The Country Under My Skin

Author: A Memoir of Love and War

Gioconda Belli is a passionate and articulate Nicaraguan woman who was raised in a well-to-do, traditional household and has a tremendous love for her country. Her intelligence and commitment to justice lead her in the 1970s to an involvement with the Sandanistas, and the revolution they achieved. This book, a riveting account, is an inside story of that revolution, the glory, the dishonor, the life and death of many souls, the agony and the on-going inspiration of a group of people who responded to brutal repression, sometimes with the best that was in them, sometimes not.

"The Country Under My Skin" candidly describes the ebb and flow of power between different elements of the Sandinistas, different visions of how the revolution should be carried out, and of who should be in charge. Belli portrays three tendencies within the revolution: the guerrillas in the mountains, the war in the cities and the organizing of workers to exert mass political and economic pressure. One of these tendencies, after a struggle, prevailed: war in the cities, led by Humberto and Daniel Ortega. It was a victory for them that held within it the seeds of the eventual destruction of the revolution.

According to Belli, the Ortegas were unscrupulous, egocentric, and power-hungry. They were more interested in their own aggrandizement than in the well being of Nicaraguan people, she asserts. And when they came to power after the revolution, they sought to match the United States Military swagger for swagger, rather than set a more conciliatory tone. Belli saw their posture towards the world as childish and counter-productive, and she was alarmed. We then read the sad story of the decline of the revolutionary spirit, and of national solidarity, the eclipse of the Sandanistas, collapsing under the weight of their own ethical compromises.

Belli writes mournfully that others within the revolution were vastly different. Within the two defeated tendencies were idealists, romantics, poets, and intellectuals, who were politically and physically courageous. There were thousands of Sandanistas guided by transcendent notions of compassion and community. A high percentage of these were murdered by the Somoza regime, by the National Guard, henchmen of the dictator, who later became "Contras." They were disproportionately eliminated because they had the courage to risk their lives. By the time the dictatorship was actually overthrown, those surviving to run the new government were the ones who had been unwilling to risk their lives, and who had an opportunist streak.

This memoir goes beyond that tale. It is also the personal story of a feminist within a revolution run largely by traditional, macho men. The Sandanistas may have been visionaries in some ways, but many of them viewed women as second-class citizens. Belli appears to have been one of the most prominent women in the nation, an acclaimed poet, key player in the revolution who became head of the Sandanista Television Network, confidante to many of the foremost men. She included among her lovers, Modesto, the premier guerilla in the nation. But until the happy ending, her marriage to a sensitive American journalist, she spends her life highly conflicted between her need for love and her need for independence, in a culture which saw female love as being synonymous with dependence. Her honest struggle with this, as her parents look on in bemusement, two marriages fail, and four children are raised, makes for fascinating reading.

She meets with General Torrijos, leader of Panama, and he humiliates her, treating her like a would-be love slave. She encounters Fidel Castro twice, and he tries to be her wise patriach, lecturing her pedantically while examining her up and down. Her relations with numerous other men are similar. Illustrated in this book is the fact that there are different levels of revolution, and different arenas of consciousness-raising. Development in one level or arena does not automatically imply the same in another.

A delightful feature of the book is the humor. These were not grim fanatics living for bloodshed. The book is replete with irreverent laughter over revolutionaries using sticks and twigs to clear an abandoned airstrip of slow-moving or stationary cows, in service of a clandestine arms drop-off, and of their companeros flying in highly suspect, antiquated planes which threatened to fall apart at any moment. When the Sandanistas took power and Belli assumed control of the television network, she pulled such shows as Bonanza and I Dream of Jeannie in favor of serious-minded, educational programming. Within a week, she reports, everyone was so bored and tortured by the new offerings that the American shows were returned to the air. And, responding to reports that American fighter planes would soon be flying over their airspace, the joke among the starving Sandanistas was that all that was needed to win them over would be for the planes to bomb them with Milky Ways.

Belli reports that after 40 years of murderous rule by Somoza, the Nicaraguan people achieved freedom through revolution. President Reagan responded to this by funding the dictator's military in their attempt to regain control, and by demanding, at gunpoint, that the Sandanistas instantly achieve a mature democracy which Somoza had never remotely pretended to desire. With the Sandanista leadership in pusillanimous hands, and the military threat from the north overbearing, the revolution failed.

What did not fail was the example to the rest of us of, at least, the potential of collective passion, in service of high ideals, to change the world.

John Hughes is a spiritual sojourner with a penchant for hoary old tunes from before the birth of rock and roll. A single father of two, he's lived in Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Calcutta, India, in search of elusive bliss.