The Jaguar Smile

5 ESTELÍ

At five a.m. on the morning of 19 July, the day of the seventh anniversary celebrations, I went to the home of Daniel Ortega and his wife, the poet Rosario Murillo. After getting past the usual compound walls and guards, I entered a rambling bungalow of many verandahs and large numbers of carved wooden rocking-chairs. The decor reflected Rosario Murillo’s interest in the country’s arts and crafts: there were brightly coloured wooden animal mobiles dangling from the beams, and pottery decorated with pre-Columbian motifs, and cushions covered in the softened bark of trees. The house revealed very little about Comandante Daniel, for whom, it seemed, reticence had become (had always been?) second nature. Children’s toys, and indeed children, were everywhere. There was no shortage of little Ortegas, and many of them, I noted, were wearing ‘Masters of the Universe’ T-shirts, featuring the eternal battle of He-Man and Skeletor; another indication of the omnipresence of US culture.

The Sandinista leadership assembled. This year, the main ‘Acta’ or celebratory event was to be held at Estelí, the northern town, just forty kilometres from the Honduran frontier, that had always been solidly behind the Frente. (Even the local bishop was the most amenable member of the Nicaraguan church hierarchy.) The decision to hold the Acta at Estelí was an act of defiance, and it was a racing certainty that the Contra forces would be doing their best to ruin the day. ‘We will show them we can defend our frontier,’ Daniel Ortega said.

Pragmatically, four of the FSLN ‘nine’ stayed behind in Managua, as did Sergio Ramírez. We set off in convoy, preceded by the now-familiar outriders in their orange washing-up gloves. Their hands, I thought, must get terribly hot and sticky in there.

The Nicaraguan people knew what to do when the rubber gloves approached: they got out of the way. We zoomed northwards. Daniel Ortega drove his own, black Landcruiser. I travelled behind him with Rosario Murillo and two of the ‘nine’, the agriculture minister Jaime Wheelock and the FSLN’s political chief, Bayardo Arce, in Comandante Arce’s vehicle. Arce looked impatient as we bowled along (he has a reputation for being something of a speed merchant). Scarecrow Ronald Reagans hung — by the neck — from roadside trees.

Arce munched on an enormous cigar as we crossed the bridge at Sébaco. ‘It would be a good day,’ he remarked absently, ‘for the contra-revolución to attack a bridge.’

‘Hmm,’ I agreed, keeping my voice deep and courageous. The road was lined with members of the peasant militias in fatigues, carrying their Kalashnikovs. ‘We decided to use the militias for security purposes today,’ Arce said. ‘We couldn’t pull the troops in from the frontier, as you’ll understand.’

‘Hmm,’ I agreed again. In Sébaco, I noticed, you could go and play bingo at the Red Cross building. They obviously didn’t get too much work, I reassured myself.

‘The security seems excellent,’ I mumbled. Jaime Wheelock, baby-faced and friendly, grimaced. ‘There are a lot of roads,’ he said. ‘We can’t guarantee that they are all safe.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see.’

Wheelock was worried that the Contra would hide out along the smaller mountain roads and ambush the campesinos as they made their way to Estelí. Many rural communities had been instructed not to try and make the trip into town for the Acta for this reason. ‘We are trying to keep it as much of a local event as possible,’ Wheelock said. ‘In a way it’s a tribute to the people of Estelí, who have sacrificed very much.’

The mountains were closing in ahead of us. We were in a heavily cultivated valley, and suddenly Wheelock launched into his favourite subject: agrarian reform. It was extraordinary the way that cherubic countenance would light up the moment the talk got round to pigs or coffee or rice. In this valley, he said, the mixed economy was functioning perfectly. That, over there, was a large private farm, and there were some small private farmers and over there, state-owned farms. The state offered the private sector expert advice, technical assistance and even acted, at peak harvest times, as a supplier of labour.

‘The campesinos used to be forcibly shunted around the country under Somoza, didn’t they?’ I asked. ‘So how is it that they are so willing to become travelling labourers for the revolution?’

‘Obviously we don’t make them move by coercion,’ Arce spoke, his words sidling past the obstacle of his cigar. ‘It requires persuasion, political work.’

Wheelock said, ‘It’s because we have given them land. Now they have their own land, they have a base. And then different harvests happen at different times, so it is a way for them to use their slack periods profitably.’

‘Still, it’s surprising they’re willing to be so mobile,’ I said.

Wheelock smiled happily. ‘It is because they have great trust in the revolution, now.’

O the beauty of the mountains at Estelí. They sprang from the earth in improbable, contorted forms, in shapes plenty of fantasy, as the old tobacco map had put it. Sixty or seventy thousand of us had crowded into the plaza, cradled by the mountains’ encircling arms. Banners waved: power to the people. And, on the Tannoy, as we waited for the Acta to get under way, there was 1950s rock music. Estelí danced to ‘Rock Around the Clock’.

Backstage, in a hospitality room under the main stand, the Sandinista leadership was receiving messages from the front. Short-wave radio brought the news that two large Contra groupings had been identified, and had crossed the frontier into Nicaragua. Ortega, Arce, Wheelock and the others went out to greet the crowd.

Daniel Ortega would never be a natural orator, but according to the old hands I asked, he had become much, much better at public speaking than he used to be. ‘You should have heard him last year,’ one party worker whispered to me. ‘Phoo!’

I thought he spoke simply and well, if a little stilted when he waxed rhetorical. He said, not for the first time, that Reagan was ‘worse than Hitler’, and that was plain silly. But he was much more effective when he listed the numbers of teachers, doctors, volunteer workers and campesinos who had died in the last year, and spread his arms wide after each statistic to demand from the people: ‘Quién es culpable?’ (Who is to blame?) And they roared back their answer: ‘Reagan.’

One day, he said, when Nicaragua was at peace, history would remember there was a nation that would not lie down and be crushed.

‘Patria libre!’

‘O MORIR.’

That evening we were back in Managua, and the good news was that the the Contra had not managed to do a single thing all day. No roads had been mined, no campesinos attacked, no bridges blown. Nada. At the old Somocista country club, Managua was having a party. Salsa and bossa nova music filled the night sky. I looked at the dancers and thought that it was not the moment for an escritor hindú to disgrace himself by attempting to compete with such performers.

Somebody took my elbow. I turned to find a small, elderly gentleman with a cane nodding meaningfully at me. He was, of course, a poet. ‘I greatly admire,’ he said to me, ‘your Indian poet, Tagoré.’

I was taken aback. What was old Rabindranath doing here, with this accent on his final e? ‘Is he translated here?’ I asked.

‘Victoria Ocampo, the great Argentine editor and intellectual, fell in love with the work, and with the man,’ came the reply. ‘I do not know, however, if they had an affaire. I suspect not. But Victoria Ocampo was determined that Latin America should discover this great genius, and she published many excellent translations.’

‘Then Tagore is better read in Latin America than in India,’ I said. ‘There, many of the translations are very bad indeed.’

‘Tagoré,’ he corrected me. ‘I admire him for his spiritual qualities, and also his realism.’

‘Many people think of Latin America as the home of anti-realism,’ I said. He looked disgusted. ‘Fantasy?’ he cried. ‘No, sir. You must not write fantasy. It is the worst thing. Take a tip from your great Tagoré. Realism, realism, that is the only thing.’

I escaped from the admonitory shade of Rabindranath and sat down with Rosario Murillo and Hugo Torres, the Frente’s political education chief (and, what else, a poet). Also at the table were Susan Meiselas, the American photographer whose work in Salvador and Nicaragua I had long admired, and an American film producer, Burt Schneider. I arrived as Rosario was wondering how the people of the USA could tolerate what their government was doing to this tiny country.

‘You’ve got to understand that for Americans, Nicaragua has no reality,’ said Burt, a tall rawboned man with long arms and large gestures. ‘To them it’s just another TV show. That’s all it is.’ He went on to argue that the US would never invade Nicaragua because of the memory of Vietnam. Susan Meiselas said she found it hard to be so optimistic. So did I; in neoconservative America, the lesson of Vietnam seemed to be that the real mistake had been to quit when they did, instead of staying to finish the job.

‘The trouble is, Rosario,’ Schneider cried, ‘nobody knows if you’re communists. Hell, I don’t know myself. What do you reckon, Susan?’ He leaned conspiratorially across the table to Meiselas, ‘Does she look like a Commie to you?’ Schneider had known Rosario a long time, and she and Torres both smiled politely, but the joke fell pretty flat.

In the background, the nine comandantes de la revolución were having their picture taken. It was the only time I ever saw them all together, and my only glimpse of Tomás Borge, a tiny gnome with a large cigar.

‘Look at them,’ Burt said lovingly. ‘Looks like a school photo, doesn’t it? Isn’t it a privilege to be here with them, on this day?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is.’ Happy birthday, Nicaragua. I drank a toast in the best rum in the world, Flor de Caña Extra Seco. Mixed with Coke, it was called a Nica-libre, and after a few glasses I was ready to take on the salsa champions and knock them dead. I went outside to dance.