A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990

National Interest, The, Summer, 1996 by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

"We radicalized our model to look more like Cuba", Humberto Ortega told Kagan later in a surprisingly frank exchange. "We wanted to copy in a mechanical way the model that we knew, which was Cuba, and we identified with it . . . we didn't want to follow other models." It was a standard hard-left operation: neighborhood block committees, party-controlled trade unions, collectivization of the peasants, the lot.

Contrary to modern mythology, the first serious stirrings of guerrilla warfare in Nicaragua had nothing to do with the ex-Guardia in Honduras. Groups of ex-Sandinista "kulaks" started attacking police outposts in a battle against the seizure of properties. One unit was led by "Dimas", a Sandinista hero who had "liberated" parts of the Nueva Segovia during the revolution. Kagan calls it the "invisible rebellion of the summer of 1980."

The establishment of a Leninist state had to be disguised. A Sandinista party paper, known as the 72-Hour Document, spelled out the methods employed to keep "imperialism" at bay and use the private sector as "bait for getting foreign capital." Washington had an incentive for pretending not to see the strategic deception. "Denying that the Sandinistas were Communists put off the day when President Carter could be accused of having 'lost' Nicaragua", writes Kagan. Hoping that the Sandinistas could still be bought off, the Carter administration poured aid into the country. When hard evidence started coming in that the Sandinistas had turned Managua into the quartermaster's office of the Salvadoran guerrillas, the Carter administration helped cover up for them.

The Republicans had no illusions, of course, but, contrary to general belief, President Reagan had little appetite for a show-down with the Sandinistas when he took office in 1981. Nicaragua was already lost, and that humiliation was hanging nicely around the neck of the Democratic Party. He sent Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders to tell the Ortegas that they could keep their revolution, so long as they did not try to incite revolutions in the rest of Central America. White House aides James Baker and Michael Deaver pressed Reagan to focus on his domestic agenda. The administration had more important things to do than squabble with liberal Democrats over a bankrupt coffee republic with a population of three million. The country was not worth the candle.

But the Sandinistas pushed their luck too far. Convinced that history would soon sweep Marxist allies into power across the isthmus of Central America, they increased their clandestine support for the FMLN in El Salvador. It was a disastrous mistake. Everybody in the Reagan administration was agreed about one thing: the need to stop another country falling into the Soviet orbit, especially in Central America. El Salvador had to be defended, and that meant taking the fight to Nicaragua itself. Years later General Humberto Ortega admitted that the Sandinistas had made a disastrous mistake. "We paid a heavy price for our international romanticism."