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, thescene 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
W hen 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 hadbeen worrying for days. Martínez Rivas, a poet notorious
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, thescene 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
W hen 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 hadbeen worrying for days. Martínez Rivas, a poet notorious
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