Marxist "Science" and Revolutionary "Faith" in Nicaragua

BY MARLO LEWIS JR.

Nicaragua is one of seven countries in the world today where an anti-Communist resistance movement is waging guerrilla warfare against an avowedly Marxist government. In none of these countries are the insurgents on the verge of winning, but in nearly all of them the guerrilla forces are growing in size. The governments of Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Cambodia would quickly go down to defeat were they not propped up by thousands of foreign troops from Cuba, the Soviet Union, or Vietnam. Similarly, Nicaragua's Sandinista government could not long remain in power without the $150 to $250 million worth of military assistance it receives each year from the Soviet bloc.

The geopolitical stakes in the conflict between Nicaragua's Marxist government and the so-called "contra" guerrillas are high--higher than most Americans realize. The Caribbean Basin, of which Nicaragua is a part, is a major supply artery of the U.S. economy. Over 40 percent of all foreign imports entering the U.S. pass through Caribbean waters, as does 50 percent of our imported oil. The Caribbean also forms the eastern approach to the Panama Canal, which enables our under-600-ship Navy to maintain a three-ocean presence. In addition, the region is an indispensable staging area for any U.S. defense of the South Atlantic sea lanes, which carry up to 25 percent of American and 60 percent of European petroleum important, as well as strategic minerals critical to Western defense industries. Most important, the Basin is a departure zone for more than half the men and material that our nation would send to Europe in the event of the Warsaw-Pact invasion. Our economic welfare and national security depend in no small measure, therefore, upon our being able to control the airways and sea lanes of this strategically vital region. Our capacity to exercise such control can, however, no longer be taken for granted.

Should war come, U.S. maritime traffic and naval operations in the Caribbean would be in danger of attack by Cuba's 200 MiG aircraft, three submarines, two frigates, and 50 fast patrol boats armed with missiles and torpedoes. Some of these forces could be used to strike cities and military bases in the American southeast, as could the numerous Soviet submarines, battleships, and aircraft that periodically deploy to Cuban ports and airfields. Were Nicaragua to become, like Cuba, a secure base for the projection of Communist military power, we would face an even greater threat to our security. Fortunately, two factors continue to obstruct Nicaragua's transformation into a soviet beachhead and forward base: the Sandinistas fear of U.S. military intervention, and the existence in Nicaragua of a large and growth insurgent movement.

At present, Nicaragua endangers U.S. interests chiefly by adding to the instability of an already turbulent and violence-prone region. The Sandinistas provide weapons, training, sanctuary, and logistics support to terrorist groups in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Honduras. What enables them to carry on this campaign of subversion, with little risk of retaliation, is Nicaragua's massive arms build-up, financed and supervised by the Soviet bloc. With an army of over 60,000 professional soldiers and officers, 140 tanks, multiple rocket launchers and long-range artillery pieces, and a half dozen of the deadly "Hind" helicopter gunships, the Sandinistas are clearly in a position to intimidate their neighbors.

It is important to recognize, however, that Nicaragua's militarization, the presence in the country of two to three thousand Cuban military advisers, the regime's alignment with the Soviet bloc, and even the Contra movement itself are symptoms or effects of a more fundamental malady or cause. That cause is the character of the Sandinista regime. If the Sandinistas were not Marxist-Leninists, there would be no civil war in Nicaragua today. It is the Sandinistas' Marxism-Leninism that has impelled them to establish single-party rule, restrict and suppress civil and religious liberties, prosecute the indigenous Indian population, and support foreign terrorist groups. Above all, it is because the Sandinistas are pro-Soviet by conviction that Central America has become a focal point of the East-West conflict.

Myth-Busters

How then did the Sandinistas come to power, and precisely what are their ideological convictions? Shirley Christian's Nicaragua and David Nolan's FSLN shed powerful light on these questions and many other matters of moment.

Nicaragua is investigative journalism at its best and superb current history. Illumined by the author's extensive first hand knowledge of Nicaragua, the book provides a detailed chronicle of Nicaraguan politics from the mid-1970s until the present. Although Ms. Christian never engages in polemics, she manages in the course of her narrative to refute several widespread misconceptions or myths about Nicaragua.

It is often asserted, for example, that in the early twentieth century the U.S. used its military might to suppress democracy in Nicaragua. There is some truth to this accusation: in 1909 the United States Marines helped a rebellion overthrow Nicaraguan President Jose Santos Zelaya, who had challenged the Monroe Doctrine by inviting European governments to build a canal across Nicaragua. But for the most part the U.S. intervened in support of Nicaraguan democracy. More pertinently, the failure of democracy in Nicaragua during the 1920s and 1930s can fairly be blamed only on Nicaraguans themselves.

U.S. Marines were sent to Nicaragua again in 1912 and twice in 1926, with a contingent of 100 leathernecks remaining in the country for 12 consecutive years. In this period, however, the Marines they helped to maintain and defend democracy. Their job was to supervise elections, ensure that the losing party abided by the results, and keep the peace. In the first third of the century, Nicaragua was continually convulsed by warfare between two political parties that dominated public life throughout Central America--the Liberals and the conservatives. The Marines attempted to make the parties respect the constitutional arrangements to which they both professed allegiance. To be sure, the United States had a self-interested motive in intervening, but the motive was not to exploit Nicaragua economically, as the Sandinistas claim. Rather, it was to uphold the Monroe Doctrine. When one party illegally ousted the other, it typically repudiated the foreign debts that had been contracted under the previous administration. On more than one occasion this had led to armed intervention by European powers.

It is an article of faith among the radical left that the U.S. is to blame for the rise to power of Anastasio Somoza Garcia and his National Guard. This myth is also overturned by Christian's book. It is true that the Guard was initially organized and trained by the Marines. But the explicit aim of U.S. policy-makers was to create a nonpartisan force whose primary loyalty would be to the Nicaraguan constitution. In January 1933 the Marines turned over command of the National Guard to Anastasio Somoza, but with the approval of Nicaraguan President Juan Bautista Sacase, who was also the uncle of Somoza's wife. Neither Present Sacasa nor U.S. Minister Matthew C. Hanna could have known that in three short years Somoza would make the Guard loyal only to him and overthrow Sacasa. Ironically, Somoza's usurpation could easily have been prevented, had the Marines remained in Nicaragua. The Marines were withdrawn by Herbert Hoover in response to mounting domestic criticism of his interventionist foreign policy.

The Sandinistas take their name from Augusto Cesar Sandino, a Liberal general who broke ranks in order to carry on a guerrilla war against the U.S. Marines. The Sandinistas portray Sandino as a revolutionary martyr, assassinated because he dared to champion the people's interests against the oligarchs and their imperialist backers. True, Sandino was killed by the National Guard, perhaps on direct orders from Somoza himself. But the assassination had nothing to do wish Sandino's "anti-imperialism" or his alleged devotion to social justice.

In 1925 a Conservative general, Emiliano Chammoro, stole the presidency from Carlos Solarzano, another conservative, who had been elected the year before. Liberal generals took up arms against Chammoro, and a bloody civil conflict ensued. In 1926 the Marines intervened, and in May 1927 the two parties accepted a peace treaty sponsored by the U.S. The treaty stipulated that the Liberals be given control over six departments in return for laying down their arms, and that a presidential election supervised by the U.S. be held in 1928. To Sandino, however, this arrangement was intolerable, because it allowed a Conservative, Adolfo Diaz, to serve as President until 1928. Refusing to make peace, Sandino instigated a guerrilla war. He continued to attack the Marines, the National Guard, and conservative notables even after a Liberal was elected president in 1928. Sandino finally came to the peace table in 1933, following the election of Juan Bautista Sacasa as President. Sandino agreed to surrender his arms in return for a large tract of land where he and his followers could live as farmers. The land-comprising 36,800 square kilometers, or one-fourth the national territory (!)-- was given to Sandino as promised. But he did not keep his part of the bargain, surrendering only a fraction of his arsenal. Moreover, he began to demand that his forces be recognized as a government authority in the northern mountains. In effect he was attempting to create a separate state within Nicaragua. Sandino thus posed a direct threat to the sovereignty of the Nicaraguan government and to the territorial integrity of his country. It is no wonder that he met with a violent end.

The most widely held misconceptions about Nicaragua have to do with the recent past. According to a common line of argument, the Sandinistas, or most of them, are nationalists and social democrats rather than Marxist-Leninists. They have been pushed into the arms of the Cubans and the soviets, it is said, by such hostile U.S. policies as support of the Contra movement and the mining of Nicaraguan ports. It is the emergency created by a U.S.-fostered insurgency, we are told, that has led the Sandinistas to suspend democratic liberties. Above all, we are assured, it is not any aggressive intention on their part but fear of a U.S. invasion that has prompted the Sandinistas to expand Nicaragua's military forces.

Both Christian and Nolan establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that all nine members of the ruling National Directorate are Marxist-Leninists and have been so since their earliest participation in the Sandinista movement. For example, the movement's principal founder, Carlos Fonseca, after spending a year in the Soviet Union, wrote a book in 1957 entitled A Nicaraguan in Moscow, in which he claimed that Soviet citizens enjoy full freedom of speech, assembly and religion; and predicted that owing to the superior efficiency of a centrally planned economy, the U.S.S.R. would quickly overtake the U.S. in agricultural production.

If the Sandinistas are nationalists, it does not seem to bother them that their country is swarming with Cubans. Though they often describe their revolution as nationalistic, they also view it as the local expression of a global movement that began in Moscow in 1917. Furthermore, Sandinista nationalism is not inconsistent with territorial expansion or intervention in the affairs of other ntions. In 1969 the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) published a detailed statement of its goals. Among the policies advocated was struggle for a "true union of Central American peoples within one country."

The myth of the FSLN's pro-democratic orientation has been assiduously cultivated by the Sandinistas themselves, for reasons that are not hard to fathom. In May 1977, the FSLN made a collection decision to dispense with the rhetoric of class struggle and join ranks with the non-Marxist opposition to Somoza's rule. This strategy was devised chiefly by Humberto Ortega. By means of it, he maintained, the Sandinistas could "rally all our people around the FSLN without losing at any time our revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Sandinista identity." By adopting a democratic façade, Ortega argued, the FSLN could win broad international backing and forestall hostile action by the United States. Also, by gaining the confidence of the business community, the Sandinistas could avert a massive flight of capital from the country when they took power.

In keeping with Ortega's strategy, the Sandinistas promised the Organization of American States in June 1979 that their political program was founded on the concepts of pluralism, a mixed economy, and a nonaligned foreign policy. It soon became apparent that they had no intention of honoring this commitment.

Immediately after the new Nicaraguan government was formed, the FSLN began systematically purging non-Marxists from positions of power. By December 1979 the Sandinistas had seized control of the key Ministries of Defense, Planning, and Agriculture. In May 1980 they unilaterally expanded the Council of Ministers from 33 to 47 members, so as to "pack" the organization with Sandinista activists. The FSLN captured the electronic media and would not permit non-Marxists to buy television time; dismissed professors with "bourgeois' attitudes from the universities; and set up a "Popular Church" to compete with the traditional clergy. Strikes were forbidden. Rationing and price controls were imposed on Nicaragua's once flourishing and broadly participatory urban markets. The FSLN established "block committees' to issue ration cards, collect intelligence, and threaten persons deemed "reactionary." Decrees were issued making it a crime to publish "disinformation" about the economy and security matters, such as by reporting shortages, strikes, or political disputes. Another decree, against "political proselytizing," prohibited citizens from assembling in public to petition for redress of grievances. All of these assaults upon the personal and political liberties of Nicaraguan citizens took place before the end of 1980. During the same period the Sandinistas charted a course in foreign policy that was anything but nonaligned.

In late 1979 or early 1980 Nicaraguan pilots were being trained to fly MiGs in Bulgaria. In October 1979 there were 1000 Cuban teachers and 200 Cuban military personnel in Nicaragua. By December some 1200 Nicaraguan students were living on Cuba's Isle of Youth. And in March 1980 the FSLN signed a party-to-party agreement with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. These developments occurred months before Ronald Reagan was elected President of the Untied States, and two years before the Contras launched their first serious military operation. It was in this period, moreover, that the Untied States furnished $128 million in economic assistance to the new Nicaraguan government--ten times the amount we gave to the Somozas in the preceding 20 years. In sum, if the first eighteen months of their coming to power, the Sandinistas behaved very much like Marxist-Leninists and very little like democrats. Defense Minister Humber-to Ortega inadvertently let the cat out of the bag in June 1981. Speaking in what he thought was a confidential meeting with his subordinates, Ortega declared: "…our revolution has a profoundly anti-imperialist character, profoundly revolutionary, profoundly classist; we are anti-Yankee, we are against the bourgeoisie…we are guided by the scientific doctrine of the revolution, by Marxism-Leninism."

Christian holds the Carter Administration partly responsible for the Nicaraguan revolution and hence for the triumph of the FSLN. In her judgment, it was still possible as late as January 1979 for the United States to have averted a catastrophe. All the Carter Administration has to do was bring decisive pressure on Somoza to resign. Nicaragua was not yet in a condition of general civil war, and if elections had been held, there is no doubt the non-Marxist opposition would have come out on top. Moreover, with a National Guard suitably reformed but still intact and under democratic leadership, it would have been possible to hold the FSLN in check. Christian attributes the Carter Administration' unwillingness to force Somoza's resignation to a mindset that views U.S. "interventionism" as immoral.

Concerning recent U.S. policy toward Nicaragua, Christian faults the Reagan Administration for not making up its mind about what it is trying to accomplish. Is the objective in supporting the Contras to overthrow the FSLN? Or is the objective merely to compel Managua to send the Cubans home and terminate arms deliveries to Salvadoran terrorists? By professing to seek only a change in policy rather than a change of regime, Christian contends, the Administration unwittingly lends credence to the falsehood that the Contras are not freedom fighters but mercenaries and tool of U.S. foreign policy.

The Evolution Of Sandinismo

While Shirley Christian's Nicaragua is mainly a political history, David Nolan's FSLN is chiefly an intellectual history. Through a meticulous examination of FSLN political tracts, speeches, and memoirs, Nolan lets the Sandinstas describe and identify themselves. One great merit of the book is that Nolan scrupulously abstains from imposing an alien explanatory framework or paradigm on his subject. He strives to understand the Sandinistas as they understand themselves. For example, when he examines the historical background of the FSLN's ideology, he discusses only those elements (the Nicaraguan tradition of revolt, the Sandino legend, the Marxism of the student subculture, the Cuban revolution) that the Sandinistas themselves acknowledge as having influenced their thinking and world view. Nolan enables the reader to follow the FSLN's successive attempts, from 1961 to 1979, to develop and put into practice an effective strategy of Marxist revolution. While clearly exhibiting the differences between the FSLN's three main factions or "tendencies," he also uncovers a common core of belief and articulates its "inner logic."

The FSLN's careers as a revolutionary Marxist organization can be divided into four or five periods. From its founding in 1961 until 1963, the FSLN was influenced by Che Guevara's theory of the insurrectionary foco (focal point). Based on a romantic interpretation of the Cuban revolution, the foco theory argued that it was not necessary to wait until classic Marxist conditions for revolution to materialize. Marx had taught that the proletariat alone was the truly revolutionary class, and the proletariat was of necessity a product of advanced industrial capitalism. Since most of Latin America was rural and economically backward, Marx's analysis seemed to condemn Latin American revolutionaries to a life of inaction. Guevara contended that insurrectionary violence could create its own favorable conditions. The guerrilla warrior, by his military daring and willingness to sacrifice his life for the oppressed rural populace, could capture the imagination of the peasantry and ignite a popular revolution. Like all other experiments with foquismo--including Guevara's own in Bolivia--the FSLN's first guerrilla action in 1963 was a complete failure, and nearly resulted in the organization's destruction.

The surviving members of the FSLN drifted back to the cities and began to engage in trade union organizing, in an effort to "raise the consciousness" of Nicaragua's small urban proletariat. In this period the FSLN collaborated with Nicaragua's Moscow-line socialist Party (PSN). The Sandinistas made two discoveries: the workers had no interest in revolution, and the PSN could not be budged from its preoccupation with narrow "reformist" and economistic" issues. In November 1966 the FSLN abandoned unionism and returned to rural-based armed struggle.

The FSLN did not however return to Guevara foco theory. The organization found new sources of inspiration in the Asian guerrilla concept of protracted people's war, as advocated by Mao Tse-tung, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Ho Chi Minh. The protractecd war theory emphasized the guerrilla's need to organize the peasantry and develop a clandestine support structure. In the Sandinistas' first guerrilla action during this period--a battle with the National Guard at Pancasan in August 1967--35 FSLN combatants were killed, including one of the organization's founders, Silvio Mayorga. Nonetheless, the prolonged-war theory remained the FSLN's guiding doctrine for almost ten years.

In 1975 the FSLN split into two factions, or "tendencies.' Since the late sixties, FSLN had a small but active urban following, especially on the university campuses. These urban-based activists supplied the guerrillas with weapons and money, and they infiltrated the student movement and radical Catholic organizations. They objected to the way the popular-war theory relegated their efforts to a secondary support role. Jaime Wheelock, the intellectual leader of these critics (now the Sandinista Minister of Agriculture), argued that the peasantry was a relic of the pre-modern past. Thus it could not serve as the class base of a revolution intended to usher in a radically new kind of society. Only the proletariat could be the agency of radical social transformation, as Marx had said, and it was time for the Sandinistas, who claimed to be Marxists, to start practicing what they preached. In October 1975, Wheelock and the rest of the Proletarian Tendency were expelled from the FSLN for ideological deviationism.

In early 1977 the Sandinista movement was on the brink of collapse. The few surviving rural guerrillas had been chased into the country's sparsely populated Atlantic coast. Carlos Fonseca, the FSLN's founder and chief theoretician, had been killed. Most of the other leaders were in jail or in exile. The organization's urban wing was torn by ideological disputes. Yet two years later the FSLN would ride on the crest of a victorious popular revolution and make themselves the owners of power. This dramatic reversal in the FSLN's fortunes can be traced to a new strategy formulated by Humberto Ortega. In Ortega's view, the FSLN had been following strategies appropriate to Mao's Chine and Marx's Germany rather than a strategy designed to fit the realities of modern Nicaragua. Neither the peasantry nor the proletariat, he believed, provided a broad enough population base for revolutionary war. The FSLN had to recruit allies and supporters wherever it could find them, Ortega argued, even it this meant concealing the true nature of the Sandinistas' intentions and ideology. Specifically, the FSLN should make alliances with social democrats, liberal businessmen, and in fact anyone else disaffected with the regime; build mass front organizations secretly under Sandinista control; engage in both urban and rural guerilla warfare; and provoke violent clashes between the government and the people. Predictably the other FSLN factions attacked Ortega on ideological grounds, accusing him and other members of the Tercerista (Third Way) or Insurrectional Tendency of "petty-bourgeois putchism" and similar vices. But the Terceristas quickly came to dominate the military phase of the anti-Somoza struggle; and in March 1979 the three FSLN factions united behind the insurrectional strategy, with prodding from Fidel Castro, who made unification a condition for receiving Cuban military aid.

Divine Providence Vs "History"

It may at first seem bizarre that Marxist-Leninists should take their intrasectarian disputes over strategy with such deadly seriousness. But the better and frequently bloody factionalism that has characterized the Communist enterprise since it's founding is in no way adventitious. Disagreements over strategy are also disagreements about the true meaning or direction of history, and the concept of History in Marxist thought closely corresponds to the idea of Divine Providence in Biblical thought. Marxism-Leninism regards History as both the highest court of judgment and the agency by which man's earthly salvation will be achieved. The quarrel among the three FSLN tendencies was thus quasi-theological in character.

The Sandinistas are historical determinists. They view History as a process subject to universal and necessary laws, a process culminating in the creation of a global classless society or Communism. In every historical situation, the Sandinistas believe, there is a correct course of revolutionary action. Those who act in accordance with History's imperatives succeed; those who do not, fail. The problem is that prior to engaging in revolutionary theory or strategy can therefore only be proven in action. This is what is meant by the "unity of theory and practice", a concept central to Marxist-Leninist ideology. The Sandinistas understand historical truth to be "progressive", revealed over time through repeated attempts to apply theory to reality. This explains why the Sandinistas attach a kind of cosmic significance to the history of their movement, to the failures of foquismo, trade unionism and protected war as well as to the success of the later insurrectional strategy. The failures also are believed to contribute to knowledge of History's plan. There is of course a simpler way of putting all this. The Sandinistas learned from experience and were lucky enough to be at the "right" place at the "right" time.

Although Nolan refrains from evaluating the Sandinistas' ideology, I could not help noticing its strong resemblance to augury. Imagine: you pick a strategy for seizing power; if it works, then your victory was both justified and ordained by the World Historical Process; if the strategy does not work, then you have not yet learned to read History's design. By making experiments with various revolutionary strategies--experiments that can in no sense be considered controlled--the Sandinistas believe they have scientifically discovered the true trajectory of History. Yet nothing--not a hundred defeats for their movement, not the failure of every Communist regime to meet minimum standards of decency--could undermine their belief in the reality of History as a power dictating their eventual triumph. A good analogy to the Marxist notion of the unity of theory and practice is the ancient Roman's custom of consulting auspices, or reading the entrails of beasts, before adopting a particular plan of battle. If they were victorious, the Romans concluded that they had deciphered the omens correctly. If they lost, the Romans assumed they had not adequately divined the will of the gods. The Sandinistas' revolutionary epistemology differs in no fundamental respect from the Roman one. Which should also remind us of something: those who believe in augury are not for that reason rendered weak and incapable of harming their neighbors.

Besides determinism and the unity of theory and practice, Nolan discerns eight other "major themes" of the Sandinistas' ideology. Two of these in particular are worth noting.

The first is "transcending bourgeoisness". For the Sandinistas the most contemptible thing in the world is to be bourgeois. Transcending class origins is held to be difficult but not impossible, which is surely convenient, because the social composition of the FSLN is overwhelmingly middle the upper-middle class. Bourgeoisness as the FSLN define it is less a matter of income or empirical position in society than of consciousness. A bourgeois is a person "whose life is centered on his own individuality, and whose interests and concerns center on himself and his family, instead of the problems of the masses." Bourgeois attitudes are especially loathsome because they sustain the capitalist system, which in turn fosters and reinforces those very attitudes. It follows that a principal aim of revolutionary action is the eradication of bourgeois consciousness from the minds of the people. As a first step the revolutionary seeks to "purge the bourgeois" within himself. It is partly in light of this necessity that we can understand the FSLN's historical identification with rural guerrilla warfare. Life in the mountains, among illiterate Indians and peasants, was experienced by FSLN student activists as a release from the false desires and conventions of bourgeois society.

The other theme is "revolutionary faith." More than anything else Sandinismo is a militant secular faith. As noted earlier, the revolutionary cannot know whether his strategy or theory is correct until he has tested it in action. Yet the verification he seeks through practice may be a long time in coming. Indeed, he may not live to see the moment of truth. Nonetheless he preserves, in spite of countless hardships, setbacks, and dangers. Only faith can produce this kind of commitment--a fact that becomes even clearer when we recall that the ultimate goal of the Marxian project is the total reconstitution of society and the regeneration of human nature. Not only is the goal at variance with all past experience, but its realization is assumed by Marxists themselves to lie in the distant future. The truth of Marx's prophecy therefore cannot be known. For all their talk about possessing a scientific doctrine, what Marxist-Leninists really have is faith in an unknown and unknowable future.

According to Nolan, Sandinismo's real basis in the souls of its adherents is not theory or cognition but a visceral reaction to perceived injustice combined with an intuitive vision of a better world. He comments: "Revolutionary theory, in the form of Marxism-Leninism, was adopted as a means of systematizing their world view and giving it clear definition. Had the Sandinistas not been exposed to Marxism, they would have found or created another paradigm on which to construct their ideological vision."

Both Nicaragua and FSLN deserve to be read carefully by those entrusted with the making of our nation's foreign policy, as well as by citizens seeking clarity about a vital topic of pubic debate. If these books are carefully read and their insights imaginatively applied, we will surely make better and wiser decisions the next time a well-disguised Marxist-Leninist movement threatens to take over another Latin American country.


NICARAGUA: REVOLUTION IN THE FAMILY
By Shirley Christian,
Random House 1985
337 pp., Cloth
FSLN: THE IDEOLOGY OF THE SANDINISTAS
AND THE NICARAGUANREVOLUTION
By David Nolan,
The Institute of Inter American Studies,
University of Miami, 1984,
203 pp., Paper