I didn't understand why the campesino was so obsessed about our not breaking the brush. But it seemed to me to be overdoing it in the middle of an ocean of vegetation to be saying, "Compa, don't nick the trees with your machete. I realized that my shells [for his shotgun] had slipped out of my kerchief--had been dropping out along the way--because a campesino had found some of them. He wasn't covered with mud, except for his boots.
He pulled out a spotless kerchief and mopped the sweat from his face, while my kerchief was sopping with mud. I had mud on my hair, on my face, everywhere. Before we were marching through brush, now we were marching through mud. When you tried to get a footing on those jagged waves of ground, you lost your balance, your bag swung to one side, and bang! We recovered from our blisters, and for the first time in three days I took a s [relieved his bowels. You take a handful of leaves and wipe yourself.
You can't sleep because they get in your blanket, and you have to make a bed of embers under your hammock, a little fire of smoldering sticks to create smoke. You're in your hammock with that constant bbzzzzzz in your ears. There's a tiny insect that harasses you all day [called "no see-ums" in the Caribbean], then at night it slips through the weave of your hammock or blanket and keeps right on biting you when you're lying down.
It's a nightmare; it's horrible you can't sleep in peace. It's the loneliness. Nothing is as rough as the loneliness. Loneliness is starting to forget the sounds of cars, the longing at night for electric lights, the longing for colors, because the mountain dresses only in green or dark colors.
Longing for your favorite songs, longing for a woman, longing for sex. You long for the company of all those things, but you can't have them; it's a loneliness forced on you against your will. You can't leave the guerrilla war. Because you've come to fight, which has been the great decision of your life. But gradually you are mastering the environment, learning to march. Your legs are getting stronger. You learn how to swing a machete. And as time passes your hair starts to get long.
I sprouted a mustache in the mountains. Washing so little roughens your skin. Over long periods of time your cuts and scratches heal, and new ones come to take their place, until your hands and your arms are a different color. Calluses form on your hands. And you belch right in front of everyone.
It's as if very gradually this mass of men was becoming one more element, a few more creatures of the mountain--intelligent, yes, but like animals, and even worse, like inhibited animals.
This, in a way, was what helped to forge in each of us the steel that was needed to overthrow the dictatorship. Our skin was weathering, the look in your eyes hardening, our eyesight sharpening, our sense of smell keener. Our reflexes--we moved like animals.
Our thoughts were hardening, our hearing was more acute, we were starting to take on the same hardness as the jungle, the hardness of animals; we were growing a half-human, half-animal hide.
And so a spirit was forged that enabled us to endure all the mental and physical hardship. That is why we said that the genesis of the new man was in the FSLN. The new man began to be born with fungus infections and with his feet oozing worms; the new man began to be born with loneliness and eaten alive by mosquitoes; he began to be born stinking. That's the outer part, because inside, by dint of violent shocks day after day, the new man was being born with the freshness of the mountains.
A man--it might seem incredible--a tender man who sacrifices himself for others, a man who gives everything for others, who suffers when others suffer and who also laughs when others laugh. The new man began to be born and to acquire a whole series of values, discovering these values, and cherishing them and cultivating them in his inner self.
I kept thinking of Che, of Che's new man, and it hit me then--the enormity of what Che meant when he talked about the new man: the man who gives more to others than the average man is able to give. But at the cost of sacrifices. At the cost of the destruction of his faults, of his vices. We just stared, convinced that Tello was right.
That bastard had hit us in our weak spot. Eventually your head stops spinning. Those feelings [of doubt] subside, and you start to reflect maturely, calmly.
You are saved by the fact that the FSLN inculcated in us a historical will, an infinite, boundless stubbornness. And all at once your brain starts to function. Okay, thousands of people may die, but you have to keep on fighting to bring down the enemy.
Because to be against the Guard, even though you may die--to be a guerrilla fighter--is an absolutely honorable stand. If you die, you die with honor. Your death is in itself a protest. Because I didn't have any experience in that sort of work.
She just stared at me, unbelieving, then burst out laughing in my face. Then she turned serious. I was in a Peace Corps training camp, not a guerrilla camp! Puerto Rican campesinos, who watched with us, howled with laughter at our gullibility.
Of course, they said, the whole thing had been faked! When I became friends with someone, I always wanted that relationship to develop into something that had political content, and vice versa--I always tried to build a political connection into a solid personal friendship. Nearly a million kids ages 5 to 11 have received their first vaccine dose includes video story.
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In addition, a new military force, the Nicaraguan National Guard , would be established under United States supervision. Anastasio Somoza became the leader of this National Guard. Sandino refused to sign the peace treaty and resumed his battle against the United States Marines. He gained most of his support from the rural areas and although he only had about men his guerrilla war caused significant damage in the Caribbean coast and mining regions. Sandino argued that he would continue the war until American troops left Nicaragua.
Sandino now ended his guerrilla war and began peace talks with President Juan Bautista Sacasa. During their meetings, Sacasa offered Sandino a general amnesty as well as land and safeguards for him and his guerrilla forces.
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