By Geraldina Colotti on February 21, 2023
There is a beautiful photo of a very young Daniel Ortega, with his fist raised under a painting of Sandino, which is still circulating on the web. This image was later used by the everlasting western-style critics to denounce how far away that image was from the Ortega of today, how far away the hopes of the revolution were.
A popular revolution that, in 1979, inspired by the national hero Augusto Sandino, with broad participation, and the unity of the various social classes, the fall of ideological barriers between Christians and Marxists, the abolition of the death penalty, the re-education of executioners, and included priests in the revolutionary government. The Ministry of the Interior called itself “sentinel of the people’s joy”. It was a revolution of poets and painters turned into ministers and generals, a gigantic campaign to make 60% of the population literate, had raised hopes similar to those of the Cuban revolution.
Distant hopes, said many well-known figures of that revolution, from their lofts in Miami. That those same figures had supported the majority of the programs of the right, after the defeat in the 1990 elections, was soon forgotten. Just as the titanic struggle then waged by imperialism to prevent any sign of victory of the proletariat from filtering into the Western camp, on the eve of the great international restructurings designed to cut the road to class struggle, was quickly forgotten.
To recall some elements of the strong entry of reactionary forces into the camp, suffice it to mention the invasion of Panama at the end of December 1989, and the consequent blockade of the Nicaraguan government’s dollar deposits by Washington. Then came the collapse of the socialist countries of the East. In the Iran-Contra scandal trial, then US President Ronald Reagan admitted to having financed the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries between 1984 and 1986.
With the end of the Sandinista government, the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were implemented. But some sectors of the workers resisted. It was Daniel Ortega who traveled the length and breadth of the country to keep that resistance alive. And it was always Daniel who organized the rescue of a country that fell into the abyss, and who led the FSLN to electoral victory, after 16 years, in 2006, by joining the Latin American integration of Cuba and Venezuela. And it is still Daniel, together with the party founded in 1961 in the name of Sandino – assassinated on February 21, 1934 – who today assumes the weight of choice and decision, in this phase of encirclement of the revolution.
In April 1922, Lenin wrote a brief article published in Pravda titled, “We Paid too Much”, in which he criticized the concessions made by two important members of the party to the representatives of the three Internationals, in connection with the trials being carried out against former revolutionaries.
But what concession has the international bourgeoisie made to us, asks Lenin, would their governments agree to promise not to apply the death penalty to their political opponents? They would not, while we are witnessing – he says – “the struggle of the reactionary bourgeoisie against the revolutionary proletariat”. And perhaps this situation has changed now that the popular masses, with some exceptions in the countries of the South, no longer seem capable of opposing the powerful attack of the imperialist forces?
Of course, Lenin, the revolutionary capable of great advances, the man of the united front and the the New Economic Period (NEP), does not evade the narrow doors that present themselves to the proletariat, but he knows when it is necessary to put one’s feet in order to go through the doors without losing one’s head.
This is an experience that the Sandinista revolution has already known in depth. And today, on the anniversary of the assassination of Augusto Sandino, it seems to say to all those talking crickets, to all the lapdogs of the empire, “We have already paid too much”.