Dispatch from Nicaragua

MANAGUA, Nicaragua--Managua's ragged army of the poor awakens early to prepare for work. Within the thousands of cardboard and tin shacks that ring the Nicaraguan capital, the breakfasts of beans and rice are headed over wood stoves and eaten quickly, patched clothing is pulled on, and an army of maids, servants, shoe-shines, car-washers, vendors of every conceivable food and item, beggars and hustlers, young boys and old women, all hanging to the economy by the edges of their fingernails, drifts off to work.

For many of the poor, there are no jobs. In a recent sociological study of Managua, fully 40 per cent of the heads of poor families reported they were without any sort of work. These families, mostly headed by women, subsisted on the few pennies brought in daily by the smaller boys (and sometimes girls) who shine shoes, wash cars or sell tiny pastries.

At dusk, the poor come home to another meal of beans and rice; then, they relax in the doorways and chat with their neighbors along the streets of dust. An inferno of small children runs everywhere. The literate adults--estimated at between 50 and 60 per cent of the population--cannot read at night because there is no electricity. They cannot bathe; there is neither running water not toilets. So they perhaps light a candle to prolong the day, and the conversations, before going to bed.

Each Latin-American nation has its own name for the urban poor--Argentina has its villas miserias, Brazil its favelas. Mexico its colonias proletarias. In Managua, the poor are called "parachutists," because so many of them have "landed" on unoccupied land to erect their shacks and begin the continual search for work that Iured them from the countryside. The wave of migration began about 1950 and has continued to the present; the poor, 70 per cent of them outside the capital, now constitute fully one-half of Managua's 400,000 population.

The parachutists and their counterparts in the other Latin-American cities are among the victims of a distorted and unbalanced economy dominated by foreign, largely North American, interests. Immense plantations, owned by American corporations in partnership with the handful of rich Nicaraguans and worked by agricultural workers some of whom earn less than $1 a day, produce coffee, bananas, cotton and beef for the import market. At the same time, peasants working tiny, inefficient plots of land (which often also belong to landlords) struggle to coax enough beans, rice and corn from the soil to feed their families, with perhaps something left over to sell in the local market. With the climbing birth rates, and the continuous introduction of labor-saving machinery in the large estates, peasants and small-town dwellers stream to the capital, attracted by rumors of work they can no longer find in the places where they were born.

But there is no work in Managua. The tremendous inequality of wealth and income has largely prevented the emergence of a significant internal market that could encourage industrial development. The average Nicaraguan can afford at most two changes of clothes--little incentive for a flourishing textile industry. Even the small middle class--the more successful small shopkeepers, the few white collar employees--wield little spending power by Northamerican standards. As a consequence, the few necessary manufactured goods and all capital goods are imported, also largely from the United States. Luxury goods are concentrated, of course, in the few lavishly wealthy homes. The poor are trapped on the edges of a sluggish and static economy that can neither employ them nor produce to fulfill their needs.

Nicaragua is even more extreme than the general case, for here is a dynasty, the Somoza family, has dominated the country for over 40 years and cornered wealth and power to an extent considered extreme even by Latin American standards. The dynasty's founder. Anastasio Somoza Garcia, took power in 1933 with the help of United States Marines and held it until he was assassinated in 1956. Since then, his two sons have taken turns as president and commander of the National Guard. Nicaragua's euphemistically named combination army and secret police force, which the United States aids and helps train. One Somoza son, Luis, died two years ago; the other, Anastasio, had himself elected president again last year with a term of office that lasts until 1981.

Somoza is easily the most hated man in Nicaragua. In conversations in all parts of the country, held in near-whispers because there are thought to be "orejas." National Guard cars," everywhere, his name is pronounced bitingly, with vengeance. The corpulent dictator is said to own almost everything and to job what he does not own in December 1972 an earthquake leveled several square miles of downtown Managua, killing 10,000 people. Somoza is widely suspected of stealing some of the international aid that flowed into the country after the disaster. (Two years later, the wreckage has been cleared away but nothing in the destroyed center city has been rebuilt; the housing shortage has forced some of the parachustists to live in old railroad cars.)

In recent months the criticism of Somoza has become even more bitter. Nicaragua's chronic crisis has been exacerbated by rising food costs, seen by the people as an indication that Somoza is speculating in prices (certainly the shift in rural production from foodstuffs to the more profitable export crop of cotton has contributed to the hike, and Nicaragua's food prices are clearly higher than those in neighboring Central American countries.) Additionally, the housing shortage in Managua remains acute, and a two-month strike of construction workers has halted all rebuilding save that which takes place protected by armed guards. The construction workers, who are appreciably better off than the great mass of urban and rural poor, wanted their wages raised from $9 to $11 a day, and their hours of work reduced from 12 to 8.

Yet the deepening bitterness is complemented by a growing hope. To the traditional image of Somoza as a fat, lying thief a new demension has been added--that of a coward. The dictator is now mocked for living in an underground redoubt, surrounded by bodyguards, for being afraid to appear in public. One young woman claims that he is acutally dead and that the country is being directed by a mummy.

The cause of Somoza's fears is an intelligent, courageous and confident guerilla organization, the Sandinista National Liberation Front. The Sandinistas have been struggling against the dictatorship since the middle 1960)s, but they captured the national imagination with a spectacular kidnapping at the end of last year. In an effort that has become known as "the event of December 27," or merely "the 27th," the Sandinistas broke into a diplomatic reception in Managua and took hostage eleven of Somoza's inner circle, leaving the dictator no choice but to comply with their demands, which were; freedom and guaranteed flight to Cuba for 15 imprisoned guerillas, $5 million in ransom, and perhaps most important, the publication and broadcast in all the newspapers, and the government-controlled radio and television for the reason for the raid. Somoza immediately declared a state of siege and placed the country under martial law, and the country has been abuzz ever since.

The Front has named itself after Augusto Cesar Sandino, a Nicaraguan patriot who alternately battled, defeated and eluded U.S. Marines in the hills for seven years before he was tricked and murdered by the original Somoza in 1933. The Marines, sent to enforce Nicaragua's payment of loans held by North-American banks, were not the first imperialists to interfere in Nicaragua's affairs.

Sandino tried to rekindle the spirit of unity in this fragmented region and to add to it a consciousness of the pressing need for a social revolution to accompany the expulsion of foreign powers from the area. He accurately pinpointed the existence of a small Nicaraguan upper class, based on the glaring inequalities of land and wealth, as a critical barrier to any meaningful independence for the Nicaraguan people. Sandino's failure inaugurated the Somoza dictatorship, now challenged by the guerilla leader's spiritual successors 40 years later. Sandinista literature is illustrated with photographs and silhouettes of the original chief wearing his wide-brimmed Western-style had and cradling his rifle.

The Sandinistas call their political strategy "prolonged armed struggle," a phrase that illustrates another necessary quality they possess--patience. They are to predicting any early victories. They advocate a struggle balanced between city and country, and say that at present they are warning, putting on trial and sometimes executing, particularly oppressive landlords and government officials in rural areas. Their tactics are highly imaginative: one of their December 27 demands was that the government give a pay raise to the lower ranks of the National Guard, and obvious efforts to separate the soldiers from the officers. And two weeks later, doubtless embarrassed by the demand. Somoza did grant a partial pay hike, although he claimed it had been scheduled all along.

The Sandinistas themselves probably number about several hundred, although they are completely underground and there is no certain way to gauge their strength. They reveal themselves from time to time in unexpected ways: a worker who makes deliveries between Managua and Leon says he picked up a Sandinista who was hitchhiking to El Salvador to buy arms, and people in Managua are said to run after automobiles that quickly strew the Front's literature in the darkened streets.

By and large, however, the Front remains hidden--even from its firmest supporters, the students. The National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN), located in the northern city of Leon, is a center of resistance to the government. A Latin American tradition, not yet violated in Nicaragua, protects the autonomy of the university, and the corridors and walls of UNAN are papered with posters and literature supporting the Sandinistas. The students tell a North American visitor that perhaps 80 per cent of them are socialists and anit-imperialists. The students are primarily from middle and supper-income backgrounds, although slightly less so than in the United States, because the very wealthy send their children north to study.

The students are on the average slightly younger than their North American counterparts, although some of less wealthy must leave school from time to time and work in the fields to support their families, thereby prolonging their years of study. The students live in large, cheap boarding houses and watch their money carefully. They read "Carlos Marx," organize their own discussion sections on Franz Fanon, listen to Radio Havana on shortwave sets, and talk much more quietly in the streets outside the university, lowering their voices or quickly changing the subject when a stranger approaches. They seem less remote from the daily life of their country than North American students, more readily conversant with the practical aspects of the problems facing the poor--nutrition, for instance, or the conditions of rural labor. Some of them are undoubtedly swept up in the political currents: Latin American students are even more notorious than their North American counterparts for leaving their left-wing views behind them when they graduate. But many will surely be Sandinistas very soon.

The students are perhaps the most directly affected by another aspect of imperialism--the growing domination of Nicaragua by North American culture. English is becoming a kind of second language, necessary for medical students whose textbooks are in English, for the purchaser of a home appliance for which the operating instructions are in English, even for a shoeshine boy or a waitress who would coax a few extra centavos out of the gringo tourists. Some of this cultural influence is due a filtering down of the upper-class aping of everything North American: much of it, however, is pure necessity in a society shaped and dominated largely from without.

The students, aware of their own cultural past and eager and willing to continue to build upon it, naturally are painfully sensitive and resentful of their nation's subjection. Moreover, the extremely hierarchical nature of the social system effectively closes some roads to them. And they need walk no farther than eight blocks from the university, where Leon's poor districts begin, to be reminded of the misery and the agony in which a majority of their countrymen live.

Most likely, the Sandinistas originally were predominantly students and young professionals, teachers and doctors. Now, however, the Front stresses that its membership includes peasants and workers, and extended conversations in other areas of the country make it clear that support for the Front is not limited to the university. One of Managua's striking construction workers, for example, expressed amazement that workers might feel any resentment toward student leftists. "It's the same struggle," he said simply.

For the Sandinistas the choice is clear. If they would free their country from North American domination, if they would plan their economy with the needs of their people and not the profits of the wealthy in mind, if they would broaden the bases of political participation and accord each man and woman in all Nicaragua the respect and dignity that each merits--the Sandinistas must fight. If they would feed the hungry and create meaningful work for the poor, if they would repatriate the parachutists, who are outcasts in their own land, if they would draw upon their own resources and replace the sea of North American trash with their own culture--if they would do all this, they must continue fighting with guns as well as words. In the words of a spray-painted slogan on the walls of a poor neighborhood in Leon. "There will be a Christmas for everyone or there will be a Christmas for no one."

Daniel Swanson '74, a former president of The Crimson, is traveling through Central and South America this year.