Lately I’ve been reading a lot of articles over the
arguments over the first world proletariat "parasitism"
theory. As explained by Mike Ely of the Kasama
Project:
“We have all run into theories that argue that the working
class in the U.S. is a class of parasites that lives off people in the third
world. It is argued that workers make more than the value of their labor power
-- and that this fact proves that they must be living off the exploitation of
others...
…This is a quite moralist and pessimistic view -- even if it mascarades as if it is just applying Marxist political economy (which it isn't).”
…This is a quite moralist and pessimistic view -- even if it mascarades as if it is just applying Marxist political economy (which it isn't).”
I agree that the theory is wrong on many levels. However, I
have been to some poor third world countries and this is about one of those countries,
Nicaragua. It is not as important to compare poverty as it is to be in
solidarity with those who do live in the deep poverty of the third world.
This is a part of a series I’m writing on life in third
world countries, including attempts at political, economic and cultural
liberation.
I went to Nicaragua as part of Witness for Peace tour, about
1993. There were about 20 of us who went to visit places and the country and
make notes on what we saw. We spent nearly 2 weeks in Nicaragua. Of the cities
we went to were Esteli, Quilalí, El Coco and the capital, Managua.
Background:
The Sandinista National Liberation
Front (FSLN) successfully overthrew a US puppet government of Anastasio Somoza
in 1979. He ran a dictatorship and dynasty. The Sandinista government or FSLN
tried to build a Marxist revolution, but they did it by creating a Western
style parliamentary government in which all political parties where legal and
all could run candidates for elections.
Through the 1980s the
conflicts in Central America, mostly El Salvador and Nicaragua, were the main
issues of then President Ronald Reagan. Reagan treated the FSLN as if they had
created a Stalinist state and made the country his target for fighting the cold
war. Saving the FSLN government was a main issue for the US left. At the same
time the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) was attempting a
revolution of its own in El Salvador.
Reagan sponsored the Contra
guerrilla movement, a CIA rebel band of those who wanted to return Nicaragua to
a puppet state. The FSLN leaders were
voted out of power in 1990. Reagan had provided massive aid to an UNO
coalition, that came together to vote out the Sandinistas.
Today, the conflicts seem
over. The FMLN agreed to end their revolutionary war and join the government as
a political party. I wasn’t able to travel to those countries until the end of
both conflicts, in about 1993. I still got a lot out of that trip. It was my
first time to third world countries other than Mexico. I got to see what poor
people and peasant people really live like in some of the poorest countries in
the world. This article will be about my stay in Nicaragua.
The trip:
While we have poverty in the US and it is as real as
molecules, the poverty in Nicaragua is deeper and effects more people there,
including the middle class. The
differences are everywhere. Most restaurants, even the better ones, rarely have
running toilets. Some had simple out houses. Even the nicer restaurants lacked
working toilets. Those that had the actual toilets usually lacked working
parts. Often a pale of water sat next to toilet bowels so that the water could
be poured into the bowels to flush it.
Beer and rum were the most common liquor we found. Anything
else was very difficult to find. There were several types of rum and two brands
of beer. Even wine was nearly impossible to find. The only time I saw many different
types of liquor was at the duty shop at the airport.
Bottles for beer or soda pop of any type were treated as
gold. In shops where a person bought a bottle of soda, it was poured into a
plastic bag with a straw for anyone wanting to take it anywhere out of the
place it was bought.
Items in stores were sparse. In a grocery store there where
two types of soap—that is two brands. I needed some film for my camera and
there were two types, consisting of two brands. It isn’t like Wal*Mart where
there is a full wall filled with different types and brands of camera film. For
most of the people living there cameras were too expensive to own, so buying
film was not really their biggest problem.
Maybe there were special stores where the wealthy could get
more brands and variety of stuff to buy. But I never saw any of those.
Once outside the capital or other major towns, there is only
one paved road, the Pan American Highway, which went from North to South. The
rest of the roads are sand or dirt. One road we took came to a stream with no
bridge. There was a shallow spot for cars to cross through. Some towns could
not be reached if there were heavy rains. That meant that if we were in such a
town and it rained, we were stuck there for a while. In the morning we went to
a restaurant for morning breakfast. There were some people there who ate
leftover food when people were finished eating. We were eating in the outdoor
part of the restaurant. It was a little shocking to see that kind of poverty.
These people seemed really hungry. They seem to eat anything they could and
were not worried about people’s germs.
Nicaragua has a small
population compared to other countries in Central America. It has about 2 million
people. We only spent one day in Esteli. It is a fair sized town and has paved
streets. In larger cities as Esteli there is a variety of food in restaurants. Mexican
restaurants seem to be the favorite of many people. In the most rural
communities people ate mostly refried beans and flower tortillas. They do
have platanos
or baked bananas in the morning. There were an occasional egg, meat of beef,
pork or chicken, that is cooked to the point of tasting like beef jerky. That
may be due to avoiding health problems with undercooked meat. They usually had
enough to eat, but not much variety.
It was peaceful while we stayed in Esteli. But two weeks
after we left, the recontras
(a left over group of guerillas that fought for the rights to land) fought a
battle in the very streets we drove in.
We spent a lot of time in Quilalí. It had dirt roads and was
a fairly sparsely populated town. It was in the mountains. The mountains of
Nicaragua are not really that high, as compared to the Rockies in the US. The
seemed more like the flint
hills of Kansas. There were no peaks and no snow. But people in town told
us that the mountains have been stripped of trees and local deforestation.
We stayed in a hotel. Most of our meals were at the motel.
As with most towns we went to people cooked their food in wood stoves. The
smell of wood smoke was everywhere.
We met with the town council. About half of them were
members of the Sandinista (FSLN) Party. All the council members were involved
in getting a single TV set that the town would share. It would be hooked up to
a cable outlet and would receive TV shows, mostly from Mexico.
There wasn’t a lot of entertainment for us or the people of
this town. At first a lot of the members of our group were shocked that
Sandinista members would be involved in the TV acquisition when there were so
many needs the people in the town had. By the time we left the town, we
realized that entertainment is a need like anything else. They are people—and
people want things such as TV. They want to enjoy themselves and I think some
people in the group forgot that.
When the weekend came, a lot of workers walked into town,
bought rum and walked around the town square drinking it, getting drunk and
talking with friends.
There were two clubs in town. One had music and resembled a
disco. The other was a simple tavern. We were warned not to go in the later
because it was dangerous. Supposedly we could be killed in that place and we
all took the advice and stayed out. For us foreigners there were times and
places where it was just too dangerous to visit. We were told not to go out in
the streets at night in Esteli.
The town did have electricity, but it was not always that
reliable. One day the lights all went out in a storm and the innkeeper told is
that they had no idea if it would be off one hour or a few days. Lucky for us
it was only a few hours.
El Coco is probably the most depressing town I have ever
been to, or at least close. It was located on a cliff over a river. The day we
went was in January and it was close to 100° Fahrenheit. For a winter day it
was miserably hot. The buildings were mostly made of cinder block and almost
none of the buildings were painted. Many ex-contra guerrillas were given land
to work by the Nicaraguan government. However the people in the village lacked
tools for the farming they needed to do. They had seeds, but lacked any tools.
It was a poor dull town. There were very few businesses or stores. The town
seemed to have a sense of hopelessness to it. In some ways it was barely a town
at all—just a piece of land for people to live on.
This was the last town we visited. This trip to Central
America, took me to the poorest country I ever visited. It gave me a look at a
part of the world that most Americans never see. This is not a place where
people worry about their I-pads color, or how many apps their phone has—at least
not when I was there.
A commercial on my TV, recently, has
this guy and his family worried about visiting their neighbor who doesn’t have
the same TV bundle package and lacks the ability to watch or record 6 different
TV shows at the same time. While in Nicaragua, there are people who want to
share a TV and watch one channel, which is a big step up for them.
Many people in
Nicaragua fight a gritty battle to survive and meet their basic needs. Yet, as their
American counter parts, they look for ways of entertaining themselves. Life is
hard and most Americans never see that. When we read about people in such
countries, we see statistics and political sound bites, but not the faces of
the people who are forced to live there under corrupted dictators and squalid
poverty.
But these people were usually very proud and they made the
best of what they had. They were clean. In all the towns, most people took
baths every day. If they had no soap, they just scrubbed hard. No one I met
ever smelled badly.
They also understood the need for education and valued it
way more than the US crybabies who moan and bitch about “having to pay for
educating some one else’s kid.” Before the revolution, many people were illiterate
and the Sandinistas tried to change that. They ran a national
literacy campaign.
That attitude doesn’t seem to exist here. In Kansas and
other states, education is being cut and people, especially conservatives, don’t
seem to value it anymore.
And that is what people here in the US need to know about
the other part of the world. I’ve met people who told me they had no interest
in every going to a country that has such poverty. Even religious people I’ve
met have said that. It seems a kind of “head in the sand” attitude. “See nothing, hear nothing, do nothing.”
Some of us can’t afford to travel. Those of us who can need
to do so and remind US people that some people barely survive, while US people worry
about how fast their computers are. But again, this should not be used to divide
our own poor against them; we should be in solidarity with them all. We have
the same enemy regardless of the degrees of poverty.
- សតិវ អតុ.
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