The Jaguar Smile

by Salman Rushdie

  Of the ten earliest leaders of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, nine had been killed before Somoza fell. Their faces, painted in the Sandinista colours of red and black, stared gigantically down on the Plaza de la Revolución. Carlos Fonseca (who had founded the Frente in 1956 and who fell in November, 1976, just two and a half years before the Sandinista victory); Silvio Mayorga; Germán Pomares: their names were like a litany. The survivor, Tomás Borge, now Minister of the Interior, was up there too, one living man among the immortals. Borge was badly tortured and, the story goes, ‘took his revenge’ on his torturer after the revolution, by forgiving him.

  In a country whose history had been a continuous rite of blood for the forty-six years in which the Somozas had headed one of the longest-running and cruellest dictatorships on earth, it wasn’t surprising that a martyr-culture should have developed. Over and over, I heard the legends of the dead. Of the poet Leonel Rugama, who was trapped in a house by Somoza’s National Guard and ordered to surrender, and who yelled back, ‘Que se rinda tu madre!’ (Let your mother surrender!), and fought on until he died. Of Julio Buitrago, surrounded in a ‘safe house’ in Managua along with Gloria Campos and Doris Tijerino. Finally he was the only one left alive, resisting the might of Somoza’s tanks and heavy artillery hour after hour, while the whole country watched him on live television, because Somoza thought he’d captured a whole FSLN cell and wanted their destruction to be a lesson to the people; a terrible miscalculation, because when the people saw Buitrago come out shooting and die at last, when they saw that just one man had held off the tyrant for so long, they learned the wrong lesson: that resistance was possible.

  In Nicaragua ‘at seven years’ the walls still spoke to the dead: Carlos, we’re getting there, the graffiti said; or, Julio, we have not forgotten.

  A painting by the primitivist painter Gloria Guevara, titled Cristo guerrillero, showed a crucifixion set in a rocky, mountainous Nicaraguan landscape. Three peasant women, two kneeling, one standing, wept at the foot of the cross, upon which there hung a Christ-figure who wore, instead of a loincloth and a crown of thorns, a pair of jeans and a denim shirt. The picture explained a good deal. The religion of those who lived under the volcanoes of Central America had always had much to do with martyrdom, with the dead; and in Nicaragua many, many people found their way to the revolution through religion. The versicle-and-response format of the Mass now formed the basis of much political activity, too. Sandino’s old slogan, patria libre o morir (a free homeland or death), was now the national rallying-cry, and at the end of public meetings a platform speaker would invariably call out, ‘Patria libre!’ to which the crowd would roar back, rather spookily if you hadn’t shared their history, and if, for you, another, faraway martyr-culture, that of Khomeini’s Iran, represented a fearsome warning, ‘O MORIR!’

  The Nicaraguan revolution had been, and remained, a passion. The word had secular as well as Christian resonances. It was that fusion that lay at the heart of Sandinismo. That was what Gloria Guevara’s painting revealed.

  And then,

  we’ll go wake our dead

  with the life they bequeathed us

  and we’ll all sing together

  while concerts of birds

  repeat our message

  through the length and breadth

  of America.

  (From Until We’re Free, by Gioconda Belli.)

  The generations of the dead were the context of seven-year-old ‘Nicaragua libre’, and without context there could be no meaning. When you stood in front of la Loma, the terrifying ‘bunker’ which had been the seat of the Somozas’ power, you began to remember: that the first Somoza, Anastasio Somoza García, had presided over the killing of some 20,000 Nicaraguans until he himself was shot, at a ball in León, by the poet Rigoberto López (who was himself killed by the National Guard an instant later); and that, after a brief period of (slight) liberalization under one of Tacho I’s sons, Luis, the other son resumed normal Somoza operations in 1967. This was Tacho II, last and greediest of the line. It was just seven years since the horror ended, seven years since men were fed to panthers in the despot’s private zoo, since torture, castration, rape. Seven years since the beast. La Loma made the United States’ claim that Nicaragua was once again a totalitarian state sound obscene. The bunker was the reality of totalitarianism, its hideous remnant and reminder. The beheaded, violated, mutilated ghosts of Nicaragua bore witness, every day, to what used to happen here, and must never happen again.

  The most famous ghost, Augusto César Sandino, had by now been thoroughly mythologized, almost as thoroughly as, for example, Gandhi. A little, frowning man in a big hat, he had become a collection of stories. In 1927, he had been head of the sales department of the Huasteca petrol company in Mexico, when the Nicaraguan Liberal, Sacasa, backed by the army’s chief of staff, Moncada, rose in arms against the US-backed conservative, Adolfo Díaz. Sandino returned to Nicaragua to fight on the Liberal side, and when Moncada did a deal with the US and laid down his arms, Sandino refused, so that Moncada had to tell the Americans: ‘All my men surrender except one,’ and Sandino and his ‘Crazy Little Army’ took to the mountains … Yes, that story, and the story of his betrayal, his assassination by Somoza’s thugs in February 1934, after he had signed a peace treaty and when he was on his way home from the celebratory banquet. I was struck by the fact that it was Sandino’s hat, and not his face, that had become the most potent icon in Nicaragua. A hatless Sandino would not be instantly recognizable; but that hat no longer needed his presence beneath it to be evocative. In many instances, FSLN graffiti were followed by a schematic drawing of the celebrated headgear, a drawing that looked exactly like an infinity-sign with a conical volcano rising out of it. Infinity and eruptions: the illegitimate boy from Niquinohomo was now a cluster of metaphors. Or, to put it another way: Sandino had become his hat.

  In the west of the city was a low hill on which the initials FSLN reclined, each whitish figure about a hundred feet long, like a recumbent Hollywood sign. At first I thought the letters had been cut out of the hillside in the fashion of an English white horse, or maybe they were made of concrete, or even marble? But the sign was only wooden, made up of boards lying on the hillside, propped up, where necessary, by simple gantries. When I got closer to it, I saw that it had already started to look somewhat the worse for wear. Before the revolution there was a different sign on this hill. ROLTER, it read, advertising a local manufacturer of boots and shoes. That discovery intensified my sense of the provisional quality of life in post-revolutionary Managua. One wooden advertisement could easily be replaced by another. Nor could I resist the implications of putting the Frente Sandinista’s sign on what used to be Boot Hill.

  It was the rainy season in Managua; the skies were overcast. A cold wind blew from the north.

  2

  THE ROAD TO CAMOAPA

  The walls of the home of Nicaragua’s Vice-President, the novelist Sergio Ramírez, were hung with masks. ‘Ah,’ said the security guard, admitting me to a courtyard of old trees surrounded by spacious verandahs, ‘el escritor hindú.’ Spanish uses hindú to mean ‘Indian’; the construction de la India, which seemed OK to me, sounded stilted to Nicaraguan ears. So during my stay I became the hindú writer, or even, quite often, poeta. Which was quite a flattering disguise.

  In Nicaragua, the mask was an indispensable feature of many popular festivals and folk-dances. There were animal-masks, devil-masks, even, as I was to discover, masks of men with bleeding bullet-holes in the centres of their foreheads. During the insurrection, Sandinista guerrillas often went into action wearing masks of pink mesh with simple faces painted on them. These masks, too, originated in folk-dance. One night I went to see a ballet based on the country’s popular dances, and saw that one of the ballerinas was wearing a pink mask. The mask’s associations with the revolution had grown so strong that it transformed her, in my eyes at least, into something wondrously strange: not a masked dancer, bu
t a guerrilla in a tutu.

  The true purpose of masks, as any actor will tell you, is not concealment, but transformation. A culture of masks is one that understands a good deal about the processes of metamorphosis.

  I set off in the company of Sergio Ramírez and one of the nine-man National Directorate of the FSLN, Luis Carrión, to the town of Camoapa in Boaco province, to witness a part of one of the most important transformations taking place in the new Nicaragua. It was National Agrarian Reform Day, and in Camoapa land titles for no less than 70,000 acres were to be handed out to the campesinos.

  Sergio Ramírez was unusually big (well over six feet) and heavily built for a Nicaraguan, and could look, at times, positively Chinese in a Mikadoish sort of way; Luis Carrión was of a much more characteristically Nicaraguan light, slight build, with a moustache that was — as they used to say in the Paris of the 1968 événements — ‘Marxiste, tendance Groucho’. They were both remarkably free of the pomposity and circumlocution that were so often the stock-in-trade of politicians. ‘How many acres have been redistributed since the revolution?’ I asked, and once they had agreed how many manzanas (the Nicaraguan land unit) there were in a hectare, and we had all haggled about the number of acres a hectare contained, we arrived at a rough figure of over two million acres, handed out to about 100,000 families.

  I was impressed, and said so. Ramírez nodded. ‘It shows the people that we have the will to keep our promises.’

  When Don Anastasio Somoza fled the country, he took with him everything he could carry, including all the cash in the national treasury. He even had the bodies of Tacho I and Luis Somoza dug up and they, too, went into exile. No doubt he would have taken the land as well, if he’d known how. But he couldn’t, and nor could his cronies who fled with him, and so the government of the new Nicaragua found itself in possession of the abandoned estates, amounting to half the arable land in the country. The land being redistributed was taken from those immense holdings and not, as Carrión and Ramírez clearly felt obliged to explain, from anywhere else. ‘Nobody who stayed in Nicaragua to work his land had it confiscated,’ said Ramírez, who spoke excellent English but tired of it after a while and lapsed into Spanish. ‘Since our absolute priorities are production and defence, why should we meddle with someone who is producing? On the contrary, we assist many large, private landowners.’ On the road to Camoapa, which passed between the country’s two big lakes, Lake Managua and Lake Nicaragua (really an inland sea, and the only place in the world where you could be eaten by freshwater sharks), they were at pains to point out farms and industries that remained in private hands. There was often a little, defensive something that would creep into the discourse of Nicaraguan leaders. ‘No country is put under a microscope the way we are,’ Foreign Minister d’Escoto would tell me. That sense of being watched, all the time, for the tiniest slip, made them jumpy.

  The road to Camoapa was made of brick, like many roads in Nicaragua. Somoza used to own a brick factory. After the ’72 earthquake he insisted that the nation’s thoroughfares be reconstructed in Presidential bricks, which he then sold to the nation at high prices. ‘But we discovered that the bricks were also very easy to lever up,’ Luis Carrión told me contentedly, ‘so that during the insurrection years we were often able to stop his convoys quite easily, thanks to his own brick roads.’ Carrión looked too young to be running a country. Nicaragua made ‘young novelists’ of thirty-nine years feel antique. At least Sergio Ramírez was a few years older than me. Then again, he made me feel short.

  I asked Ramírez about the recent pronouncements on Nicaragua by the famous Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, in the New York Times and elsewhere. ‘His positions have moved so far to the right these days that I wasn’t surprised by his criticisms,’ Ramírez said. What, then, did he think of Vargas Llosa’s suggestion that the people who merited the West’s support in Nicaragua were neither the Contra nor the FSLN, but the anti-Sandinista democratic Nicaraguans, who might even now be a majority? Carrión and Ramírez both laughed. ‘There’s no such majority,’ Ramírez said. ‘Let me know if you locate it.’

  Vargas Llosa also hinted that the Sandinistas were a Soviet-style state in disguise; that the various nods in the direction of a mixed economy and a pluralistic democracy were no more than window dressing; and that, in fact, the FSLN was being obliged to preserve such things precisely on account of the pressure from outside. (Though, of course, he hastened to add that he did not support the Contra.)

  Ramírez seemed genuinely annoyed by this suggestion. If it weren’t for the war, he said, much more power could be given to the people than a state of emergency permitted; that is, peace would mean more democracy, not less. ‘We have the right to self-determination. Our internal structures are nobody’s business but our own.’

  ‘But,’ I suggested, ‘now that the $100 million for the Contra has been approved, other people have made it their business, haven’t they?’

  Luis Carrión replied. ‘The hundred million is not the point. The counter-revolution is not the real threat.’ His view was that the Contra army had effectively been defeated. ‘These days they try hard to avoid meeting us in direct combat, because of their heavy losses. They concentrate instead on terrorist acts, aimed at the civilian population, and at damaging production. We expect more of these now. We expect they will try something in the cities, even in Managua, now that they have the extra money; but we are prepared. They also have a major problem of recruitment and morale. Their numbers have fallen by several thousand in the past two years. No: the real threat is the CIA.’

  Ah yes, la Cia. My reflex reaction to the Agency’s entry into the conversation was simultaneously Eastern and Western. The Western voice inside me, the voice that was fed up with cloaks and daggers and conspiracy theories, muttered, ‘not them again’. The Eastern voice, however, understood that the CIA really did exist, was powerful, and although it was easy to make it a scapegoat, it was also just a bit too jaded, too cynical, to discount its power.

  The CIA operated in Central America through what it charmingly referred to as UCLAs: Unilaterally Controlled Latino Assets. Now that it was to be permitted to resume overt operations, those Assets would be going to work with a will. Conservative estimates of the CIA’s planned 1986–87 budget against Nicaragua suggested a figure somewhere in the near vicinity of $400 million — four times the aid allocated to the Contra forces. Add to that the $300 million being spent by the Reagan administration to try and ‘buy off’ Nicaragua’s neighbours, and you had a grand total of $800 million being spent on dirty tricks and destabilization, to bring to heel a country of under three million people.

  (The total amount of money raised by the Band Aid, Sport Aid and Live Aid events, just to offer some sort of comparison, was less than a quarter of this figure.)

  It was the CIA that had mined the harbour at Corinto, and in the face of overt operations like that, the Nicaraguan government would face real problems. Carrión said, ‘Against such aggression, there is simply not much we can do. We lack the resources.’

  Carrión believed that when Reagan realized the Contra would never do the job for him, a direct US invasion on some pretext or other would follow. I was to discover that this was the more or less unanimous opinion of the Sandinista leaders I encountered. ‘Reagan has invested too much personal prestige in the Nicaragua issue to leave office without trying to smash us,’ Ramírez said. The government was preparing for the US invasion by arming the campesinos. ‘Our best defence,’ Luis Carrión told me, ‘is the people in arms.’ It was a phrase I heard many times during my stay. Many thousands of ordinary Nicaraguans had already been given AK-47 automatic rifles, as well as other hardware. If the the Pentagon could be convinced that the US body count would be high, it might make an attack politically unsaleable. ‘Nicaragua will not be like Grenada for them,’ Luis Carrión said. ‘It will not be quick.’

  I had begun to see great mountains of corpses in my mind’s eye. I changed the subject, a
nd asked Sergio Ramírez about a recent report by the ‘International League for Human Rights’, published in the Herald Tribune. ‘Repression in Nicaragua is not as conspicuous or as bloody as in other parts of Central America,’ said Nina H. Shea, programme director of the ‘New York-based’ group. ‘But it is more insidious and systematic.’

  Ramírez began by saying that the most important human rights organizations had given Nicaragua a pretty clean report. Then he lost his temper. ‘You see,’ he cried, ‘if we do not murder and torture people as they do in Salvador, it just proves that we are so fiendishly subtle.’

  A cow strolled across the road and the driver braked violently. Ahead of us, the security outriders, who all, rather unusually, wore bright orange washing-up gloves, came to a halt. ‘One must understand one’s animals,’ Luis Carrión said mildly. ‘A cow will never deviate from its chosen direction, never turn around. A dog, however, is unreliable.’

  We arrived in Camoapa, which was in holiday mood. Five thousand campesinos filled the main square, around which fluttered great hosts of small blue-and-white national flags, alternating with the red-and-black banners of the Frente. Straw Sandino-hats, scrubbed children in their best clothes, militiamen on guard. ‘Señor Reagan,’ read a placard held up by a member of the Heroes and Martyrs of the First of May 1986 Co-operative, ‘you won’t get even the smallest lump of our land.’ And, elsewhere in the crowd, another banner demanded: ‘Trabajo y fusiles!’ Work and rifles. It wasn’t easy to believe in Vargas Llosa’s hypothetical anti-Sandinista majority here. The government, understanding that its power base lay with the campesinos, had given rural areas such as this priority over the cities in terms of the allocation of the country’s scarce resources. Food shortages weren’t nearly as acute here as they were getting to be in Managua, Granada and León; and such preferential policies, coupled with the land reforms, had ensured that communities such as Camoapa had remained loyal FSLN strongholds.