A Revolutionary’s ‘Fire’ Comes Down From the Mountain

Calmly, as if he were offering his grandmother’s favorite pan dulce recipe, Omar Cabezas served up the formula for a revolutionary.

“To be a revolutionary,” he began, “you have to love life. You have to have a little bit of craziness, a sense of humor, a lot of luck, a tremendous desire to live. You have to have a good political line with the people--a vanguard that will interpret in the correct way the desire of those people--and”--Cabezas smiled impishly--”you have to have a little bit of Don Quixote in you.”

Tilting at windmills, climbing mythic mountains, living a life as visionary as it is revolutionary . . . and dreaming, always dreaming: Is this guerrilla warfare that the chief political officer of Nicaragua’s ministry of the interior is talking about? Is this the Sandinista Front, the rebel group that rose to power in Nicaragua in 1979? Is this the insurrectionist movement whose opponents, the contras, President Reagan has praised as “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers”? Is this the government to whose opposition Congress has recently voted $38 million in assistance?

“Look, Sandinistas are described as terrorists, anti-democratic, repressing the truth, totalitarian and anti-church. It is said that we eat the saints.” Cabezas paused, taking a drag on an endless chain of cigarettes. Smoke swirled around him and he resumed: “They say that we are bad. I can swear to you that we are not bad people. The only thing they can accuse us of, and rightly so, is that we are dreamers.”

Certainly it was as an idealistic teen-ager, possessed by the simple utopian desire of changing the future of his country, that Cabezas left his Leon University studies to join the Frente .

“I trampled through the mud,” he writes in “Fire From the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista” (Crown: $12.95), the story of his life as a Sandinista guerrilla. “I was glutted with mud, spattered with mud; I cried in mud, sloshed through mud; sunk my head in mud; there was mud in every crevice of my body; . . . but I had something with me in the mountains that I never talked about. . . . You see, I wanted to live, because I went to the mountains with a fistful of ideals in my hand; I never let go of them or let them get dirty; and if I fell flat in the mud, when I pulled out my hand, there, tight in my fist, were those ideals.”

A Brush Fire

Cabezas’ book has ignited a kind of brush fire of its own. The first such Sandinista saga, the book soon sold 50,000 copies in a country of 3 million inhabitants, making it the all-time best-seller of Nueva Nicaragua, its Nicaraguan publisher. A three-chapter translation by poet Kathleen Weaver lit the interest of Crown editor Steven Murphy. “The chapters were so exciting as literature,” Murphy said. “If someone had told me it was fiction, I would have been interested as well.”

Earthy, witty, sensual, filled with the flavors and feelings that enveloped Cabezas on a journey at once political and picaresque, “Fire From the Mountain,” Murphy said, “was also important because of what is happening in the world. We saw it is as a topical story with a wide audience, largely because it is handled in such a personal way. You can’t say this is a political diatribe.”

“I am talking about my emotions,” Cabezas said through translator Noel Corea, “not ideology. I have not written a political manual.”

Stunned by Visa

Still, Cabezas and his North American publisher admit they were stunned when the writer/revolutionary was abruptly granted a visa to visit America. Cabezas is, after all, a highly popular Cabinet officer in a regime that the Reagan Administration openly opposes. At 34, small and darkly handsome, he is almost a central casting dream of the law-student-turned-insurgent. As fellow Latin American writer Ariel Dorfman observed, reviewing “Fire From the Mountain” for the Los Angeles Times, “Americans who read (this) story with an open mind may find it difficult to say, after finishing it, ‘This man is my enemy. This man must be eliminated.’ ”

But Murphy, for one, is either cynical or realistic enough to link the granting of Cabezas’ visa with Congress’ vote to aid the contras. “It came at about the same time,” Murphy said. “I guess they figured the Administration was getting enough bad press and didn’t need to be accused of withholding visas.”

Cabezas himself is of much the same mind, suggesting first of all, that since his visa was granted after Congress had voted the contra aid, “my presence here would not be an influence in either way.” Besides, Cabezas added, “If they didn’t allow me to come, perhaps the book would have sold even more, because they would have converted me into a more controversial person, and perhaps they would have made a larger market.”

At the State Department’s Office of Consular Affairs in Washington, Nita Novodvorsky said her agency’s visa office had “no information” about the Cabezas visa.

In any case, Cabezas said, it was smart diplomacy. “Look,” said Cabezas, “we have always allowed visas to Americans to visit our country: senators, journalists, congressmen, church people, students--and we would very happily give a visa to Ronald Reagan.”

In fact, Cabezas would probably be only too happy to host a visit from the American President. Of Reagan’s praise of Cabezas’ contra opponents, the Nicaraguan smiled, commenting, “Academic deficiencies, we could say. That must mean he was a very bad student in school.”

Without Ideology

Cabezas was something of a cocky student when, on a steaming-hot day during 1968 Holy Week, he joined up with the tiny, motley band that took to the mountains to fight the Somoza government. Though not entirely capricious--”we did have a little blood,” he said, explaining his father and three brothers were killed combating the Somozas--clearly it was not an ideological decision. Indeed, Cabezas writes, he became a Sandinista with idealism but with very little ideology. “I wasn’t a theoretician.” Rather, “it was more or less a question of manhood. I wanted to fight the dictatorship.” Politics? “Politics,” Cabezas writes, “gets you nowhere but into jail or the cemetery.”

Nor could the young Omar Cabezas, fighting mosquitoes and mountain leprosy, eating monkeys and equipped by now with the nom de guerre of Eugenio, have pictured himself as a writer. For that matter the book began not as a full-fledged manuscript but as a series of interviews by an American newspaper journalist seeking “some sort of oral history of the revolution.” One day, Cabezas remembered, “she came to my office with a folder and she said, ‘I have something to tell you. Commandante, you are an innate writer, and you have not found that out yet.’ ” Cabezas was astonished. “And she throws the folder on the table and she says, ‘Read.’ I read the three interviews, and a strange phenomenon happened. I couldn’t stop reading, I found it so interesting. It was something weird. I found I could write.”

Still, Cabezas blanched when she urged him to complete his memoirs. “I said to her, ‘You are a bit crazy. I can hardly fulfill the reports of my superiors, and you are asking me to write?’ ” Finally, Cabezas began to tape his recollections and ideas. A friend who was helping him left Nicaragua, “and then I found another amiga and asked if she would tape with me.” Here the tale sounds more romantic than revolutionary: “That is my wife now, Ruth Elizondo. She is Gata to me, my little cat.”

His book, he contends is less a diary of a revolutionary than a “compilation of the moments that stuck in my mind forever.” As to whether it is a page in Latin American history, Cabezas shrugs.

“Look, I am a normal person--” a pause, while Cabezas corrects himself: “What I wanted to say is that I am an average revolutionary. That I had a life, that I had a little piece of the history of my revolution, our revolution, that my own history is a little bit of the history of my country, and that the history of my country is as well a little bit of the history of Latin America, that I believe in the same manner that the history of Latin America will be written, and in a small corner my name will appear.

Sips of Ice Water

“But I am going to make a confession to you.” Cabezas leaned forward, by now having loosened his tie, interspersing puffs on his cigarette with sips of ice water. “I think that this happened, happily, because I did not set out to write a book. Because the truth is that in Latin America, several books have been written about revolutionaries. But they are very orthodox, very formal: They do not eat, they do not cry, they do not masturbate, nothing. Perhaps that is what has attracted people to this book. Other books about guerrilla fighters have not touched the human aspects.”

Crown editor Murphy describes Cabezas’ advance as a “good” five-figure sum. Published June 21, the book is already in its third North American printing. But Cabezas insists he is taking none of the profits.

“I have already donated the money to the revolution,” he said. “For the orphans of the war.” Again, Cabezas the idealist surfaces: “I do not want a single cent. I don’t need money to make me happy. I need only two things, for which I don’t need money: To have a people as beautiful as ours for whom to fight, and to have a woman as beautiful as my Gata to love and to love me.”

Inform the People

And besides, he continued, “For me, my dream is to inform the North American people, to counter the propaganda campaign that some means of communication in North America have mounted.”

But Cabezas’ book does ride a crest of sorts in North American interest in Latin American literature. Not surprisingly, Cabezas has some ideas on this phenomenon as well.

“It’s a crazy theory of mine,” he said, “and that is that the North American capitalists have negated themselves to the development of industry, technology, electronics, to the conquest of space, nuclear arms, MX, the Pershing missiles, and so forth. And in Latin America, they did not want to give us the technology. What they did was take the main brains out, so that we don’t have the big laboratories and all.

“And then, what we have is many men of letters, a natural compensation, if you wish.

“We have developed the verb,” Cabezas said, “and you have developed matter. Through the centuries, our verb is becoming perfect. And obviously, in your case, your arms are getting better.

“Besides the banana,” said Cabezas, “we give you ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ (by Colombia’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez).

“And now,” he added so immodestly, “we give you ‘Fire From the Mountain.’ ”