Marxist-leninist Nicaragua has in the last few years emerged as the new destination of political tourists from the United States who have revived a grotesque and embarrassing tradition in Western intellectual-political history: the reverential pilgrimage to highly repressive Communist countries by educated people, beneficiaries of considerable political freedom and material well-being.

By 1979 this tradition had temporarily fallen into discredit. Following the death of Mao in 1976, his successors’ revelations about Chinese society largely demolished the worshipful accounts the pilgrims to China had brought back earlier. Mao himself ceased to be deified and (even before the official Chinese rejection in late 1984 of Marxism as an infallible guide to the future) the new Chinese regime began moving toward more free enterprise and better relations with the United States.

By the early 1980’s a number of developments had also reduced the glamor and reputation of another Communist country, Cuba. On the one hand, Dr. Benjamin Spock still believed that “. . . the Castro government . . . has made remarkable, admirable progress in education, in housing, in . . . health care—for all citizens,” and for a publication of the United Methodist Church, Cuba, as of 1981, still represented “a vision of the future.” On the other hand, the appeal of Cuba to its American admirers was sharply reduced by the outpouring in 1980 of 125,000 refugees (most of them poor, and young, and dark-skinned), the persecution of homosexuals, the growing militarization of the society, the stationing of tens of thousands of troops abroad, and the increasingly intimate relationship between Castro and the Soviet Union (which had lost its own attraction decades earlier when even its most ardent supporters were jolted out of their faith by the celebrated revelations of Khrushchev about the reign of Stalin).

As for Communist Vietnam, it was one thing to celebrate it when American bombs were raining down and its heroic guerrillas were defying American military might, but it was something else again to sing its praises after over a million people had escaped under extremely hazardous conditions from the southern portion of the newly united country.

In these circumstances the rise of Marxist-Leninist Nicaragua could not have been better timed. Here was a small country which had earlier been dominated by the United States, run by a corrupt pro-American dictator, and redeemed by an authentic revolution, the culmination of years of guerrilla war. The new regime came complete with a youthful leadership, most of them former guerrilla fighters, some of them intellectuals of sorts (among the top leaders, Daniel Ortega, Ernesto Cardenal, and Sergio Ramirez had poetic-literary leanings or credentials), and others among them devotees of liberation theology. There was also something for the feminists in the person of Nora Astorga, the Deputy Foreign Minister celebrated for helping to trap and kill a general of Somoza (“Oh God,” said an American woman described by the Washington Post as a political activist, “to try to get the guy to bed and then kill him! Fantastic. It’s like a Western. That’s my dream, to do that to Reagan, George Bush, go right down the line!”).

For many American sympathizers, events in Nicaragua represented a replay of the 1960’s—there was, at any rate, an appealing resemblance: “Here,” said Playboy, “was a place seemingly run by the kind of people who were 60’s radicals. Wherever we went, people were young, singing political folk songs and chanting, ‘Power to the People.’ One night there was even a Pete Seeger concert in town!” Elsewhere the leaders of the regime were described as “Rock ‘n’ Roll Rebels . . . into baseball, beer, and Bruce Springsteen.”

No wonder, then, that the roster of prominent supporters of the Sandinista regime included so many well-known veterans of the radical movement of the 1960’s: William Sloane Coffin, Ron Dellums, Ramsey Clark, Linus Pauling, George Wald, Benjamin Spock, Allen Ginsberg, and Abbie Hoffman. The National Sponsors of USOCA (U.S. Out of Central America), a major pro-Sandinista lobby, included Eqbal Ahmad (of the Institute for Policy Studies), Noam Chomsky, Harvey Cox, David Dellinger, Douglas Dowd, Richard Falk, John Gerassi, John C. Leggett, Robert McAfee Brown, Bertell Oilman, Ruth Sidel (author of a glowing report on welfare in China under Mao), Pete Seeger, Leonard Weinglass, Adrienne Rich, Jessica Mitford, the Berrigan brothers, and many other Vietnam-era radicals.

People of this political stripe were, somewhat paradoxically, reinvigorated by the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan (“the best organizer we have,” as one of them said during a demonstration against the administration’s policies in El Salvador). Reagan was the exponent of everything the Left detested: faith in capitalism, simple patriotism, an expressed willingness to use force in the defense of American interests abroad, and an unapologetic anti-Communism. Far from killing off the Left, then, the election of Reagan stimulated a resurgence of its political energies, especially in the universities, the churches, and the media.

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Knowing that it had this substantial reservoir of sympathizers on which to draw, and making good use of the lessons of Vietnam—the main one being that public opinion in the United States has great influence on foreign policy—the Sandinista regime began organizing and encouraging tours to Nicaragua almost immediately after the triumph of the revolution in 1979: “Now that the rebels are victorious,” wrote a New York Times correspondent, “there is a new rush of assorted politicians, journalists, academics, and ‘revolutionary groupies’ eager to witness . . . the first popular revolution on the continent in twenty years.”

Throughout the early 1980’s the tours gathered force. As another Times correspondent wrote in 1982: “So many Americans and Western Europeans have descended on Nicaragua to study and work with the Sandinista government that a word, ‘internacionalistas,’ has been coined to refer to them.” A year later, in 1983, the Times reported that “Over the past year the Managua government has been a near-permanent host to American fact-finding missions, ranging from church delegations to doctors, students, and Senators, who are warmly received, briefed, and shown projects.”

The scope of the new pilgrimages may be gauged in part from the number of organizations promoting the tours. They include Marazul Inc. (specializing in trips to socialist countries; in January 1985 alone, Marazul sponsored 13 different tours to Nicaragua); National Network in Solidarity with the Nicaraguan People (with branches in 75 American cities); Nicaragua-Honduras Education Project (which “Sponsors trips to Nicaragua, mostly for state and local opinion-makers such as elected officials”); Nuevo Instituto de Centro America (which organizes five-week courses of language study); the Guardian (a weekly radical newspaper which has organized tours since 1980); Tropical Tours (the official representative of Tur-Nica, the Nicaraguan national tour agency); Tur-Nica itself; U.S. Out of Central America (a “national group with representatives in more than 100 cities actively opposing U.S. policy . . . in Central America. Work includes lobbying elected officials, tours, and donations of medical suplies, . . . teach-ns, and a traveling slide show”); Witness for Peace (supported by the Quaker American Friends Service Committee, with 100 chapters nationwide).

Careful preparations have preceded the tours. According to a story in the Christian Science Monitor:

. . . At a conference in Mexico City, Rosario Murillo, the wife of Nicaraguan junta leader Daniel Ortega Saavedra, asked a well-connected American, Blase Bonpane, to organize delegations of prominent American celebrities to Nicaragua. . . .

Mr. Bonpane, a former Maryknoll priest and professor of Latin American history at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a liberation theologian sympathetic to the Sandinistas. He understood . . . the impact Hollywood stars could have on American public opinion.

By now American liberals have created a virtual industry of delegations to Nicaragua. . . . More than 2,500 Americans have taken part in such missions. . . .

Delegations of church activists, college professors, architects and planners, artists and photographers, nurses and health-care workers, journalists and media-professionals, Vietnam veterans and average citizens . . . have headed south. . . .

Many of the most visible critics of U.S. policy come from Hollywood—celebrities like Ed Asner, Mike Douglas, and Susan Anspach.

Much of the Hollywood interest in Nicaragua can be traced back to Blase Bonpane who helped organize a nine-city tour . . . with singer Jackson Browne, actors Mike Farrell and Diane Ladd, former Georgia State Sen. Julian Bond, and others. The tour was aimed at rallying opposition to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua.

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The extraordinary political importance attached to the tours has also been indicated by the readiness of the Sandinista leaders to make themselves available to the visitors. In the words of a Miami Herald account:

Almost any visiting American official, no matter how low his rank, can now expect to meet with at least two of the nine comandantes. . . . Non-official American visitors . . . can count on at least one comandante and a well-worn tour of revolutionary highlights.

There are visits to the neighborhood Sandinista Defense Committees, tours of schools and clinics, and trips to the northern town of Jalapa to witness the damages wreaked by CIA-backed anti-Sandinista guerrillas. . . .

“When they return to the United States they have a multiplier effect on the public opinion of your country,” [Interior Minister Tomas] Borge said.

The experience of Texas Civil Liberties Union Legal Director, James C. Harrington, was typical:

We met with Sergio Ramirez (a novelist and member of the three-member junta . . . ), two department directors, with Deputy Foreign Minister Nora Astorga (a charming heroine of the revolution), . . . with the Minister of Culture (Father Ernesto Cardenal), and with two of the three Electoral Commission members. . . .

We broke mid-day bread with three Supreme Court members. . . .

Claudia Dreifus, who interviewed members of the Sandinista Directorate for Playboy, also found them most accessible:

After the interviews were under way, some of the Nicaraguan leaders began inviting Marcelo [the photographer] and me, well, to hang out with them. Things we did in Managua: go with Borge to a prison farm for Miskito Indian counterrevolutionaries; watch Father Cardenal put on an all-day Latin American song festival in Revolutionary Square . . . dinner at Ramirez house.

The Nicaraguan public-relations campaign has been appropriately described by the Miami Herald as “. . . a low-key but relentless sales job, subtle but effective, high in moral tone but aimed right at the guts of the Americans’ conscience.” For as Minister Borge has said: “Nicaragua’s most important war is the one fought inside the United States. . . . The battlefield will be the American conscience. . . .”

Accordingly, the regime has tailored its message to different audiences. As John Vinocur of the New York Times has noted:

To American visitors, frequently from church and university groups, the revolution is described as a humanist one, a struggle against misery. To other visitors, with left-wing views, the talk is of “scientific change” with no interest in achieving “perfect democracy,” but a revolution aimed at a “total social transformation.”

Not all visitors have been mere sightseers. The Washington law firm, Reichler and Appelbaum, which is the Nicaraguan government’s official registered agent in the United States (and is reportedly paid about $320,000 per year for its services) has sent hired investigators who have been provided “in-country transportation, boarding, housing, office space [and] staff,” to help collect information on atrocities committed by the contras.

Other visitors, like their predecessors in Cuba who cut sugar cane (the Venceremos Brigade), have volunteered to work on various projects such as picking coffee beans. However, the “central thrust is what each volunteer does when he or she returns to the United States.” In other words, to quote Diane Passmore, national coordinator of the National Network in Solidarity with the Nicaraguan People, “The major goal is to have them return and tell others about the country and their experiences.”

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And so they have. For example, following a ten-day visit, Republican State Senator Jeanette Hamby from Oregon and her fellow women tourists returned with “the fervor of new converts.” Reported Colman McCarthy in the Washington Post:

In Oregon, Hamby and her friends have been speaking regularly before political, civic, and church groups. They are seeking to persuade people . . . that our policies there [in Nicaragua] are politically wrong and morally corrupt.

So too, Michael Harrington, the well-known author and chairman of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, came back from Nicaragua feeling, as he wrote,

more ashamed of my country than at any time since the Vietnam war. The Nicaraguans are a generous people, a poor and often hungry people, who want to make a truly democratic revolution and it is we who work to subvert their decency.

Similar feelings both about the Nicaraguan revolution and American policy were expressed by other prominent American writers. William Styron joined a group of fellow novelists from Europe and Latin America in protesting American threats to the “modest but profound achievements of the Nicaraguan revolution.” The poet Adrienne Rich described Sandinista Nicaragua as “a society that took poets seriously” and approvingly quoted someone who told her: “You’ll love Nicaragua. Everyone there is a poet.”

This remark recalled the news brought back from North Vietnam by Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd in 1966:

We knew . . . what the Vietnamese contribution to a humane socialism would be: it was evident in the unembarrassed handclasps among men, the poetry and song at the center of man-woman relationships, the freedom to weep practiced by everyone. . . . Here we began to understand the possibilities for a socialism of the heart.

Other echoes of past pilgrimages to Communist regimes could be heard in comments about Nicaraguan prisons:

The prison we visited was the first of seven prison farms. Former national guardsmen willing to cooperate are moved through a series of more and more relaxed prison settings. The prison we saw had 38 inmates, no armed guards, conjugal visits. . . . The man speaking had high praise for the government and said if freed he would go to fight for the FSLN [the Sandinistas] in the north. Money made from the crops is put back into improvements for the prison. . . . As part of the routine the men attend classes in literacy and agriculture. Many who previously had no skill but shooting a gun now have plans to become farmers.

This, from a group of American churchmen. And indeed, of all the pilgrims to the Marxist-Leninist regime in Nicaragua, it is church groups who have become its most active and dedicated supporters (perhaps because, as former President Jimmy Carter put it in announcing his endorsement of a project “to build homes for landless peasants” in Nicaragua, “We want the folks down there to know that some American Christians love them”).

Thus: Maryknoll nuns have returned from Nicaragua to lobby in Washington and have exerted considerable influence on House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill. The Reverend William Sloane Coffin (who had earlier affirmed the decency of the North Vietnamese Communist regime) now assured readers of the New York Times that the Nicaraguan regime could not possibly be Marxist-Leninist since it included Roman Catholic priests (all of whom, incidentally, were on record asserting the compatibility of Marxism and Christianity). In any case, Coffin was satisfied that the goals of the Sandinistas were “to stop the exploitation of the many by the few and to end foreign domination.” A reporter for the Catholic Worker sensed “an atmosphere of youth, vitality, and hope throughout Nicaragua.” Father Richard Preston of Lansing, Michigan, reached the conclusion that “the reign of God has arrived in Nicaragua” as well as “the reign of truth, hope and justice.” A member of the Quaker Witness for Peace group disclosed that he had “never been in a society so permeated by religion” as Sandinista Nicaragua, and David Sweet, a founder of Witness for Peace, emphasized “the Christian nature of the Nicaraguan revolution” and insisted that “the revolution is drawing its strength from Christians. . . .”¹

On this point too the echoes of past pilgrimages are loud. For example, D. F. Buxton, an English Quaker, wrote of the Soviet Union in 1928: “In the emphasis they place on the spirit of service, the Communists have taken to heart some of the most important maxims of the New Testament . . . their society is a more Christian one than ours.” An American Quaker, Henry Hodgkin, proposed in 1932: “As we look at Russia’s great experiment in brotherhood, it may seem to us that some dim perception of Jesus’s way, all unbeknown, is inspiring it. . . .” Hewlett Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury, regarded Stalin’s Russia as “singularly Christian and civilized. . . .” And to a group of Christian theologians, Mao’s China “has come to exert some particular impact on our understanding and experience of God’s saving love.”

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It is not being suggested here that Nicaragua today is nearly as repressive or violent a country as the Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao. But on the other hand, as Octavio Paz, the eminent Mexican writer, puts it, “the process of Sovietization is quite advanced” in Nicaragua today. Thus even when allowances are made for the overpowering effects of favorable predisposition and the inherent limitations of learning about a country through a short conducted tour, the credulousness of the pilgrims to Nicaragua remains staggering. Not only do they ignore the lessons of similar pilgrimages and tours in the past; they also blind themselves to the abundant information and testimony available about Nicaragua, much of it coming from Nicaraguans untainted by any association with the Somoza regime and who were in fact supporters of the revolution which deposed him, that belies the image projected by the Sandinistas and carefully cultivated through the tours.

Edén Pastora is one such prominent leader who first fought against Somoza and is now fighting the Sandinistas. He writes:

Sadly, the revolution’s bright promise has not been realized. The Sandinista directorate has replaced the Somozas with a totalitarian tyranny. . . .

The government has emasculated the country’s independent labor unions. . . . Freedom of the press has been practically extinguished. . . . The directorate has set up a powerful secret-police apparatus. . . . [The regime] remains silent in the face of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and acts as an apologist for the . . . crackdown in Poland.

. . . Despite . . . loans and outright grants totalling over $1.5 billion, the economy is in shambles. . . . Living conditions are deteriorating. The real wages of Nicaragua’s working class have plummeted 60 percent during last year. . . .

Domingo Sanchez Delgado, “a dedicated Marxist-Leninist” and nominee of the Socialist party for President, says:

We are not Sandinistas. . . . We don’t want a country where the press is not free . . . where power is abused . . . where young people can’t go to the movies because they are afraid they will be captured for military service.

. . . There is arrogance and abuse of every sort. This is hardly revolutionary conduct. . . .

Virgilio Godoy Reyes was Minister of Labor in the Sandinista government from 1979 until 1984. He has reached the conclusion that

these five years have shown the great error we made in giving our confidence to those who think of nothing but the interests of their party. . . . After so many dreams, disillusion. Instead of liberty, new forms of oppression. To say that the workers and peasants are in power is a monstrous lie. . . . The only equality we are achieving is equality in misery.

Arturo Cruz, former Sandinista ambassador to the U.S. and the most prominent democratic critic of the regime, writes:

The Sandinistas are evidently determined to ignore the democratic yearnings of the Nicaraguan people. . . . The problem of Nicaragua is not MIG’s and assault helicopters. It is, fundamentally, the absence of liberty—the character of the government that will put such weapons to use.

There has also been criticism from some former American admirers of the regime. Robert S. Leiken of the Carnegie Endowment is one of them:

For one who has sympathized with the Sandinistas, it is painful to look into the house they are building. . . . Each succeeding trip to Nicaragua drains my initial reservoir of sympathy for the Sandinistas. . . .

One of the most depressing aspects of our trip was to hear from so many that their lives are worse today than they were at the time of Somoza.

. . . A Sandinista nomenklatura has emerged. Party members shop at hard-currency stores, dine at luxury restaurants restricted to party officials, and vacation in the mansions of the Somoza dynasty, labeled “protocol houses” [as in Cuba]. . . . Vans pull up daily at government and party offices to deliver . . . delicacies unavailable elsewhere.

. . . Ration cards are confiscated for non-attendance at Sandinista meetings.

. . . Draft resistance has become a mass movement in Nicaragua.

Senator Edward Kennedy, generally speaking not a harsh critic of the Sandinistas, has had this to say about their policy toward the Miskito Indiians:

. . . The Sandinistas’ treatment of the Indians continues to be unconscionable. One-third to one-half of the 90,000 Indians on the coast have been displaced. Some 20,000 fled to Honduras to escape the Sandinistas’ scorched-earth policy . . . 10,000 are confined to resettlement camps. . . . Most disturbing of all, 3,000 to 5,000 have lived for two years in forced-labor camps which resemble concentrations camps. . . .

The treatment of the Indians is not the only manifestation of the repressive policies pursued by the regime. Contrary to the claims of American sympathizers, the Sandinistas (according to the Nicaraguan Commission of Jurists) carried out over 8,000 political executions between July 19, 1979 and December 12, 1982. This and many other examples of political violence and human-rights violations have been extensively documented in what probably is the single best compilation of the true record of the Nicaraguan regime. Its author, Humberto Belli, used to be a supporter of the Sandinistas and editorial-page editor of La Prensa.

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In the light of such information, and against the background of past precedents, the current political pilgrimages to Nicaragua emerge as a remarkable example of the confluence of deception and self-deception. This, indeed, is in part the message that Michael Massing intended to convey in an article in the Nation (“Hard Questions on Nicaragua,” April 6, 1985), a rather mild demurral from the Left’s blind enthusiasm for the Sandinista regime for which, predictably, he was then heavily pilloried in that magazine’s letters section. As that exchange once again underscores, today’s new pilgrims demonstrate the same tenacity of belief, the willful inability to learn from history, and above all the hostility toward our own society that have repeatedly predisposed certain groups and individuals to admire and idealize political systems opposed to ours, especially when they are run by revolutionaries acting in the name of Marx. The only question is—and it may not be premature to raise it, since as we have seen there are already signs of disillusionment with the Sandinistas—who will be next?

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¹ The German novelist Guenter Grass agreed. After visiting a Sandinista prison in the company of Minister of the Interior Tomas Borge, Grass decided that “in this tiny, sparsely populated land, . . . Christ's words are taken literally. . . .”