by Pete Hamill
II.
The Church of Santo Domingo de Guzman was consecrated on May 4, 1963, but on this bright Sunday morning, as well-dressed people filed into pews for the 11 o’clock Mass, the building felt much older.
The altar was all wood and white cloth, with painted plaster statues of the risen Jesus and a serene Mary. At the foot of the altar stood a huge carved wooden chair, flanked by chairs of diminishing size. This was a church in the old style, serene as Sunday morning, marred only by the round fluorescent lights attached to the wood-panel ceiling.
To the right of the entrance there was a confessional booth upon which was fixed a permanent sign: EXCMO SENOR ARZOBISPO METROPOLITAN MONS MIGUEL OBANDO BRAVO. How extraordinary: In this small church, wedged on a breezy hill above the American and the Soviet embassies, every sinner had the chance to confess his failures of flesh and will to one of the most powerful men in Nicaragua. For this was the church of Managua Archbishop Obando Bravo, the acknowledged leader of the opposition to the Sandinista revolutionaries.
“If he were the candidate in the elections,” says Conservative leader Mario Rappaccioli, “he would get 80% of the vote, no contest.”
Since 1980, Obando Bravo has warned his flock against the “totalitarian” drift of the revolution, opposed the military draft, urged the Sandinistas to bring the contra leadership into the government. The Sandinistas have reacted in varying degrees of contempt and rage. But their slogan — “between religion and revolution there is no contradiction” — acknowledges their fear of Obando’s potential for trouble.
On this day, two thirds of the archbishop’s parishioners were female, and seven of these polite, oddly sad women wore pearls. They also wore dresses of muted blues and grays, sensible shoes and expressions that were more baffled than defeated. In Marxist caricature, they were, of course, the hated bourgeoisie, vicious exploiters of the poor, grubby materialists whose souls longed for permanent salvation in Miami. But Nicaragua is not Cuba; there are no mobs scaling the walls of the Peruvian Embassy, no long waits for exit visas; anybody who wants to leave can leave. These people have chosen to stay.
On this day, a young four-piece band in yellow long-sleeved shirts played at the front of the church. They were very good, but all eyes were on the archbishop. He entered forcefully, a squat compact man with gold-rimmed glasses, garbed in purple and scarlet. Everything about him was blocky: hands, features, feet, body, even the powerful tuneless bass in which he did some singing. During the hand-clapping up-tempo tunes, Obando’s mouth remained sealed; he would sing only one chorus of “Glory, Glory Hallelujah” through the long morning service.
His sermon was unremarkable, a reflection on Pentecost, an expression of mild bafflement about why his efforts to end the contra war had been so misunderstood, a prayer “for those in prisons, for those who are fighting.” His tall peaked archbishop’s hat was secure upon the blocky head; he dispensed Communion with paternal ease.
When the Mass ended, his flock walked out into the sunshine, whispering, murmuring, failure clinging to them like dandruff on a suit. I saw only one peasant family in the church: a man with a brown hawklike Indian face, his wife, his children. They sat in the last pew and didn’t leave until the last station wagon door had slammed.
Later that day, I went to Mass at the Church of Santa Maria de Los Angeles, a low circular building in the heart of a slum called El Riguero. The 1972 earthquake that moved Archbishop Obando from the ruined cathedral to Santo Domingo also destroyed the old church in El Riguero. This new church is the replacement, and it’s not yet finished. One huge mural on the far wall remains incomplete, but against the back wall are murals of what is called here the “Church of the Poor” or “The People’s Church.”
We see Jesus portrayed as a revolutionary, Sandinistas battling oppression, a portrait of Gaspar Garcia Laviana, a Spanish priest of the Sacred Heart who went off to the mountains in 1977 to fight with the FSLN. His farewell letter to his parish sums up for many the Christian roots of the Nicaraguan revolution:
“The Somoza system is a sin, and to free ourselves from oppression is to free us from sin. With my gun in my hand, full of faith and love for my Nicaraguan people, I will fight to my last breath for the coming of the kingdom of justice in our homeland, that kingdom of justice that Messiah announced to us under the light of the Star of Bethlehem.”
Garcia Laviana was killed in combat in 1978, and his name was remembered fondly during a brief talk at these evening services by the Rev. Uriel Molina. This remarkable priest, a native of Matagalpa, is one of the best-known exponents of the “option for the poor,” which motivates the pro-Sandinista movement in the Nicaraguan church. He is of the generation profoundly shaped by the style and example of Pope John XXIII, by the reforms of Vatican II in 1962, and most importantly, by the calls for change that came from the 1968 meeting of Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia.
“The Sandinista front was born at the same time as Vatican II,” Molina once explained. “In 1965, my superiors sent me to the only house we had in Managua, in the El Riguero neighborhood. That was before the earthquake when the old Managua still existed, and El Riguero was quite far from Managua. I ended up there in a little church, with very poor people.”
Almost 20 years later, the people of El Riguero are still very poor, and there are more of them; the poor have been crowding into Managua, the birth rate is up and the death rate is down.
On this evening Molina conducted services in a plain white robe, accompanied by a nine-piece band, which alternated up-tempo tunes and melancholy revolutionary songs. The only obvious members of the bourgeoisie were some visiting foreigners. The people themselves were simply dressed in clean clothes, their children freshly scrubbed. Nobody wore pearls.
At the end of Mass, Molina remained beside the altar and slowly removed his priestly garments; he finished in a sports shirt and slacks and then began to talk individually to his parishioners. The moment was oddly moving, part of the process of demystifying the role of the priest and emphasizing his work.
For the priests of Uriel Molina’s generation, the most crucial theologian has been a Peruvian priest named Gustavo Gutierrez, whose use of Marxist theory led to his book “A Theology of Liberation.” In a way, this has been the most revolutionary book in modern Latin American history, a call for revolt against the traditional church alliance with dictators, land owners, army colonels and industrialists at the expense of the poor. Molina and others who have embraced liberation theology grew up in a state of rage caused by the desperate poverty they saw around them and the indifference of the church. Gutierrez said that the problem was “how to say to the poor, to the exploited classes, to the marginalized races, to the despised cultures, to all the nonpersons, that God is love and that all of us are, and ought to be in history, sisters and brothers.”
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, such present Sandinista leaders as Army Chief of Staff Joaquin Cuadra, Vice Minister of Interior Luis Carrion, agrarian reformers Roberto Gutierrez and Salvador Mayorga, among others, came to El Riguero to work with Molina, to learn from him, to share his “option for the poor.” Most were middle-class university students seeking a moral alternative to the repression and corruption of the Somoza regime. Defying the desperate pleas of their parents, most stayed for a few years, sharing the poverty of the ghetto, and then moved on to the FSLN. Certainly the experience deeply marked them all and remains critical to the philosophy of the Sandinistas.
Commandante Alvaro Baltodano once told journalist Margaret Randall:
“We read the Bible, studied liberation theology and discovered that if you really read the Bible with your eyes open, you find that the history of the Hebrew people is a history of their fight for liberation. When you read about the life of Jesus Christ you realize that whether he was or wasn’t God, he was a man who was with the poor and who fought for the freedom of the poor.”
The history of the split in the post-revolutionary church in Nicaragua has been t
urbulent.
The division was clearly seen during the visit of Pope John Paul to Managua last year. On the same day, he humiliated a kneeling Rev. Ernesto Cardenal (the priest-poet who is now minister of culture), and then ignored the mourning mothers of 17 Nicaraguan soldiers who had just been killed by contras. This led to angry chants in the Plaza of the Revolution of “Queremos la Paz” (“We want peace”) from the pro-Sandinistas and “Viva Obando” from their opponents.
The Sandinistas insist freedom of religion is guaranteed in Nicaragua. But as junta coordinator Daniel Ortega says, “When priests enter a political discussion, rather than a theological one, we feel we have the right and the duty to answer them politically.”
Obando insists, “we want a system that is more just, more human, that does away with the enormous gaps between rich and poor. But we believe that Christianity is enough to change the conscience of man and the conscience of society without the need to resort to Marxism-Leninism.”
The division remains.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS,
June 25 and 26, 1984
PRAGUE
Year after year I’d see them in public places: on street corners in Chicago or in Washington parks or standing in the rain outside the United Nations in New York. It was always Captive Nations Week or some great date in a fading national history, and the exiles would chant their anguish and their protests in languages I could never know. The men were gaunt and moustached. The women were plump, with shiny pink skin. The languages in their leaflets had too many consonants, and in my life I was drawn more passionately to lands that were lush with vowels. Usually I sighed and walked on by.
After Hungary in ’56, there was a brief time when their existence was recorded in the public prints. This man had fought a Soviet tank with a Molotov cocktail and that man’s sister had died hurling a paving stone at a machine gunner; they made words and phrases like sacrifice and freedom and in vain sound like something more than Fourth of July oratory. But by the time we had plunged into our own anguished ’60s, most of us had ceased to care. We could do something about Vietnam. It was our war, waged by our politicians, fought by our armies. We could do nothing about Eastern Europe except exchange missiles with the Russians.
But the exiles kept coming on the appointed days to the United Nations. The numbers dwindled. The men began to look sleeker and were certainly grayer, and the women seldom came at all. Some of my friends in the reporting trade dismissed them with innuendo — their leaders were on the CIA payroll, some of them had collaborated with the Nazis, they were mere props for the addled legions of the American Right. I remember talking to some of them one drizzly morning (for the weather of Eastern Europe often seemed to have immigrated with them). I needed a column for the newspaper I then served, and tried to get them to tell me their solutions to the problems back in the old country. “Drive out the Russians!” they said. “Use the atom bomb!” Faces flushed, mouths contorted, they split the damp air with their slogans. One balding man literally screamed at me: “Better dead than Red!” I never wrote the column.
In ’68 we read about the changes in Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubcek, the lifting of the heavy hand of Stalinism, the exuberant attempt to make “socialism with a human face.” In a way, this crack in the Stalinist ice pack seemed to further isolate the exiles outside the United Nations, particularly the Czechs and the Slovaks; they began to look like cranks. Then, on August 20 of that terrible year, one week before the American tribes gathered in Chicago for the Democratic convention, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring was crushed. In Chicago, through the billy clubs and the tear gas, some young American antiwar demonstrators held signs accusing Mayor Daley of running “Czechago.” That year, nobody cared much for exact analogy.
But after that brief flurry, Eastern Europe faded from the American consciousness. The Reagan Right, of course, used its existence to pander for ethnic votes; the fading American Left sometimes spoke wistfully about the Prague Spring. But neither seemed really to care very much. There were other matters to divert us: Watergate, abortion, Iran, drugs, various gurus, the religion of the Leveraged Buyout. Reagan railed at the Evil Empire, invented the contras (degrading the 1956 Hungarian resistance by calling these hired thugs “freedom fighters”), and directed the heroic invasion of Grenada. But there was never any talk about “rolling back” the Red hordes in Prague or Warsaw, Sofia or Bucharest, East Berlin or Budapest; and places such as Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, and Latvia had long ago vanished from the map. The attitude was brutally simple: Eastern Europe was “theirs”; Central American was “ours.” Realpolitik uber Alles. And every year or so, I’d pass the old exiled stalwarts holding weathered signs and chanting in the streets, occasionally producing one of their American children to do a dance in a folk costume from the old country. If it was a slow news day, the papers maybe even ran a picture.
But while visiting Prague and East Berlin last December, I kept thinking about those angry and grieving exiles and felt increasingly ashamed of myself. I should have listened harder and learned more. In Prague, there were people like them everywhere, with the same gaunt faces and ill-fitting clothes, the same grievances against injustice, except that now the world was listening. Their uncontested leader was the fifty-three-year-old playwright Vaclav Havel, whose moral authority was based on the years he’d spent in the country’s prisons. But when I first saw him, at a basement press conference in the Laterna Magika theater, I realized that he easily could have been one of those men from the sidewalk opposite the United Nations.
He did not speak in slogans. Even when addressing vast crowds, Havel’s language is concrete, precise, nuanced; he does not rant; even in confrontations with his former jailers, he sounds most reasonable. But his mission was the same as that of his countrymen: to get the dead clammy hands of Stalinism off Czechoslovakia and allow its people to breathe freely. Within a month after Prague police had used bats, clubs, and gun butts on hundreds of student demonstrators, Havel and other members of the opposition umbrella group called Civic Forum managed to force the old hard-line leaders to accept the first noncommunist government in the nation since before the communist coup in 1948. Not a shot was fired, not a window broken. It was an amazing process to watch; I woke each morning charged with an exhilaration I had almost never felt in the minefields of politics.
This revolution was a triumph of human intelligence. Czechoslovakia, like all countries ruled by totalitarians, was an oligarchy of the stupid. After 1968 the country’s best writers, including such world-class talents as Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, and Ludvik Vaculik, were silenced, jailed, or driven into exile. Rock ‘n’ roll musicians were thrown into dungeons. Only the corniest jazz (white Dixieland, for example, or moldy swing music) was officially tolerated. The brilliant Czech new wave of ’60s filmmakers was halted, the best people exiled or cast out of the industry, while the Barrandov film studios ground out witless comedies and historical epics that nobody went to see. Thousands of scientists, engineers, schoolteachers, and scholars were removed from their jobs because they were ideologically suspect, and were then forced to do the most menial labor. In all cases, they were replaced by mediocrities, ass-kissing careerists, and Stalinist hacks. It was the most sustained act of national stupidity since Spain expelled both the Jews and the Arabs within ten years of each other at the end of the fifteenth century, thus ridding itself of its most brilliant artists, architects, mathematicians, and merchants.
For an American, some of this was uncomfortably familiar. We, too, once had a blacklist that prevented writers, directors, and actors from working in movies or television — on ideological grounds. During the McCarthy era, we, too, lost scientists, schoolteachers, and scholars, on ideological grounds. Our religious Right continues trying to impose its party line on everything from abortion to the content of television shows. We have a free press, but the vast majority of our newspapers wouldn’t challenge the intelligence of a cocker
spaniel. Certainly, in our mass media, we seldom read, see, or hear from American communists or socialists, who are dismissed as a disloyal opposition. In Prague, people showed me bound copies of samizdat, precious hand-typed books passed from person to person because they were banned from the bookstores. In East Berlin I saw a line of almost three hundred people waiting in a freezing rain to buy the first West German books to be sold in the East. But a glance at any American best-seller list, or the shelves of any bookstore in a shopping mall, will show you what most Americans have chosen to do with their freedoms.
Still, we have choice, and until last year, millions of Eastern Europeans had no choice at all. Those who protested, like Havel, were visited by the secret police and taken away in handcuffs. He was a writer, and writers are rememberers or they are nothing. And that made him dangerous. In Czechoslovakia people were told to forget the Prague Spring, to forget the country’s democratic past between the world wars, to forget the 1948 coup. The social contract was simple: Let the party make the big decisions and the individuals could make most of the small decisions. If they agreed to give up memory and a critical intelligence, citizens could indulge in small bourgeois pleasures: a cottage in the country, a car, skiing, clothes that made Czech women the most chic in Eastern Europe. In Moscow, citizens wait in line for potatoes; on Parizska Street in Prague, I saw a line outside Christian Dior.
But the basic neo-Stalinist demand was for national amnesia, and that, too, was familiar. It was at the heart of the Reagan era, when Americans were urged by the Great Communicator to forget Vietnam and forget Watergate, and use borrowed money to indulge in mindless pleasures.
This is not to say that the United States is the moral equivalent of a totalitarian state. That’s ludicrous. But all human beings, including Americans, are confronted every day by the temptation of the totalitarian solution. Wandering the streets of Prague and East Berlin, I never saw a homeless person, never ran into a junkie, never felt a personal sense of menace. The total state, after all, places order above all human values, including justice. But back home in New York and Los Angeles and other American cities, I’ve talked to many people over the years who demand those Good Old Draconian Measures to deal with our disorders. They would gladly surrender the Bill of Rights if that meant clearing the streets of drug addicts and gunmen. I even heard this argument from some of the Eastern European exiles on the rainy sidewalks outside the United Nations.