WHEN BRECHT WROTE, ‘By chance I was spared. If my luck leaves me, I am lost,’ he might well have been referring to Nicaragua. In 1979, it was because President Carter was preoccupied with the American hostages in Iran that Nicaragua was spared the usual intervention when its people rose up against the tyrant Anastasio Somoza, of whom Richard Nixon had said: ‘Now that’s the kind of anti-communist we like to see down there.’
Exploiting their luck, the Nicaraguans went on, precariously, to lay the foundations of a decent society unheard of in most countries of the region. Indeed, they smashed the stereotype; no more did they work on ‘Somoza’s farm’; no longer were they victims, accepting passively their predicament.
The depth of the Nicaraguan revolution struck me when I stayed in a frontier community, El Regadio, in the north of the country. Like everywhere in Nicaragua, it is very poor and its isolation has made change all the more difficult. However, within a few years of deposing Somoza, the Sandinistas had established a ‘well baby clinic’, including a rehydration unit which prevents infants from dying from diarrhoea, the most virulent Third World killer.
When I was there no baby had died for a year, which was unprecedented. The production and consumption of basic foods had risen by as much as 100 per cent, which meant that serious malnutrition had disappeared. There was a new school attended by children who, before 1979, would have laboured in the fields; and a total of eighty-seven people, mostly middle-aged campesino women, had learned to read and write. One of them, a large mixture of jolliness and shyness called Petrona Cruz, mentioned to me the word, pobreterria, for which there is no precise translation. ‘It’s the equivalent of people calling themselves the scum of the earth,’ she said. ‘It was a view of ourselves based on shame, on believing that things could never change. The word doesn’t exist now.’
Many in the West may have forgotten, if they ever knew, the political subtlety of the Nicaraguan revolution. In the early days there were Stalinists, Maoists, liberals and even conservatives among the Sandinistas, but the dominant strain were genuinely non-aligned radicals and visionaries, who were probably closer to Mexico than Havana, and to ‘liberation theology’ than Marx. A friend of mine, Xavier Gorostiaga, a Jesuit economist, told me, ‘When the North Americans reduce our uniqueness to a jargon they themselves do not understand, they deny the power of our nationalism. For example, the most powerful influence on Marxism here is Christianity and our Indian heritage. In Nicaragua today to be a Christian can mean you have a real option for the poor.’
Unlike the Cubans, the Sandinistas left most of the economy in private hands (and were attacked from the left for doing so). They held the country’s first democratic elections in 1984; and in all their programmes designed to end hunger, preventable sickness and literacy, they maintained an ‘option for the poor’.
They offered to their neighbours, all of them suffering under murderous Washington-sponsored tyrannies, a clear demonstration of regional nationalism at last succeeding in abolishing pobreterria. Consequently, they represented a threat. During the second half of the 1980s, they were attacked by the United States, using a Contra army funded, equipped and trained by the CIA, often secretly and illegally, whose speciality was the terrorising and murder of civilians. Today, only the United States stands condemned by the World Court for the ‘unlawful use of force’ against another, sovereign state – Nicaragua.
The result was the devastation of the frail Nicaraguan economy. Last year, the Sandinistas narrowly lost the country’s second election (they remain the largest single party). In hindsight, one can view that as inevitable. They were much too confident of their base and some had become arrogant; above all, people wanted the blockade to end and Washington off their backs; many queued to receive their $40 each for voting for Violetta Chamorra – an irresistible bribe if you have an income of less than $200 a year.
I was reminded of this last Saturday evening when I was invited to the celebration of a remarkable project in London. More than seven years ago a young man called Robert Todd – Todd to his friends – was moved by a documentary film Nicaragua, made by Alan Lowery, Elizabeth Nash and myself and shown on ITV. Todd decided to ‘do something’. He began by buying for £18,000 a derelict house – actually little more than a shopfront – in Vauxhall. He then drew together a network of craftsmen and women, artisans, carpenters, electricians, most of them amateurs.
They set about building a house, which would be sold and the money given to Nicaragua. The house is mostly of wood, the result of inspired scrounging: the stairs are of mahogany and there are magnificent handmade parquet floors; doors are from the floor of Battersea power station; window frames from the laboratory desks at local schools; stairs from British Rail desks, much of it acquired during judicious raids on skips. There are fine skylights, stained-glass windows, and murals drawn by local children.
It is not just a beautiful house, but a symbol of the conversion of the obsolete and the abandoned to new life, and of the energy of commitment. Less than £9,000 was spent on materials, and all the labour was given free. A year ago the house may have been worth a quarter of a million pounds. ‘It’s been a race against the collapse of capitalism!’ says Todd, now with an anxious eye to the falling property market. Certainly the house is worth a great deal of money and, when it is sold, this will help restore Nicaragua: perhaps to build again well-baby clinics and to restore agricultural cooperatives now bereft of resources.
For me, the achievement represented by the house built by Todd and Sarah, Mick and Tim, and many others, reinforces the notion that while luck, always ephemeral and capricious, will depart, people will wait, their hope never lost. Nicaragua’s revolution, and its ‘threat’, remain pending.
March 29, 1991