Nicaragua Network

MONDAY, JANUARY 05, 2009

The Children Eat and Go to School (January 5, 2009)

By Katherine Hoyt, National Co-Coordinator, Nicaragua Network

[Editor's Note: Chuck Kaufman's “Open Letter to Nicaragua Solidarity Activists” (see below) generated a lot of discussion, including mostly positive feedback about the Nicaragua Network position toward Nicaragua and the government of President Daniel Ortega. Much of that discussion took place on listserve made up mostly of expatriates from the US and Europe. Nicaragua Network Co-Coordinator Katherine Hoyt responded to postings that thought groups like ours should issue blanket condemnations of the Ortega government.]

My mind keeps going back to an article on Cuba by Orlando Núñez about five years ago. He criticized a number of actions of the Cuban government but he said that he continued to support the Cuban revolution because “We socialists are seduced by the fact that the children eat and go to school.” In other words, because of those simple facts, he couldn't condemn the whole process.

Many of us feel the same way about what is going on in Nicaragua today. So many things are being bungled; good people offend the wrong person and are dumped from the government or party; inexplicable attempts are made to discredit long-time revolutionaries who stuck with the FSLN when others left. Women's lives are lost because of a dastardly alliance with a reactionary church. And these conflicts among Sandinistas are not easily resolved because they go back at least to '94 if not '84 or '74!

But when long-time respected educator Miguel De Castilla accepted the appointment as Minister of Education and announced that on the first day of the new government school fees would be abolished, I was thrilled. This battle against school fees was a battle we at the Nicaragua Network had joined as one of the founding organizations in the US of the world-wide 50 Years Is Enough Campaign in the mid 90s. I was thrilled again when Ruth Herrera, with whom we had worked on campaigns against the IDB on water privatization, was named head of ENACAL and announced the end of the contract with the Chilean company that would have led to ENACAL's privatization. We had sent delegations to Nicaragua to visit examples of alternatives to the Washington Consensus that included the small farmer development model pioneered in Nicaragua by CIPRES. Now that model became government policy.

We know there have been problems with these programs as they have developed (including not collaborating with all of those who had been working on these issues outside of government for years) but we have also heard many good reports. After working for so many years on these same problems on the international level and finally seeing a government come into power and do what only governments can do at the policy level to confront and solve the problems, could we condemn that government outright because of its other (substantial) faults? I for one have not been able to do that.

So the Nicaragua Network will continue to condemn policies or actions that we feel merit condemnation, praise those that we think are laudable, and stay out of most issues where foreigners (especially from the United States) should not interfere.

One more small thing. I'm getting old. Next month I turn 65. I lived in Nicaragua 11 ½ years under the Somoza dictatorship. So I want to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen in that forever famous interchange in 1988 with then vice-presidential candidate Dan Quale who had likened himself to John Kennedy. Bentsen said, “I knew John Kennedy; John Kennedy was my friend; you're no John Kennedy.” I knew the Somoza dictatorship; I lived under the Somoza dictatorship; this is no Somoza dictatorship. And I believe that the Nicaraguan people have advanced beyond the point at which they could slip into a dictatorship of left or right. And much of that has to do with what was learned by the people during the Sandinista revolution the first time around.