‘Um,’ I stumbled, ‘well, yes.’
‘But how can it be?’ she asked in obvious distress. ‘The USSR is so helpful to third world countries. How can it be doing things like this?’
There is a kind of innocence abroad in Nicaragua. One of the problems with the romance of the word ‘revolution’ is that it can carry with it a sort of blanket approval of all self-professed revolutionary movements. Donaldo Altamirano told me how deeply he felt in solidarity with the Provisional IRA.
Now Kalin Donkovy, who had been ponderously quiet all evening, began to speak, as unstoppably as a steamroller, about the poetry of Bulgaria. ‘Our tradition is of martyr poets,’ he declared. ‘Do you know that the symbol of our writers’ union is of the winged horse, Pegasus, with a bullet-hole in his chest? The most successful volume of modern poetry in Bulgaria is an anthology of dead poets. And this is not surprising. When poets suffer with the people, their work improves.’
Martínez and Altamirano responded to this statement with great warmth. The parallels with Nicaragua were obvious. The ghosts of the local martyr-poets walked into the ASTC cafeteria and joined us, the ghost, for example, of Leonel Rugama, who, in the old days at the India Cafe, used to tell stories about his mad uncle who lived in Macondo, with the Momotombo volcano in the background; who died at the age of twenty; and who believed that the revolution was ‘communion with the species’.
That was a fine, romantic sentiment, I said to Rugama’s ghost. But nation-building required something more prosaic: the ability to make distinctions, for example, between the PLO and the IRA.
I wondered if Nicaragua’s ghosts would permit the living to make such distinctions. On the one hand, the romance of the dead; on the other, the great American fist. It could turn into quite a trap.
10
MARKET DAY
The Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar loved Nicaragua, and came here often. When he was in Managua his favourite places were the markets. He would wander, with Tomás Borge, through the old ‘Oriental market’ that grew up in the earthquake-ruins of the city centre. They must have made an outlandish couple, Julio the giant and tiny Tomás. Nicaragua returned Cortázar’s compliment and loved him, too. The author of the fiendishly esoteric and complicated Rayuela (‘Hopscotch’) had been on first-name terms with many market traders. Now he, too, was dead.
When the big new covered markets like the Mercado Roberto Huembes were constructed, the traders didn’t want to leave their sites at the Oriental market. They were afraid their regular customers wouldn’t be able to find them in the cavernous new location. Daniel Ortega went to a meeting with the traders and old women yelled at him for hours, We won’t move, you can’t make us go. But some did, and then more, and now very few remained at the Oriental site.
At the Roberto Huembes market there were giant pink bunnies dangling over my head. These were piñatas, children’s party pieces. You filled them up with sweets and hung them from the ceiling. Then the children beat them with sticks until they burst in a shower of sweets. Young mestizo girls eyed the piñatas longingly.
There was a distraction. To the music of drums, the jigantona, the giant dancing woman, jigged past, about ten feet tall, her head a wide-eyed mask, her hips wobbling. The children rushed along behind her and so did I. She shimmied past a wall on which satirical cartoons had been pinned: Cardinal Obando y Bravo kneeling at Uncle Sam’s feet, begging, Give me your blessing, to which Uncle Sam replied, OK, baby, you are Contra, I am Contra, God is with you. Nobody (except for me) glanced at the cartoons. Everyone followed the dancing giantess, who was a lot more fun.
In different parts of the market you could buy furniture, arts and crafts, shoes, household goods, food, more or less anything that the shortages (and inflation) permitted. Some of the shoes cost more than a month’s salary for an office worker. Meat, corn, oil, potatoes, beans were all hard to come by. As a result, as I wandered around it, it wasn’t hard to hear complaints. Not surprisingly, the government came in for a lot of stick. The shoppers knew that not all the shortages could be blamed on the war. Recently, 20,000 pounds of beef went bad in the government’s meat-packing company because it was stored without refrigeration. Then there had been the 200,000 dead chickens to account for. And of course the prices made people angry. They could hardly afford a bottle of shampoo these days.
Because Nicaragua was fertile, people weren’t actually starving. There was always the great profusion of fruits to keep the wolf from the door, and, to my India-trained eyes, the scene at the Roberto Huembes was not a portrait of real, grinding poverty. But that argument, the always-someone-worse-off approach, wasn’t a particularly good or useful one. There was real hardship in Managua, and real bitching, too.
Many foreign observers, visiting Roberto Huembes and other markets, had used this moaning as a sign that the people had turned against the Sandinistas. I found things to be rather different. The FSLN was attacked all right, until you asked: What should the government do? Should it talk to the Contra, should it make some accommodation with the US, should it sue for peace? The answers to those questions were in an altogether different tone: no, no, of course they can’t do that. The war must go on.
The jigantona danced away, down the avenue of the cobblers. I went home and read, later that day, about another mythical being. In an interview with Omar Cabezas, he revealed that, instead of the imaginary friends that some children invented, he had owned, until he was about eighteen, an entirely imaginary dog. Gradually, his friends became fond of the dog, too. They would even borrow it for a couple of days at a time. ‘It was a group craziness,’ he said, ‘that I invented.’ Leonel Rugama, the poet, was one of the dog-borrowers. Once Cabezas lent Rugama a book and never got it back. When asked where it was, Rugama replied: ‘That sonofabitch dog destroyed it!’
Another dog-borrower was a young revolutionary named Roberto Huembes. Like Rugama, Huembes died during the insurrection years, and was now a covered market. Even the dog was dead. ‘One day,’ Cabezas explained, ‘it was run over by a car.’
11
EL SEÑOR PRESIDENTE
When I arrived at Daniel Ortega’s house on the evening of 24 July, Miguel d’Escoto was already there, his back a little less painful than it had been the last time we met. News had just come in of an attack by unnamed assailants on some sort of Contra ‘summit’ in the heart of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. Some of the FDN leaders were thought to have been injured. ‘The attack shows how freely the Contra can move inside Honduras,’ d’Escoto said. ‘They were meeting in a building very close to the house of the President of Honduras. That couldn’t have happened without the government’s approval.’ Who was responsible for the attack? Father Miguel’s face was impossible to read. ‘Of course, we are being blamed.’
More guests arrived, until most of the country’s leading poets and intellectuals were there: Rocha, whom I’d met at the National Assembly; Silva, who ran a children’s hospital; Claudia Chamorro, the Nicaraguan ambassador to Costa Rica. Ernesto Cardenal’s beam, beret, smock and jeans turned up. So did Carlos Martínez Rivas, about whom people had been worrying for days. Martínez Rivas, a poet notorious for embarking on mammoth drinking bouts that often put him in hospital, had been hitting the bottle again; so when he turned up sober with Sergio Ramírez, there was a general sense of relief. Martínez Rivas was thought by many to be the most innovative, fresh poet in Nicaragua. ‘He hates being translated,’ Cardenal told me. ‘He thinks translation is a form of assassination.’ Martínez Rivas’ booming good humour, faintly jowly face and bush-shirt that was a little tight at the buttons reminded me of a favourite (and now dead) uncle.
‘There’s wine in this soup,’ he scolded Rosario Murillo sternly. ‘What are you trying to do? Make an alcoholic of me?’
Also present was José Coronel Urtecho, a tall Tatiesque man of gentle bearing, who murmured to me as Martínez Rivas and Cardenal began the verbal sparring that would continue all evening: ‘They are the two gr
eatest poets of Latin America.’ Coronel’s modesty was also great; his own reputation equalled theirs.
Rosario Murillo was telling me about her last trip to New York with Daniel. They had decided to try and make a direct appeal to the American people, who were, as the opinion polls showed, mostly opposed to the Reagan policy in Central America. So she had gone on the Phil Donahue show, and Daniel had been filmed by TV cameras as he jogged in Central Park. ‘From that point of view things had gone so well,’ she said. ‘After Donahue people would wave to me in the street and shout Viva Nicaragua.’ She had even managed to button-hole Nancy Reagan at a public function and suggest that maybe the two of them might get together and try and mend some fences. Nancy, mumbling awkwardly, had been steered away by her minders at high speed.
‘Then Daniel said he needed new glasses.’ Rosario asked some American friends to arrange for a discreet appointment with an optician, and these (very wealthy) friends had insisted that the new glasses would be their gift to President Ortega. When Daniel and Rosario emerged from the opticians they found, to their dismay, that the press were there after all. The next day, the New York papers splashed the story of how the President of impoverished Nicaragua had spent $3,200 on new spectacles. ‘That much money,’ Rosario said. ‘I never dreamed glasses could cost so much. It’s true we bought a few pairs, including sunglasses for the children, because we cannot get such things here, but still! And we hadn’t paid a cent, anyway, but they didn’t print that.’ The scandal of the President’s spectacles had left its mark. ‘You don’t know how careful we have to be when we’re there. We have meetings scheduled from before breakfast until late at night, and we never eat out anywhere. Endless Chinese takeaways in the hotel room. And then that business with the glasses, really, it was too bad.’
Daniel Ortega entered, with that odd mixture of confidence and shyness. He sat down next to me — we were arranged in our wooden rocking chairs around a long, low table set out in one of the verandahs — and, without any preamble, began to talk politics. He was going to the Security Council in a couple of days’ time, to ask America to abide by the Hague judgment. But an interesting thing had happened. He had been approached by a group of US Catholic prelates who wanted a meeting with him while he was in the States. ‘This will be one of our most important meetings. It may be they want to mediate.’
‘In the matter of the expulsion of Bishop Vega?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no,’ Ortega said dismissively. ‘Vega, he’s Cia. He is completely with the counter-revolution. He has been saying appalling things, that are simply treason by any standards: openly supporting the Contra aggression.’
‘And what about Carballo?’ I asked, Carballo being the other expelled priest. Ortega was equally dismissive. ‘Carballo was Obando y Bravo’s other voice. Only he spoke much less carefully. Obando is, still, more circumspect.’
The conversation moved on to the subject of the remaining Nicaraguan bishops. The trouble with them, Ortega said, was that their attitudes were so parochial, so provincial. ‘The best one is Estelí, also the one from Bluefields, Schmitt. The rest … We opened discussions with them, you know. We said, we know you feel threatened by us, by the revolution. Tell us what your fears are and let’s see if we can work something out. We also said we wanted to consult them on various policy matters before making them public. The law on national service, for example, we would have liked to consult them on that. And on other matters, including military business.’ But the bishops had been unwilling or unable, he suggested, to speak at that level. ‘You know, one of them would pull out a piece of paper with his little local grievances listed on it, and the next would have his piece of paper, and so on. They all came with their private agendas. We had told them to resolve these things at the regional level. But they can’t think nationally.’ In his view, the bishops were far from unified. ‘They often have no coherent view on an issue. But Obando’s statements make it seem as if they do.’
Obando y Bravo’s theological education, Ortega said, had been paid for by a Somoza crony, a certain Guerrero, known as ‘Dr Quinine’ because of his dealings in the drug. Then Somoza gave Obando a house, a bank account and a Mercedes-Benz. (An embarrassing photograph existed of Somoza and Obando having a hug.) ‘There was a big fuss about the car, because it was such a blatant thing. Finally he had to give it back, but it took him nine months to do so. Nobody knew about the house and the bank account at the time. We didn’t know ourselves until after we came to power and could examine the records. We decided it would be counter-productive to move against Obando. So these things have still not been returned.’
He grinned. ‘The funny thing is, he and I are from the same village. I knew about Obando’s family from my mother.’
In 1974, the FSLN’s fortunes, which had been at a low ebb, were revived by a dramatic coup. On 27 December, Sandinista commandos arrived at a fancy dress party at the home of a Somoza crony, Chema Castillo, and kidnapped a group of ambassadors and senior officials. Somoza was obliged to accept their terms. Sandinista statements were put out on radio and TV, a number of political prisoners were freed and a ransom of $2 million was paid. (The commandos had originally asked for $5 million, but two wasn’t bad.) The intermediary between the guerrillas and Somoza was none other than Obando y Bravo. And one of the prisoners freed was Daniel Ortega.
‘Obando came with us on the plane to Cuba,’ Ortega reminisced. ‘I went over to talk to him, to say that our families knew each other and so on. But I formed the impression that he was very frightened. I asked him what the matter was and he finally said, “Do you think Somoza put a bomb on the plane?” It was sad; he was afraid that he would be sacrificed.’ Ortega, fresh from jail, had to offer reassurance. ‘I told him our people had checked the plane and we didn’t think there was a bomb. But after a while he was frightened again. This time he said, “Do you think they will arrest me when we land in Cuba?” It was incredible. I said, “Do you seriously think Fidel is going to put you in jail?” It showed how provincial his thinking was.’
I brought the discussion back to its starting-point. ‘What will the US bishops offer you, do you think?’
‘They will have their own agenda, that’s sure; Vega and so on. But maybe they want to mediate between us and the Vatican.’
‘Do you really think the Vatican is ready to make a settlement with you?’
‘It’s possible. There are indications. In the period in which I was refusing to meet Obando, Sergio visited Rome. Before he left, the papal nuncio here in Managua said it was impossible for the Pope to receive Sergio in the present circumstances. But in spite of that, the Pope did receive Sergio, and they had a constructive meeting.’ This was fascinating. Perhaps the Pope really had understood how great the challenge to his authority had grown in Central America, and had decided that the God of the Poor had to be placated, made peace with, because he could not be destroyed.
I asked about the forthcoming trip to the UN. ‘Presumably the US will use its veto in the Security Council.’
‘That’s certain,’ Ortega agreed. ‘But then we can go to the full General Assembly and argue it out there.’
Would Nicaragua be suing the US for damages in the US courts, as had been suggested? ‘At this time,’ Ortega said carefully, ‘we don’t want to assume the US has rejected the Hague ruling. We must give them the chance to accept.’
There was an interruption: a quarrel between the assembled great poets. Carlos Martínez Rivas burst into an attack on Ernesto Cardenal’s nationwide poetry workshop scheme, under which ordinary people — Cardenal was particularly fond of pointing to the large numbers of participating policemen — could write and discuss poetry. Cardenal was evidently rather proud of the workshops (I had heard him, three years earlier, extolling their virtues at a literary congress in Finland), but Martínez Rivas did not mince words. ‘Poetry has stagnated in Nicaragua,’ he boomed. ‘Nobody reads any more. They only open Ventana (the literary supplement of Barricada) when they’ve go
t something in it. And then they only read their own poems. Anyway, with these workshops, everybody has started sounding exactly the same. Nobody’s trying new things, nobody’s looking for a new language.’
Having seen some of the workshops’ output, I had some sympathy with Martínez Rivas’ argument, but kept out of the fight. Cardenal’s smile remained in place, but its temperature seemed to have dropped. There was old business between these two. They had been quarrelling for years. They conducted themselves very well, never ceasing to be amicable, to crack jokes, but the dispute was real for all that. From the sidelines, Sergio Ramírez mischievously egged them on, trying to draw Coronel into the fray, but he wouldn’t be tempted. Martínez Rivas began to tease Cardenal for being so prolific. ‘I remember once, years ago, I was asked to write a poem in two weeks for some fiesta. The winner got to choose the festival queen. I said, how can I write a poem in two weeks? Go ask Cardenal. So they did, and he had something already written that he adapted, and he won the prize. I said, how can you use a thing written in one spirit for a completely different purpose? But anyway, he won. So I said that since I’d arranged it all for him, he had to let me choose the queen. He got the prize, but I chose the girl.’
Amidst these barbed tales of old Managua, I remembered another instance in which Cardenal had adapted an old poem to a new purpose. He had drafted a poem about the death of Sandino, and the fact that his grave was unknown. Then, in 1954, an attempt to capture Anastasio Somoza García, the then dictator, ended in failure. One of the conspirators, Pablo de Leal, had his tongue cut out before being killed. It is said that another, Adolfo Báez Bone, was castrated. The main torturer was Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who would be the last dictator of the line. When Cardenal heard the news, he decided to make Báez Bone the subject of his poem instead of Sandino:
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