by Tim Cahill
In Managua, trees and grasses grew out of piles of debris and rubbish, and the concept of numbered addresses had little meaning. Letters to people in Managua are labeled with reference to various landmarks, like this:
In the old Little Rocks section
Below the hospital
One block south
One block west
The telephones generally didn’t work. Sometimes, I dialed twenty or thirty times over the space of an hour to get another party in Managua itself. A single page of telex cost an outrageous $36, U.S.
We stayed at the Intercontinental, one of the centers of social life in Managua. There were sometimes Sandinista officials in the bar. It did not seem to be a bar in a war-torn country where drinking and coupling and laughing are matters of some serious import. In the Intercontinental bar, there was a sense of serious import, and nothing else. No one laughed, ever. It seemed the most joyless place on the face of the earth.
Inflation was running at 1,200 percent. Nicaragua’s money was useless outside the country and not much good inside. The government needed valid currency to purchase foreign goods, so anyone visiting the country was required to cough up $60, U.S., upon entry. This bought 240,000 córdobas, which you got in hundreds. You could always tell the American citizens who had just flown in. They had huge córdoba bulges in their pockets and they wore skulking looks of guilt.
They had, doubtless, just read a little pamphlet in English that every American was handed sooner rather than later. It was a history of U.S. involvement in Nicaragua. The United States marines had occupied the country and propped up a corrupt government, on and off, from 1912 to 1933. In the last five years of the occupation, General César Augusto Sandino had fought the Americans, who were in the process of installing General Anastasio Somoza, father of the earthquake profiteer, as supreme commander of the Nicaraguan National Guard.
Sandino was captured by the guard and killed in 1934. The Somoza family, supported by the United States, used the national guard as a personal army. By 1978, the family owned over half the land in the country and had a hand in most of the larger businesses.
In 1978–79, there was fighting in the streets. Anastasio Somoza, the second son of the U.S.-installed general of the same name, was ousted by a coalition of groups calling themselves Sandinistas, after Augusto Sandino, who, pictures in the Nicaraguan embassy in Argentina suggest, had been somewhat cross-eyed.
The U.S. had occupied the country and supported the corrupt Somoza regime. So there was plenty to feel guilty about standing there drinking a beer in the Intercontinental bar with a pocketful of córdobas that you couldn’t spend because the hotel wouldn’t take them. Hotel bills had to be paid in dollars.
I met a Catholic priest visiting from San Francisco. He was, he said, on a fact-finding mission. He wore civilian clothes and was full of compassion for the poor and dispossessed but I thought he lacked the reporter’s instinct. The fact finders, I learned, a dozen of them, were ferried around in a government-owned van. They could ask the driver to stop anywhere.
“Some of the houses,” the priest told me, “are very poor. And our translator will ask the people in them any question we have. Just anything at all.”
I imagined the scene: a man is sitting in his house and a government representative herds twelve grim-faced gringos inside. The man can see them all noting the dirt floor, the shabby bed, the cooking fire. What does he think of the Sandinista government? He tells the government translator that he thinks the Sandinistas are doing fine. He thinks they’re swell.
Nicaragua, the priest said, is a largely Catholic country, and there had been some talk in the United States that the Marxist Sandinistas were suppressing freedom of religion. But the priest told me that his translator had pointed out graffiti that read, THERE IS NO CONTRADICTION BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION.
It was not a message that I saw someone scrawling on a wall in a burst of anger or inspiration. Still, I was willing to entertain the concept. There was a stifling solemnity to life in Managua that reminded me of the Catholic grade school I had attended. Managua was like a city run by nuns.
“There will be no laughing in this classroom. No comic books. Puberty is strictly forbidden. We will keep our thoughts pure and our minds on God.”
Instead of God, however, people in Nicaragua were forever being told to keep their minds on the New Man, the proud and free Nicaraguan who would grow out of the revolution.
All over Nicaragua, reading material was strictly censored. The opposition newspaper had been shut down but someone had climbed to the second story of the closed building and hung out a large black cardboard skeleton. It was labeled THE NEW MAN.
The only books available, anywhere, were inspirational tracts about Karl Marx and the New Man. Even at the Intercontinental, the revolving bookrack had nothing but thin paperback volumes with black covers printed on bad stock. They had titles like Fidel Castro Presents Three Ways You Can Improve Your Village.
I FINALLY DID FIND something apolitical to read. It was a full-color brochure, in English, that I found on a table in the lobby of the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism, Intourismo.
You can visit Nicaragua at any time of the year and will always find an excellent weather.… At the central highlands of Nicaragua … temperature is cool the whole year long, with a dry atmosphere and during the rainy season between October and November turns out to be one of the most delicious climates in the country.
There’s a lot of this sort of thing in the brochure. Weather is an inoffensive proposition. Garry and I were killing time, waiting for an interview with someone from Intourismo. Finally, after some hours, we talked with a zaftig, fashionable young woman named Chistita Caldera. It had to be a hard job, working for the Institute of Tourism in a country at war, and Chistita, who was called Chepy, could barely endure my bad Spanish. She broke into English in the middle of one of my excruciating sentences.
“They don’t pay me to translate.”
I continued to explain the project in Tarzan Spanish and memorized phrases: nonpolitical … mission of peace … unity of the Americas … Pan-American Highway, a ribbon of hope … Guinness Book of World Records … worldwide attention.
And—these sentences specially polished for the interview—“what a shame if we were stopped in Nicaragua.” It would be in all the papers all over the world and could even—¡caramba!—negatively affect the tourism industry in the country.
Chepy listened, and, as she did, her face brightened by degrees. She began speaking English which they didn’t pay her for but which was easier for both of us.
“Ahh,” she said. “This is good. This is not what I had thought. Not at all.”
What had she thought?
Nothing. Nothing. How could she help us?
We asked her if there was a way of smoothing things over at the southern border. Chepy said she would think about it. If it could be arranged, she would come herself to meet us.
CHEPY WAS, in fact, there at the border. She was wearing jeans, a flowered blouse, and an appropriately Latin amount of lipstick. She eased us through the formalities in only three hours and we didn’t even have to buy córdobas or demonstrate that we had been taking the malaria pills that Rich Cox had brought to the end of the earth for us.
Garry had not completely shaken off the fever—his bad case of jitters—but he needed to drive through Nicaragua. It seemed to be a matter of principle. Driving would also relieve him of the necessity to talk. He was, he told me privately, afraid of what he might say.
Chepy said that it had been tough for her to get a car from the government, to get the gasoline, to get a photographer who could drive the car back while she rode with us. In the end, the Sandinista government had agreed to assist us in clearing customs because they “are interested in attracting tourists to the country.” Chepy said that there were plenty of “internationals” in Nicaragua, people from the United States or Germany or Sweden who come to see what the revolution had
wrought. They came out of curiosity or idealism. They were very sincere and they lived cheaply, in solidarity with the people. Which is not what the Institute of Tourism had in mind.
Officially, the government said it was “interested in classical tourism, not sociopolitical tourism.” The Institute of Tourism, for instance, had turned deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza’s seaside estate into the Olaf Palme Convention Center. The government hopes the golf course, casino, and private airstrips will be attractive to conventioning dentists.
The photographer took our picture for the Institute of Tourism newsletter. He took our picture because we were real apolitical visitors and a potential inspiration to dentists worldwide.
Chepy told us that she had thought Garry and I were internationals when she first met us in Managua. She had expected us to express solidarity with the revolution and do nothing whatever to foster the cause of classical tourism or in any way help her attract dentists to Nicaragua.
It had taken her half an hour of my bad Spanish before she realized that we were Institute of Tourism kinda guys.
THE ROAD was exceptionally bad and there were huge potholes all over. It was like the road into Ecuador from Peru and it was a bad road for all the same reasons. There would be no high-speed invasion over this cratered pavement.
Chepy, sitting in the back of the cab, said she wanted to interview us for the Intourismo newsletter. How did I like Nicaraguans and Nicaragua? We were fifteen miles into the country, driving along the shore of Lake Nicaragua. On the far shore was a huge volcano looming over the blue-gray waters of the lake. It was a perfectly shaped cone, rounded and green and inordinately sensual.
I said that Nicaragua was beautiful, as anyone could see, and all Nicaraguans were imbued with the spirit of friendship. Nicaragua was the friendliest, most beautiful …
Chepy cut me off.
“I would like you to comment on the political situation.”
“We are apolitical visitors,” I said. “That’s the point.”
“But you must say something about the political situation.”
Garry muttered under his breath and shot me a murderous look. I was going to have to take this one. Chepy didn’t want to hear what Garry had to say.
I thought about it for a while. Telling the whole truth was out of the question. I thought the Sandinistas were heavy-handed ideologues who had succeeded in squeezing every ounce of joy out of the country.
On the other hand, the contra insurgents were terrorists, funded by my own government. I had seen pictures of women and children who had suffered at the hands of the contras. The pictures were taken by my friend Paul Dix, who lives in my hometown in Montana. He had spent two years in Nicaragua, working for the quasireligious organization Witness for Peace. He was interested in documenting the effects of the conflict on civilians. He would document atrocities on both sides, he said.
Paul tried to get out to the scene of the fighting as soon as it was reported. More often than not he found a house burned to the ground, most of a large family dead, and one or two survivors wandering around in a daze. The contras often targeted health-care workers and teachers.
Paul thought the Sandinista leaders had some poetry in their souls and didn’t find life in Managua completely oppressive. He would admit that, under the Sandinistas, Nicaragua wasn’t exactly an ideal society. There were some things that irritated him.
“But so what?” he had argued. “What if the whole country is a totalitarian dungeon? Does that give us the right to pay a bunch of terrorists to basically go around and cut the throats of four or five people a night?”
Paul often talked at length with the children who had survived various attacks. He gave them crayons and asked them to draw pictures of what had happened.
One of the pictures I saw showed a bright red house. A stick man standing outside, a contra, was throwing a little round ball through a window into the red house. The little round ball was meant to represent a grenade. Because this was a child’s drawing, the contra was smiling. Small children don’t know how to draw a face that isn’t smiling.
In another drawing, there was a bodyless smiling circle on a stick stuck into the ground. The girl who drew the picture said that contras had decapitated her nineteen-year-old brother and put his head on a fence pole. The head was drawn like a bright, round, happy face.
And now Chepy wanted me to talk about politics, for the record. I had had half an hour of sleep in thirty hours and didn’t want to have to think at all. I said that I hoped the Arias peace plan would be fully implemented.
“You are against the interference of foreign governments in Central American affairs?”
“Yes.” I sensed that this was what Chepy needed to hear me say, for the sake of her job. It had, for me, the benefit of being my actual opinion.
“Would you write this down so I can translate exactly?”
And so I wrote that down and drew a happy face under the place where I signed my name.
LATER, CHEPY SHOWED US a picture of her daughter, a blond six-year-old cutie dressed in a clown suit for her birthday party. Chepy and her husband were separated, she said, and she had to raise her daughter alone. He didn’t support the child at all.
She had thought about going to the U.S.—one of her sisters was attending college in Seattle—but she imagined that she’d end up being a waitress. “And here,” she said, “I work in”—Chepy made an expansive gesture that encompassed the filthy cramped cab of the truck—“international relations.”
We dropped her at her home in Masaya and exchanged addresses. Chepy said that her home address would be the best place to reach her. “I don’t know what will happen,” she said. She might have been referring to the political situation or to her personal life. It seemed best not to inquire more closely.
Garry tried to give her $100 but Chepy said she couldn’t take it. “Yes you can,” Garry said, “you have a daughter.”
“Then,” Chepy said, “I will spend it all on her.”
THE ROADS IN THE INTERIOR were good and fast. There was little traffic because gasoline was rationed, but we did see several large Bulgarian-made trucks full of people being ferried somewhere for some reason. The people wore civilian clothes and were jammed tightly into the back of these trucks. They weren’t shouting or singing or laughing. They didn’t look like they were on their way to concentration camps, either. They looked like everyone in Managua: people who weren’t having a good time at all.
We were never stopped, not once.
The road to the border with Honduras rose into a series of rounded green hills. The trees were more sparse than in the lowland, but the heat was less oppressive. It was not the great weight upon the land that it had been in Managua. We had found, as the tourist brochure promised, “an excellent weather.” When I looked down from the summit of one of the higher mountains, I could see groves of trees separated by meadows of thigh-high grasses. The ridges were closely spaced. It was beautiful country where, I thought, small groups of armed men could maneuver for months and never be detected.
A brisk wind had sprung up and was blowing the petals of some bright red flowers across the road. There were brick houses along the highway, and all of them had flowers growing in the yard. We passed a school. Dozens of children were walking back toward the houses, carrying books and laughing.
We saw several billboards that looked like advertisements for a Rambo movie, but the words below the noble-looking armed men and woman read, DEFEND YOUR LAND, DEFEND YOUR CITY, DEFEAT THE ENEMY.
Not far down a slope near the road, there was a pond fringed with green algae that was so bright the color seemed bogus, a kind of artificial Day-Glo green set against the lighter green of the grass and the darker, more brooding cast of the forecast.
The hills were steeper near the border and there were rocky cliffs. A man in patched jeans, a yellow T-shirt, and sandals was pushing a homemade wheelbarrow full of wood. He had an automatic rifle slung over his back.
And then we were at the border, only four hours after we had entered the country. The customs building was located in a small settlement with an indoor market where the produce looked better than anything I had seen in Managua. A group of boys, ranging in age from about ten to eighteen, surrounded the truck and clamored for our attention. They would take us to the right offices, in the right order, and we would clear customs in a flash. We were given to understand that we needed their help, which, they assured us, would be very inexpensive.
Some of the boys looked too young to hire for this purpose, some looked devious. One, an older boy, was a tall gawky fellow with a loony, toothless smile who appeared to be happily insane. We chose the oldest of the border hustlers. This responsible individual promptly turned our papers over to the toothless loon, who gave out with a mighty shout and ran off down the street. He waved our documents over his head and whooped and laughed and staggered as he ran.
All of the other boys were laughing.
“We gave your papers,” one of these evil ten-year-olds said, “to the craziest person in all of Nicaragua.”
“What did that kid just tell you?” Garry asked.
“He said they gave our papers to a lunatic.”
The fever flush bloomed in Garry’s face. He took off at a dead run and caught the boy with our documents at the entrance to a building. Inside, I was amazed to discover that there were, in fact, customs offices. The officers seemed to know the boy with our papers, and when he didn’t get things right, they gently corrected him and sometimes actually guided him by the arm to the next stamping station.
Garry worked on the act—smile, laugh, hand out lapel pins—but he was flat and unconvincing. We suffered through a pit search and were cleared for immigration.
