Has the left’s
writing ink gone dry?
There’s something wrong with the so-called left-wing
intelligentsia.
By Celia Hart
Santamaria [28.06.2008 - 19:03]
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Something
weird is happening to the so-called left-wing intelligentsia. This new
fashion of putting their signature to support anyone anywhere in our
exhausted world who no longer knows where to turn has become an
ill-fated habit.
Intellectuals who learned how to love above all else are once again giving their precious vote to projects of a questionable neoliberal nature. And that’s what’s going on in Nicaragua, where it seems the world is shedding its tears today.
As you all know, I have no love lost for Danielismo! That’s why I won’t change one word of my article “Nicaragua’s pink election” (1), where I expressed my reservations about the differences I found between the Sandinista revolution won by force of arms and this… I don’t know if I should call it a Sandinista thing, but certainly not a revolution, barely won at the polls.
However, my doubts came from just the opposite direction. I had condemned precisely the fact that they made a deal with the oligarchy, the Church and all those sectors we know only too well to expect a victory that belonged to the people, who for 16 years lived under the neoliberal yoke, not only through hunger and grief but also the most devastating political and moral limbo.
I’m all the way for Toni Solo’s words (2) about the present reality in our dearest Nicaragua: “The FSLN government is in some ways a quixotic attempt to manage seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. The Sandinista bourgeoisie rode to power in 2006 on the overwhelming popularity of Daniel Ortega. Their contribution was to fund the campaign and bring on board Nicaragua’s politically open-minded business classes. The popular base in the urban barrios, in rural areas, in the cooperatives and labor unions mobilised electoral support. These two main components of the FSLN’s political viability enjoy an equivocal relationship which tends to be reflected in government policy. The MRS acts constantly to upset that equivocal balance and fulcrum to deepen FSLN's internal contradictions, so far without notable success”.
The truth is, convenient though it may sound, a government can’t just side with the Indians and the cowboys, especially if there’s no need for such alliances. One way or another, the red and black Nicaraguan people would have achieved victory without the ambiguity of a bourgeois election or being forced to make the regrettable concessions to Nicaragua’s rancid right-wing we all know about. It’s already in black and white, and I’m not smudging any more sheets of paper today… because in addition to that, like Che said, I would smear them with my most sorrowful tears.
One reason for this situation is exactly what many of us said back in 2006: the huge stir caused by the decision to stand out to a centrist party like the MRS. Eliminating parties submitted to capitalism’s interests is as logical and rational a measure in a Revolution as opening a window on a hot day.
The Cuban Revolution, which Galeano and Benedetti loved and shared so much, did away in one fell swoop with all those parties unequivocally linked to the local bourgeoisie and therefore to imperialism, and it did it without holding any reservations or giving any signatures either.
That’s what the FSLN is entitled and morally bound to do. What it certainly can’t do, for all our sakes, is accept namby-pamby, supposedly democratic petitions.
There are three words the mere sound of which always makes me “draw my gun”, to paraphrase Nazi Germany’s Goebels: terrorism, democracy and referendum... because all three are gagging us and making us jump from one side of the ravine to the other as we go to great lengths to please our enemy.
We must make no more mistakes and understand once and for all where class struggle is really hatched, never mind how much so many people try to do to get us muddled up. The class struggle is the one and only call we must answer to. But beware! I mean the real one; the real struggle waged by the real classes… not a bunch of wrong conclusions from the classics, who did understand what we failed to, because they put their whole heart and soul into the task. We do nothing but invoke them as if they were biblical mandates...
Were Karl Marx be studied in the jungles of Colombia, Che understood in the besieged Palestine, or the meaning of a Commune explained to us again in Oaxaca, we would be too wise to accept this shameful cease-fire and accept as a one of humanity’s great accomplishments –and without even blushing– that the number of people who starve will be cut in half in a few years, as if it were lizards we’re talking about!.
It’s to prevent this kind of thing, now that our forms of struggle are being challenged, that Sandino, Che, Karl Marx, José Martí and Jesus of Nazareth would come together and rise up with their rifles, slings, arrows and words.
Peace is war as long as there is injustice.
We have an excellent analyst who has summarized very specific world events in journalistic humor by means of a Marxist revolutionary approach. Reinaldo Taladrid says what has become a happy slogan: “Find the money connection and everything will make sense”. Said more or less like this, we in Cuba have managed to understand who the distinguished Ladies in White really are, and who dictates democracy and brandishes democratic-sounding phrases to speak about freedom of expression, but fails to say why self-confessed murderers remain at large. All of that is made possible by the money connection.
So go and find the MRS’s money connection and then you’ll know what they stand for with their “donors” and their civil society. Civil Society… now there’s another term which is probably making dear Antonio Gramsci turn in his grave.
Look at Erick Dickenson’s research (3) on this “money connection” and you’ll see how the MRS is likely to “renovate” Sandinism: “The famous Venezuelan-American attorney and writer Eva Golinger makes a summary about one of those Yankee donors –the NDI– in her latest book ‘The National Democratic Institute and the Human Rights Foundation’. And I quote: “Far from being an NGO, the NDI is but a financial and consultative arm of the US government that promotes its agenda around the world at the expense of participatory democracy and the will of the peoples”.
Whoever needs funds from the enemy to organize a march or to win an election is undeserving of respect by the people. This is the same people whose memories some want to erase but who made the whole world rise up in 1979. With all of their flaws but also with all of their merits, this people led a revolution which is still in the making ever onward to victory.
I’ve said it before: the current FSLN leaders are not in my all-star roster. When it comes to politics, however, you must follow your brain and your heart, and especially your heart… but never your gut feelings, as it’s so often the case.
My true absolute owners, those who give me guidance and advice, are the revolutionaries of Nicaragua, a country I’d be willing to give my life for, and maybe the last source of happiness my mother had. She was no ordinary woman and never got any joy from menial things… and whose daughter was perhaps the only unremarkable thing she ever had.
That’s why I support the FSLN’s measures against the opposition parties, the enemy’s accomplices everywhere and for all times. That’s why I don’t think our Colombian comrades should be extradited, not after fascist Uribe’s raid on Ecuador, and I put myself at the service of my endeavor to comply with Martí’s words that the forest is always a lot more important that the tallest of its trees.
If ever there’s a rally in support an opposition which is nothing but an apposition of the oligarchy, may that superb people take to the streets crying out the opposite, but this time without pink banners or conciliatory, ecumenical mottos! May Sandino and [Carlos] Fonseca Amador’s beautiful and spirited people come out under their banner, the only one there is!
The black and red banner is my favorite; it was Sandino’s banner, the one our intense Julio Antonio Mella was always ready to support despite every sterile Stalinist guideline, the one of my irreplaceable 26th of July Movement, which the more you get to know the more it grows. It’s the banner of the dearest Chileans, who never stop bleeding but still have so much to do: the anarcho-syndicalist banner…
Is all by chance? As Albert Einstein said once, God does not play dice.
May Managua and all of Nicaragua dress in red and black this Friday!
Sandinismo can be renovated no more than Lenin, Che, Fidel or the spring can. Only the people who want to use them can be change or otherwise fade away, but not them.
I feel a sort of love for Mario Benedetti that few can equal and none can excel. He molded my younger days, not only because he met my mother or because his almost childish innocence made me feel part of his generation. I’d like to see his name on the list of demands against the Guernica threatening to happen in the Middle East today, and see his hand clenching a pen that writes about topics which make my planet weep…
Perhaps I’d like to see him describing Mars instead of supporting tepid right-wing parties… he, the poet of my youth by virtue of a woman called Haydée…
But, alas, I won’t… it’s maybe the price of living for so long. Sometimes I’m appalled at the fact that today’s Guernica will never have a Picasso anymore than Spain –the real Spain– will ever have a Miguel Hernández, and wonder I’ll ever see again the committed poetry of days gone by, capable of facing up to these horrors and this epidemic amnesia.
The world history Eduardo Galeano has given us as a present in his new book, a history we all cling to as if it were our salvation, will go down the drain for as long as the author’s signature defends a democracy he himself rejects and mocks… and it goes on… and on… and on…
Whatever happened to these writers’ inkwells? How do we fix them again?
No one can tag me as an advocate of present-day Sandinism, as it’s been made clear and widely spread, I’m happy to say. Yet, it’s by no means a sign that I would ever stand behind those who seek to undermine the wonderful movement of women, youths and students now coming to the fore in our Nicaragua, nor a deterrent to my standing ovation for the FSLN’s courageous decision to grant our Colombian comrades political asylum rather than deliver them to the fascist Uribe and the military who kidnapped them.
Meanwhile, the Colombian government has been quick to show its claws again. Nicaragua is a mainstay of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, so we must defend the red and black colors there –however little they were remembered during the 2006 election campaign– even if we had to change one or two verses of the most beautiful revolutionary anthem ever.
The pens of today’s left-wingers hardly give me any leeway, as I fail to gather their gist. Nevertheless, I do know that Sandino’s Nicaragua, fresher than the leaping waters of a new fountain and therefore in need of no renovation, would make us feel the unprecedented joy of the 1980s all over again, the joy for which my mom gave me her last smile.
Banning a bourgeois party is a simple formality in any revolution. Fidel and Che outlawed the opposition in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, and they were applauded by Eduardo Galeano, Mario Benedetti and many others.
May Revolution flow freely through Nicaragua and the most beautiful streets of Central America without anybody’s interference and certainly without any signature, church or dubious pacts!
Today is Salvador Allende’s centennial. Only with Allende’s image and self-sacrificing attitude can democracy come into being. And if it turns out that the ballot boxes are not enough –as everything seems to indicate– we’ll do with Che’s rifle, Víctor Jara’s guitar and Roque Dalton’s pen.
America, you only have one choice
May the Nicaraguan people take to the streets on Friday, armed with the Nicaraguan revolution’s true significance –which goes way beyond anyone or anything– to demand more revolution, more commitment, less foreign “donors” and a lot more eagerness to fight for what belongs to them… and to us all.
No to any attempt at intervention!
No to the sluggish and submissive NGOs!
No to the enemy’s money that soils our souls!
Yes to Sandino, who will never let us down or need to be renovated, because he’s intrinsically new!
I might end up alone (again), but José Martí said:,
They that travel alone travel with humanity, and are heard by all when nobody listens.
Revolution or Death.
References:
1. Celia Hart, Nicaragua’s pink election, Rebelión, 2006.
2. Toni Solo, 19-06-2008, in At work for Negroponte?, in response to the article Dora Maria deserves to be listened to, by Noah Chomsky, Tom Hayden, Brian Wilson et al.
3. Erick Dickinson, Los “renovados sandinistas” (MRS) admiten apoyo económico estadounidense, Tegucigalpa / 080624.
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