The Jaguar Smile (5 page)

Now, however, there was the economic blockade. A shipment of Dutch cranes, en route to Nicaragua, had been impounded by the US authorities in the Canal Zone. IBM had withdrawn all service facilities from Nicaragua, obliging an already impoverished country to change, at great expense, from IBM computers to other, less ideologically motivated brands. (What would become, I wondered, of the IBM word processor Sergio Ramírez had shown me with all the eagerness and pride of a new-technology nut?) Most recently, Oxfam America had been prevented by the Reagan administration from sending a $41,000 shipment of seeds, hoes and farm equipment to Nicaragua.

It was impossible to spend even a day in Nicaragua without becoming aware of the huge and unrelenting pressure being exerted on the country by the giant standing on its northern frontier. It was a pressure that informed every minute of every day.

In the morning paper, Nicaragua’s leading cartoonist, Roger, had drawn a gigantic Uncle Sam, who was bending over and peering through binoculars at a tiny Nicaraguan house the size and shape of Snoopy’s dog kennel. ‘Yes,’ read his speech balloon, ‘I can see it clearly: they’re definitely planning to invade.’

The
‘Peanuts’
strip, by chance, had just run an American variation on the same theme. Linus, Snoopy, and, if memory
serves, Lucy sat watching TV, dressed up in camouflage combat fatigues. ‘What’s he saying now?’ the girl asked. Linus replied, ‘The same thing he said yesterday. He says there are people out there who want to destroy our way of life.’ ‘I don’t trust him,’ said Lucy or Patty or whoever it was. ‘Really? Why is that?’ ‘I don’t trust anybody.’

The Soviet ministers stood beside Daniel Ortega as he made his call to Moscow. The
New York Times
, in a leader article, had just called the Sandinistas ‘Stalinists’. Stephen Kinzer, the paper’s man in Managua, had belatedly filed a report (without visiting the scene) on the most recent Contra atrocity, the mining of a road in northern Jinotega province, near Bocay. The mine had blown up a bus and killed thirty-two civilians, including several schoolchildren. Kinzer’s report suggested that the FSLN could have planted the mine itself, in a bid to gain international sympathy.

Pressure, and a phone call to Moscow. My enemy’s enemy becomes, eventually, my friend.

There was a shortage of beans in Managua. (Imagine Italy running out of pasta.) Some days it was hard to get corn to make tortillas. Inflation was close to 500%, and prices had gone crazy. It could cost you six head of cattle to get your truck serviced.

The economy was hugely dependent on imports. Nicaragua produced no glass, no paper, no metal. It was also very vulnerable to attack. The economist Paul Oquist described it to me as a ‘one of everything economy’ – one deep-water port, one oil refinery, one international airport. US ‘surgical strikes’ would have little difficulty in paralysing the country. ‘Maybe they would spare the refinery,’ said Oquist, a
norteamericano
himself, ‘because it’s run by Exxon.’

In the five years of the war, the Nicaraguan economy had
suffered an estimated $2 billion-worth of damage. In 1985, Nicaragua’s total exports had been valued at $300 million; imports ran at $900 million. Two billion dollars was roughly the same as one year’s gross national product. So Nicaragua had lost one entire year’s production in the last five, with most of the damage occurring in the second half of that period.

When the International Court at the Hague ruled against the US, it also upheld Nicaragua’s claim that the US was liable to pay reparation for the economic damage. The Court also rejected the US argument that Nicaragua was the ‘regional aggressor’, and that states in the zone were therefore entitled to defend themselves against it. (The judges who voted for the majority verdict came from Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, China, France (two), India, Italy, Nigeria, Norway, Poland and Senegal. The three who dissented from the judgment were from the United States, Britain and Japan.)

The Reagan administration wasn’t interested in international law, at least not when its custodians found against the US. The situation was surreal: the country that was in fact acting illegally, that was the outlaw, was hurling such epithets as
totalitarian, tyrannous
and
Stalinist
at the elected government of a country that hadn’t broken any laws at all; the bandit was posing as the sheriff.

Daniel Ortega finished talking to Moscow and put down the phone. Everybody, Russians, Nicaraguans,
escritor hindú
, burst into smiles. It was, after all, the Day of Joy.

And after the Day, the Night. In a large, green circus-tent donated by Cuba, musicians from all over Central America were playing in a festival of contemporary music, the
nueva canción
. Salsa-rhythms and protest songs alternated. Managua had become quite a centre for liberal American musicians. As well as the artists in the circus tent, the
Carpa Nacional
, there had
been recent concert performances here by Peter, Paul and Mary. Jackson Browne had been down, too.

Meanwhile, across town, seven women poets were reciting in the ruins of the Grand Hotel. Most of the hotel had collapsed in the earthquake. What remained – a central courtyard overlooked by balconies and open, now, to the sky – served the city as a cultural centre. The ruins were crowded with poetry-lovers. I did not think I had ever seen a people, even in India and Pakistan where poets were revered, who valued poetry as much as the Nicaraguans. At the back of the open stage, the seven women clustered and paced, all dressed up to the nines for the occasion, and all clearly nervous. They came forward in turn, to be introduced by the critic Ileana Rodríguez, and as each poet finished her reading and returned to the far end of the ruins, the others would group around her, to embrace and to reassure.

Two of the seven poets particularly caught my attention: Vidaluz Meneses, a slight, grave woman with a quietness of delivery that was gently impressive, and Gioconda Belli, winner of the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize. Her poetry was at once extremely sensual and politically direct.

Vidaluz Meneses’ father had been a General in Somoza’s National Guard and had eventually been assassinated by the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, in Guatemala in 1978. (He was there as Somoza’s ambassador.) Her moving poem,
Last postcard for my father, General Meneses
, showed her to be a writer whose work had been enriched, though also made much more painful, by the ambiguity of her family circumstances. (At the time of her father’s death, and for some years previously, she had been working secretly with the Frente. When her father found out, relations between the two became, not unnaturally, rather difficult.) In an interview with Margaret Randall, Meneses talked about that ambiguity: ‘I have never been able
to hate the enemy, but I feel a tremendous sorrow. Because someone I loved so much didn’t share my ideals. And that, I guess, is the central thread of my work … And yet I know that with that poem I disappoint many friends … Maybe the poem seems weak to them. I believe that poetry has to be authentic, though.’

She spoke of belonging to a ‘sacrificed generation’, for whom the work of rebuilding the nation had to take priority over their private needs as poets. It was the kind of statement one might perhaps have expected from a woman whose revolutionary motivation was essentially religious in origin, as Meneses’ certainly was. But Gioconda Belli, a far more secular poet, made very similar remarks to Margaret Randall. She had just decided, she said, to make her work (for the revolution) ‘the best poem I can write.’

Belli’s poems closed the evening. She had created a kind of public love-poetry that came closer, I thought, to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I had yet heard:

Rivers run through me
mountains bore into my body
and the geography of this country
begins forming in me
turning me into lakes, chasms, ravines
,
earth for sowing love
opening like a furrow
filling me with a longing to live
to see it free, beautiful
,
full of smiles
.
I want to explode with love …

4

MADAME SOMOZA’S BATHROOM

I
t had become the custom, when young writers gathered in the cafés of Managua, to rubbish Ernesto Cardenal. As Father Cardenal was not only the country’s most internationally renowned poet, but also the Minister of Culture, I took these attacks to be indications that the country’s literature was in reasonably healthy and irreverent shape. The coffee-shop sniping didn’t seem to bother Cardenal much. He just went on beaming away, looking, with his little beret and his silver locks and beard, and his
cotona
, the loose peasant’s smock he wore over his blue jeans, like a Garry Trudeau cartoon of himself: the radical Latino priest according to
‘Doonesbury.’

The attack that did upset Cardenal, and many Nicaraguans along with him, was the Pope’s. The story of Wojtyla’s arrival in Managua had passed into legend: Cardenal knelt to kiss the Pontiff’s ring, but John Paul II shook angry fists at him and commanded him to regularize his relationship with the Church. The poet burst into tears.

At the time of my visit, neither Ernesto Cardenal nor the
other priest high in the government, the Foreign Minister, Miguel d’Escoto, were permitted to officiate at the Mass. They were, in effect, suspended. As I read Cardenal’s poem
The Meaning of Solentiname
, some of the reasons for this rift in the Church became clear:

Twelve years ago I went to Solentiname with two
brothers
   
in Christ
to found a small contemplative community …
contemplation
brought us to the revolution;
and thus it had to be
because in Latin America
a man of contemplation cannot turn his back
on political struggle …
What most radicalized us politically were
the Gospels
.
At mass, we discussed the Gospels
with the peasants
in the form of a dialogue
,
and they began to understand the essence of the
divine
   
message
:
the heralding of God’s kingdom
,
Which is: the establishment on earth of a just
society …
At first we had preferred to make
a non-violent revolution
.
But later we came to understand
that right now, in Nicaragua
,
non-violent struggle is not possible …
Now everything has come to an end in our
community
.
Solentiname
was like a paradise
but in Nicaragua
paradise is not yet possible
.

I met Cardenal in Hope Somoza’s bathroom. The Ministry of Culture occupies what used to be the dictator’s residence, and the Minister’s office, he gleefully informed me, had once witnessed Mme Somoza’s daily
toilette
. Had he ever been here, I asked, in the bad old days? No, no, he exclaimed, throwing up his hands in a parody of what would once have been perfectly legitimate terror. ‘In those days the place was surrounded by guns, tanks, helicopters. It was frightening just being in the neighbourhood.’ I told him of my own experience of being in the neighbourhood of a Somoza, and he was delighted. ‘Then you know everything.’

He showed me round. ‘This was the bar. That is the Japanese house which Hope Somoza liked to use for her meditating. Here, for the guards, and here, for the horses.’ Concrete tennis courts cracked and decayed in the rain. I felt that the re-allocation of this house of barbarity to the Ministry of Culture was a particularly elegant revenge, and so, clearly, did Cardenal.

Back in Hope’s bathroom we discussed his development as a poet. There was the early influence of Neruda – ‘his lyric mode, not the political stuff’ – and, later, the much more profound impact of North America: Pound, Whitman, Marianne Moore. We also talked about the parallel development of his political radicalism. ‘In the beginning I was a sort of Christian Democrat. I had many arguments with Carlos Fonseca and the others. I was against the revolutionary route at that time. They were always very patient with me, very gentle.’ This, after all,
was a man who had entered a Trappist monastery when he was thirty-one. Revolution did not come naturally to such an inward, contemplative spirit.