78
PARTISAN REVIEW
This is, I think, preposterous on the face of it and, in any case,
it was not , and is not, true . When I went to Managua in 1981 as part
of a delegation led by Felipe Gonzalez and Carlos Andreas Perez
(which included a representative of the just victorious French Social–
ists who had all but eviscerated the Communist Party in their coun–
try), we spent hours in a closed meeting with the Political Commit–
tee of the Sandinistas in which every single Socialist speaker
hammered away at the centrality of democracy; free elections, non–
alignment, etcetera. As I recounted in my book-Radosh leaves out
my facts which interfere with his theses-over the years we argued
with the Sandinistas against any "Marxist Leninist" conceptions in
Nicaragua to the point that our repetition became almost boring.
At the Rio meeting of the International prior to the Nicaraguan
elections - Radosh's account of it is a melange of half-truths learned
secondhand - the Sandinistas met under the aegis of Carlos Andreas
Perez of Venezuela, one of their most outspoken critics who could
not be dismissed since , as president of his country, he had helped
them during the struggle against Somoza. The Sandinistas made
some basic concessions including
moving the date of the elections.
(Radosh's confusion on this count is a result of the fact that he is talk–
ing about a later appeal to postpone the elections which came after
Arturo Cruz, as the spokesperson of the anti-Sandinista
Coordina–
dora ,
had refused the Sandinista compromise.) Did the Socialists,
then , turn the Sandinistas around? No. Did they have a positive,
and democratic, influence upon them so that the elections were, by
Central American standards, relatively open and an utter contradic–
tion to the notion that the society was "totalitarian"? Yes.
That limited, but unmistakable, success was a result of the fact
that the Brandt initiative led to an historic transformation of the In–
ternational which gave it some moral authority in the third world.
There are now over twenty member parties in Latin America and
the Caribbean , some of them
7"
the Venezuelans, Costa Ricans and
Ecuadorians-now in power. But there was, and is, a problem, one
which I explored at length in my book. The third world is, for
reasons not of its own making, not filled with democratic, much less
social democratic or socialist, movements . Therefore, said Brandt,
and the International all but unanimously agreed , there must
be
contact and dialogue with political organizations and movements
which are most emphatically not socialist and with which socialists
have profound disagreements.
