VOICES FROM NICARAGUA: 'We are the masters of our history.'

...We had a Nicaraguan teacher for a little while, but we didn't get along," they said...

...he wanted one united Central America "from Panama to Puerto Rico...

...Finally, many Sandinista adherents appear to believe that a degree of pluralism is more efficient than state ownership...

...Their reasons center not so much on material improvements or ideology as on power and participation...

...And the way they cook a pig...

...The campesinos stood at attention and removed their hats, and the words of the Sandinista anthem filled the air: "Our people are the masters of their history, architects of their liberation...

...Peasants getting title to the lands will work them as cooperatives, growing fruits, vegetables, and grains...

...They are good teachers—and we never had schools here before, only in the city...

...Within this sector, the Sandinistas openly regard the landholding campesinos and small merchants as the more deserving people and likelier allies, and they reward them with easier access to loans and lower interest rates in the state-owned banks...

...Second, they need a mixed economy if they are going to strengthen links with Western Europe, Mexico, and the OPEC nations and avoid falling into total dependence on the Soviet bloc in the likely event of a U.S...

...And surprisingly or not, they were strongest in the countryside, among the campesinos—the backbone of Nicaragua, the farm laborers and small peasants— despite their legendary fear of communism and change...

...Likewise, when I asked a young farmworker named Jose Antonio which of the pro- or anti-Sandinista Managua-based newspapers to believe, he replied, "None of them...

...Landowners who failed to maintain or work their holdings have also been taken over...

...The colony was leveled by Somoza's air force...

...Because it is just for them to do so, because that is the reality...

...I think 90 per cent of the people support the revolution today...

...The most prominent Church official, Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo of Managua, gave his blessing to the armed struggle to oust Somoza only in the last of its twenty years— and he was following a constituency of parishioners, priests, and nuns who had been constructing a revolutionary church for a decade...

...In the Council of State, as in the U.S...

...However, several things keep the Sandinistas from expropriating the larger capitalists or denying them their share of funds...

...trade embargo...

...The "violent" regime in Managua cannot be removed the way the non-violent one in Santiago was a decade ago—and this infuriates Washington...

...What is going on in Nicaragua today fits neatly in a small nutshell...

...But we are going to have new relations among people, based on participation...

...I asked them about their new school...

...This has happened often enough before in Latin America, most recently and tragically in Chile...

...Almost anyone from the city is apt to be viewed with the same suspicion...

...They also command loyalty, I found, from many teachers, small merchants, and the like—as well as enmity or careful neutrality from others...

...First, the Sandinistas lack the technical competence to administer large sections of the economy...

...Maria Espinosa, a national secretary of the Rural Workers Association, typifies these militants and their goals...

...He was suspicious of the Soviets and said they were as dangerous as the Americans...

...But they turned out to be ordinary people and good teachers...

...I spent one of those weeks living and working with rural people, and the other meeting with union activists and government officials and buttonholing people in the streets, parks, bars, and restaurants of Managua and other cities...

...They see themselves representing the majority on the bottom more than the minority at the top...

...Oh, los cubanos...

...Claro, certainly we do...

...And they hope to gain land...

...The Sandinistas are also creating a class of peasant cooperatistas (co-op members) on land confiscated from private planters who are not working it satisfactorily...

...The contest between pro- and anti-Sandinista forces goes on not only in the Council of State, but in the press, the pulpit, the marketplace, and nearly everywhere...

...While I was there, the second phase of Nicaragua's agrarian reform was just under way...

...The ceremony's country-fair atmosphere took a solemn turn at the end, as relatives of fallen guerrilla combatants from the area made appearances...

...The reform is intended not only to redistribute the land more equitably, but to spur the transition from cash-crop agriculture to more balanced farming that allows the country to feed itself...

...What our union proposes almost always passes," she admitted...

...The people of Leon are rock-bottom poor, and sandinismo has not fundamentally improved their lot yet...

...Few tears would probably be shed across Nicaragua if control of most privately owned coffee and cotton plantations eventually passed to the state, but both campesinos and the Sandinista leadership support smaller private farms and the new co-ops in the production of basic grains...

...The workers are beginning to acquire the skills that will let them take on more and more of the running of the economy...

...I asked Carmen, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of six who lives with her family in a few small rooms of the former farm owner's summer house...

...The campesinos were doubtful—they did not think the miracle beans were growing well...

...Little by little, they hope to gain a better diet, a doctor, a day care center...

...Her newest and nearest neighbors are two Cuban teachers who live in another room...

...The Church hierarchy has removed radical parish priests, and during my visit, local Catholic activists were staging protest sit-ins at churches in several cities and towns...

...Americans killed Sandino," one worker said bluntly...

...A pineapple from the market in the city of Leon is a delicacy...

...We have many state administrators who were trained to think they are at the center of things...

...f The private sector: Private businesses, ranging from small campesino farms to large plantations and an Exxon oil refinery, control 80 per cent of industrial and agricultural production...

...All this was far from home, where our own commandante sits in the State Department and claims that the Nicara-guans are the objects of a Cuban power grab...

...The commandantes, however, do not legislate any more than Ronald Reagan does...

...With the Cuban teacher, we get along much better...

...We have many private owners who think the same way...

...Oh, me, I'm marchando con la revolution," said my first random man-in-the-street, a night watchman in his fifties who was whiling away the afternoon watching the crocodiles in a Managua park...

...They wore all types of costumes...

...A young mother of six says she was afraid of the Cubans at first...

...Over the week, the words that echoed through the answers of these campesinos wereganar (to win, earn, or gain) andpoco apoco (little by little...

...1 The Church: Everybody in Nicaragua says the country's Catholicism will define its political future, but what this means is unclear, since the Church is split...

...Congress, the political center of gravity is not far from the executive...

...Now she can leave her children with them while she works the fields with her machete to earn extra money 11 The unions: Organized labor has blossomed since the overthrow of Somoza...

...Strikes by all of the unions are banned under a one-year state of social and economic emergency declared last summer in response to Nicaragua's desperate lack of hard currency and the threat of politically motivated economic destabilization...

...the small-town farm owner who ran a charter bus and a bar on the side, who said he had been better off under Somoza...

...I heard others as well: the worried young Managua wholesale executive who told me the government was destroying the incentive to invest...

...Yes, many people are afraid when they hear Cubans are coming," she told me...

...They make no bones about their intention to preside over a social revolution...

...The radical unions have been organized, by and large, by veterans of the guerrilla war...

...She was from the city, and she didn't like it here in the country...

...I asked Rosalda Moreno, a Rural Workers' Association leader, how this "pluralistic" body really works...

...The right wing is allowed to have its say...

...But most often, I heard the voices of san-dinismo...

...They are building us the world's biggest sugar mill, you know...

...I spent two weeks in that country in January, one of thirty-five U.S...

...The campesinos do not answer foreigners' questions glibly, the way the people in the city often do...

...But they turned out to be people...

...He grimaced...

...the taxi driver squeezed between high gas prices, better bus service, and depressed tourism, who spoke of being jailed for a short while because "I have too big a mouth...

...The diet here is rice, beans, and tortillas, and the question has been and still is whether there will be enough...

...Earlier, the lands of Somoza and his friends had been expropriated...

...These are not the only voices of Nicaragua, of course...

...Only the Sandinista-led Rural Workers' Association organizes in the countryside...

...They say, over and over, that they are willing to defend it with their lives...

...The rumbles we hear in the Capital today are hardly surprising...

...A university-trained Nicaraguan agronomist and two visiting Cubans had brought a new bean variety to one of the farms where I stayed, a bean that was supposed to increase the farm's ability to feed itself...

...They want their rice and beans mixed together, and they want their beans in liquid, like soup...

...During my week in the cotton-belt lowlands of the Pacific coastal province of Leon, I lived, ate, slept, and picked cotton on two plantations, formerly the property of Somoza associates, taken over by the campesinos when the owners fled, and now operated by the state...

...I pressed him on the issue of outside domination, of the Cuban influx...

...Peasant cooperatives in the Leon Province were receiving land titles for the first time...

...People say they are coming to take over, but they are helping us...

...The three most important forces, besides the Sandinista Front itself, are the Catholic Church, the private business sector, and the unions...

...Such seizures are now outlawed, and the unions are supposed to request official government intervention instead...

...What is new in Nicaragua—for the first time since the Cuban revolution—is that the radical reformers, and not the defenders of the economic status quo, have the guns...

...At times, the Sandinista unions have seized lands and factories when owners refused to negotiate or transferred equipment or funds abroad...

...I posed the same questions over lunch— fried chicken, fried bananas, beans—to the man opposite me at an outdoor counter...

...Many have never met an American before, and they are not well disposed to like us...

...Wages have risen, but so have food prices, despite partial controls...

...Now 75 per cent of unionized industrial workers are members of the Federation of Sandinista Workers, and the rest are split among two non-Sandinista leftist bodies and two opposition unions affiliated with the American Institute for Free Labor Development (an anti-socialist group created in the 1950s by the CIA, AFL-CTO, and several multinational corporations...

...Campesinos still ask if there will be enough, but they are marching with the revolution...

...But those who are with the revolution have a majority...

...Their proposals must be passed by the Council of State, a body of delegates from political and economic groups including the Sandinista Front, allied and opposition parties, unions, business associations, and the women's association...

...The revolution incorporates many people from different sectors," she says...

...Nonetheless, Jose Antonio and most of these workers and their families are marching with the revolution...

...If a man, for instance, was wearing a Lee denim cap, or a Caterpillar tractor cap, or even a Yankees baseball cap—all of them badges of membership in the Nicaraguan working class—he was uncannily likely to be "marching with the revplution...

...Poco a poco-little by little-they hope to gain a better diet, a doctor, a day-care center Cuban allies or no Cuban allies, the Sandinistas embody first of all the hopes of the have-nots...

...So I made a nuisance of myself among the campesinos, pressing them to tell me their feelings about the Cubans—especially the 2,000 primary school teachers whom our government and the Nicaraguan opposition insist are agents of indoctrination...

...Foreign Minister Miguel d'Escoto, a priest, once edited the Maryknoll Order magazine in the United States, and the Minister of Culture, Father Ernesto Cardenal, is a world-famous poet who organized a communal Christian peasant society on an island in Lake Nicaragua...

...I can leave my children now with the teachers, trusting that they're in good hands, so I can go to work too and earn some money, with a machete, clearing the fields for planting...

...Yes, I was afraid...

...It is needed, they say, to conserve scarce funds for social services and basic investment in the war-torn economy...

...They have gained literacy, schools, and the Rural Workers' Association, the first workers' organization ever in these parts...

...Usually it is a change in an old Somoza labor law...

...Each has its divisions...

...Popular radical reformers, mostly Marxists of some stripe, head the government...

...He noted advances in literacy, the cleanup of damage from the 1972 earthquake, the increase in steady work, and the decline in government corruption...

...The union has brought shorter hours, sick leave, vacation pay, and better living facilities...

...Perhaps more important is its resistance to becoming another Chile...

...The land title ceremony was addressed by Jaime Wheelock, a thirty-four-year-old guerrilla commandante and Minister of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform...

...The question so often posed about Nicaragua is whether or not it will become another Cuba...

...residents invited by the Nicaraguan Rural Workers' Association—the Sandinistas' agricultural union that represents workers on both state and private farms...

...He recited the "genealogy" of the lands, many of them once held by small and middle-sized peasants who lost them to debt or outright seizure by the National Guard...

...And many times, as I say, I was struck by the way their characterizations of the ongoing San-dinista revolution matched their clothes...

...Finally, I pressed a farmworker who had picked cotton with Cuban teachers...

...But his feelings about san-dinismo were enthusiastic, even exaggerated: "The revolution gives us the chance to learn and grow...

...The political direction of Nicaragua is in the hands of the nine commandantes who make up the national directorate of the Sandinista Front...

...The radical wing of the Church is represented in the government...

...What are you doing here...

...Dick Cluster is on the staff of Dollars and Sense and editor of "They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee," a collection of essays on radical movements of the 1960s...

...He was a shoe repairman, and not given to parroting Sandinista party lines...

...Didn't he have some problems with the Cubans, with their different ideas...

...now more farms of a certain size are being taken over if the owners have abandoned them or are not putting them to use...

...What is surprising, to me, is how many liberal Americans who wept for Allende are now responding to the Sandinistas with so much criticism, and so little support...

...The radical reformers have been drowned in their own blood by military coups...

...Sandinista leaders say the ban is a lesser form of austerity, parallel to the greater austerity imposed on the upper classes through taxes and import and currency controls...

...At another cotton farm, named Ca-simiro Sotelo for a Sandinista killed in the war, I played word games with two children who had never met a non-Spanish speaker before...