Saga of Hope, Despair : A Family’s Decade of Sandinismo

When the Sandinistas marched triumphantly into Managua on July 19, 1979, Edgar Paladino and Lilliam Espino piled their children into the family’s Datsun pickup for a joy ride around the city, joining the mass jubilation at the dawn of a revolution.

A construction engineer, Paladino had once been jailed by the Somoza dictatorship, and his wife had been blacklisted for leading a teachers’ strike. For a 20-year-old son in the guerrilla ranks, they had turned their home into a hide-out, buried guns in the back yard and loaned the pickup for nighttime Sandinista missions. Elated now that the danger was past, they set out to work for a new Nicaragua.

“That day, all Nicaraguans knew what happiness was,” recalls Edli Paladino, a daughter who was 10 at the time. “That day, we were all Sandinistas.”

Politically Divided

Today, after a decade of Sandinista rule, the hope and idealism that united the young family have faded. Like their country, the Paladino clan is politically divided and economically drained. Looking back, they agree on little but how ecstatic they were that day the old order collapsed.

On the zinc-covered porch of their stucco home, where they bicker about politics in the 90-degree heat, Edgar, 56, and Lilliam, 52, are an odd couple of ordinary folks with a revealing family saga about everyday trials in revolutionary Nicaragua.

She was a liberal and he a conservative when they wed 33 years ago in a Baptist ceremony. Today, she quotes Che Guevara, the late Cuban rebel, to defend the Sandinistas, whose politics he now despises. A school principal with a penurious salary, she imparts revolutionary ideals of populist nationalism to her neighbors’ young children. He is a self-made craftsman whose work is his ideology, a man who quit his church to protest its Sandinista leanings.

Model of Endurance

In a country torn by Sandinista attempts at socialism, the U.S.-backed Contras and Latin America’s economic debacle of the 1980s, the Paladinos are a model of middle-class endurance. For nearly two decades they have driven the same used truck and lived in the same dimly lighted five-bedroom house in a neighborhood called Las Brisas, amid tropical fruit trees, iguanas and parrots.

Their seven children are dark, thin, warmly intense and articulate people who each share, to varying degrees, their father’s stubborn independence and their mother’s social conscience. But the revolution has shaped their lives in radically different ways:

-- Edgar Paladino Espino, now 30, made the switch from urban guerrilla to career Sandinista soldier and militante, the one Paladino committed for life to the party. His brothers were drafted to fight the Contras. The experience drove Mauricio, 27, into exile but transformed Cedric, who is 19 and still on active duty, into a fervent Sandinista.

-- Three daughters--Rosa Lilliam, 29, Ivania, 26, and Mewseth, 23--joined the Sandinista Literacy Crusade for six months of volunteer teaching to unschooled peasants in remote villages and returned with lasting bonds to the revolution. Edli, 20, who missed that mission, calls herself a “reactionary.”

The parents’ own sharp political differences have been softened by common personal values: the primacy of home life, their children’s education, respect for the conviction of others.

“Everyone in my family has done and said what he considers right,” Lilliam said on the porch one day recently. “We disagree, but the anxiety we have lived through has bonded us emotionally, sentimentally.”

Touching her husband’s shoulder, she added: “This revolution was made for the poorest--the workers, the peasants, the proletariat, not for us. This opinion of mine frightens Edgar, but we love each other, don’t we?”

“You sound like a Marxist,” he chided, with an affectionate glance.

Edgar Paladino Espino was a 17-year-old medical student in Leon when he was struck by the poverty there. “I could have closed my eyes and kept studying,” he says.

Instead, he began passing out Sandinista leaflets. As the uprising grew, he led armed holdups of delivery trucks in Managua’s slums to build the movement’s war chest. His brothers watched in awe, suspecting he was insane.

“I sent my son to become a doctor, and he graduated a guerrilla,” scoffs Edgar the elder.

On the day of triumph, the younger Edgar was too busy to join his family for the joy ride in the Datsun. He cruised Managua in a limousine seized from a National Guard colonel, rounding up collaborators of the deposed regime. Weeks later, he helped organize the Sandinista police.

An exemplary career followed: military training in Cuba, combat duty in an elite battalion, decoration for valor, high-level tasks giving political training to Interior Ministry troops and police. Twice in combat he suffered head wounds.

By 1986 he was exhausted. His two marriages had failed, and the pain of his injuries lingered. The ministry gave him leave to undergo surgery and finish his studies as a history major. He moved in with his parents and two sisters.

Edgar now earns money--more than his ministry salary--by helping his father on construction jobs. He also writes poetry criticizing the petty bourgeois values of the older generation. The son minimizes the contradiction.

“My father defines himself as an opponent of Sandinismo, but he really isn’t. He works on projects given out by the revolutionary state. In practice, he’s a collaborator.”

The elder Edgar Paladino’s illusions ended the very day of the Sandinista takeover. Driving home from the celebration, he was cornered by a Sandinista gang and told that his truck “belongs to the people.” After a tense argument, he kept the truck, but the Sandinistas have since intruded on his domain.

He quit teaching construction mechanics at the Technological Institute in 1983 when Sandinista students and Soviet, East German and Bulgarian technocrats took control, he said, and “tried to politicize the curriculum.” He stopped going to Baptist services in the neighborhood when the minister “started talking more about the comandantes than Christ.”

His business did well in the early 1980s as postwar aid came in. But as the Contra conflict squeezed the economy, government ministries founded their own construction firms to take a bigger share of the scarcer projects. Gradually, he laid off his 15 workers, staying in practice as a solitary consultant.

“Engineers were once the supermen of Nicaragua,” said Paladino, who earned his degree at age 40. “Now I work just to subsist.” The $200 or more he earns each month is about a third of his former income and must feed a household of six.

He survives by keeping his politics mostly to himself. He shuns the engineer’s guild tied to the right-wing opposition. When it was rumored that affiliation with a new, pro-Sandinista guild was needed to get government contracts, he became a charter member. He quit when he realized the jobs would come anyway, through younger, well-connected colleagues.

Reflecting on the decade, he said: “Getting rid of Somoza was the good part. He ran the country like a hacienda and treated us like peons. But it worked, it produced. The bad part is, Nicaragua has been set back 20 years.”

Mewseth Paladino was 13 when she hauled a sack of pistols to a guerrilla safehouse for her brother in 1979. But only after she donned the blue uniform of the Literacy Crusade a year later did she feel like a revolutionary.

Like three of her siblings and thousands of other city teen-agers, Mewseth first experienced Nicaragua’s rural poverty during the campaign. She also got a preview of the Contra war when anti-Sandinista gunmen raped three of her co-workers, prompting Mewseth’s evacuation from one mountain village to another. She taught 14 peasants to read and write that year, from primers glorifying Sandinista heroes.

“It was the best thing the Sandinistas have done, the only good thing,” said Mauricio Paladino, who took part but later became disillusioned.

The adventure made a deeper impression on his sisters. “I learned to love this cause that so many people spilled their blood for,” said Mewseth. “I became convinced the revolution will never die.”

Returning to school, Mewseth and Ivania joined the Sandinista Youth and the Sandinista Militia, taking weapons training after class each day. Ivania and her mother worked at night in an adult education campaign.

At first the girls’ father encouraged them, driving to visit the villages where they taught in 1980. But later their activism irritated him. Ivania took part in a 1983 Sandinista congress that gave students more control of the universities, a cause that soured him on teaching.

“We stopped talking politics with him,” Ivania said. “We had to sneak out of the house to do anything political.” Eventually, Ivania and Rosa Lilliam married Sandinistas--with their father’s blessing--and moved out.

The Contra war hit home in Las Brisas with the compulsory draft. Jaime Mojica, a friend of the Paladinos, was conscripted and came back in a coffin. President Daniel Ortega sent a wreath, but Mojica’s family dumped it in the street. Feelings against the draft ran high in rich and poor neighborhoods alike. The Paladinos accepted it, painfully.

Mauricio Paladino was drafted in February, 1984, when troops raided the university. A Sandinista classmate, his boyhood nemesis, fingered Mauricio, and off to the army he went. His bewildered parents searched 22 days before finding him on duty at a tank regiment beside a volcanic lake, then wept for joy.

A harder separation was to come. On Nov. 4, 1984, Mauricio’s superiors handed out ballots and ordered the unit, then stationed in Ocotal, to vote in that day’s national elections. Mauricio complained aloud that the ballots were already marked for the Sandinista candidates, declaring bluntly, “I’m not voting for you!”

Mauricio believes that what happened eight months later was retaliation for his outburst. As he slept, his rifle vanished. Someone scratched “Viva el FDN” (the Contra army) on the handle. The next day, an officer confronted him and “I was put in detention like a Contra.”

Fearing a long prison term, he escaped and took a bus home, bribed an army clerk with $11 for discharge papers and rode another bus to Honduras. With $550 from his father, a fortune for the family, he paid a guide to smuggle him from Tijuana, Mexico, across the California border on New Year’s Eve, 1985.

Mauricio gained political asylum and now lives with an aunt in Downey, Calif. He earns $7 an hour as a soil testing specialist at an engineering firm, drives a 1985 Toyota and sends home $50 a month. “The Sandinistas have formed their empire,” he said in a telephone interview. “I think I’ll die here.”

The 1984 election that kept the Sandinistas in power gave a measure of the Paladinos’ diverging views. Like Mauricio, his father abstained, and Cedric was too young to vote. Four children and their mother, who counted ballots at the neighborhood polling station, voted for Daniel Ortega. Edli, 16 then and barely eligible to vote, cast her ballot for Clemente Guido, the conservative runner-up.

Rosa Lilliam Paladino is married to Rene Guido, a one-time Sandinista Youth activist and son of the opposition candidate. Her children posed with their grandfather in 1984 campaign ads, but she voted for Ortega.

Since then, the near-collapse of the economy has tested the revolutionary faith of Rosa Lilliam and Ivania. Each dropped out of Sandinista activities and struggled to raise three children on incomes far below those of their parents. Both interrupted university studies.

Unassembled Home

In 1986, Ivania and her husband, an acclaimed young artist who lives by the sporadic sales of his paintings, obtained a plot of land and the walls and roofing for a prefabricated house. But the material is still stashed in her parents’ yard for lack of money to have it assembled. They are stuck in a rented house.

Rosa Lilliam scrimped to buy a tiny TV set on her husband’s $80 monthly salary as a government engineer. Last year it was stolen, and the policeman who recovered it tried to keep it for himself--until Rene got a court order.

“This kind of corruption abounds,” said Rosa Lilliam. “The vices are rooted in our society. But I still trust in the revolution. The president is trying. I don’t see how a change (of government) could make things any better.”

Too young for the insurrection or the Literacy Crusade, Edli and Cedric Paladino were indifferent spectators of the revolution. A year apart in age, they shunned the Sandinista Youth and focused on their studies. Cedric idolized his oldest brother--as a boxing champion and chess player, not as a war hero.

Then the army drafted Cedric in February, 1988, his fourth year of high school, offering a rite of passage from pampered adolescence to revolutionary manhood--or martyrdom.

That month the Contras’ U.S. military aid ended. But the war has been slow to fade, and Cedric’s hunter battalion sees its share of combat. Of 50 draftees who began the two-year tour with him, all but four have died or dropped out.

“I’ve been in the service 20 days, and I feel very lonely,” he wrote early on in his diary. “Every day is harder, but I think I’m adjusting.” Six weeks later he penned: “Felix left, and Rommel deserted. Now I’m alone, without friends.” Felix worked in the president’s office and was allowed to return to his job.

Cedric went home on a 10-day leave last September. His family tried to arrange his transfer to a noncombat unit but failed. After intense reflection, he went back to the war front. He joined the Sandinista Youth branch of his battalion, became a platoon leader and now gives political lectures to his peers.

In an emotional reunion with his mother and two of his sisters last month, in a northern village where the battalion was camped, Cedric announced his motto: “The days of sacrifice pass, but the joy of having triumphed lasts a lifetime.” Then he added: “Don’t worry, Mama, war is not what you think. The Contras are terrified of us. They don’t fight, they run.”

Edli was astonished by her brother’s conversion and told him so.

“When (the Contras) kill me, you’ll wake up too,” he said.

Edli: “No, I’ll be more reactionary. I’ll say you died because of the draft.”

Cedric: “The draft doesn’t kill. Did the draft put a bullet in our brother’s (Edgar’s) head? No. It was the Contras, those assassins!”

Edli: “They’ve brainwashed you.”

Cedric: “I’m not some ignoramus who can be brainwashed.”

Edli: “Then they fooled you. . . . In Managua you never talked this way.”

Cedric: “Look, I’d never slept in the mud, never eaten wormy mangoes, never gone a month without taking off my boots, never felt the fear of getting shot. I’m getting a social conscience, a human conscience. When I come home . . . I’ll straighten all of you out!”

In 1970, Lilliam Paladino made speeches against the Somoza regime for trying to “bury” her profession. Striking teachers were demanding 30% raises from “miserable” salaries of $120 a month. When the protest failed, Lilliam and other union leaders were banished from public schools.

Today Lilliam earns $18 a month as a principal, and teachers make less. Yet when hundreds of her colleagues defied their pro-Sandinista union with a wildcat strike last May, she backed the government’s hard line. Raises were limited to 14% plus subsidies for food, bus fare and housing.

The difference between then and now, she insists, is fundamental, saying that “we are in a revolution” that tries to extend education to the poor. “And revolutions must pass through difficulties,” she adds.

“Esteemed companeros ,” she told a Teachers Day assembly at her school last month, “you are the ideological pillars of the revolution. You deserve love and respect. But don’t forget that the limitations (on salaries) are a product of North American aggression.”

That assertion, which Lilliam sincerely believes, points to the riddle of the Nicaraguan conflict: Is the country’s steep decline rooted in a fatally flawed revolution or the U.S. attempts to destroy it?

The debate goes on quietly these days, in the Paladino home and countless others, on a dramatic personal level: whether to abandon Nicaragua or to stay.

Edli Paladino sees her family sliding into poverty and longs to leave. From the porch, she points up and down the block at the homes vacated by neighbors.

“The Jimenez house on this corner, some Cubans live there now. Fresi, who lived just over there, her family got dollars for the house and left. The Alfaros too, all gone to ‘Paradise,’ as they call Miami. Dona Tere and her daughters, the Sacasas. Even Manolo Jarquin, who fought with my brother (against Somoza) and was so Sandinista. That shocked me.”

Six months ago, when the government laid off 30,000 workers and slashed public spending, the elder Edgar Paladino said he “almost threw in the towel.” The family discussed an ambitious plan to sneak into California illegally. “We would leave by July to join Mauricio,” Edli said. “Mama would stay behind with one of us until Cedric finished the service, then sell the house and follow.”

The plan was shelved when Edgar got some unexpected construction jobs and Lilliam had second thoughts. “It was a crazy idea,” she said. “I can’t work there. Here I have my house, my job, a plot in the cemetery. Besides, when the aggression ends, when we can work in peace, everyone will live better.”

“That’s an illusion, dear,” her husband said. “If 1984 repeats itself and the Sandinistas win again next year, it will be time to take off. Life here will be impossible, worthless.”