Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia: Development and Culture in the Modern State

By Daniel Chavez

The history of modern Nicaragua is populated with leaders promising a new and better day. Inevitably, as Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia demonstrates, reality casts a shadow and the community must look to the next leader. As an impoverished state, second only to Haiti in the Americas, Nicaragua has been the scene of cyclical attempts and failures at modern development. Author Daniel Chavez investigates the cultural and ideological bases of what he identifies as the three decisive movements of social reinvention in Nicaragua: the regimes of the Somoza family of much of the early to mid-twentieth century; the governments of the Sandinista party; and the present day struggle to adapt to the global market economy.

For each era, Chavez reveals the ways Nicaraguan popular culture adapted and interpreted the new political order, shaping, critiquing, or amplifying the regime's message of stability and prosperity for the people. These tactics of interpretation, otherwise known as meaning-making, became all-important for the Nicaraguan people, as they opposed the autocracy of Somocismo, or complemented the Sandinistas, or struggled to find their place in the Neoliberal era. In every case, Chavez shows the reflective nature of cultural production and its pursuit of utopian idealism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9780826520494

Daniel Chavez

Daniel Chavez is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of New Hampshire.

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Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia

Nicaragua

AND THE POLITICS OF UTOPIA

Development and Culture in the Modern State

Daniel Chávez

Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville

© 2015 by Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235

All rights reserved

First printing 2015

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

LC control number 2014029783

LC classification number F1528.C46 2014

Dewey class number 972.8505'2—dc23

ISBN 978-0-8265-2047-0 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-8265-2049-4 (ebook)

For Margarita,

flower and rain in the long season of learning.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: A Tale of Three Utopias and One Dictatorship

Chapter 2: Market Dreams and the Transnationalization of Nicaraguan Politics and Literature

Chapter 3: The Lion in Tropical Winter: The Last Phase of Dictatorship and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Utopia

Chapter 4: Nature, Gender, and Development in Sandinista Nicaragua

Chapter 5: Cultural Warfare I: The Struggle for a Revolutionary Reader

Chapter 6: Cultural Warfare II: Film Exhibition and the New Spectatorship

Chapter 7: Democracy without Dreams: Neoliberalism as Technocratic Utopia

Conclusion

Notes

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The intense and long process of completing the research and writing of this work would have been impossible without the cooperation and generosity of a number of people and institutions. First the Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan provided resources for my two visits to Nicaragua in 1996 and 1997. Those visits allowed me to gather the basic materials for research and gave me the opportunity to meet and interview some of the protagonists and authors discussed in my book. In Nicaragua my gratitude to Daisy Zamora, Sergio Ramírez, Guillermo Rothschuh Villanueva, and Jorge Eduardo Arellano for taking the time to talk to an eager but novice researcher and guiding me to understand better the key moments and basic facts of the rich and complex cultural and political life of their country. I also had the opportunity to briefly converse with Omar Cabezas and with the late Tomás Borge (1930–2012), who gave me important clues about their own work. Through the years I also counted with the cooperation and guidance of Dr. Margarita Vannini and the professional team at the archive of the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica (IHNCA) at the Universidad Centroamericana. They made the impossible possible and provided materials that do not exist anywhere else in the world. My gratitude to Blanca Buitrago and Melisa and Andy Nelson, for bringing materials from Nicaragua, for hearing my ideas and letting me believe that I had something valuable to say about their country.

My conversations with my professors and colleagues at different American universities have been invaluable. At Ohio University Professor Thomas Walker got me hooked on researching the history of the most fascinating country in Central America. Daniel Torres, Pepo Delgado, David Burton, and the late Tony Serna gave encouragement and guidance. At the University of Michigan José Rabasa, Santiago Colás, and Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola read parts of my dissertation and provided invaluable comments. Special thanks are due to the director of my committee, Frances Aparicio, and to Catherine Benamou, who helped me refine the scope of my work inside the vast sea of Latin American visual and cultural studies. At Vassar College my colleagues and friends Mihai Grünfeld, Andy Bush, Liza Paravisini, Eva Woods, Mario Cesareo, and Michael Aronna made my first teaching job and my research an unforgettable experience. For their passion for the profession and the many spells of laughter shared I cannot thank enough my colleagues at Washington University in Saint Louis: Tabea Linhard, Stephanie Kirk, María Fernanda Lander, and Guillermo Rosas. At the University of Kentucky I had the chance to advance my research on Nicaragua and widen the scope of my work with the support of great colleagues Enrico Mario Santí, Ed Stanton, Aníbal Biglieri, Yanira Paz, and Susan de Carvalho.

The heaviest burden in revising, advising, and pushing me through the final stages of this work was shared with my dear colleagues at the University of Virginia; at the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, David Gies, Gustavo Pellón, Mané Lagos, Donald Shaw, Fernando Operé, Michael Gerli, and Deborah Parker; at the Department of History Tico Braun, Brian Owensby, and Tom Klubock; at the American Studies Program the staunch support for my work came from Grace Hale, Sandhya Shukla, and Anna Brickhouse. Special mention to Miguel Valladares, a truly dynamic librarian, for his many contributions. Special thanks are due to my writing team extraordinaire in Virginia who gave the best suggestions and advice and provided the hope and guidance at the last stages of the project, therefore my heartfelt gratitude to Hector Amaya, Sylvia Chong, and Jennifer Petersen. I also want to thank my graduate and undergraduate students at UVA whose questions and enthusiasm for the Revolutions of Latin America inspired me to continue with this book, here I want to mention Tony Cella and Marco Segura for their unwavering support.

Finally I want to mention Sarah Bishop, my editor whose suggestions and corrections made readable more than one obscure paragraph. Also the anonymous readers at Vanderbilt University Press who gave great suggestions, and a very special debt of gratitude to my editors in Nashville, Eli Bortz and Joell Smith-Borne, whose patience with my syncopated rhythm of production and whose faith in my work has never faltered.

Introduction

A new society is born not with a cataclysm or a revolution but long before. Implementing new ways of making land more productive, finding more just and efficient ways of distributing work and making food affordable, arriving at conditions under which shelter is sufficient, making sure health and education reaches all, but especially the middle and lower classes. Imagining a new society is not only the task of scientists, philosophers, poets, and religious leaders, but also requires the commitment of traditional politicians, the pressing matter driving the efforts of revolutionaries, and the demand of those who have never had a chance to ask if a new society is possible. In this sense, despite decades of pervasive arm strife and rampant poverty, the twentieth century in Latin America and especially in Nicaragua was the century of trying in fast succession, sometimes imposing with violence, new ways of transforming society. Beyond cynicism or militant partisanship, I believe that behind most forms of organization proposed by different social and political groups, there is always an envisioned horizon of justice, effective political participation, and material abundance. Despite the fact that for a long time the idea of utopia has been mostly associated with revolutionary thought, once a reader approaches the ideas, writings, and the imagination of any individual or collective actor that exerts or tries to exert power, it is possible to detect the remnants or complete elements of a utopian discourse.

In this book I propose that to any of the three major eras that profoundly marked Nicaraguan society there was a specific brand of utopian thought. Even if some readers might find the idea of a Somocista utopia curious if not ironic, given the amount of violence deployed at different moments in the forty-three years in power of this autocratic family, in the first part of Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia I aim to demonstrate how the Somocista governments, despite being organized around a repressive capitalist-liberal form of government, did have a conservative dream of a stable, modern, and prosperous society. In the second part of the book, by approaching the mythologies of development and the dreams of a transformation of the individual into the New Man of socialism, I propose that the literary and political discourse of Sandinista era, 1979–1990, coincided with and fed the imagination and the everyday practice of a government trying to build a new social horizon. Finally, in the third part of the book I discuss how, after the crumbling of the socialist camp in Europe, and the first defeat of the Sandinista Front in 1990, the return to democracy is marked by an accelerated dismantling of the socialist aspects of the previous model, and the expedient implementation of a fundamentalist discourse of the market imposing the version of a leaner and more efficient neoliberal state. That discourse of a stronger capitalist society and a contracted but better-run state sector resulted also in a technocratic utopia of particularly conservative if not authoritarian strains that resurfaced in the new formula of a partly liberal, partly Sandinista, and partly conservative societal pact, which lasted until 2005, at the end of the third liberal regime in the postrevolutionary era.

When the time comes for Nicaragua to celebrate the bicentennial of its independence in 2021, the territorially largest republic of the Central American isthmus will have tried in succession the largest variety of governmental arrangements in the Americas. In two hundred years, the country of Rubén Darío and Augusto César Sandino has seen the onset and decline of an empire (1821–1823), the rise and fall of conservative (1858–1892) and liberal republics (1893–1909), a failed attempt at a slave-holding government under American filibusterer William Walker (1855–1857), puppet governments under foreign occupation (1912–1924; 1927–1933), a long dynastic dictatorship (1937–1979), a socialist revolution (1979–1990), a succession of neoliberal regimes (1990–2006), and more recently, what seems to be a stretched stint of postmodern neopopulism (2006–2016). Short of a constitutional monarchy, no form of government available to a Latin American or Third World country has been excluded from the intense and sometimes surprising history of this nation.

Nicaraguan Exceptionalism

Perhaps because of the high price paid for the turns and trials of history, Nicaragua consistently ranks as the second poorest country on the continent, only marginally above earthquake-ravaged Haiti. This protracted condition of destitution has been the subject of a long and rich list of economic, historiographic, political, and cultural works that use all the social and economic theories at hand to try to explain the complexity and high-spirited dynamics of Nicaraguan society. No attempt to answer the riddle of Nicaragua’s failed development was spared in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In fact, with the temptation of the revolution ensconced readily in the minds of local and international intellectuals, there were hundreds of books, pamphlets, and reports published in all the languages of the Americas and Europe describing, praising, denouncing, or simply imagining the reality of the last triumphant Latin American revolution of the Cold War era. When the first electoral defeat of the Sandinistas came in 1990, coinciding with the fall of the socialist camp in Eastern Europe, the idea of development, the keystone to every economic program, was displaced or symbolically substituted with that of the market. With the advent of neoliberal and neoconservative regimes during the 1990s and early 2000s, the publication of scholarly works on Nicaragua has shown a less agitated pulse. However, since the return of President Ortega to power in 2006, with his alignment with the politics of Chavismo in Venezuela, the interest seemed to peak again.

What is it that Nicaragua has lacked or had in abundance that makes it a society in constant political redefinition? How much of the undoing of this country’s efforts to realize that magical word development and assume equal access to global markets is the consequence of its placement among the constellation of Latin American and Third World nations? What share of this Sisyphean history of still unachieved progress is the product of specific practices of social construction imposed on or adopted by this nation? These questions are too important and too difficult to ignore, but they are also not easy to answer.

In this book I advance the hypothesis that Nicaragua’s history of revolving governmental arrangements is a result of different hegemonic groups representing and consolidating their material interests through successive utopian visions. I do not pretend to offer a psycho-social study of how utopian thought emerges; rather I propose to study the discursive and ideological bases of the three decisive moments of social reinvention Nicaragua has gone through in the last century: Somocismo, Sandinismo, and the utopian vision of the global market economy under neoliberalism.

Despite the difficulties in presenting definitive answers, I believe some partial but relevant observations can be suggested. Politically and historically, Nicaragua has been exceptional in many respects, not always for the better. If we are to believe that geography is destiny, Nicaragua’s possibility for transcontinental waterways; its abundance of environments from sierras to marshes, lakes, sylvatic coastal lines, fertile valleys, and volcanoes; and its exposure to the benefits and dangers of Caribbean and Pacific climatological forces are not unique to it but certainly have shaped many of its social characteristics and historical events.

However, not everything can be explained by geographical determinism. Culturally, Nicaragua defies many definitions and easy conclusions about Latin American countries. Nicaragua has a Spanish-speaking majority populating the Pacific coast, and a number of indigenous multilingual and English-creole-speaking groups in the South and North Atlantic Autonomous Regions on the Atlantic coast. Very few countries on the continent still experience what some have termed a schizophrenic cultural divide. But fragmentation in this case is not synonymous with stagnation. The cultural divide in Nicaragua has not impeded gleams of hope and glory in the historical process of nation building and, in many ways, has spurred a desire for cultural as well as material integration (cf. Ramírez 2007).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spearheading the Latin American renovation of the Spanish language through poetry, Rubén Darío, the poet from Metapa, along with Cuban cultural and political figure José Martí, brought about a reinvigoration of writing practices and led the process of cultural independence of Latin America from its past colonial condition. Despite criticism and rejection by certain groups, the Modernista generation reconfigured the map in terms of cultural influences and paved the way for modern Latin American literature to position itself at the forefront of Western aesthetic and philosophical innovation.

As proposed by several critics, the literary field is a symbolic space for the managing of influences and the negotiation of cultural capital and Modernismo dealt with these processes masterfully. Modernista letters not only recuperated traditional themes and forms of composition from Greco-Latin to medieval and Renaissance origin but also appropriated and resignified influences from modern European literatures—especially French and English. These cultural influences were absorbed and reconfigured at the same time that poetic devices and Spanish lexicon were freshened and reinvigorated to the point of changing forever not only poetry and the short story, but journalistic, public, and everyday language as well.

By the late 1920s, once Modernista innovations had become mainstream and the endless repetition of its decadent motives—princesses, swans, fauns, and castles—became hollow formulas for the endless cult of Rubén Darío’s myth, the impulse for the renovation of literary forms was taken over by the letters of the avant-garde. However, the interim generation between Modernismo and the avant-garde includes an important bridging figure in Nicaragua, Salomón De la Selva (1893–1959), a young writer studying in the United States and serving with the Royal Air Force during the Great War, who was the first contemporary Latin American writer to publish his first collection of poetry originally in English. De la Selva’s Tropical Town and Other Poems (1918), spurred and supported by his mentor Edna St. Vincent Millay, was a seminal work infused with the ideas and quests of the American New Poetry and brought about a truly bicultural Nicaraguan aesthetic vision. The young avant-gardist generation of the 1930s admired and read with an attentive eye the discoveries and energizing views of De la Selva’s work. The two cultural roots from Spanish- and English-speaking traditions clash and collide with productive and artistic results in this singular and early example of hybrid identity in De la Selva. From this point on, every important literary group would draw some of their best poetic devises from the current Spanish-speaking and Anglophone traditions, as De la Selva did.

When the avant-garde dominated the artistic horizon in larger countries of the continent, including Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, in the 1920s and 1930s, Nicaraguan literature too produced its share of experimental voices and vitriolic disputes. But beyond the aim to spur a real change in writing practices, the intellectual activity of these years set the tone to propose a vision of a different society, a utopia in which vernacular culture and the international trends in the arts could be fused in a practice of socially relevant literature backed by different forms of political organization.

It was precisely in the crucial decades of the 1920s and 1930s when a triple process of modernization compelled the social forces of Nicaragua to finally break with the long nineteenth century, and participate in a belated but avowedly violent twentieth century. At this point conflicting projects for political, economic, and literary modernization erupted in full force. Nationalism galvanized the hegemonic and subaltern classes, and on several occasions, the imperialist intervention of the United States tilted the balance of power in the fragile Nicaraguan state of the early 1900s.

Forceful intervention to protect American economic interests started in 1909 with the presence of warships in the Bluefields port area on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. The formal occupation by the US Marines started in 1912 when unpopular president Adolfo Díaz called for American assistance; the occupation lasted until 1924. But the American warships left only to return in 1927 and remained until the armistice with the nationalist forces of Sandino was signed in 1933. For his dogged war of resistance, General Augusto C. Sandino was presented in the American press as a bandit and retrograde influence. In contrast, he was hailed in most Spanish-speaking countries, and in Western Europe, as a champion of freedom and a paradigm of true Latin American autonomy.

This is another distinctive element in Nicaraguan history—that the fragile but heroic resistance of a small guerrilla army commanded by a visionary could become such a symbolically important factor to denounce and counter the designs of the emerging imperial power of the United States for decades to come. The saga of Sandino, betrayed and killed in 1934 by the constabulary force, the Guardia Nacional, which was trained by the Marines and was in the hands of Somoza, would become the single most important figure for Nicaraguan and Latin American resistance to US hegemonic and imperialist advances until the advent of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

While the American occupations were taking place in the 1910s and 1920s, the confrontation of several factions of liberal and conservative forces were occurring, and literary activity was also booming among groups of intellectuals in the two major cities of Nicaragua. León, to the north, with deep roots in political liberalism, was the source and bastion of the Nicaraguan Modernista generation from the 1890s until the 1920s. In opposition, Granada, to the south, became the cradle of a young generation of conservative writers who published leaflets, newspapers, and journals, conversing with, and sometimes confronting, the avant-garde movements of Europe and Latin America.

For a brief period the literary and political visions of utopia coincided in their antibourgeois, Catholic, propeasant, internationalist, and Hispanicizing views. The protofascist colors of the Blue Shirts (to echo the Brown Shirts of Mussolini) of Luis Alberto Cabrales, one of the young intellectuals of that era, were in ascent until the war in Europe changed anew the geopolitical panorama in 1939. With Somoza now eager to cultivate the support of the American government, the conservative avant-gardists readily exhausted their utility for the Nicaraguan autocrat. Soon the authoritarian penchant of the Somoza regime ostracized the young intellectuals still adamant at practicing an acerbic form of criticism. Thus by the late 1930s and after, the divide between literary imagination and public discourse was cast for the next forty years. The generation of writers emerging during the 1940s would deepen the gap between literary and political imagination by practicing a stringent and politically active form of conversational antipoetry that not only declared its opposition to the regime, but made a central element of their poetic devises the attack and denouncing of the repressive, exploitative, and violent ways of the regime and its capitalist supporter the United States government. The exteriorista poetics of the three central figures of the 1940s, Carlos Martínez Rivas, Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, and Ernesto Cardenal, left little room to doubt their political, social, and aesthetic preferences since they were in frontal opposition to the family of Nicaraguan autocrats.

Not until the first phases of the struggle by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in the early 1960s would the utopian vision of social reconstruction from the literary and political spheres coincide again. By the early 1970s, the utopian discourse of newer generations of poets, activists, and novelists, as well as the public speech of the nascent revolution, tended to complement or coincide with each other for the most part in their ideological, axiological, and progressive political views. But later on, in the middle of the Sandinista decade in power, some cracks in the alliance of the public and literary spheres started to show, and by the beginning of the 1990s, the pact between the utopian literary and the utopian political discourse was broken again. With the ascent of the fundamentalism of the markets in the neoliberal era (1990–2006), the rift continued, although taking different forms and defining again at least three separate views: the neoconservative support for a technocratic utopia in the hegemonic liberal parties, the remnants of a socialist tendency in the party politics of the FSLN, and the civilist struggle of writers, artists, and nongovernmental organizations separate from the two hegemonic parties. This last diffuse compact included the disaffected members of the original Sandinista ranks and most of the prominent intellectual figures that contributed to the expression and dissemination of the utopian discourse of the revolutionary era.

Utopian Function and Myth

The theoretical framework for my conception of the utopian function in literary and political discourse is derived from three main sources: the analysis on More’s Utopia proposed by Louis Marin in Utopiques: jeux d’espace (1973), the exhaustive cultural and philosophical tracing of the idea of hope in Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1954–1959), and from the political conceptualization of utopian thinking proposed by Karl Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia (1936). Also the more contemporary reformulation of ideas of development and conceptions of social space and time in the works of Krishan Kumar will serve as a counterpoint to many of the misconceptions attributed to the practice of utopian discourse in the fields of literature and popular visions of economic development.

Extending the analysis of utopian discourse proposed by Fredric Jameson one can say the utopian function of political and cultural discourse and the literary genre of utopian fiction share a similar structural base. The simultaneous presence of mythical and representational elements is affirmed and negated to produce a more complex mediating discourse. This discourse is a temporal representation standing for a neutral term foreseen in the distant and still unrealized new society. This neutral term is the sum of the not here, not there—for example, in the case of More’s Utopia, it is the other land that is not in America nor in Europe. It is the projection of a realizable future in which the contradictions of the mediating complex term will be resolved. These ideas can be better grasped using the semiotic rectangle proposed by Jameson to explain Marin’s text (see figure 1).

FIGURE 1. Composition of utopian discourse.

The terms -S and -S* are supposed to be negations of S and S* respectively (Jameson 1989: 91). This complex composition of utopian discourse explains the dialectical character attained through contradiction and synthesis, as in the case of the opposition prevalent in agricultural and cultural planning during the Sandinista era.

This is to say, on one hand, the promotion of the popular-traditional values embedded in the cultural policies of the revolution enters in an apparent contradiction with the plans of rapid socialist modernization in agricultural production. Here, the popular and the modern enter in an oblique relation of negation, thus tainting many aspects of the Sandinista political and cultural discourse. On the other hand, for our purposes, the points of contact, or lines of interrelation between divergent elements (S and -S) do not always express a strictly negative function as if they were contraries but rather constitute a complex form of partial oppositions. In any case, these interconnections underscore the complexity of relations between mythic elements present in the discourses of stability and modernity during the Somocista regime, or in the discourse of democracy and efficiency in the neoliberal era. In each case, a graphic variation of the first diagram will serve as a basis to discuss the presence and deployment of the utopian function in that specific discourse formation.

In my work, the discourse of utopia is not considered as a form of deception or delusion as the term utopia has frequently been defined since the nineteenth century, in part owing to the influence of Marxism in its effort to denounce the social experiments of Saint Simon, Fourier, and Owen as eschewed paths to true socialism (Marx and Engels 1985: 117; Kolakowski 1992: 182). As pointed out by Krishan Kumar utopia has received friendly and unfriendly fire from all fronts. For those socialists who were not convinced that the Soviet Union was utopia made real, the concept was still unwelcome because it distracted from the main tasks of organization of social forces to instill immediate change. The Right and the Center have been even more virulent in their attack on utopia. For them utopia is, by definition, an affront. For liberals and conservatives the whole enterprise is deeply suspect. It is an act of hubris that makes claims for human reason that are unreal and liable to encourage dangerous ventures in practice (Kumar 1993: 65).

In time, however, if the European movements for democratization of 1989 gave the final proof of the failed utopias of socialism, the recent global economic debacle in 2008 proves that the neoliberal hard facts based religion of the markets was as tainted by hubris and unreliability as the previously touted irrational promises of socialist utopias. Therefore, neoliberals and conservatives are also prone to entertain certain utopian perspectives.

In response to these clever and sometimes sophisticated charges against utopia as a literary genre and against all forms of utopian discourse, I propose to go back and argue against some of the newer stances of modern criticism. In the three volumes of The Principle of Hope, a long and sometimes baroque defense of the utopian principle, Ernst Bloch does find a profoundly human, not essentialist, but still constant drive to imagine the future. For Ernst Bloch, the utopian function is the conscious manifestation of an extended form of psychological life, a category he contends was not included by the Freudian map of the psyche because it did not fit well with theories of the repressed. Bloch termed this other unconscious form of daydreaming as the Not-Yet-Conscious.

The Not-Yet-Conscious is admittedly just as much a preconscious as is the unconscious of repressedness and forgottenness. In its way it is even an unconscious which is just as difficult and resistant as that of repressedness. Yet it is by no means subordinated to the manifest consciousness of today, but rather to a future consciousness which is only just beginning to come up. The Not-Yet-Conscious is thus solely the preconscious of what is to come, the psychological birthplace of the New. And it keeps itself preconscious above all because in fact there is within it a content of consciousness which has not yet become wholly manifest, and is still dawning from the future. (Bloch 1986: 116)

For the German philosopher, the work of imagining a better future is a consubstantial element to psychological life. The three volumes of his monumental Principle of Hope are devoted to give fundament to the presence and varieties of this preconscious activity and its correspondences with its conscious manifestation that he calls the utopian function. Obviously, there is no space here to fully consider the validity or utility of this theoretical reformulation of psychoanalysis. Such proposal merits a different and more extensive kind of work. However, the philosophical principle of locating the longing for a different future and a better society among the innermost desires and subconscious impulses of human cognition has a clear justification when we analyze the history of political thought. As I will try to demonstrate in the following pages, the presence of the utopian function is a constant in the deployment of political conceptualization and planning.

The utopian function is present in all discourse or ritual that is proposing, foreseeing, or calling for human progress. This is evident in a sense of social and not only material reconstruction of reality; it is a discourse in search of the perfectible character of human society, in search for the best of what we could be. Of course, the abstract references to the best or to the perfect must be defined not according to essentialist principles but to the particular social reality and the material demands of its historical circumstances: "Historically, the function of utopia is that of a discursive practice that is poetic and projective at the same time; utopian practice, in a historically determined moment, designs or schematizes unconsciously, through the spatial playing of its internal differences (incongruities), the empty places (topos) that the concepts of social theory will fulfill, in an ulterior phase" (Marin 1973: 10).

The utopian in political and economic discourse is also an invocation, an invitation to foresee what is to come. It is an interpellation to the principle of hope in the modern subject to wrestle with the impossibilities, with the obstacles of today, by using myth-like structures to resolve the contradictions. The utopian function as a complex structure veers toward a representation of totality beyond the unresolved questions of the moment in a space that the real could occupy eventually.

In this context, I conceive myths as socially grounded discursive representations about the organization of the world, based on other messages that could be codified as emotions or as other discursive elements, and whose content is partially structuring the subject’s vision. However, myth lacks the capacity to suggest totality, even though it does solve some contradictions. This is to say, myth is an integral part of the utopian function but does not have the wholeness of vision of the utopian. The vision of the possible glimpsed by the Not-Yet-Conscious does not always emerge from the accumulation and combination of myths. In many ways, myths tend to be associated with the sphere of emotions as part of the social experience, and this helps in its acceptance as a desirable or restorative force, but it is not enough to imagine a way to the future; only a utopian vision can fulfill that.

The abundance of messages and discourses that are constantly repeated or reinforced by the media in the public sphere determine some of the perceptions and practices of the people. In this way, myth sometimes acquires the same symbolic weight of some material aspects of reality. A most recent case in point is the mythology related to the efficiency and capacity for self-correction of the financial markets, which came to a hard landing when the real-estate bubble and the magic of financial engineering were revealed to be unstable and the fantastic promises of constant gains were proved false. I will study the ways in which this dominance of myth can affect whole discursive formations in its representation of economic and aesthetic phenomena.

I have subdivided my analysis around three historical moments with an identifiable mythic and utopian content. First, the era of Somocismo, dominated by the developmentalist imagination of the midcentury. Second, the revolutionary society envisioned by Sandinismo and conflated in the complex symbolic term of the New Latin American Man, a utopian moment that crumbled about the same time as the Berlin Wall and the rest of the socialist societies of Eastern Europe in 1989 or soon after. Finally, the neoliberal promotion of globalization marks the last decade of the millennium and the beginning of the new century with a new form of technocratic utopia of high efficiency and global market dominance. In my three historical examples, the complex term of the semiotic rectangle at top of the diagram; see figure 2) is occupied by a discursive formation in which the notions and projections of human and material progress are the central element.

FIGURE 2. Discursive components of the conservative utopia of the Somoza era (1937–1979).

I have chosen to identify these three examples as the three moments of the discourse of development. This category is relevant not only for its economic implications but because since the nineteenth century it has become the incarnation of the idea of progress. In the discourse of development, the discourse of economic doctrines, political thinking, and philosophic reflection converge with the practices of governmental and social regulation under a great variety of state forms. Beyond its direct material and economic consequences, it can be said that the discourse of development has a privileged symbolic relation with the economic forces of late capitalism. Thus, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the cracks in the imaginary building of both capitalism and development were more evident than ever.

In this sense, my work is also a criticism of the idea of development, a reflection on the impact that such discourse has had in the cultural history of the last decades in impoverished nations such as Nicaragua. Because my knowledge of the technicalities and scientific aspects of the economy of development are limited, this work should be considered as a cultural and political criticism of one of the most influential and powerful concepts in whose name the hegemonic powers of capitalism have contributed to the depletion and forfeiture of the human and material resources of the peripheral economies of Latin America and other continents.

Discourse and Development

At the core of this book is the idea that each political and cultural act is particular to a certain state formation. In each state formation, the structural elements are determined by the conditions of unequal development in societies at the economic periphery of capitalism. I also assume that both old and new technologies of communication accord all cultural and political activity a quality of performance and spectacle. All political and literary products have at a certain moment a performative expression in the public sphere. In this sense, this is an investigation about the ways and means in which power is imposed and expressed through discourses and texts. I adhere in many ways to a Bakhtinian understanding of how discourse generates or emerges as a sociolingustic act of representation with several competing registers immersed in a continual heteroglossic process of negotiation (see Bakhtin 1992). At the same time, I try to pay attention to the aspects of public performativity in the deployment of power at the levels of the political, the economic, and the aesthetic dimensions (see Goffman 1959; Schechner 1990: 42; Turner 1990: 8).

This is not an investigation on the possible influences of the literary and the spectacle in the economic structure, nor a new consideration of the Althusserian overdetermination of aesthetic practices, but rather a conjoined observation of the presence of a specific element in the content and form of a discourse, the utopian discourse, that is at the core of the cultural and political practices in the concrete case of the peripheral economy under study. The fact that a revolution was underway in Nicaragua during the 1980s extends and multiplies the potentiality of utopian discourse. But this does not mean that the utopian factor is only present as acting principle in such circumstances. The aim in the seven chapters of the book is to trace the presence, multiplication, and transformation of this elementary principle of human activity, this principle of hope, as termed by Ernst Bloch, under different socio-historical conditions.

My initial conceptualization of the state as the locus of political and cultural discourse does not pretend to provide an exhaustive redefinition of this complex structure. But I do base my analysis on the presupposition that the state is the process and expression of human institutions of power in which the discourse of law and the political action of classes, interest groups, and individuals concur, to codify and regulate social and economic life. The particular institutional form adopted by the state under diverse material and historical circumstances is produced by the relations of production that affect but are also affected by symbolic relations of reproduction (cf. Bourdieu 1980: 160; Jessop 1990). In this case, I consider that the performative expression of such relations incarnates in a diversity of mythic discourses and ritualistic acts. If I focus on this rituality and the modern mythology around the structures of the state, it is due to the undeniable fact that both practices are relevant components in contemporary society, and not with the intent to primitivize the complex forms of social interaction necessary for the exercise of power and political action. My aim is to underscore the fact that most cultural and politically significant actions affecting a collectivity, at some point, take the form of a representation and from these emerges a mythology of words and images (Bourdieu 1980: 87).

I rely primarily on the pervasive presence of the written word and its delivered form in public as political speech or as reported testimonial account to describe and theorize the cultural practices that are of interest to society (see Ong 1993: 8).¹ It is through language that the spectacle of an army parading in the midst of a multitude is redirected. The physical and spatial presence of a column of soldiers is reinforced by the speech of a general, by the loudspeakers of the meeting, or by the narration of a televisual broadcast of this act. Of course, the linguistic trace of this performance, a published speech, a journalistic report of an official ceremony, the text of a presidential address or for that matter a film do not fully account for the complexity and richness of any performative event. There is an immense amount of information that needs to be considered when a political leader is in front of an audience of diverse class origins and political convictions. In an audience, a subject is perceiving all the elements of the spectacle and processing this new information, which s/he adds and compares to her/his previous experiences, absorbs or rejects what s/he is receiving, and decides to incorporate, or not, this information to her/his political and/or practical life (Hall 1994). For the most part, I circumscribe my work to texts, and in some chapters to photographic images and films, in hopes of grasping a good part of the bigger and broader categories of a historical situation. I make assumptions and build theories around these materials, knowing that my practice of cultural analysis is limited, but also encouraged by the presence of those traces.

In the practice of writing a poem to be read in front of an audience in a workshop, or in the simple physical discipline and mental concentration needed to read, there is also a labor of corporal and visual control that is required to insert this activity into the real, to make it part of the catalogue of the socially relevant acts of the individual in the midst of a collectivity (cf. Negri and Hardt 1994: 9). We read not only to learn or acquire knowledge, but also to speak, write, apply, or enact such knowledge in the daily activities of social interaction. In this sense, discourse in its written or oral form is one of the most important sources for my argument.

Moreover, in an effort to trace at many levels the construction of the New Latin American Man in the Sandinista Revolution in the sixth chapter of this book I propose an analysis of the policies fostered by the Sandinista government to produce a new kind of cinematic spectator. From the point of view of cultural policy, film exhibition and reception were central to the overall ideological confrontation in which the Sandinista government was engaged. The act of reading a narrative film from a revolutionary perspective, even if the production of such spectacle was not intended to promote a specific ideological stance, is a challenge for both cultural officials determined to change the modes of reception, and for the spectators that are immersed in a revolutionary situation. It is important to consider that the transformation of the spectator was one more effort, along with many others such as the literacy campaign and the poetry workshops, to foster the emergence of a more nationalist and critically engaged modern subject.

The modeling of a new identity in order to achieve political, economic, and cultural development is in many ways a task embedded in the general effort to build a better society. At all levels, the utopian function of discourse is at work, as the grounding layer for the material and ideological transformation of the new society.

Myth and Utopia in the Discourse of Development

Since I am using the concept of myth in relation to development and both of them are associated with the utopian function of discourse, it is necessary to clarify what the theoretical coordinates involved in my discussion are. While discussing the idea of myth, it is not my intention to reopen the anthropologic and ethnologic debate about primitive and modern thought introduced by Lévi-Strauss in his seminal work of 1955 (see Lévi-Strauss 1989: 809–22; Paz 1987). Rather, I wish to use the definition and connotations of the concept of myth in a more contemporary register, as presented in Mythologies by Roland Barthes. In this work by the Algerian-born professor of the École d’Hautes Études, myth is revisited in its modern conditions in French media and social practices. Although seen by many as a trivialization of a more serious conceptual field, his reappraisals of the practice of mythology in contemporary society allow us to look beyond the purely oral nature of myths as seen by the classic treatments of the subject.

For Barthes, these contemporary myths are forms of language built over a second level of signification. This is to say, it is a form of parole built on linguistic formations, and its functions could vary but are still related to the primitive need to explain the inexpressible or to solve antinomies or contradictions in a narrative or representation (Marin 1973: 53; Barthes 1957: 199). In a society of spectacle, however, it seems that myths, like the myth of development, can trigger a series of images that make the spectator react emotionally to historical narratives.² This emotional identification can trigger irrational support for ideas and agendas that should be considered under a more critical mode of reception. Economic and political discourses tend to use myths in a discretionary way, trying to relate specific historical or social images to cover up the fragmentary views of their ideological positions. Although a series of myths could be interrelated in order to acquire the semblance of totality, our contemporary use of them tends to underline the fractional character of postmodern concepts of history and society. By affirming the emotional power of myths, I am not trying to reintroduce as valid the master narratives of modernity, but rather to reactivate the possibility for the search of totality. This latter function can be played out by utopian discourse.

According to Louis Marin, utopian discourse could be conceptualized as an effort to solve historical contradictions, a form of the dialectical synthesis of contraries. It embodies the discourse of the neutral not here, nor there, but somewhere in an heterotopic space (Marin 1973). Under this light, in More’s Utopia, the land of king Utopos is not the Old nor the New World but a negotiated version of both. For Marin, utopian narratives function as a simulacrum of historical synthesis between the needs, aspirations, and possibilities of social reality. Aesthetically, this simulacrum is deployed in an imaginary space of synthesis that unifies historical projects. As Marin explains this different conception of space, "it is a plural organization of space. This discourse with a closure through the synopsis of a totalizing (or totalitarian) view, this multiple production signified by the non-congruence of the resulting spaces: a game of super-imposed spaces (multiple spaces) in a strict coherence of a totalizing discourse" (Marin 1973: 10). This multiplicity of spaces then becomes one in which contradictions are not treated univocally and in a discretionary way but rather in a more ambitious, synthesized, and holistic conception of society and history. Here then lies the most important difference between myth and utopia, at least for us. A utopian discourse is not hiding a simplistic reconstruction of images or emotional reactions to history. Its form must deal with many contradictions and has to propose, project, and poetically imagine an alternative space of negotiated contradiction.

Certainly, as Marin himself affirmed, there is a possibility of moving from a concept of totality toward a scheme of totalitarianism. This thin edge could explain in part the negative connotations associated with the word utopia (Bell 1988).³ Against this disqualification of utopia as a strategic design with totalitarian risks, I assume that there are also utopias of conservative origins. In other words, although utopian thought is conceived as a form of revolutionary departure from actual conditions of life, utopian thinking can also acquire the form of a conservative social structure (cf. Mannheim 1985: 229–38). Again the best example for a conservative utopia comes from economic discourse:

In a general way, it can be said that economists produce stories that are actively conservative. The discourse of forecasting furnishes examples readily.

Since it is founded on techniques of econometric models that can only foresee the future through data of the past with a hypothesis, extremely strong, of the permanence of structures of the past. The model is only functional if some structures do not change. As an effect of representation, as effect of advertising, it can contribute to hinder change. Econometric techniques induce researchers to a certain indifference regarding the future, which has been reduced to a mere conservative inflection of the past. In a general way, economic discourse is buttressed by the establishment and is comforted back by it. Contrary to the meta-economic discourse, it offers no rêveries of impossible changes, it excludes all radical change. However, similarly to meta-economic discourse it is always threatened by utopia—a conservative utopia—because reality changes after all, even in a radical way. (Guillaume 1974: 42)

The conservative nature of developmentalist economic analysis derives from its historically focused tools of forecasting market behavior. Moreover, this specific trait could also be identified with the mythical conceptions we have pointed out, but there is also a totalizing view in the classical discourse of economic sciences regarding the basic methodological tenets of their research and prescriptive measures of productive and commercial activities. This total view of equilibrium is understood as the space of perfect control of variables, which is ideologically identified with many conservative measures. Good examples of economic utopian thinking are the theory of general equilibrium and the theory of perfect competition; as is well known, both play a central role in the doctrine of economic liberalism. These theories present models in which the economic agents—consumers, workers, companies—are supposed to obey rules of rational and schematic behavior in which the interactions, synthesized by a system of prices, arrive at a general equilibrium qualified as the optimal conditions. Although economists themselves have expressed their reservations regarding this optimum, this has not prevented zealots from spreading the idea that this state is in fact the ideal social objective to be achieved (Guillaume 1974: 46).

Another example of methodological considerations converted into utopian images of perfection comes from the constant emphasis on the virtues of free markets. Free markets are not, as assumed by the economic discourse in popular media, the natural state of things when politics does not intervene in economic transactions. Any study with a long historical perspective shows that free markets are a rare deviation of short existence. Regulated markets are the norm and emerge spontaneously in any society. Free markets are a construction of state power. The idea that free markets and a minimum of governmental intervention go together as part of the neoliberal tenets of the New Right is exactly the opposite of truth. Given the fact that societies tend naturally to regulate markets, free markets can only be created through the centralized power of the state. Free markets are creatures of strong governments and cannot live without them (Gray 1999: 3–4).

It is important to notice that it is not economists as a discursive community who exploit these notions in order to transform them into political messages. Rather, it is conservative hegemonic forces supporting the status quo who justify through those notions the harsh corrective measures that will prevent structural changes. This support for stasis could explain many of the features that neoliberal policies highlight as the main goals for a responsible, rational, and efficient economic policy.

Political neoconservatism draws an artificial and ideological link connecting the kind of order proposed by economic theory with the notion of authoritarian regimes and the social order imposed by force. Studies in Chilean and Argentine economic evolution during the 1970s and 1980s have demonstrated that the relative stability of these governments was in any case conjunctural and not structural (Garciarena 1990: 64; García Canclini 1990: 56–57; Bruner 1990: 90–91).⁴ Only at the level of political discourse is possible to establish such a metaphysical link between notions of order in counterterror regimes and the notions of equilibrium derived from the economic discourse of academia. However, this association was easily disseminated and adopted by ruling elites in Latin America from the 1970s to the 1990s. Milton Friedman also pointed out the mythical (and false) character of the association of free markets with authoritarian regimes:

The adoption of free-market policies by Chile with the blessing and support of the military junta headed by General Pinochet has given rise to the myth that only an authoritarian regime can successfully implement a free-market policy.

The facts are very different. Chile is an exception, not the rule.

The military is hierarchical and its personnel are imbued with the tradition that some give and some obey orders: it is organized from the top down. A free market is the reverse. It is voluntaristic, authority is dispersed; bargaining, not submission to orders, is its watchword; it is organized from the bottom up. (Friedman 1987: 129)

The authoritarian idea of progress through military order is part of a conservative utopia, and as such it imposes a supposed freedom of the markets. However, in the midst of violence and repression, military order cannot deliver freedom in politics. The temptation of total control makes the military lose sight of the importance of a free society and the fact that sooner or later, the public is bound to demand different conditions. Otherwise, the continual repression by these regimes can easily undo the short-term economic miracles they could have produced in the beginning (Friedman 1987: 130).

What are then the options against these manipulative and short-termed mythological notions of economic and political progress? What were the elements that led to the adoption of conservative utopian views spread among television and radio audiences and among the few readers of newspapers and journals of such marginalized economies of the Central American isthmus?

I believe that by tracing the changes in hegemonic discourses in politics and in literature it is possible to present a clear panorama of the successive modes of articulation of the mythical and the utopian in a society. I propose that the reconfigurations of this horizon of possibilities for the resolution of symbolic contradictions interact through three different moments in the recent history of Nicaragua. The first of these moments starts with a classic modernizing period, represented by the manipulation of the symbolic horizon of discourses inherited from the nineteenth century in Latin America and specifically displayed during the era of the Somozas (1937–1979). The second is related to the political and cultural struggle waged since the inception of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in 1961, which lasted up to its electoral defeat in 1990. The third and last discursive formation can be identified with political and cultural developments of the last decade of the twentieth century during the neoliberal regimes of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (1990–1995) and Arnoldo Alemán (1996–2001). The particularities, social possibilities, and perspectives for the future in each period will be analyzed through a close reading of representative texts coming from the political, economic, and literary discourses of the time.

CHAPTER 1

A Tale of Three Utopias and One Dictatorship

The political ascent of the Somoza family and its consolidation of power in the government of Nicaragua from 1934, the year of the death of Augusto C. Sandino, until the ousting of the third and last member of the dynasty in 1979 delimits one of the most important periods of modernization of a Central American nation carried out under the auspices and influence of the United States. The continual support of a military family in power—sometimes reluctant or tacit, other times very active—is a classic example of the blunt and costly ways in which United States governments of the twentieth century conducted foreign relations with the republics of the isthmus and other Latin American nations (Grandin 2006; Rouquié 1984: 141; LaFeber 1993: 83).

Ever since the short adventure of William Walker, the American filibusterer, in Nicaragua and Costa Rica (1855–1857), and the first interventions by the US Marines in favor of the liberal governments of the late nineteenth century, the implanting of a civilizing process was supposedly the intent of the Pax Americana. Its associated rhetoric resembled the rhetoric previously used to justify the bloody massacres that resulted in the occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish American War of 1898 (cf. Grandin 2006: 24–25; Pike 1992; D. Rodríguez 1993: 176, 258–62).¹ From that watershed point in history when the new imperial ambitions of the United States became clear, some elite groups of Nicaragua and other Latin American nations purposefully, if not enthusiastically, embraced