[Marxism] Follow up on sectarian version of the lessons of Nicaragua

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(a comment that appeared on my blog)

Hello Louis,

Federico Fuentes, based in Caracas and La Paz, sent me the article 
“Nicaragua: Lessons of a country that did not finish its revolution” 
yesterday. I read it quickly, and sent off a brief response to him that 
I attach below. Later he sent me a link to your blog response to the 
same missive.

I write about Nicaragua with almost thirty years experience in the 
Sandinista movement, and seventeen years as a militant of the FSLN, and 
as a Nicaraguan citizen since 1990. I have three granddaughters and live 
the life of a worker, albeit better paid than most because of my 
language skills. Both my son and his wife work, and we are all 
Sandinista in orientation, but only I am a member of the FSLN.

Your response to Claudio Villas’s two-part article is effective, but 
meets him mostly on the terrain of showing how his arguments fail to 
square even with the Marxist categories and theories it is written to 
defend.

There is a more important level that needs more attention, that of 
historical fact and reality.

I cannot take the time or space here to deal with all the erroneous 
statements found in both parts of the article. All I can do is advise 
the readers to handle the item with care, and demand, next time, a 
description of the contents the way federal regulations now demand on 
food, beverage, and drug packaging.

My brief response to Federico (who sent me Part 1 of the article not to 
express agreement with it, but I suspect, rather dismay) dealt with a 
couple of obvious errors of historical fact. The writer is simply either 
ignorant of Nicaraguan history and reality, or knows it only from news 
clippings and essays in the far left press over the years, or is open to 
willful distortion of established fact.

One should also note the slanders against Fidel Castro and the Cuban 
communist party leadership, who, if we are to believe Claudio Villas, 
exerted pressure on the “Sandinistas to maintain their alliance with the 
democratic bourgeois governments in Central America and the Caribbean 
instead of with the USSR.” The defeat of the Nicaraguan revolution, it 
seems, is due to their failure to totally embrace and become totally 
dependent on the USSR, instead of relying on a pluralistic array of 
alliances that included aid from Nordic countries, from Canada, and from 
some friendly Latin American governments. And that was on the eve of the 
fall of the Berlin Wall, the restoration of capitalist regimes in 
Eastern Europe, and the collapse of the USSR itself!

To be very frank, people capable of writing such nonsense do not live in 
the real world, they live in the world of an ideologically driven 
church, the world of the WORD (theirs, of course).

One only need imagine what these folks say in the confines of their own 
meeting places about the Cuban and Venezuelan leadership, who relate to 
the current FSLN leadership as comrades and allies, members of ALBA, and 
their bridge into the rest of the region (where important signs of 
change in our direction have taken place in El Salvador, Honduras, 
Guatemala, and even Costa Rica). But then, they have to be careful 
because saying too much might upset their apple cart in Caracas where at 
the moment Hugo Chávez gets good marks from the jury in the UK. So 
Chávez merits our support for what he does in Venezuela, but falls flat 
on his face in Nicaragua because he dances a good tune with Daniel 
Ortega and gives cover to Fidel’s secret agenda of supporting the 
national bourgeoisie wherever it seems to be able to stand on its own feet.

Other errors of fact are mentioned in my note to Federico below.

Hi Federico,

I was wondering when the Woodsites would get around to saying something 
about events here.

The article itself might have been written by a computer program 
supplied with sufficient data and facts by a good historical researcher.

But it reveals considerable ignorance of that same history, especially 
since it operates with categories that hardly existed here during the 
period of the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty. The urban masses that led 
the insurrections were not working class in composition in the main, 
they were plebian masses largely self employed "informal" sector 
workers, and in engaged in small trading activities. The (unionized) 
industrial working class was tiny, and the crafts unions predominated in 
the organized union movement. Public employees and teachers had a big 
weight compared to other sectors, but were pro dictatorship in their 
majority because of relative privilege. Of course there were exceptions, 
some of them outstanding. It was among students and teachers, and among 
health workers that the FSLN started to be able to recruit in the early 
days.

The second big error of the article is to say the FSLN had nothing to do 
with the urban insurrections, but entered the cities after they were 
liberated. This is false in the case of all the major cities, including 
above all Estelí and Managua. Three successive insurrections in Estelí 
in the spring and fall of 1978 and then in July 1979 were led by the 
FSLN and by Comandante Zorro. León was liberated by a combined 
insurrection and occupation of Sandinista armed units led by Comandante 
Dora María Téllez. The Managua insurrection was punctuated by a 
strategic retreat of most of the population of the eastern barrios of 
the city known as the Repliegue Táctica. Around 25,000 marched in the 
dark of the night from east Managua to Masaya, about 30 kilometers 
southeast of the city. This evacuation was led by the urban section of 
the FSLN, in coordination with the national directorate. Key figures 
were Comandante Carlos Nunez Tellez, Comandante Mónica Baltodano, and 
Julio Lopez Campos, and many others whose names were on the lips of tens 
of thousands of people during all the years of the revolution.

To the note above that I sent to Federico, I would just here add a 
couple of points:

• I would like to ask Claudio Villas how he thinks the FSLN could have 
pulled off the evacuation of a whole sector of the capital city, the 
most working class sector where many of the industries were located, if 
it had no roots in the urban working class? Maybe the liberation 
theology priests pulled it off? To this day none of those very fine 
compañeros have claimed credit for leading the evacuation of Districts 
four, five, and six of the Capital. That would have been ridiculous 
because everyone in Managua knows who led that action, just as everyone 
in other cities knows who led the insurrections where they live.

• What is true is that the sweep, vigor, and scope of the mass uprising 
took the divided leadership of the FSLN (the three-way split was only 
healed in March of 1979, partly under the impact of the mass uprisings 
and partly under the prodding of the Cuban CP leadership) by surprise 
and compelled a rethinking of strategy and tactics. But to say the FSLN 
did not lead the insurrections and the revolution is simply absurd. Only 
sheer ignorance or willful distortion could allow for such an assertion.

How does the expression go? – There, but for the Grace of God, go I, or 
something like that.

No thanks!

Felipe Stuart Cournoyer
Managua

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