Nicaragua has been the battleground where two great ideologies have clashed. Descriptions of the conflict have an almost archetypal sound, so dramatically can the combatants be charac-terized. On the one hand were, first, the forces of Somoza, puppet dictator with controls operated by the US, representing what has variously been called "free market capitalism," or "the free ´enterprise system." Now "the neoliberal eonomic model" (NLM) is the label for a system operated by global institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Under any label its purpose is to maximize profit and the accumulation of wealth. On the other side were the forces of the Sandinistas, whose original ideals included a government for the people, especially the poor people. Their ideals reflected Marxist economic theory and a deep, structural Christianity called "liberation theology," in which Jesus' call for love of the "little ones" was the guiding principle. So clear was the conflict, so unmitigated by compromise or blurred by equivocation, that almost everyone who knew what was happening in Nicaragua felt passionately about it --one way or the other. President Reagan felt passionately enough to install and subsidize an illegal guerilla army against the Sandinistas and slap a total embargo on the country. In 1990, the people of Nicaragua, longing for an end to the hunger and the funerals and assaulted by a US designed and financed political campaign, voted to install Violetta Chamorro, the “unity candidate", as president.

On the island of Cuba, a similar ideological struggle has simmered and boiled since the 1950's. In 1959 Fidel Castro and his followers took power on the island from the dictator, Batista, and set up a different kind of dictatorship, (mostly) for the people. Agricultural reform aimed to give the peasants land plus the means to a decent life, especially education and health care. Cuba's split became a geographical as well as political when the avid supporters of free market enterprise, dreading the very word “communism," set up a new, undeclared republic in Miami. The US napalm -bombed Cuba's cane fields, starting an intermittent process of harassment and warfare--- military, economic and political-- that continues into the present. Fidel and the reforms that he started also continue along with some of the less attractive features of dictatorship like political repression. The United States calls Cuba a police state; followers of Fidel say “we love him."

In May of 2004, I was one of fifteen people gathered in Managua under the auspices of Witness for Peace (WFP) to begin a study-tour of these two countries and to look at the neoliberal model from the inside and the outside. In Nicaragua, the model is dominant; in Cuba, it has been rejected. How have the lives of the people been affected in each case? We were witnesses, there to find out and report back. The delegation's schedule had been planned by our long-termers, young men and women (Americans except for Ariel, who was Cuban) who lived in the host country for about two years and acted as our guides, translators, and group facilitators.

During our week in Nicaragua we toured Managua, visited a church, a maquila, a sewing cooperative, a slum, two health clinic,s, a rural school,and a farming cooperative. We heard from an economist, and met with unemployed maquila workers who had been fired for striking, with members of a rural solidarity group , and with university students.. We lived for two days with families in the countryside. What were our gleanings?

For almost all the people we talked with, life is very hard. Estimates of unemployment ranged from 50 to 80 percent.. How do people live? One member of a family, usually the father, may emigrate to Costa Rica or the U.S. and send money home. All but the very youngest must work, usually in the informal economy. Every time our bus stopped at a traffic light, we were besieged by children selling us ice in plastic bags, or CDs, or Chiclets, and by women or men vending tortillas or shoelaces. Half of the schoolaged children are not in school, since parents must pay 10 cordobas a month for each child, and provide their own school supplies, books, and uniforms. It is a rare family that can afford to send all of its kids.

In a community of shacks near the city dump, Francesca , a former seamstress, and a group of others have developed an ingenious means of survival. Carlos and Manuel go into the dump and pull out all the discarded plastic bags and bundle them into hundred-pound lots for delivery to Francesca. She and members of her family wash and scrub them and hang them on the line to dry. They are then bundled again, and Francesca sells them to Julio, who presumably sells them to retailers or consumers. It's hardly a living for anyone, but it helps.

There is employment in the maquilas of the free trade zones. A free trade zone is a fiercely fenced in area usually near an airport where unfinished material is delivered to factories (maquilas, maquiladoras) for processing. We visited one such maquila,--considered one of the best in the zone-- where 900 workers, mostly young women, assembled and sewed the pre-cut pieces of blue jeans.. The completed jeans are shipped elsewhere for washing and pressing before final shipment to the U.S for Sears and Penneys'. For a nine-hour day with two fifteen minute breaks and a half-hour for lunch,, the worker earned $2.30. Working conditions were not cruel, but they were dehumanizing. Bathroom breaks were timed at a four-and-a-half minute maximum. The girls were searched going in and out of the factory to prevent theft, and were regularly given pregnancy tests and fired if pregnant. They had a union, but we couldn't find out whether or not it was effective. We did meet privately, over dinner, with representatives of a nother union, who had been fired for striking. “We would do it again," they said.

We were not allowed to talk to the machine operators at the factory, nor take pictures of them. The two men who were our guides and answered our questions were “management" and surely earned more than the laborers. They spoke of Mr. Craig Milller, the owner of the company, who lives in the U.S. and visits every couple of weeks. Presumably he makes a great deal more than the laborers.

A principle of the NLM is that economic growth comes from trade. Each nation has a resource that is its specialty. In Nicaragua (as in China and many third world countries) the resource is cheap labor. Self-sufficiency is virtually outlawed by this model.

We saw another side of labor in Nicaragua at the Women's Sewing Cooperative in Nueva Vida, on the outskirts of Managua. There, a group of women who had lost everything in Hurricane Mitch formed a cooperative. They built their own building of cinder blocks and concrete, made contact with a grower of organic cotton, began to manufacture tee shirts which they now sell to Maggie's Organics, which, in turn, retails their products over the internet. The group is jubilant over the loan/grant they have recently received from the Inter-American Foundation. Similarly, in the rural community of Arenal, we visited the farming cooperative, which survived the change of government in 1990 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998. It was hard to get loans, the men said, but they drew strength from their community organization – and from the larger-than life portraits of Sandinista heroes on the walls of their building. Nicholassa, my hostess for a two-night stay in Arenal, cleans houses (whose houses? I wondered), while her husband drives a taxi in a nearby city and often gets home at midnight or after.

The NLM calls for loans to debtor nations from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which imposes strict requirements on the debtor. It must slant its economy toward export, and must radically cut back its social programs, such as education and health care. In Nicaragua, these deprivations are clearly visible in the decline of educational opportunity and strikingly in the lessened health care. There are local clinics in the cities and the country, but according to the doctors who spoke to us, the services they offer are minimal: charting of children's development, vaccinations, mammograms (not free), free medicine --when there is any. One dentist serves 37,000 people. Maria seemed to speak for the Arenal solidarity group when she declared emphatically: “I think it is a disgrace that we have allowed them to take our revolution away from us! Cuba has done it better!"

Were there any bright spots in our picture of Nicaragua? Yes! The entrepreuneurship of the women at the sewing cooperative, the vigor and determination of the members of the solidarity group in Arenal, the ability to organize,-- and the dances and music performed for us by university students. These were marvelous, and our week was brought to a thrilling conclusion by a performance of the Ballet Folklorico Nicaraguense in Managua. Viva the arts!

With Maria's exclamation in mind, we wondered what we would find in Cuba. What would forty-five years of Fidel's dictatorship and a US embargo have done to that country? Ariel, our Cuban long-termer, brought home a color TV set from Nicaragua, attesting to the increased variety of consumer goods achieved as predicted under the NLM. He warned us that Cuba was not a paradise, but he was obviously happy to be home, and immediately threw a party for us and introduced us to his mother, wife, and eight-year-old son. We all admired his house, which showed the effects of his own craftsmanship and was in contrast to most of the housing in Cuba—shabby and deteriorating.

During our week in Cuba we were again caught up in a whirlwind of learning experiences: a tour around Havana and a chance to shop in its farmers' market and artisans' market, a tourof a cigar factory, visits to two museums, a health clinic, a maternity center, a performing arts school, and an agricultural cooperative, a two-day stay in historic Santa Clara in the center of the island, a visit to the Ché Guevara memorial, lectures from the Director of the Martin Luther King Center , and from an economist, Gladys Hernandez. Finally we met with a representative of the Cuban Foreign Policy Office and with Mr. Daniel Sainz of the United States Interest Section.

Wherever we went we heard about the priority Cuba gives to its children. They can all count on good health care and good education. We enjoyed watching the school children —the littlest ones in red shorts or skirts with white shirts, older youngsters in navy blue and white, and teenagers in white shirts and gold colored pants or skorts (very cute!) At the maternity center we saw that the first right of the child is the right to be well born. Women undergoing problem pregnancies, or pregnancies in problem settings, could receive free live-in care that would give them rest, nourishing food, and nursing attention at a center in their own province. We couldn't fit an elementary school into our schedule, but we did visit a performing arts high school . We thrilled to the music and dance/drama and learned that the school's graduates would be assured of work in their art under government sponsorship.

Early in the revolution adult literacy was a priority goal. A whole museum is devoted to pictures and records from the 1961 campaign where –as in Sandinista Nicaragua--adult illiterates (700,000 of them) were turned into readers. Our bus driver, Martin, was excited when he discovered that his records as a teacher in that campaign were preserved forever in the Literacy Museum!

Then came the climax of the trip: a visit to the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations in the morning and to the United States Interest Section in the afternoon. We listened, through our translators, to a statement by the Ministry representative. He summarized the history of US/Cuban relations and brought it up to date, including Bush's latest Executive Order, just coming into effect. The policy of an embargo against Cuba has been in place since 1960, even before Cuba was designated a socialist country. At that time, 40% of the productive land was owned by the US, and 90% of Cuba's trade was with the US. The embargo was a deliberate act to suffocate the Cuban Revolution. Another policy was to create or support opposition to the regime withinin Cuba. These are still the basic policy of the US.

The trade embargo didn't hurt as much as expected until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, and with it went 85% of Cuba's external trade. The GDP plummeted 35% over the next four years, starting what is called the “Special Period," a time of desperate economic hardship. Caloric intake fell by 38% causing an average weight loss of 20 pounds per Cuban. The US tightened the economic screws, figuring that when the people were desperate enough they would rebel against their government, but support for Fidel did not fall as predicted (nor did the Bay of Pigs invasion produce the expected uprising of the Cuban people.)

In 1999 the Elián Gonzalez crisis showed how much opinion had shifted: a majority of the US public favored a return of the boy to his father in Cuba instead of permanent custody by his relatives in Miami. Recent polls show that both the American public in general and Cuban-Americans considered separately all support free trade with Cuba in medicine and food, and free travel. Both houses of the US Congress have formed a bipartisan Cuba Working Group, moving toward changes that would benefit both countries. Only the Executive sees things differently.

In May of 2004 Bush promulgated a new set of Executive Orders which introduce one set of deprivations and restrictions for Americans and an additional set for Cuban-Americans, along with US aggressions toward the island. We heard some anxiety about these from the people we met, but there was also a calm assurance that despite the increase in suffering, Cuba would get through without giving up its revolution (meaning its welfare programs.) There is some good news: tourism is booming (by everyone except US citizens) and there is high hope for the pharmaceutical industry, which has just created a new and unique vaccine for meningitis.

In the afternoon we met with Daniel Sainz of United States Interest Section. He said,“Well, Cuba is a difficult country to understand. There is no soap, but they are always clean. There is no food, but there doesn't seem to be any real hunger. You don't hear them complaining about him, but you see them stroking their chins (he gestures, mimicking the caressing of a beard) and you know they're talking about him." When we referred to what we had heard from our guide (Ariel) he told us that Cuban guides were highly trained and able to convince and fool the people they lead – “They're the best!" he said. “There is no question that Cuba is a police state." As I reflected later on his words, I concluded that he was sealed off by both his impregnable belief system and his life style from any contact with the Cuba that we had come to know and admire. On the other hand, I now wonder if I was the one sealed off from the realities of oppression and human rights violations. More study is needed! Six days do not an expert make! The US continues to contemplate an invasion of the island, or the assassination of Fidel and his brother, Rául. The embargo will not be ended, we were told, until the country has held a “free election" in which neither of the brothers is a candidate.

Our trip has ended, but our task has not. Now we are out to spread the word, to educate --and to continue our own education. Locally, three of us are available to give illustrated talks: I live in Amherst, Liz Kelner in Shelburne Falls ,and the Reverend Kate Stevens in Charlemont. We encourage you to invite one of us to speak (without charge) at your church, organization, or study group.

Page last updated: February 18, 2005