Nicaragua: Ortega Says Protestors are “Rightwing Vandals”
Today, Nicaragua’s youth are fighting against a dictatorship with the same patriotism youth did yesterday [in the 1970s against Somoza]
By Onofre Guevara Lopez (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES — The Right is a political label which, like the Left, emerged during the 1789 French Revolution’s political and social conflicts, as a result of where these movements were fortuitously sat in the National Constitutive Assembly: the Mountaineers (revolutionaries) on the left and the Girondins (conservatives) on the right.
Right, and Left, aren’t concrete concepts and they don’t have any shape or form; rather they are unreal, simple words – a (fictitious) fantasy which is used arbitrarily and conventionally to discredit something or someone when there is a political interest at stake and they don’t share the same political affiliations.
The Right is divided into many different movements, just like the Left is, and there isn’t the slightest bit of homogeneity among them but a thousand groups of every political nuance, size and class under the sun; because a poor worker, the victim of political alienation, can have conservative opinions and actions, while a rich person can have socialist ideas, the product of a humanist ideological education.
The Right, and Left, don’t have a nationality or geographic location and the use of these terms in serious political discourse is becoming less and less useful. However, they remain in our common language just like the slang term “son of a bitch” does when you want to insult someone; although after being used so many times, it’s almost lost its ability to anger someone.
However, from what we have heard about the Right from Daniel Ortega’s government officials, which their media parrots are repeating during the current political crisis, it is being given the highest lottery prize: the Right has been granted authorship of the revolution of conscience which the student and working youth have led since April 18th this year.
Our country’s Right, or rather its leadership, has historically lacked its own political initiatives (Washington used to supply them with their initiatives) and it has small political parties, it has no popular support, yet Orteguismo is giving it “super powers”, as if they were the Yankee dolls Superman and Batman.
They see it as what is leading thousands of students from every university, ordering millions of countrymen to take to the street, all over Nicaragua, in order to protest against the government’s crimes and violence, demanding justice and for those responsible for this violence and crimes against humanity to leave office.
The Right has been given so many abilities to influence and order an entire population to demand a peaceful life and democracy in Cuba (which, we already have enough of according to Mother Rosario’s preachings) that even the CIA must be surprised, or jealous, of what the national Right is capable of doing, even when they haven’t organized it, like they used to during Reagan’s presidency.
Plus, Nicaraguans make up the Right, the Left and the Center so there isn’t any reason to suppose that they should stand on the sidelines of the tragedy which we are all experiencing because of oppressive and dishonest rulers, who don’t have any flags but their ambitions, even though they take shelter under the Left’s flag.
The CIA must be analyzing the reason why there are such large popular mobilizations (which have been taking place every day for over a month) throughout the nation and be just as surprised when they hear the same slogans which were shouted during the revolts against their godson Somoza, like: “Let your mother surrender!” (Sandinista poet Leonel Rugama cried out when the Somoza Guard asked him to surrender), “The people united will never be defeated)”… And this other one: “Free Homeland and life!” a humanist paraphrasing of the slogan “Free Homeland or death!”
Intelectuals in some Leftist groups who have announced their defense for Daniel Ortega worldwide, should ask themselves (like the CIA should be asking themselves): why are these popular marches also enlivened with the same music and songs as the protests during the revolt against the Somoza dictatorship?
Sure enough, they’d realize that those battle hymns of the revolutionary people which are sung and inspired by brothers Carlos and Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy, by Venezuela’s Los Guaraguao, Chilean Inti Illimani and the Argentinian Mercedes Sosa, are the same ones which are sung on Nicaragua’s streets 40 years later, because today, Nicaragua’s youth are fighting against a dictatorship with the same patriotism national youth did yesterday!
Another detail: if this unarmed uprising of conscience of the entire population didn’t have a patriotic, just and democratic objective, then the same Mejia Godoys and other singer-songwriters wouldn’t be creating new songs (like they are now) inspired by and dedicated to the young people murdered by Ortega’s paramilitary forces. Likewise Rappers are standing with this popular struggle.
In the face of this situation, both CIA magicians, who conjure up counter-revolutionary situations, as well as wise men from the Left of mechanical thought, can reach the conclusions they want to about what is happening in Nicaragua, like they always do, but they will never reach a conclusion that hits the nail on the head like Nicaraguan Felix Maradiaga Blandon’s (*) does:
“I believe that the Nicaraguan youth are the revolution’s daughter. Some of us are the Revolution’s children in a more painful way. We see her as something that was betrayed, others are more proud, but we are (all) children of a revolutionary process and that is ingrained in the collective mindset of the new generations. It’s a generation which grew up seeing the Revolution as a historic moment, like youth: the youth of their parents and grandparents who didn’t put up with a dictatorship and that is where the (Ortega) regime made a mistake, thinking that this rebellious free spirit had become a spirit that could be controlled with incentives; (and that) this rebellious spirit resides in the young men and women who were the ones who made us want to follow behind them.” (Director of Nicaragua’s Institute of Public Policy and Strategic Studies, interviewed on Sunday, La Prensa, 20/05/2018)
These truths, born within different social groups, gives us the chance to build a democratic post-Ortega State. The thing here is that national opposition parties (from any movement) lack the ability to summon the population by themselves, exclusively. And today’s popular uprising involves every political movement, including the Sandinista movement which broke away from Orteguismo’s corruption, but they weren’t the driving force.
The country’s youth has created their own leaders and the population has recognized their leadership. With their support, they have created the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy. However, according to Ortega and his media, they form part of the “evil Right”; but since this “Right” is putting up the dead, what side are the people shooting at them from?
A simple answer would be to say that they are being shot at from the Ortega “Left”, but Ortega’s actions and that of his paramilitary forces don’t resemble any Leftist concept or movement… because they are a tropical, fascist mafia!
Sooner or later, the outcome of this crisis will be a democratic society and I hope we never have to face the dictatorial rule of another opportunist ever again. The healthy youth movements inspired by the revolution (who are inspiring another kind of revolution with their struggle) will be the guarantee of this democracy, free of having to make compromises and bowing down to anybody.
What do you think Ron is the reasoning for the GAESA which is controlled by Raul Castro’s son-in-law, purchasing such a widespread range of products from the USA that are available from other sources?
Could it be simply a lack of morality or possibly *corruption?
It is almost weird that the eight TV channels in Cuba constantly pump out the PCC anti-US propaganda whilst purchasing so much US product!
*This assumes that you agree that communists can be corrupt.
As another addition to the trivia trove, may I say that the frozen Ostrich legs that were on sale by CIMEX eighteen months ago were not from the US, but Brazil!
A reasoned comment. I, too, have some agricultural experience in Cuba and have written a series about that, which you can see under themes on my website (www.ronridenour.com). I agree with your general assessment of why agricultural production is so poor, and I abhor that Cuba’s bureaucrats buy food from the US of Fucking A, and wish to deal even more with the despicable imperialist mass murderers.
Alas, where can we find, where can we create a decent, disciplined, democratic workers’ revolution?
No Ron, I am not anti-socialist per se, having many friends who are democratic socialists, but admit openly that I have never voted socialist. I have voted both Liberal and Progressive Conservative, but if I had been a US citizen at the last Presidential Election, would have held my nose and voted for Clinton. I am however virulently anti-dictatorship and ant-communist.
My primary concern is for the individual and the various freedoms of expression, freedom of movement. freedom of the press and so on.
I am not a professional writer, but as one living the majority of my time at home in Cuba, married to a Cuban with a large number of Cuban relatives, I grew tired of hearing and reading when in the “outside world” that undefined “change” was taking place in Cuba under the dictatorship of Raul Castro. For the average Cuban no such change has occurred. As Cubans cannot write and have the means to get published, and if they could, would be jailed for criticism of the Castro regime, I wrote “Cuba Lifting the Veil.”
My knowledge of communism in practice is fairly deep. Note I refer to “in practice”. All the theoretical ‘socialists’ (by that i mean the far left) have a common thread, that being that when a ‘socialist’ system flounders or makes mistakes, they parrot that: “They were not practicing ‘true’ socialism.” which evidently varies from one mind to another. As for Marx, i think he is in the right place and that most if not all of his ideas ought to be with him in Highgate Cemetery. ( Incidentally, did you know that Highgate got so full that they buried one above the other – as many as fourteen deep. I hope that you like me, find trivia entertaining!)
My chapter in my book about the US background in Cuba and the Americas (including Canada) is not flattering, quoting for example the US Secretary of State writing to Britain’s Foreign Secretary on July 20, 1895:
“The United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.”
I cannot however agree with you that the morass of incompetence in Cuba’s agriculture is a consequence of “US subversion, harassment and murder”. Agriculture is my original profession and indeed I first visited Cuba with an international group of agricultural scholars. I know some of the background of it from the importation by Fidel Castro of Dr, Reginald Preston from Aberdeen in Scotland in 1963 forward, and have visited Cuban cooperatives and small farmers, The root (suitable word) of the problem is a bunch of communist bureaucrats driven by communist policies creating an ever-declining economic mess resulting in Cuba having to import some 80% of its food requirements, whilst tens of thousands of acres (hectares) of good agricultural land revert to bush.
So I hope Ron that that provides some idea of why I contribute here.
Carylye is most likely anti-socialist but he is right that both Lenin and especially Stalin treated nearly all farmers the same, as enemies when all were not. They sought to rush the natural process, they collectivized too much too soon. They were wrong, yet it was also a reaction to the fact that the West and Japan, led by the US of course, invaded Russia to reassert the reactionary feudal system and its White Army, something that Carylye and most critics of Russia/Soviet Union fail to recognize and aknowledge.
Cuba, however, did not imitate that approach completely. It allowed eight percent of agricultural land to be held privately from the start, and collectivized most the rest until gaining experience and then allowed various types of cooperative farming. But, yes, there is corruption and greed in much of farming due, in large part again, to US constant subversion, harassment and murder (See my books on Cuba, especially “Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn”, and thousands more on the subject). Other problems are internal, that is, the failure of the government to allow significant working class decision-making and advancing the socialist revolution by stopping market economy encroachments. Cuba and much of the “real left” in Latin America has not advanced sufficiently a socialist revolution.
An interesting contribution Ron Ridenour. How was it that the “left” in the USSR virtually eradicated the small farmers? The Marxist class scheme defined the mass of the small farmer peasantry as ‘petit bourgeois’ being owners of private property but not exploiters of the labour of others. Lenin elaborated this into a triple division, the poor peasant with little or no land, the middle peasant, constituting the bulk of the peasantry and the rich peasant described as ‘Kulak’ who supposedly exploited the rest economically. To Lenin followed by Stalin, all were undesirable, collectivization was introduced and the kulaks deported to Gulags in Siberia where most perished.
The “left” in Cuba has decimated the agricultural sector with corruption within ANAP being the subject of articles in Havana Times
I find it difficult in consequence to understand how you associate the “left” with the interests of the small farmers.
Won’t it be ironic though if the Evil Empire saves the Sandinista Revolution?
And it can with a couple of simple economic sanctions that would turn the tide against the Ortegas.
The Nicaraguan people deserve better. I know, I live there half the year.
“Left” is rooted in the interests of the working people, the small farmers, the poor in objective conflict with the rich, oppressors, employers, royalty, elitists. That is what the Sandinistas were “leftists” seeking to overthrow the oppressors. In my book, and that of most original leftists, this requires seeking an economy based on something other than the profit-greedy based capitalist system.
Daniel Ortega and “Mother” Rosario abandoned the real left when they embraced counter-revolutionary businessmen and politicians, and reactionary Catholic church leaders in order to come to government power again.
I know them personally since I was once the PR worker for Rosario, and had interviewed her husband and written about them and Sandinism for various media. My first book is about the Sandinista Revolution, “Yankee Sandinistas”, which Father Ernesto Cardenal endorsed.
What is occurring under the Ortega dynasty has nothing to do withe “leftism”, with socialism, with revolution. He/Her are opportunistic power-hungry egoists just like royalty.
Anyone who wishes to be a solidarity activist for the righteous Sandinista Revolution must reject them as legitimate leaders while, of course, rejecting any imperialist encroachments.
Onofre Guevara Lopez has given an interesting analysis of the “left” and the “right” in politics. Pursuit of the concept leads to the conclusion that the two extremes are just that. But in reality, politics form a circle which if one imagines it formed around a tree, meet around the back. Hence both extremes pursue similar policies of repression and dictatorship and in practice, both have demonstrated that. There is little difference between the Castro brothers and Pinochet. Both have purged, both have endeavored to eradicate any form of opposition and both merit detestation. The desire for absolute power and control over everybody drives dictators and would-be dictators. Ortega and Maduro demonstrate that. They envy those like the Castros who have succeeded in achieving it. The people are but pawns in a game of winner take all as demonstrated in Cuba.