Towards the close of Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge – faced with a miserable Mexican exile, and oppressed by the spread of totalitarian ideas – offers a number of reflections on the fate of the betrayed Russian revolution and the ‘socialist experiment’:
It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only Bolshevism also contained many other germs – a mass of other germs – and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is this very sensible?
I went to Nicaragua, as I had gone to Cuba, Angola, Zimbabwe, Grenada and other such loci, not as a tourist of revolution but as an amateur biochemist. How were the bacilli doing? What germs were emerging as the dominant strain? In other words, would Nicaragua turn into another example of frowsty barracks socialism, replete with compulsory enthusiasm, affirming only the right to agree?
I went to Nicaragua determined not to come away saying things like, ‘You have to remember the specific conditions – the blockade, the sabotage, the CIA . . .’ The Sandinistas make large claims for a revolution in liberty – socialism with a human face – and for a new kind of American state that fuses the best of two opposing world systems. This time, they seemed to say, would be different. It didn’t seem patronizing to take them up on it.
Managua is a famous hell-hole that, with its sprawling barrios and its crass, nasty Intercontinental Hotel, combines the worst of the Third World and the tackiest of the New. In between – nothing much. Until the Sandinistas cleared the rubble from the 1972 earthquake, there were the beginnings of an urban jungle in the real sense. Lianas and creepers were everywhere, and there was the exciting prospect that snakes, parrots and pumas would move in to midtown. How like the Macondo of Márquez that would have been – what stirring copy.
But they don’t tell you how beautiful the country is outside its capital. In the interior there are cool colonial verandas and courtyards, mountain resorts, lava plains, jungles and forests. Nicaragua is a caesura between the Atlantic and the Pacific, precariously built on an earthquake fault. The great volcano at Masaya, with its enormous crater full of swirling green parrots, makes such a hypnotic inhaling noise that the Spanish conquerors put up a huge cross to ward off the breath of the Evil One. This is a land of miraculous virgins and frantic rumours. Tranquility is found only on the shores of the giant inland ocean of Lake Nicaragua, where Pablo Antonio Cuadra wrote his Songs of Cifar and The Sweet Sea – the lake is the Aegean of his Odyssey – and where the fishermen do their millennial stuff. This is also where various American adventurers of the last century planned to build the first isthmian canal, and incorporate Nicaragua as a slave state into the Union. Not far from the lake and the volcano is Monimbo, an Indian town where, in legend and in fact, the insurrection against Somoza and the Americans began.
Nicaragua has always impelled its writers into politics, or exile, or both. Ruben Dario had to leave the stifling backwardness of the country in order to conduct his experiments in modernism. The novelist Sergio Ramirez spent much of his life in Berlin. The poet Rigoberto Lopez – seeing no future at all – killed the elder Somoza in what he must have known was a suicide attack. It is perhaps no surprise that the last Somoza held the intelligentsia in such utter contempt that he succeeded in fusing its writers and intellectuals into a united front opposed to his rule. But when the Somoza dynasty collapsed, the unity it inspired disintegrated as well. It followed, I felt, that the writers in Nicaragua might turn out to be an especially sensitive register of the country’s affairs, and I ended up spending most of my time there talking to two men, Sergio Ramirez and Pablo Antonio Cuadra, at one time friends and still mutual admirers, who between them exemplify the depth of the Nicaraguan revolution and the intensity with which its failings are felt. Ramirez, the nation’s leading novelist and one of the few non-uniformed members of the Sandinista directorate, serves as Vice President to Daniel Ortega and was the founder of Los Doce, the Group of Twelve which mobilized civilian and intellectual support for the revolution. His novel Te dio miedo la sangre? (Were You Scared of the Blood?) is published in English as To Bury Our Fathers. Pablo Antonio Cuadra is a poet who also publishes the review El Fez y La Serpiente (The Fish and the Snake) and edits the literary supplement of the right-wing anti-Sandinista news-sheet La Prensa. A disillusioned ex-supporter of the Somoza family, Cuadra counts himself a supporter of the 1979 ‘Triumph’, which he now regards as a revolution betrayed.
Sergio Ramirez was acting President on the night that I saw him, because Daniel Ortega had winged off to Moscow. Our five-hour conversation was interrupted only three times – twice by calls from Ortega and once by an earth tremor which first removed and then replaced the smiles on the faces of the guards. I, who knew no better, decided to take their relative insouciance at face value. Ramirez, on the other hand, sprang to his feet and ordered the doors thrown open. In an earthquake zone, you are ever ready for the moment when you may have to stand under the lintel. Also, a door temporarily shut can become a door permanently jammed. The two threats of an earthquake framed our discussion in other respects, if only by analogy: like every Sandinista, Ramirez expects that one day the Yanquis will bring the roof down; and, like most visitors, I wanted to know whether some of the ‘temporary expedients’ – censorship, informing and conscription – would harden into features of a permanent system.
Considering that Ramirez was, as acting President, speaking on the record in a week when the White House had announced economic sanctions against Nicaragua, he displayed considerable candour and scepticism about the course of the revolution. But so, sometimes, does Fidel Castro (who also likes late-night sessions with foreign guests). ‘Before the “Triumph”,’ Ramirez recalled, ‘there were many discussions about writing and culture. We felt that we might have the first opportunity really to test ourselves in a society where writers have always had a role. But there was a temptation to develop a “line”, and I call it a temptation because of the old idea that art should “serve”. We knew of the negative experiences of other socialist and Third World countries. We decided, instead, on a policy of complete creative freedom.
‘At our first assembly of writers in the national palace I made, and later published, a speech. I warned that we don’t need a recipe for writing. I don’t mind experiments by our “workshop” poets, though there is a risk of doggerel. The result of an individual’s intimate work, though, must not be despised.’
I saw what he meant about the workshop poets, when I came across a stanza by Carlos Galan Pena of the Police Complex Workshop, writing to his beloved Lily:
you and I are the Revolution
and I am filled with my work
and you spend hours and hours
. . . in the office of propaganda.
The most that can be said of this is that Ernesto Cardenal’s Ministry of Culture is encouraging people who have never thought of themselves as writers before.
I ask Ramirez about the dismal situation of the writer in Cuba, most notably the persecution of the poet Heberto Padilla. Ramirez is rather cautious: it is ‘necessary to be present’ – involved – in a revolution; those who defect to the other side – as Padilla did in fleeing to the United States – have in essence surrendered. But Padilla is ‘not a bad poet,’ Ramirez adds, ‘and there are rights to which everyone, even those who criticize the revolution, must be entitled.’ Even so, it was interesting to learn that, during the first five years of the revolutionary government, he did not write at all: Ramirez – who otherwise describes his whole literary endeavor as a conscious struggle against the seductive influence of Gabriel García Márquez – was afraid during this period of producing a politicized or didactic prose.
I suggest that it is almost axiomatic that writing can only exist in a pluralist society, and mention Orwell’s remark that the imagination, like certain wild animals, is unable to breed in captivity. Ramirez agrees with enthusiasm: ‘We don’t censor the cultural section of La Prensa’ (revealing that they do censor the rest of it). He admires Milan Kundera, for instance, and cannot blame him for choosing exile over living under a military occupation. But Kundera is also ‘simplistic – totalitarianism doesn’t come only from the East’.
A totalitarianism of a different sort is evident in Ramirez’s To Bury Our Fathers, which deals with two generations of Nicaraguan life under the ancien régime. Ramirez claims that every incident in the novel actually took place, at least in the sense that oral history has established certain episodes as having ‘actually happened’, and the humour with which he accepts a reported event as fact is typical of a country that lives on myths and rumours. The brain of Nicaragua’s greatest poet, Ruben Dario, for instance – its dimensions were reputedly enormous, a ‘fact’ that greatly impressed the provincial minds of the time – has gone missing, and every now and then fresh gossip about its whereabouts goes humming on its rounds. And nobody knows where Sandino is buried. His body was interred hugger-mugger by the American-trained Somocistas who betrayed and murdered him, and ever since strenuous, fruitless efforts have been made to locate his grave (which may well be under the runway of Managua airport).
Rumour and myth are, however, also the most formidable enemies of the Sandinistas. The CIA manual written for the right-wing terrorists and discovered before the last US presidential election is obviously strong on such matters as assassination, the use of local criminal networks and the techniques of economic sabotage. But it is equally strong on spreading slander and alarm. Stories about Sandinistan orgies, or the nationalization of the family, are standard; one of the most illuminating, though, is the story of the Virgin of Cuapa. On 8 May 1981 a local sacristan in the town of Cuapa named Bernardo found himself in conversation with the Virgin Mary. In a succession of appearances, she told him about the suffering Nicaragua has had to endure since the earthquake: ‘If you do not change,’ she is meant to have said, ‘Nicaragua will continue to suffer and you will hasten the coming of the Third World War.’ Our Lady showed a shrewd grasp of contemporary politics, especially in describing the Sandinistas as ‘atheists and Communists, which is why I have come to help the Nicaraguans. They have not kept their promises. If you ignore what I ask, Communism will spread throughout America.’
This is of a higher standard than the usual Christian Democratic miracle. In its pedantic toeing of the US State Department line (especially the artful bit about the Sandinistas not keeping their promises) it outdoes Fatima in 1917 or the repeated counter-revolutionary uses of the blood of San Gennaro. Despite official attempts to dismiss the episode – the liberation theology faction has also denounced it as ‘bourgeois Mariolatry’ – the Virgin of Cuapa, in some sense, lives. She is a decisive weapon in the campaign to get peasants to join a vendée run by their former masters.
Ramirez smiles and admits that ‘as a writer, I of course believe in the Virgin of Cuapa’. The Sandinistas, in any case, possess what they consider to be a more potent icon: the spirit of Cesar Augusto Sandino, whom nobody in Nicaragua would dare oppose. Even his former enemies pay homage to him in their pamphlets and broadcasts, and one presumes that they would not bother to counterfeit a bankrupt currency. Disgruntled stall-holders who dislike the regime will tell you that, in spite of everything, they feel prouder to be Nicaraguan these days. One is, in vulgar terminology, either a Sandinista or – one of Sandino’s favourite expletives – a vendepatria: a vendor of the fatherland, selling off the country.
What is his government’s greatest mistake? There is a large repertoire to select from, he replies, but chooses to answer by way of an episode elaborated in his forthcoming book about Julio Cortázar. ‘On the day that we took over the American-owned mines on the Atlantic coast, Julio was with us. I wanted to show him what we had found. There were files on every worker. One, for example, was the file of a man who had laboured there from 1951 until one week before the “Triumph”. He was listed as having been fired. Under the heading REASON FOR DISMISSAL was the entry “Killed in an accident”. I can show you this surreal file and many others like it. They would sack dead workers in order to avoid paying compensation to the family. And we also captured the records of the “personal tax” that the owners paid to Somoza in order to get away with it. The relationship his regime enjoyed with the United States was indulgent to the point of carnality.
‘The mines themselves were worthless – another piece in the Somoza museum of horrors. The machinery was useless – fit only to be worked by the cheapest labour. Nationalizing gained us nothing. But we did it to show that an era had ended. It was an act of love as much as hatred. Maybe it was a mistake.’
In Chile and Argentina, he says, the middle and upper classes are a powerful social force, organized and capable of exerting influence. In Nicaragua, they are a mere shadow thrown by foreign influence, an ‘appendage of the United States’.
Vendepatrias, in fact?
‘I don’t like such simplistic phrases.’
‘Oh, doesn’t he?’ Pablo Antonio Cuadra, in his dingy office at La Prensa Literaria, talking about his old friend Sergio Ramirez (‘un bueno hombre de letras‘), dismisses anti-Americanism as a local contagion. Admittedly, the hemisphere is dominated by the United States, but it is too easy to blame the Yanquis for everything. ‘In any case, Sergio should be writing, not trying to be a politician. The FSLN have thrown away the revolution – the most magnificent moment that Nicaragua ever had.’ Cuadra is prepared to say that the situation is actually worse than it was ten years ago under Somoza, ‘if you omit his last few weeks of terror and bombing’ when he ordered his own capital to be strafed from the air.
How different would it be if the United States invaded?
This, he says, is ‘a horrible question. The Americans might negate even the original revolution. But to imitate the Soviet Union is the most macabre thing of all.’
More macabre than a Somocista restoration?
‘Sí. It is more difficult to remove.’
Nevertheless, Cuadra is not a particularly expert political observer. At one point, he was a nationalist, enthusiastically supporting the Somoza dynasty; towards the end of the Somoza terror, Cuadra wrote a defence of Ramirez’s literary faction, Los Doce, which got him into hot water. And when he finally gave his support to the revolution, he was seen in the worst possible light: a late joiner. La Prensa, the paper Cuadra now writes for, is a vulgar, sensational, superstitous right-wing propaganda sheet, publishing lies and distortions on a scale that even Western diplomats find embarrassing; it also carries Cuadra’s name on the masthead – under the sonorous title of ‘Don Pablo Antonio’ – as its director, together with Jaime Chamorro. The Sandinista party paper Barricada used to be edited by Carlos Chamorro, his brother. Nuevo Diario, the other leftist daily, is edited by Xavier Chamorro, another family member. Chamorro, Chamorro and Chamorro . . .
Is there not something inescapably political about Latin American contemporary writers – Neruda, Fuentes, Márquez, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, even Borges? Is this automatically unhealthy?
Not at all, he replies: every one of us has been politicized, and life itself is political. But very few of these writers have mixed their literary work with their politics – except for Neruda, for whom it was his downfall as a writer. Even Márquez keeps his polemics in a separate compartment. It is, in other words, not politics that must be avoided, but politicization.
Cuadra recalls the first assembly of Nicaraguan writers where Ramirez repudiated a ‘line’ or a ‘recipe’: ‘Cortázar was there and so was I. There were great proclamations about artistic freedom from Sergio and Ernesto Cardenal. I even had Cuban friends who said that this might have a positive influence in Havana. But within a year, Ventana was publishing Fidel Castro’s notorious speech to the intellectuals, saying that “nothing against the revolution was permitted.”‘ Ventana is the Sandinistas’ literary and cultural magazine – edited by Daniel Ortega’s wife, and described by Ramirez as ‘boring’.
Ramirez says that Cuadra is a great poet who doesn’t understand revolution. Cuadra says that Ramirez is a great novelist who has become intoxicated by politics. Ramirez and Ernesto Cardenal say that the restrictions on liberty result from the exigencies of war and blockade, and from the threat of invasion. Cuadra says that they result from a dogmatic, ideological tendency inherent in the FSLN. Ramirez says that Nicaragua will not become ‘like Bulgaria’. Cuadra grants that so far there is no imposed socialist realism, but points out that many of his contributors are asking to be published anonymously: there is a general tendency towards ‘the correct’.
It is possible to conclude rather glibly that both men are right, and that Nicaragua is becoming a hybrid or a compromise. Mario Vargas Llosa, for example, takes the view that the Sandinistas will become like the ruling party in Mexico, the so-called Institutional Revolutionary Party, which retains the lion’s share of power and patronage without acquiring a total monopoly. This sort of diagnosis – arguably true for the moment – treats a very volatile present as somehow static. Ramirez doesn’t want conformity and Cuadra doesn’t want the forcible reimposition of a right-wing dictatorship. Both men may be optimists.
In spite of the brave and, I believe, genuine aspirations of Sergio Ramirez, there are symptoms of an encroaching orthodoxy in Nicaragua. During our conversations, for example, he used the terms ‘one-party society’ and ‘closed society’ as synonymous. Today’s Nicaragua is, at least in the cities, a multi-party society. The posters and emblems of the Conservatives (who are really conservative) and the Liberals (who are not really liberal) are everywhere. Likewise those of the Communists. But it is also a one-party state. All the power worth having belongs to the FSLN; the broadcasting station and the armed forces are both officially called ‘Sandinista’. Foreign policy, despite some anomalies, is directed pretty solidly towards the Warsaw Pact. And in cultural matters, a sort of dull utilitarianism is creeping in. Even Ramirez is not proof against it. Denying newsprint to the opposition, for example, is due to ‘the rationing of scarce resources’. The unavailability of books and magazines, except from Eastern Europe, is due to ‘the lack of foreign currency’. There is some truth in these claims. But they are, equally, just the sort of euphemisms that led, through many false dawns, to the Zhdanovization of culture in Cuba.
On 6 April 1984, Ernesto Cardenal wrote to his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the Ministry of Culture, promising that censorship of opposition newspapers would end the following month when the elections began. It didn’t. Father Cardenal is a devout Catholic and was a friend of Thomas Merton (two qualifications he shares with Pablo Antonio Cuadra), and these facts are often cited, by observers like Graham Greene, as proof of Cardenal’s commitment to freedom and pluralism. Why not as proof of his readiness to believe anything – like his wide-eyed admiration of the austere absence of materialism among the Cubans?
In numerous respects, the Sandinista revolution is its own justification. Despite some exaggerated claims, the achievements in social welfare and education are spectacular and moving. So is the fact that, after half a century and more of tutelage, Nicaragua is no longer a mere ‘ditto’ to the wishes of the United States. But the only way to justify the gradual emergence of a one-party-state is by continual reference to the neighbouring fascisms and the menace of imperialist invasion. And I would rather leave that job to the cadres of sincere, credulous, self-sacrificing American youth who are everywhere to be found in Nicaragua (‘Look, man, the people care more about full bellies than about freedom in the abstract’). The Americans’ motive for being there is generally religious, and likewise their method of argument. I have seen this movie before, most recently in Grenada: Maurice Bishop abolished such independent media as there were, and then had no means of appealing to the people when his own turn came.
The contortions and ambiguities of the Left are familiar. What about those of the Right? Pablo Antonio Cuadra told me, almost visibly squirming, that the worst thing the CIA had ever done was to finance and train the contras, the Somocista terrorists in the north: nobody who has seen the contras‘ work can doubt that, if they came to power, they would emulate the ways of the military governments in Guatemala and El Salvador if they got the chance. And military regimes – especially in Latin America – are just as hard to remove as Stalinist ones. In addition, no regime in Latin America has shown an interest in social welfare or education or merely raising the economic ‘floor’ – the elementary subsistence level on which most people have to live the one life that is allowed to them.
This is why no conversation with a Sandinista lasts for more than a few minutes before coming up against the name of Salvador Allende. By allowing his murder, and thus by welcoming a dictator into Chile, Dr Kissinger and his confrères inadvertently educated a whole generation of Latin American radicals. Pluralism is now seen by many of them as a trap or a snare: an invitation to make yourself vulnerable, a none-too-subtle suggestion of suicide. Stand in the middle of the road, and you get run down. Did not Sandino surrender to his murderers under a guarantee of safe conduct? The fact that this argument can lead to disastrous results (as it did with Maurice Bishop, who used it all the time) does not diminish its force or its relevance.
And the Nicaraguan opposition does not believe in democracy. Its leaders will tell you so. The Cardinal dislikes the revolution because it promises free education and teaches Darwin in the schools (‘atheist indoctrination’). The rightist parties, and most of the centrist ones, are mostly organized around one caudillo, and say openly that they would be happy to come to power by whatever means available – by force or with the aid of a foreign government. Most deplorable in many ways are the American liberals, who have now voted to aid the contras to avoid being accused by Reagan of ‘appeasing’ the Communists. These people never thought of Central America as a ‘critical’ problem when it was a sweltering, superficially tranquil serfdom. To deem a country worthy of your attention – and, possibly, of your military – only when it explodes from misery and neglect: this is the highest and most callous form of irresponsibility. North American bien-pensants have more to apologize for than they can ever realize. As Victor Serge puts it:
A feeble logic, whose finger beckons us to the dark spectacle of the Stalinist Soviet Union, affirms the bankruptcy of Bolshevism, followed by that of Marxism, followed by that of Socialism . . . Have you forgotten the other bankruptcies? What was Christianity doing in the various catastrophes of society? What became of Liberalism? What has Conservatism produced, in either its enlightened or its reactionary form? If we are indeed honestly to weigh out the bankruptcy of ideology, we shall have a long task ahead of us. And nothing is finished yet.
What, then, of the bacilli? The healthy ones are still alive, and still circulating. As Ramirez said to me: ‘Without the confrontation with the United States, we could put Nicaragua under a glass bell and experiment in freedom.’ Or alternatively, as Cuadra said: without some of the pressure from abroad things might be proceeding further along the Castroite path. Both men are still free to speak, and both of their futures will be significant monitors of Nicaragua’s progress or its decline.
The critical, forensic finding seems to me to be this. Nicaragua has witnessed six years of revolutionary government, after half a century of the Somozas, and more than a century of humiliating colonial subordination. It has done so with hardly any acts of vengeance and without a massacre; capital punishment has been abolished, even though some Sandinistas now say they wish they had shot the Somocista old guard instead of releasing it to reincarnate in Honduras and Miami. Nicaragua has not avoided all the mistakes and crimes of previous revolutions, but it has at least made a self-conscious effort to do so. The Stalinist bacilli are at work all right, but they do not predominate as yet and there is nothing that says they have to. Perhaps one should beware, anyway, of biological analogies. On the shirts and badges of the American ‘advisers’ in Honduras is a monogram which pre-dates Marx and Lenin and, probably accidentally, has an echo of the elder Simon de Montfort. Emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, it reads ‘KILL ‘EM ALL – LET GOD SORT ‘EM OUT!’
