The young men in the photo above are (left to right) Luis and Hector. My wife and I stayed with them and their family for a few days last week, out in the countryside of Nicaragua. We asked our host brothers to show us somewhere cool and they brought us to this cliff (during the rainy season it’s a waterfall). As we walked to the site, Luis and Hector used a slingshot to shoot down fruit from trees. We snacked the whole way there.

When we arrived, we lay down on the rocks, looking out over a lagoon, rested and talked a little politics. I told Luis about an incident that ocurred earlier that day when our group of US citizens visited a cooperative farm (which our host father helped set up after the revolution). One of my fellow North Americans said to a founding member of the Co-op with sarcastic sentimentality,

So, my government was right when they told us you guys were communists. Because everything you’ve been saying so far, today, sounds like communism.

Luis laughed at that, and began talking about other countries that were communist. He mentioned Venezuela and I ventured that I thought Venezuela might be a democracy, and Luis said:

Communism is the same thing as Democracy.

I told Luis that in my country, many people equate capitalism with democracy, and he kind of shook his head and said something like, “that’s not true” or something.

But to explain what he meant by “communism”, I want to talk about the response to the statement made at the co-op. The leader of the Cooperative responded to the allegation of being a communist with the following paraphrase:

Yes, I am a communist. But I am not a communist so much in the political sense. I am a communist because God is a communist. Does God want us to live in constant fighting? Does God want us all to be against each other? No. God wants us all to live together in communion. And that is what we do. That is why I am called a communist.

Remember, these are the guys that Reagan warned us about. And it turns out that, unsurprisingly, people everywhere are really just the same. They want to live their lives on their own terms, in their own way, without anyone telling them otherwise. For many in the United States, this means a capitalist system. But for the family we stayed in, and for many of the other companeros and companeras in the countryside, that freedom to live the way they choose is synonymous with the cooperation and community lifestyle that we happen to define as “communism”.