The Jaguar Smile (4 page)

The road to Camoapa was made of brick, like many roads in Nicaragua. Somoza used to own a brick factory. After the ’72 earthquake he insisted that the nation’s thoroughfares be reconstructed in Presidential bricks, which he then sold to the nation at high prices. ‘But we discovered that the bricks were also very easy to lever up,’ Luis Carrión told me contentedly, ‘so that during the insurrection years we were often able to stop his convoys quite easily, thanks to his own brick roads.’ Carrión looked too young to be running a country. Nicaragua made ‘young novelists’ of thirty-nine years feel antique. At least Sergio Ramírez was a few years older than me. Then again, he made me feel short.

I asked Ramírez about the recent pronouncements on Nicaragua by the famous Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, in the
New York Times
and elsewhere. ‘His positions have moved so far to the right these days that I wasn’t surprised by his criticisms,’ Ramírez said. What, then, did he think of Vargas Llosa’s suggestion that the people who merited the West’s support in Nicaragua were neither the Contra nor the FSLN, but the
anti-Sandinista democratic Nicaraguans
, who might even now be a majority? Carrión and Ramírez both laughed. ‘There’s no such majority,’ Ramírez said. ‘Let me know if you locate it.’

Vargas Llosa also hinted that the Sandinistas were a Soviet-style state in disguise; that the various nods in the direction of a mixed economy and a pluralistic democracy were no more than window dressing; and that, in fact, the FSLN was being obliged to preserve such things precisely on account of the pressure from outside. (Though, of course, he hastened to add that he did not support the Contra.)

Ramírez seemed genuinely annoyed by this suggestion. If it weren’t for the war, he said, much more power could be given to the people than a state of emergency permitted; that is, peace would mean more democracy, not less. ‘We have the right to self-determination. Our internal structures are nobody’s business but our own.’

‘But,’ I suggested, ‘now that the $100 million for the Contra has been approved, other people have made it their business, haven’t they?’

Luis Carrión replied. ‘The hundred million is not the point. The counter-revolution is not the real threat.’ His view was that the Contra army had effectively been defeated. ‘These days they try hard to avoid meeting us in direct combat, because of their heavy losses. They concentrate instead on terrorist acts, aimed at the civilian population, and at damaging production. We expect more of these now. We expect they
will try something in the cities, even in Managua, now that they have the extra money; but we are prepared. They also have a major problem of recruitment and morale. Their numbers have fallen by several thousand in the past two years. No: the real threat is the CIA.’

Ah yes,
la Cia
. My reflex reaction to the Agency’s entry into the conversation was simultaneously Eastern and Western. The Western voice inside me, the voice that was fed up with cloaks and daggers and conspiracy theories, muttered, ‘not them again’. The Eastern voice, however, understood that the CIA really did exist, was powerful, and although it was easy to make it a scapegoat, it was also just a bit too jaded, too cynical, to discount its power.

The CIA operated in Central America through what it charmingly referred to as UCLAs: Unilaterally Controlled Latino Assets. Now that it was to be permitted to resume overt operations, those Assets would be going to work with a will. Conservative estimates of the CIA’s planned 1986–87 budget against Nicaragua suggested a figure somewhere in the near vicinity of $400 million – four times the aid allocated to the Contra forces. Add to that the $300 million being spent by the Reagan administration to try and ‘buy off’ Nicaragua’s neighbours, and you had a grand total of $800 million being spent on dirty tricks and destabilization, to bring to heel a country of under three million people.

(The total amount of money raised by the Band Aid, Sport Aid and Live Aid events, just to offer some sort of comparison, was less than a quarter of this figure.)

It was the CIA that had mined the harbour at Corinto, and in the face of overt operations like that, the Nicaraguan government would face real problems. Carrión said, ‘Against such aggression, there is simply not much we can do. We lack the resources.’

Carrión believed that when Reagan realized the Contra would never do the job for him, a direct US invasion on some pretext or other would follow. I was to discover that this was the more or less unanimous opinion of the Sandinista leaders I encountered. ‘Reagan has invested too much personal prestige in the Nicaragua issue to leave office without trying to smash us,’ Ramírez said. The government was preparing for the US invasion by arming the
campesinos
. ‘Our best defence,’ Luis Carrión told me, ‘is the people in arms.’ It was a phrase I heard many times during my stay. Many thousands of ordinary Nicaraguans had already been given AK-47 automatic rifles, as well as other hardware. If the the Pentagon could be convinced that the US body count would be high, it might make an attack politically unsaleable. ‘Nicaragua will not be like Grenada for them,’ Luis Carrión said. ‘It will not be quick.’

I had begun to see great mountains of corpses in my mind’s eye. I changed the subject, and asked Sergio Ramírez about a recent report by the ‘International League for Human Rights’, published in the
Herald Tribune
. ‘Repression in Nicaragua is not as conspicuous or as bloody as in other parts of Central America,’ said Nina H. Shea, programme director of the ‘New York-based’ group. ‘But it is more insidious and systematic.’

Ramírez began by saying that the most important human rights organizations had given Nicaragua a pretty clean report. Then he lost his temper. ‘You see,’ he cried, ‘if we do not murder and torture people as they do in Salvador, it just proves that we are so fiendishly subtle.’

A cow strolled across the road and the driver braked violently. Ahead of us, the security outriders, who all, rather unusually, wore bright orange washing-up gloves, came to a halt. ‘One must understand one’s animals,’ Luis Carrión said mildly. ‘A cow will never deviate from its chosen direction, never turn around. A dog, however, is unreliable.’

We arrived in Camoapa, which was in holiday mood. Five thousand
campesinos
filled the main square, around which fluttered great hosts of small blue-and-white national flags, alternating with the red-and-black banners of the Frente. Straw Sandino-hats, scrubbed children in their best clothes, militiamen on guard. ‘Señor Reagan,’ read a placard held up by a member of the Heroes and Martyrs of the First of May 1986 Co-operative, ‘you won’t get even the smallest lump of our land.’ And, elsewhere in the crowd, another banner demanded:
‘Trabajo y fusiles!’
Work and rifles. It wasn’t easy to believe in Vargas Llosa’s hypothetical anti-Sandinista majority here. The government, understanding that its power base lay with the
campesinos
, had given rural areas such as this priority over the cities in terms of the allocation of the country’s scarce resources. Food shortages weren’t nearly as acute here as they were getting to be in Managua, Granada and León; and such preferential policies, coupled with the land reforms, had ensured that communities such as Camoapa had remained loyal FSLN strongholds.

Jaime Wheelock, another of the FSLN’s nine
comandantes de la revolución
, who was now the agriculture minister and looked even younger than Luis Carrión, addressed the crowd. It was impossible not to notice that the emotional distance between the audience and the orator was very small. I couldn’t think of a Western politician who could have spoken so intimately to such a crowd. The parish priest of Camoapa, Father Alfonso Alvarado Lugo, also spoke. ‘I am happy,’ he told the
campesinos
, ‘that you, who used to be on the streets, can now cultivate the land.’ The
campesinos
came up and received their land titles, informally, with little fuss. It seemed natural to be moved.

The versicle-and-response format took over. A young Sandinista woman acted as cheerleader. ‘The people united,’ she
cried into a microphone, and the crowd replied: ‘ … will never be defeated!’

‘Let us struggle!’

‘ … For peace!’

‘Venceremos!’

‘No pasarán.’

Oh, by the way: at the end of the ceremony, the village band played – amongst other popular local tunes – the
Internationale
.

3

POETS ON THE DAY OF JOY

O
n the seventh anniversary of Somoza’s departure with coffins and coffers, I found myself accompanying a well-known poet who was on his way to make an important telephone call. The poet was Daniel Ortega, whose most popular work was perhaps the one entitled
I missed Managua in miniskirts
. When Managuan hemlines rose above the knee, Ortega was in jail.

President Ortega – or ‘Comandante Daniel’, as he was universally known – didn’t want to talk about his prison experiences any more. His poem,
In the Prison
, indicated why this might be:

Kick him this way, like this
,
in the balls, in the face, in the ribs
.
Pass me the hot iron, the billy-club
.
Talk! Talk, you son-of-a-bitch
,
try salt water
,
ta-a-alk, we don’t want to mess you up
.

I began to ask him about his writing, but he seemed embarrassed by my questions. ‘In Nicaragua,’ he said, ‘everybody is considered to be a poet until he proves to the contrary.’ Nowadays, his main literary effort was to persuade his ministers and officials to speak clearly to the people. ‘Too often we fall into using a language that puts them off, that creates a gulf.’ He looked like a bookworm who had done a body-building course; his manner, too, combined a bespectacled blinking, mild-voiced diffidence with an absolutely contradictory self-confidence. You wouldn’t kick sand into his face any more.

Talking to the people was a priority for his administration. He regularly took his entire cabinet to meet the people in popular forums, making himself accountable in a way his main Western critics never would. I tried to imagine Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher agreeing to submit themselves to a monthly grilling by members of the public, and failed.

Today, however, was about a different kind of communication. The phone call Ortega was on his way to make represented the ceremonial inauguration of the ‘Inter-Sputnik’ communications link between Nicaragua and the countries of the socialist bloc. We arrived at the dish antenna, which sat in the Managua hills not far from the wooden FSLN sign, and listened to speeches from Russian dignitaries. The new installation had been paid for by the USSR, and the US was already calling it a spy base. It looked like a telephone system to me.

As Daniel Ortega telephoned first his ambassador in Havana and then Nicaragua’s man in Moscow, the stupidity of US policy seemed glaringly obvious. In Nicaragua, there were old Jack Nicholson movies on the television, Coca-Cola did great business, the people listened to Madonna on the radio, singing about
living in a material world/and I am a material girl
; baseball was a national obsession, and people spoke with pride of the number of Nicaraguans who had made the major leagues in
the United States. In the old Somoza days, when the newspapers were censored, they would print photographs of Marilyn Monroe and other Hollywood movie stars in place of the banned articles, creating what may be a unique alliance of Hollywood with radical protest. In Nicaraguan literature, too, the US influence was of enormous importance. The country’s poetry had been profoundly affected by the work of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound.