Reflections

...intelligence agencies and U.S...

...they are, rather, ecumenical radicals of the sort that dominated our own New Left in the 1960s...

...Total medical care is available to all without charge...

...It's the success...

...They took power themselves, disbanding Somoza's hated national guard and arresting some of its members...

...All these are hallmarks of a remarkably humane revolutionary regime...

...But about 60 per cent of the gross domestic product is still I turned out by private industry, and most of the private capitalists who did not send I their money abroad are functioning as they did in the past...

...The incidence of such illnesses as malaria and measles has been reduced by two-thirds or more, and no case of polio has been reported since 1981...

...Finally, there is an all-out military attack mounted with overt or covert American participation...

...They are not rigid ideologues, committed in principle to unremitting hostility toward the Colossus of the North...

...Housing conditions in Nicaragua, as elsewhere in Latin America, are abysmal...

...They had seen the center of their capital city, Managua, destroyed by a 1972 earthquake that claimed 30,000 lives...

...They had experienced a 25 per cent drop in their gross domestic product in the first year of revolutionary government...

...A third of the population is in school or attending classes to erase illiteracy—it has been reduced from 50 per cent to 10 per cent—or to upgrade skills...

...The attempt to maintain an open, pluralistic society has been marred by some failures, but I am persuaded that the Sandinistas are sincerely committed to democracy...

...But the Sandinistas refused to accede to U.S...

...Four political parties make up the ruling coalition, the Patriotic Front: the Sandinista National Liberation Front...

...They chose to support and even assist the Salvadoran revolution, to accept the help and friendship offered by Cuba, to increase their trade with France, Libya, Algeria, and the Soviet bloc...

...Yet Nicaragua is the only Central American nation currently increasing its real capital investment...

...An engineer at our Managua hotel works his regular eight-hour shift and then devotes an hour to teaching fellow workers who can neither read nor write...

...Anything that worked, we were for...

...It is repaying its debts, and has impressive plans for the future—if it is left in peace...

...The hope is that these minimal facilities will be expanded and improved as circumstances permit—a process called "progressive urbanization...

...For years, the brutal Somoza dynasty enjoyed Washington's wholehearted support as it amassed all but incalculable wealth at the expense of the Nicaraguan people...

...The government's answer is a program that awards families small plots on which to build their own homes...

...If Washington were as preoccupied with the welfare of the Nicaraguan people as Reagan Administration rhetoric says, it would embrace the Sandinistas and render them all possible assistance...

...Unless the Reagan Administration's ever more bellicose military actions manage to unseat the Sandinista government and devastate Nicaragua, the elections are all but certain to take place on schedule in 1985...

...I concluded that the Sandinistas have made—and continue to make—a genuine effort to carry out their program...

...armed forces mobilize, train, and finance counterrevolutionaries to conduct a campaign of sabotage...

...They promised to preserve a pluralistic society in which the freedom to dissent would be protected, to maintain a mixed economy in which private enterprise would flourish alongside public ownership, and to hold democratic elections in 1985...

...The Somozas left a national debt of $1.6 billion, and new debts of $700 million have been incurred in the last four years...

...The first act is to subject the offending nation to a relentless economic squeeze...

...Washington, probing to see whether the new regime in Managua was for sale, offered a $75 million loan...

...But every nation at war imposes censorship, and there is no doubt that Nicaragua is at war...

...There have been no cases of torture or killing by the police...

...The Sandinistas' transgression, unforgivable in the eyes of U.S...

...In the late 1970s, when it became clear that the Somoza days were numbered, the Carter Administration (in conjunction with Catholic prelates and Nicaragua's official Moscow-oriented communist party) tried to ease the last Somoza out of power while leaving the system relatively intact...

...It has been estimated that two years of revolution cost Nicaragua some $4 billion, taking into account capital flight, damage to the economy, lost income, and other social devastation...

...The Sandinistas made every effort to avoid an outright rift with the United States...

...The revolutionary Sandinistas would have none of it...

...Government to intervene...

...Though the Reagan Administration has tried to depict the Sandinista government as a vicious dictatorship, U.S...

...How can we hold one without serious preparation...

...The government provides credit, technical assistance, a communal water tap, electricity, a private latrine, and a school nearby...

...Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the editor of La Prensa, meeting with some twenty Americans who came to Nicaragua in July to maintain a frontier vigil and picket the U.S...

...The Sandinistas built 3,000 homes, but quickly realized that they could hardly make a dent in a housing deficit that amounted to 240,000 units in Managua alone...

...Nicaragua, with a population of less than three million, lost 600 soldiers in the first half of this year...

...They blame their shortcomings on the state of siege in which they have been placed by Washington's campaign of harassment, though internal critics charge that the pressures from the North cannot bear the full blame for what they see as a drift toward authoritarianism...

...At a meeting where land titles were awarded to members of twenty-three farm cooperatives, I met a young mother of four who boasted she was in school, just like her oldest child...

...By the end of this decade, Nicaragua expects to save about $100 million a year by replacing oil imports with new hydroelectric and geothermal facilities now being developed...

...The extensive holdings of the Somoza family have been nationalized, and banks and other financial institutions are now under public ownership...

...Left to their own devices—freed, that is, from Washington's determination to wreak havoc—they could turn this small country into a regional showcase...

...The task that confronted the Sandinistas when they came to power was to revive a devastated nation...

...Next, U.S...

...policymakers, was to assert a claim to national autonomy...

...Once it became clear that Nicaragua would no longer be a submissive satellite of the United States, Washington began turning the screws...

...sources in Managua—including backers of the Reagan policies—admit there are few political prisoners, except for national guardsmen captured during the revolution and recently seized contras...

...We are pluralists, both in our economic life and in our political structure," a Sandinista leader told me when I visited Nicaragua this summer, "because we always have had the practical task before us of destroying the dictatorship...

...conditions: They would not turn their backs on the revolution in nearby El Salvador, for example, nor would they reject Cuban offers of assistance...

...Though at least half of the country's Catholic clergy support the regime—and four priests serve in the government-Archbishop Miguel Obando is often scathingly critical...

...Sometimes Washington's tactics are crowned with quick success—as they were in Salvador Allende's Chile ten years ago...

...The object of these disruptions and assaults is to prove that revolutions don't work and that revolutionaries can't possibly deliver on their promises of a better life...

...Some 10,000 "contras," supplied, trained, and financed by the CIA, mount daily attacks along the Honduran border, and another force led by Sandinista defector Eden Pastora (Commander Zero) is attacking in the South...

...Despite the military emergency, I encountered many Nicaraguans who feel free to castigate the government—even in writing...

...Meanwhile, the promise to sustain a mixed economy has been kept: Exxon is still refining petroleum and Texaco is still selling it at the pump...

...Among these are the Conservative Party, which dates back to the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and the Trotskyites, who generally support the regime but have strong reservations about the mixed economy...

...After all," one official told me, "we have never had a real election in all our history...

...Sidney Lens is The Progressive's Senior Editor...

...I went to Nicaragua to see for myself whether the Sandinistas had managed to keep their promises despite the mounting pressures to which they have been subjected by the United States...

...Various commissions are making intensive preparations for the vote, and soliciting ideas from many other nations on how to proceed...

...Other parties openly oppose the regime or are, at best, lukewarm in their support...

...The record in health is equally impressive...

...In the economic sphere, the Sandinistas have scored some remarkable achievements...

...Instead, it is making every conceivable menacing move...

...They had made a revolution that resulted in some 40,000 deaths before it triumphed in 1979...

...I have no doubt that some of these acts of censorship were capricious and arbitrary, and that others were simply stupid...

...What I found most impressive in Nicaragua is an overwhelming sense of a government that cares about its people...

...embassy, displayed a number of articles that had been censored out of his opposition newspaper...

...Their political roots are not Stalinist, Trotskyite, or Maoist...

...And sometimes the outcome remains in doubt—as it does with respect to the Sandinistas of Nicaragua...

...the Nicaraguan Socialist Party, composed in fact of Moscow-oriented communists...

...a comparable loss for the United States would be 45,000...

...In the face of these dire circumstances, the Sandinistas devised a program that would, they expected, win broad support at home without alienating the United States...

...It isn't the failure of Nicaragua's revolution that has prompted the U.S...

...the Popular Social Christian Party, and the Independent Liberals...

...Sometimes they meet with repeated failure, as in the twenty-five-year campaign against Fidel Castro's Cuba...