Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  It was 1982 and I arrived just a couple of days after Tomás Borge and Daniel Ortega of the FSLN comandancia had declared the revolution “socialist.” I was ready, dictionary in hand, to defend the Revolution, and the first thing I did was look up Fr. Ernesto Cardenal, Minister of Culture. I’d exchanged a couple of letters with him and sent him copies of pamphlets and the one issue of The Second Coming. The Rosa Luxemburg/Dorothy Day Cultural Brigade had also done a poetry benefit for the FSLN and I’d sent him money for that. It couldn’t have amounted to more than fifty dollars, but he graciously thanked us for the donation and the solidarity.

  Cardenal politely received me at his office in the Ministry of Culture but my Spanish was confined to the present tense of a dozen or so verbs, so the conversation was, to say the least, limited. He recommended me to another ministry where he thought I might be able to work doing layout for a publication, a task that wouldn’t require great language skills. Nothing came of that contact, not even an interview.

  I wandered around Managua marveling at this strange country in the middle of a very promising revolution. The literacy crusade, begun under Ernesto Cardenal’s brother, Minister of Education Fernando Cardenal, had brought down the rate of illiteracy from over fifty percent to around thirteen percent in just six months, a stunning success for which the nation was given an award by the UN. The Ministry of Culture was holding poetry workshops all over the country, teaching peasants, militia, prisoners, policemen, and anyone else interested, the art of reading and writing poems. The government was attempting to implement a free healthcare system, raising up daycare centers and schools and community centers all over the country, financed by international solidarity. As one person told me in those days, “You can travel all over Central America and only here will you find campesinos wearing glasses, because now they know how to read.”

  Toward the end of my month in Nicaragua I took a trip to Ometepe Island in Lake Nicaragua, got terribly sick and returned to Managua with a fever. I was staying with a young seminarian at an Anglican church, but it was a limited stay and I had no money and no ticket home. Eventually my friends in Berkeley, many of them as poor as I, raised money to send me a ticket to come home.

  I was still sick and feverish and the trip through Honduras seemed surreal, especially as we drove through an intense storm, one that had been going on for nearly a week. I arrived, exhausted, in San Pedro. I crossed the street from the bus station and took the first hotel I saw, the Hotel oderno, the “M” in the name having burned out. The Moderno was anything but modern, but it served my purposes for a clean, cheap place to stay until my flight out the following day. In the hotel’s café I met a Guatemalan schoolteacher who invited me to sit with six of his friends. They invited me to join them for a beer and I apologized when I ordered a soft drink because I was taking antibiotics for my fever. The person I sat next to was introduced to me as Victor and he was, at first, surprisingly cold and aloof. As I talked with the other teachers he listened closely and finally turned to me and looked me in the eyes.

  “At first,” he began, “I thought you were CIA. But now that I hear you talk I know you aren’t. If you were CIA you’d speak better Spanish.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take that (I still carried my dictionary with me wherever I went and referred to it often) but I thanked him and affirmed that I wasn’t, indeed, CIA.

  “We’re all teachers. We’re here from Guatemala for a conference of teachers,” he said. Leaning toward me, he spoke more quietly in a confidential tone, “We teach the Indians in the mountains how to read and write. You know, in my country, it’s a crime to teach Indians to read and write. Still, we go into the mountains to villages where mestizos are rarely seen. And there we see little children who are dying of starvation. And you know what that’s like? To see children die of starvation?” He teared up as he stared at me and I shook my head. “They vomit worms before they die. And do you know why they die? Guatemala is a rich country. We grow all kinds of food but it is sent to your country. They die in my country, the children, because you eat their food. And you live in Disneyland, completely unaware of it.”

  I was speechless and so were my companions at the table. There was a heavy silence in the café, a heavy, anguished silence. Victor wiped the tears from his eyes and cheeks. Then, looking around at his companions, he raised his beer to toast. “But still, life is beautiful!”

  I am haunted by that moment and cannot recall it without tears even now. It was as if I had encountered all of Latin America face to face in this one person, Victor, with whom I would spend only a few minutes on a rainy Saturday in an otherwise nondescript Honduran town and yet would remember him the rest of my life.

  By the time I returned from Nicaragua I was moving toward theological agnosticism. I was still inclined to work with the Christians because I felt comfortable with their ethic and their culture of kindness, but I needed more space to grow than Christianity offered. Still, when I was offered a job—if it could be called that since the work paid nothing but room and board—working at a social justice ministry of Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in East Oakland, I took it. I was interviewed by the only other two staff of House on the Way over a cup of tea in a beautiful, sylvan valley right in the middle of the East Oakland ghetto. In the interview I’d told Betty Frazer, the resident counselor, and Fr. Richard “Dick” Schiblin that I was agnostic and I felt closer to Marxism at that point than to Christianity, neither of them flinched. They still hired me on the spot.

  In exchange for printing the newsletter for the Church and House on the Way ministry, I had access to the Multi 1250 printing press. Once I managed to learn how to run the press I started printing small runs of poetry books and a new magazine that I co-edited with Marc Batko called Poor Konrad, named after the 16th century revolutionary German worker’s conspiracy to “bind the strong man and take the kingdom by force” (Mark 3:27). We printed statements from the Nicaraguan churches translated by James and Margaret Goff in which they implored Christians in the US to work to stop the killing and acts of terror the CIA was directing against their country. And indeed, as time went on the US government increased financing to the Contra army that was wreaking havoc on the country.1

  Once again, Marc and I found very little support for, or interest in, the issue of revolutionary Christians in Nicaragua except among a few of our friends. We felt it was nevertheless important to get out the regular statements from Nicaraguan churches and translations of Nicaraguan poetry and German liberation theology, particularly the writings of Dorothee Sölle and other Christian socialist theologians, as well as Ernst Bloch.

  Nevertheless, the Sandinista process defined the word “revolution” for me and convinced me that there existed the possibility not just for individual searches for utopia, nor small utopian communities in progressive cities, like the House Church of Berkeley, but for large-scale social projects that could transform nations and peoples. I wanted to be part of that any way I could so I contacted Ernesto Cardenal, enlisting a Puerto Rican priest who lived in the Redemptorist monastery to help me write the letter in Spanish.

  A few weeks later, in October 1983, the day the US invaded the tiny island of Grenada, I got a letter back from Ernesto Cardenal, inviting me to Nicaragua. Dick and Betty were supportive of my going to Nicaragua and they did what they could to help me organize my trip and find some funding. Another priest who was living at House on the Way, a real saint, Fr. Pat Leehan, gave me two hundred-dollar bills. “Roll them up and put ’em in your sock. You’ll need ’em,” he said. Pat was involved in the Sanctuary movement and had personally smuggled dozens of Guatemalan and other Central American refugees in his tiny red car with tinted windows. He was mostly deaf and had KPFA on in his room from early morning into the night and you could hear it blaring as soon as you walked into the upstairs area where House on the Way had its offices and living quarters.

  Arriving in Managua, I stayed at Hospedaje El Molinito and immediately fell in with a group o
f ex-pats, internationalists and revolutionary tourists from the US By now the counter-revolution was in full swing and the Contra war was underway along the border, funded by the US government and cocaine dollars—though, in all honesty, both sides in the conflict were getting money for their war chest taking cuts from the cocaine going into the US to make the dangerous new drug, crack.

  Soldiers and milicianos and brigadistas in olive green were everywhere but in Managua life went on as usual. In Gringolandia, a few square blocks of Barrio Marta Quezada near Tica Bus station, and especially at Comedor Saras (Sara’s Café), you could find the internationalists guzzling beer and talking politics, frequently with Daniel Alegria at the center of the conversation. Daniel was Claribel Alegria’s son and assistant to Tomas Borge, Minister of the Interior.2 Aside from a good knowledge of English, Korean, and God-knows what other languages, Daniel was our contact for information and analysis of the political situation in Nicaragua. He knew everyone and everything about the country from his work in the Ministry of the Interior (MINT). When I say “our” contact, I mean most of the internationalists and tourists who passed through. Daniel was the unofficial Sandinista internal ambassador to internationalists. Besides that, he was funny and had the ability to state things clearly and poignantly. One morning as we discussed the US and international capitalism over eggs at the hospedaje/comedor known as the casa con la puerta verde, the house with the green door, he turned to me and asked, “Do you think most North Americans understand that everything they own is splattered with someone else’s blood?”

  My transition from Christianity to Sandinismo was by now fairly complete, although I still found (and continue to find) much wisdom and spiritual resonance in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Still, for all practical purposes, I’d made the transition from one set of symbols to another, much the way the original people of the Americas traded the names of their gods for the names of saints even while maintaining the original meaning and substance that nurtured their lives and cultures. Over time the new and old faiths and rituals blend together such that the convert is able to distinguish the two, and easily manage the dissonance that would overwhelm and befuddle anyone else.

  I probably spent too much time drinking beer with Daniel and the other internationalists at Comedor Sara’s but I did manage to get out of Managua from time to time to do interviews. On one such occasion I interviewed a number of young Christians who were picking coffee during the harvest, some from the traditional peace churches. I was struck by their sincerity and commitment but I was at a loss as to how to respond to them when they asked me about North American Christians and their views on the Sandinista Revolution. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that most Christians in the US probably knew nothing of their struggle. Most, like me just a few years before, didn’t even know where Nicaragua was.

  Chapter Six: A Dream Made of Red Stars and Black Roses

  Toward the end of my time in Nicaragua I went to hear Ernesto Cardenal and Lawrence Ferlinghetti do a reading at the memorial amphitheater dedicated to Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the founder of La Prensa newspaper who had been killed for running articles unfavorable to Somoza during the dictatorship. I was stunned by the beauty of Cardenal’s translation of Ferlinghetti, and it struck me as I sat listening that I should translate and publish poems being written by soldiers, police, peasants, and youth involved in the poetry workshops being held all over the country under the Ministry of Culture.

  I’d collected a large number of them, published in the popular magazine, Poesía Libre (Free Poetry), a publi­cation of the Ministry of Culture that was printed on Kraft paper and bound with cheap twine. It was ubiquitous in Nicaragua, appearing even in the supermarkets where in the US one would find The National Enquirer. It sold for a few pennies and it had some really extraordinary poetry in translation from all over the world, and it also had copious amounts of poetry from the talleres de poesía (poetry workshops), a project of the Ministry of Culture that had become a national phenomenon.

  I returned to the Bay Area and started translating poetry. At House on the Way I moved into the basement so I could be near the printing press. I wanted to master the craft of printing so I began sleeping on the worktable in the evening, right next to the wild animal I hoped to tame. Eventually the printing press submitted to my will and I embarked on my career as a printer. Only rarely did I get paid work, but I got in lots of practice printing small books of poetry, including Flamingos in Gangland by bob rivera, Similitudes by Eugene Warren, and my own first chapbook of poems, Names, a book I decided, a week after I printed it, wasn’t ready, so I recycled the entire edition. I found paper in odd sizes and quality at a local paper discount store run by Sikhs, and managed to find other print shops where I could make paper plates that I needed to print with. I began printing for Witness for Peace, Pledge of Resistance, and other political groups, but my options, and my equipment, were limited.

  For the 1984 Democratic Convention Dave Smith and I printed up a pamphlet titled “Commies for Christ” that featured Jesus on the cover, gazing adoringly at an image of Karl Marx. We passed out a few thousand of the pamphlets, Dave showing up in his suit and tie on his lunch hour to leaflet. He’d taken a job at Wells Fargo in the financial district to try to save money so he could return to Nicaragua and work with TechNica, a solidarity organization of tech workers. I didn’t know how he dealt with the contradictions of having a job at a bank and working to overthrow capitalism at the same time, but that was his business.

  Dave had to leave after an hour, but I stayed around for a hardcore-punk show with Dead Kennedys, the Dicks, MDC, and others. As the music ended, the audience formed a spontaneous demonstration that marched to the Hall of Justice where we demanded the release of a number of protestors who had been arrested on a march and tour of the bloody corporations of San Francisco that morning. When we got to the entrance to the Hall of Justice we saw that the exits were sealed off by uniformed police and we realized we had been trapped. Police on horseback charged into the crowd beating people with billy clubs and plainclothes cops emerged from the crowd and began jumping people and handcuffing them. Those trampled by police on horseback were later booked for “assault.” In the chaos I looked around for an escape and saw one person I vaguely knew.

  “Over this way, there’s an alley!” he cried, also recog­nizing me. We ran through the confusion and he commented, “check it out: the plainclothes cops are all dressed the same. They’re the big guys in flannel shirts and jeans. They look like lumberjacks.” Sure enough, the cops were all dressed, as if in uniform, in plaid flannel shirts, blue jeans, and black jackboots.

  We ran down the alley and then I remembered where I’d seen the man I was with. We’d met in the basement of a Catholic Worker house in Oakland where he had a printing press and was organizing a printing collective called “Red Star Black Rose Printing and Graphics.” His name was Ben Clarke and he and I would eventually become close friends and comrades over the coming years.

  A few other contacts came out of our leafleting the Democratic Convention. The most significant one was Henry Noyes, the founder of China Books and Periodicals in San Francisco, who had been intrigued by the thought of Communist Christians and had gotten in touch through our post office box. He was a “young man” of seventy-four and had become politically active years before during the Spanish Civil War doing solidarity work with the Republic by raising money in England for ambulances. After getting his Masters at University of Toronto and his PhD at the University of London, he finally landed at the University of Missouri where he was head of the Creative Writing Department for six years. Somewhere along the way he’d become a communist, though exactly when, and how much of a “communist” he’d been, he guarded as a closely-held secret. He and his family moved to Chicago in 1945 where he taught in an adult school, but his defense of China and the Soviet Union got him fired. He went to work in a machine shop in Chicago where he became a union steward and, eventually, after being chased out
of several jobs for his communist views, founded China Books. Eventually he moved China Books to San Francisco in 1960 and he began driving around the country selling Mao’s Little Red Book and other publications from China. It was largely, if not exclusively, due to Henry’s efforts that Mao’s Little Red Book fell into the hands of the Black Panthers, and from there to a very large part of the Left.

  Henry was a delightful, brilliant gentleman and we hit it off from the first time I met him at his house in the Mission shortly after he wrote to us at Poor Konrad. He had me pegged as an anarchist, probably because I worked at Red Star/Black Rose and had no party affiliation. I surmised that Henry was a Maoist, but we had an “ecumenical” anti-capitalist faith and both were far enough from party politics that our political differences served mainly as the basis for long and engaging conversations that we both seemed to find productive.

  Henry believed in “united fronts” for building a revolution, and so did I, but his dialectical materialist perspective also helped me move beyond the less productive political views and tactics I’d inherited from the “idealism” of the Anabaptists and Evangelicals. Often in those circles the emphasis was on civil disobedience and acts designed to “witness” against social evils. Henry didn’t find that approach to be of much value. “I only fight battles I think I can win,” he told me. The idea of tying one’s self up in legal problems to “make a statement” just didn’t fit in with his pragmatic revolutionary perspective. It made sense to me.

  Henry was there when I was living on a shoestring and needed a place to stay, or if I didn’t have enough money for a meal he’d find something to cook up or invite me out to a local restaurant in the Mission. Though our friendship was tried much later after the Tiananmen Square massacre—which at first he denied, and then, incredibly to me, claimed was a CIA plot—he remained a friend and I still miss his bright optimism, his infinite curiosity, and his down-to-earth brilliance over a decade after his death in 2005.