Toward the end of my month in Nicaragua I took a trip to Ometepe Island in Lake Nicaragua, got terribly sick and returned to Managua with a fever. I was staying with a young seminarian at an Anglican church, but it was a limited stay and I had no money and no ticket home. Eventually my friends in Berkeley, many of them as poor as I, raised money to send me a ticket to come home.
I was still sick and feverish and the trip through Honduras seemed surreal, especially as we drove through an intense storm, one that had been going on for nearly a week. I arrived, exhausted, in San Pedro. I crossed the street from the bus station and took the first hotel I saw, the Hotel oderno, the “M” in the name having burned out. The Moderno was anything but modern, but it served my purposes for a clean, cheap place to stay until my flight out the following day. In the hotel’s café I met a Guatemalan schoolteacher who invited me to sit with six of his friends. They invited me to join them for a beer and I apologized when I ordered a soft drink because I was taking antibiotics for my fever. The person I sat next to was introduced to me as Victor and he was, at first, surprisingly cold and aloof. As I talked with the other teachers he listened closely and finally turned to me and looked me in the eyes.
“At first,” he began, “I thought you were CIA. But now that I hear you talk I know you aren’t. If you were CIA you’d speak better Spanish.”
I wasn’t sure how to take that (I still carried my dictionary with me wherever I went and referred to it often) but I thanked him and affirmed that I wasn’t, indeed, CIA.
“We’re all teachers. We’re here from Guatemala for a conference of teachers,” he said. Leaning toward me, he spoke more quietly in a confidential tone, “We teach the Indians in the mountains how to read and write. You know, in my country, it’s a crime to teach Indians to read and write. Still, we go into the mountains to villages where mestizos are rarely seen. And there we see little children who are dying of starvation. And you know what that’s like? To see children die of starvation?” He teared up as he stared at me and I shook my head. “They vomit worms before they die. And do you know why they die? Guatemala is a rich country. We grow all kinds of food but it is sent to your country. They die in my country, the children, because you eat their food. And you live in Disneyland, completely unaware of it.”
I was speechless and so were my companions at the table. There was a heavy silence in the café, a heavy, anguished silence. Victor wiped the tears from his eyes and cheeks. Then, looking around at his companions, he raised his beer to toast. “But still, life is beautiful!”
I am haunted by that moment and cannot recall it without tears even now. It was as if I had encountered all of Latin America face to face in this one person, Victor, with whom I would spend only a few minutes on a rainy Saturday in an otherwise nondescript Honduran town and yet would remember him the rest of my life.
By the time I returned from Nicaragua I was moving toward theological agnosticism. I was still inclined to work with the Christians because I felt comfortable with their ethic and their culture of kindness, but I needed more space to grow than Christianity offered. Still, when I was offered a job—if it could be called that since the work paid nothing but room and board—working at a social justice ministry of Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in East Oakland, I took it. I was interviewed by the only other two staff of House on the Way over a cup of tea in a beautiful, sylvan valley right in the middle of the East Oakland ghetto. In the interview I’d told Betty Frazer, the resident counselor, and Fr. Richard “Dick” Schiblin that I was agnostic and I felt closer to Marxism at that point than to Christianity, neither of them flinched. They still hired me on the spot.
In exchange for printing the newsletter for the Church and House on the Way ministry, I had access to the Multi 1250 printing press. Once I managed to learn how to run the press I started printing small runs of poetry books and a new magazine that I co-edited with Marc Batko called Poor Konrad, named after the 16th century revolutionary German worker’s conspiracy to “bind the strong man and take the kingdom by force” (Mark 3:27). We printed statements from the Nicaraguan churches translated by James and Margaret Goff in which they implored Christians in the US to work to stop the killing and acts of terror the CIA was directing against their country. And indeed, as time went on the US government increased financing to the Contra army that was wreaking havoc on the country.1
Once again, Marc and I found very little support for, or interest in, the issue of revolutionary Christians in Nicaragua except among a few of our friends. We felt it was nevertheless important to get out the regular statements from Nicaraguan churches and translations of Nicaraguan poetry and German liberation theology, particularly the writings of Dorothee Sölle and other Christian socialist theologians, as well as Ernst Bloch.
Nevertheless, the Sandinista process defined the word “revolution” for me and convinced me that there existed the possibility not just for individual searches for utopia, nor small utopian communities in progressive cities, like the House Church of Berkeley, but for large-scale social projects that could transform nations and peoples. I wanted to be part of that any way I could so I contacted Ernesto Cardenal, enlisting a Puerto Rican priest who lived in the Redemptorist monastery to help me write the letter in Spanish.
A few weeks later, in October 1983, the day the US invaded the tiny island of Grenada, I got a letter back from Ernesto Cardenal, inviting me to Nicaragua. Dick and Betty were supportive of my going to Nicaragua and they did what they could to help me organize my trip and find some funding. Another priest who was living at House on the Way, a real saint, Fr. Pat Leehan, gave me two hundred-dollar bills. “Roll them up and put ’em in your sock. You’ll need ’em,” he said. Pat was involved in the Sanctuary movement and had personally smuggled dozens of Guatemalan and other Central American refugees in his tiny red car with tinted windows. He was mostly deaf and had KPFA on in his room from early morning into the night and you could hear it blaring as soon as you walked into the upstairs area where House on the Way had its offices and living quarters.
Arriving in Managua, I stayed at Hospedaje El Molinito and immediately fell in with a group of ex-pats, internationalists and revolutionary tourists from the US By now the counter-revolution was in full swing and the Contra war was underway along the border, funded by the US government and cocaine dollars—though, in all honesty, both sides in the conflict were getting money for their war chest taking cuts from the cocaine going into the US to make the dangerous new drug, crack.
Soldiers and milicianos and brigadistas in olive green were everywhere but in Managua life went on as usual. In Gringolandia, a few square blocks of Barrio Marta Quezada near Tica Bus station, and especially at Comedor Saras (Sara’s Café), you could find the internationalists guzzling beer and talking politics, frequently with Daniel Alegria at the center of the conversation. Daniel was Claribel Alegria’s son and assistant to Tomas Borge, Minister of the Interior.2 Aside from a good knowledge of English, Korean, and God-knows what other languages, Daniel was our contact for information and analysis of the political situation in Nicaragua. He knew everyone and everything about the country from his work in the Ministry of the Interior (MINT). When I say “our” contact, I mean most of the internationalists and tourists who passed through. Daniel was the unofficial Sandinista internal ambassador to internationalists. Besides that, he was funny and had the ability to state things clearly and poignantly. One morning as we discussed the US and international capitalism over eggs at the hospedaje/comedor known as the casa con la puerta verde, the house with the green door, he turned to me and asked, “Do you think most North Americans understand that everything they own is splattered with someone else’s blood?”
My transition from Christianity to Sandinismo was by now fairly complete, although I still found (and continue to find) much wisdom and spiritual resonance in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Still, for all practical purposes, I’d made the transition from one set of symbols to another,