Sandinista (White Heat)

Lyrics

Saw a movie, “Top of the World”
But I found it didn’t lift me,
Jimmy Cagney’s mother died,
It didn’t move, it didn’t shift me

And Santiago fell 10 years ago, or more
And it seems we’ve been falling ever since
And now there’s something stirring in Managua
It’s got the power, it’s got the power to convince.

How we ever gonna thank you enough
You’ve shown us that the good can get tough
Sandinista!

The future seems so far away, sometimes
Without a guide and with no example
But your work, can take so many there and give
Washington more than a sample.

How we ever gonna thank you enough
You’ve shown us that the good can get tough
Sandinista!

If we could only brush away
The dust of 50 years
We’d be on a road in Spain
With a white hot sun above
And all around are voices
Other accents and other tongues
Here to say that this republic
Needs our arms, and it needs our love…

How we ever gonna thank you enough
You’ve shown us that the good can get tough
Sandinista!

Song Description

The Sandinistas were so inspiring – they seemed determined to avoid the mistakes made by so many progressive movements (for example, I’m still horrified at the way so many left-wing people flock to Cuba for some kind of PC holiday – just because they are the last of the ‘revolutionary’ states doesn’t make one-party systems any more attractive). Maybe Ortega needed to take a leaf out of Fidel’s book, or Stalin’s come to that, but instead they attempted to make democracy ‘deliver’ but once people are tired and ill-fed and nervous they can lose their resolve – which is what many Nicaraguans did. Who can blame them?

The defeat of the Sandinistas is still of huge political-historical significance. How are we ever to confront and overthrow capitalism and replace it with a system that generates and distributes wealth justly? That organises life in ways that value individuals, respects difference, encourages creativity, discourages cruelty, and so on? But that begins this in the ‘here and now’ and grows the future by winning hearts and minds to new ways of being (while enduring and surviving the Bush-Rumsfelt-Corporate America commandos?)