I arrived in Nicaragua early in July, at the height of the recent round of confrontations between the Sandinistas and the country’s internal opposition. A week before, La Prensa, Nicaragua’s leading newspaper, had been closed, and one of the “turbulent priests,” Father Bismarck Carballo, spokesman for the nation’s Conference of Bishops, then traveling in the United States, had been refused permission to return to the country. On July 3, the day before I arrived, Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega was deported to Honduras.

For those with eyes to see, Nicaragua is not an inspiring example of revolution in action. But of course one important problem is that many if not all of the “revolutionary tourists” who visit the country—and it is said that there are now 40,000 U.S. “friendship delegates” there, not to mention all those from other Western countries—lack eyes to see, as well as lacking enough Spanish to hear and understand what the people feel (I mean the real people, not the Sandinista comandantes). And, more disturbingly, the same seems to be true of the many American and other foreign journalists on the scene.

There are two Managuas—the Managua of the workers and peasants, and the Managua of the bureaucrats and foreign “groupies.” Residents of the former Managua must spend hours in line at a supermercado del pueblo, or searching through the private markets, hunting for scarce staple items, while residents of the latter feast on lobster at $6.00 a plate in the Hotel Intercontinental. Generally, where one sees Nicaraguans out of uniform, or Nicaraguans without briefcases (the classic symbol of Leninist power), one sees no foreigners, and vice versa.

The division between the two worlds begins at the customs gate. The luggage of visiting Americans is left alone, or only cursorily examined, while packages brought in by Nicaraguans of all classes are broken open, inspected, and, in many cases, confiscated. This was my first opportunity to experience the rather fearless grumbling that Nicaraguans carry on daily; one woman whose goods were confiscated complained loudly that foreign tourists can do anything, but Nicaraguans themselves have no rights. Another individual, awaiting his turn in the lines, commented bitterly on “la burocracia.” This is a new word for Nicaraguans; some pronounce it incorrectly, with an accent on the i.

I spent four hours one Saturday walking patiently through the Mercado Oriental, the main private market in the city. (From now on I intend to ask bright-eyed leftists who speak enthusiastically about their experiences in Nicaragua if they can describe for me how to get to the Mercado Oriental.) The Mercado Oriental is a classic market of the Mediterranean type, sprawling across about four square blocks. The day I visited, however, only about half the space seemed to be in use. The low level of activity, visible immediately, contrasted markedly with market Saturdays I had seen in Mexico, the Philippines, and Spain. The reason was strikingly obvious: there was very little to sell or to buy.

I went from stand to stand, backward and forward through the market, retracing my steps in the narrow corridors. Finally, I sat down and wrote in my notebook the sum total of items for sale on this bright Saturday. At about ten stands, fish and shellfish. At about a dozen others (two or three for each item), some fried pork, some tortillas, some bread, yucca, plantains. At one or two stands, some beans and some onions, and at a few others, low-quality clothing and shoes, much of it plainly homemade from castoff materials. Finally, some ice cream, soft drinks, and beer. Nothing in plenitude, and everything highly priced. A small plate of fried pork sold for 200 cordobas; the daily wage is 500. Meat had been reported to be generally absent from the markets for about a month. Fish from the country’s two huge lakes seems to be keeping the people alive.

In a supermercado del pueblo a few blocks away, the offerings were not much better. There was some ground coffee, some butter (put up in plastic bags), a great deal of unsold vinegar, unsold steak sauce, unsold mustard and ketchup, unsold drinking glasses, health drinks made out of wheat and put up in large cans (imported from the People’s Republic of China), various cleaning fluids that would be good for use on linoleum but devastating if one attempted to substitute them for the ever-absent hand soap, and, in the meat coolers, brooms and mops. There was also some shoe polish.

I should add two additional details: in the Mercado Oriental, I listened for some time to a man discoursing on cats and how to eat them. The absence of songbirds in Managua, a hot and tropical city, was similarly explained: the people have eaten them.

Who is to blame? A better question would be, cui bono, or who benefits? The Sandinista elite and its courtesans insist that the U.S. and the contras are responsible for the growing scarcity and hunger. Stephen Kinzer, a facile reporter for the New York Times, admits in a typical dispatch (July 14) that “many Nicaraguans say they believe mismanagement and inefficiency are responsible for some shortages,” but then he turns to the favored explanation. Comandante Jaime Wheel-ock, for example, states that in its current war situation, the country has no money for “development”—as if providing people with staples were an item for development investment rather than a simple daily necessity. Kinzer himself adds a labored explanation having to do with the lack of foreign exchange—as if Nicaragua had ever before had to purchase rice, beans, potatoes, meat, or cooking oil abroad. Perhaps the simplest alibi would be the best—the contras came one night and destroyed all the staples in the country.

Unfortunately, the truth is obvious: thanks to confiscatory taxation, the first share of all wealth goes to the party and police (the latter, designated as “armed formations of the interior ministry,” highly visible in a special blue uniform), the second share goes to the army, the third to the foreign “revolutionary tourists” with dollars, and the last to the people themselves. The real Nicaraguans are living in a barter economy. As in most Leninist systems, there is no incentive for the peasants to grow and sell their produce. Anyone tempted to blame this on the war should look at a similar conflict, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39; there, notwithstanding political problems and Communist influence, and aside from the case of besieged Madrid, most of the Republican side ate reasonably well throughout the conflict, for the simple reason that the Catalan and Valencian peasantry supported the cause of antifascist defense. In Nicaragua, there is a sense that the great majority of the peasants support the contras.

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Yet the most soul-destroying aspect of the scene is not the terrible scarcity in the markets but the opulence in which the comandantes and their foreign associates live. To be sure, in the Hotel Intercontinental there are also shortages: many items appearing on the menu are not available; one evening there is chicken, but only deep-fried; another evening there are no salads. Still, life is easy for those armed with dollars, particularly foreign news people and visiting radicals.

Some other details from life in the Hotel Intercontinental: in the hotel bookstore one can purchase Muammar Qaddafi’s Green Book, and American Trotskyite publications, but no editions of the poetry of Ruben Dario, the Nicara-guan national poet and one of the greatest modern poets in Spanish. Nicaragua does, unlike Cuba, continue to produce good medium-priced cigars, hand-rolled (the Cuban production today, aside from the very top quality, is machine-rolled); but these, again, are to be found only in the hotels and tourist “dollar shops.”

And there are begging children, exactly as in other impoverished countries, but with significant differences. These children by and large stay away from foreigners; one has the impression that they have heard too many lectures from the revolutionary tourists and the East-bloc advisers. The one place they approached me was in the ruins of the Managua cathedral, as if they knew that only someone who would visit a church would give them something. They asked me for “un pecho,” a coin, explaining that they wanted it “to eat.”

Watching the comportment of the comandantes and the American leftist visitors, I found myself recalling a set of lines by the American poet Philip Lamantia:

You can not close
You can not open
You break yr head
You make bloody bread!

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2.

It took quite an effort to find a map of Nicaragua, and when I finally obtained one I had to pay three U.S. dollars for it. And then I discovered that Santo Domingo de las Sierritas, a small hamlet outside Managua where I wanted to go, was not shown on it; to locate the village I had to find a map dating from the Somoza period. The apparent reason is that this is where Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the real head of the Nicaraguan opposition, serves mass every Sunday.

I went to mass at Santo Dormingo de las Sierritas on July 6, the Sunday following the expulsion of Bishop Vega. In the end, it was not difficult to find. A taxi driver at the hotel smiled very broadly when I asked if he could take me there; there is no other reason to go than to participate in the mass.

The little church is on a hill, surrounded by beautiful, green countryside. Peasant families come on foot, throughout the morning, to attend mass. At the church I met the leaders of the genuine opposition parties—the Social Christians, Social Democrats, Conservatives, and Independent Liberals—who had come to offer solidarity with the Church in its hour of struggle. (I say the “genuine” opposition parties in contradistinction to the tame opposition parties that are pledged to support the Sandinistas.)

The mass itself was an emotional and very educational experience. To begin with, although the Cardinal is often painted in the U.S. press as an inveterate conservative and ally of the privileged classes, the majority of those at his mass were humble people, peasants and workers. Furthermore, the service itself was a “Latino” affair, with electric guitars, the singing of Protestant as well as Catholic hymns, and no Latin in the liturgy. The entire ceremony, however, was suffused with a sense of resistance. Both the entrance of Cardinal Obando y Bravo to the altar and the several mentions of the names of Father Carballo and Bishop Vega were greeted with applause. The readings included the epistle of Paul from imprisonment, the book of Isaiah, and, most affectingly, the third Psalm, beginning,

Oh Lord, how powerful are my enemies!

and concluding,

You will break the teeth of my enemies. . . .

Each line of this first Davidic Psalm was read by Cardinal Obando y Bravo, and then repeated by the congregation. It occurred to me that there was a possible subtext to this selection, which is David’s lament when surrounded by the forces of his rebellious son Absalom. It would be understandable that Cardinal Obando y Bravo should view the Sandinistas as his rebellious children, for, notwithstanding the propaganda against him and his bishops circulated in the U.S. and elsewhere, the truth is that the Cardinal had always been on the anti-Somoza side and even a supporter of the Sandinista rebellion. Indeed, Somoza had referred to him as “Comrade Miguel” because of his many gestures in defense of such Somoza-era prisoners as Tomás Borge, the present-day head of State Security. (The now-expelled Bishop Vega, by the way, Somoza had called the “red bishop.”)

As the mass drew to its close, the congregation sang two beautiful hymns: one, to the Virgin Mary, with a chorus “se salve, se salve Nicaragua,” and another, repeating “in our land, on our soil . . . long live Nicaragua, long live Nicaragua.” Outside, a busload of Sandinista soldiers had earlier passed by slowly, as if to remind the congregation of the dangers they faced. But they, and the opposition leaders who had come to join them, were evidently willing to brave these dangers, no doubt strengthened by the severity and power of the Cardinal. He is a man who, as Nicaraguans say, looks more like a soldier than a priest.

Late in the service, a message was read from the Pope, who was then visiting Colombia, expressing his dismay at the attacks on Father Carballo and Bishop Vega. And for his part, President Daniel Ortega found himself moved to comment on the situation that same weekend at one of the secular observances with which the Sandinistas would like to replace the Catholic mass as a communications event. This was one of the “face the people” (De Cara al Pueblo) sessions, held in Esteli, a provincial city, where Ortega, in his curiously-accented Spanish, soft-pedaled the repression before an audience which, at least from the newscast I saw, seemed made up more of foreigners than of Nicaraguans. I do not claim a native’s command of Spanish, or status as an expert on dialects, but I found Ortega’s manner of speaking very hard to follow. A Nicaraguan friend who was also watching told me that since they came back from Cuba after the Sandinista seizure of power, the Ortega brothers and Tomás Borge have affected the mannerisms, gestures, and even the accent, of Fidel Castro.

While speaking with members of the opposition, I identified myself as a Jew, which called forth interesting reactions. First, praise of the Jews for belonging to a religion that defended traditional values against Communism. Second, comments on Pope John Paul II’s ecumenical visit to a Rome synagogue some months previous. Finally, there were jokes about my being the only Jew left in Nicaragua, and recountings of the famous attack on the Managua synagogue in 1978. Questioned about this outrage, the Sandinistas have replied that it took place while Somoza was in power, deftly skirting the issue of who carried out the assault and why. But the attack, as has recently been documented in these pages,¹ was mounted by Sandinista hardliners as an “anti-Zionist” act. I went by the building. Today it has been painted over with Sandinista slogans. In the doorway I saw a woman with a pistol strapped to her body.

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3.

On this, my first visit to a “liberated and transformed” Nicaragua, I thought often of George Orwell’s book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. I have come to the conclusion that Orwell was wrong in one detail. Orwell blamed the Communists for dragging Spain back from its revolutionary hopes to a state where fat men gorged in restaurants while children begged in the streets. But this was not a return to the bourgeois order; rather, it was an anticipation of Communism as it already existed in Russia and would have existed in Spain had the Communists seized full control of the Republic, something they attempted but never fully achieved.

In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell also expressed great enthusiasm for conditions in the early, revolutionary Barcelona, where power was visibly in the hands of the working class. This, he said, was a situation clearly worth fighting for. Is there anything in “revolutionary” Managua that would sustain such a feeling? I found nothing.

One must ask, then, what other foreigners find to defend there. The answer must be, I think, nothing visible or concrete. The foreign “revolutionary tourists” who have descended on the country are perfectly satisfied with abstractions. They think in terms of “the process,” not the reality of daily life. To them what counts is what is said and written by the Sandinista leadership, and nothing else. They are deaf to the cries of ordinary people like the proletarian women in the Mercado Oriental, because they will never go there.

Yet the messages conveyed by those people are unequivocal. “I tell you, all this will pass,” a woman in one of the stalls in the Mercado repeated to me. Others spoke defiantly of the coming defeat of the comandantes and the liberation of the country. Still others told me of the eviction of peasants from their land to make way for useless, grandiose agricultural projects such as the planting of African palm trees. The dislodged peasants are grouped in settlements where they are compelled to work for subsistence rations, and are ordered to join the militia. They join a militia, but it is not the Sandinista army; rather, it is the contras.

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4.

It is crass to admit it, but to fly from Nicaragua to Costa Rica (with my last glimpse of Managua a giant Aeroflot jet on the diminutive runway) is to return to the real world. Although Costa Rica’s agricultural base is actually less productive than Nicaragua’s, the country seems to be everything Nicaragua is not; prosperous, literate, healthy, with an extensive welfare system, it even seems to represent, in the end, an almost paradisiacal version of what all of Central America could be.

If the presence of Costa Rica on their southern border constitutes a permanent challenge to the pretensions of the Sandinistas, the people of Costa Rica, as well as the press and the government, are equally very concerned about events to their north. Much of the most important information on Nicaragua is to be gleaned from Costa Rican media. For example, the respected, conservative Costa Rican daily La Nación, outlining the possibility of a real famine in Nicaragua, has reported fears among the Sandinista leaders of food riots. The same paper has also reported a rush to emigrate that is now affecting even the middle ranks of the Sandinista leadership, and, most recently, the possibility that, hurt by unfavorable international publicity, the nine comandantes might be pondering a second round of national “elections.”

This leads me to the issue of Nicaraguan opposition strategies, about which one can learn as much in Costa Rica as, perhaps, in Nicaragua.

There are several Nicaraguan oppositions. There is first of all the Church, a mighty and combative force. But it is very hard to gauge the extent to which the Nicaraguan Church can, as in Poland, take the initiative in organizing and leading the internal opposition. Certainly the Church already shows the bruises earned in prior campaigns. Nobody rejects the possibility that the Sandinistas will either expel or try Cardinal Obando y Bravo.

There is also, as I have noted, a tolerated internal opposition, consisting mainly of the Coordinadora parties: the Social Christians, the Conservatives, the Independent Liberals, and the Social Democrats. These organisms are tolerated, it seems, mainly because of their international contacts: the Social Christians with the Christian Democrats of Western Europe, for example. Their leaders today consist mostly of veterans of the anti-Somoza war. They are circumscribed, but undefeated. There seems to be a strong and authentic sentiment among these parties for closer coordination, if not for a final fusion into a single party.

Then there are the tolerated independent trade unions, such as the Confederation of Trade-Union Unification (CUS), affiliated with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, and the Confederation of Nicaraguan Workers (CTN), of a Christian Democratic stripe. These bodies seem to have a higher public profile than the Coordinadora parties; one sees their flyers, for example, posted in the streets of Managua, but little or nothing from the Coordinadora parties. Ironically, the flyers issued by the independent unions make much greater use of a “class struggle” rhetoric than do the propaganda posters of the government-controlled union, the Sandinista Confederation of Workers (CST). The flyer put out by the CUS for May Day, for example, reads “Remember the Martyrs of Chicago,” referring to the Haymarket bomb defendants of 1886, traditionally associated with May Day and particularly so in Spanish-speaking nations where there remains something of an anarcho-syndicalist tradition.

Aside from the tolerated internal-opposition parties and unions, there are also the groupings of what I have called the tame opposition. These are parties that profess criticism of the Sandinista government while subscribing to the Sandinista program. They include the Nicaraguan Socialist party, which was the “official” pro-Moscow Communist group for many years but has now become somewhat Eurocommunist; its candidate in the 1984 “election,” Domingo Sanchez Salgado, was among those who protested the conditions of political intimidation under which the voting was carried out. Moscow itself seems rather to have turned its back on the Socialists, preferring to deal with the Sandinistas. There is also the Nicaraguan Communist party, led by one Allan Zam-brana, which seems to have attracted substantial elements among younger radicals and trade unionists disenchanted, for various reasons, with the Sandinista leadership. These two groupings are seconded by other sectarian Marxist or radical Christian groups, and each seems to have a trade-union section of its own. But it is impossible to determine whether these leftist remnants can play an independent role.

Another group whose future is uncertain consists of that section of the Sandinista bureaucracy that retains some kind of conscience or will to resist the direction of the regime. These elements are not to be disregarded. There is a steady stream of Sandinista defectors into the ranks of the armed opposition. Together with the remnants of future possible fissures within the leadership, this by now rather considerable element may prove crucial in the struggle to free Nicaragua from Soviet domination.

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Of course, for many Nicaraguans as for many Americans, the key to the Nicaraguan contest remains the armed opposition, the contras themselves. Although one would be hard put to know it from the U.S. press, the United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO), the main armed grouping, is by no means a uniformly rightist organization, notwithstanding the presence in its Honduran-side leadership of the conservative Adolfo Calero and the former National Guard officer Enrique Bermúdez. (With regard to the widely reported “Somocista” past of the contra commanders, it is worth noting that 32 former officers of Somoza’s National Guard are now serving in the Sandinista forces, a list headed by General Federico Prado.) In the past, social democrats like Arturo Cruz and Alfonso Robelo were labeled as mere front-men for the contras; today this is clearly not the case. UNO has attracted a wide range of Left-leaning democrats who simply see in it the only way to save Nicaragua. I even heard that the second-level political leadership of UNO includes a number of former Trotskyists from various Latin American countries!

But those who insist, while fighting the comandantes, that they are the true Sandinistas and therefore perceive some kind of continuity between the revolutionary struggle against Somoza and that against the nine comandantes are, one gathers, increasingly distant from a widespread and growing sentiment within Nicaragua itself. Many in the opposition feel that the Nicaraguans have had enough of revolution, enough of San-dino, enough of red-and-black flags, enough of this or that promise “in the name of the people.” One contra figure told me that “this nonsense about who is the real Sandinista may be useful for winning over people in Washington, but not in Managua.” (This must sound ironic to American ears, tuned to the Washington debate.)

I encountered similar reactions in discussing whether the contras will, in the end, opt for a traditional military structure and strategy or follow any of the guerrilla structures and strategies that would seem attractive to irregular troops fighting in the jungle. The fact is that the contras have by and large emphasized the traditional military approach, and precisely as a means of affirming their break with the Sandinistas. I was assured that anybody who attempted to sell even the techniques or advice of a Mao or a Guevara would be greeted with great hostility by the contra rank-and-file. And this is the same rank-and-file, it should be remembered, that today is made up overwhelmingly of poor peasants, many illiterate, who oppose Communism for the same reasons that friendly U.S. intellectuals would have them oppose capitalism. They do not see themselves as professional soldiers (and they are not mercenaries, a charge for which no evidence has ever been presented). The phrase “peasants in arms” is commonly employed.

Whether the armed opposition or the internal opposition can or will win the day in Nicaragua is by no means certain at this point. For my part, I continue to suspect that however Fidel Castro might attempt to prevent it, there remains the possibility of a Nicaraguan Grenada—the collapse of the regime in the wake of a faction fight in the leadership. The recent bloody events in South Yemen followed this pattern, and although they did not make possible that country’s liberation, the experience, along with similar convulsions in Mozambique and elsewhere, shows that there is a fundamental instability in many of the party elites that have come to power under the Soviet aegis today.

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5.

By now we have grown accustomed to intellectuals who claim some literary or artistic distance from doctrinaire leftism while nonetheless continuing stridently to defend the crimes and outrages committed by the Soviet Union or its worldwide surrogates. But there are examples that continue to shock by their boldness, if not their shamelessness.

Such a one must be the German novelist Guenter Grass, who has become a tireless propagandist in the ranks of the “blame-America-first” lobby. Undoubtedly his best-known recent performance in this genre was at the PEN Club congress earlier this year in New York. But among Nicaraguan oppositionists he is better known for an incident of such audacious bad faith that it merits recounting here.

Some time ago Grass visited Nicaragua and Poland in quick succession. Upon returning to his native land, he published an article in Die Zeit comparing the two countries’ recent dramas. Grass then met with the editors of the Polish underground journal Przeglad Polityczny and, after discussions with them, formulated a proposition: a leading Polish intellectual should begin a correspondence with the Sandinista culture minister, the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal.

One can easily imagine how many leftist consciences in Europe would have been salved had this proposal gone in the direction Grass, a defender of the Sandinistas, hoped. For as he baldly stated his intention, through this initiative “both of the dogmatic temples of faith, capitalist and Communist, would be shaken.”

Fortunately, the Poles did not fall into the trap. Rather, they directed a letter of criticism to Cardenal, beginning with the stern admonition that “the Soviet temple is quite sturdy, thanks in part to you and your friend’s [Grass’s] policies, and we have no desire to shake the American temple.” Further along in the letter they noted sarcastically how “Western intellectuals trumpet their support for revolutionary Nicaragua with the same hysterical euphoria as they did before for Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, or Ethiopia.” After denying any sympathy for Nicaragua’s Somocista past, the Polish editors declared:

We are not surprised that, as your policies oppose the U.S. and run counter to its interest, you look for allies among Communist countries. We also understand that in your situation it may seem better to forget about the domestic policies and foreign aggression of these allies; you certainly cannot plead ignorance of these things. It is impossible for clergymen not to know about the situation of the Church and its faithful in Czechoslovakia or the USSR; it is impossible for poets not to know about the situation of poets in the “people’s republics”. . . .

The Polish editors concluded their letter with a list of stern questions about such matters as the attacks on La Prensa, the war on the Miskito Indians and other indigenous groups, and the Sandinista policy of “rely[ing] on the help of Cuban experts, representatives of a country where workers receive heavy sentences for trying to organize free trade unions.” Addressing Cardenal personally, they warned that, just as the Polish workers came to despise “their” red flag and Internationale, “a poet will emerge in Nicaragua who will compose a poem about the universally hated, ubiquitous name of Sandino.”

Little need be added. Clearly, the Poles understand the situation in Nicaragua very well. Similarly, nearly everybody I have encountered in the Nicaraguan opposition identifies with Solidarity, and indeed, many agree that what most frightens the Sandinista rulers—even more, perhaps, than the United States—is, precisely, a “Polish”-type situation.

One thing that sets the present moment off from previous historical turning points is the very small number of Western intellectuals who are today willing to identify with the contra cause. True, the Nicaraguan resistance today possesses a powerful lobbying agency in the Reagan administration. But aside from that, its serious advocates—those willing to investigate the situation in Nicaragua rather than to “let the President handle it”—are few, a literal handful. This is not to fault those who have supported the contra cause; it is only to point out that more is necessary in the arena of historical meditation and analysis. When the Spanish Civil War, deformed by Muscovite influence, turned into a nightmare, there was an Orwell to grapple with the phenomenon—and there was an international trend, tiny as it then seemed, prepared to hear his arguments. Where is the Orwell, the Dos Passos, the Camus of the Nicaraguan civil war?

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¹ “Sandinista Anti-Semitism and Its Apologists” by Joshua Muravchik, Susan Alberts, and Antony Korenstein, September 1986.