Well, he has written for The New Yorker but, your dates are wrong as well as the venue.
The controversy over his two Mother Jones pieces noted in these interviews w/him,
http://silverback.gnn.tv/blogs/9988/Paul_Berman_on_Sandinistas_anarchists_and_the_cult_of_Che
>...Stephen Marshall: Let's jump back in time to the infamous 1986 article you wrote in Mother Jones, which I find really fascinating. When you wrote that, it was the second and last part of a series you had been sent out there to report – I figured that Michael Moore became Editor of the magazine between the two.
Paul Berman: Right.
SM: Reading it was surprisingly moving. I really only know about the Sandanistas through the prism of the Iran-Contra scandal. But I wanted to ask you, considering Moore's reaction and that of much of the left at the time, were you aware, going into it, that you were writing such an incendiary report? That there were such high ideological stakes at the time? That by presenting this oblique view of the Sandinistas as Leninists, that there would be so much trouble, or did you not see that coming?
PB: I presented the piece in a naïve spirit – calling it the way I saw it. I didn't really worry about what the response should be. I was under a certain pressure from the left to come up with the right response, but the pressure on the left that I was under was the other way; it was to condemn the Sandinistas. That's because I had all these ties to the Wobblies and the libertarian left of America. The Wobblies knew a great deal about Latin-American Marxism – more than me, really – and they were able to read things more clearly in some cases than I was. I listened to them and somewhat pushed that way. The only thing about the reaction to that piece that surprised me was to find that my position was regarded as not left-wing. I thought it was obvious that I was writing from a left-wing position.
The later pieces that I wrote – I wrote a number of pieces where I thought that I was the only journalist in Nicaragua approaching it from a left-wing point of view. In my mind this meant applying the methodologies or analytic approaches that had been worked out by some of the radical left-wing historians in the '70s and the '80s. History from the bottom-up, local history, emphasis on workers themselves – not just on abstractions – and so a lot of the work I did in Nicaragua consisted of going out to one town in particular outside of Managua repeatedly and interviewing ordinary people and workers – shoe makers, looking at the shoemakers' union, things like that. Trying to tell the history of the Nicaraguan events from the point of view of the craftsmen and proletarians. And from the point of view of the workers' organizations. And from that point of view, which was related to the kinds of history that was developed by the New Left, really – from that point of view it became obvious what was happening in Nicaragua, which was that workers were being oppressed by people who were in the name of the left creating a centralized state on a kind of East European model. It was not a Reaganite story and not a right-wing story, but neither was it a kind of Marxist mythology or Guevarist or Fidelista mythology about Latin America that a lot of people regarded as left-wing.
SM: Right and there was a concern that the story would be used by Reagan and the right-wing supporters of the Contras against the Sandinista cause.
PB: I'm speaking about my own article and my feelings on my own article. Not about Moore. I don't want to comment on Moore.
SM: Gotcha.
PB: I went about it in the spirit that I hope would be with any journalist – I called it as I saw it. As for the Leninist nature of the Sandanistan front – here I can only laugh at myself because I had to spend a year reading through Sandanistan doctrines before I could look up from my desk and say with great simplicity, "Ah ha! They're Marxist-Leninists!" And it was really just simple as can be that Sandanismo, in the version of the 1970s and '80s, consisted just of some creative linguistic adaptations of traditional Fidelista notions, rhetorical alterations of some very traditional terms. Rhetorical alterations that deceived a lot of people and deceived a lot of Nicaraguans into imagining that the Sandanistan front that was a social democratic organization. But it wasn't.
SM: Let me ask this, while we're on the subject of Latin America. I went to see you and Michael Ignatieff speak in New York in October, 2004. And I think it was the week before, you had published your review of Motorcycle Diaries on Slate. That essay really hit me because although I have been to Cuba and balanced my idealism with knowledge of Che's darker actions, I think I was still holding onto the rhetorical symobolism of his message. And I got pissed at your essay. It really upset me, so I went online to guage reactions to the article and found a lot of really insightful writing that backed it up. So that was a pretty significant moment in the shaping of my perception of Guevarism. At least in understanding where the staunch leftist opposition to it comes from.
But you were young and idealistic during the time that he was in those jungles, fighting those wars. When he was America's top enemy of the state. Was there ever a time when you romanticized him or saw value in his message? Or were you always slightly skeptical? And, secondly, even though you now warn against the fascistic aspects of his legacy, do you see any value in the message he spread through his speeches about imperialism and creating a better world? Are those just rhetorical or do they have any value for you?
PB: First, the thing I wrote in Slate was not a review , it was a commentary on the cult of Che. I say that because some people trash that as a bad film review, because I reduced the film to a certain kind of politics. But that was always my intention. Did I ever romanticize Che Guevara? No. I was never entranced by Che Guevara. When I was quite young I read something by a Spanish anarchist in exile who wondered why people in the New Left were romanticizing Che when they could be romanticising Durrutti – and I always thought that that was a good point. Maybe for a while I romanticized Durrutti. (Durrutti was the militant leader of the Spanish Anarchists, or the anarcho-syndicalists of the Spanish Civil War. He was a romantic and heroic figure.)
The inspiring lines that you are pointing to by Che, are, I think, the problem with Che. These are the lines that it all boils down to: you should do what the state tells you to do, you should give up your own autonomy and freedom to decide things and you should obey orders. That was the actual meaning of these things. It was Che who militarized the discussion of labor and work in Cuba. If you join an army, you should do it selflessly and be willing to die for your brothers – but if you're a worker there should be other values that come into play. Che is the one who introduced this kind of military language. And I think it's wrong to regard it as inspiring.
Finally, everything I say in that piece in Slate derives from the views of Régis Debray in his book Loués soient nos seigneurs which I wrote about in Power and the Idealists. So when I say these terrible things about Che it's not like I've just invented insults and thrown them at him. I'm actually paraphrasing or drawing on the commentaries of his close comrade, Régis Debray. The other problem with Che is that when people get excited about him, they forget that Cuba had and even now has a fine libertarian and left-wing tradition which was, unlike Che, anti-Stalinist. And actually for the freedom of the workers and for social justice without losing the freedom of the workers. My attitudes on Cuba were again influenced greatly by the Wobblies and the anarchists. One of the first things that happened in Cuba after Che and Fidel took over – in Cuba, the labor movement had been built up in a large degree by the Cuban anarchists or the anarcho-syndicalists who come out of the Spanish tradition. There is an anarchist wing of the left that is different from the Communist wing of the left – and the difference is that the Anarchists are for the rights of the workers themselves not the state. They're for the workers' self-management and for the freedom of the individual and workers' democracy. The anarchists have a picture of a grassroots self-managing socialism which is different from that of a top-down militarily-structured totalitarian state. The anarchists have a very different idea than the Communists.
In Spain in the 1930s the dominant faction of the left of the anti-fascists: the anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists, which is a word that indicates anarchist trade unionists. The largest trade unions in Spain were anarchist oriented. The second largest group of trading unions were socialist oriented, which is to say democratic socialist (the communists were only a small faction in Spain.) The labor movement in Cuba owed a great deal to the labour movement in Spain – the old fashioned movement, pre-Franco – and therefore was libertarian in orientation, anarcho-syndicalist. Some of that had died out by the 1950s – what happened after Fidel and Che took over is that they immediately suppressed the anarchists in Cuba and the anarcho-syndicalists. They shot a lot of those people. And then a lot of those people fled to Venezuela and Argentina and in some cases to Florida. My picture of the Cuban revolution was derived from this wing of the Cuban left. This wing of the Cuban left was pretty much opposed and denounced by almost everybody in the American left except for a few factions who paid attention to them. I was influenced by those factions.
http://www.democratiya.com/interview.asp?issueid=5
>...Alan Johnson: In the 1980s you travelled to Nicaragua to report on the Sandinista Revolution. Did the independence of mind you speak of play a part in your reporting?
Paul Berman: I travelled to Nicaragua many times, beginning in 1985 at the invitation of Mother Jones magazine. I went there with a journalistic idea that drew on the old anarchist notion of workers' autonomy - which was also pretty much the idea that was in vogue on the left in those days amongst the Marxist and Marxist-influenced historians. This was the idea that you could find in the writings of E.P. Thompson, or of Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery and other people in the United States - the idea of writing history from the bottom up, the history of workers' grass-roots movements and organisations, and of trying to get an accurate picture of the mode of production, not just abstractly but with faces and names. I had read pretty widely in these historians, and I went to Nicaragua precisely with the idea of studying the revolution from this point of view.
I spent a lot of time in a provincial town called Masaya, which had been the original home of the revolution against the Somoza dictatorship. Masaya is an industrial town in the eighteenth-century style. Shoe-making is a big industry. I became friends with some of the shoemakers. They had a co-operative, and I studied its history, which led back into the history of Central American Marxism. The shoemakers in Masaya had played their part in the revolution against the old dictatorship. I began to look at events from their point of view - to see the revolution from below. And I found myself in an odd situation.
On the one hand I was writing some of the most classically left-wing journalism (in my own eyes) to come out of Nicaragua – I was talking to workers' organisations and telling the story from their point of view. On the other hand, telling the story from the point of view of the Masaya workers did not put the Sandinistas in a flattering light. It took me a little while to realise that the Sandinistas were running a version of a Leninist revolution and that they had created a thorough system of top-down oppression which descended all the way into the workplace and the cooperatives and the home and the neighbourhood and the school, which was really quite resented by a lot of people – the same people who had been at the forefront of the revolution against the Somoza dictatorship. This was a big story. I suppose I had stumbled onto a Central American Kronstadt.
I was a little timid at first about arriving at conclusions that were at odds with those of so many friends and comrades. But I became more confident. And then I found that I had become very unpopular among a great many people, and this was a little daunting. Then again, I found myself encouraged and cheered on by some of the old Anarchists back in New York. A friend went to see my old Wobbly friend and mentor, Sam Dolgoff, not too long before his death, in the late 1980s. Sam asked about me, and when he was told that I had gone to Nicaragua and was reporting on the Sandinistas, he said, 'He better not come back liking them.'
I also came out of Nicaragua having developed an enormous passion for Nicaraguan literature and Latin American literature more generally, and I have been writing about that, though most of what I've written hasn't been published yet.
-- Michael Pugliese