[Pen-l] Tecnica

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Last week I finally digitized the Tecnica video at Columbia Teacher 
College's Instructional Media Lab and uploaded it to 
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4498574155037161575&hl=en 
Since it is 20 minutes long, I really didn't feel like chopping it in 
two to fit youtube's 10 minute limit. Apparently youtube is on the 
verge of eliminating this restriction but not quite yet.

I was president of the Tecnica board in the late 1980s through 1992 
when it went belly-up. Relying heavily on donations from liberal and 
radical foundations, it was victimized by the FSLN getting voted out 
of office in 1990. Nicaragua was no longer sexy. We had already 
launched a technical aid program for the ANC and the frontline states 
but it was not well-established enough to survive the downturn in funding.

In 1984 I went down to Nicaragua to observe the elections with a 
delegation from the Guardian newspaper, a weekly radical publication 
that went out of business in 1992. Nothing in my experience in the 
SWP prepared us for what a living revolution would be like. The same 
kind of peasants who were fighting for land in El Salvador were now 
enjoying a much better life on cooperatives in liberated Nicaragua. 
Health care was now universally available and literacy programs were 
making people real participants in the political life of the country.

When one of the members of my delegation found out that I was a 
computer programmer, he slipped me a leaflet that some people in the 
Bay Area had put together. They were looking for computer programmers 
and other skilled professionals to work in Nicaragua. After the 
Sandinistas had taken over, a lot of the better paid workers had fled 
to Miami just as had happened in Cuba after 1959. As soon as I got 
back from Nicaragua, I called the number on the leaflet and spoke to 
Michael Urmann, an economist who had launched the project called 
Tecnica. I agreed to go back to Nicaragua for two weeks with a 
delegation of about 15 other technical specialists and give some 
classes on structured programming techniques. I brushed up on my high 
school Spanish and returned with my course notes.

I ended up teaching at the Central Bank in Nicaragua, their version 
of the Federal Reserve. About one out of four students seemed like 
committed Sandinistas but the rest were like young people anywhere. 
They simply wanted a better life. Like young computer programmers 
everywhere, the job was a means to an end.

I was all set to take on new job at the Ministry of Construction 
supporting the largest mainframe in the country, which was about 
1/10th the size of the computers I was used to working on at home. 
The people at this agency were more political than at the Central 
Bank and I was knocked out to hear revolutionary folk songs being 
sung over lunch. Things were never like that at my jobs at Houston 
and Boston banks.

full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/tecnica/

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