Sandinista Frustration : Nicaraguan Isle: Home to Few Rebels

Here at the outer edge of the Sandinista revolution, where palms sway in the Caribbean breeze, a good revolutionary is hard to find.

The easygoing, English-speaking people of Corn Island just haven’t caught the spirit. By and large, they have turned their backs on la revolucion since it blew in from the Nicaraguan mainland like a tropical squall in 1979.

After 6 1/2 years of political work, the ruling Sandinista Front for National Liberation has only five card-carrying members among the island’s permanent population of about 4,000. Neighborhood-based Sandinista Defense Committees and other revolutionary “mass organizations” have been massively snubbed.

‘Free-Going’ People

“In Corn Island, the people they think different from the people on the mainland,” Hurley Morgan, head of the local government, told a recent visitor. “We didn’t have an insurrection or anything like that. The people here have just been free-going from ancient days.”

Grumbling about Sandinista policies and practices is widespread among Corn Islanders. Characteristically, though, there is no sign of anti-government action.

In contrast to the way it is on the mainland, opposition organizations are unknown here.

“People say you have to live with it, you can’t fight it,” Ducy Downes, a shopkeeper and former lobster fisherman, said. “You have to slide with the current. If you swim against the current, you will drown.”

Forty miles east of the Nicaraguan mainland, this former British possession is a perfect cliche of a pleasant Caribbean hideaway. Balmy breezes rustle through groves of coconut palms; gentle waves lap at sparkling beaches. From the porches of clapboard houses, spread out along sandy lanes, residents greet passers-by with a friendly “good morning” or “good evening.”

Sound of Reggae

In the evenings, Caribbean reggae music drifts from residences and rum shops, a syncopated symbol of how Corn Island differs from the Nicaraguan mainstream.

Most Corn Islanders are descendants of slaves brought here from Jamaica by English settlers around the middle of the 18th Century. Since the slaves were freed, in 1841, generations of Corn Islanders, with surnames like Morgan, Downes, Campbell and Quinn, have lived in remote tranquility.

They didn’t ask for a revolution.

“They just want to be the way they always been,” Elvis Downes said, “do as they like to when they want to.”

Downes, 21, thinks differently. He said he is one of the five members of the Sandinista Front’s “base committee” in Corn Island. Their goal is to bring the revolution home.

A slender man with an engaging smile above a clump of chin whiskers, Downes zips along the island’s lanes on an old blue Honda motor scooter, making his revolutionary rounds.

He returned to the island last February after two years in Cuba, where he was trained as a lathe operator. Since November, he has been the island coordinator for the Sandinista Defense Committees.

The previous coordinator left the job amid a scandal over missing committee funds. When Downes took over, he said, the few committees that had been started were defunct.

“There wasn’t anything,” he said. “I started from zero. None of them was functioning, because the people here in Corn Island are afraid of political and military affairs.”

Downes has been organizing meetings in different island neighborhoods, trying to coax people into the committees, trying to soften the militant image of the groups. He calls them Comites Pro Mejoramiento--Spanish for Pro-Improvement Committees.

Development Emphasized

He plays down defense, revolutionary vigilance and political formation--standard organizational themes for Sandinista Defense Committees on the mainland. Instead, he emphasizes development projects--neighbors working together to improve community living conditions.

In the meetings, Downes said, he explains to skeptical islanders: “Look, I don’t want you to think I’m coming to put a gun on you. I’m not coming to put a green suit on you. I’m not coming to put a politician in your head. I am just coming to get you to have the projects you want.”

Still, residents shy away.

Kinzer Campbell, 39, said, “I went to two or three different meetings. They explained their way of getting around.”

But Campbell did not join. “I don’t want to get into politics,” he said.

Downes said the Sandinista Youth, another of the mass organizations, has only 20 or so members. The Sandinista militia, which organizes and trains volunteer citizen-soldiers, has only about 60.

Conscription Suspended

In 1983, when the Popular Sandinista Army started nationwide military conscription, young Corn Island men began fleeing the island in boats, taking refuge in Costa Rica and the nearby Colombian island of San Andres. Facing the threat of mass mutiny, military authorities suspended the draft on the island.

“If they start calling people up, everybody leave,” said a young man sipping fruit-flavored sugar-water from a plastic bag in an island store.

Before the revolution, Corn Island was attracting increasing numbers of American tourists, and their dollars gave a welcome boost to the local economy.

In 1972, the idea of developing Corn Island as an international resort was reportedly discussed by Howard Hughes, the late American multimillionaire, and Anastasio Somoza, the late Nicaraguan dictator.

“What I heard was that in Somoza’s time, he was selling this island to Hughes, and Hughes was going to convert it into a second Vegas,” Morgan, the local government man, said. “That was the big talk.”

A Hasty Departure

After a devastating earthquake in Managua, in 1972, Hughes left Nicaragua in a hurry and never returned. Somoza, whose sumptuous weekend cottage on Corn Island was burned during the Sandinista insurrection, fled the country in 1979.

Since then, tourism on Corn Island has taken a dive.

The new government took over the main tourist hotel on the island when the American owners left. Now called the Isleno, which means “Islander,” the 17-room beachside resort is badly in need of repairs. Often it is almost empty.

Corn Island’s other tourist hotel, the smaller Morgan, is no better off. Like most buildings on the island, it badly needs paint and repairs.

“No paint, lumber, hinges,” said owner Roberto Morgan, 75. He has closed the hotel dining room for lack of customers and food.

“Sometimes you don’t have flour, sometimes you don’t have rice, sometimes no beans,” Morgan said. “Are you understanding the dissatisfaction?”

Many of the island stores are closed, or reduced to offering a few odds and ends when they are available. The two main restaurants have also shut down, one in 1979 and the other last year.

Transportation Problem

Supplies are scarce on Corn Island because of shortages in mainland Nicaragua and because of inadequate transportation to the island. Transportation problems also have discouraged tourists.

“People come here and they want to get back out--and no plane, no boat,” said Lewellyn Morgan, owner of a closed restaurant and a nephew of Roberto Morgan.

The government airline Aeronica flies old DC-3s between the island and the mainland, but flights are often canceled.

A ferry that used to serve Corn Island from the coastal city of Bluefields was often requisitioned by the Sandinista army. The ferry has not been seen here since last year, when it replaced a coastal ferry that was destroyed by anti-Sandinista guerrillas.

Boats belonging to Promar, the government lobster-packing plant on Corn Island, are now the main means of surface transportation to and from the mainland. Promar was owned by Somoza before the revolution. Two other lobster-packing plants, one owned by Americans, have closed.

It is illegal to sell lobster to anyone but Promar, which pays independent fishermen the equivalent of about 30 U.S. cents a pound. The price is as high as $6 a pound on San Andres Island, about 80 miles away. This difference in price adds to the discontent among fishermen, and more than half of the island’s men are fishermen.

Fisherman’s Complaint

Last year, many islanders protested bitterly when two lobstermen were arrested and jailed on charges of selling outside the government monopoly. Glenn O’Neill, who owns a 40-foot lobster boat, said the government is forcing private fishermen like him out of business.

“You can’t make it, man, you can’t make it,” said O’Neill, 40, as he sat on a dark porch at twilight, watching fireflies wink in a coconut grove across the lane. He complained that Promar supplies its own boats with lobster traps, gasoline and repair parts before making any available to private boat owners--who often get little or none.

“That’s why I say they want to get us out of business,” he said.

Corn Island’s other big economic activity is growing coconuts, which can be sold legally only at the official price. The price, a little more than one U.S. penny a coconut, is another source of grumbling.

Corn Island and a smaller island nearby, Little Corn Island, were once inhabited by Indians and were probably discovered by the Spanish in the 16th Century. English and French pirates frequented the islands in the late 17th Century. According to at least one history, the pirates enslaved the Indians, who soon became extinct.

The Mosquito Coast

Corn Island later became part of a British-held territory along the coast of Honduras and Nicaragua that was called the Mosquito Coast, after the Miskito Indians of the area.

Under the 1783 Treaty of Versailles and the 1786 Convention of London, Spain acquired sovereignty over the Mosquito Coast. But as Madrid’s grip on its American colonies slipped in the early 1800s, England moved back in. Corn Island became part of the “Kingdom of Mosquito,” headed by an Indian king under British protection.

Col. Alexander MacDonald, superintendent of British Honduras, decreed freedom for Corn Island’s slaves in 1841, in the name of Queen Victoria of England and King Robert Charles Frederick of Mosquito.

In 1860, Britain and Nicaragua concluded a treaty that ended the protectorate, making the Mosquito Coast and Corn Island a self-governing territory of Nicaragua.

Nicaragua took full control of the territory in 1890 but later ceded some of its sovereignty by signing a treaty with the United States. That pact, signed in 1914 and called the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, gave the United States exclusive rights to build a trans-oceanic canal in Nicaragua and to lease Corn Island.

Unbuilt Canal

The island was to serve as a rest area for canal construction workers and as a naval station near the canal’s Caribbean terminus. The canal was never built, and the United States never took possession of the island.

Before the Sandinista revolution of 1979, the big event of the century for Corn Island was the lobster fishing boom that started in the 1950s. Some residents recall with unrevolutionary nostalgia the prosperity brought by the lobsters.

“We are having a hard life compared to what we used to live with Somoza,” one former lobsterman said. “If anyone try to tell you they are living good, it’s a lie.”

This man, perhaps an extremist by Corn Island standards, said that only President Reagan now has the power to change the destiny of Corn Island and Nicaragua. Nodding to his 3-year-old son, he said, “He don’t have a future if Reagan don’t work fast.”