Nicaragua: Senate swings back behind
Reagan's blockade'
It should come as little surprise that the US Senate should vote $38 million to fund the brutal CIA-run contra gunmen in Nicaragua, only weeks after Ronald Reagan failed to secure $14 million funding.
While sections capitalist establishment Democrats and Republicans disagree with Reagan's tactics in handling the Nicaraguan situation, none of them disagree with the principle of seeking to reinforce US imperialist domination the American general and Central America in vulnerable to manipulation by the various military and agencies of US imperialism, who
Soviet silences
on Nicaragua
President Reagan's decision to impose a US economic blockade on Nicaragua has served to underline number of ways in Nicaraguan Revolution developed differently from that in Cuba.
*Though Cuba's new government in 1959 was initially towards the Soviet Union, by the end of 1959 it was seeking top level relations and vithin 2 years of the overthrow Batista regime Cuba's trade had almost wholly switched from exchanges with the USA to exchanges with the Eastern Europe. The impact of Reagan's embargo on Nicaragua however reveals the extent to which, nearly 6 years after the fall of Somoza, the Sandinistas had retained their trading links with the West and in particular the USA.
*The final moves towards an economic ' blockade of Cuba were met by declarations from the Kremlin would take over the purchase of cancelled Cuban sugar exports to the USA at the cost of stockpiling unused sugar in the Soviet Union. This material support to the Cuban revolution was part of the at-
By HARRY SLOAN have been swift to exploit the recent tour of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by Nicaraguan
President Ortega.
While Democrats of the US
Republicans may speeches with self-determination, consistent concern is for the capitalist class.
movement which bedrock of the fight to break the economic blockade of Nicaragua revolutionary cool
Sandinista revolution.
of the
USSR and ionalisations which swept away tively abandon revolution in El Salvador firm that it economic
OI
- even commitment to a and some lard their high-sounding references to "human rights" or rights and domination of the US
It is the international labour must form the cut the backing for relative tempts by the Khruschev leadership to multinationals score military and political advantages by winning new allies on the doorstep of the cross-class
In contrast the Reagan measures have
La resounding silence from Moscow, whose leaders have since 1979 made it quite clear that this time they are not prepared to challenge US imperialism boost they will give only token support to the vantage over Castro regime was met by an increasingly political Cuban capitalism on the island in the autumn of 1960, the Reagan pressure on 'regional settlement" which would effec-
The Sandinista response is conditioned not only by the evident lack of political, military commitment from American Moscow, but also the continuation with the leadership of a cross class alliance and a
"mixed" (capitalist) Socialist Viewpoint, No. 6, June 1985. Page 15
Ortega meets Gorbachev. economy. This type of cross class alliance rapidly broke down in a polarisation of the Cuban leadership during 1959 itself as the pro-capitalist, anti-communist wing egged on by the USA publicly broke with Castro and the more radical young rebel fighters.
This different pattern of development is in turn related to the existence in prerevolutionary Nicaragua of a substantial "anti-Somoza" section of the capitalist class, more firmly based within the less developed Nicaraguan economy than the handful of corrupt bourgeois politicians who backed Castro's struggle against Batista in an economy overwhelmingly dominated by US investment and
This type of ditterence helps underline why attempts to copy the Sanidinista-style front in other Central American countries — and elsewhere in the world - have been largely ineitective, even counterproductive.
*In combatting Reagan's blatant attempt at economic sabotage (after his efforts to official funding to the "contra" murder squads had foundered in the US Congress), the Nicaraguans have an adthe situation which faced Cuba: the emergence of the EEC as an alternative trading bloc with a degree of independence from the USA makes it much harder for Reagan to make his blockade really effective. Few European leaders other than Thatcher (and she on a covert basis) have lent support to the US blockade: most see Reagan's tactics as a source of continued conflict (and a force driving the Sandinistas towards Havana and Moscow) rather than a road to any stability in Central America. The increased economic influence of some South bourgeoisies also offers Nicaragua more avenues for breaking the blockade, even given the indifference of the Stalinist leaderships.