Seeking an Alternative to the Sandinistas

This spring, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) was rocked by the resignation of Moises Hassan. One of the FSLN’s most senior and dedicated members, Hassan joined the party in the 1960s, when it was little more than a cell. He played a key organizing role during the struggle against Anastasio Somoza, and, after the dictator’s fall, served on the first revolutionary junta. More recently he was the mayor of Managua. In April, however, the 46-year-old Hassan, citing irreconcilable differences with the Sandinista Front, announced that he was leaving it.

Hassan is not the first high-level official to desert the Sandinistas. Eden Pastora, the renowned guerrilla commander, left in 1981 to take up arms against his former comrades. Last year, Roger Miranda, a major in the interior ministry, defected to the United States and began collaborating with the Central Intelligence Agency. Hassan’s case, though, is much different. While souring on the Sandinista Front, Hassan has no intention of seeking its overthrow. Rather, he plans to stay in Nicaragua and remain politically active, helping, perhaps, to establish a left-of-center alternative.

Hassan embodies the rise of an important new force in Nicaraguan politics--individuals who support the revolution but not necessarily the FSLN. During a recent visit to Nicaragua, I ran into one disgruntled Sandinista after another. They included journalists, feminists, a radio announcer, a poet, even a taxi driver working in front of the Inter-Continental Hotel. Some of them had retained membership in the party but had grown disaffected. Others, like Hassan, had left altogether.

As long as Nicaragua remains under siege from the United States, these individuals--anti-imperialist to the core--shrink from saying anything that might lend comfort to the enemy. Now, however, with the war winding down and the revolution out of mortal danger, they are more and more willing to speak out.

Every Marxist regime, of course, has produced its own batch of dissidents, but these heterodox Sandinistas seem a breed apart. They are not like the Russian Mensheviks, who championed parliamentarism over Leninism, nor the Bukharinists, who favored entrepreneurs over commissars. They do not resemble the Hungarians of 1956, who hoped to drive out the Soviets, nor the Czechs of 1968, who sought to peel back socialism. The Sandinista dissidents are not social democrats. They wholeheartedly endorse el proceso, as the revolutionary process in Nicaragua is often called. Many, in fact, would qualify as hard-liners, supporting a tough line on the political opposition, strong controls on the economy and close supervision of the press.

What bothers these mavericks is not so much the FSLN’s ideology as its internal structure and style of operation. Nine years after taking power, the Sandinista Front continues to bear the stamp of its guerrilla origins. Distinctly military in cast, the party places a heavy stress on duty and discipline. Policy is set by a small group at the top, then is passed down the line to be carried out. Members are expected to perform their assigned tasks without complaint. And, at all times, Sandinistas are expected to conform to an austere moral code exalting such revolutionary virtues as selflessness, collectivism, modesty and abstinence.

Such regimentation does not go down well with Nicaraguans, a congenitally individualistic and independent-minded lot. No one better illustrates this than Moises Hassan. The son of Palestinian immigrants, Hassan holds Nicaragua’s only doctorate in theoretical physics, earned from North Carolina State University in the early 1970s. Returning to Managua, Hassan joined the faculty of the National University. There he lived a double life--one as a professor, the other as a clandestine organizer. During the late 1970s he helped build a secret Sandinista network in the barrios of Managua. His work was so impressive that, upon taking power, the FSLN named Hassan (along with Daniel Ortega) to represent it on the five-person revolutionary junta.

Soon after, however, Hassan’s career began a steady slide. In March, 1981, he was dropped from the junta and appointed minister of construction. Two years later, he was transferred to the Interior ministry as a deputy. Then it was on to Managua’s city hall to serve as mayor. The final blow came in April, when the FSLN carried out a major personnel shake-up. As part of it, Hassan was removed as mayor and appointed rector of the Simon Bolivar Engineering University in Managua.

In less than nine years, then, Hassan went from the heights of government to the obscurity of an engineering school. Explanations for his fall vary. Hassan’s admirers attribute it to his ingrained independence and outspokenness; in their view, the Sandinistas, by demoting Hassan, were attempting to get him out of the way. Others, however, say that Hassan never showed any real aptitude for government, that he could make much better use of his talents at an engineering school.

The switch left Hassan feeling bitter. The front never consulted him about his new post; in fact, it did not even tell him about it in advance. He decided to go public with his resignation--an extraordinary step for a lifelong Sandinista.

During an interview at his home in Managua, Hassan made clear that he had not suddenly turned into a civil libertarian. Sipping vodka-and-tamarind-juice cocktails in a comfortable, plant-filled courtyard, Hassan spoke critically of the Terceristas, the FSLN faction led by the Ortega brothers that is generally associated with a more moderate brand of Sandinismo. The Terceristas’ continuing effort to mollify the bourgeoisie, Hassan told me, “has caused the revolutionary quality of the front to suffer tremendously.” On international matters, Hassan remains active in PLO support activities; on a wall of his house hangs a photo showing Hassan embracing Yassir Arafat during the latter’s 1980 visit to Nicaragua. Clearly, Hassan has lost little of his fervor for the revolution.

He has, however, lost patience with the Sandinistas’ style of governance. To Hassan, the front has become too elitist an organization, its leaders too cut off from the people. The party, he believes, has grown too hierarchical and top-heavy. Aside from the nine comandantes on the National Directorate, he says, members find it almost impossible to affect policy.

Hassan is far from alone in such sentiments. The FSLN is a thoroughly heterogeneous organization, embracing not only professional revolutionaries but also Jesuit priests, liberation theologizers, feminists, bohemians, technocrats, even anarchists. Many of them find the front too rigid and imperious, too intent on regulating the lives--and thoughts--of its members. These malcontents favor a more open, diverse, let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach to revolution. Thanks to them, the Sandinista Front is forever in ferment, with people constantly passing through its ranks. By now, in fact, the party probably has more former members than current ones. (The FSLN has 24,000 members in all.) While some, like Hassan, leave voluntarily, others find themselves expelled--”excommunicated,” as some call it.

As an example of the latter, consider the experiences of Alan Bolt and William Grigsby. Soon after Somoza’s fall, Bolt, a prominent cultural figure in the FSLN, was named head of the National Theater. Over time, however, he grew frustrated with the party’s institutionalized notions of culture and its limited views of what was acceptable fare for the masses. Bolt eventually resigned his post and returned to his native city of Matagalpa, where he founded a peasant cooperative and experimental theater.

Bolt’s case sparked the interest of Grigsby, then the news editor at El Nuevo Diario, a staunchly pro-government newspaper. In early 1987, Grigsby--himself a member of the FSLN--assigned a reporter to interview Bolt. Bolt freely unburdened himself of his views, and when the interview appeared, it caused a furor within the front. Party leaders, furious over such a public display of discontent, promptly revoked the memberships of both Bolt and Grigsby. Grigsby subsequently lost his job at El Nuevo Diario as well.

“I still support the Sandinista revolution,” says Grigsby, who now works at a state-owned radio station in Managua. “But I have a different idea of how to do journalism (than do party leaders). I believe that criticism is intrinsic to journalism. Everyone, everything can be criticized.” Reflecting on his experience, Grigsby says that losing membership in the party was a “very hard moral blow. I grew up in the FSLN and still feel linked to it.” Grigsby’s ardor for the revolution is undiminished, however, and he remains determined to advance it outside the party. So, I asked, it’s possible to be a revolutionary without being a Sandinista? “Of course,” he replied.

Thousands of other Nicaraguan revolutionaries would agree. Until now, these frustrated Sandinistas have largely refrained from any independent political activity. With Nicaragua at war for the last six years, supporting the regime has been their first priority. Now, as the Nicaraguan conflict moves from the military to the political sphere, a new space may be opening up. Moises Hassan, for one, is considering getting back into the fray, perhaps as a candidate for mayor of Managua.