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.