THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CRISTINA RODRIGUEZ

The Women's Committee of the Irish Nicaragua Support Committee has prepared

for publication the autobiography of a remarkable Nicaraguan. Maeve Taylor

tells how it came about.

Members of the INSG have known Cristina Rodriguez since she was a women's

trade union leader in the Agricultural Day Labourers Union, ATC. From the

very start she impressed Irish solidarity workers with her revolutionary

commitment to the struggles of the impoverished class from which she

herself comes. Her commitment to women's and revolutionary struggles

inspired the Irish women's delegation to Nicaragua in 1993, only

subsequently matched by the tremendous impact she made on women across a

range of sectors and communities when she visited Ireland as part of the

Nicaraguan women's exchange visit in 1994.

Cristina Rodriguez was born in 1950 in the rural area of Leon, in the

Pacific region of Nicaragua. Her family worked as agricultural labourers

on a large private estate until she was eleven years old when circumstances

drove them into the precarious existence of day labourers in the cotton

industry and a life of grinding poverty. Married at 14, she gave birth to

fourteen children, two of whom died in infancy. .

In the years preceding the Revolution she was involved in the indigenous

land movement and the Sandinista struggle against the dictatorship of

Somoza. Her daughter's murder by the National Guard led her to increased

activism in the revolutionary movement. Under the Sandinista government

she became active as a trade union leader in the agricultural sector and

was later a founder member of the trade union women's section.

Disenchantment with the Sandinista party structures and some of its closely

allied trade unions, as opposed to the ideals of 'Sandinismo' led her to

set up her own independent organisation to carry on her very important work

with women agricultural labourers made unemployed in the early 1990's from

the cotton and banana industries.

During Easter Week 1995 Cristina told us her life story. The fourteen

hours of tapes we made over three days tell the story of her passage from

the grinding poverty of a young single mother in a strongly macho culture

to activism as a feminist and trade union leader, through the revolutionary

period to the present day. Her life spans the period of contemporary

Nicaraguan history from the dictatorship of Somoza through the Sandinista

Revolution and the Contra war to Violeta Chomoro 's neo-liberal government.

Cristina's political/feminist awakening and development over this period

characterised by a purity of purpose eschewing all opportunities for

personal advancement provides an inspiring insight into one Southern

woman's struggle on behalf of her class and her sex. The members of the

INSG Women's Exchange Project feel that her amazing life story is worthy of

reaching a wider audience in book form.

Our project aims eventually to publish her life story as a development

education tool promoting awareness of the struggles of women in the South

and inspiring Irish women in the process of their own empowerment...The

first stage is the publication of her story itself. The Women's Exchange

Study Tour is now proud to present the autobiography of Cristina Rodriguez

(with notes by Molly O'Duffy), which will be launched in the Latin American

Solidarity Centre during Latin America Week.

The following is an extract from her commentary on the triumph of the

Sandinista Revolution in 1979.

"The Revolution happened because the National Guard had come to be hated

among the people, not only in the city but in the countryside as well.

Somoza sent the National Guard out like a fury against the people of

Nicaragua. Everywhere they were murdering innocent people under Somoza's

orders. With all the atrocities committed against them, the people had to

rise up and this helped the Sandinistas, it meant that the whole country

rose up and there was a revolution across the whole population. Of course

not everybody had the same reasons; we have to recognise that it was not

the same thing for a family which had been hurt by the death of one or more

of their children at the hands of the National Guard, as for those who had

spent years fighting for a political ideology. So what happened? The

people rebelled and there was a revolution of all the people together. If

it had only been the National Directorate of the Sandinista Front, they

would never have toppled Somoza: the insurrection succeeded because all the

people rose up against the indiscriminate way the National Guard was

attacking them.

In 1978 my daughter, Isabel, was killed by the National Guard, murdered

when she was pregnant. She may have been in a few demonstrations and

things, but she was a pregnant woman ready for the midwife and the National

Guard did not respect even that and killed her. They attacked the

defenceless. To my mind that is what a people revolts against: all the

poverty, the ignominy and the ignorance. In Nicaragua we lived in a

situation of the utmost difficulty and desperation, especially women. The

female agricultural worker's lot was miserable: her role was to bear

children, to work for half pay, to endure ill health, to do without

medicines for her children, to be denied education for her children and for

herself.

A a great policy of Somoza and the landowners: that the government should

not concern itself with raising our cultural level. In that way they could

deny us our wages and no one would go to complain, and even if someone

dared to go to the Ministry of Labour to make a complaint, the landlord

would pay off the official and the worker would get nothing, or more likely

be accused of being a thief. So as not to end up in prison the worker

would leave the estate and give up the struggle. All those elements helped

lead the people to a revolution.

My daughter's death hit me very hard. But it did not discourage me from

continuing the struggle: for if my daughter, a pregnant woman, had been

murdered for nothing more than making tortillas for the rebel command near

her house, why not get more involved in the struggle and die for something

more than a few tortillas? Why not die in the struggle to be valued and

value ourselves as workers?

* * * * * * * * * * *

A big achievement for me during the Revolution was to have acquired more

skills and theory to stand up for myself and for other women, so that I can

teach women that no one is born knowing it all, that the life is the best

teacher. For example, after giving birth to fourteen children, if I see a

woman with eight, I can see myself in her, I know how that woman will cry

when she has not got enough to feed her children, or to buy them clothes or

shoes, because I have lived through that. I know her children have never

had toys: they play in the dirt with sticks and leaves, as my children did.

During the Revolution there were pinatas, there were toys and children's

centres, but that is all history now, especially in the countryside.

For more information contact Maeve Taylor at 01-4751998.