Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (34 page)

"You should go to America," I said.

"There, is only one bad thing about America," said the drum
beater. "They won't let us in."

Back in London, I was having dinner in the Groucho Clubthis week's in-spot for what's left of Britain's lit glitz and nouveau
rock riche-when one more person started in on the Stars and
Stripes. Eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part
about "Your country's never been invaded." (This fellow had been two during the Blitz, you see.) "You don't know the horror, the
suffering. You think war is ..."

I snapped.

"A John Wayne movie," I said. "That's what you were going to
say, wasn't it? We think war is a John Wayne movie. We think life is
a John Wayne movie-with good guys and bad guys, as simple as
that. Well, you know something, Mister Limey Poofter? You're
right. And let me tell you who those bad guys are. They're us. WE
BE BAD.

"We're the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in
Reeboks. We're three-quaters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck
and descended from a stock market crash on our mother's side. You
take your Germany, France and Spain, roll them all together and it
wouldn't give us room to park our cars. We're the big boys, Jack,
the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers
of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats
in Cap d'Antibes. And we've got an American Express card credit
limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go.

"You say our country's never been invaded? You're right, little
buddy. Because I'd like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who'd
have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in
the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying `Cheerio.'
Hell can't hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit
further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names
of. I'd rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen
and jack of all you Europeans. We eat little countries like this for
breakfast and shit them out before lunch."

Of course, the guy should have punched me. But this was
Europe. He just smiled his shabby, superior European smile.
(God, don't these people have dentists?)

SEPTEMBER 1987

There are probably more fact-finding tours of Nicaragua right now
than there are facts-the country has shortages of practically
everything. Nonetheless, everyone's going, every senator and representative, the entire pet shop full of '88 presidential candidates,
every church-group bake-sale committee and Mush-R-Us liberal
coalition. I see that even Mayor Koch is planning to go, probably
looking for new kinds of mismanagement to be used in New York
City.

Well, I wasn't about to be left out. I wheedled my way onto a
weekend trip sponsored by the National Forum Foundation, a
conservative think tank founded by former Vietnam POW Senator
Jeremiah Denton and headed by the senator's son Jim. The Forum
Foundation has been taking bipartisan delegations of congressional
staff members to Nicaragua. The theory is, I guess, that congressional staff members haven't been listening to their own campaign
promises for years and are therefore not insane yet. If you take staff
members, they might see something. Whereas if you take con gressmen themselves, they'll probably think they're back in their
home districts and promise to quit committing adultery.

Anyway, my staff delegation (or "StaffDel," as these things are
called) was made up of young men and women whose bosses were
potential swing votes on the contra aid question. The staffers were
in their middle twenties, earnest, bright and dutiful. On the plane
to Managua they studied State Department briefings and Congressional Research Service reports, scoured books pro and con about
the Sandinistas and filled note pads with neatly lettered questions
to ask anyone who'd stand still. I drank.

Is Nicaragua a Bulgaria with marimba bands or just a misunderstood Massachusetts with Cuban military advisors? Beats me.
Personally, I like the kind of research you can get your hands on,
the kind you can heft. That is, I like to do my principal research in
bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie
less convincingly than they do in briefings and books. But I hadn't
even made it to the bar in the Augusto C. Sandino Airport when
Nicaragua began researching itself and in a palpably hefty way. To
get into the country, you have to change sixty U.S. dollars into
Nicaraguan cordobas. Jim Denton went to the exchange window
with $480 for our group of eight and came back with 4,080,000
cordobas, which filled an entire Adidas gym bag. In 1979, in the
last days of the utterly bankrupt Somoza regime, the "corb" was
fifteen to the dollar. Now the official rate is 8,500 to 1. On the
black market you can get 14,000.

Somebody has definitely let a dialectical materialist loose in
the Nicaraguan monetary system. You probably have to take economics over again two or three times at Moscow U. before you can
make cash worth this little. And free enterprise had disappeared
from Sandino Airport (if enterprise is the word for what goes on at
Latin ports of entry). There were no taxis, no guys trying to snatch
your luggage, no touts, no beggars, no shoe-shine boys, no Indian
urchins selling you Mayan relics from Taiwan, no nothing but runty
teenagers in army uniforms staggering around morosely under the
weight of AK-47s. (Amigos, if you'd get with the right superpower
block, you could have M-16s. They're four and a half pounds
lighter)

We drove to Managua in a U. S. embassy van with bullet-proof windows. It was early Friday evening but downtown was nearly
empty. The traffic was mostly East German IFA trucks full of
soldiers. Our Nicaraguan driver said IFA stands for Imposible
Frenar A tiempo, "Impossible to Stop on Time." The few private
cars were shambling down the vacant streets trailing smoke.
Hardly a one had both headlights working. Many of the streetlights
were also out. There were still a few commercial billboards, stained
and faded. But there were lots of brightly painted new signs with
pictures of workers and peasants-chins, guns, gazes and what-not
uplifted. And the Sandinista Front initials, FSLN, were spraypainted on all vertical surfaces.

A few cantinas and cafes were open, but the people inside
them just seemed to be standing there. We passed a Japanese car
dealership with one car on the lot. Broken mechanical things
seemed to be piling up at intersections. Factory yards were high
with weeds. I opened the van door to find out if music was playing
anywhere. It wasn't. And one thing that I saw was truly shocking.
Nicaraguans were in line at bus stops-long, orderly, silent lines.
Latins don't queue up for anything, let alone quietly. It's contra, as
it were, everything in the culture. Imagine Lutece serving a Bartles
and James wine cooler. Imagine British soccer fans applauding
politely when Milan scores. Imagine the Supreme Soviet conducting business in bikini underpants. Something, I realized, was
deeply, deeply wrong in Nicaragua.

Now, a lot of people tell me this gray and depressing atmosphere is a product of the civil war, that Nicaraguans are on
short rations and under tight discipline because they're in a struggle to the death with vicious mercenaries supported by massive
U. S. covert aid. These are the same people who tell me the contras
are completely ineffective, have no chance of winning and have
squandered all the cash they get from America on big houses with
swimming pools in Miami. I don't know. I'm not a liberal so I have a
poor grasp of stuff I don't know anything about. I have, however,
been in places where guerrilla wars were being fought-El Salvador, the Philippines and Lebanon. Those places weren't like this,
and East Berlin, Poland and Russia were.

But let's be fair. Maybe Nicaragua isn't really communist.
Maybe it's just going in for the "Communist Look." You know, the way you can get a "Turbo Look" Porsche 911 with the air dam and
the fat tires and the big whale-tail spoiler in the back but without
the actual turbo-charged motor-sort of a life-style, fashionstatement kind of thing. Some Albanian-trained decorator probably
came over to our luxury hotel, the Managua Intercontinental, and
pulled up all the carpets at the corners, spread dust and mildew in
the rooms, rubbed the chrome off the sink fixtures, broke the
shower heads, made the bar service surly and complicated, and
took all the comic books, sexy fotonovelas and copies of the Miami
Herald out of the hotel newsstand and replaced them with biographies of Fidel Castro and the works of Lenin. "Today's tourist .. .
goes back to his air-conditioned hotel and orders haute cuisine,"
read the brochure from the government tourist agency called Intu-
rismo, as in the Russian Intourist. "Friday Special-Festival de
Hamburguesas' read the menu in the lobby.

We met our first Sandinista that same night, General Secretary
of the Foreign Ministry Alejandro Bendana, who mentioned that
he'd rather be out dancing at the street festivals (which I saw no
sign of) and said he assumed we would, too. Tsk. Tsk. There but
for lack of international understanding . . . Bendana oozed selfconfident charm. His clothes were nattily rumpled, he bummed
cigarettes and, having gone to Harvard, he spoke better English
than we did. He was full of enthusiasm for the Central American
Peace Pact, the Arias Accord. Bendana vowed Nicaragua would
comply-unilaterally if need be-with all of the Accord's requirements, though he had to look in his briefcase to see just what those
requirements were.

In a fit of bonhomie, Bendafla then hinted the government
would soon allow the one opposition newspaper, La Prensa, to
publish again, permit the Catholic radio station to resume broadcasting, free some political prisoners and announce a partial
cease-fire with the contras.

"The revolutionary process," said Bendana with real heat,
"does not require having a newspaper shut down, does not require
having a radio station shut down, does not require eliminating
political parties. Those measures go against the grain of the revolution!" By the look on the faces of the StaffDel members, I'd say it
had occurred to them that Bendana worked for a revolution that didn't require those things but had done them anyway. The aides
had some major questions, which Bendana parried like an amused
and slightly absent-minded Northwestern football coach defending
his team's record against Michigan and Ohio State.

"The revolution has made mistakes," said Bendaiia. "We are
prepared to put the Cubans on a boat tomorrow."

I liked the guy-a bad sign. People I like shouldn't be
allowed anywhere near government. I know my friends. They'd
borrow the Soviet Hind helicopters for picnics, seduce Rumanian
gymnast nymphettes and tell every gaggle of visiting Americans
exactly what they wanted to hear, just like I would. "Some believe
the Nicaraguan revolution was on a Marxist-Leninist track. We
don't see it that way," said Bendafla.

This hardly jibes with what Bendana's Sandinista companeros
have been saying.

`... Marxist-Leninism is the scientific doctrine that guides
our revolution," announced Defense Minister Humberto Ortega in
a speech to the Sandinista military in 1981.

"You cannot be a true revolutionary in Latin America without
being Marxist-Leninist," Interior Minister Tomas Borge told Newsweek in 1984.

For years now you've been able to count on the Sandinistas for
William F. Buckley fodder, for Reagan-electing quotes:

We are not going to be so naive as to accept a civic opposition, because that doesn't exist anymore.

-President Daniel Ortega, quoted
in The Economist, 1986

Our friendship with Libya is eternal.

-Tomas Borge, quoted in The Washington
Post, 1986

And my personal favorite:

They [La Prensa] accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it.

-Nelba Blandon, Interior Ministry
Director of Censorship, quoted in The
New York Times, 1984

I guess the big question is, are they kidding? Are the Sandys
pulling our leg when they say this stuff? Or are they goofing on us
when they say they're going to allow unfettered elections and
freedom of speech? Should we believe what they've said before?
Should we believe what they're saying now? Or should we sit by the
algae-choked swimming pool at the Managua Intercontinental and
drink two dozen beers brought to us by a waitress who can no longer
legally be tipped and has turned as efficient and willing as the
average Budapest customs official?

The next morning we went to meet with the leaders of the
Nicaraguan Permanent Commission on Human Rights, who were
not nearly as full of pep as the General Secretary of the Foreign
Ministry. In fact, they were a depressing bunch.

Nicaragua has two competing human-rights commissions.
Human-rights commissions seem to go forth and multiply in places
where a human right hasn't been seen in years. The Permanent
Commission on Human Rights was founded in 1977 to deal with
the heinous crimes of the Somoza regime. In those days the
commission defended a number of people who later became Sandinista leaders, including the present Interior Minister (and head of
the DGST secret police) Tomas Borge. Now the Commission has its
hands full dealing with the heinous crimes of its former clients.
"They called us communists before. Now they call us counterrevolutionaries," sighed Executive Director Lino Hernandez.