Adiós Muchachos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution

11. Rivers of Milk and Honey

11 | Rivers of Milk and Honey After we had already been defeated in the 1990 elections, Dr. Emilio Álvarez Montalván, Nicaragua’s most respected Conservative ideologue, once commented that Sandinismo had brought compassion for the poor to Nicaraguan political culture for the first time. This is truly one of the revolution’s enduring legacies, beyond the ideological illusions that bedazzled us then, the bureaucratic excesses and the inadequacy of applied Marxism, inexperience and improvising, posing, imitations, and rhetoric. The poor continue to be the vestige of humanism from the project that collapsed along the way, on its journey from the catacombs to its loss of power and ethical catastrophe. It is an obscured or delayed compassion, yet somehow still alive. Through its identification with the poor, the revolution was radical in the purest sense. In the spirit of justice, it was capable of repeated naïveté and arbitrariness, often losing sight of what was truly possible and what could only be desirable or fair. Moreover, what was desirable and fair was at odds with reality. The economic system, as it existed in reality, was obsolete. It needed to be abolished . Yet there was also the social fabric marked by centuries of cultural tradition, which was precisely where the most resistance to desired changes originated. It was a resistance whose influence we did not entirely appreciate because we believed our determination to put an end to poverty would be sufficient for the old beliefs to be abandoned. 160 | CHAPTER 11 The image we were faced with was that of the miserably destitute with nothing, the poorest of the poor evoked by Leonel Rugama in his poems: Siuna miners dying of silicosis; farmers deep in the Jinotega mountains, where they had no salt, or in the lost valleys of Matagalpa, where vitamin deficiency caused night blindness; workers in Chinandega’s banana plantation camps who slept in crates the size of a dog kennel; or the legions of rag pickers in the Acahualinca garbage dumps adjacent to the sewage channels on the shore of Lake Managua; mothers with their children, grandchildren with their grandmothers, fighting the vultures for something to eat. The Arcadia of the first months was marked by immeasurable innocence . The collective excitement swayed consciousness between delirium and dreaming, anxiousness and hope. It was an excitement that took on political weight and that would never be repeated, the excitement of feeling committed to a cause for change, to the very end. Furthermore, to the very end meant all or nothing. No one would have picked up a rifle to wage a revolution halfway. Revolution, not the peaceful transition sought by other sectors of society, was an inevitable corollary to Somoza’s overthrow. A proposal for radical change needed radical power, capable of defending itself and freeing itself of risks. It was also an infinite power. You do not win an armed struggle to conquer power shortterm , not when it involves sweeping history aside. What’s more, in that context, moderates start to seem suspicious. Besides cutting the workday in the fields in half and doubling the minimum wage, large landowners were forced to introduce meat, milk, and eggs into the workers’ diet, something that labor inspectors were never able to enforce. The cost of public transportation remained frozen until the subsidies became unsustainable. We increased pensions for retired workers, we opened hundreds of day-care centers, children were vaccinated against polio in massive campaigns, the National Literacy Crusade got under way, and agrarian reform began from day one. However, when it was time to distribute lands expropriated from the Somoza family and their supporters, as well as property later confiscated from large landowners, we distanced ourselves from the emotions that urged us to transfer individual property titles to landless peasants, history ’s most neglected subjects. Instead, ideological precautions prevailed, which led to the birth of the Agricultural Production Units (upe). According to the theory, farmers would live and work with good salaries, and RIVERS OF MILK AND HONEY | 161 they would have clinics, schools, and day care for their children. Yet the land would be state property, similar to the land allocated to the cooperatives . In that way, it would not lead to the eventual creation of a new rural petty bourgeois class. It was a mistake that would cost lives because the revolution, by violating the most sacred of its...