When the Reagan administration began its war against Nicaragua, I recognized a deeper affinity with that small country in a continent (Central America) upon which I had never set foot. I grew daily more interested in its affairs, because, after all, I was myself the child of a successful revolt against a great power, my consciousness the product of the triumph of the Indian revolution. It was perhaps also true that those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, had something in common – not, certainly, anything as simplistic as a unified ‘third world’ outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel.

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Revolution and romance have always been inextricably linked, and there is no better example of this than Nicaragua, the underpopulated isthmus (“it was the emptiest of the countries of Central America”, and still is) that forms part of the slender waist of America. The mere whispers of its syllables is poetry, and despite — or because of — its poverty one needs only to delve into its recent history to find romance and ideals and hope, which luckily, isn’t very difficult. Her history echoes at you wherever within her borders you travel: through the bullet-holed walls of the fading buildings, the colourful revolutionary murals, the young men you meet who were even younger when they fought in the revolution… As the Indian-British author Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Versus, Midnight’s Children) wrote in The Jaguar Smile, a firsthand account of his three-week visit to Nicaragua in the July of 1986 for the seventh anniversary of the triumph of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN):

In Nicaragua ‘at seven years’ the walls still spoke to the dead: Carlos¹, we’re getting there, the graffiti said; or, Julio², we have not forgotten.

In writing this very slim volume, only “a portrait of a moment” in Nicaragua’s life when “all the possible futures were still (just) in the balance”, Salman Rushdie spoke with el presidente Daniel Ortega (himself a poet), the First Lady Rosario Murillo, and other prominent members of the government (most of them also poets and novelists) such as then Vice-President Sergio Ramírez, agriculture minister Jaime Wheelock, Minister of Culture Father Ernesto Cardinal (”the country’s most internationally renowned poet”), and foreign minister Miguel d’Escoto.

‘In Nicaragua,’ [Daniel Ortega] said, ‘everbody is considered to be a poet until he proves to the contrary.’

I did not think I had ever seen a people, even in India and Pakistan where poets were revered, who valued poetry as much as the Nicaraguans.

The author also met with some members of the opposition, such as Doña Violeta Chamorro who would later defeat Ortega in the 1990 presidential elections. However, the author makes no claims to objectivity, and in fact, is quite unashamedly partisan, which isn’t the same as saying he was completely blind to the revolution’s critics; he wasn’t. But the Contra war was a showdown between David and Goliath, and like most of us who have not been directly subjected to the excesses and mistakes of the revolution, he was rooting for David.

However, the author had not made up his mind about Nicaragua before he arrived. He wrote:

I went eagerly, but with a good deal of nervousness. I was familiar with the tendency of revolutions to go wrong, to devour their children, to become the thing they had been created to destroy. I knew about starting with idealism and romance and ending with betrayed expectations, broken hope. Would I find myself disliking the Sandinistas? One didn’t have to like people to believe in their right not to be squashed by the United States; but it helped, it certainly helped.

Daniel Ortega, the frontman of the FSLN, first came to power as Nicaragua’s President in 1984, four years after the FSLN military ousted the 44-year Somoza dictatorship in the 1979 revolution. However, the FSLN soon found themselves having to defend itself against la Contra, a counter-evolutionary army created, assembled, organized and armed by the CIA. At the time, Cold War sentiments still existed and the U.S. had declared Nicaragua a satellite of Communist Russia; they believed that this tiny country was going the way of Cuba.

On 27 June 1986, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that US aid to the Contras was in violation of international law. But meanwhile the US House of Representatives went on to approve President Reagan’s request for $100 million-worth of new aid for the counter revolution to defeat the Sandinistas.

The Reagan Administration wasn’t interested in international law, at least not when its custodians found against the US. The situation was surreal: the country that was in fact acting illegally, that was the outlaw, was hurling such epithets as totalitarianism, tyrannous and Stalinist at the elected government of a country that hadn’t broken any laws at all; the bandit was posing as the sheriff.

* * *

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 have a grand total of $800 million being spent by the Reagan administration 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.)

* * *

The economy was hugely dependent on imports. Nicaragua produced no glass, no paper, no metal. It was also very vulnerable to attack. The economist Paul Oquist described it to me as a ‘one-of-everything economy’ — one deep-water port, one oil refinery, one international airport. US ’surgical strikes’ would have little difficulty in paralysing the country. ‘Maybe they would spare the refinery,’ said Oquist, a norteamericano himself, ‘because its run by Exxon.’

In the five years of the war, the Nicaraguan economy had suffered an estimated $2 billion-worth of damage. In 1985, Nicaragua’s total exports had been valued at $300 million; imports ran at $900 million. Two billion dollars was roughly the same as one year’s gross national product.

And it was at this window in time that Salman Rushdie arrived in Nicaragua to see how the revolution was getting on.

Salman Rushdie witnessed some of the transformations that took place in the new Nicaragua, the central one being the redistribution of land. He also witnessed Daniel Ortega - taking his entire Cabinet with him - talking to the people in popular forums, “Inter-Sputnik” communications between Nicaragua and the countries of the socialist bloc, the economic blockade imposed by the US that led to 500% inflation and a shortage of beans and tortillas (imagine China running out of rice, or Italy running out of pasta), the closing down of the opposition newspaper la Prensa which was apparently being financed by the CIA, the functioning of the mixed economy where state-owned and private farms co-existed, and the drafting of the new Nicaraguan constitution. The author mostly traveled on the Pacific side of the country, but he did make one stop on the Caribbean coast: Bluefields, a place so isolated from the Pacific side that the revolution had been alien to it, had in fact, been “more like annihilation” to its inhabitants’ livelihood.

This memoir will take you hardly any time to finish. It’s invaluable information put together tightly - short, sweet and precise, yet still in narrative form. And best of all, it doesn’t read like a history book or an academic record, certainly nothing like your usual journalistic dispatch. It is, in fact, a very poetic construction, mirroring the poetry and romance of Nicaragua, its exoticness. Salman Rushdie gave it away when he decided to name his memoir after the Spanish limerick about the young girl and the jaguar:

There was a young girl of Nic’aragua
Who smiled as she rode on a jaguar
They returned from the ride
With the young girl inside
And the smile on the face of the jaguar

In one of the closing chapters of his memoir, as a conclusion, Salman Rushdie wrote:

… it occurred to me that the limerick, when applied to contemporary Nicaragua, was capable of both a conservative and a radical reading, that there were, so to speak, two limericks, two Misses Nicaragua riding two jaguars, and it was necessary to vote for the version on preferred. If the young girl was taken to be the revolution, seven years old, fresh, still full of idealism of youth, then the jaguar was geopolitics, or the United States; after all, an attempt to create a free country where they had been, for half a century, a colonized ‘back yard’, and to do so when you were weak and the enemy close to omnipotent, was indeed to ride a jaguar. That was the ‘leftist’ interpretation; but what if the young girl was Niaragua itself, and the jaguar was the revolution? Eh? What about that?

I closed my eyes and looked through my collection of Nicaraguan snapshots. Finally I chose between the two girls on the two jaguars. I tore up the picture that looked, well, wrong, and threw it away. In the one I preserved, the girl on the jaguar looked like the Mono Lisa, smiling her Gioconda smile.

After the Contra war 1981-88:

As part of a peace agreement between the Contras and the FSLN, it was agreed that elections would be held in 1990. And soberingly, a war-weary electorate voted out the FSLN, electing instead Doña Violeta Chamorro. After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.

Daniel Ortega surprised, even impressed, many of his international opponents by accepting the voters’ verdict. But at the same time, the Sandinistas were harshly criticized for pushing through, on behalf of many of their most prominent members, a last-minute land-grab of valuable real estate. It was a characteristically contradictory Sandinista moment. When in power, they had acted, simultaneously, like people committed to democracy and also like harsh censors of free expression. Now, in their fall, they had behaved, once again simultaneously, like true democrats and also like true Latin-American oligarchs.

In November 2006, Daniel Ortega was voted back into power, leading the FSLN, but promised less radicalism this time around.

1. Carlos Fonseca was the founder of the FSLN in 1956, and who died in November 1976, two and a half years before the Sandinista victory. [↩]
2. In his memoir, Salman Rushdie also relates the story of Julio Buitrago, who had been surrounded in a ’safe house’ in Managua along with some others. “Finally he was he 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 a tyrant for so long, they learned the wrong lessons: that resistance was possible.” [↩]