IS NICARAGUA A MARXist-Leninist state? Is it another Cuba or is it on its way to becoming one? To find the answers to these questions, I traveled to the heart of the revolution.
En route to Nicaragua, I made a stop in Venezuela, where a friend expressed his amazement. ''You? In Managua? That place is practically another Cuba. With your reputation as a right-winger, things could go badly for you. Be careful.'' (For reasons that elude me, anyone defending freedom of expression, free elections and political pluralism in Latin America is known as a right-winger among the area's intellectuals.) Actually, I wasn't careful at all. Instead of going badly, things went so well that I was worn out - bone-tired from the hospitality lavished on me by the Sandinistas and by the opponents of the regime. During my monthlong trip in January, I talked to hundreds of people. I traveled through most of the country, where fewer than three million people live in an area somewhat larger than that of Greece. And I found striking differences between Nicaragua and Cuba.
By its fifth year, Fidel Castro's Cuba had become a Soviet satellite. Cuba's economic and military survival depended on the Soviet Union. Every sign of opposition had been suppressed. The private sector was eliminated. The party bureaucracy had extended its tentacles throughout the country and ideological regimentation was absolute.
In Nicaragua, five and a half years after the fall of the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, a pluralist society - even though it is under stringent state control - still exists. Private enterprise dominates agriculture, cattle raising, commerce and industry. Political opponents openly denounce the regime through the Democratic Coordinator, a coalition of anti-Sandinista political parties, labor unions and business groups. And despite severe censorship, criticism can be found in La Prensa, the weekly Paso a Paso, and two or three radio news programs.
There is no doubt that political opposition is tolerated because it is not very effective. As the November elections demonstrated, the Sandinistas do not allow competition on real terms (they refused to postpone the elections in order to complete negotiations with the popular Coordinator coalition so that its candidates could appear on the ballot). But it is also true that the opposition is not subjected to the terror and paranoia that threaten all dissidence in a totalitarian state.
Nicaragua, which now plays host to thousands of visible and invisible advisers from the Soviet Union, Cuba and the countries of the Eastern bloc, receives military and technical assistance from these countries. But Nicaragua is far from being a satellite of the Soviet Union - not because of a decision by the Sandinistas, who would, I believe, have been glad to place themselves under Moscow's protection, but because of Soviet reluctance to assume the burden of another Cuba or to risk a direct confrontation with the United States. (During my stopover in Venezuela, President Jaime Lusinchi told me that he had asked the Soviet Union if it was planning to send MIG's to Nicaragua; the reply he received through the Russian Ambassador was: ''We're not that crazy.'') This explains Fidel Castro's speech late last year in which he announced what everybody already knew: that Cuba would maintain a prudent neutrality if Nicaragua were invaded. He urged the Sandinistas to reach a negotiated settlement with the United States within the framework of the Contadora agreement. (The treaty was first put forward last year by the Contadora nations of Latin America as their proposal for a peaceful settlement for Central America.) Limited aid from Moscow, combined with internal resistance to the establishment of a Marxist-Leninist regime, economic disasters brought on by nationalization and statism in the early years of the revolution, as well as deprivations caused by rebel terrorism and sabotage, have all served to moderate the Sandinistas' Communist stance.
They now appear to be following a vaguely neutral, nation-alist and socialist political model - one that they believe will make the regime's survival and the achievement of domestic peace more likely. If this direction is maintained, there is a chance that the Sandinista regime will evolve into a loose socialist dictatorship independent of the Soviet Union. Yet, one cannot rule out the possibility of a sudden return to the Sandinistas' original intentions (to turn Nicaragua into a Marxist-Leninist state) should the external circumstances change - for instance, if the Soviet Union should suddenly decide to take Nicaragua under its wing.
In the meantime, the Sandinistas have boldly announced they would sign the Contadora agreement, devalue their currency, reduce subsidies to transportation and abolish those for certain basic goods. They have also announced a moratorium on arms purchases and promised that 100 of the Cuban military advisers - a fraction of the total - would be sent home. They are declaring that their regime is a nonaligned, pluralist mixed economy. That is now half true, but it could be a reality if in exchange for their concessions, they could obtain peace and guarantees of non-intervention. In Nicaragua, myth and reality often go hand in hand. One day, Vice President Sergio Ramirez Mercado said to me while I was having supper at his house: ''I suppose you know the motive behind the wining and dining by the Sandinistas and the reactionaries. We all want you to say nice things about us in your article and bad things about the other side.''
Ramirez is a 43-year-old novelist with a fine sense of humor; we've been friends since before the Nicaraguan revolution. He lived in West Berlin and was head of a university press in Costa Rica before the revolution. Ramirez's enemies say that he exaggerates his radicalism in public so that he won't lose influence with his Sandinista comrades; in fact, they say, he is one of the most moderate men in the regime.
It is an interesting twist: a Sandinista accused of being a closet moderate. During my month in Nicaragua, I came across many such ironies. Take Managua, the capital. I used to think that the most labyrinthine city in the world was Tokyo. I was wrong; it's Managua.
The earthquake of 1972, which destroyed most of the city, has left vast ghostly spaces in the center of Managua. The Sandinistas have converted part of the Gran Hotel, severely damaged in the earthquake, into a theater. There, on Jan. 9, three days after my arrival, on a stage built over what once was a swimming pool, Commander Daniel Ortega Saavedra presented a folkloric program for the foreign delegations that had come for his presidential inauguration, held the next day.
The Government had provided me with an escort, the novelist Lizandro Chavez Alfaro, director of the National Library. He is maniacally punctual, insisting I arrive at my appointments an hour ahead of time. That day was no exception, which was fortunate. As the other guests were arriving, I had had the opportunity of touring a section of the hotel that now houses a Museum of Modern Art. It was a brilliant idea to display abstract, surrealist and primitive paintings and sculptures among ruins that looked as if they had been designed ex-profeso by a daringly imaginative architect. I could never find the ruins of the Gran Hotel again. People would give me directions, but I could never follow them.
The streets of the rebuilt capital are all side streets; they have no names and the houses have no numbers. Directions are pure conundrums. ''Go 70 varas up and 20 down from where the little tree used to be.'' What little tree are they talking about? A tree that once existed in the past, no one knows when, at a spot where there is now nothing, but Managuans still use the ''tree'' as a point of reference. A vara, roughly three feet, is a medieval Castilian measurement that nobody else in the world uses except the Nicaraguans. And how does one interpret ''up'' and ''down''? I was given a variety of explanations. According to some, ''up'' is the east, where the airport is located; ''down'' is the west, where you find the cemetery. According to others, both terms come from the Indians, for whom ''up'' meant where the sun rises and ''down'' referred to where it sets.
Outside Managua, I was entranced by the variety and beauty of a landscape dotted with lakes, volcanoes, jungles, rugged mountains and plains that support a thriving cattle in-dustry. To travel the Atlantic coast, official permission is required because of the battles between the Government and the 70,000 Miskito Indians, a third of whom have fled to Honduras. In the rest of the country, one can travel freely, even along the northern frontier with Honduras, where there is a strong anti-Sandinista rebel presence. (A map of Nicaragua appears on page 44.) On some of these trips I was accompanied by the affable Lizandro Chavez, who is a native of Bluefields on the Atlantic coast. On others, I was alone. I was surprised by the lax security measures and the general normalcy of life, even in Esteli and Jinotega, where abandoned villages, destroyed cooperatives, blackened wrecks of burned vehicles and other signs of war with the contrarevolucionarios are everywhere. Bluefields and its environs were the only areas where I noticed a certain anxiety in ordinary residents. Yet attacks and incursions by rebel Miskitos there are less frequent than along the Honduran border.
Chavez arranged the interviews with governmental officials, and I took care of interviews with the opposition myself - at least for the first few days. By the second week, I wondered how I would find the time to squeeze in conversations with just a third of the ministers, owners, farmers, former political prisoners, businessmen, unionists, journalists, priests, feminists, evangelicals and poets (even madmen with ''essential information'' for my article) who had contacted me. At the same time, I was deluged with invitations to social events.
Nicaraguan hospitality is legendary, but the invitations were symptomatic of the importance that both the regime and its opponents place on what is said about Nicaragua outside the country. Both sides know that the fate of Sandinism is being decided not only inside but also outside Nicaragua, especially in the United States.
LTHOUGH THE SANDINISTAS may be prepared to make almost any concession to restore peace to their country, they are obdurate about one point: They will not relinquish power. The desire to hold on to power is, of course, not peculiar to the Sandinistas. It characterizes totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, even the discreet dictatorship of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico. Don Emilio Alvarez Montalban, an ophthalmologist and a conservative, is a respected political analyst for the opposition who has a keen appreciation of the ironic. One evening he says to me: ''Every day this revolution smells less and less of Moscow and more and more of Mexico City.'' I tend to agree with him.
Most of the opposition, however, respond angrily to any suggestion that the ruling Sandinista Front is less than totalitarian. At their meetings, they cite examples of human-rights abuses, the mockery of the Anti-Somocista People's Tribunals, the harassment of free trade unions, the abolition of the right to strike, the cancellation of 24 radio news programs, the contradictory decrees and threats of confiscation leveled against the business community, the Marxist indoctrination of the young in the schools and the army. Those attending the meetings are not circumspect in their choice of words. Some, after giving their full name, make ferocious - and unverifiable - attacks on the Commanders: They have stolen the best homes; they have a house of assignation on the Southern Highway; they have turned Sacuanjoche Restaurant into a place where Cubans, Russians, Bulgarians and the other Communist advisers can indulge their orgiastic fantasies.
When I say that in the totalitarian countries of my acquaintance a meeting like theirs would be inconceivable, they reproach me for my naivete. Can't I see that this kind of ''tactical'' tolerance will soon end? They are risking their freedom, perhaps their lives, by speaking up.
I always leave these meetings admiring their tough stand, but skeptical of their effectiveness. The civilian opposition appears to be associations of the elite, so prone to internecine wrangling that they leave themselves open to the Sandinistas' divide-and-conquer tactics. Almost all of the opposition parties - the Democratic Conservatives, the Liberals, the Christian Socialists and the Social Democrats - have a splinter group in the National Assembly.
There are capable and highly intelligent men among the opposition leaders, but their overall political activity is impractical. They refuse, for instance, to admit that it was a mistake to boycott the November elections. Regardless of how fraudulent they may have been (they were no more rigged than the ritual elections in Mexico or the ones held recently in Panama), participation would have given the opposition more representatives on the national level (the non-Marxist opposition parties took 29 seats in the 96-member Assembly), more clout in denouncing official excesses and errors, as well as the opportunity to exert some influence on the system.
Instead, they preach a legalism and an orthodox liberal democracy that Nicaragua has never had and that, sadly, it probably will not have in the near future. By telling each other, and trying to convince everyone else, that the country is now, or is about to become, a totalitarian satellite of the Soviet Union, they have adopted the politics of catastrophe - of waiting for the contras, aided by the United States Marines, to rescue them.
And who are the contras? The Sandinistas call them ''mercenaries'' and ''gangs''; President Reagan calls them ''freedom fighters.'' Most of them are in the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, which operates out of Honduras and is led by Adolfo Calero Portocarrero, former head of the Conservative Party. Then there is the Revolutionary Democratic Alliance in the south, along the Costa Rican border, which is headed by Eden Pastora Gomez, the former Sandinista.
The Government and the opposition versions of the war with the contras are so contradictory that trying to see the two sides clearly often leads to confusion. But one point is clear: The ''bourgeoisie'' is not at the front. This is a war between poor men. Most of the contras - like the badly wounded Sandinista soldiers I saw in the German Pomares Field Hospital in Jinotega - are peasants. Many have only a vague idea of what they are fighting for. Some think they are fighting Yankee imperialism. Others, judging by contra leaflets, believe that they are engaged in a crusade against the forces of Satan.
The contras can inflict a great deal of damage on the Sandinista regime. Perhaps they can do more harm than they have already (7,968 casualties in four years, according to President Ortega; the equivalent figure in the United States would be 600,000), but they have no chance of overthrowing the Government. The support they enjoy in certain peasant and bourgeois quarters is not enough to provoke a general uprising similar to the one that toppled Somoza.
Furthermore, the contras' economic and military dependence on the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States arouses irremediable suspicion even among those who are hostile to the Sandinistas - who remember the numerous North American interventions and occupations, especially the one that left the Somoza dynasty as its legacy. Pablo Antonio Cuadra, the noted Roman Catholic poet, writer and co-editor of La Prensa, and one of the most respected of the opposition figures, tells me that ''the C.I.A.'s covert aid to the contras has been a very serious mistake.'' A North American invasion is not the solution if one is trying to preserve democratic options in Nicaragua. The kind of massive, and bloody, military intervention that will be needed to overthrow the Sandinistas will not result in a democracy. Only a dictatorship can impose order in a country devastated by terrorism and civil war. To maintain the existing fragile freedoms under the present regime, the only choice for the opposition is to reach some kind of an agreement with the Sandinistas. Although the regime has traveled far down the road toward totalitarianism, the challenges and difficulties it faces are an inducement to compromise. Because the opposition parties do not recognize this, they have become marginal to the central political realities of Nicaragua.
HE GROUPS THAT HAVE BEEN EFFEC-tive in forcing the Sandinistas to modify their Marxist-Leninist intentions are the farmers and industrialists. Unlike their Cuban counterparts a quarter of a century ago, they did not fly to Miami when the Government turned progressively Communist soon after it came into power.
Enrique Bolanos Geyer, a prosperous industrialist, rancher and farmer, is a steadfast critic of Sandinism. He is also president of the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (known as Cosep), the country's largest business federation that had financed three political strikes against the Somoza regime in 1974. ''Bolanos's problem, and Cosep's problem, is that they haven't resigned themselves to their loss of political power,'' claims Vice President Sergio Ramirez. ''We have no difficulty in reaching an understanding with Carlos Pellas, the multimillionaire, or other industrialists who discuss credits, foreign currency, stocks and investments with us. But no capitalist will ever be president of the Central Bank again, or dictate our economic policy, and that is what Cosep cannot accept.'' Perhaps he is right. But beneath the apparently incompatible doctrines, there are signs of cooperation between the capitalist sector and the regime.
Before the Sandinista revolution, the Pellas family was, after the Somozas, the second richest. The family still has vast holdings, the most important of which is the San Antonio Refinery in Chichigalpa. I spend a day there, escorted by the young, dynamic Carlos Pellas, who elected to stay in Nicaragua when his father and brothers moved to Miami. There are 3,000 workers on the payroll (5,300 during the harvest), and about 20,000 people who live on company-owned land. In recent years, there has been a decrease in production, stemming from an affliction whose ravages can be seen everywhere: the scarcity of foreign currency.
The Government's delay in giving the refinery dollars to pay for repairs and replacement parts meant that many of its trucks and tractors were out of service, and the transport of sugar cane to the factory was reduced drastically. Moreover, rats devoured some 200 tons of sugar cane because the refinery did not receive the $100,000 it had requested to buy poison. ''Because we couldn't get that money on time,'' says Pellas, ''we've lost 400,000 quintales of sugar; that's approximately $2,700,000.'' (A quintale is about 100 pounds.) Since the revolution, about 70 of the company's technicians and professionals have left the country. Two of the currently employed engineers have moved their families to Costa Rica and visit them every two weeks. Why? ''So that our children won't be called up for patriotic military service, and because we're afraid the country will become Communist.''
As often as they voice fears that the Sandinista Government is headed toward Communism - a fear common among the middle class - the refinery's professionals complain about the lack of worker discipline that Sandinism has brought with it and of the high cost to the owners of continuing to pay the salaries of workers conscripted into the army.
Nevertheless, the San Antonio Refinery is expanding (by expanding, an owner not only gets more foreign currency but shows his faith in the Government). The San Antonio Refinery has built a new mill that will equal the output of its factory. ''I think the company is secure for another five years,'' says Pellas. ''Only God knows after that.''
The man touted by the regime as its ''capitalist'' is Samuel Amador. ''He's the capitalist we show to foreigners so they won't think we're Communists,'' jokes Vice President Ramirez when he introduces me to Amador. It is a role the flamboyant 48-year-old farmer and rancher plays marvelously well.
I spend a weekend with him in Sebaco, 66 miles from Managua, in his mansion with its marble, its two gigantic heart-shaped swimming pools and its 11 dogs. It is the house of a Nicaraguan Great Gatsby. ''It cost me $800,000,'' Amador tells me as he raises his little finger with its flashing diamond ring. What is $800,000 to a man happy to have lost $2.5 million during the war that overthrew Somoza? He has just been elected Sandinista representative to the National Assembly.
That weekend, Commander Jaime Wheelock Roman, the Minister of Agrarian Reform, and 50 North Americans arrive by bus for supper. Amador tells his visitors that the best proof that ''Nicaragua will never be Marxist'' lies in his four estates, his 3,750 acres of rice, sorghum and vegetables, his livestock, his new houses in Matagalpa, his 180 employees, the vineyards he intends to plant, and the tourist project he will launch this year in the Jinotega Mountains.
He introduces me to his two teen-age sons, ''volunteers in the coffee harvest,'' who, he assures me, will do their pa-triotic military service. ''For now they're turbas , so what?'' (''Turbas,'' a derogatory term for the masses, or mob, are civilians used by the Sandinistas for political intimidation. ''Yes, we are the turbas, so what?'' has become their rallying cry.) At night, as we stroll through his garden full of frogs, he confesses that his happiness is not absolute. He has two daughters living in California who refuse to visit him and who write to him that ''one day the Communists will slit your throat.'' When I ask him if there is anything in the regime that isn't perfect, he says: ''A.T.C.'' (the Association of Rural Workers, the official peasants' union). They have taken over his lands twice, and Amador has had to use all his influence to dislodge them.
According to Cosep, the private sector is a fiction in Nicaragua. ''What kind of landowners are we?'' its members ask. ''The state decides what we should plant and when we should plant it. We can sell only to the state, only at the price it sets. It pays in cordobas and decides when, and in what currency, it will give us money for upkeep and equipment. With the banks nationalized, we have to depend on the state for credit, too. And we live with the threat that they'll confiscate our land on the pretext that we're sabotaging the economy.''
The Sandinistas' point of view is quite different. ''We are saving the private sector in Nicaragua,'' claims Commander Wheelock. I accompany him as he escorts the Prime Minister of Iran, Mir Hussein Moussavi, on a tour of the Cuban-built Timal Refinery in Malacatoya, 14 miles from Managua, which is the biggest refinery in Nicaragua and which was opened by Fidel Castro on Jan. 11.
''The peasant masses were hungry and angered by the exploitation they had suffered,'' Wheelock continues. ''They were pressing for the lands, and there were many unjustified takeovers. But thanks to agrarian reform, which has distrib uted two million manzanas '' - about 3.7 million acres - ''and because the peasants trust us, we have avoided widespread expropriation of private holdings. We are slowly rectifying whatever abuses may have taken place.''
I ask him why employers are not allowed to pay their workers bonuses or give them higher salaries than those set by the state. His reply: ''To avoid the anarchy that would result during the current crisis if there were rivalry between employees of different companies, and to avoid the creation of privileged elements within the working class.''
Relations between the owners and the Sandinistas, although full of mistrust, are not always negative. Seventy-five private rice growers organized the National Association of Rice Growers in 1979 and are affiliated with Cosep. They are proud that their 22,500 acres produce 50 percent of the rice grown in Nicaragua - that is, 92 million pounds, which is the output of the 35,000 state-owned acres the Government expropriated from Somoza. None of the 75 have been exiled or had their property confiscated. Three plantations were taken over, but the rice growers' association moved heaven and earth and managed to recover them.
''After endless negotiations,'' says Mario Hanon, the association's president, ''we convinced them to let us open our own marketing association. We handle 90 percent of the private production and 10 percent of the state harvest as well, since the state companies have discovered that if they sell rice to our marketing association, payment is fast and reliable, which is not the case with the state marketing agency.
''We can't sell freely, only to buyers sent by the state, but at least our rice is processed and sold efficiently,'' continues Hanon. A short, energetic man in his early 50's, Hanon is an engineer who was imprisoned by the Sandinistas for four months soon after they took over. ''At the National Rice Commission . . . we have marathon discussions with the Government delegates, but, I must confess, they've always set a price - at least until now - that meets our expectations.''
The leaders of the rice growers' association say that they have earned the respect of the Sandinistas, which is why they were allowed to establish a research company specializing in fertilizers, as well as a seed-exporting plant.
''It may be that not all the trade associations are as united as we are,'' says Hanon. ''We're like a fist. As soon as there are rumors of confiscations, we hire lawyers, we swamp the regime with letters, lawsuits, claims, requests for meetings. We knock on Commander Wheelock's door, and if he doesn't open it we climb in through the window. The Cuban advisers for the state rice plantations were a disaster, and that worked in our favor, too.''
As I say goodbye to Hanon and his colleagues in the association's office in downtown Managua, I tell them that at least from their perspective, the future of private enterprise does not seem so dismal. ''We've put a tape in our heads that plays the same thing over and over,'' says Hanon. '' 'Nothing's happened here; let's get to work.' The trouble is that sometimes the tape breaks and we remember the crisis, the war, the insecurity. That's when we begin reeling - and we're not even drunk.''
T COVERS 10 OR 12 BLOCKS IN the eastern end of Managua, and its multicolored displays in crowded kiosks, stalls and counters recall the bazaars of the Middle East. It is called the Oriental Market - Nicaragua's black-market heaven.
The shelves in the supermarkets and stores that sell merchandise at Government-fixed prices are usually half-empty, and people have to wait on long lines to buy subsidized or rationed goods. But go to the Oriental Market and nothing is scarce and there are no lines. Prices, however, are much higher than the official ones.
When I was in Nicaragua, toothpaste - officially priced at 27 cordobas (equivalent to $1) - was not for sale anywhere except at the Oriental Market, where it cost $7. The tailors' cooperatives were supposed to sell jeans for $18, but the supply did not even remotely match the demand. Jeans were available at the Oriental Market for $180. The Oriental Market also dispensed medicines that were in short supply at the pharmacies.
What the Sandinista Government had intended to do was to protect the ''real wages'' of the workers and, through price controls and subsidies, to price essential goods within reach of even the poorest citizen; in January, the average monthly salary for a worker ranged between $110 and $150. But, some say, this policy has turned Nicaragua into a country of speculators, hoarders and smugglers - a country where the most profitable business is the channeling of goods from the legal economy into the black market.
I mentioned to a Government official that the only people who benefitted from this system were the wealthy, that it actually harmed the poor for whom the system had been created. ''That's the problem when you set up socialism halfway,'' he said. ''If we had nationalized the entire economy, this corruption would not exist.''
A few days after I left Nicaragua, I read in the paper that the Sandinista regime had decided to abolish subsidies for agricultural products and to allow the free market to determine prices.
ICARAGUA IS ONE of the most Catholic countries I know. When I was traveling through the department of Esteli, I saw caravans of peasants in their Sunday clothes, many of them barefoot to fulfill a vow, who were walking to the Sanctuary of Our Lord of Esquipulas in El Sauce, some 45 miles away. Every Nicaraguan village has its saint and honors its patron's feast with a celebration that usually lasts several days and includes festive processions and rituals.
Religion has long been inseparable from politics in Nicaragua, but perhaps the most critical debate in the country today is between the ''people's church'' and the Government on one side, and the church hierarchy and the majority of the faithful on the other.
Many Catholics fought with the Sandinistas against Somoza, and almost all the leaders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (F.S.L.N.) - even those most devoted to Marxism like Tomas Borge Martinez, the Minister of the Interior, or Carlos Fonseca Amador, a founder of the Front - had a Catholic education. The Catholic hierarchy had frequent confrontations with Somoza, and after his overthrow gave the Sandinistas its blessing in a pastoral letter. But the support was shortlived. It ended with the radicalization of the regime and the rise to prominence within the Government of the ''people's church,'' which advocates a synthesis of Marxism and Christianity. The supporters of this movement claim that the first duty of Christians is commitment to the revolution, and they identify sin with ''unjust capitalist social structures.''
''We are not a parallel church, but a reform movement that is trying to live in solidarity with the poor,'' says Jose Arguello, editor of Amanecer, which is published by the Antonio Valdivieso Ecumenical Center. ''For us the problem is not whether the revolution is moving toward Marxism, but whether it is going to survive. The alternative is not democracy but something like the situation in Guatemala or El Salvador. A Marxist country is better than a dead one.''
Ernesto Cardenal Martinez - a priest, poet, Minister of Culture and one of the most extreme advocates of the ''people's church'' - has proclaimed that the ''true Kingdom of God is a Communist society, and Marxism is the only solution for the world.'' (Cardenal, one of four revolutionary priests in the Sandinista Government, was recently suspended a divinis for not resigning his ministerial post.) Nicaragua has consequently become the magnet for liberation theologians, Socialist Catholics, radical theologians, apocalyptic prophets and Marxist-Leninist priests from all over the world.
Its name notwithstanding, the ''people's church'' is largely composed of members of the religious elite - priests and laymen whose intellectual disquisitions and sociopolitical work lie beyond the scope of most of the Catholic poor. The majority of Nicaraguan Catholics, like Catholics in the rest of Latin America, do not practice the reflective, intellectualized, critical religion that the ''people's church'' espouses. On the contrary, theirs is a simple, intuitive, disciplined and ritualized faith that has always strengthened the church in Latin America. The efforts of the leaders of the ''people's church'' to combine politics and religion have only found a response in the intellectually militant members of the middle class, many of whom are already converts.
The most outstanding figure in the ''people's church,'' the Franciscan Uriel Molina, is saying a solidarity mass in the church of Santa Maria de los Angeles in Managua's Rigueiro District, where he has been priest for many years. The chapel is circular and bare of statues except for one of the Virgin. There are, however, huge revolutionary murals in which Christ is dressed as a Nicaraguan peasant and villainous Yankee imperialists and well-fed soldiers shoot young people carrying Sandinista flags. The Peasant Mass, by the composer Carlos Mejia Godoy, is punctuated with revolutionary songs written to very pretty music.
The lesson in Father Molina's sermon deals with the ''process of revolutionary social change which Christians should experience through their faith.'' When the time comes for the embrace of peace, the mass turns into a political meeting. More than half of those attending are North American visitors. Encouraged by the presence of state television cameras, they rush toward Commander Tomas Borge, who is beside me, kiss him, photograph him and ask him for his autograph. I whisper to him: ''The revolution's in trouble - this looks like Hollywood.'' ''MOST NICARAGUAN CATH-olics,'' says the Archbishop of Nicaragua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, ''are loyal to the bishops and the Pope.'' There is strong evidence he is right.
I see it at the Festival of San Sebastian in Diriamba, where a lively crowd gives an old priest an ovation when he takes the microphone as the procession begins and shouts: ''The Communists are responsible for this war, and they're forcing our boys into the army to fight it.'' And I see it most of all in the excitement Monsignor Obando generates in his public appearances.
When I attend mass at his church of Santo Domingo de Las Sierrietas on the outskirts of Managua, Nicaraguans of all classes - waving Nicaraguan and Vatican flags - receive the Archbishop with applause (it is his birthday) and cheers for the Pope. Beneath the traditional appearance of the church and its traditional decorations, everything, including the congregation's exaggerated enthusiasm, is as politically charged as it was in the Rigueiro District. (Ever since John Paul II's visit to Nicaragua in 1983, the Pope has become a buzz word: Cheering him is equivalent to protesting against the regime.) At 59, Monsignor Obando is a charismatic personality. His cardinal's vestments cannot hide his rugged Indian features and his compact peasant's body. In contrast to his adversaries, Monsignor Obando has no intellectual pretensions. He is a conservative like John Paul II, with whom he is on very good terms. He combines commitment to tradition and ecclesiastical authority with a sense of justice and a notable ability to communicate his spiritual message to humble people.
''The regime is not totalitarian yet, but every day there are more signs that it is moving in that direction,'' he says. ''We are in favor of reform. We are opposed to the great economic gap between rich and poor. But social justice is one thing, and filling a country with hatred, preaching the class struggle, advocating war to the death between capital and labor - that is another matter entirely.''
I tell him what Tomas Borge told me: ''We're worried that the C.I.A. will try to assassinate Monsignor Obando and blame us.'' The Archbishop sighs. ''Somoza said the same thing: 'I'm afraid that the Sandinistas will kill you and blame me.' And he tried to give me protection, which of course I refused, just as I had refused the Mercedes-Benz he wanted to give me as a gift. Tell Commander Borge that he doesn't have to send me protectors, because I already have four of them: the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and myself.''
He tells me that in late 1983 a peculiar incident occurred. On his way home from a pastoral in the country, ''three armed men dressed as soldiers stopped the car; only the driver and I were in it. They forced their way in and made us drive to an isolated spot and park. In the darkness they insulted me and said they were going to kill me. I always carry a two-way radio and I managed to shout into it what was going on. This surprised them, and they ran away. Apparently their orders were just to frighten me.''
Pastoral letters of the Nicaraguan bishops criticizing the regime have touched on highly controversial issues, such as the conflict between the Sandinistas and Miskito Indians; the church blames the situation on acts of violence by the Government. But the pastoral letter of a year ago provoked the greatest furor when it advocated a dialogue between the Government and the contras. The Sandinistas have steadfastly refused to negotiate with the rebels.
It is, however, the church's frontal attack against Marxism, perhaps even more than the economic crisis or external pressures, that has been a moderating influence on the regime. The Sandinista Directorate recently established a dialogue with the bishop's conference. While I was in Nicaragua, there were two private meetings, one between Monsignor Obando and President Ortega, and another between President Ortega and the president of the bishops' conference, Msgr. Pablo Antonio Vega, but the results were not made public. THE PEASANT VILLAGE of Cuapa is in the department of Chontales, in the center of Nicaragua. One night in 1981 the sacristan, Bernardo, went into the church and saw a brilliant light that radiated from the Virgin and illuminated the entire chapel. The phenomenon disappeared when Bernardo switched on the electric light.
One morning three weeks later, when he was fishing along the river, the sacristan suddenly felt great joy. The landscape around him began to change: the sun was in eclipse, he heard birdsong and the rustling of leaves, and he saw flashes of lightning. A cloud descended to earth. On the cloud was a beautiful, barefoot young woman, with her hands clasped, a cape embroidered with jewels wrapped around her, a crown of stars on her head. She had chestnut hair, honey-colored eyes, bronzed skin. She stretched out her hands and a feeling of warmth flooded through the sacristan. ''What is your name?'' he stammered. ''My name is Mary.'' ''Where do you come from?'' ''From heaven. I am the Mother of God.''
This first vision took place on May 8. There were four more, in June, July and September, always on the eighth of the month. The sacristan was also summoned on Aug. 8, but he couldn't respond because the river was in flood and he could not cross over. In his last vision, it was not the young woman who appeared to him but a little girl about 8 years old.
In the first vision, the Virgin asked Nicaraguans to say the rosary with their families, and she exhorted them to love one another, to fulfill their obligations and to make peace. She also said: ''Nicaragua has suffered a great deal since the earthquake, and if you do not change, Nicaragua will continue to suffer and you will hasten the coming of the Third World War.''
The message was unequivocal in the second vision. Bernardo asked her what she thought of the Sandinistas. Her answer: ''They are atheists, Communists and that is why I have come to help the Nicaraguans. They have not kept their promises. If you ignore what I ask, Communism will spread throughout America. But you must not leave the country; you must not turn your back on your problems. If you listen to my pleas, Nicaragua will be the light of the world.''
Bernardo, a friendly man in his early 40's, tells me the story in a mild voice. We are in the garden of a seminary in Managua where he is in seclusion. He says that he still cannot reveal everything that Mary told him. He has that quiet look of the believer that I find fascinating yet unnerving. He tells me that when Monsignor Vega, who is the Bishop of Juigalpa, authorized him to reveal the miracle, and crowds of pilgrims began to come to Cuapa, three Government officials visited him and offered him a farm with good land and cows, free of charge, if he would say the Virgin was a Sandinista. He answered that he could only tell the truth. They offered a compromise: All he had to do was to stop saying she was anti-Sandinista. ''I cannot betray her,'' he replied.
Then a campaign against him began in Barricada and Nuevo Diario, the two official newspapers, and on television. He was called insane, hysterical, delusional. One morning at dawn, the police broke into his house and tried to kidnap him, but the devout who slept close by came to his rescue. Two years ago, the church brought him to the seminary in Managua to protect him; he takes care of the garden and regales the seminarians with stories of the visitations.
By the time Bernardo was moved to Managua, the Virgin of Cuapa had become an object of veneration in Nicaragua. Tens of thousands of the faithful have crowded into the village, sometimes led by Monsignor Vega and Monsignor Obando. Whenever the censorship allows, La Prensa publicizes the pilgrimages and defends Bernardo. The church hierarchy has let it be known that ''the petitions of the Virgin were not in opposition to the teachings of the church.''
The efforts of the ''people's church'' to eradicate ''bourgeois mariolatry'' have been unsuccessful. During Commander Ortega's inauguration, Monsignor Vega, who read the benediction, cleverly evoked the Virgin of Cuapa before hundreds of guests and millions of television viewers. When the Valdivieso Ecumenical Center tried to counterbalance this ''mariolatry charged with potential counterrevolutionary politics'' with novenas that proposed a progressive and revolutionary image of the Mother of Christ, the hierarchy declared the novenas impious and denounced the center for anti-Christian activities.
This is not a medieval history. In Nicaragua today, belief or disbelief in the Virgin of Cuapa situates people on one side or the other of the country's ideological conflict.
HE NEWSPAPER LA Prensa is the voice and catalyst of the anti-Sandinista opposition. I attend an independent-union meeting of its employees in Managua, which has been called because the Government censor suppressed 60 percent of their copy the day before and the newspaper could not be published.
All copy must be presented to the Ministry of the Interior by midmorning. Three or four hours later, the Director of Media, Lieut. Nelba Cecilia Blandon, returns the materials, indicating the paragraphs, articles, headlines and photographs that must be excised. On the average, a quarter of the paper was censored in 1984, and since censorship was established three years ago, the paper could not publish 29 times. La Prensa has a ''morgue'' of approved texts that it substitutes for those that have been cut.
During the meeting on Jan. 9, the eve of the anniversary of the assassination of the paper's previous editor - Pedro Joaquin Chamorro (who was reportedly killed by Somoza loyalists) - the staff gives a warm welcome to his widow, Violeta de Chamorro, who often visits the offices of the newspaper which she owns. A motion is approved urging President Ortega to abolish censorship and to end harassment ''of our workplace.''
Jaime Chamorro, brother of the slain journalist, co-edits the paper with Pablo Antonio Cuadra. Chamorro is an important leader of the Conservative Party and one of the most outspoken members of the opposition. He explains that Sandinista persecution takes many forms: intimidation of the paper's distributors by the ''turbas'' that has forced 20 of its 150 outlets to close; denial of foreign currency to the paper for the importation of raw materials; the withholding to the paper of news items from state agencies, and pressure on contributors and employees to end their association with the paper.
Despite all this, and despite the fact that the paper comes out as late as 6 or 7 in the evening in order to comply with the censorship procedures, La Prensa sells all of the 70,000 copies permitted under the paper quota. On days La Prensa cannot publish, its readers send in the price of the paper as a token of solidarity and in recognition of La Prensa's symbolic value. ''I'll stay in the country only until they close it down for good,'' says an engineer at a sugar refinery.
Is the regime aware that censorship damages its image in the rest of the world? ''This is a war of aggression,'' Tomas Borge explains. ''Let the attacks and sabotage against our country by the C.I.A. and the mercenaries end, and censorship will end. We are at war, and every country at war uses censorship to protect security.'' He adds that official publications must also submit to Lieutenant Blandon's scissors. ''What happened to Allende in Chile is not going to happen to us,'' says Daniel Ortega. ''Before the coup, the Government was destabilized by the C.I.A.-controlled media.'' Several Sandinistas, Jaime Wheelock among them, lived in Chile during the Allende period, and they are haunted by what happened to the slain leader's party, Popular Unity.
Total censorship, however, is difficult to achieve. Photocopies of suppressed texts circulate from hand to hand; people discuss them on the street and read them to each other on the telephone. And the anti-Sandinista stations - Radio Impacto in Costa Rica and the contras' September 15 that apparently broadcasts from Honduras - are heard everywhere. But perhaps the most serious consequence of censorship is the impoverishment of political debate in the news media. There is, in fact, no debate: There are only attacks and mutual incomprehension.
The level of the two official newspapers is very low. Barricada is made up of communiques and Nuevo Diario tends toward sensationalism. The editor of Nuevo Diario is Xavier Chamorro, the brother of La Prensa's co-editor. Until recently, Barricada's editor was Carlos Fernando Chamorro, son of La Prensa's slain editor. A reserved, secretive young man who spouts the passionate and truculent slogans of the Sandinistas, Carlos Chamorro is now in charge of the Government's Propaganda Department.
In many minds, the Chamorro family has become a symbol of a divided country. Violeta de Chamorro, an elegant, courageous woman whom history has pushed to the front lines, assures me that her divided family (and there are many such families in Nicaragua today) still meets occasionally for lunch, and that they talk to one another cordially about everything except politics. Mrs. Chamorro herself was a member of the Provisional Government, but resigned because of differences with the Sandinistas.
Censorship has so exacerbated La Prensa's opposition to the Government that although Lieutenant Blandon censors one-quarter of the copy every day, with what remains the paper manages to strike a blow against the regime even when it seems to be reporting the weather or the miracles of the Virgin. Nicaraguans decipher the allusions and barbs just as the Spaniards did during Franco's last years when censorship was beginning to weaken and newspaper readers routinely read between the lines. La Prensa, which questioned the validity of the November elections, never calls Commander Ortega ''President of Nicaragua.'' It always refers to him as the ''Executive Officeholder'' - the same term Pedro Joaquin Chamorro used for Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
OMMANDER TOMAS BORGE, Minister of the Interior, is one of the nine members of the National Directorate of the Sandinista Front. He is the sole survivor of the five who founded the Front in 1961. Born into a poor family from Matagalpa, he went toschool with Carlos Fonseca Amador, another of the Front's founders, and he began to conspire against Somoza when he was 14. He spent six and a half of his 54 years in prison, five in the mountains as a guerrilla and 19 years in hiding.
He is the oldest of the Commanders of the Revolution (the rest are in their 30's), the most talkative, the one most inclined to confuse desire with reality, and the most amiable. He is a short man with curly hair, a broad chest and vaguely Oriental features. His exuberance charms journalists. At a dinner with foreign correspondents in Managua, the reporters unanimously describe Borge as ''the only Commander whose speeches aren't boring.''
If it is true that all Nicaraguans have a kind of natural addiction to poetic imagery - Nicaragua has a higher percentage of good poets than any other Latin American country - in Tomas Borge this trait has been honed to a perversion. In front of the Ministry of the Interior he has hung an enormous poster that proclaims the ministry ''Guardian of the People's Happiness.'' The title of his book on Carlos Fonseca is ''Carlos, Dawn Is No Longer a Temptation.''
Writers are often guests at Borge's house. He is an avid reader, and I am certain he suffers from a frustrated literary vocation. Although I sometimes think he idealizes and colors Nicaraguan reality until it turns into science fiction, at other times I am convinced that he speaks with utmost candor.
On the day of our first interview, we are in the simple house where he lives with his wife and several young children. He says it is a shame I write good novels but have such bad political ideas, and I respond by asking if what they say about him is true: that he is the hardnose of the revolution, Moscow's man and Cuba's tough guy, a fanatical Marxist and Communist. The part that bothers him is ''hardnose.'' ''They say that about me? I'm the softest of the bunch. Let me tell you something. If I had been the candidate in the November elections, the bourgeoisie in this country would have voted for me. Know something else? The prisoners' children love me.''
''We're the only revolution in the world that hasn't shot anybody, that has abolished the death penalty,'' he says. ''And as for my police, all you have to do is walk down the street to see how respectful they are toward the people. This is the only country in Latin America where nobody's afraid of the police. Just yesterday I sent some cops to break up a strike - the workers had taken over the premises. I arrived a little later and what do you think I saw? The strikers and the cops were having beer together!''
Days later, when he learns that I am going to attend Father Uriel Molina's solidarity mass, he suggests we go together. We arrive early and walk along the miserable unpaved sreets, past the shanties of plywood and tin in the Rigueiro District. There is no wild cheering when the poor recognize Borge, but many of them wave, call him by his first name, and some even brave his guards - soldiers armed with machine guns - to embrace him. He is the classic politician: He kisses babies, picks up children, and gives the pencils and ballpoint pens he has in his pocket to anybody who asks for one.
After mass we go to eat at Lobster's Inn. The after-dinner conversation lasts more than four hours. I ask him if he misses his life in the mountains. ''Not at all. I'm a city man. Those five years as a guerrilla were terrible. A guerrilla's life seems very romantic, but it's really monotonous, uncomfortable, and your one daily, absorbing, obsessive concern is hunger.''
He asks me why I am not a revolutionary like other Latin American writers - Garcia Marquez, for example, or Julio Cortazar. I try to explain, but he doesn't seem particularly convinced by my conviction that without freedom all social reforms are bound to fail sooner or later. He says that Fidel Castro, who spent three days in Nicaragua for Daniel Ortega's inauguration, told him that in spite of my criticisms of Cuba, he wanted to meet me but wasn't able to find me. ''Your police must be terrible,'' I tell him, laughing.
He assures me they are enormously efficient. ''We've infiltrated the contras; we know all their moves and catch them like rabbits. I've even infiltrated the C.I.A. We don't use torture, so our only option is to be very good cops.''
Toward the middle of January, Borge gives a dinner in my honor at his house. It is one of the few chances I have to talk with Nicaraguan writers. I discover that Nicaragua is like the rest of the world. Writers don't discuss literature when they get together: They talk about other writers who aren't there, and they talk politics. There are about 25 poets and novelists at the dinner, including Ernesto Cardenal, Minister of Culture, who is an excellent poet. I have attacked him for some of his outrageous demagogic statements, but every time we meet he is very cordial and suave, acting as if he knows nothing about what I have said about him.
Borge denies the insistent rumors that over and above his ideological differences with Commander Jaime Wheelock (Borge is radical and Wheelock is moderate) they despise each other. He also insists it is not true that relations between himself and Daniel Ortega are strained because Borge wants to be President. ''Revolutions are invincible,'' he says, ''unless they commit suicide by becoming divided, which was the case in Grenada, where Maurice Bishop was murdered by his own comrades. If we were disunited, the United States would invade immediately.''
Borge's claim that prisoners are not tortured is disputed by Dr. Lino Hernandez Triguero of the Permanent Commission on Human Rights. ''We have proof,'' Hernandez tells me, ''of tortures that leave no mark. Prisoners are locked inside a dark cell for two or three months, for example. In the case of Dr. Alejandro Pereira, a political prisoner, Borge's men made him listen to a tape of his wife's voice pleading with him to confess to the charges against him.''
How many political prisoners are there in Nicaragua? There are conflicting statistics. According to Borge, of the country's 6,000 prisoners, 2,000 are Somoza's ex-guards and about 200 are contras. According to the opposition, the number is much higher. Enrique Sotelo Borgen, a Conservative representative in the National Assembly, estimates that there are about 10,000 political prisoners.
Many of the prisoners accused of being counterrevolutionaries are in the Zona Franca prison where, according to the Commission on Human Rights, there are at least ''1,000 political prisoners in filthy and inhumanly overcrowded cells.'' The prisoners are allowed one visit every two months from one family member for one hour. The visitors start lining up at the prison gate the night before. I ask Borge for permission to visit Zona Franca; although he promises he will send it, I never receive the permit.
At our last meeting, Borge takes me to one of the prides of his ministry: the ''open farms.'' At one, 14 miles from Managua, there are 59 prisoners - all former Somocista guards - who plant corn, beans and other food products on a 125-acre farm. There is no security of any kind, and the farm is run by a prisoners' council whose president, a former sergeant sentenced to 29 years in prison, was Somoza's bodyguard. They have visitors every Sunday, and every six months they can spend a week with their families. The farm has two rooms set aside for ''conjugal meetings.'' According to Borge, there are seven ''open farms'' with a total of 900 prisoners, who are chosen on the basis of good behavior.
At the beginning of our visit to the farm, a former lieutenant in the guards who has six months left to serve asks Borge for an early pardon. Borge makes this proposal to the prisoners: ''I'll let him out if you promise not to ask me to shorten all of your sentences.'' They agree. But at the end of the visit an official comes to Borge with the case of another prisoner who signed into Somoza's guard when he was 14 years old. He has been sentenced to 10 years in prison, and has already served five. His behavior has always been exemplary. Borge calls the prisoner over and asks him what he would do if he were free. ''I'd finish school and then I'd study medicine.'' Borge cuts the five years off his sentence and gives orders for his immediate release. The young man begins to cry. The cameras of the state-controlled television, which accompany Borge on his tours, record it all.
HE SANDINISTAS boast of having received 67 percent of the vote in the recent elections, but the organizational structures in Nicaraguan society make it difficult to determine if the figure is a real reflection of the regime's popularity.
The Cuban-style Sandinista Defense Committees organize the populace by street and district. Anyone who does not belong is an outcast, since it is through these committees that one receives the coupons to buy rationed and subsidized basic commodities. The committees also grant the certificates of good conduct required for obtaining passports, state jobs or student scholarships.
The committees have made a valuable contribution to the campaigns for literacy and mass vaccinations, and they played an important role in the success of police operations against crime and drug traffic. In Managua, there is no drug problem among the young. It is safe to walk through any neighborhood, day or night, and the American Ambassador has only one bodyguard in contrast to the six needed by his counterpart in Costa Rica and the eight in San Salvador. The chief function of the defense committees, however, is to spy on neighbors.
Besides these committees, other mass Sandinista organizations include the official unions, which have not replaced the independents but have reduced and marginalized them, and the People's Army, which now has compulsory military service.
Although it is obvious that most of the population take part in these organizations, it is also obvious that participation is often grudging because it is unavoidable. Two days after my arrival, I spend a morning in Nagarote, 26 miles to the west of Managua.
About a week earlier, army recruiters - soldiers themselves - came to the village at dawn and battered down doors in their search for deserters and draft dodgers. The villagers reacted violently, fighting with fists and stones while someone rang the church bells to alert those who were still asleep. The recruiters retreated, but they came back with ''turbas'' armed with truncheons. In the meantime, the villagers had torn up the paving stones and built barricades in the streets. Nagarote was not pacified until midnight, after many villagers had been wounded or arrested.
The dozen or so women who tell me the story in the village church, where thrushes fly around the naves, are angry and frightened. ''They say they'll be back tonight to take the girls away, too. They take away boys we've worked so hard to raise just to have them die like dogs.'' The women also complain about shortages, high prices, long lines and poor transportation. (The state-controlled transportation system is awful: One day in Managua I waited on line for an hour and a quarter for a bus, and once I got inside I thought I would die of asphyxiation.) Three weeks later, I see 50 women, humble women like the ones from Nagarote, in the hallways of Archbishop Obando's house. They are there to tell Monsignor Obando about a similar though less-violent incident in a Managua shantytown. The roundups by the recruiters in movie houses, buses and sports stadiums is a topic that follows me around Nicaragua.
On the Atlantic coast, while I am waiting for a boat on the Bluefields dock, I hear two officials talking about ''the kids who've gone to live in the woods to escape patriotic military service.'' And in a Managua seminary, two young seminarians - who were rounded up themselves as they were walking along the street, and who were later released - tell me about the boys who waited for a red light, disarmed the guards in the truck that was taking them away, and then escaped. For much the same reason that many American youths evaded the draft during the Vietnam War - to avoid getting killed - many Nicaraguan youths prefer to go into hiding rather than serve the two years in the army fighting the contras.
The explanation for the Government's recourse to a military draft, imposed in January 1984, that is so openly despised by so many people is that the war against the rebels leaves them no alternative. ''It's not only a question of mobilization at the front,'' Vice President Ramirez tells me. ''Many of the personnel protect public buildings and production centers threatened by sabotage.''
More than 35,000 young men are believed to have been called up. In the countryside, youths as young as 14 and 15, who have no papers on them, have been rounded up. According to the Sandinistas, recruits receive a three-month training program before they are sent out to fight. The families of such youths, as well as opposition members, say that soldiers are sent out after a week's training, if that.
Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that anger at Sandinista policies means that every Nicaraguan who complains is an enemy of the regime. Every one of the enraged women in Nagarote voted for the Sandinista Front. Says one of them: ''I pray that with President Ortega's help, things will get better.''
The war, contra sabotage, the Government's totalitarian measures, a weakening economy - all of these factors have cooled the once almost-universal support for the regime. However, broad segments of the population, especially the poor, still favor the Government.
They have received concrete benefits from the revolution in the areas of health, education and land distribution, even though statist policies, combined with the worsening economy, have often impeded these reforms. All Nicaraguans have access to hospital care, for example, but the hospitals usually have no medicines to give them. Lowering the cost of basic food products through subsidies has caused a decline in agricultural production because it is cheaper for the peasant to buy food in state-run stores than to plant it.
But the egalitarian impulse that motivated the reforms, the desire to make amends to those Nicaraguans who had suffered neglect and abuse for centuries, still holds immense persuasive power. Even Arturo Jose Cruz, a leader of the Democratic Coordinator, the civilian opposition coalition, and the person least likely to be impartial about the regime, recognizes this.
He is in Managua for a few days, and I meet with him in a small house in Altos de Santo Domingo. Cruz, who now lives in Washington, is the best-known opposition figure abroad. An elegant intellectual, Cruz became the president of the Central Bank soon after the revolution and was his Government's Ambassador to Washington before he broke with the Sandinistas. I ask him if any good has come out of the revolution.
''Agrarian reform is a carefully conceived plan,'' he replies, ''and the literacy campaign, rural development, the improved status of women - they are all positive. But their most important achievement is that they have broken down the tremendous class barriers that once divided society. The Sandinistas' mistake is thinking that none of these accomplishments is compatible with freedom.''
T OFTEN HAPPENS IN revolutions. Before their triumph, the dynamic power of their call is centered on the libertarian impulse - hatred of the tyrant, of repression, of censorship. Once in power, however, egalitarianism takes control, and conflict between the two impulses is inevitable. This has happened in Nicaragua.
Tragically, liberty and equality are harsh antagonists. At the heels of a revolution, there is a temptation to establish social justice by sacrificing individual freedom; conversely, a desire to safeguard liberty can lead to further exploitation and unspeakable inequality. Real progress depends on achieving a tense equilibrium between the two ideals. No socialist revolution has yet achieved that balance.
The Nicaraguan revolutionaries who took power after a gallant struggle against a dynastic dictatorship believed they were free to distribute land, guarantee full employment, develop industry, lower the cost of food and transportation, end inequality, eradicate imperialism and aid neighboring countries in their own revolutionary struggles.
Five and a half years later, they are beginning to discover that transforming a society is far more difficult than setting up ambushes, attacking barracks or robbing banks. Furthermore, Marxist-Leninist slogans are no panacea for the brutal conditions of underdevelopment, the broad diversity of human responses and behavior, and the limitations placed on the sovereignty of poor, small nations when they become pawns in the rivalry between superpowers.
In my conversations with Sandinista leaders, they appear to be gradually learning the bourgeois art of compromise. Of the nine members of the Directorate, the one who is reputed to have learned it best is 39-year-old Commander Daniel Ortega.
I am told that Violeta Chamorro has called him ''the best of all of them.'' He is also the quietest - a tough, somber man who seldom smiles. I accompany him on a tour of the northern front where he visits war widows and orphans, as well as soldiers wounded in contra ambushes - youths of 15, 16, 18 years of age with ruined faces, hands, legs. Throughout, his expression of cold solemnity never wavers.
On my last day in Nicaragua, he invites me to lunch with his wife, Rosario Muril-lo, at their comfortable home (the house of a banker who went into exile) in a well-to-do neighborhood of Managua. Rosario Murillo is a slender, warm woman who is a poet and a representative in the National Assembly. Their seven children, several from their previous marriages, live with them.
Daniel Ortega doesn't drink or smoke; he runs 3 miles and works 15 hours a day. He began to conspire against Somoza when he was 13 years old, and he spent seven years in prison for robbing a bank to obtain funds for the revolution. Although the nine Commanders assert emphatically that they are absolute equals, Commander Ortega, in fact, has been emerging as a leader, first as Coordinator of the Governing Junta and now as President.
I tell him that my month in his country has been a schizophrenic but privileged time for me. Every day, I speak alternately with Sandinistas and the opposition who, from one hour to the next, offer me the most contradictory versions of the same facts. I say I am alarmed by the mutual deafness between the regime and the dissidents.
''We'll get to understand one another gradually,'' he assures me. ''We've already begun a dialogue with the bishops. And now that the Assembly is beginning to discuss the Constitution, we'll reopen the dialogue with the parties that boycotted the elections. Perhaps it will go slowly, but our internal tensions will be resolved. That's not the hard part. The hard part is negotiation with the United States. There's the root of all our problems. President Reagan has not renounced the idea of destroying us. He seems to negotiate, but then he pulls back. . . . He doesn't want to negotiate. He wants us to surrender.
''We've said that we're willing to send home the Cubans, the Russians, the rest of the advisers. We're willing to stop the movement of military aid, or any other kind of aid, through Nicaragua to El Salvador, and we're willing to accept international verification. In return, we're asking for only one thing: that they don't attack us, that the United States stop arming and financing . . . the gangs that kill our people, burn our crops and force us to divert enormous human and economic resources into war when we desperately need them for development.''
Rosario Murillo calls us to the table, and I do not have the chance to tell Ortega that in my opinion negotiations with the Reagan Administration seem the simpler of the Sandinistas' two major problems: the United States and the civilian opposition. When the United States Government realizes that the Sandinista regime will not be overthrown by the contras, and that a direct intervention would be catastrophic for the cause of democracy in Latin America, it will probably negotiate what are, in the long run, its greatest concerns: getting the Soviet Union and Cuba out of Nicaragua and cutting off aid to the Salvadoran rebels. I have no doubt that Commander Ortega and his colleagues will grant that in exchange for peace.
What they won't grant so readily is what the domestic opposition wants: full democracy and power sharing. Unfortunately, they are loyal to an old Latin American tradition, one that they share with a good number of their adversaries. They believe, although they don't admit it, that real legitimacy resides in the weapons that enable you to take power, and that once you have power, there is no reason to share it.
That is why it is so difficult for the regime to reach an understanding with an opposition that tends to back itself into an all-or-nothing position. And yet the survival of the Sandinista revolution depends on negotiation, agreement - or at least accommodation - with its opponents. Perhaps that is not the ideal solution for those of us who still support the ''forms'' of democracy, but it is worth every effort to promote social justice within a system that is at least minimally pluralist, to fend off the suffocating despair and injustices endemic to Marxist dictatorships.
One night in Nicaragua, Don Emilio, the old conservative and political analyst, tells me this: ''Our native Latin American culture is all powerful. It swallows up everything you give it. It assimilates everything and eventually puts its own stamp on it.'' I think to myself that is exactly what Ruben Dario did, that obscure Nicaraguan who started out imitating the French symbolists at the end of the 19th century and ended up revolutionizing poetry in the Spanish language. Will Latin American culture swallow up the impatient Marxism of the Sandinistas and turn it into something else, something better? The circumstances are auspicious.
Fuente:
VARGAS LLOSA, Mario. (1985). In Nicaragua. Recuperado el 2 de noviembre de 2018 de https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/28/magazine/in-nicaragua.html