From Marxist to Classical Liberal

Socialism, like all actions and ideas, ought to be judged by the results in the application of the ideas and policies and not exclusively on their stated intentions.

I was born in Nicaragua, a country with a history of violence and insurrection. Nicaragua was in a state of civil war when my parents shipped me to Montreal in 1979, a move that effectively saved my life. The previous winter, my mother had sent me to stay with friends in Guatemala City, waiting out the violent outburst that the assault on the Legislative Assembly in Managua had brought the previous September of 1978.

A student ID card

I returned to Grade 11 in February, only to be told that I would be leaving again soon. I was not pleased to leave behind my native land, my track and field training, my friends, and my family. I was an adolescent boy with Marxist sympathies. My maternal grandfather, who was a conservative, had given me materials to read from an early age that indisposed me to the Anastasio Somoza regime. Ironically, that same grandfather was married to a distant member of the Somoza family, my grandmother.

As an adolescent, my sympathies lay with the communist Sandinista g…