Piecework

This was not yet Vietnam, of course; but almost every Nicaraguan I met here fully believes that Ronald Reagan will be reelected and then use some pretext to mount a full-scale invasion. So all over the countryside, in places where Augusto C. Sandino fought the United States Marines from 1926 to 1933, and where the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) fought Somoza’s National Guard from 1961 to 1979, the Sandinistas are stashing arms: machine guns, ammunition, grenades, mortars. Managua might someday soon be carpet-bombed into dust, but the Sandinistas are preparing to fight a guerrilla war in the countryside for the rest of the century.

On this slate-gray morning, we land in a lumpy cow pasture outside a small town called Matiguas. Ortega, Wheelock and the others have landed first, and they wait for us to join them. A line of kids appears behind a barbed wire fence separating the field from a gravel road. Ortega leads the way to the fence, starts talking to the kids. “Are you going to school? How are the teachers? What are you learning?”

Then an aide separates the strands of barbed wire, and Ortega and the rest of us duck through, and the first rain begins to fall. More kids arrive, as Ortega strolls to a small plaza, where trucks and soldiers are waiting. A young girl approaches Ortega with a covered basket of tortillas. He takes some, chats with the girl, the rain pouring down harder, cameras whirring, flashbulbs popping. It is clear now what Daniel Ortega is doing: he will be the FSLN candidate for president in the eventual election, and this morning he is running for office.

We pile into cars and trucks, and then there is a wild jolting 45-minute ride along the gravel road, nothing truly visible through the gray walls of tropical rain, and a sudden lurching halt. Campesinos wait on horses, along with more Sandinista soldiers, civilian officials, rural bureaucrats. And then two white horses are brought forward, and Ortega and Wheelock mount them.

There’s a moment of hesitation: Wheelock and Ortega look like city boys playing cowboy for a day, the SDS off to a rodeo, and then they start to move. For one absurd moment, it’s as if Sandino’s army had been resurrected, or we’ve entered a scene from “Viva Zapata.” Here they come, the horses’ hooves clattering on stone, and below them in the distance are the people of Rio Blanco.

I can hear their cheers through the rain. It’s a shameless act of theatrical hokum, but it works. Wheelock looks down at a lowly foot soldier from the American press and struggles to suppress a smile. It’s as if he’s saying: Could Fritz Mondale do this? Or the world’s master of the manufactured moment, Ronald Reagan?

After that entrance, everything else is anticlimax. Ortega makes a speech, but the wind blows his words around, and the rain falls harder, while the crowd hurries back and forth from the speakers’ stand to a nearby shelter.

From the audience, the questions are no airy abstractions. Where is the promised school bus? Why does it take so long to get our milk to market? When will you fix these terrible roads? Soldiers want to know why mail takes so long to be delivered, and why, if they can’t have leave to go home, their girlfriends can’t come to visit?

Ortega and the others give answers, and then it’s over, and on to the next campaign stop. The rain never ends, but the commandantes, who lived with rain and worse during the years in the mountains, look as if they infinitely prefer it to the weatherless offices of Managua.

It would be a mistake, of course, to think that the Sandinista leadership is made up of kids on a lark. Ortega was in Somoza’s prisons from 1967 to 1974, was jailed numerous times before that, and fought as a guerrilla during the last three years of the revolutionary war. His brother Humberto was also a jungle fighter (and is now minister of defense). His brother Camilo was killed in February 1978, when he was the only FSLN member to join the rebellious Indians in the town of Masaya. Daniel Ortega looks young, but he’s not playing at being a revolutionary; he is one.

He is also, of course, a Marxist. Unfortunately, to call someone a Marxist these days is to say very little that is precise; the present governments of France and China, Greece and Albania (among others) could be described as Marxist, since their leaders were certainly shaped by the theories of Karl Marx.

But Ortega and the other FSLN leaders have repeatedly said that for them Marxism is only one tool among many; the core of their revolution is Sandinismo. This vague doctrine boils down to an absolute insistence on the sovereignty of Nicaragua. Sandino himself said it this way in 1928: “What motivates us is the desire that the Yankees not have a pretext for continuing to tread upon the soil of our Fatherland, and [the desire] to prove to the civilized world that we Nicaraguans ourselves are capable of solving the problems of a free and sovereign nation.”