways, says Roberto Cardenal, secretary of La Prensa's editorial board, newspaper publishing today is "worse" than it was under Somoza because the dictator's officials practiced pre-censorship, reading the paper's pages before they were printed and excising what displeased them...
...Now we look at the government like we looked at the national guard of Somoza...
...But our hopes are disappearing...
...In its physical aspect, Managua, a city of 700,000, is much improved...
...Radio Sandino, a government station, permits a popular daily show to poke fun at the Sandinistas...
...He apologized for the get-up, saying he was going1 to his daughter's graduation later in the day...
...Almost all the coffee growers are losing money," Cuadra says...
...Sixty per cent of the Nicaraguan economy is still privately owned and it produces 80 per cent of the country's gross national product...
...nothing on the shutdown of the Nicaraguan Human Rights Commission and the jailing of the Commission's director...
...A McDonald's in a shopping center thrives on sales of the "cuarto de libra" and "batidos"—quarter-pounder and milkshake, made to U.S...
...Non-Marxist Nicaraguan moderates think U.S...
...That puts the Sandinistas further on edge...
...Skeptics say whatever the rate, 'reading' means indoctrination: Two thousand Cubans are now teaching in the schools There are a dozen political parties, five within the Sandinista front...
...We don't want communism...
...The point, says Sergio Ramirez, one of the three junta members, is that "we are a free and independent country and not part of the orbit of influence of the United States-, not part of any orbit in the world...
...The problem, he says, is that the Sandinista government is luring campesinos off the land to build its military machine...
...Because the city center sits astride a fault line, though, the Sandinistas have no intention of rebuilding it...
...Before going to the State Department's anti-terrorist office, Quainton served two years as ambassador to the Central African Republic...
...We're importing corn, rice, and beans now...
...The Sandinistas moved in with troops and shut down the newspaper for two days, claiming the story was a fake, "irresponsible journalism," and they may have been right...
...New schools and free clinics have sprouted up around the country though teachers and health workers are in short supply...
...The newspaper printed a story about an anonymous plot to blow up two of Nicaragua's chief industrial plants, a sugar refinery and a cement factory...
...The majority of the population feels the revolution has been betrayed by the system those gentlemen in Managua want to impose...
...Cattle, especially, were heavily exported in the months immediately after the revolution...
...Augustin Ramirez, who owns a small coffee finca in Jinotega Province fifty-five miles northeast of Matagalpa, says: "No more than 20 per cent of the campesinos are Marxists, maybe less...
...They tried to break me," he says...
...To Reagan's people, ideology is everything...
...Both are isolated on the Caribbean coast and there is no road from the "Spanish" part of the country to the Caribbean...
...He adds: "We are a poor, weak little country that trains its army only in self-defense...
...The bloody toll of 1978 and 1979—more than 40,000 dead in a nation of 2.7 million—still weighs heavy on their minds...
...In a few years we'll be importing coffee...
...The two television channels are Sandinista-run, featuring Bulgarian health documentaries and the like, and sixteen of the thirty-seven radio stations are also government-run...
...We have a position with the revolution," says La Prensa editor Pablo Antonio Cuadra...
...From six to seven each evening, the government forces all radio stations into the national network for its literacy program...
...Unlike so many other Latin American regimes—Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador come to mind instantly—the Sandinistas have not resorted to torture or murder of political opponents...
...The revolution said it would take from the rich and give to the poor...
...You can't pick green beans...
...He laughs about a Sandinista plan to send Managua bureaucrats into the campo, the way Fidel Castro sent urban Cubans into the sugar cane fields in the 1960s...
...They, like the Sandinistas, fought to overthrow Somoza and want to maintain a pluralistic society with a mixed public-private economy—a goal to which the Sandinistas at least give lip-service...
Vol. 46 • May 1982 • No. 5
