The Revolution in Nicaragua: Another Cuba?

William M. LeoGrande

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1979

Article preview: first 500 of 9,008 words total.

Summary:  For two decades, the hemispheric policy of the United States has been haunted by the specter of ?another Cuba.? The fear that Cuba?s revolutionary upheaval might be repeated elsewhere energized the Alliance for Progress and, when progress gave way to order, that same fear justified providing counterinsurgency assistance to a continent increasingly dominated by military dictatorships. Lyndon Johnson sent a force of 20,000 men to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent ?another Cuba,? and Henry Kissinger unleashed the CIA on Chile for the same reason.

William M. LeoGrande is Assistant Professor of Government at the College of Public and International Affairs of the American University.

For two decades, the hemispheric policy of the United States has been haunted by the specter of "another Cuba." The fear that Cuba's revolutionary upheaval might be repeated elsewhere energized the Alliance for Progress and, when progress gave way to order, that same fear justified providing counterinsurgency assistance to a continent increasingly dominated by military dictatorships. Lyndon Johnson sent a force of 20,000 men to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent "another Cuba," and Henry Kissinger unleashed the CIA on Chile for the same reason.

The collapse of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua has made this fear more palpable than ever. The United States labored mightily over the past year to prevent the accession of a Sandinista government in Nicaragua, but in the end was reduced to reluctantly arranging the terms of transition from Somoza to a provisional government appointed by the guerrillas. Preoccupied with isolating the Sandinistas, Washington policymakers consistently under-estimated their strength and exaggerated that of Somoza. Now that he is gone, the Cuba specter still hovers, threatening to obscure U.S. understanding of the dynamics of post-Somoza politics just as it obscured the dynamics of his collapse.

Nicaragua's future course will be determined fundamentally by internal forces-how the revolutionary coalition breaks down into contending political camps, the relative strengths of those camps, and the issues around which the political battles of the future are fought. No external actor will be able to control this process, but the United States can have an impact on it by affecting the alignments of the political contenders and the issues which divide them. Whether Nicaragua becomes "another Cuba" will depend in no small measure on whether the United States reenacts the mistakes it made 20 years ago in its relations with the first Cuba.

II

Nicaragua, like Cuba, was victimized early in the century by the new "Manifest Destiny" which guided U.S. hemispheric policy during those years.1 It became a virtual protectorate of the United States in 1912 when the Marines were dispatched, ostensibly to protect American property and citizens during a period of civil strife. In fact, U.S. interest in Nicaragua was primarily strategic. Considered for a time as a possible site for the canal across the isthmus, Nicaragua's location remained strategically important for defense of the canal in Panama. U.S. control over the customs houses of Nicaragua was established less to insure the loans of U.S. bankers than those of Europeans, whose potential for intervention the United States perceived as a strategic threat.

Except for a brief interlude in 1925-26, U.S. troops remained in Nicaragua until 1933. The second occupation never quite succeeded in pacifying Nicaragua. Augusto César Sandino, a general of the Liberal Party, refused to accept the imposition of a Conservative president, and for nearly six years he fought a guerrilla war against the Marines, achieving international stature as a nationalist and anti-imperialist. When the United States withdrew under the banner of FDR's Good Neighborism, it left the task of ensuring stability to the American-trained National ...

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