Nicaragua's Continuing Revolution

At Center Screen, the Carpenter Center, Dec.4,5,6

AS THE CAMERAS pan over post-revolution Managua, a folk singer laments the old days when, roughly translated, his country was "a feudal estate encumbered by the owners with a mortgage." Teaching people three, four and five times his age to write and read, an 11-year-old boy--one of 120,000 brigadistas in the nation's literacy campaign--recites to his pupils lessons like: "The Sandinista Front guards against Yankee imperialism." Along the highways, there are those insipid billboards--the smiling workers with strong shoulders and full faces, who sell only happiness and, by inference, obedience. The crudity of the symbols causes a little shudder. They seem so familiar, and they should, since they mark every up-to-date society, from Iran to Libya to, as these movies show, Nicaragua.

Such rhetoric, such icons, in most cases are the tools of control and indoctrination: Khadafy's Green Book and omnipresent portrait, the lying broadcasts and boasts of an Amin or a Radio Moscow, the ridiculous and extravagant nonsense of carefully lettered signs, declaring the socialist progress that has been visited on Kabul. But in a choice few places, and Nicaragua is one, they are the reflection--not the source, the reflection-of something very different. Of unity, not control; of the notion that here is something right and proper that most people can and do support, in the general if not the specific. That is why you should not wince when you watch these two films. One-sided propganda they are, but some questions, in some parts of this earth, only have one side. So when a farmer looks into the camera and says, "It is our opinion that we shall cultivate our land jointly," it does not sound insincere, like it would if he had a Russian accent.

Center Screen's wise decision to show these films in this order is one reason the slogans sound natural and meaningful. Lilienthal's Uprising recreates the final bloody months of the 1979 revolution, and Sandino, a documentary, looks at the year that follows the victory. Despite crude acting and a liberal dash of sentiment, Lilienthal succeeds brilliantly in showing how this revolution--and more important how the brutal piggishness of American ally Anastasio Somoza--touched the life of the people. Little wonder that Nicaraguans who watched their neighbors, their sons, shot in the back for no good reason, who ran off the streets to avoid the ubiquitous National Guard convoys, who saw their priests murdered and their churches desecrated, little wonder that they embraced the ideology of the brave Sandinistas who toppled all that. When everyone knows someone--or, more likely, 25 or 50 someones--who died in the revolution, then everyone has a stake in its success. The same farmer proud of his new collective, eager to fulfill the goals of the uprising, opens Sandino by recalling a neighbor's lot in the fighting: "The Lopez family, they lost three sons. That is very hard to take."

Too much talk of the masses, of "groundswells of popular sentiment," can hide an important idea about revolutions, one that Lilienthal makes the center of his movie. Far from being some sort of tidal occurrence, a revolution is made up of first hundreds, then thousands, finally millions of individual decisions. Usually the decisions are horribly hard; the young Guard member in The Uprising who eventually joins the Sandinistas knows it will likely be the death of his parents. Those who have a hard time imagining how bad conditions were under Somoza (or are under El Salvador's "14 families") might try thinking about how bad things would have to be before they'd risk their own and their family's lives.

Lilienthal's portrait of the city of Leon in the final days of the revolution--reenacted with the eager aid of dozens of actual participants--has its share of melodrama, certainly. And the drama is poorly developed, really just one episode after another. But the director drives home one crucial point: short of wholesale slaughter, there seems no way of stopping a popular revolution in a small country. The few National Guardsmen who must "control" Leon, in reality control only the garrison in the center of the city, and the radius of automatic fire around their heavily armed vehicles. Sooner or later, by defection or defeat, the soldiery will fall, though the lengths Somoza went to--including the aerial bombing of Nicaragua's cities--are terrifying. Especially worth American notice is the deadly force of a few jeeps with gun mounts and a few more armored personnel carriers. Few squawk when such material is dispatched to Latin American despots, but against outgunned opponents, and unarmed civilians, it is precisely this equipment that allows control of city streets.

UPRISING ENDS with a wonderful victory celebration, fireworks, music, young men telling stories of their bravery, and, for the first time in the movie, people out in the streets, unafraid of what might rumble around the corner. It's in the wake of the parties that Sandino, Now and Forever, takes up this story. Faced with an enormous debt, a treasury that's been relocated to Miami Beach, unemployment near 50 per cent, and continued military threats from as far away as Washington, D.C., the Sandinistas must rebuild Nicaragua. They do not follow the approved revolutionary path, killing all the National Guardsmen and forcibly converting the economy so they may plunder it. Instead, the executions are limited, as are the jailings of political opponents; dissent within limits is allowed; some attempt is made to include non-Sandinista elements in the ruling government.

Very sympathetic to the government, Sandino lacks a certain credibility (certainly no more, though, than any accounts in the American press of events in the nation). It nonetheless provides a technically skillful and sometimes moving closeup of people adjusting to the idea that they have some control over their own lives. Revolutionary fervor is not lacking; the volunteers, mainly from Nicaragua, fan out across the nation in a truly impressive literacy effort, for example. And there seems a readiness to defend the revolution. When counterrevolutionaries (a particularly simpering, cowardly band of counterrevolutionaries) sneak across the border to murder one literacy brigadista, hundreds of men from the People's Militia volunteer to join the army in the eventually successful manhunt. Nicaraguans may not one and all love their new government, but there seem to be very few who are eager to return to anything like Somoza's rule.

On their way to teach writing, one group of young brigadistas meet an old brigadista--one who had fought alongside Augusto Cesar Sandino in the late '20s and early '30s, one who had fought actual Yanquis and not just the products of our arms industry. The youngsters are fascinated, the toothless old man only too happy to answer questions like, "What did you do with the Yanquis when you caught them?" ("We let them go without their ears," he grins). You can either be amazed by the power of tyrants to hold out against suffering people, or the power of long-suffering people finally to make their stand and win. But you will understand why winning means more than a change in government. To people who survive that long, it means a new way of walking, thinking, praying.

Which is excuse enough--if an excuse is needed--for the new, slogan-filled way that Nicaraguans have of talking. It is their badge of victory. And if the 11-year-old literacy teacher sometimes sounds a little like a hawker of socialist newspapers in the Square, listen on, for he has much more to day. In the midst of one reading lesson, the topic, of course, the revolution, he looks up and says, "It is really evil for people to bomb their own countries."