Human billboard at Super Bowl event

She won’t like it, but what the hell. Let’s start with the question of whether Tanja Winter is a Communist. "Communism is not even relevant!” she protests. “It’s not an issue.” But it’s not as if no one else has ever brought this up before. People write letters to local newspaper editors stating that this sixty-one-year-old La Jolla matron is a Communist. Even Winter admits, "I’ve become notorious in San Diego because [KSDO talk show host) Stacy Taylor red-baits me and calls me a Communist. But that’s not the issue! Whether I’m a Republican or a Democrat or whatever is not the issue. I don’t have to prove my loyalty. I don’t have to prove my purity.”

And I would like to know why the Sandinistas blew up the only synagogue existing in Managua, and why are they so anti-Semitic?" Winter answers, “This is another of those questions that is used to create hatred."

Paul Stachelek

So are you a Communist?

"I’m not a Communist, no. I never was.”

How do you describe your politics?

"My politics are very eclectic."

Would you call yourself a Socialist?

"I would say probably. I think probably for the majority of the people of a country to get the kind of protection and the resources that they need, we probably need some kind of a socialist state, because there are resources people can’t get for themselves. The whole purpose of a government is to provide the services to the people who need it. And I have not seen a capitalist country that provides that."

Tanya Winter at Superbowl table

Communism needs to be studied, Winter insists. “I think we need to understand it. The only thing that Communism means is that it’s an economic system where the government owns and controls the means of production and the wealth. And that's all it means. I mean, Mexico and France and the Scandinavian countries have an enormous amount of their resources controlled by the government, and we don't get apoplectic about that." But people use the label of “Communism" as a weapon. Winter continues. “We have now a philosophy that if you call somebody a Communist, you can kill them. It’s like saying 'nigger.' If it’s a nigger, you can kill him, you can lynch him. It’s okay. Red-baiting is nothing but an attempt to shut people up. When Stacy calls me a Communist, it’s a way of discrediting me. It’s a way of saying, 'Don’t listen to that woman.’ ”

Silence this woman? Preposterous. The one thing you know about Winter after five minutes of talking to her is that she can’t be intimidated. The years seem to have built up her strength, rather than worn her down. Her hair is steel gray, and her gaze is flinty, imperious. Imagine Bea Arthur playing Maude, the one-time crusading television liberal. Winter is a smaller woman than Maude, but her lifelong political activism has been larger, more radical, more revolutionary. “It would be wonderful if in this country we could have some intelligent discussions about revolutions,” Winter says wistfully. “We are so obsessed with the idea that revolutions are something we need to be against that we forget that we came from a revolution ourselves, and we forget there are needs for revolutions " In different stages of history, she asserts, different revolutions become the focal point for mankind.

“For instance, in the beginning of the century, the Russian Revolution was definitely the most important — and it became a lesson and an inspiration. Then came the Chinese Revolution. In spite of all the badmouthing of Mao, I think Mao was one of the great leaders of our time. He was an absolutely incredible man who also had the sense of what was needed and what was right." Revolutionaries in Mozambique and Tanzania learned from the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Winter says. "And the Nicaraguans have a whole new creative idea that’s right for now."

Ah, Nicaragua! The tiny Central American country may be 2500 miles away, but it never long is absent from Winter's comments, from her thoughts. Almost five years ago, she founded the Friends of Nicaraguan Culture, San Diego’s leading pro-Sandinista organization, and ever since then, Nicaragua has been the brightest star in Winter’s constellation of twinkling causes. Every Wednesday night, a dozen or so fellow Sandinista supporters gather in the living room of Winter’s La Jolla Shores home. Less than five minutes from the beach, it’s a serene haven of wood-paneled walls and abundant plants and finely bound art books. Eastern European icons and African sculpture adorn the walls; records and musical tapes are piled high. How does anyone make the spiritual journey from here to the dust and deprivation and bloody war that is Nicaragua? How, in such a place of cultured calm, can anyone summon up the daily discontent to do unrelenting battle against the American system?

Though Winter does, she has no real answer for how or when her vision of utopia and her activism first coalesced. “It seems like to me it’s always been there,” she says with a shrug. Born in France, she spent the first six years of her life in Berlin, the second six in Prague. She was the offspring of Russian Jews and grew up speaking Russian, German, and Czech. Her father supported the family by producing independent feature films, but a few months after Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Tanja and her mother fled to the United States. Before Tanja’s father could join the family, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where several years later he died. That loss, more than any subsequent book, more than any teacher’s words, profoundly affected her. Winter says. “People don’t understand the tragedy of war. It destroys families. But we don’t feel that here because we’ve never really experienced it firsthand.”

While her father’s disappearance and death catalyzed something within her. Winter says her mother never was politically active. The two settled in New York City, and Tanja’s own activism didn't really blossom until after she graduated from Hunter College and married her husband Bernie, a dentist. “He was really a rebel," Winter laughs merrily. “In college, he organized student rallies and strikes." Though the couple soon had three children, domesticity never dampened their ardent radicalism. During the Fifties, the Winters marched for civil rights; by the early Sixties, they were fighting against nuclear testing.

From its inception, the American involvement in Vietnam drew their scorn and protests. In 1974 they heard about a tour being organized by a progressive New York newspaper, and they joined it and thus were among the first Americans to visit China. “For us it was a great adventure,” Tanja says. She was so thrilled by the way in which Chinese Communists had transformed that society that she subsequently chaired the San Diego chapter of the US-China Friendship Association for about two years. (The Winters retired to San Diego in 1975 in the hope that the climate and relaxed lifestyle would benefit Bernie’s heart condition.)

Being a left-wing activist in San Diego “has its positive and its negative aspects,” Tanja reflects today. “It’s really hard to organize here. It’s really difficult to get people to think about the issues.

Life is too easy, too beautiful, too sunny. Everyone is happy and prosperous. You know, when you’re prosperous, you’re just busy making more money. You don’t want to deal with the street people or anybody else."

The presence of the military is another obstacle for die-hard peaceniks here. Winter says. “And the city council people are very conservative. We wanted to organize a sister-city project with Nicaragua, but little things like that are even a struggle to get going." On the other hand, the positive side of moving to San Diego “was that I really felt this was a place where my efforts could make a difference," Winter says. Because there aren’t many activists, “every person that works here for peace and justice has an impact. I have clearly felt that I’ve had an impact, and that feels good.”

By the end of the 1970s, Winter says she was concentrating most of her time and effort on a combination of antinuclear and peace actions. "I was very involved when Sundesert and San Onofre were an issue. And we worked really hard.” Also active in the local United Nations Association, Winter attended a U.N.-sponsored “international women’s conference” in Copenhagen in 1980. She had begun hearing about Nicaragua (since the Sandinistas overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979), but she says she didn’t really know anything much about the country. In 1982 a friend attended a conference organized by women’s groups in Managua, and after that Winter says the idea of visiting Nicaragua settled in the back of her mind. She finally acted upon it in July of 1983 when she traveled to the Nicaraguan capital with two other San Diego women to attend a conference on Central America sponsored in part by the Association of Sandinista Cultural Workers. “I had a feeling that there was something important happening there and that I really needed to know more about it."

Winter says the conference lasted four or five days, after which the 250 participants were shepherded around the countryside for another week or so. “It’s a very small country, you know, so you can see an awful lot in a short time.” At the conclusion of the tour. Winter was bubbling with new-found convictions. “In this country (the United States], we have leadership that is so mediocre. But in Nicaragua, it’s just the opposite. The people who are in the government there are creative, intelligent, committed, hard-working. There are four priests in the government. There are writers. Sergio Ramirez happens to be a novelist.

They’re literate. They’re very politically savvy. They’re creative. They’re a wonderful leadership! These people are very interesting because they are highly educated, privileged people, in the sense that they have had all the benefits of education and so on, but they’re totally committed to the campesinos. It’s so hard to imagine in leadership such as we have here in the United States, where they don’t give a damn about the poor.”

How could she divine so much about the leadership in such a short time? "It’s like Martin Luther King or Gandhi or people who are committed to justice," she bristles. “For instance, ask me. How do I know about Martin Luther King?

You know because you hear what he says, you see what he’s doing, and it’s consistent.”

Winter says her visit to Nicaragua also convinced her of something even more thrilling: that the revolution had worked a fundamental transformation in the Nicaraguan peasantry. “See, people don’t understand what is so exciting about Nicaragua. The excitement is the whole perception that there can be a fundamental change in the way people look at things, a fundamental change in what the priorities are." Winter thinks the revolution inspired "a large minority” of the Nicaraguan populace “to be able to go past their own immediate needs, past their own family concerns, into a greater concern for the community.” She says,

“It gives you the kind of hope for humankind that we don’t get here [in America]. Here we’re cynical. Money is the most important thing. Bower is the most important thing, and people who don’t have it don’t deserve it. That’s essentially the summary of our attitudes. And people like myself and others who go to Nicaragua and see the actual working of a society where the priorities have totally reversed themselves come away feeling very, very inspired.”

Winter was so inspired that she formed the Friends of Nicaraguan Culture. She says one of the group’s goals has been to help San Diegans visit Nicaragua (both by providing information about and organizing tours), and to date several hundred Southern Californians have made the pilgrimage through them. (Winter herself has returned three times, in 1984, 1986, and 1987.) Winter’s group also has raised “tens of thousands of dollars” in “material aid.” She says although the priority of the Sandinistas has always been “to provide for the needs of the people,” the war against the American-backed contras has devastated the economy and caused tremendous physical damage. “We raise money and buy medical supplies and school supplies.” But Winter says her organization’s most urgent aim is "to provide alternative information to people about Nicaragua. There is a lot of information available. It’s just that people don’t have access to it.”

A few days before Super Bowl Sunday last January, Winter and her cohorts thus were plotting an offbeat attempt to provide America with some of that access. They had decided to form a “human billboard” near the entrance to the San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, displaying several giant signs that would urge a “no" vote on the upcoming Congressional decision over contra aid. Thousands of journalists from around the country would be covering the football game, right? Ollie North had supposedly given the Redskins a pep talk, so an anti-contra demonstration might catch the media’s fancy, right? “I don’t know if it’s gonna work,” Winter said with a nervous giggle. "But we’re going to try it.”

So it was that while many San Diegans were still sleeping off the effects of Saturday night’s Super Bowl celebrations, a small band of the Friends of Nicaraguan Culture had already gathered in a section of the Fashion Valley shopping center parking lot near Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor. By 8:45 a.m.. Winter waved good-bye to one van carrying nine people armed both with giant red-and-white banners (“Say No to Contra Aid”) and smaller posters (“Honk for Peace in Nicaragua”). A second van, provided by the Rebel Bakers of Ocean Beach, began loading another group of demonstrators, and another matronly Friends member, Barbara Davis, cautioned, “Remember, we’re not talking to the people (entering the stadium]. It’s a silent vigil. Just hold your tongues.” Winter added briskly, "Just smile.”

Davis and Winter pored over a large cardboard map that Davis had drawn up, showing the stadium, all the feeder roads around it, and detailed notes on the surrounding topography. Davis and Winter both were assuming that within a few hours traffic would so clog the stadium approaches that all the demonstrators would be temporarily marooned. So Winter fretted about making sure that the ingoing groups carried with them adequate supplies of food and water. She nagged this person and that, and she couldn't seem to stand still. Now and then she would bark out suggestions like some pushy, overanxious mother. “Tell them not to drink too much water,” she ordered someone. “They’ll have to go to the bathroom!”

As one of the chief organizers of the event. Winter decided that she herself would stay in the base camp at the shopping center, rather than wielding a sign at the stadium. Throughout the morning, more Friends would trickle into the parking lot, and soon a rhythm developed: political chitchat interrupted by minor logistical crises. Someone asked whether anyone had heard how native Americans were talking about staging a protest over use of the “Redskins” name. “I have a suggestion,” Davis said. “They [the football team] should change their name to the Rednecks.” Appreciative chortles all around. “I have a question," interposed one pretty young woman dressed in a white surgical coat covered with handlettering. “Why aren’t we going to be chanting?”

Davis replied, “First, we don’t want to start any fights. Most of them [the Super Bowl attendees] are drunk. Also, they’re thinking too much about the game. We figure the longer we can stay there, the better.”

A shopping center security guard drove up. Though he smiled and asked pleasant questions, tension flooded the group like an injection of adrenalin. Winter was veteran of enough demonstrations to feel confident that the law allowed the group to gather here, and the security guard didn’t suggest otherwise. Yet when his assistant nonetheless began writing down license plate numbers and photographing those assembled, one angry young woman complained. “What do they do with that stuff?” she asked. Winter grimly agreed, “It is an act of intimidation. For some reason, it’s so threatening to people. I mean, all we’re doing is making a statement. After all, we’re working for peace!”

Despite her fresh indignation. Winter is used to the surveillance. She says she has become so accustomed to the presence of undercover police that she now routinely photographs them. (“They don’t like that," she grins.) For all her years of marching and protesting, Winter has only been arrested twice, both times intentionally (once during a sit-in at Congressman Bill Lowery’s office, and again last Mother’s Day at a nuclear test site in Nevada). She says another interesting incident occurred once when she and her husband were picketing in support of striking air traffic controllers, and a plainclothesman started questioning her so closely that “I thought it indicated they’d been spying on me.”

By 11:00 a.m., the security guards had left and Davis called out to a small coterie of supporters, “Come on, come on! We’re planning our next action.” Congress would begin voting on contra aid in two days, and the Friends thought it might be nice to station people at various freeway overpasses during the rush hour on that day. “We’re thinking of the Laurel Street bridge over 163, but when they chase us from there, where can we go that’s close?” When the planning shifted farther north, Winter volunteered, “I could probably get the UCSD students to do that area on La Jolla Village Drive.”

“I’m just so mad about Ortega and the pope,” she snapped a few minutes later, referring to the recent meeting between the Nicaraguan leader and the pontiff. “The pope was very nasty,” Winter declared. “He embraced Pinochet. He embraced Waldheim. But Ortega, no!” She suddenly spotted another volunteer and told him she had saved for him a current article from the Nation magazine. “It’s all about the terrible media distortion under [British Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher!”

By 1:30 high-spirited demonstrators had begun to return to the parking lot.

Despite scattered derisive comments and much less traffic than anticipated, the demonstrators agreed that the signholding had gone well. “I’m very pleased," Winter said warmly. But two weeks later, she had changed her mind.

"I think it had very little impact. I was very disappointed,” she said grumpily. "I mean, I'm glad we did it. You always do all of these things, and you don’t worry about them afterwards.” But only one news report, on Channel 8 television, even mentioned the demonstration. As if the dearth of media attention weren’t offensive enough. Winter said the Channel 8 reporter "had the audacity to say that there were people demonstrating for and against the contras ” when in fact no contra supporters were there. “That teaches you a lot,” Winter added sourly.

Actually, Winter has already made up her mind about the American mass media. “The media is getting more and more controlled by the same people,” she rails. “And they simply don’t want to allow the American public to hear the message." She thinks part of the problem is that “the people who have been in control have done their damnedest to mystify this whole thing, make it sound so complicated, like it’s really too complicated for the rest of us to figure out. And I don’t believe that. I think things are really quite clear. To me it all seems so simple.”

She says, “In a really healthy society, so many services would be provided either free or at little cost. For instance, housing, education, health, the basic needs would be so easily met that you wouldn’t have to have a lot of money. The money would be for luxuries. The basic necessities should be provided for everybody.”

But who will provide that?

“The government! I mean, that’s what governments are for. The whole purpose of government is to provide what individuals cannot provide.”

But doesn't the government have to get it from somewhere?

“The money’s there! Look, $300 billion a year is going for weapons. We’re the richest country in the world. We don’t have a problem with money.” Should we be spending any money on defense at all?

“The best defense is a strong United Nations, a willingness to negotiate conflicts.”

And you believe you can always resolve conflicts?

“You could always resolve conflicts or you can take some measures to disarm someone. Every war that is ever waged ends in some kind of negotiated peace. Why can’t we have that negotiated peace in the beginning?”

What about Hitler?

“It needed to be stopped before it happened. It was the compliance of other nations that allowed him to continue what he was doing. I think there were warnings. He wrote the book about what he was going to do! Partially, it happened because we allowed in this world the rise of a society that was based on hatred and the idea of a super race.”

We allowed that in what sense?

“Well, we turned our heads, and we didn’t pay any attention."

What would you have had them do? March in and take over Germany?

“Well, I think the League of Nations was one thing that we didn’t support. I think we have to have some strong international structure. Maybe a world body of some kind that can take some action. I don’t know exactly in detail. But I do know that every war has ended in negotiations. I think Hitler probably could have been stopped a hundred times along the way somewhere. Also, after World War I, Germany was beaten down and economically distressed. They weren’t helped in any way. and that’s what gave rise to Hitler. The main problem is we never try to solve the basic problems.

“One of the great needs of civilization today is creativity,” Winter declares. But to foster that, she thinks people have to work less than they do now. “People shouldn’t have to work eight hours a day. Especially not in our day and age, when it isn’t necessary anymore. I think if people worked six hours a day, it would be plenty. Then they would have more time to think and do more creative things.”

Would you trade off a lowering of the GNP for that?

“You don’t have to. Because as a matter of fact, that’s one of the reasons we have unemployment. Now with the advance in our technology, people don’t have to work eight hours a day.”

So why do they?

"I think that in Europe, they’re already talking about cutting down the week to thirty-five hours. See, they’re making more profit. The corporations are making more profit because they have more automation. Computers and all that stuff. They can do the work in half the time. There’s no reason for them to make any less money. We just assume that if somebody works two hours less a day that they have to make less money. But if they can get the same work done in six hours instead of eight, why should they be there eight hours?”

Although Winter doesn’t work for a living, she says not a day passes that she doesn't devote time to some political cause or other. Within the last few years, she’s become busier than ever (her husband died two years ago), and now Winter estimates that all her activism adds up at least to a thirty-hour week. “I really recommend it to people," she adds. “It makes you feel that you're contributing something. It gives you some purpose in your life. And I feel we owe something to the rest of the world. We’ve been ripping the world off for the best part of our lives."

So she stuffs envelopes, mailing anti-contra diatribes to a select mailing list. She organizes speakers, films, benefit concerts. But not all the effort is directed at Nicaragua. This month, for instance. Winter will join other nuclear protesters in Nevada again. Another current project has her programming political films (“anything relating to preserving the earth and justice and peace") on three

local cable television stations that are providing two half-hour slots for the alternative fare. “Eventually, we want to publish our own alternative TV guide," Winter declares.

And once in a while, only very occasionally, she agrees to participate in a debate. “Ordinarily, I don't like debates because of the name-calling and red-baiting that goes on among right-wings." But one recent Friday morning. Winter headed for a class of high school students at La Jolla Country Day School. One of the political science teachers at the private facility decided to immerse her class in the controversy surrounding Nicaragua, and both Winter and a local contra supporter had already appeared, on separate occasions, to present their sides. On this climactic morning. Winter had agreed to face off against a different pro-contra speaker. “What can I lose?" Winter said beforehand. “If I find that it's impossible. I'll simply tell the kids to remember that the main strategy of the Reagan administration right now is a propaganda war against the American public.”

If you are going to battle for the hearts and minds of young people. La Jolla Country Day School is an inspiring place to do it. The campus reeks of affluence: beautiful grounds, gleaming facilities.

The young people who stream into the classroom where the debate will be held are clear-eyed and well mannered and so perfectly groomed that you could plop the lot of them into a Pepsi commercial without touching a hair; it’s already been blown dry and gelled into place. Gold jewelry and expensive footwear abound, and yet somehow they look merely accessory to the shining, intelligent faces. When the teacher introduces the two debate opponents, the class looks rapt with curiosity and attention.

They’ve already been introduced to the grandmotherly defender of the Marxists. Speaking up for the contras is a tall, good-looking young man named Chris Alario, who was referred to the teacher by the local Republican Party. In his introduction, Alario says he’s not working for the GOP. He tells the group he was first invited to visit some of the contra camps in 1985, while he was a junior at UCSD and running a conservative publication there called the California Review. He graduated in 1986 and since then has become so taken by the resistance movement that he decided to work — as an unpaid volunteer, he insists — for the contras. “I am part of a large and growing support network attempting to build support for the resistance in the United States.”

For maybe ten minutes, he talks in a low-key, unvarnished manner, and he makes some disarming admissions. Somoza was corrupt and a dictator and he needed to go, Alario concedes. Also, “there was a lot of truth to allegations” that the original contras were a band of former Somozistas, who committed some human rights atrocities. But as the Sandinistas consolidated their power, the resistance grew, and eighty percent of the contra ranks now are made up of campesinos who’ve grown disgusted with the new regime. Alario attacks that regime not so much for its Marxist principles but for its incompetent management, which (along with the war) has made a shambles of the economy.

The Sandinistas' acceptance of a billion dollars in aid from the Soviets and Cubans makes Nicaragua a de facto part of the Soviet empire, while the contras now “stand on one principle,” Alario contends — that is, “living up to the promises of the 1979 [Sandinista] revolution” — a mixed economy, protection for human rights, and a nonaligned foreign policy.

All of this irritates Winter, but she controls most of that emotion as she launches into a rebuttal. She says, “I didn’t hear anything to justify the murder of 25,000 people by the contras,” and she calls the assertion that the Sandinistas didn’t live up to their revolutionary promises “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard of.” The Sandinistas have eliminated the death penalty, she points out; now thirty years in prison is the country’s stiffest penalty. Winter starts ranging far and wide, as if there’s just too much ground to cover in too little time: the American press is seriously distorting the truth....the contras are massacring innocent civilzns....contra aid violates dozens of American laws....the contra war, not the Sandinista revolution, drove hordes of refugees out of Nicaragua.

When she concludes, you can almost read the discouragement on some of the students’ faces. Presented with two equally dry piles of facts, who can say which is the truth? But there’s life in this group yet. The first student questioner asks about the controversial Nicaraguan elections of 1984, in which the Sandinistas garnered sixty-seven percent of the vote. Alario’s response is to question how those elections can be described as “free" when the Sandinistas control the army, nineteen out of twenty radio stations, all the television stations, and “neighborhood defense committees" that dole out ration cards, medical treatment, job applications, and other essentials of life. Besides the army, the Sandinistas also have a secret police, Alario charges.

“The Nicaraguan army is really a people’s army!’’ Winters cries out in response. “It’s an army that you don’t feel at all threatened by.” The elections were the most democratic and most scrupulously adhered to in all of Latin America, she asserts, which causes Alario once again to point out the political and economic context in which they were held. The contras are calling for truly free elections, he says. Winter yells back, "They had free elections, and they didn't get any representation. That’s a fact! That’s a fact!”

Winter is growing increasingly agitated, a state that drives up the pitch of her voice and speeds the pace of her words. She’s really edgy; everyone in the room can feel it, while Alario remains polite, calm, mild-mannered, and the angrier Winter grows, the more the students seem subtly to turn against her. One girl asks if it’s true that the Sandinistas were teaching children to add and subtract with the use of hand grenades. “Well, I think there was a time when they had children’s readers where they had pictures of some of the military stuff that you mentioned," Winter answers. “I don’t particularly like that. But I think you have to understand the context. When a country’s at war, it’s their reality.”

Another girl asks more pointedly about Sandinista censorship of certain Roman Catholic leaders, and Winter fires back that the Nicaraguan cardinal has been using his position to attack the Sandinistas politically. “I will say that any country at war, whether it’s the United States or anyone, has always during wartime had a right to restrict freedom of the press.... When we had World War II, we sent the Japanese to concentration camps, we shut down all the German newspapers, we wouldn’t tolerate a church in this country that was preaching Nazism when we were at war with Germany."

“That is not true,” a young woman challenges Winter evenly. “The Ku Klux Klan existed —"

“Not during World War II," Winter interrupts.

"Yes. during World War II," the young woman says confidently. “And also there were many neo-Nazi movements. And I would like to know why the Sandinistas blew up the only synagogue existing in Managua, and why are they so anti-Semitic?"

Winter answers, “This is another of those questions that is used to create hatred. The people who bring it up are always the ones who don’t give a damn about minorities in the first place."

Sidelong glances flash through the room, and the young woman emits a tone of outrage. “I am a minority,” she declares, as her classmates erupt in nervous laughter.

“But why did you hear about it in the first place?" Winter retorts. “Because someone told you that. It didn't come out of your own head."

“But is it true?" the girl challenges. "I just want to know if the Sandinistas did stone a rabbi to death, an eighty-four-year-old man."

“The Jews left when Somoza left," Winter says. “Nobody was driven out of the country. There is no anti-Semitism —" She’s drawing open guffaws now and interjects, “Wait a minute! I’m Jewish, so you’re talking to the wrong person."

But the testiest exchange of all is initiated by a slight, very earnest young man, who asks Winter about the arrest by the Sandinista government of Social Christian leaders after a public rally. Within moments. Winter is openly shouting at the boy. “A few fat cats lost what they had and they want it back! That’s what the whole struggle is about!"

“The contra forces are the people of Nicaragua," he yells back.

"No, they’re not!”

“Yes, they are!" a chorus of youthful voices tells Winter.

The boy adds, "You'll have to show me some evidence," and Alario interjects calmly, “I’ll show you some evidence." Applause for the contra defender erupts.

As a final comment, Alario recommends to the students a book that he describes as “sort of a primer,” called Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family by a New York Times reporter named Shirley Christian.

"I think she works for the CIA,” Winter says venomously.

“Oh yeah."

“She does!" Winter snaps.

“Yeah, she’s on the payroll," says Alario, his words laden with sarcasm.

Although the teacher dismisses the class, the tension is running so high that more than a dozen students surround Winter, who is shrieking, “I cannot beliee this!" She pleads with the young people, “Don’t you understand this? That it affects you and your future? You may go down there and wind up in a body bag! Try, just a little bit, to open your minds to another perspective, other than what you know."

When she finally extricates herself from the students, she mutters. "Creepy! That’s the hardest thing of all, to see young people already set in their ways." But within moments, some of the humor that deserted her so completely begins to return. "At least I survived," she says wryly. "And you have to do things like that once in a while.”

Winter says she’s both more optimistic and more pessimistic now than she’s ever been before in her life. “I’m pessimistic because of the incredible amount of power held by people whose motives and commitment are to continuing their power at any cost — and who have this unbelievable ability to manipulate information. That is our greatest challenge, to somehow be able to get the information out. The battle is clearly over information. The battle against the American public is for their minds; to create a population that is full of fear and hatred for other ideas, for other systems, for other people."

At the same time, Winter says, "History is on our side. If we survive long enough, it has to change. Because what we’re dealing with here is the death throes of a system that isn’t working anymore. And probably we will be the last country to change, because we have the most powerful institutions. We’ve done the best job of living under the system. So it’s going to be the hardest to change here.”