Читать книгу Home from the Dark Side of Utopia - Clifton Ross - Страница 11

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 for which the nation was given an award by the UN. The Ministry of Culture was holding poetry workshops all over the country, teaching peasants, militia, prisoners, policemen, and anyone else interested, the art of reading and writing poems. The government was attempting to implement a free healthcare system, raising up daycare centers and schools and community centers all over the country, financed by international solidarity. As one person told me in those days, “You can travel all over Central America and only here will you find campesinos wearing glasses, because now they know how to read.”

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, much the way the original people of the Americas traded the names of their gods for the names of saints even while maintaining the original meaning and substance that nurtured their lives and cultures. Over time the new and old faiths and rituals blend together such that the convert is able to distinguish the two, and easily manage the dissonance that would overwhelm and befuddle anyone else.

I probably spent too much time drinking beer with Daniel and the other internationalists at Comedor Sara’s but I did manage to get out of Managua from time to time to do interviews. On one such occasion I interviewed a number of young Christians who were picking coffee during the harvest, some from the traditional peace churches. I was struck by their sincerity and commitment but I was at a loss as to how to respond to them when they asked me about North American Christians and their views on the Sandinista Revolution. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that most Christians in the US probably knew nothing of their struggle. Most, like me just a few years before, didn’t even know where Nicaragua was.