The Jaguar Smile (14 page)

Under the British, the Atlantic coast gradually acquired its sizeable Creole population. This was made up in part of runaway slaves from elsewhere in the Caribbean, and in part of people imported by the British to work for them as overseers and clerical staff. Thus, unusually, the British, who were more accustomed to using blacks as slaves, turned them, in Nicaragua, into a petit-bourgeoisie.

The Spanish-speaking
mestizo
population was growing, too, and in 1838 the Republic of Nicaragua was established.
Mestizo
numbers continued to increase, and at the last count they made up over half the population of Zelaya. (The blacks or Creoles, at 50,000 plus, accounted for about a quarter.) Old resentments between the Creoles and the ‘pañas’ – from
españoles
, Spaniards – had diminished, but the divisions were still occasionally noticeable. The army on the Atlantic coast was almost wholly
mestizo
. This racial division between soldiers and civilians hit me the moment I arrived at the long wooden hut that was Bluefields’ airport terminal. The Creoles didn’t like joining the
paña
army, though they didn’t mind signing on with the police.

The Somoza dynasty handed the Atlantic coast over to the transnational companies, who dug fortunes out of its gold mines and profited also from the abundance of precious woods. The transnationals created, in Zelaya, a distorted, totally dependent company-store economy, habituated to imported US produce and at the mercy of the foreign employers. They exported the area’s wealth, put back little or nothing, and when the last Somoza fell they decamped. The effect on the locals’ way of life was shattering. And then the Sandinistas arrived, singing heroic songs of revolution and liberty. It wasn’t surprising they got a frosty welcome; the revolution of the Pacific-coast
pañas
had felt, to many people on the other side, more like annihilation.

Bluefields was poor as mud. (Only dry places could be dirt poor.) It was too poor to build a waterfront. A few jetties, all loose planks and holes, stuck out into the bay. The wooden houses with their verandahs and balconies looked attractive, but when you got close you saw the rot, the poverty. Children played hoop; Creole ladies lounged on barrels, ample-bottomed and well buttoned-up.
Vote for Yazmina & Fátima
, the walls insisted. I went into a bar in which a
mestizo
sailor, Pancho, was holding forth. ‘I’ve been everywhere,’
Pancho stated. ‘Miami. Mobile, Alabama. I’ve been all over. Let me tell you something: I liked Mobile, Alabama better than Miami, Florida. People don’t bother you in Mobile. It’s like here, in Bluefields.’ The rain began to belt down and Dylan started to sing
‘Stuck Inside of Mobile’
in my head. ‘Is there any beer?’ I asked, and the small jelly of a woman who ran the bar said, ‘No. Beer finish.’ But when she left the room, Pancho winked and fished out a bottle of
cerveza Victoria
from the cold box. ‘Be my guest.’

The proprietress returned and blew her stack. ‘Where you find that? Pancho, you no good. These days you got to look after your reg’lar customers, and those beers is reserve. They is reserve. I need meat and ting, I gotta keep the butcher his beer. You got beer at your house, you get me one.’ Pancho made mollifying, insincere noises. I felt bad, and didn’t enjoy the drink.

After dark, in a Creole bar in the Old Bank
barrio
, I was befriended by Francisco Campbell. He was home on leave from the Nicaraguan embassy in Washington, and he was a man with a problem: the US authorities had just expelled his wife, Miriam, who had also worked at the embassy. He was a likeable, generous man, and put his troubles aside to show me a good time. We ate the bar’s special ‘chop suey’, with which no Chinese person would ever have felt the slightest affinity, but which tasted spicy and delicious, and drank Flor de Caña Extra Seco with tamarind water.

The transnationals, Francisco told me, had been the ones who cut Bluefields’ trade links with the Caribbean. He was keen to restore them. ‘Do you know Trinidad imports all its beef from Argentina?’ he demanded. ‘Do you know how many thousands of miles further that is?’ He was also eloquent on the subject of shrimps. They spawned in the Escondido tideway
and then, in the rainy season when the rainwater pushed the salty water back, they headed out to sea. The lagoon at the river’s mouth would fill with shrimps; it would be alive with shrimps. They were the easiest catch in the world. But trawling was banned, because then you’d catch too many, and ruin things for the future. ‘Shrimp fishermen from Jamaica have been raiding our continental shelf for as long as I can remember,’ he expostulated. ‘It’s about time we came to some arrangement about that.’

We emerged from the bar when the Extra Seco was gone, and strolled down the street past the Moravian school. The night sky was full of stars, but if you kept looking up at them you were in serious danger of falling down one of the many holes in the road. Francisco had been thinking about his wife, and as we passed the school he cried: ‘I was expelled myself once, you know. Right here, from this school.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘It was the long hair of Mary Hebbert,’ he said. ‘That did it.’ Mary Hebbert had the most beautiful long fair hair, and the young Francisco wanted desperately to attract her attention. One day as he was coming to class – he was not yet ten years old – he saw the hair of Mary Hebbert dangling out of the classroom window. He had an impulse he could not resist: he pulled it. Unfortunately, he pulled too hard, and she banged her head against the window frame. She decided to make a big song and dance about Francisco’s bid to be noticed, and the headmaster asked his parents to remove their boy from the school.

‘That’s terrible,’ I said.

‘It was OK,’ Francisco grinned. ‘You survive expulsions.’

‘What happened to Mary Hebbert?’ I wanted to know.

‘I found out,’ he said contentedly. ‘She married a klutz and lives in the Caymans. So she got hers in the end.’

Cathy Gee, a US citizen working with a local development agency, was telling me about the death of the Rama language when I noticed the smashed computer VDU in her office. The screen had gone, and the insides were in a terrible mess. ‘Oh, yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, it was on the boat the Contra attacked. It got shot.’ She pointed to something taped to the top of the unit. ‘We found the bullet, too. Yeah.’ The computer had been a keenly anticipated gift. ‘Too bad.’

‘So the Contra are assassinating machines now,’ I said.

We got back to the Rama language. There were only twenty-three people alive who could still speak it: the other Ramas had already lost their tongue. A French linguist had spent months with the ageing twenty-three, to record the structure and phonetics of the language before it disappeared. ‘She came up against quite a problem,’ Cathy told me. ‘Most of the old Ramas had lost their teeth, so they couldn’t pronounce some of the words properly. Yeah.’ False teeth were much too expensive to be an option. Dental costs could therefore deliver the final blow to a tiny, dying language. Nicaragua is a land of small tragedies as well as large ones.

Thomas Gordon, the Creole
delegado
of Zelaya’s Special Zone II, which included Bluefields, was in his thirties, bespectacled, goateed, and owned a pet macaw. (An English-speaker, he had had to take Spanish lessons, but was by now thoroughly bilingual.) His deputy, Felix, was a
mestizo
, and had the happiest smile I saw in Nicaragua. Originally Felix had been the boss, and Gordon his assistant, but now that the roles were reversed, Felix showed no trace of resentment. The two men bubbled with plans for the improvement of Bluefields. ‘This town doesn’t even have a decent cinema,’ Thomas Gordon exclaimed. ‘There are places, but the picture is so dim you can hardly see it. We’ll change that. And we’re rebuilding the
roads. You may have noticed there are a lot of holes.’ I said I had. ‘I’m afraid your hotel is not so good. I want some decent hotels here. You’ll have to come back one May for the Mayo Ya, and see all the changes.’ The Mayo Ya was the music festival that filled the town for one month, with the spirit of carnival. I discovered, to my disappointment, that for the rest of the year the best
costeña
musicians were to be found living in Managua, and the only way of hearing the music in Bluefields was on records and tapes.

‘You’re lucky tonight,’ Gordon said. ‘We’re having a party for the Cuban doctors. It’s gonna be something, man. We’re gonna dance. I mean, we’re gonna have a
time.’

‘I’d love to come,’ I said. He offered to drive me around town, and as we drove he soliloquized about the latest employment projects. ‘At Kukra Hill, on Pearl Lagoon, we’ve got what could be the oldest working sugar mill anywhere. We had no funds to modernize it, but recently we found in the jungle a plantation of precious woods.’ A government order permitted the revenues from non-traditional exports to be retained in the exporting region (all other funds had to be centrally collected), so Gordon hoped this one-off sale of rare woods would finance the renewing of the sugar mill. ‘We’re gonna get that mill. We’re starting on the operation now, even before Autonomy comes.’

‘Autonomy’ was the autonomy project, the biggest political news on the coast, the scheme that had begun to convince some Zelayans that their best hopes did indeed lie with the revolution. I was keen to talk about it, but Thomas Gordon was pointing out the sights of the town. In Old Bank, the Creole
barrio
, the wooden houses ranged from sprawling bungalows to cramped, spartan shacks. In Central there was a pink obelisk bearing a white silhouette of Sandino. In Cottontree, Gordon took me to see his childhood home. ‘You know, I’ve
got a white brother,’ he said. ‘Tall, pale skin, fair hair, blue eyes. But he thinks black. I mean, he identifies himself with the blacks here. That’s what counts.’

He introduced me to the macaw, who accompanied us into the warren of bare-floored wooden rooms, with comfortable old armchairs and a big airy kitchen. I loved it. Out back was a large ‘yard’, a wild garden in which mangoes and breadfruit hung from tall, spreading old trees. ‘How wonderful still to have contact with the house in which you grew up,’ I told him, a little enviously. He smiled happily. ‘I came back to Bluefields after the triumph,’ he said. ‘I wanted to do something for my own place.’

I was going up to Pearl Lagoon the next day. ‘See the sugar mill,’ he insisted. Also at Kukra Hill there was the new African palm project. The palms would provide oil, copra, jobs. ‘But they’re having trouble getting labour. They should have known. Blacks don’t care to work in plantations any more.’
They
: another hint of the old Creole-
paña
friction? He denied it. ‘Before the revolution, it’s true, there was some, but that was in the old society.’ Class, racism, sexism, were all deemed to have been abolished by the revolution. There was something rather endearing about the idea.

The autonomy project was the FSLN’s way of recognizing that they had made a series of disastrous, alienating mistakes on the Atlantic coast. Inexperienced, over-zealous young political cadres had arrived among the Creoles and the Indians and created a good deal of bad feeling, for instance by making all manner of promises, of new hospitals, schools, and so forth, promises that the government quickly discovered it couldn’t deliver, because of the war, the scarcities and the inaccessibility of the region. The arrest of a Miskito leader, Steadman Fagoth, increased resentment. The FSLN insisted that it had cast-iron
evidence that Fagoth had been a Somoza agent, but the
costeños
weren’t interested. Fagoth (who always denied the charges against him) was released, and went instantly into the Contra war. The bridge-building organization known as MISURA-SATA (for Miskitos, Sumos, Ramas and Sandinistas) fell apart after the Fagoth affair and the compulsory resettlement of many Miskitos living along the Río Coco, which formed the frontier with Honduras. Fagoth, dropping the SATA, named his counter-revolutionary force MISURA. In Zelaya, the Sandinistas faced at least four Contra groupings: the main FDN forces; MISURA, still fighting even though the latest word was that Fagoth was no longer its driving force; KISAN, an Amerindian group that had just announced it would use sabotage and speedboat ambushes to try and cut the government’s links with sea and river posts on the Atlantic coast; and the Costa Rica-based ARDE forces in the south.

There was no question that the FSLN had seriously mishandled the Miskitos, and attempts to claim that they had heard there was to be heavy CIA bombing in the Río Coco area, and that the evacuations were for the people’s safety, only increased the feeling of a cover-up. The autonomy project was an attempt to prove that the Frente had learned from its mistakes. The policy of evacuating Miskitos from the Río Coco had been reversed, and many of them were going back to their old territories. (Some, however, chose not to, having grown accustomed to their new lives.) The policy of unconditional amnesty for anyone returning from the Contra was also having an effect. As morale slumped in the Contra armies, Miskitos were returning to the fold.