THE LIVERPOOL OF NICARAGUA
Richard West on the Militant
Tendency's friends among the Sandinistas
Corinto THE Sandinista newspaper Barricada re- cently ran a story about a meeting to honour the Beatles 'at Liverpool, the once great port of north-west England, which is suffering a financial crisis'. The article did not mention that Liverpool is the 'twin town' of Corinto, the main Pacific port in north-west Nicaragua, a country even more broke than Liverpool. Last summer, a delegation of Liverpool dignitaries and assorted trade union bosses arrived on a visit, doubtless financed by Liverpool rate- payers, and distinguished themselves by changing all their money at the airport at the official rate of 28 cordobas to the dollar, when they could legally have obtained at least 300 in town.
When I remarked on this to a West German 'internationalist', a young left- wing doctor from Cologne, his face was contorted with envy: 'Do they have many of these twin towns between England and Nicaragua?' Yes, I explained to him, Lon- don was twinned with Managua, the capit- al, Sheffield was due to be twinned with `I think he's always been limited.' Esteli, Leon with Oxford, and Bluefields, the Atlantic port, with a population of English-speaking blacks from Jamaica, was twinned with the London borough of Lam- beth, which also has many Jamaicans. The doctor sighed: 'That would never happen in West Germany where the Social Demo- crats who control the cities are very right- wing. But in England I think it is different. You .even have bleck burgomeisters, j a?' It was my turn to sigh, as I thought of Bernie Grant, who is a burgomeister of sorts for the London borough of Haringey.
After a number of false starts, I at last got a car in Leon to visit its neighbouring seaport, Corinto. We drove past fields of the cotton that dnce was the best in the world but now is largely going to waste for lack of skilled pickers. One Dutch textile factory has discontinued producing its finest quality cloth which could only be made from Nicaraguan cotton. Most of the pickers these days are boys and girls who are forced to come here or lose their place at school or university, or so I was told at Chinandega, half way from Leon to Corin- to. This has the distinction of being the first open city bombed during a civil war, in 1927, when two American pilots employed by the National Guard dropped sticks of dynamite, lit from cigars, on the Liberal army which was engaged in looting the houses of known or suspected Conserva- tives. The town has since been compared with Guernica, the Basque town bombed by Franco's air force, a point of interest to Peter Kemp, with whom I visited Chinan- dega in April last year. He had fought three years in Spain, for the Nationalists, and he does not believe in the Communist version of Guernica, any more than the Sandinista version of Chinandega. Nor was Peter too pleased when he and I were asked if we were Swedes. Nicaraguans are chary of talking to foreigners from the pro-Sandinista countries like Russia and Sweden. At Chinandega a rather bewil- dered lady asked if we were German. When we said English, she asked again: `Are you from Federal England or the English Democratic Republic?'
Throughout Central America, the chain of volcanic mountains lies near the Pacific, so that the coastal strip has a rich soil. However it also means that summer rain flows in torrents across the plain, eroding the soil and silting up natural harbours. Corinto is really a roadstead more than a port, and never prospered like Panama, which is the only good port on the Pacific side of the isthmus. But geography cannot be blamed for the woebegone, down-at-heel look of Corinto, compared with Leon or Chinandega. Instead of adobe houses, with arabic tiles, there are rickety huts of unpainted wood or bits of debris. The railway track is overgrown and littered with rubbish. The whole town pongs. Crude anti-yankee daubs are every- where.
There was a Russian ship in port and another whose flag I did not recognise but was probably from the socialist bloc, bring- ing military supplies. The presence of these unpopular allies may explain the unusual hostility of Corinto people. I could not find a café with soft drinks for sale, or even a cup of coffee; this in a country which is one of the world's largest producers of coffee. The little cinema advertised a film that was shown in Managua in April, and then at Leon in August — Abortar en Londres 'To Abort in London', about the adven- tures of four girls from Spain who take advantage of Britain's only growth indus- try, courtesy of David Steel. (Only this week the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys showed that Britain is now the world's leading abortion centre, with 20,000 out of the 34,000 foreign women coming from Spain.) The showing of Abor- tar en Londres was no doubt intended as a challenge to the Roman Catholic Church, which is overwhelmingly on the side of the Pope and against the 'liberation theolo- gians'. The two priests who are ministers in the government are regarded like those Poles who joined the communist Pax orga- nisation. Clergymen in Liverpool who praise the 'Popular Church' of Nicaragua, would find that it did not really exist in their twin-town, Corinto.
Liverpool was destroyed first by the Yobboes, the bloody-minded trade union- ists in the shipyards, docks and factories, and then by the Loonies, the town plan- ners, social workers, race relations medd- lers, feminists, progressive educationists and self-serving town-hall bureaucrats. Corinto, indeed Nicaragua, never enjoyed much industry, and what one might call the working class was neither militant nor heavily unionised. The communists of the Nicaraguan Socialist Party had a working agreement with the Somoza dictatorship, and did not go in for industrial disruption such as the great dispute in Liverpool on which union bored holes. Corinto joined in the series of general strikes against the enormity of the Somoza dynasty; but these strikes, like most acts of opposition to the Liberal Somozas, were led by the Con- servative Party.
The Sandinistas took the name of a peasant leader, and now claim the support of the urban masses, but they started as and remain a Loony group of urban, middle class ideologues, nourished on slo- gans and half-understood readings of Trotsky, `Che' Guevara, Marcuse and similar half-baked thinkers. It is as if the student radicals of the 1960s — people like Tariq Ali and Paul Foot in England — had exploited a genuine popular revolution to seize power and enforce their theories.
To give some idea of the people who run Nicaragua, let me quote from Omar Cabe- zas's autobiography Fire from the Moun- tains: The Making of a Sandinista trans- lated by Kathleen Weaver (Jonathan Cape, £9.95). He describes how the Sandi- nista student organisation won control at Leon University, during Somoza's time, through 'sleepless nights painting banners and posters and making up slogans', then explains that they could not afford this activity out of their own pockets: We had to steal from the university from the different administrative offices. The huge handbags of the companeras (girl comrades) were notorious for all the stuff we could toss into them: staples, reams of paper, poster crayons. We swiped glue, staples, anything we could get our hands on, we stole. Can you imagine our joy when suddenly we had 200 pesos at our disposal to buy ten cans of spray paint to make posters and banners? Or to paint our slogans on the walls of the universi- ty and the city.
The author, now a government minister, goes on to describe how he and his companera stole French letters from a department store, and boasts of the treat- ment he gave to the dean of the University, who 'had been teaching us to defend with the law the sanctity of private property.. . I quickly painted in capital letters on the spotless white of the Dean's house:
THROUGH THESE DOORS ONE ENTERS THE 15TH CENTURY.'
Omar Cabezas is now a minister in the government of Nicaragua; in Liverpool he would no doubt hold high office. The Militants in Liverpool and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua have beggared the people in whose name they rule; they keep alive their little support by a frenzied campaign of hate against an enemy they have them- selves created, the United States, or in Liverpool's case, a Tory government trying to make cuts and retrenchment.
But let us not be hard on Corinto. The little town's baseball supporters do not murder the fans of rival clubs. Nor do they barrack the black players from clubs such as Bluefields, with mass chanting of 'nig- ger, nigger, nigger', which is the custom at football matches in Liverpool. Nor does Corinto elect Eric Heifer.
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