By and large, however, the Front remains hidden--even from its firmest supporters, the students. The National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN), located in the northern city of Leon, is a center of resistance to the government. A Latin American tradition, not yet violated in Nicaragua, protects the autonomy of the university, and the corridors and walls of UNAN are papered with posters and literature supporting the Sandinistas. The students tell a North American visitor that perhaps 80 per cent of them are socialists and anit-imperialists. The students are primarily from middle and supper-income backgrounds, although slightly less so than in the United States, because the very wealthy send their children north to study.

The students are on the average slightly younger than their North American counterparts, although some of less wealthy must leave school from time to time and work in the fields to support their families, thereby prolonging their years of study. The students live in large, cheap boarding houses and watch their money carefully. They read "Carlos Marx," organize their own discussion sections on Franz Fanon, listen to Radio Havana on shortwave sets, and talk much more quietly in the streets outside the university, lowering their voices or quickly changing the subject when a stranger approaches. They seem less remote from the daily life of their country than North American students, more readily conversant with the practical aspects of the problems facing the poor--nutrition, for instance, or the conditions of rural labor. Some of them are undoubtedly swept up in the political currents: Latin American students are even more notorious than their North American counterparts for leaving their left-wing views behind them when they graduate. But many will surely be Sandinistas very soon.

The students are perhaps the most directly affected by another aspect of imperialism--the growing domination of Nicaragua by North American culture. English is becoming a kind of second language, necessary for medical students whose textbooks are in English, for the purchaser of a home appliance for which the operating instructions are in English, even for a shoeshine boy or a waitress who would coax a few extra centavos out of the gringo tourists. Some of this cultural influence is due a filtering down of the upper-class aping of everything North American: much of it, however, is pure necessity in a society shaped and dominated largely from without.

The students, aware of their own cultural past and eager and willing to continue to build upon it, naturally are painfully sensitive and resentful of their nation's subjection. Moreover, the extremely hierarchical nature of the social system effectively closes some roads to them. And they need walk no farther than eight blocks from the university, where Leon's poor districts begin, to be reminded of the misery and the agony in which a majority of their countrymen live.

Most likely, the Sandinistas originally were predominantly students and young professionals, teachers and doctors. Now, however, the Front stresses that its membership includes peasants and workers, and extended conversations in other areas of the country make it clear that support for the Front is not limited to the university. One of Managua's striking construction workers, for example, expressed amazement that workers might feel any resentment toward student leftists. "It's the same struggle," he said simply.

For the Sandinistas the choice is clear. If they would free their country from North American domination, if they would plan their economy with the needs of their people and not the profits of the wealthy in mind, if they would broaden the bases of political participation and accord each man and woman in all Nicaragua the respect and dignity that each merits--the Sandinistas must fight. If they would feed the hungry and create meaningful work for the poor, if they would repatriate the parachutists, who are outcasts in their own land, if they would draw upon their own resources and replace the sea of North American trash with their own culture--if they would do all this, they must continue fighting with guns as well as words. In the words of a spray-painted slogan on the walls of a poor neighborhood in Leon. "There will be a Christmas for everyone or there will be a Christmas for no one."

Daniel Swanson '74, a former president of The Crimson, is traveling through Central and South America this year.