Ronald Reagan had decided to go on an anti-communist offensive, declaring the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” Many socialists and communists I knew agreed with that assessment, but we also saw the US as no less evil an empire. The anti-nuclear movement burgeoned under Reagan: he ended up being its best organizer. We seemed to be ever closer to nuclear war as well as intervention in Central America. Meanwhile, the entire culture seemed to be veering off toward the right in politics as well as in ethics and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority seemed to have captured the attention of Christians in Middle America. The entire political scenario, domestic and international, looked bleak, except for Central America where revolutionary insurgencies offered some hope for alternatives in a bipolar world, or so we thought. I expressed my sense of doom in a journal entry in late 1981:
I watch my hands turn to ash.
I hear the cry of billions.
The stars roll up like a scroll
into the glowing darkness.
A black silk shroud
for a can of Del Monte corn.
A coffin for a box of Kelloggs
Sugar Frosted Flakes.
The Pepsi generation degenerates
into a carbonated corpse.
Capital and competition
are the whores in every bed,
the idols of every altar;
icons of these gods reside
in every mind,
in the eye of every heart
and each tv screen of the soul.
I watch my legs melt away.
The waste of autos fills my lungs.
My veins pump pesticides and preservatives.
The little I have left is a shriek.
And I screw my lips into a smile
to meet my dead friends at a party
where we’ll spend the evening re-
membering what it was like
to be alive.
I was obsessed with activist politics, and I could tell even bob was beginning to worry about me. He suggested I take a break and gave me a copy of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery to read. I didn’t read it. I had more important things to read than what I thought to be the obtuse, elitist and a-political poetry of Ashbery. I couldn’t understand why bob would push such material on me. But he was worried, and trying to cool me down with some post-modern cold water. That was how worried he appeared to be.
I didn’t have it in me to worry about myself. I could only think that I needed to act against the great injustice of the world somehow, the great insanity that had even engulfed the church. And I was sure that if we could raise our voices and speak out it would somehow make a difference. It had worked with the prophets of Israel, hadn’t it? Or had it?
Chapter Five: The Sandinista Revolution: y un Paso Atrás
In fact, our little Evangelical-Marxist magazine had been largely ignored. Our little group of activists, and the little groups of activists dispersed around the country were all being ignored. There were more important things going on for North Americans, and television told them what they were. Everyone knew who J. R. Ewing was; millions followed Dallas on television. Hardly anyone knew which side the US was on in Nicaragua or El Salvador—or even where those countries were. Moreover, they didn’t seem to care much, either. That was the reality behind the world of television the country lived in.
The Cold War began to explode in the Central American Isthmus after the July 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. The Monroe Doctrine, which had conceived of, and supported, a major role of the US in the affairs of its neighbors for the previous 150 years, suddenly was called into question as civil and guerrilla wars, with the backing of Cuba (and therefore, the Soviet Union), savaged the region. At the time the situation was understood in stark black-and-white, Cold War terms—and for many, it still is. In those days I saw the Sandinista Revolution as a distinctly new breed of socialism that departed from Soviet orthodoxy by welcoming Christians and others into the process, something the mainstream press couldn’t quite grasp. Only years later did I understand the Central American civil or guerrilla wars of those years in their greater complexity. At the time I held a legitimate, but limited, view of the situation: that the imperial power of the US was seeking to destroy national liberation movements, and I couldn’t be a neutral observer. By the very fact that I was a North American and US citizen, I had an obligation to oppose US government support and involvement in the bloodshed.
The spirit of the Sandinista Revolution of Nicaragua was expressed in the popular slogan of those days: “Between Christianity and Revolution there is no contradiction.” Christians filled posts at all levels of the Sandinista Government of Reconstruction: from the Ministers down to the base. I think the religious sensibility that permeated the revolutionary current had a humanizing effect on the process itself. The Sandinistas abolished the death penalty on taking power and avoided what would have been a certain bloodbath in the process. After the struggle that ended in victory for the FSLN on July 19, 1979, utopia seemed within reach in Nicaragua. The government of reconstruction called on the people to help clear the rubble and rebuild. What they began to rebuild were clinics, day-care centers, hospitals, schools, and cooperatives that formed on expropriated lands of the ex-dictator Somoza and his family.
Certainly the country was governed by a guerrilla group organized, as was usually the case, along “democratic centralist” lines—with perhaps more emphasis on the “centralist” than the “democratic.” Nevertheless, many of us hoped the nine-man junta would ensure that there would be at least a degree of consensual decision-making at the executive level of government, while the people at the base, who had come into their own as a revolutionary class, were clear they would no longer tolerate dictators. Indeed, in the final days of the revolutionary struggle the people of the neighborhoods became their own “vanguard,” though I wouldn’t know that or what it meant until many years later.
I took a Spanish class at Vista Community College but a half semester into it I could wait no longer. I dropped out of my first semester of Spanish and started preparing for my trip to Nicaragua. I was determined to join the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front, FSLN) and fight to defend the Revolution. Months after the ink had dried on the pages of The Second Coming and the pages were collated and stapled, I left for Nicaragua, taking a drive-away car to Houston and flying from there.
It was 1982 and I arrived just a couple of days after Tomás Borge and Daniel Ortega of the FSLN comandancia had declared the revolution “socialist.” I was ready, dictionary in hand, to defend the Revolution, and the first thing I did was look up Fr. Ernesto Cardenal, Minister of Culture. I’d exchanged a couple of letters with him and sent him copies of pamphlets and the one issue of The Second Coming. The Rosa Luxemburg/Dorothy Day Cultural Brigade had also done a poetry benefit for the FSLN and I’d sent him money for that. It couldn’t have amounted to more than fifty dollars, but he graciously thanked us for the donation and the solidarity.
Cardenal politely received me at his office in the Ministry of Culture but my Spanish was confined to the present tense of a dozen or so verbs, so the conversation was, to say the least, limited. He recommended me to another ministry where he thought I might be able to work doing layout for a publication, a task that wouldn’t require great language skills. Nothing came of that contact, not even an interview.
I wandered around Managua marveling at this strange country in the middle of a very promising revolution. The literacy crusade, begun under Ernesto Cardenal’s brother, Minister of Education Fernando Cardenal, had brought down the rate of illiteracy from over fifty percent to around thirteen percent in just six months, a stunning success