RONALD RADOSH
71
rington is aware "of how often 'revolutionary tourists' had been
seduced by those they had casually - and not always acciden–
tally - met in the Soviet Russia of the twenties and thirties or Mao's
China of the fifties and sixties ." And yet, he admits that it was "a
heady experience" to feel "identification with an actual living revolu–
tion."
Harrington's opposition to his former comrades who went on to
lead the fight against the Sandinistas has blinded him to the pos–
sibility that their charges about the Sandinistas might
be
more ac–
curate than his own apologia. He complains that Carl Gershman
was near to being "hysterically wrong" about what might happen in
Nicaragua. What Harrington does is to invoke as his own the latest
style of left-wing apologia; that is, there were of course hard-line
Marxist-Leninists in Nicaragua who desired a Soviet/Cuban state as
their model , but there were also pragmatic indigenous radicals op–
posed to them. The principal point , he argues, is that the United
States "acted as the recruiting sergeant for the 'Marxist-Leninists,'
i.e., its policies provided proof that the simple-minded theories of
American imperialism espoused by the 'hards' were true." As for
Nicaragua voting in the United Nations with the Soviet Union
under Brezhnev, on Afghanistan, he replies that it was not the
Soviet Union that had "sponsored armed interventions in Nicaragua
six times in forty years ."
Harrington obviously does not agree with Octavio Paz, who
addressed 'the Mexican left on these very issues, and who wrote that
he was "quite aware that it is not easy for any Nicaraguan to forget
the fatal intervention of the United States in the internal affairs of
the country for more than a century, nor its complicity with the
Somoza dynasty ." "But do past grievances , which justify anti–
Americanism, justify pro-Sovietism?" asked Paz. Harrington sug–
gests he thinks that it does; at best he fails to understand, as Paz puts
it, that "the government of Managua could have taken advantage of
the friendship of Mexico , France, and the Federal Republic of Ger–
many, as well as the sympathy of the leaders of the Second Interna–
tional, in order to explore a path of independellt action that would
neither deliver it to the hands of Washington not ttlrh the country
into a bridgehead for the Soviet Union.
It
has not done so ." In
Nicaragua, Paz writes , a "popular uprising ... national in scope,"
was taken over from the start by "an elite of revolutionary cadres"
whose one goal was to establish "a bureaucratic-military dictatorship
