It’s
not difficult to imagine Arnold Matlin as a pediatrician, the profession from
which he recently retired after 33 years. With his restless energy and jovial
demeanor, it’s easy to picture him being as gentle as possible when a shot is
necessary or coaxing infants to stick out their tongues.
But
there’s more to a person than his profession. Matlin, called Arnie by his
friends, loves attending Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and watching
figure-skating competitions. And in the basement of his Avon home he’s got one
of the most elaborate electric train sets you’ll find in Western New York.
There’s
one other thing: In Nicaragua, Matlin has recently been declared a “Hero of the
Revolution.”
He
is the only United States citizen ever to have received this medal, the
Sandinistas’ highest honor.
No,
Matlin did not have a secret life as a revolutionary fighter. The battles he’s
waged have been fights to provide better health care and education in one of
the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere. Since 1988, Matlin, his wife
Margaret, and his two grown daughters have given far more than money to the Nicaraguan
people. He and his family have been instrumental in bolstering health clinics,
building a school, and providing scholarships to educate nurses.
In
the town of El Sauce, Nicaragua, Matlin is indeed a hero. He was instrumental
in Rochester’s adoption of the town by way of a Sister Cities program (it’s
official in Nicaragua, unofficial in Rochester) and has helped its people in a
variety of ways. But it’s his motivation for all of this that may be the most
fascinating aspect of his generosity.
“I
make a lot of speeches in Nicaragua,” Matlin says, “and every single time I
say, ‘Don’t think I don’t realize that the reason you need this help so much
more is because of what my government did to your government.’ Everybody who
works in Nicaraguan solidarity feels the same way. We did terrible things to
them. Fifty thousand people died in the Contra war, including Sandinistas and
Contras. They’re Nicaraguans too.”
The
Matlin family founded the Servicio Infantil Rural “La Norita,” a Head-Start
style program that gives 30 pre-school children per year a leg up on their
education. Matlin, who will give a talk on Nicaragua next Tuesday, April 5, at
SUNY Geneseo, won’t reveal how much his family has spent on the program. But he
will admit that the cost is well into five figures. The center, which employs
two teachers, a gardener, a watchman, and a cook, has run smoothly since 1990.
And it recently occupied a new state-of-the-art building paid for by the
Japanese government.
“It’s
the best example of ‘stone soup’ I’ve ever seen,” Matlin says. “The mayor
wanted to give the land to us. We didn’t want the land; it’s not our turf, so a
non-profit organization took the land. The woman who runs it went to the
Japanese Embassy and asked if they wanted to build a school. Formal plans cost
$1,000. That’s a lot of money in Nicaragua. We had $1,000. The building cost
$50,000, and it’s going to last forever.”
At
least one member of the Matlin family visits the school once a year.
The
center was actually the idea of Matlin’s older daughter, Beth, a kindergarten
teacher in Boston. Matlin’s wife and his younger daughter, Sally, a bilingual
advocate for female victims of domestic violence in Oakland, California, have
also been deeply involved in Nicaraguan projects.
Matlin
has helped in health care by giving medical lectures and bringing supplies. But
perhaps his family’s longest lasting contributions will be the fruits of the
tuition scholarships they’ve provided for students in nursing school.
“They
don’t want air conditioning. They’re not asking for a Hummer,” he says. “They
want to be able to go from practical nurse to registered nurse or from
registered nurse to a bachelor’s degree. It’s very reasonable.”
Matlin
believes it’s important not to impose aid on people; he says the community
itself must be involved.
“You
go down and talk to the people and ask, ‘Do you want to build a community
center? Will you help build it? Do you want to have a well? Do you want to
raise chickens? Do you want to raise cows?'”
Raising
cows is so significant that the website of Ciudad Hermana, the Sister City task
force of Rochester’s Metro Justice, is called PregnantCow.com. On the site,
potential donors have a variety of choices. Among them: $25 purchases three
chickens or a rooster, $100 will purchase two goats, $500 will purchase a
pregnant cow. That last item is not only a practical commodity, it’s a fitting
metaphor for gifts that keep on giving.
“You
buy the cow and you get the calf also, because the cow’s been inseminated,”
Matlin says. “You get a loan, you’ve got to give it back to the next person.
They call it a rotating or revolving loan. That’s the better way to do
charitable work, in my opinion.”
With American
troops in Iraq, turmoil in the Middle East, and power struggles in former Soviet
Republics dominating the international news, Nicaragua may be just another
country on the map. But during the 1980s, Nicaragua was near the top of the
United States’ foreign-policy obsessions.
In
1979, the Sandinistas (a revolutionary group named for liberal leader Augusto
Sandino, who was murdered by right-wing forces in 1934) overthrew Nicaraguan
dictator Anastasio Samosa. During his presidency, Ronald Reagan did everything
he could to defeat the Sandinistas, including an economic embargo and aid to
opposition fighters. With the Cold War raging, the rationale involved keeping
Leftist governments out of the United States’ sphere of influence in Central
America.
This
policy led to one of the most egregious abuses of power in US history. In what
became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, the Reagan Administration sold weapons
to Iran (a country that was our enemy at the time) to illegally fund the Contra
rebels who were fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government.
“Why
did the US want to do that?” asks Matlin. “It was the threat of a good example.
If the Nicaraguans had taken over their own destiny and they were acting as a
sovereign nation where people counted and it was working, the US couldn’t stand
that. That’s not what we wanted.”
The
Sandinistas were finally defeated at the polls in 1990 and, despite repeated
efforts by former president Daniel Ortega to win back the presidency, the
Sandinistas have remained out of power on a national level since then. They
have, however, gained recent footholds in local elections.
Matlin
has ideas about why the Sandinista government could not survive US pressure.
“The
embargo just broke the country’s economy,” he says. “Anybody who says the
Sandinistas made economic mistakes… the answer is there was an embargo. They
were trying to run a country and build a revolutionary country and at the
height of the Contra War. Fifty Nicaraguans a day were dying. We’re talking
about serious problems here. We’ll never know how well the Sandinistas would
have done. I’ve heard economists say the Sandinistas were doing very well. The
revolution was taking hold.
“I
am not this super-sophisticated guy sitting here in his nice pleasant home
that’s heated in the winter and air-conditioned in the summer and saying ‘Well,
of course, the Sandinistas made mistakes,'” Matlin says. “I think the
Sandinistas did great. They were brilliant in being able to overthrow Samosa,
who was a bloody US-supported dictator. They were brilliant in being able to
keep things together for 11 years despite all these attacks by proxy with the
Contras and all of the economic attacks by the United States.
Matlin
believes that if the Nicaraguans had been left alone they’d still be the
government of Nicaragua and Nicaragua would be a far better place. He doesn’t
believe the question even has two sides. “I think the US was absolutely wrong
in this. It was a terrible, evil thing we did, and we got away with it.”
But
Matlin also believes that if the Sandinista government had not been defeated,
the US would have taken even stronger action. He points to Cold War-era
military exercises on Honduras right across the Nicaraguan border and says the
lesson was not lost on the Nicaraguans: The US can invade if it wants to.
“Frankly,
I think that was on the table a lot — a direct, US-armed military invasion of
Nicaragua,” he says. “I think it was considered many times. I think the fact
that 100,000 very vocal people — doctors, teachers, union leaders, ministers
— went down to Nicaragua, came back, and started to give lectures to the
Rotary and to Kiwanis and their professional organizations and whoever else
would listen kept that from happening.”
Matlin is not
ready to say all of that is in the past. He believes the United States may not be
finished interfering in Nicaraguan politics.
He
points to a February 24 column by Robert Novak titled “Sandinistas again
creating problems in our backyard,” published in newspapers throughout the
country (but not in Rochester). Novak warns that the Sandinistas are slipping
back into power in Nicaragua. He brings up the fact that Hugo Chavez, a Marxist
who was elected president of Venezuela, is “spreading his ‘Bolivarian
Revolution’ throughout the region.”
It’s
no coincidence that Novak, considered by many to be a thinly veiled mouthpiece
for Republicans and the Conservative movement, is signaling a need for renewed
US interference in Nicaragua, Matlin says.
“Novak
is preparing us that we might have to do it.”
Matlin
is also circulating a letter titled “Tell the US State Department hands off
Nicaragua!”
In
it he notes that Dan Fisk, US deputy assistant secretary of state, traveled to
Nicaragua last November 4 to consult with political leaders on what he referred
to as “democratic forces.” By this, Matlin says, Fisk meant right-wing
Nicaraguan political parties.
Matlin
points to the fact that last year the Sandinistas won a large victory in
municipal elections. He believes that Fisk visited Nicaragua to make sure the
right-wing forces create a unified front to prevent the Sandinistas from
regaining power.
Matlin
may be reading the zeitgeist correctly. A New
York Times article on March 21, titled “US suspends military aid to
Nicaragua,” discusses “rising tensions” over shoulder-launched antiaircraft
missiles that the Nicaraguan Army has failed to destroy. The next day, in “The
return of Latin America’s Left,” a Times op-ed column, Alvaro Vargas Llosa (a senior fellow at the Independent Institute
and the author of Liberty for Latin
America), noted the growing trend toward Socialist governments in the
region.
If
the US decides to take action, Matlin worries that the American public has
become more docile in relation to our government’s foreign policy.
“If
anything, I think now the situation is worse than it was because now we don’t
have covert invasions. We just interfere overtly and lie about it,” he says.
“The Iran-Contra scandal — if it happened in 2005 — wouldn’t be a scandal.
Everybody would just applaud. We don’t have the sense of outrage anymore.
People were outraged about selling weapons to the Iranian government. I don’t
know if they were outraged because we sold them to Iran or by the fact that
this was an absolute, direct way to get around the will of Congress, which
after all represents the American people. And Congress said, with the Boland
Amendment, you can’t send any aid to the Contras.”
Matlin owes
his political outlook to his stint in the US Army. He was drafted in 1968, while
he was in the middle of his medical residency at the University of Michigan.
“I
always had strong feelings that things weren’t right in the world and could be
made better, but I didn’t act on them in a political way until I got drafted
into the Medical Corps,” he says.
In
1969, Matlin and his wife felt strongly enough about the Vietnam War that they
got on a bus near his Ft. Hamilton base and went to an anti-war mobilization in
Washington DC. When he returned, he joined the group that founded the Staten
Island Peace Coalition.
“I
went to the meeting. Everybody’s going around the room — ‘I’m a social
worker,’ ‘I’m a labor organizer.’ I said, ‘I’m an Army Captain.’ I remember
Arlo Guthrie and the others; they all slid away from me on the bench.”
Matlin
was not deterred.
“The
Army radicalized me,” he says. “By the time I got out of the Army I was so
furious with what was going on in Vietnam, I have never forgotten it. I have
never slacked off since then. They probably should never have drafted me. I was
a good doctor, I took care of the kids to the best of my ability, but I’ve
given the military establishment a lot of trouble between then and now.”
When
Matlin left the Army, he did the final year of his residency at Strong Memorial
Hospital and decided to settle in the area.
He
moved to Livingston County and found there was no local peace group, so he, his
wife, and two other couples formed Genesee Valley Citizens for Peace in 1972.
After 33 years the group is still active, meeting once a month in members’
homes.
In 1988, while
attending a demonstration outside the Federal Building in Rochester, Matlin was asked by
local activist Henrietta Levine if he would like to go to Nicaragua. He said
yes and embarked on the first of his 21 trips to the nation.
“This
was a poor country that had a revolution, and the revolution succeeded,” he
says. “The government cared about its people — poor people. The Sandinistas
had an outstanding health system. The Nicaraguan constitution says that health
care is the right of the people and the responsibility of the government. Our
constitution doesn’t say that. We don’t have any laws that say that either. So
that’s why I bonded to Nicaragua.”
Over
the decades Genesee Valley Citizens for Peace has had plenty of wars to
consider, including Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But Matlin
says he is not a pacifist.
“For
example, I think the only way to overthrow the Samosa dictatorship was by an
armed revolution,” he says. “I think there are wars that are justified, I just
haven’t seen one since I’ve been old enough to recognize one. I have yet to see
a war in which we’ve been involved that couldn’t have been avoided by peaceful
means.”
When
pressed, he agrees that situations of “ethnic cleansing” — like recent events
in Kosovo and Rwanda — may be examples that would justify military action.
“I’m
not saying there are not times that you need combat or wars,” Matlin says. “I’m
saying that nowhere in Central America have we been the least bit justified. We
picked the side of repression and oppression and we ignored the will of the
people. Why do you think they had those revolutions? They had those revolutions
because the situation was so bad.”
As
for the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq:
“The
Genesee Valley Citizens for Peace talk about hardly anything else,” he says.
“In terms of Afghanistan, we take the position that we shouldn’t have destroyed
a whole country because we were looking for Osama bin Ladin; we should have
been concentrating on finding Osama bin Ladin.
“If
the reasons given to invade Iraq were the reasons we invaded Iraq, they were
wrong,” Matlin says. “So why are we there? I don’t see anything positive to be
said about Iraq. I think it was blatant aggression, but my expertise doesn’t
extend to every armed conflict. As far as the solutions to the problems that
face the world, I don’t pretend to have them. But I know the US should keep its
hands off the Nicaraguan elections.”
Meanwhile,
Matlin’s work continues. He set up a program at the University of Rochester, where
he’s on the faculty. The school sends senior medical students for four-month
rotations in El Sauce. Three of them will be leaving for Nicaragua at the end
of March.
He’s
also organized a delegation to visit Nicaragua this spring. Everyone who goes
will be traveling light.
“The
saying has always been ‘you take one suitcase for yourself and one suitcase for
the Nicaraguans.’ Sometimes we take school supplies. I take surgical gloves,
bandages, Band-Aids, gauze, and basic medicines like Penicillin and Digitalis.”
Despite
his retirement from pediatrics, Matlin remains active as a doctor, teacher, and
consultant. But he has more time for other interests. He’s studying Renaissance
Art History at SUNY Geneseo, where his wife is a professor of psychology. He’s
also had more time to travel and explore museums, churches, and cathedrals.
During a recent stay in London, he and his wife “lived in the National
Gallery.”
But
he remains most passionately interested in the people of Nicaragua. Does he see
himself as a role model?
“Here’s
what my motto would be: If you’re fortunate enough not to need help, you should
help people who are unfortunate enough to need help,” Matlin says. “That’s a
basic rule that I think goes for everybody everywhere. It isn’t whether you’re
rich or poor, it’s whether you want to help or not.”
Nicaragua:
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, a talk by Arnie Matlin, takes place
at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 5, room 201, Newton Hall, SUNY Geneseo.
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2005.
