Nicaragua Sayings And Quotes

That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.

My dad used to say, ‘This is what your right arm’s for, son,’” John said. “This is the time and these are the people and I’d give my right arm to be a light, a comfort, to them. I know you would, too. In whatever form it takes. Use these materials and make something great. Do it on faith, knowing you probably won’t be around to see how the story ends.

And what do you want?” I almost choked. “How could you even ask me that, Henry?” He sighed. “Because I’m thousands of miles away. Because I Skyped into your living room late one night and there’s a dude sitting next to you in the dark. Because Thanet tells me things. And Tennyson sent me a picture of you in a dress that looks like lingerie.” “It’s not that bad,” I said. “I didn’t say it was bad, Meg. It’s about a million miles from bad.” His voice was breaking with exasperation. “Things are crazy here, and I’m questioning everything.

When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, 'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilisation will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua we had a way of catching wild horses—by lassooing the fore feet—which was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say what I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised.

Ronald Reagan goes around saying that Nicaragua is communist and that communism is a threat to Central America. Why doesn't he say that he's a big capitalist, and that capitalism has made a great mess of Central America? Why doesn't he talk about what capitalism has done? We don't know what communism is, but we sure know what capitalism has done for us!

The modern world lacks not only hiding places, but certainties. There is no consensus about reality between, for example, the nations of the North and of the South. What President Reagan says is happening in Central America differs so radically from, say, the Sandinista version, that there is almost no common ground. It becomes necessary to take sides, to say whether or not one thinks of Nicaragua as the United States’s ‘front yard’. (Vietnam, you will recall, was the ‘back yard’.) It seems to me imperative that literature enter such arguments, because what is being disputed is nothing less than what is the case, what is truth and what untruth. If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history’s great and most abject abdications.

You seem surprised to find us here,’ the man said. ‘I am,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find anyone.’ ‘We are everywhere,’ the man said. ‘We are all over the country.’ ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand. Who do you mean by we?’ ‘Jewish refugees.’ [...] ‘Is this your land?’ I asked him. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You mean you are hoping to buy it?’ He looked at me in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘The land is at present owned by a Palestinian farmer but he has given us permission to live here. He has also allowed us some fields so that we can grow our own food.’ ‘So where do you go from here?’ I asked him. ‘You and all your orphans?’ ‘We don’t go anywhere,’ he said, smiling through his black beard. ‘We stay here.’ ‘Then you will all become Palestinians,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps you are that already.’ He smiled again, presumably at the naïvety of my questions. ‘No,’ the man said, ‘I do not think we will become Palestinians.’ ‘Then what will you do?’ ‘You are a young man who is flying aeroplanes,’ he said, ‘and I do not expect you to understand our problems.’ ‘What problems?’ I asked him. The young woman put two mugs of coffee on the table as well as a tin of condensed milk that had two holes punctured in the top. The man dripped some milk from the tin into my mug and stirred it for me with the only spoon. He did the same for his own coffee and then took a sip. ‘You have a country to live in and it is called England,’ he said. ‘Therefore you have no problems.’ ‘No problems!’ I cried. ‘England is fighting for her life all by herself against virtually the whole of Europe! We’re even fighting the Vichy French and that’s why we’re in Palestine right now! Oh, we’ve got problems all right!’ I was getting rather worked up. I resented the fact that this man sitting in his fig grove said that I had no problems when I was getting shot at every day. ‘I’ve got problems myself’, I said, ‘in just trying to stay alive.’ ‘That is a very small problem,’ the man said. ‘Ours is much bigger.’ I was flabbergasted by what he was saying. He didn’t seem to care one bit about the war we were fighting. He appeared to be totally absorbed in something he called ‘his problem’ and I couldn’t for the life of me make it out. ‘Don’t you care whether we beat Hitler or not?’ I asked him. ‘Of course I care. It is essential that Hitler be defeated. But that is only a matter of months and years. Historically, it will be a very short battle. Also it happens to be England’s battle. It is not mine. My battle is one that has been going on since the time of Christ.’ ‘I am not with you at all,’ I said. I was beginning to wonder whether he was some sort of a nut. He seemed to have a war of his own going on which was quite different to ours. I still have a very clear picture of the inside of that hut and of the bearded man with the bright fiery eyes who kept talking to me in riddles. ‘We need a homeland,’ the man was saying. ‘We need a country of our own. Even the Zulus have Zululand. But we have nothing.’ ‘You mean the Jews have no country?’ ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ he said. ‘It’s time we had one.’ ‘But how in the world are you going to get yourselves a country?’ I asked him. ‘They are all occupied. Norway belongs to the Norwegians and Nicaragua belongs to the Nicaraguans. It’s the same all over.’ ‘We shall see,’ the man said, sipping his coffee. The dark-haired woman was washing up some plates in a basin of water on another small table and she had her back to us. ‘You could have Germany,’ I said brightly. ‘When we have beaten Hitler then perhaps England would give you Germany.’ ‘We don’t want Germany,’ the man said. ‘Then which country did you have in mind?’ I asked him, displaying more ignorance than ever. ‘If you want something badly enough,’ he said, ‘and if you need something badly enough, you can always get it.’ [...]‘You have a lot to learn,’ he said. ‘But you are a good boy. You are fighting for freedom. So am I.

The US was propping up a war machine in El Salvador, she told them; it had long treated the region as a geopolitical laboratory. The CIA had overthrown the Guatemalan government in 1954 at the behest of an American corporation that, among other things, wanted bigger tax breaks abroad. Honduras had come to be known in the region as the USS Honduras, a de facto American military installation. For years, the US’s man in Nicaragua was a dictator. In Castillo’s circles, as the saying went, El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.

Amidst these barbed tales of old Managua, I remembered another instance in which Cardenal had adapted an old poem to a new purpose. He had drafted a poem about the death of Sandino, and the fact that his grave was unknown. Then, in 1954, an attempt to capture Anastasio Somoza García, the then dictator, ended in failure. One of the conspirators, Pablo de Leal, had his tongue cut out before being killed. It is said that another, Adolfo Báez Bone, was castrated. The main torturer was Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who would be the last dictator of the line. When Cardenal heard the news, he decided to make Báez Bone the subject of his poem instead of Sandino: Epitaph for the Tomb of Adolfo Báez Bone They killed you and didn’t say where they buried your body, but since then the entire country has been your tomb, and in every inch of Nicaragua where your body isn’t buried, you were reborn. They thought they’d killed you with their order of Fire! They thought they’d buried you and all they had done was to bury a seed.

We were in Pittsburgh at the end of September. The Pirates had already clinched the division, and the great Roberto Clemente was looking for his 3,000th career hit. I wasn’t in the lineup again. Clemente wasn’t a power hitter like Mays or Aaron, but he had won four batting titles, was a perennial All-Star, and even at the age of 37 was hitting well over .300. Roberto lined a sharp double down the left-field line in the fourth inning, and we saw history being made again. He joined Willie and Hank and a handful of others to reach that milestone. I remember thinking at the time how difficult it must be to get all of those hits, and for Willie and Hank to get all those home runs. I’d only reached about 900 hits with more than 2,000 to go if I ever was to hit that mark. That put it into perspective for me, that I really was watching one of the greats of the game. It was a dark day for baseball on the last day of 1972 when Roberto’s plane went down while delivering supplies to Nicaragua. He was only 38. I heard about the plane crash the next day, and it was like losing a brother. It was a great loss for the game of baseball and humanity—especially knowing how his fellow Puerto Ricans felt about him. He was a treasure, and he did it the way nobody else could. Some say he did everything wrong at the plate but he had great results behind it. You wouldn’t teach hitting the way he hit, but it was right for him. What he did was in him like it was in with me. He was a man of stature, and it was his calling. Some people are called to preach, some people are called to teach, and some people are called to serve. He was called to serve, and he served his entire island. I believe everything is predestined, and we just have to act out what’s already on the wall of your life. He’d probably always been aware of the need to do something more for others than for himself. He looked around and saw a need and acted on it. I’m certain he looked at who he was and what he accomplished and how he could take being famous into being a blessing for others. I’ve said this many times before, that those who depend on you are seeking a hand up and not a handout. I didn’t think about it then, but I think about it now, how good the Almighty was to wait to call Roberto home after he got his 3,000th hit—a milestone hit that put him next to the greats of the game.

(Note: The following was written in 2003, before the full implication of US military commitment in Afghanistan and Iraq could be fully appreciated. The passage also predates US drone attacks against targets in Pakistan and Yemen - to say nothing of Israeli affairs since 2003. It is unknown if and how the author's comments would change if he were writing the same today.) The value of Israel to the United States as a strategic asset has been much disputed. There have been some in the United States who view Israel as a major strategic ally in the region and the one sure bastion against both external and regional enemies. Others have argued that Israel, far from being a strategic asset, has been a strategic liability, by embittering U.S. relations with the Arab world and causing the failure of U.S. policies in the region. But if one compares the record of American policy in the Middle East with that of other regions, one is struck not by its failure but by its success. There is, after all, no Vietnam in the Middle East, no Cuba or Nicaragua or El Salvador, not even an Angola. On the contrary, throughout the successive crises that have shaken the region, there has always been an imposing political, economic, and cultural American presence, usually in several countries - and this, until the Gulf War of 1991, without the need for any significant military intervention. And even then, their presence was needed to rescue the victims of an inter-Arab aggression, unrelated to either Israelis or Palestinians. (99)

I am like God, Codi? Like GOD? Give me a break. If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb. Codi, please. I've got things to do. You say you're not a moral person. What a copout. Sometime, when I wasn't looking, something happened to make you think you were bad. What, did Miss Colder give you a bad mark on your report card? You think you're no good, so you can't do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It's the other way around, it's what you do that makes you who you are. I'm sorry to be blunt. I've had a bad week. I am trying to explain, and I wish you were here so I could tell you this right now, I am trying to explain to you that I'm not here to save anybody or any thing. It's not some perfect ideal we're working toward that keeps us going. You ask, what if we lose this war? Well, we could. By invasion, or even in the next election. People are very tired. I don't expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees. What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, "What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?" I didn't look down from some high rock and choose cotton fields in Nicaragua. These cotton fields chose me. The contras that were through here yesterday got sent to a prison farm where they'll plant vegetables, learn to read and write if they don't know how, learn to repair CB radios, and get a week-long vacation with their families every year. They'll probably get amnesty in five. There's hardly ever a repeat offender. That kid from San Manuel died. Your sister, Hallie "What's new with Hallie?" Loyd asked. "Nothing." I folded the pages back into the envelope as neatly as I could, trying to leave its creases undisturbed, but my fingers had gone numb and blind. With tears in my eyes I watched whatever lay to the south of us, the land we were driving down into, but I have no memory of it. I was getting a dim comprehension of the difference between Hallie and me. It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.

I spend the day unpacking and reading mail. In the afternoon I go for a long walk in the woods around my rural home, troubled by the many human scenes of grief, embarrassment, and disbelief I witnessed at the main Auschwitz camp and at Birkenau. I wonder why there are no billboards on those grounds, telling us, say, of Stalin and the Gulags in Siberia that were to come later. Of the rise of Marcos, Stroessner, Charles Taylor, Milošević. I recall the Mothers of the Disappeared in Buenos Aires in the 1980s, shouting “¡Nunca más!” And then later those same words in Chile. And after that, in Nicaragua.

Over time, the Saudis gave $32m to the Contras.86 The routing of this money was linked to the AWACS sale in that a fund was created from the sale, from which the Contras’ monthly money was diverted.87 Bandar would say later: ‘I didn’t give a damn about the Contras – I didn’t even know where Nicaragua was.’88 This support was the Saudi way of investing in America, the ultimate aim being a Saudi–American alignment to compete with Israel’s relationship with the US.89

Pew Research Centre, a self-described “fact tank” based in Washington.* This found that only 69% of adult Latin Americans are now Catholics, down from 92% in 1970. Protestants now account for 19%, up from 4%. Over the same period the share of those with no religious affiliation has grown from 1% to 8%—though most of these people still believe in God. Pew’s study finds sharp variations from country to country. In four Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua—barely half of the population is still Catholic. Though 61% of Brazilian respondents say they are Catholic, 26% are now Protestant. In many other countries there are still firm Catholic majorities. Whatever their denomination, most Latin Americans remain deeply religious. Only Uruguay stands out as a bastion of secularism—a tradition dating back more than a century. Two things distinguish Latin American Protestantism. First, it is mainly a result of conversion (see chart). Second, two-thirds of Latin American Protestants define themselves as Pentecostal. Much more often than Catholics, they report having direct experience of the Holy Spirit, such as through exorcism or speaking in tongues. Indeed, the words “evangelical” and “Protestant” are used interchangeably in the region. Pew finds that Latin American Protestants are conservative on social and sexual issues, such as gay marriage and abortion. As Catholics become more liberal on such questions, that points to looming American-style “culture wars”.

Investigations revealed that two Venezuelan nationals, Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano, who had been employed by Luis Posada Carriles, planted the bombs that destroyed a Cuban airliner. The men admitted to the crime and confessed that they were acting under Luis Posada’s orders. During the ensuing investigation, explosives, weapons and a radio transmitter were discovered at Posada’s private detective agency, in Venezuela. Posada was arrested and jailed in Venezuela. Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano were sentenced to 20-year prison terms. It was later learned that Posada was overheard saying, “We are going to hit a Cuban airplane and Orlando has the details.” Posada was tried and while awaiting a verdict escaped from prison once again. Apparently a sizeable bribe was paid to his guards and other authorities making it possible to buy his way out dressed as a priest. Once out he fled from Venezuela to Panama and then to the United States. It was only after his return to the United States and he was assigned to Nicaragua, as a deputy to Félix Rodríguez that his CIA connection became apparent. Félix Rodríguez was the CIA Operative who helped capture “Che” Guevara in the Bolivian highlands. After an investigation of Posada’s background by the press it became apparent that Posada was responsible for 41 bombings during the Contra conflict. By his own admission, he also planned numerous attacks against Cuba. In 1997, it was discovered that Posada was involved in a series of terrorist bombings in Cuba, with the intent of disrupting the country’s fledgling tourist industry.

. I will start our own little group there, in some place like Ometepe, as described in Disputed Questions. Howard Frankl, the ex-beatnik poet who translated my poems and just recently entered the monastery of Cuernavaca, would go there also; there is another young poet in Nicaragua who also wants to go, and a young Father [Father García], who is a professor in the seminary of Managua, who is also planning to write to you in the next few days, to consult with you regarding his vocation. We would naturally be above politics, but we would help them with advice, letters, etc., and with a place of retreat where they could go to think and meditate. I have spoken a lot about all of this with Coronel, and he too has planned these things a lot with me, and would be a very permanent guest. He already leads a very eremitic life in Río San Juan, even though he lives with his wife; every day he reads the Rule of Saint Benedict, and his life is very Benedictine. He says that he is not going to participate in the new government, that this is for Pablo Antonio, and that it will be up to us to help them with advice and prayer. I was in Ometepe because my grandmother has some properties there and I went to take a look. They do not seem very good to me, and

Yogurt is good for you. And it’s just one spoon,” Sharpcot had replied, but this stack summoned a billion voices, all of them saying in a chorus, “Just one spoon.” From kids’ lunches and store shelves and desk drawers and airline meal packs, in every country of the world: Canada and the United States and Nicaragua and Uruguay and Argentina and Ireland and Burkina Faso and Russia and Papua New Guinea and New Zealand and very probably the Antarctic. Where wasn’t there disposable cutlery? Plastic spoons in endless demand, in endless supply, from factory floors where they are manufactured and packaged in boxes of 10 or 20 or 100 or 1000 or individually in clear wrap, boxed on skids and trucked to trains freighting them to port cities and onto giant container ships plying the seas to international ports to intercity transport trucks to retail delivery docks for grocery stores and retail chains, supplying restaurants and homes, consumers moving them from shelf to cart to bag to car to house, where they are stuck in the lunches of the children of polluting parents, or used once each at a birthday party to serve ice cream to four-year-olds where only some are used but who knows which? So used and unused go together in the trash, or every day one crammed into a hipster’s backpack to eat instant pudding at his software job in an open-concept walkup in a gentrified neighbourhood, or handed out from food trucks by the harbour, or set in a paper cup at a Costco table for customers to sample just one bite of this exotic new flavour, and so they go into trash bins and dumpsters and garbage trucks and finally vast landfill sites or maybe just tossed from the window of a moving car or thrown over the rail of a cruise ship to sink in the ocean deep.

As Noam Chomsky so well explains in his book, What Uncle Sam Really Wants: When his rule was challenged by the Sandinistas [the insurgent group named after Augusto Cesar Sandino] in the late 1970s, the US first tried to institute what was called “Somocismo [Somoza-ism] without Somoza”- that is, the whole corrupt system intact, but with somebody else at the top. That didn’t work, so President Carter tried to maintain Somoza’s National Guard as a base for US power. The National Guard had always been remarkably brutal and sadistic. By June 1979, it was carrying out massive atrocities in the war against the Sandinistas, bombing residential neighborhoods in Managua, killing tens of thousands of people. At that point, the US ambassador sent a cable to the White House saying it would be “ill advised” to tell the Guard to call off the bombing, because that might interfere with the policy of keeping them in power and the Sandinistas out. Our ambassador to the Organization of American States also spoke in favor of “Somocismo without Somoza,” but the OAS rejected the suggestion flat out. A few days later, Somoza flew off to Miami with what was left of the Nicaraguan national treasury, and the Guard collapsed. The Carter administration flew Guard commanders out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings (a war crime), and began to reconstitute the Guard on Nicaragua’s borders. They also used Argentina as a proxy. (At that time, Argentina was under the rule of neo-Nazi generals, but they took a little time off from torturing and murdering their own population to help reestablish the Guard -- soon to be renamed the contras, or “freedom fighters.”)3 Again, we see Jimmy Carter not really living up to all of his lofty human rights rhetoric.

Aboard the yawl was one Nicaragua Smith, the same man who had stolen a skiff the previous summer and deserted to the Yankee fleet. Smith was court-martialed, then hauled off by cart to face public execution. Smith refused a blindfold, says historian David G. McComb, and stood tapping his foot on the coffin lid as the band played firing-squad music.