The Welsh Nicaraguan Solidarity Movement
On first appearances Wales and Nicaragua seem unlikely bedfellows. Wales – part of the UK’s ‘Celtic Fringe’ – a country of rolling green hills, rugby, rain, farming and mining. Nicaragua a central American nation of heat, colour, beaches, rainforest and tourism. But appearances can be deceiving. As the artist Dan Rees highlights the two countries formed an unlikely brotherhood in the 1980s. This was typified by a solidarity based on socialist values in a battle against the neoliberal, conservative, capitalist establishments of the UK and the US respectively. This exclusive ARTUNER insight will contextualize the solidarity between Wales and Nicaragua in greater detail.
Rees grew up near Merthyr Tydfill, a proud industrial town in South Wales. He was initially drawn to Nicaragua having seen a Welsh Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign poster from 1986 in the Merthyr Tydfill Ironworks Museum. This was a group formed in Wales to support theSandinista Revolution underway at the time. The Sandinista’s were a leftist organisation that in 1979, after years of bitter struggle within Nicaragua, had seized control of the country. In 1981, with the swearing in of Ronald Reagan, America’s policy towards Central America shifted drastically. Rather than continuing Jimmy Carter’s attempts to work with the Sandinista’s Reagan instituted a stronger anti-communist approach to Latin America which included isolating the Sandinistas. It is widely believed that in attempting to do this America was funding the Sandinistas opponents, the Contras, who embarked on a series of offensives within Nicaragua. Reagan’s alleged involvement most famously came to the surface through the ‘Iran-Contra affair’ in 1987, which attempted to raise funds to support the Contras through the sale of arms to then embargoed state of Iran. In turn, it is also widely assumed the Sandinistas were receiving aid from the USSR, meaning that Nicaragua effectively became a staging ground for a proxy war between the two main protagonists of the ongoing Cold War: the US and the USSR.
But why did Wales, and in particular the people of Merthyr Tydfill feel a sense of allegiance to their Nicaraguan counterparts?
To answer this question first requires looking back to 1831 and the events of the Merthyr Rising. After years of unrest, brought about by anti-worker moves such as the lowering of wages and the wider onset of unemployment, coal miners took to the streets of Merthyr Tydfill calling for reform. The reformers quickly turned to rioters as they demanded change through violent and criminal action, storming buildings and skirmishing with the British Army, dispatched to try and quell the uprising. But unable to do so the authorities eventually took refuge in a local hotel as between 7,000 and 10,000 workers marched into Merthyr Tydfill under a red flag, the first time the now ubiquitous symbol of left-leaning movements was used, and took control of the town. Eventually order was restored but the events of the Merthyr Rising would go down in history and be remembered by future workers in Wales.
Indeed it is this history that probably paved the way for the formation of the Welsh Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign. In the 1980s Merthyr Tydfill, and Wales in general, was facing a drastic shift in economic fortunes. With the move away from heavy industry instigated by the Thatcher government, traditional industries that the rioters of the Merthyr uprising were employed in were beginning to suffer. These workers though had always been organised into unions designed to protect the rights of individual members through being stronger as a collective. This is an inherently socialist idea and one that continues to this day. The unions, and thus by extension their members, saw the moves by the British government as worrying and potentially dangerous. By removing people’s sole source of income and not providing an alternative they feared there would be wholesale unrest. In the Sandinistas fight against the Contras the members of the Welsh Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign felt a sense of brotherhood. For presumably, if defeated, American ideals of neoliberal, capitalist free markets would have been enforced upon the people of Nicaragua? This is the origin of the solidarity between Wales and Nicaragua and is what Dan Rees examines in the current day.
Rees’ works on Nicaragua and Merthyr Tydfill look at the affect of the disintegration of socialist led institutions. Even though they may, in name, no longer exist Rees highlights the enduring neighbourliness and community spirit apparent in both Wales and Nicaragua. In Boys Sharing Flip-Flops Rees expertly shows brotherhood between the four young boys. They strike the same pose, they wear similar clothes and most importantly, given the title, the two to the left of the composition share a pair of flip-flops, community spirit epitomised. Footwear is referenced in Rees’ other works concerning Merthyr Tydfill and in particular his video piece Merthyr Risingwhere he winds his way through the town to its outskirts and to an Asda superstore, which was reported to have sold 78,000 pairs of white socks to a town with a population of only 55,000. This is, presumably, Rees questioning whether capitalism has made Merthyr Tydfill a better place?
In his works on these two groups of people, two similar, diminished cultures, Rees asks the viewer to consider how our plight might be similar to others around the world. By highlighting the unlikely link between Wales and Nicaragua he shows that people throughout the world are, in the end, the same. They share the same desires, the same hopes. This might make people consider the overarching sense of human brotherhood throughout the world, a consideration that might make it a better place.
