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Last Night in Managua by Doniphan Blair
Young Sandanista soldiers head to Battle of Granada, 1979. photo: courtesy the Sandanista Archives
A reprint of an article first published in the Clinton Street Quarterly, Portland, Oregon, 1984.
HE COULDN'T STOP LAUGHING THE
whole way to Managua. Bit by bit the other passengers were getting that way too, even though some of the younger men, between guffaws, were exchanging quizzical looks. It was obvious; after the listless, colorless Honduras, he was happy to be home. A middle-aged singer with a tiny Chaplin mustache, he was back from a tour of the Honduran “hot spots” where he probably entertained his share of counterrevolutionaries ("contras").
We met at the last of the three custom houses entering Nicaragua, 30 miles east from where I crossed into the country in 1978. Even back then, despite the “civil war” and the pernicious welcome of the Guardia Nacional, with their chipped teeth, sunglasses and low slung forty-fives, pecking away at Kafkaesque immigration forms, I was relieved to be out of Honduras.
Now I was delighted to be back in Nicaragua. Sure the initial vision of the bombed-out custom house might have boded ill to some. I was mollified by the soldier, bedecked with flowers in his boots, waving me through, while his buddy “siesta-ed” barefoot in the back.
The tinge of the macabre was effaced by the official who filled out the simple immigration form long-hand. A tiny brass bar on his collar distinguished him from his colleagues lolling about the 6’x6’ concrete box, although he was more interested in the ball game blasting out of the box in the corner. It was the finals of the amateur world series in Cuba and Panama and Nicaragua were tied one-one, with two outs and two men on for Panama. His “office” had no desk, no files—not even a phone through which to run a security check on me (he WAS issuing me my visa) or to notify HQ, if he saw any tanks roll by.
For a country at war, it was a pretty relaxed border. Because there were no buses, the musician and I plus a couple of others began hitchhiking south. The sun was still hot over the low scrub cover that cascades down the foothills from the Honduran highlands. The rumor that the forests had all been auctioned off by Anastasio Somoza was confirmed by the distinct lack of trees and the loaded lumber trucks arriving from the north. One Honduran teamster, who gave me a ride, told me he always returns empty—Nicaragua had no more exports!
As we drove on we saw soldiers everywhere, riding on vehicles, marching single file alongside the road; the silhouette of their AKMs (Russian-made automatic rifles) with its curved cartridge clip forever catching the eye. One long bridge was so well protected we could barely get across for the crowds of soldiers chatting and strolling lackadaisically. On the far end, a pair of boxing gloves hung from the guard booth—apparently the pugilist arts are in—but no guard emerged to demand “papers,” as is the routine elsewhere in Latin America.
Here and there the hills began to be speckled with banana plants and small mango trees, sometimes colored by purple bougainvilleas, indicating gardens. When we got to the junction with the road from Ocotál, where Augusto César Sandino and his small army first challenged the U.S. Marines in 1927, we waited for a thru bus.
Poster featuring Augusto Sandino, the first revolutionary from 1920s, circa 1984. photo: courtesy the Sandanista Archives
As a rainbow appeared to the south, I began talking with a Sandinista soldier who had just hiked out of the bush. When the bus arrived, he also boarded, accompanied by his Sancho Panza, a grenade thrower who couldn’t have been much older than 15. Then, relaxing his chin on the muzzle of his AKM, we continued our discussion. Since the barrel was a few inches from my face, I told him right off I was a little nervous. I had never been that close to an automatic rifle before.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” I asked, without thinking. “I don’t know. I didn’t stop to look. It’s a war out there,” he answered.
He was of a thick build, with clear hazel eyes, in an educated face, expressing an almost artist-like intensity that sharpened perceptibly when he pronounced words like “imperialismo” or “Sea-ya” (C.I.A. in Spanish). He wanted to know what where Americans’ feelings towards Nicaraguans, would Reagan be re-elected, the size of our army, etc. Then we got into the merits of the AKM (it fires underwater), the odds of a Sea-ya invasion, the strength of the Sandinista army (”We could easily go all the way to Guatemala but they have to do it on their own”), the best Nicaraguan beer (Victoria), the amount of leave time he was permitted (“I just ask my comandante ‘permiso’ whenever I want…”).
Finally, with no antipathy, he asked why we were supporting the Contras. I attempted to extract a facsimile of motivation for such activities until my feeble explanations were drowned in laughter. The musician had commandeered the bus and was taking us all the way to Managua. When we arrived the musician came up to me and, placing his hand rather sexually on my arm, asked me where I wanted to go. A bit surprised, I disregarded his information but spent the next two hours in a cab trying to reconstruct his directions.
And finding a location in Managua is no moot point. A real city hardly exists, there are few marked streets and no house numbers. Addresses are merely the estimated distance in meters east or west, towards or away from a known landmark. In testament to the graft ability of Somoza and the unrealistic filmmaking of “Under Fire” with Nick Nolte (1984), there is absolutely no city center. It disappeared along with some 15,000 people, just after midnight on December 23, 1972, in the massive earthquake and was never rebuilt.
Somoza pocketed the overseas relief and merely bulldozed the rubble off the streets, where it sits today. All that remains of the 200 or so square blocks of the three- or four-story structures is an eerie pastiche of overgrown lots, slices of walls, the cracked half-collapsed super structures of a few apartment buildings and the intact Bank of America building and central post office. Now poor families squat in the serviceable sectors of the wreckage, horsemen heard cows to pasture from one block to the next, and the city has spread out in a vast network of suburbs.
That development just happened to augment another income for Somoza, whose cement and road-building companies built the connecting streets and highways. With no inner city, traffic isn’t bad and, despite the lack of spare parts, the street are full of buses, trucks, taxis, private cars—even a sprinkling of Mercedes Benzes. Apparently, it was a bourgeois revolution.
Once I got my bearings and adjusted to the heat—it’s five-shower-a-day-plus-siesta weather—I headed out. Nicaragua’s status as this hemisphere’s second or third poorest country suddenly became obvious, although the dogs, which are generally the first to go, looked all right. The bright green foliage grows before your eyes in the heat and hides the garbage; small lizards sunbathe on the piles of bricks; men relax in open porches with slat walls; women with umbrellas drag children sucking sodas from the corners of tied-off plastic bags; businessmen in “guayabera” shirts with purses tucked under their arms hurry on; while the kids—generally with Japanese mitts—play sandlot baseball everywhere. Judging from the faces, the Spanish conquerors were not prudes and black and Indian features are well represented.
Rafael Stevens, a Miskito Indian I met at a bus stop, did lower his voice and switch to pidgin English whenever a Sandinista soldier walked by. But he insisted racism was minimal; female equality has been embraced by the Sandinistas; and they even decreed that men must help with the house work. If sparks of the indefatigable Latino machismo still fly, they are a bit more polite than elsewhere. On the love front, I saw couples walking hand in hand, necking publicly, and women who unabashedly stared me down. A romantic people, Nicaraguans are, according to one young lady I talked to, liable to abide their hearts more than their parents or the Church. For them, to marry for money is almost sacrilegious—a stance similar to their political leaders.
Female fighters were common in the Nicaraguan, albeit only around five percent of units, 1979. photo: courtesy the Sandanista Archives
Neighborhoods are also an odd mixture, flopping from middle class to poor on the same block, although no one escapes the graffiti. The red-over-black slash of the Frente Sandinista Liberación Nacional (FSLN) is ubiquitous as well as "No Pasarán" (They will not pass!—a message to the Yanquis). Except for the absence of certain minimal luxuries, like light bulbs and soap, life amidst the revolution seems quite normal. Managua McDonalds is doing a land-office business; “Return of the Jedi” is playing down the block from my hotel; and “campesino” (poor farmer) land holdings have increased from three to 44% of total in five years.
But then I went to the press center and heard the striking Captain Rosa Pasos give a military briefing. All was not roses. The large map was sprinkled with red arrows indicating counter-revolutionary incursions, some reaching as far as Estili, 90 miles north of the capital. She reviewed the statistics for the first three weeks in October: 92 combat situations, 240 Contras and 82 Sandinistas dead, 28 Contras captured, 4 civilians dead, 20 wounded and 163 kidnapped and 34 air space violations. Using her pointer efficiently but with a distinct absence of military bearing, smiling luxuriously and unintimidated by the banks of cameras and microphones, Captain Pasos easily fielded questions. Most importantly there were still no MIG fighter jets coming from the Soviets and Bluefields, on the Atlantic coast, was still closed to foreigners. Indeed, the map graphically illustrated that the state of Zelaya, which is the eastern half of Nicaragua and home to 200,000 Miskito Indians, was under siege.
The next day, over a couple of “gaseousas” (soft drinks), I got a taste of how Machiavellian it really was. My friend Rafael was happy to tell me his convoluted account of things, although waves of nervousness sometimes played across his slightly weather-beaten brown face. Living broke on the streets had not afforded him a good night's sleep in a while. He had grown up in the semi-idyllic neglect of the Somoza years and became relatively well to do as a lobster fisherman until a lack of spare parts and international politics strangled the business. Then his two brothers refused to join the Contras and were killed. This incurred a certain suspicion and, despite of professions of neutrality, Rafael was arrested, tortured with electricity and nearly drowned by the Sandinistas. Only a magic spell cast into his food by a “brujo” (witch doctor), whom his sister brought to him in prison, initiated his release. The brujos are devoted Christians, he assured me, but the complete lack of doctors makes them dependent on indigenous medicine. I guess the brujos double as lawyers as well.
I “lent” Rafael some money, until he could find a job, and left town to see the Festival de San Gerónimo in nearby Masaya. Fog rolled in from Lake Managua but the threat of rain did not dampen festivities. People in their Sunday best or fully costumed were flocking from all over to see or join the parade. The town was jammed and floats bearing brass bands, outrageously-dressed individuals or dancers, many of whom were crossdressing men, had trouble squeezing through. Scores of other revelers in drag, costume or out, marched jubilantly in between. The colorful panorama was suddenly interrupted by a pair of gigantic oxen towing a black cart suspended high between two 12-foot high wheels. Underneath the vehicle hung a bucket filled with motor oil in which sat a completely blackened boy. Above him, the drivers were also covered by oil and behind the cart with his wrists fettered and on a twenty-foot chain, was another “black” youth. Swinging wide arcs at the end of his chain he sent the crowd screaming away in a effort to avoid being stained by one his oily limbs. “A tribute to the devil,” a man told me.
My surrealist reverie was pierced by the gaze of a “nica” (Nicaraguan woman), staring me down and inviting me into a small courtyard. There, for the benefit of a private party, an elderly highly-proficient marimba player was flailing away. Soon I was dancing with all the women and some of the men and swigging shots of rum—to their wild cheers. One red-cheeked fellow endeavored to educate me on the local dance steps, to more crowd approval, especially when I imitated the apparently gay moves. The young, obviously gay member of the group which had just adopted me, Omar, claimed it was fairly prevalent. Not all the transvestites I saw earlier were gay, he said, but were put up to it by dares or bets. Homosexuality was condoned by the people and the new government, he said, a claim later contradicted by people in the queer community of San Juan del Sur, in the south of the country.
About eight of us, led by Omar’s Aunt Rosaria and including his 14-year old dressed-to-kill cousin, Annabella, proceeded to dine, drink and dance our way into the night. About three a.m. I found myself staggering down a country road to their grandmother’s house where, disregarding my protests, they pulled the mattress right out from under her. Then they plunked it down in the tiny living room between the four over-sized carved rocking chairs (a Masaya specialty) for me and Omar. While the women nestled in among the children, sometimes two or three to a bed, and grandma snored on her bed frame, I spent the night suffering the retroactive fire power of the local rum and trying to convince Omar I wasn’t gay.
The next morning, after I had been brought back to the land of the living by three or four coffees, I marveled at their hospitality. Grandma beamed benevolently while Omar prepared the traditional breakfast of beans and eggs for everyone. Aunt Rosario’s older son, who lived there, piled all the rockers onto the bed and mopped the floor. The children, after initial shyness in my presence, scampered around playing sing-song games. They invited me to come back and stay whenever I felt like it and I left, a little groggy but complete refreshed.
Daniel Ortega, left, and Fidel Castro, right, at a rally during the Nicaragua's first democratic election in 1984. photo: courtesy the Sandanista Archives
For some reason, I longed for a cool breeze. So, after getting rained out one afternoon, I hopped the bus for Matagalpa. In the seat behind me, reading a Bible through a pair of fashionably framed glasses, I found a recent draftee out of economics school—Francisco. He wasn’t all that happy with the government and he made no bones about it, regardless of the fact that the rest of his unit and his comandante were sitting right behind him. His father had a small shop that was devastated by the earthquake, so now he sold lottery tickets on the street. Francisco was working himself through university with a job at the Central Bank, fast becoming a yuppie, until his untimely draft call up. He complained of the absolute paucity of consumer goods, the Marxist economics he had to study, the lack of good novels in the bookstores and the marriage of party and state. According to Francisco, one third of the GNP was going the military. "The government was breaking the people’s back," he said.
In Matagalpa, I offered to treat him and his whole unit to a beer, preferably a Victoria, hoping to hear their views on things, but they had to report directly to the front. Matagalpa is a wealthy cattle town in the cooler foothills—hence the breeze I was looking for. Some of its more spiritual citizens have formed a yoga institute, following the tradition of Serge Raynaud de la Ferrier, a French yogi who came through Latin America in 1947 and accrued disciples from Guatemala to Peru. I discovered it the next day, after a spiritual-cum-political discussion, and took a delicious steam bath. After which I left immediately for San Rafael del Norte—the war zone.
It was beautiful country: small, steep hills, leading up to the rolling high plateau that was Sandino’s old stomping ground. In fact, San Rafael is where he met his true love, Blanca Arauz, and got married in 1933. Some twenty kilometers out of town, waiting at a small fork in the road, I looked up at an overhanging bluff and, as my eyes adjusted to the shade, watched a battalion of soldiers dissolve out of the trees. At least one hundred, some women, and they were all watching me—grinning broadly. It looked a lot cooler up there then on the road, waiting for a ride that would undoubtedly be long in coming, so I climbed up.
What a crew! The comandante had raced back to Managua on important business and they were bivouacking here until his return. They had been in the mountains for weeks and their camouflage uniforms were ripped and covered in mud. At least half of them were too young for the razor but even the women were battle-tested and tough. One kid, with grenades hanging off everywhere and an AKM on his back was teasingly poking a woman’s behind as she struggled up the steep muddy slope. She turned around and whomped him one in the shoulder. One couple was snuggling in the grass and I asked an older, mustachioed fellow holding a machine gun, who seemed, even with out a rank, the second in command, what the policy was.
“As long as they fight,” he said, with a twinkle.
“But don’t all the guys chase the girls at first and when one finally gets her, aren’t the others jealous?” I wondered.
“She goes with whom she wants,” he said puckering his lips in the couple’s direction, which is how they point in Nicaragua. “What can we do?”
So, as a small kitchen was set up in the back and the soldiers climbed into the trees, hung hammocks and joshed with each other, I chewed the fat. Between questions about lifestyles in New York and where I intended to tour in Nicaragua, a realization started to invade my thoughts.
Yes, in all my travels in the Third World, these were the first soldiers who didn’t finger their machine guns nervously, who didn’t fan their barrels in your face when they wanted you do something, or bask in the glow of your paranoia as they transfer some of the boot they were under to you. Not only were they some of the coolest soldiers but the coolest people I had met in a long time. They weren’t cocky, arrogant or violent. They were living close to the edge—and they had that look of extreme satisfaction that one can get only when one is ready and willing to give up one’s life for a just cause—your people. And not only that, they had no animosity towards me—the gringo. Nor had I felt one iota of anti-gringoness in the whole country, not one shove in a bus, not one drunken confrontation (typical elsewhere), not one off-color passing remark (I understand Spanish perfectly).
And here they were, sitting in the cross hairs of my people, my army. Waiting on tenderhooks for that massive B-52 strike that would initiate a D-Day style invasion. “And you are going to have to fight the Yanqui invader,” shouted Daniel Ortega from the podium of his last presidential campaign address, “town by town, street by street, block by block, house by house, men, women, children, cripples, and they will not pass” (No Pasarán!). “But,” he said, lowering his voice, “when the coffee harvest comes next month, there are going to be 200 North Americans up there with us, in the war zone, helping us cut the café!”
The humanist streak runs deep in this revolution, you can feel it in your bones. It comes out in the little things—subconscious things, like the way the soldiers must have been inculcated with a respect for life, as they always keep their guns pointed straight up or down. It comes from the poets who have carried the revolution: Father Ernesto Cardenal, the Minister of Culture, Ricoberto Lopez Perez, who assassinated Anastasio Somoza Garcia (the old one) in 1956, or one of the many unknown poets of Sandino’s original band who wrote:
Long live the patriot, señores,
Whose fight is always delicious,
With pride he has confronted,
The gringo so ambitious.
That humanity became law when they abolished the death penalty and refrained from revenge on the Somocistas, even when they found their actual tortures, notably Tomas Borges, the only surviving founding member of the Sandinistas who spent months in jail, shackled and hooded.
If anyone has a right to hate the gringos, it’s the Nicaraguans. Only a couple of countries around the world can compete with its claims to the most and the most absurd Yanqui interventions. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt astutely recognized, “Somoza was a son of a bitch but he was our son of a bitch,” so we continued to use our military might to keep him firmly fastened to Nicaragua’s jugular vein. Even when the Somozas had reduced the country to one giant “finca” (farm) and amassed one of the world’s largest fortunes, the esteemed government of the United States still can’t comprehend why Nicaragua might need a revolution.
Five years later its hardly peaches and cream. With the economic base sucked to the bone by Somoza, with the bourgeoisie reluctant to invest under the new government, with Russia afraid to bankroll it for fear of a swing to the right and the West vice-versa, with a super power breathing down her neck and forcing her to put all her eggs into one armament basket, it is pretty amazing that the infant mortality rate has dropped from 121 to 58 per thousand.
The air is cool, as are the soldiers, so even if it is an armed camp, San Rafael del Norte is kind of quaint. The streets probably don’t look that different from when Sandino walked down them arm-in-arm with his beloved Blanca Arauz. There are a lot of Arauzes left. In fact, one burst in on me as I was attempting to compose the beginning of this article. He looked pretty funny in his Adidas jogging suit, shag haircut and sunglasses—considering it was the middle of the night. I thought I had another “chico plastico” (plastic boy) on my hands until he switched to Spanish and told me how alienated he felt during his nine months in Seattle. The people were nice sometimes but he felt a certain prejudice against him as a Latino and an unexplainable coldness that frightened him.
This was his country and he was never going to leave again, except, he told me later, if Nicaragua makes a deal with the Russians, then he’s going to join the Contras. Gilmar is only 18, so he is a bit idealistic. Anti-imperialist, yes, but like Sandino, no deals—liberty or death. Later, out walking, we saw the news on television of an FSLN rally in Managua. There were quite a few sets and the reception wasn’t bad in this out-of-the-way town. When Daniel Ortega came on to address the three to four hundred thousand gathered, the men came in off the street, the women out from the kitchen and everyone, including me, was transfixed. When Ortega reached the “house by house, even the cripples” section of his standard speech, Gilmar turned his sunglassed eyes to me and lifted his fist. It looked like he meant it.
The next day, the Day of the Dead, while the San Rafaeleños were all in Church, or at the cemetery praying and placing wreaths for their deceased, I snuck back to Managua to fulfill my commitment as an independent election observer. I don’t know how scrupulously democratic the United States’ first election was when we elected the leader of our own revolution to the presidency. Admittedly things looked pretty confusing when, the night before the elections, Virgilio Godoy, the candidate of the Partido Independente Liberal (PLI), swore up and down he was boycotting the election but, come morning, he was placing third in a seven-way race. True it was hard to get your party organized when the ban had just been lifted a few months ago. Harder still to go up against the Goliath FSLN, which has the built-in structure of the army and the government as well as the party. But I think the FSLN has gone out of its way to be pluralist, considering it is not easy to have a democracy when half the population is illiterate, the economy is nearly bankrupt and you’re in a state of siege.
Arturo Cruz, a favorite son of the right, who would have supposedly swept the polls, except he didn’t want to run, was invited into government right after the revolution. First as president of the Central Bank, then in the governing junta and then as the ambassador to the United States—what more does he want? An invitation with his name embossed? Is this a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship or what? He’s so popular that upon his well-publicized return from the States, a total of 300 not-so-screaming fans showed up at the airport. It’s ridiculous—the supposedly-leftist ruling junta had another conservative, Rafael Cordoba Rivas, sitting in its triumvirate. As the Newsweek photographer said to the article's author: “How are you going to explain this to the reader?”
It’s even more absurd trying to figure out things between the three politically-divided newspapers—each one run by a Chamorro: brother, brother and uncle. I wonder what Christmas dinner conversations sound like? Considering that the table would be presided over by the widow of Joaquin Chamorro, who led the “prensa” (press) into battle against Somoza until the Guardia assassinated him, probably pretty cordial.
No, it’s not easy growing up in the middle of an earthquake, a dictatorship, a civil war, a revolution, a reconstruction and now the threat of invasion. At the big election day party the FSLN threw for the kids of Managua, I ran into an 18-year old girl who was telling about her experiences in “el triunfo” (the triumph)—the six weeks of open warfare that culminated the revolution in 1979 and took place all over but was extra deadly in Managua. She was 13, throwing Molotov cocktails, firing guns out of her living room window, running food and ammo to her brothers. Now she’s shaking her hips to some hot salsa band blasting out with 100,000 of her “compas.”
The FSLN won the election, of course. After they didn’t get too much response to their shouting out of the statistics of victory, they gave it up to let the kids party. Daniel Ortega was there, as was the Vice-President Dr. Sergio Ramirez but they saw no need to make a speech.
I met my friend Francisco—the soldier economist—and he gave me a wry smile and mentioned that they let him out on leave. “Good party,” he said, as he passed me a milk of magnesia bottle filled with rum. The country was supposed to stay dry until the next day, when all the ballots had been counted, but the beer was already being served publicly.
I looked around. Big arc lights illuminated everyone quite clearly. You better party, I thought, and party hard because this might be the last. The gringo election is coming in two days and its outcome is going to give the gringo king filibuster rights to your life and all your natural resources. Sure, if the invasion comes and all you kids are drafted out to the front, I don’t doubt that you have the guts and the stamina to kick our ass. But it is going to cost you. Maybe like Vietnam, it will inflame a whole generation in the U.S. and bring down a couple of administrations and even liberate millions of your oppressed Latino brothers and sisters, but you are going to become the martyr for it—and you won’t be laughing then.
5:45 AM, Wednesday, the 7th of November, 1984, Managua, Nicaragua, with tears in my eyes.