Q24N — The Nicaraguan writer, Gioconda Belli, declared last Thursday in Costa Rica her lack of love for the Cuban Revolution, which, she said, is a “failed attempt” that has been become “a stagnant ideological straitjacket sustained by a repressive system.”
Exiled in Spain, the Nicaraguan writer expressed her opinions after receiving an honorary doctorate from the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR) – the University of Costa Rica – for her contributions to culture, education and the fight for democracy and human rights.
Belli reflected that victories can be as deceptive and illusory as defeats, and gave as an example the Cuban revolution of 1959.
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“I remember when Fidel Castro’s bearded Cuban guerrillas were victorious in Cuba, the magazine that my father and mother read and the photography and the excitement of the elders around me for that Revolution,” the author of the book commented in her speech about her novela El país de las mujeres (The Country of Women), on winning the Latin American Prize for Literature From The Other Shore 2010.
“I myself, years later, admired and was dazzled by that romantic feat that, at this point, seems to me to be a failed attempt, a stagnant ideological straitjacket sustained by a repressive system that has forced the Cuban people to go through misery, family separations, humiliations and sadness,” she argued.
Belli, now 76, and who according to her critics belonged to the Department of Agitation and Propaganda (DAP) during Nicaragua’s first Sandinista Government (1979-1990), described it as “regrettable that Cuba is now the advisor for Nicaragua and Venezuela for the organization of espionage, propaganda and methods with which it is ensured that power crushes any democratic or liberating attempt of these people.”
The poet and writer observed that “there was also enthusiasm in Latin America with the 21st century socialism” promoted by the late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, “which also turned out to be a failure.”
“And not to mention Nicaragua – governed by Daniel Ortega since 2007, after coordinating a Government Board from 1979 to 1985, and presiding over the country for the first time from 1985 to 1990 – because we all know what happened with that illusion,” she concluded.
The author of El infinito en la palma de la mano (The Infinite in the Palm of the Hand) winner of the Premio Biblioteca Breve de Seix Barral in 2008, also criticized the extreme right in Europe that speaks out against migration, as well as former US president Donald Trump, and the president of Argentina, Javier Milei.
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Belli has been attacked by a sector of the Nicaraguan opposition for her past in the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), to which she belonged during the first regime (1979-1990), and for her sympathy with the Cuban Revolution and its main leader, the late Fidel Castro.
So, in a writing titled ¿La golondrina hizo el verano? (Did the Swallow Make the Summer?) she explained that she has “rectified and made criticisms,” in which she also reveals: “I have written books and given interviews about the problems and errors of the Sandinista revolution and the product that was left of it, unfortunately, and that is the Ortega Murillo dictatorship that we suffer today.”
In those writings she admitted that she was part of a generation that failed to lead Nicaragua “to the freedom that had been won by blood and fire after the Somoza dictatorship (1937-1979).”
Gioconda Belli has been in exile for security reasons since May 2021 in the context of a crisis in Nicaragua in which the Government of Daniel Ortega has been accused by international organizations and various countries of committing human rights violations and persecuting its critics and opponents.
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On February 15, 2023, the Nicaraguan authorities deprived Belli of her nationality and her property, along with 93 other Nicaraguans, who were declared traitors to the country and fugitives from justice by Ortega.
At the time of her denationalization, Belli resided in Spain, a country that has granted her nationality and where she continues to live.
Adapted from Translatingcuba.com
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