Daniel Liberman *
“Another hot iron broke in Nicaragua,” the song began. Cuba, Cuba, Cuba, the people salute you! People sang at Luna Park waiting for the island’s star singer, Silvio Rodríguez, to appear on stage, back in the eighties of the last century.
They were happy times in Argentina, after decades of political instability and alternations between civilian governments and military dictatorships, the latter having been the worst of all, Argentina finally seemed headed towards long-delayed democracy and progress.
It is in this context that the majority of the country was united with the suffering Latin American peoples who had lived for many years submerged under endless dictatorships and lack of political freedom.
The case of Nicaragua, although distant, was emblematic. Not so much because it had freed itself from the Somoza dictatorship that had lasted four decades, since dictators like Pinochet in Chile or Stroessner in Paraguay were still in power very close to Buenos Aires, but because it was a “symbol of victory” in the fight against capitalism and North American imperialism. That is why it was Cuba, through its artists, that sang to Nicaragua in Argentina, which at the time was the birthplace of Che Guevara.
There seemed to be no apparent contradictions at that time about the legitimacy of that song. Well, I say apparent because anyone who took a minimum ideological distance from the currents called “progressive” at the time would have noticed that Fidel Castro had also been in power in Havana for about thirty years.
A good part of Argentine youth, however, believed at that time that Sandinismo was a just cause and Daniel Ortega, its legitimate leader.
At that time, the Argentine Communist Youth recruited enthusiastic young people who wanted to travel to Nicaragua to help with the harvest in the fields, in events like “La Ferifiesta”, much in the same way that Sojnut sent young Argentine Jews to work for a few weeks in the kibbutzim of Israel. Of course, neither of them would have ever thought of going to Tucumán to lift the harvest, but “that’s something else” would have been the answer in any case.
The truth is that Nicaragua had “cool” and for the young people of that time it represented much more than a small Central American country fighting for its freedom.
Years passed and some things changed: Perestroika brought the end of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the USSR and the beginning of a period of ideological uncertainties for many.
There were those who adapted better than others to the times of change: a European example of this type of transformation was perhaps Daniel Cohn – Bendit, who was called “Dani the Red” during the French May in 1969, who became a European deputy. On the other side of the extinct Iron Curtain there were also great upgrades such as that of Vladimir Putin who found his way from the defunct KGB to the presidency of Russia.
Returning to the Caribbean, there were things that never changed: Fidel Castro in Cuba did not move an inch although the paradigms of the world that saw him emerge crumbled into pieces. In Nicaragua, however, where things had never been so closed, a democratization process began that was in tune with the winds of change and was also necessary to rebuild an exhausted country after the bad government of Daniel Ortega.
Inaugurating the 21st century, when the models of socialist economy had long been left in the vault of the memories of history, some outdated leaders emerged in South America such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and some but not so notoriously aligned to the left, who intend to sell at bargain prices ideologies that in other latitudes had already been discarded.
In reality, from these models they only took what was convenient for them since, despite the alignments and manifest ideology, none declared themselves openly communist like Cuba.
In 2007 Ortega managed to return to power in Nicaragua with his wife Rosario Murillo but with his face washed of Sandinism and away from the group’s old leadership. His adaptation to the new times could not have been more timely, not to say opportunistic, since he knew how to win the presidency thanks to the push of old powerful sectors of his country linked to Somoza.
In 2011 he sought a way to legalize re-election, which was prohibited by the constitution, and was re-elected amid complaints from the opposition.
He never completely abandoned his anti-American rhetoric but he no longer had to answer to any Sandinista Movement for the fattening of his wallet.
The left as a story and the barricade discourse, while the corrupt leaders “win” and get rich, sounds to us like a very recent era and sadly known in Argentina and Brazil.
I don’t know if the socialist ideas of other times that many idealist militants defended with their lives in the 1970s would have ever come to fruition in South America. What I do know is that communism as practiced in the XNUMXth century did much to strip this concept of all its democratic legitimacy.
In any case, the model had already arrived corruptly in Cuba and from there, towards the continent, it only got worse. Whatever it is that has gone into the Venezuelan sewer, I don’t even know what to call it, but it surely doesn’t contain anything that can be called “social justice.” From then on, everything else was a parody: a pose for a photo like the ones taken by corrupt people of all times and of any political stripe.
Many thinking people of the best human quality, however, supported some of these governments that have so defrauded society. This is very difficult to explain purely in rational terms, especially when we are talking in certain cases about people who have gone through university. The only way to understand this phenomenon that I find is that of someone who does not resign himself to letting go of his youthful ideals and deceives himself, thinking that some of these outdated opportunists somehow represented the realization of his lifelong political aspirations.
But life has no turning back and history does not stop while Latin America is left thinking…
For Latin America, “Nicaragua hurts,” paraphrasing Silvio Rodríguez again, “because love hurts” and it hurts that the child is not healthy or going to school, to any school.
The state of social neglect, health emergency and lack of education and insecurity throughout the continent are more than clear evidence of how illusory the trust placed in these leaders of hollow speeches was.
Perhaps it is time in Latin America to become aware that there are no magical solutions or miraculous saviors who arrive riding on immaculate ideological steeds. The effort of all social sectors and honesty at work are the only way to create lasting infrastructure. It is also essential to understand that without investing in science and education one can never get out of the vicious circle that, sooner or later, always leads people back to demagoguery.
* Social anthropologist, University of Buenos Aires
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Publish date : 2024-06-04 18:39:51
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