Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement

by Graham Greene

  I remembered what he had told the schoolchildren the year before, that he was not going to exchange white landlords for coffee-coloured ones. I asked, ‘Is there going to be a land grab?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘we are going to be careful of the Zone resources. We can’t change the land much. The forests are needed to provide the watershed for the Canal.’

  I went back to my room in Panama City and I reread President Arias’s speech. ‘11 October 1968, a fatal day on which Satanic treason, inspired by lasciviousness, covetousness and envy swept our beloved land, covering it with groans, pain and blood . . .’

  I thought of ‘the monster’, of the ‘Judas’ in his hammock and I thought also of the fisherman who was in the habit of walking regularly up the beach at weekends past the guard and shouting drunken insults at Omar sitting on his verandah, but on the return journey, sobered by his walk, he would go by in silence. Omar was delighted by this weekend ritual, especially when it was performed in front of such serious and important guests as Mr Bunker and the American delegation. I wondered how President Arias would have reacted in his days of power.

  3

  In the evening I went to a bad Nicaraguan meal with my Sandinista friends and I met for the first time the poet, Father Ernesto Cardenal, who is now the Minister of Culture in Nicaragua. I thought him perhaps a trifle consciously charismatic with his white beard and his flowing white hair and the blue beret on top, and he seemed a little conscious of his own romantic character as a priest, a Communist and a refugee from Somoza, who had destroyed his monastery on an island in the Great Lake. Next evening we met again at the house of Camilo and María Isabel at a birthday party for one of the Sandinista guerrilla leaders, Pomares, whose life had been saved by Omar. He had been captured in Honduras and was about to be deported to Nicaragua and certain death when the General intervened.

  It seemed an oddly juvenile party for a guerrilla leader: there was a birthday cake and everyone sang ‘Happy birthday to you’, and the faces were nearly all as familiar to me now as family faces, and old Father Cardenal beamed from the background like a grandfather and the guerrilla extinguished two sets of candles, each in one blow, and I thought he was a little embarrassed by the cake and the candles. He gave me the impression of a genuine fighter surrounded by amateurs. A few days later he returned to Nicaragua and was killed in action. Now in Managua Somoza’s former headquarters, known as the Bunker, is named after him.

  Father Cardenal tried to persuade me to go over to Nicaragua, but I couldn’t help feeling that my death there would prove a too-easy gift for propaganda. Either side would be able to blame the other and my death would be more valuable than any other service that I could render, and quite possibly it might be rendered to the wrong side. Anyway, I knew the General was against my going. He believed that the civil war was reaching a climax. So I preferred to be a tourist and went off next day by helicopter to the legendary city of my imagination, Nombre de Dios: a small clearing, too small for a plane to land, and an Indian village of a few dozen huts. Not even a piece of ruined wall marked what had once been a greater port than Vera Cruz, one which had been named by Columbus Puerto de Bastimentos, the Harbour of Provisions, and which had been sacked by Francis Drake – he mistakenly left a lot of silver ingots behind.

  When we got back to Panama we found that the General’s forecast of the war in Nicaragua had been in some sort confirmed. There had been an outbreak in Managua, the capital, and the National Palace had been seized by a small group of a dozen Sandinistas, who were holding a thousand deputies and officials hostage and demanding the release of their comrades in prison.

  A dream that night depressed me so much that I woke bored and unhappy. I wanted to be back in Europe, I didn’t know why. However, one thing remained to be done before I went home and that was the long-delayed trip to Bocas del Toro, so uninvitingly described in the South American Handbook, and Chuchu agreed to come with me the next day. But it was not to be. All our plans were changed and at the same time our spirits were raised by Omar, who had tracked us down to where we were having dinner in an Italian restaurant which we had never visited before. Somehow he had discovered our whereabouts. Chuchu was wanted on the telephone.

  He came back excited and, like me, a little drunk. The General was sending an army plane to Managua early next morning – probably at five – to pick up the Sandinista commando, the released prisoners and some of their hostages, and we were to go in the plane. We should be at the airport by four. Life had become interesting again.

  Next morning we arrived just on time, but the plane had left an hour before, for Chuchu had failed to understand, or else the telephone had failed to communicate, the General’s advice that we spend the night at the airport. Chuchu found himself in disgrace. He was told firmly to hold himself ‘on disposition’ – which presumably meant staying at home by his telephone in a sort of house arrest. As for me I tried to kill a long day with reading and sleep, until he finally rejoined me, as depressed as myself. We had been summoned by the General to Rory’s house.

  We thought it best to have some rum punches first, made by Flor at the Senorial bar, for we expected a reprimand. But not a bit of it. Omar was in great good humour. He had decided to send me with Chuchu on a mission to Belize to see George Price, the Prime Minister. This was part of his determination to be my tutor in the affairs of Central America, not only in the affairs of Panama. He had become fond of Price – a strange friendship, for the two men could hardly have differed more in character, though in politics they were both moderate socialists. The friendship began when Panama supported Belize against its enemy Guatemala at the United Nations and persuaded Venezuela to do the same – the only two Latin American countries to oppose Guatemala.

  The Foreign Minister was with the General and he sketched out for us the situation in Belize, where the Conservative opposition were opposed to the independence which Price sought, since they believed that it might involve the removal of the sixteen hundred British troops serving as a trip wire against a Guatemalan invasion. Price wished to remain inside the Commonwealth, but he would have preferred to substitute Commonwealth troops for British. Guatemala might be satisfied with a small surrender of territory giving access to the sea, but then would Mexico on her northern frontier demand the same? In which case what would be left of Belize?

  ‘You will like Price,’ Omar told me. ‘He’s a man after your own heart. He wanted to be a priest, not a prime minister.’

  In the morning, before the usual Panamanian muddle started over our journey, I went to see the Sandinista commando and the released prisoners, who included Tomás Borge, who is now a good friend to me, at the military base of a unit called the Tigers. The leader of the commando, Eden Pastora, had the handsome face of a film star, and he was being interviewed for American television by a particularly stupid journalist. ‘Is it true that Carter wrote you a letter? When will you be going back to Nicaragua?’ The lights flashed and the cameras clicked. Perhaps it was at that moment, when he became aware of an audience of millions, that Pastora’s corruption began, so that four years later he turned against his fellow Sandinistas. After their victory they were to appoint him commander of the milice, the villagers who were being trained in self-defence, a sort of home guard, but not commander of the army; he was appointed the Vice-Minister of Defence and not the Minister, and yet his extraordinary exploit in capturing the National Palace with a handful of men had made him more famous outside Nicaragua than Daniel Ortega, the chief of the Junta, Humberto Ortega, the head of the army, or even Tomás Borge, now the Minister of the Interior.

  There must inevitably have been many wounded vanities when the civil war ended, and the two vanities which did most harm to the Sandinista cause proved to be those of Pastora and Archbishop Obando. (The Archbishop had negotiated the terms of the hostages’ release with Somoza and he was on the same plane to Panama as Pastora so as to guarantee the safety of the commando.)

  Now, as I half-expect
ed would happen, everything which had been arranged for our visit to Belize began to go wrong. Camilo telephoned me in the evening to tell me that Chuchu after all couldn’t go with me. Some Frenchman whom I didn’t know would take his place. I got angry (I suspected unjustly some Sandinista interference) and I told Camilo that I would prefer to go back to Europe. I had been long enough away. Camilo seemed to agree and said that he would pick me up next morning and take me to KLM for my ticket, but next morning it was Chuchu who telephoned me.

  ‘What happened last night to change our plans?’

  He said he had been a bit drunk and could remember nothing.

  ‘And this Frenchman they want to send with me?’

  A Frenchman? He knew nothing about a Frenchman. The General proposed to send me that day in a special plane with a woman who had once been a consul in the United States. I had met her during the boring lunch at the yucca farm in 1976 and had particularly disliked her.

  ‘I won’t go to Belize with her. I’ll go back to Europe.’

  ‘The General will be disappointed. He wants you very much to go to Belize.’

  ‘All right. Then we’ll go on a commercial flight, but it’s too late today, and I have to meet García Márquez at the airport.’

  We took García Márquez to the Señorial to taste Flor’s rum punches, and Márquez telephoned to the Cuban Ambassador who invited all three of us to lunch with him at the Pez de Oro – it seemed a rather unsuitable restaurant for a Communist ambassador to choose, and in fact he never turned up. We waited for more than an hour and then García Márquez and I tossed up to see who would pay for lunch and I won. Meanwhile Chuchu had telephoned the General – sometimes I thought of Panama City as one vast tangle of telephone lines and a medley of contradicting voices. The General, Chuchu told me, had said that Price had been expecting us that day in Belize.

  ‘What about that woman, the ex-consul?’

  ‘He said nothing about her. Anyway, it’s too late to do anything today.’

  On the way home I saw a soldier leading a tiger – or was it a leopard? – on a chain. A mascot of the Tigers?

  We didn’t get away next day either, because I was supposed to be meeting some opposition students in a café, but they, like the Cuban Ambassador, never turned up. They probably distrusted me as they knew I was a friend of Omar’s. Only the Ultra with the drooping moustache called Juan arrived unexpectedly with his nice wife, and Chuchu presently joined us. I learnt that Juan, like Rogelio and Chuchu, was a mathematics professor. I seemed surrounded by mathematicians. We had a bad lunch at a Chinese restaurant after bad rum punches at the Holiday Inn where an American naval officer was celebrating all by himself the fact that he had become a great-grandfather. The flight to Belize, Chuchu told me, was settled, but we had to leave very early, and remembering our failure to catch the army plane to Managua I made the Ultra’s wife promise to wake Chuchu.

  She didn’t fail me. At 5.15 she drove me and Chuchu to the airport. It proved a slow trek to Belize, with halts at Managua, San José and San Salvador, where the tarmac seemed chock-a-block with fighter planes. I was a little uneasy, as Chuchu had discovered just before we got on the plane that his passport was two years out of date and he had no visa for Belize. However, we were on a mission from the General, and so all was well.

  We were met and driven into the city which, poor as it is, had an odd beguiling charm, with wooden houses standing on piles seven feet high above the wet streets and mangrove swamps all around. Perhaps the charm comes from a sense of the temporary, of the precarious, of living on the edge of destruction. The threat is not only from Guatemala, the threat too is from the sea, which seems to be steadily, quietly seeping in, like some guerrilla force which one day will take over the city as it nearly did in 1961 when Hurricane Hattie struck with a tidal wave ten feet high.

  The hurricane season was approaching and there were posters on the walls reminiscent of the Blitz days in London and of Kurt Weill’s opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

  Hurricane Precautions, 1978

  ADVICE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC

  BELIZE CITY

  PHASE I

  1 Red Flag – Preliminary warning

  PHASE II (Red I)

  1 Red Flag with Black Centre – Hurricane

  approaching

  PHASE III (Red II)

  2 Red Flags with Black Centre – Hurricane will

  strike coast

  within a few

  hours

  PHASE IV

  Green Flag – All clear.

  Hurricane has passed.

  Search and Rescue

  Plans can be put into effect

  A long list of names was given for the hurricane season, most of them oddly unattractive – who chooses them, I wonder? For this season there were Amelia, Bess, Cora, Debra, Ella, Flossie, Greta, Hope, Irma, Juliet, Kendra, Louise, Martha, Noreen, Ora, Paula, Rosalie, Susan, Tanya, Vanessa, Wanda. I felt glad that my stay was a very short one. Only Amelia could possibly concern me: I wouldn’t have to wait until Vanessa and Wanda had passed safely by.

  I began to understand, or so I thought, the reason for Omar’s affection for George Price and his menaced city. It was as though Belize formed an essential part of the world Omar Torrijos had chosen to live in, a world of confrontation with superior powers, of the dangers and uncertainties of what the next day would bring: in the case of Belize an invasion from Guatemala or a hurricane from the Atlantic. The sole certainty from one day to another was what we had for lunch – a shrimp salad, the only edible form of food we were able to find in Belize.

  After the shrimps were finished we were driven out to Belmopan, the new administrative capital which had been built outside the hurricane zone. It reminded me of a tiny Brasilia, and like Brasilia doomed one day to be as dead as Washington without the beauty.

  In his office Price seemed to me a shy, reserved man with the touch of uneasy humility one often finds in priests, as though they are always questioning the reality of their own sincerity, but on the long drive which followed in an old Land Rover – his only car – he began to talk obsessively, like a man who has been starved of self-expression for a long time, of theology, literature, his own life. He shared my interest in the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, who had been silenced by our Church, and Hans Kung, and my admiration for Thomas Mann. We even shared our preference for Lotte in Weimar above The Magic Mountain.

  He drove us towards the Guatemalan frontier, past the Mennonite farms, where we saw stern, closed German faces, no freedom of women there, no intermarriages, and we stopped at the great Mayan ruins of Xunantunich, where Chuchu tried, but this time vainly, to communicate with his ancestors. We left him alone for a while, throwing strange noises against the great unresponsive stones.

  Price said, ‘I wrote to you once some years ago.’

  I tried to remember for what possible reason the Prime Minister of Belize could have communicated with me, but my memory was as silent as the Mayan temples.

  ‘I asked you what was in The Over-night Bag.’

  The Over-night Bag was the title of a short story which I had written many years before. I was ashamed to think of how many such letters I had dropped into the waste-paper basket unanswered, so that I was relieved when Price said, ‘I was so pleased to get a reply.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘You wrote that there was nothing in the bag.’

  I supposed it was the exotic address of Belize which had induced me to reply, for the name George Price could have meant nothing to me then. More than ten years had to pass before I found myself involved by Omar in Central American politics. It was strange to think how a trivial reply like that had won me a friend, for in the course of that drive to the Guatemalan frontier and back I felt I had gained his friendship.

  I value that friendship, for he is one of the most interesting political leaders in the world today, governing a parish of about 140,000 inhabitants, made up of Creoles, Germans, Mayan Indian
s, Black Caribs, Arabs, Chinese and Spanish-speaking refugees from Guatemala.

  I write ‘a parish’, for it is thus, I believe, that George Price thinks of Belize. Price is a Roman Catholic in religion and a socialist in politics – which he never meant to enter. It was his ambition to be a priest. After school he entered a seminary and only abandoned his studies there because his father died and left a large family for whom he had to provide. He still lives as a priest might live, celibate, in one of the small houses set on piles in Belize City. He returns there from Belmopan every evening and goes to bed around nine at latest, for he rises early at 5.30 in the morning for Mass and his daily Communion, and at 8.30 he is back at his desk in the new capital. He told me of the same dream which he had earlier recounted to V. S. Naipaul when Naipaul visited Belize: how in his sleep he had watched with envy and indignation a priest whom he knew to be an old reprobate saying the Mass and consecrating the Host – a rite which was forbidden to him.

  As we drove across Belize I was reminded again and again of the priest who lived in the heart of Price. His handwave closely resembled a blessing and he would stop the old Land Rover whenever he was asked for a lift by an Indian or a black. He was the very opposite of the Mennonite farmers who watched us go by with a glum disapproval of our infidel ways.

  At the frontier one defiant sign in Spanish of Belize independence – ‘Belice Soberano Independiente’ – faced another Guatemalan sign in English, ‘Belize is Guatemala.’ It amused Price to walk over the frontier with me into the Guatemalan custom house and have a chat with the officials who welcomed him like an old friend.

  On the way home we passed by Orange Walk Town, little more than a village, but it possesses a cinema and more than one hotel and Price was planning an international film festival to take place there because it was safely out of the hurricane belt. He told me that he intended to invite world-famous film stars to attend, but I doubt whether this dream of his ever became a reality. I found myself picturing the stars as they sat grandly down to a shrimp meal before attending the cinema which perhaps had seats for two hundred.