Tomás Borge
By I’ve spent part of the last couple of days thinking about Tomás Borge, the last surviving Sandinista founder who passed a few days ago. Borge seems to sum up both the good and bad about the Cold War Latin American revolutionary.
I feel like I can understand why someone like Borge, or any Nicaraguan of the 1960s and 70s would become a revolutionary. Imagine your country completely dominated by the United States for more than half a century. The United States had either supported dictators or outright occupied the impoverished nation for most of the 20th century. Any attempt at a more egalitarian government was met with official repression or occupation by the U.S. Marines. The American-supported Somoza regime ruled Nicaragua with a brutal iron fist and the Yankee support only began to fade after the open theft of millions in relief money after the 1972 earthquake that destroyed Managua. If you wanted change, what choice did you have other to take up arms and become a revolutionary? Borge idealized Fidel Castro, as did many of the Sandinistas. In fact, until the day he died, Borge loved Castro more than any other human being. Who can blame him? We can sit up here in the U.S. and say that Castro is so bad, etc. And maybe that’s true. But from the perspective of the Nicaraguan leftist of the 60s, no one else in 20th century Latin America had been able to stand up to the U.S. and tell the Americans to stick it. Why wouldn’t you respect that? Why wouldn’t you want to emulate that, particularly given that democratic change was impossible?
Of course, the fervent belief in anti-American nationalism did not always translate into good governance. When the Sandinistas actually kicked Somoza out, an event as unlikely as Castro winning in 1959, many of the Nicaraguan revolutionaries found themselves fairly unqualified to govern. With Carlos Fonseca, the Nicaraguan version of Castro, killed before the revolution succeeded, power was split among the Sandinista government, eventually (and unfortunately) falling primarily to Daniel Ortega, who in the last decade decided to make a deal to become an extreme anti-women’s rights Catholic in order to return to power.
But it’s not like Borge was any better. In particular, Borge was the architect of the Sandinistas’ disastrous campaigns against the Miskito Indians of the Gulf Coast, arguably the most distasteful thing they ever undertook. Since the Miskitos didn’t fit the Sandinista vision of a modernized proletarian force and basically wanted to be left alone, they became suspect enemies and were harassed and oppressed by the Marxist government in Managua. The same ideology that kept Borge and Fonseca and Ortega alive in the jungles and the prisons of Somoza proved inflexible for people with different ideas about self-governance.
So it’s with great ambivalence that I note Borge’s passing, as well as the now rapid passing of most of the Cold War revolutionary generation. They are indeed national and international heroes. Borge and others stood up against tremendous repression by the Americans and their puppet stooges throughout the developing world. Yet the revolutionary experience also did much to kill the understanding and humanity in them, making their governance difficult to defend and frustrating to analyze.