The Jaguar Smile

by Salman Rushdie

  The Jaguar Smile

  Salman Rushdie

  “I did not go to Nicaragua intending to write a book, or, indeed, to write at all: but my encounter with the place affected me so deeply that in the end I had no choice.” So notes Salman Rushdie in his first work of nonfiction, a book as imaginative and meaningful as his acclaimed novels. In The Jaguar Smile, Rushdie paints a brilliantly sharp and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the terrain, and the poetry of “a country in which the ancient, opposing forces of creation and destruction were in violent collision.” Recounting his travels there in 1986, in the midst of America’s behind-the-scenes war against the Sandinistas, Rushdie reveals a nation resounding to the clashes between government and individuals, history and morality.

  Salman Rushdie

  THE JAGUAR SMILE

  A Nicaraguan Journey

  For Robbie

  There was a young girl of Nic’ragua

  Who smiled as she rode on a jaguar.

  They returned from the ride

  With the young girl inside

  And the smile on the face of the jaguar.

  ANON

  Map of Nicaragua

  PREFACE TO THE 1997 EDITION

  It’s ten years since The Jaguar Smile was published. It was my first nonfiction book, and I well remember the shock of emerging, for the first time, from the (relatively) polite world of literature into the rough-and-tumble of the political arena. In the United States, then deeply involved in the ‘low-intensity’ proxy war against Nicaragua, the tumbling was particularly rough. After my publication party in New York, I found myself at dinner at a wealthy uptown address, surrounded by the bien-pensant liberal élite. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on hearing that I’d written a book about Nicaragua, embarking on a debunking of the Sandinistas that focused wittily on their mode of dress and lack of good society manners. This was a warning sign. If American liberals were so casually dismissive, conservatives were bound to be worse.

  And so it proved. A prominent radio interviewer, in a live broadcast, greeted me with the question: ‘Mr Rushdie, to what extent are you a Communist stooge?’ The New Republic gave the book an immensely long and rude review, perhaps the most vitriolic I’d ever received. It turned out to have been written by one of the most important figures in the Contra leadership. I was inexperienced enough, in those days, to be genuinely surprised that a respectable journal should so brazenly abandon the principle of critical objectivity for the sake of some controversial copy. I am more worldly now.

  In the last ten years, the world has changed so dramatically that The Jaguar Smile now reads like a period piece, a fairy tale of one of the hotter moments in the Cold War. ‘The Soviet Union’ and ‘Cuba’ are bogeymen that have long since lost their power to scare us. And in Nicaragua, the Contra war finally took its toll. A war-weary electorate voted out the FSLN, electing, instead, the same Doña Violeta Chamorro whom I had rather caustically described in my pages. Daniel Ortega surprised, even impressed, many of his international opponents by accepting the voters’ verdict. But at the same time, the Sandinistas were harshly criticized for pushing through, on behalf of many of their most prominent members, a last-minute land-grab of valuable real estate. (I have always wondered who ended up owning the comfortable Managua villa in which I was housed.) It was a characteristically contradictory Sandinista moment. When in power, they had acted, simultaneously, like people committed to democracy and also like harsh censors of free expression. Now, in their fall, they had behaved, once again simultaneously, like true democrats and also like true Latin-American oligarchs.

  The FSLN sign on its hill overlooking Managua was altered, after the election, to read FIN. The End. In fact, Nicaraguan politics continued to be anything but straightforward. Dissension struck Doña Violeta’s ragbag anti-Sandinista coalition almost as soon as it took power, and on many occasions she was obliged to rule with the assistance of the votes of the Sandinista opposition. I had been struck, during my stay in Nicaragua, by the incestuous nature of the ruling class. Sandinistas and right-wingers had all gone to the same schools and dated each other. Now, it seemed, they were dating each other again.

  But the stresses within the FSLN, what Marx would have called its ‘inherent contradictions’, did eventually arise to unmake it. During my visit I had been unable to meet the Sandinistas’ military strongman, Daniel Ortega’s brother Humberto, head of the armed forces. (The absence of any effective investigation of the hard-liners — Humberto Ortega, Tomás Borge — is a weakness in The Jaguar Smile. It seems probable that they were kept away from a non-Marxist like myself.) The differences between the Ortega brothers, and the group headed by Sergio Ramírez, whose key role it had been to persuade the urban middle class to support the revolution, became untenable. Ramírez left the movement, and the Sandinistas were hopelessly split. At the personal level, too, there were ruptures. Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo separated. Some of the people I had liked and admired left the country. The poet Gioconda Belli, for example, now lives in the United States. Her relationship with post-Sandinista Nicaragua is troubled and sad. And now a second election has been lost. Daniel Ortega has claimed that Arnoldo Alemán’s victory was achieved by widespread ballot-rigging, but the independent team of electoral observers has ratified the election results. Now it really does look like the FIN.

  In 1986, the story of Nicaragua looked to me like a David-and-Goliath saga. The Sandinistas, for all their incompetences and faults (and, on re-reading, I am glad to find I said a good deal about those faults), seemed like U.S. cultural mythology’s quintessential little guys who stand up against the Mister Bigs of the world and refuse to admit defeat. It looked, too, like a tale of unrequited love. Nicaragua, which loved the music, poetry and baseball of the United States, was being crushed by its powerful, careless beloved. Politics is not often so poignant.

  A decade later, romance has given way to what cynical commentators call reality: that is, the irresistible power of super-power itself. Just do as we say, as the White House emissary told Foreign Minister d’Escoto. Nowadays, in the epoch beyond the ‘end of history’, that instruction cannot be ignored. In 1986, Mario Vargas Llosa[1] had spoken of the silent majority of ‘anti-Sandinista democratic Nicaraguans’, a majority that then seemed more like a wish than a truth; now, that majority exists. Mario would say it always existed, and if I am wrong, then he is right, but one might also argue that it was created. After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price. Now that the economic blockade is over and the ruined Nicaraguan economy has begun its slow recovery, it is easy to blame the old rulers for that blockade. The power of super-power: first to describe a given leadership as unacceptable; then to create the circumstances in which it becomes unacceptable; and finally to obliterate the memory of its (the super-power’s) own part in the process.

  I met Sergio Ramírez in a European hotel room a couple of years ago. He seemed heavier, more burdened. I have corresponded with Gioconda Belli. It is plain from these and other contacts that the story of which The Jaguar Smile is one chapter has not had a happy ending.

  To re-read an old book is, inevitably, to have a sense of omissions, errors and regrets. There are one or two small howlers. In the account of the death of Julio Buitrago, I gave the impression that Doris Tijerino, among others, died with him. At the very moment I wrote this, Ms Tijerino was alive and occupying a prominent public position. Sorry, Doris.

  I would like to have been clearer, too, about my difficulties with the Minister of Culture, Ernesto Cardenal. It was perhaps too polite of me to leave out the details of a speech I heard him give in Finland, in which he said that his beloved campesino poets were being given, as models, the poems of Ezra Pound and Mariann
e Moore ‘in simplified form’; and in which he claimed, heart-freezingly, that Nicaragua was the ‘first nation on earth to have nationalized poetry.’ (A long-time literary opponent of the Soviet Union, seated near me, muttered, ‘Second nation…’)

  The whole truth would also involve a clearer account of the Sandinista leadership’s strange susceptibility to the lure of international celebrity; more detail about the incompetence of much of their bureaucracy; more criticism of their treatment of the Miskito Indians; more, perhaps, about the widespread public dislike of the President’s compañera, Rosario Murillo, and her grand ways.

  These are the failings of any book written quickly, and in the heat of a passion. But even with ten years’ hindsight, I stand by the fundamental judgments and attitudes of The Jaguar Smile, and feel, if I may say so, proud of my younger self for taking these ‘snapshots’ of that beautiful, benighted land; for getting more things half-right than half-wrong. And I mourn for Bluefields, already so poor when I saw it, and devastated since by one of the less-well-reported major earthquakes of recent years. I hope Miss Pancha the midwife and her pet cow are okay. I wish I had not run out of Flor de Caña rum. And I hope Rundown, the hot local band, are still singing Rub me belly skin with castor oil.

  SALMAN RUSHDIE

  1997

  HOPE: A PROLOGUE

  Ten years ago, when I was living in a small flat above an offlicence in SW1, I learned that the big house next door had been bought by the wife of the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The street was obviously going down in the world, what with the murder of the nanny Sandra Rivett by that nice Lord Lucan at number 44, and I moved out a few months later. I never met Hope Somoza, but her house became notorious in the street for a burglar alarm that went off with surprising frequency, and for the occasional parties that would cause the street to be jammed solid with Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar limousines. Back in Managua, her husband ‘Tacho’ had taken a mistress, Dinorah, and Hope was no doubt trying to keep her spirits up.

  Tacho and Dinorah fled Nicaragua on 17 July 1979, so that ‘Nicaragua libre’ was born exactly one month after my own son. (19 July is the formal independence day, because that was when the Sandinistas entered Managua, but the 17th is the real hat-in-air moment, the día de alegría, the day of joy.) I’ve always had a weakness for synchronicity, and I felt that the proximity of the birthdays forged a bond.

  When the Reagan administration began its war against Nicaragua, I recognized a deeper affinity with that small country in a continent (Central America) upon which I had never set foot. I grew daily more interested in its affairs, because, after all, I was myself the child of a successful revolt against a great power, my consciousness the product of the triumph of the Indian revolution. It was perhaps also true that those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, had something in common — not, certainly, anything as simplistic as a unified ‘third world’ outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel. I became a sponsor of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign in London. I mention this to declare an interest; when I finally visited Nicaragua, in July 1986, I did not go as a wholly neutral observer. I was not a blank slate.

  I went to Nicaragua as the guest of the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers (ASTC), the umbrella organization that brought writers, artists, musicians, craftspeople, dancers and so on, together under the same roof. The occasion was the seventh anniversary of the ‘triumph’, as it’s known, of the Frente Sandinista. I went eagerly, but with a good deal of nervousness. I was familiar with the tendency of revolutions to go wrong, to devour their children, to become the thing they had been created to destroy. I knew about starting with idealism and romance and ending with betrayed expectations, broken hope. Would I find myself disliking the Sandinistas? One didn’t have to like people to believe in their right not to be squashed by the United States; but it helped, it certainly helped.

  It was a critical time. On 27 June, the International Court of Justice in the Hague had ruled that US aid to la Contra, the counter-revolutionary army the CIA had invented, assembled, organized and armed, was in violation of international law. The US House of Representatives, meanwhile, went ahead and approved President Reagan’s request for $100 million-worth of new aid for the counter-revolution. In what looked like an act of retaliation, President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua had announced the closure of the opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and the expulsion of two turbulent priests, Bishop Vega and Monsignor Bismark Carballo. The storm was brewing.

  I was in Nicaragua for three weeks in July. What follows, therefore, is a portrait of a moment, no more, in the life of that beautiful, volcanic country. I did not go to Nicaragua intending to write a book, or, indeed, to write at all; but my encounter with the place affected me so deeply that in the end I had no choice. So: a moment, but, I believe, a crucial and revealing one, because it was neither a beginning nor an end, but a middle, a time that felt close to the fulcrum of history, a time when all things, all the possible futures, were still (just) in the balance.

  Nor, in spite of everything, did it seem, as I had feared it might, like a time without hope.

  1

  SANDINO’S HAT

  ‘Cristoforo Colón set sail from Palos de Moguer in Spain, to find the lands of the Great Khan, where there were castles of gold, and the species were growing up in a wildly way; and, when walking on the ways, precious stones were frequently found. However, instead of that world, another, also rich, beautiful and plenty of fantasy, was discovered: America.’

  I read this passage on a ‘tobacco map’ of Cuba at Havana airport, and to a traveller en route to Central America for the first time, it seemed like a propitious text. Later, however, as the plane wheeled over the green lagoon in the crater of the volcano of Apoyeque, and Managua came into view, I recalled another, darker text, from Neruda’s poem Centro América:

  Land as slim as a whip,

  hot as torture,

  your step in Honduras, your blood

  in Santo Domingo, at night,

  your eyes in Nicaragua

  touch me, call me, grip me,

  and throughout American lands

  I knock on doors to speak,

  I tap on tongues that are tied,

  I raise curtains, I plunge

  my hands into blood:

  O, sorrows

  of my land, O death-rattle

  of the great established silence,

  O, long-suffering peoples,

  O, slender waist of tears.

  To understand the living in Nicaragua, I found, it was necessary to begin with the dead. The country was full of ghosts. Sandino vive, a wall shouted at me the moment I arrived, and at once a large pinkish boulder replied, Cristo vive, and, what’s more, viene pronto. A few moments later I passed the empty plinth upon which, until seven years ago, there stood the equestrian statue of the monster; except that it wasn’t really him, but a second-hand statue from Italy that had been given a new face. The original face had been Mussolini’s. The statue toppled with the dictatorship, but the empty plinth was, in a way, a deception. Somoza vive: chill, dark words, not much heard in Nicaragua, but the beast was alive all right. Tacho was assassinated in 1980 by an Argentine Montonero unit who found him in Paraguay, but there was his shadow haunting the Honduran frontier, a phantom in a cowboy hat.

  Managua sprawled around its own corpse. Eighty per cent of the city’s buildings had fallen down in the great earthquake of 1972, and most of what used to be the centre was now an emptiness. Under Somoza, it had been left as a pile of rubble, and it wasn’t until after his fall that the mess was cleared up and grass was planted where downtown Managua used to be.

  The hollow centre gave the city a provisional, film-set unreality. There was still a serious shortage of houses, and Managuans were obliged to improvise with what was
left. The Foreign Ministry occupied an abandoned shopping mall. The National Assembly itself sat in a converted bank. The Intercontinental Hotel, a sawn-off concrete pyramid, had unfortunately failed to collapse. It stood amidst the wraiths of old Managua like an omen: an ugly American, but a survivor, nevertheless. (It became impossible, I discovered, not to see such a city in symbolic terms.)

  People, too, were in short supply. Nicaragua’s population was under three million, and the war continued to reduce it. In my first hours in the city streets, I saw a number of sights that were familiar to eyes trained in India and Pakistan: the capital’s few buses, many of them donated quite recently by Alfonsín’s new Argentina, were crammed to bursting-point with people, who hung off them in a very subcontinental way. And the roadside shanties put up by the campesinos (peasants) who had come to Managua with hope and not much else, echoed the bustees of Calcutta and Bombay. Later I realized that these echoes of multitudinous lands were as misleading as the tyrant’s empty plinth. Nicaragua, which was about the size of the state of Oklahoma (if you turned England and Wales upside down, you’d have a rough approximation of its proportions), was also the emptiest of the countries of Central America. There were six times as many people in the New York metropolitan area as there were in the whole of Nicaragua. The void of downtown Managua revealed more than a crowded bus.

  Filling the void, populating the streets, were the ghosts, the martyr dead. The Argentinian novelist Ernesto Sábato described Buenos Aires as a city whose street-names served to entomb the memory of its heroes, and in Nicaragua, too, I often had the feeling that everyone who mattered had already died and been immortalized in the names of hospitals, schools, theatres, highways or even (in the case of the great poet Rubén Darío) an entire town. In classical Greece, heroes could aspire to the status of gods, or at least hope to be turned into constellations, but the dead of an impoverished twentieth-century country had to make do with this more prosaic, public-park or sports-stadium immortality.