The phone rings suddenly in the darkness of pre-dawn Managua. Can I be ready in 20 minutes for a trip up north with some of the Sandinista commandantes? An hour and a half later, I’m in a small bus with a group of journalists. The announcer on Radio Sandino is exhorting us to defend the revolution, while a young woman hands out sandwiches, cookies and Pepsi-Cola.
Ahead of us, two escort jeeps bristle with automatic weapons. Off the road, a small boy tends a chestnut horse, but doesn’t look at the convoy. The radio announcer gives way to Marvin Gaye singing “Sexual Healing.”
Then we notice who is driving the Range Rover, directly behind us, with Nicaragua Libre license plate MAY S 177. It’s Daniel Ortega. He is the 38-year-old “coordinator” of the nine-man junta that has ruled Nicaragua since July 19, 1979. He’s driving almost casually, talking to others, gesturing languidly with a free hand.
“Anybody want another sandwich?” the young woman asks.
Forty-five minutes later, the bus stops abruptly. We’ve gone a hundred feet past an unmarked dirt road, and the driver has to back up. So do the two jeeps. Standing at the junction with the dirt road are Ortega, Jaime Wheelock, who runs the nation’s agrarian reform program, Joaquin Cuadra, chief of staff of the Sandinista army, and junta member Rafael Cordova Rivas. Ortega is moustached, wearing glasses, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a permanently disappointed way.
“They look like they’re about to take over a college dorm,” someone says, and of course we all laugh with the shock of recognition. The Sandinista commandantes are obviously serious men, survivors of combat, prisons or torture. But most of them are children of the ’60s; they’re the first successful revolutionaries in the world who grew up listening to rock ’n’ roll. In an important way, the overthrow of the 45-year-old Somoza dynasty wasn’t a victory of the Stalinoid cementheads of the Kremlin; it was the only true victory of the New Left.
We see more of this loose, casual ’60s style as the convoy moves up the dirt road and we come over a rise, glimpse three Soviet-built MI-8 helicopters in a field, and rows of barracks with soldiers lounging in the shade. A sign says: “The People of Sandino Are a Victorious Army,” but from a barracks radio I can also hear a Spanish version of “The Great Pretender.” Ortega strolls over to some officers and soldiers, and starts to chat. Wheelock stretches, smothers a yawn, removes his hat and ruffles his hair. Cuadra says something and Wheelock guffaws. This is not the way Charles de Gaulle arrived at an army base.
Then we are hurrying across a field to the helicopters, bound for a “Cara al Pueblo” - literally “Face to the People” — a kind of Sandinista town meeting. A man in civilian clothes, with the grave flat face of an ex-pug, slides behind the mounted AK-47 at the open door. We lift off.
For people my age, I suppose every green countryside seen from a helicopter will always look like Vietnam. On this morning, over this land, the resemblance was uncanny. Down there you could see deep thick jungle, miles of dense valleys winding through mountains. You don’t take that kind of country with gunboats or air strikes or rhetoric; you can only take it with infantry.
This was not yet Vietnam, of course; but almost every Nicaraguan I met here fully believes that Ronald Reagan will be reelected and then use some pretext to mount a full-scale invasion. So all over the countryside, in places where Augusto C. Sandino fought the United States Marines from 1926 to 1933, and where the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) fought Somoza’s National Guard from 1961 to 1979, the Sandinistas are stashing arms: machine guns, ammunition, grenades, mortars. Managua might someday soon be carpet-bombed into dust, but the Sandinistas are preparing to fight a guerrilla war in the countryside for the rest of the century.
On this slate-gray morning, we land in a lumpy cow pasture outside a small town called Matiguas. Ortega, Wheelock and the others have landed first, and they wait for us to join them. A line of kids appears behind a barbed wire fence separating the field from a gravel road. Ortega leads the way to the fence, starts talking to the kids. “Are you going to school? How are the teachers? What are you learning?”
Then an aide separates the strands of barbed wire, and Ortega and the rest of us duck through, and the first rain begins to fall. More kids arrive, as Ortega strolls to a small plaza, where trucks and soldiers are waiting. A young girl approaches Ortega with a covered basket of tortillas. He takes some, chats with the girl, the rain pouring down harder, cameras whirring, flashbulbs popping. It is clear now what Daniel Ortega is doing: he will be the FSLN candidate for president in the eventual election, and this morning he is running for office.
We pile into cars and trucks, and then there is a wild jolting 45-minute ride along the gravel road, nothing truly visible through the gray walls of tropical rain, and a sudden lurching halt. Campesinos wait on horses, along with more Sandinista soldiers, civilian officials, rural bureaucrats. And then two white horses are brought forward, and Ortega and Wheelock mount them.
There’s a moment of hesitation: Wheelock and Ortega look like city boys playing cowboy for a day, the SDS off to a rodeo, and then they start to move. For one absurd moment, it’s as if Sandino’s army had been resurrected, or we’ve entered a scene from “Viva Zapata.” Here they come, the horses’ hooves clattering on stone, and below them in the distance are the people of Rio Blanco.
I can hear their cheers through the rain. It’s a shameless act of theatrical hokum, but it works. Wheelock looks down at a lowly foot soldier from the American press and struggles to suppress a smile. It’s as if he’s saying: Could Fritz Mondale do this? Or the world’s master of the manufactured moment, Ronald Reagan?
After that entrance, everything else is anticlimax. Ortega makes a speech, but the wind blows his words around, and the rain falls harder, while the crowd hurries back and forth from the speakers’ stand to a nearby shelter.
From the audience, the questions are no airy abstractions. Where is the promised school bus? Why does it take so long to get our milk to market? When will you fix these terrible roads? Soldiers want to know why mail takes so long to be delivered, and why, if they can’t have leave to go home, their girlfriends can’t come to visit?
Ortega and the others give answers, and then it’s over, and on to the next campaign stop. The rain never ends, but the commandantes, who lived with rain and worse during the years in the mountains, look as if they infinitely prefer it to the weatherless offices of Managua.
It would be a mistake, of course, to think that the Sandinista leadership is made up of kids on a lark. Ortega was in Somoza’s prisons from 1967 to 1974, was jailed numerous times before that, and fought as a guerrilla during the last three years of the revolutionary war. His brother Humberto was also a jungle fighter (and is now minister of defense). His brother Camilo was killed in February 1978, when he was the only FSLN member to join the rebellious Indians in the town of Masaya. Daniel Ortega looks young, but he’s not playing at being a revolutionary; he is one.
He is also, of course, a Marxist. Unfortunately, to call someone a Marxist these days is to say very little that is precise; the present governments of France and China, Greece and Albania (among others) could be described as Marxist, since their leaders were certainly shaped by the theories of Karl Marx.
But Ortega and the other FSLN leaders have repeatedly said that for them Marxism is only one tool among many; the core of their revolution is Sandinismo. This vague doctrine boils down to an absolute insistence on the sovereignty of Nicaragua. Sandino himself said it this way in 1928: “What motivates us is the desire that the Yankees not have a pretext for continuing to tread upon the soil of our Fatherland, and [the desire] to prove to the civilized world that we Nicaraguans ourselves are capable of solving the problems of a free and sovereign nation.”
During the revolution, Ortega was a leader of the Terceristas — or Third Force — the segment of the FSLN that was least dogmatic, most broadly based. He is believed to be among the more moderate, pragmatic members of the leadership. But at a casual airport press conference after the trip to Rio Blanco, he said that Nicaragua must have combat airplanes to defend its airspace against reconnaissance flights that are giving logistical aid to the contras. He would get the planes from France, he said, or from the Soviet Union, or from whoever else would sell them to Nicaragua. But he would get them.
After that discussion, the few reporters walked out through the airport lounges, where Crosby, Stills and Nash were singing about Marrakesh. Two weeks later, Daniel Ortega was in Moscow.
The Church of Santo Domingo de Guzman was consecrated on May 4, 1963, but on this bright Sunday morning, as well-dressed people filed into pews for the 11 o’clock Mass, the building felt much older.
The altar was all wood and white cloth, with painted plaster statues of the risen Jesus and a serene Mary. At the foot of the altar stood a huge carved wooden chair, flanked by chairs of diminishing size. This was a church in the old style, serene as Sunday morning, marred only by the round fluorescent lights attached to the wood-panel ceiling.
To the right of the entrance there was a confessional booth upon which was fixed a permanent sign: EXCMO SENOR ARZOBISPO METROPOLITAN MONS MIGUEL OBANDO BRAVO. How extraordinary: In this small church, wedged on a breezy hill above the American and the Soviet embassies, every sinner had the chance to confess his failures of flesh and will to one of the most powerful men in Nicaragua. For this was the church of Managua Archbishop Obando Bravo, the acknowledged leader of the opposition to the Sandinista revolutionaries.
“If he were the candidate in the elections,” says Conservative leader Mario Rappaccioli, “he would get 80% of the vote, no contest.”
Since 1980, Obando Bravo has warned his flock against the “totalitarian” drift of the revolution, opposed the military draft, urged the Sandinistas to bring the contra leadership into the government. The Sandinistas have reacted in varying degrees of contempt and rage. But their slogan — “between religion and revolution there is no contradiction” — acknowledges their fear of Obando’s potential for trouble.
On this day, two thirds of the archbishop’s parishioners were female, and seven of these polite, oddly sad women wore pearls. They also wore dresses of muted blues and grays, sensible shoes and expressions that were more baffled than defeated. In Marxist caricature, they were, of course, the hated bourgeoisie, vicious exploiters of the poor, grubby materialists whose souls longed for permanent salvation in Miami. But Nicaragua is not Cuba; there are no mobs scaling the walls of the Peruvian Embassy, no long waits for exit visas; anybody who wants to leave can leave. These people have chosen to stay.
On this day, a young four-piece band in yellow long-sleeved shirts played at the front of the church. They were very good, but all eyes were on the archbishop. He entered forcefully, a squat compact man with gold-rimmed glasses, garbed in purple and scarlet. Everything about him was blocky: hands, features, feet, body, even the powerful tuneless bass in which he did some singing. During the hand-clapping up-tempo tunes, Obando’s mouth remained sealed; he would sing only one chorus of “Glory, Glory Hallelujah” through the long morning service.
His sermon was unremarkable, a reflection on Pentecost, an expression of mild bafflement about why his efforts to end the contra war had been so misunderstood, a prayer “for those in prisons, for those who are fighting.” His tall peaked archbishop’s hat was secure upon the blocky head; he dispensed Communion with paternal ease.
When the Mass ended, his flock walked out into the sunshine, whispering, murmuring, failure clinging to them like dandruff on a suit. I saw only one peasant family in the church: a man with a brown hawklike Indian face, his wife, his children. They sat in the last pew and didn’t leave until the last station wagon door had slammed.
Later that day, I went to Mass at the Church of Santa Maria de Los Angeles, a low circular building in the heart of a slum called El Riguero. The 1972 earthquake that moved Archbishop Obando from the ruined cathedral to Santo Domingo also destroyed the old church in El Riguero. This new church is the replacement, and it’s not yet finished. One huge mural on the far wall remains incomplete, but against the back wall are murals of what is called here the “Church of the Poor” or “The People’s Church.”
We see Jesus portrayed as a revolutionary, Sandinistas battling oppression, a portrait of Gaspar Garcia Laviana, a Spanish priest of the Sacred Heart who went off to the mountains in 1977 to fight with the FSLN. His farewell letter to his parish sums up for many the Christian roots of the Nicaraguan revolution:
“The Somoza system is a sin, and to free ourselves from oppression is to free us from sin. With my gun in my hand, full of faith and love for my Nicaraguan people, I will fight to my last breath for the coming of the kingdom of justice in our homeland, that kingdom of justice that Messiah announced to us under the light of the Star of Bethlehem.”
Garcia Laviana was killed in combat in 1978, and his name was remembered fondly during a brief talk at these evening services by the Rev. Uriel Molina. This remarkable priest, a native of Matagalpa, is one of the best-known exponents of the “option for the poor,” which motivates the pro-Sandinista movement in the Nicaraguan church. He is of the generation profoundly shaped by the style and example of Pope John XXIII, by the reforms of Vatican II in 1962, and most importantly, by the calls for change that came from the 1968 meeting of Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia.
“The Sandinista front was born at the same time as Vatican II,” Molina once explained. “In 1965, my superiors sent me to the only house we had in Managua, in the El Riguero neighborhood. That was before the earthquake when the old Managua still existed, and El Riguero was quite far from Managua. I ended up there in a little church, with very poor people.”
Almost 20 years later, the people of El Riguero are still very poor, and there are more of them; the poor have been crowding into Managua, the birth rate is up and the death rate is down.
On this evening Molina conducted services in a plain white robe, accompanied by a nine-piece band, which alternated up-tempo tunes and melancholy revolutionary songs. The only obvious members of the bourgeoisie were some visiting foreigners. The people themselves were simply dressed in clean clothes, their children freshly scrubbed. Nobody wore pearls.
At the end of Mass, Molina remained beside the altar and slowly removed his priestly garments; he finished in a sports shirt and slacks and then began to talk individually to his parishioners. The moment was oddly moving, part of the process of demystifying the role of the priest and emphasizing his work.
For the priests of Uriel Molina’s generation, the most crucial theologian has been a Peruvian priest named Gustavo Gutierrez, whose use of Marxist theory led to his book “A Theology of Liberation.” In a way, this has been the most revolutionary book in modern Latin American history, a call for revolt against the traditional church alliance with dictators, land owners, army colonels and industrialists at the expense of the poor. Molina and others who have embraced liberation theology grew up in a state of rage caused by the desperate poverty they saw around them and the indifference of the church. Gutierrez said that the problem was “how to say to the poor, to the exploited classes, to the marginalized races, to the despised cultures, to all the nonpersons, that God is love and that all of us are, and ought to be in history, sisters and brothers.”
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, such present Sandinista leaders as Army Chief of Staff Joaquin Cuadra, Vice Minister of Interior Luis Carrion, agrarian reformers Roberto Gutierrez and Salvador Mayorga, among others, came to El Riguero to work with Molina, to learn from him, to share his “option for the poor.” Most were middle-class university students seeking a moral alternative to the repression and corruption of the Somoza regime. Defying the desperate pleas of their parents, most stayed for a few years, sharing the poverty of the ghetto, and then moved on to the FSLN. Certainly the experience deeply marked them all and remains critical to the philosophy of the Sandinistas.
Commandante Alvaro Baltodano once told journalist Margaret Randall:
“We read the Bible, studied liberation theology and discovered that if you really read the Bible with your eyes open, you find that the history of the Hebrew people is a history of their fight for liberation. When you read about the life of Jesus Christ you realize that whether he was or wasn’t God, he was a man who was with the poor and who fought for the freedom of the poor.”
The history of the split in the post-revolutionary church in Nicaragua has been turbulent.
The division was clearly seen during the visit of Pope John Paul to Managua last year. On the same day, he humiliated a kneeling Rev. Ernesto Cardenal (the priest-poet who is now minister of culture), and then ignored the mourning mothers of 17 Nicaraguan soldiers who had just been killed by contras. This led to angry chants in the Plaza of the Revolution of “Queremos la Paz” (“We want peace”) from the pro-Sandinistas and “Viva Obando” from their opponents.
The Sandinistas insist freedom of religion is guaranteed in Nicaragua. But as junta coordinator Daniel Ortega says, “When priests enter a political discussion, rather than a theological one, we feel we have the right and the duty to answer them politically.”
Obando insists, “we want a system that is more just, more human, that does away with the enormous gaps between rich and poor. But we believe that Christianity is enough to change the conscience of man and the conscience of society without the need to resort to Marxism-Leninism.”
The division remains.