A Ballad for Nicaragua--a Pitiful Place, Yet So Desired by the Powerful

The pitiless, ever-growing siege and blockade are not taking place because democracy does not exist in Nicaragua, but so that it never will. They are not taking place because a dictatorship exists in Nicaragua, but so that one may again. They are not taking place because Nicaragua is a satellite, a sad pawn on the chessboard of the great powers, but so that it may be one again.

Ever since it became clear that the Sandinista revolution was serious and that it planned to break out of the straitjacket of neo-colonialist capitalism, the system made up its mind to wipe it out. Since wiping it out is impossible, because it would imply the extermination of the majority of the population, the system tries to deform it at least. Deforming the revolution would be, in the end, wiping it out--deforming it to such a degree that no one could recognize himself in it. If it survives, let it survive mutilated, and mutilated in its essential parts.

The four points of the compass are regaled once more with the cruel story of another revolution that has betrayed its aspirations. This propaganda wears the mask of disappointment. Relief for cynics, consolation for deserters, alibi for the greedy: Let no one bother himself with the belief that change is a possible venture.

Nicaragua spends 40% of its budget on defense and police, but Nicaragua is at war with the leading power in the world. Uruguay, a respected democracy, spends the same percentage on its armed forces, much smaller than the swelling columns of militia and people’s army in Nicaragua, and it should be noted that no foreign power is invading Uruguay or threatening it on its frontiers.

“We are forced to die and we are forced to kill,” Tomas Borge, founder of the Sandinista Front, has explained. Armed resistance to aggression reveals painfully the collective dignity of a people forced into violence from without. And although it is quite true that the rules of war impose an inevitable verticalism, and in the trenches orders take the place of explanations, it is no less true that an armed people is a proof of democracy. The fact that there are 300,000 Nicaraguans, soldiers and militiamen, armed with rifles, some in exchange for a meager salary and the majority in exchange for nothing, shows that this strange Sandinista tyranny is not afraid to arm the people, who, according to the enemy, are anxious to overthrow it.

There is no government in the Americas or in Europe, democracy or dictatorship, that doesn’t feel authorized to propose, discuss and perhaps impose some kind of solution for the problem of Nicaragua, which is the same thing as saying the problem of Central America. One has the impression that when it took on the transformation of Nicaragua the Sandinista revolution brought about an unforgivable cataclysm that challenges the powerful and violates the law of universal balance: If it weren’t for Nicaragua, Central America would be enjoying peace and happiness, or at least would cease disturbing the good order of the world. Calling for a change is permitted, proclaiming it to the sky may even turn out necessary, but making a change, transforming reality, scandalizes the gods.

Everybody has been giving Nicaragua the democracy test. With or without a dictatorship, in most Latin American countries the people vote but don’t elect, and the ceremonies of official political life are projected, like the deceitful shadows of a magic lantern, over the background of an atrociously anti-democratic social reality.

Honest opponents, and they do exist, would have to recognize at least that during these eight years the Sandinista revolution has done the possible and the impossible in laying the bases of justice and sovereignty necessary for democracy not to be a castle in the air, not to be a pro forma tax paid to the reigning hypocrisy, a joke on people who have nothing and who decide nothing.

Nicaragua has put an end to polio and has reduced other illnesses, has vaccinated the entire population and has lowered infant mortality. For the first time in the country’s history the population has been taught to read and write--and not only the Spanish-speaking population. Since the fall of Somoza, Nicaragua has redistributed more land than all other Central American countries put together through a prudent but true agrarian reform that has limited itself to the expropriation of formerly non-producing lands and those that had belonged to the ruling dynasty. Approximately 5 million acres have been turned over to 100,000 families.

The people used to be very poor, and they are still very poor, but something, something essential, has been changed. Now, for the first time, they are doing something, and for the first time they believe in what they are doing.

Nicaragua is part of the Third World. Nicaraguans are therefore third-class people. From the point of view of the opinion makers, they don’t deserve respect: Third-class people are condemned to copy; they have a right to an echo, but not to a voice.

Not all the carnival masks in the world are enough to cover up so much hypocrisy. Those who deny Nicaragua bread and butter condemn her for receiving them. Those who condemn Soviet aid in the name of independence would do better to work for some other aid so as to broaden the freedom of movement of this young and besieged revolution.

Nicaragua is not looking for walls to hide behind, but it needs shields with which to defend itself. These words I put down here, which have nothing neutral about them, are an attempt to give some of that help, even though it be of small import. Ambiguity and fog have become fashionable now, and taking sides is considered a sign of stupidity or poor taste. But this writer feels a joy in choosing, and he confesses to being one of those antique creatures who still believe that joy gives meaning to the mysterious adventures of the human animal on this Earth.