I was searching for photos of Nicaragua on Flickr in hopes that they would jolt the deepest recesses of my memory of that indefinable country (I have no photographs of it because I didn’t have a camera with me while I was traveling there), and I stumbled upon this collection of the revolution (and also some photos of the proceeding years leading up to the Contra War) by Marcelo Montecino. This first one in particular, which immortalizes a soldier who had just returned from the front, is my favourite because of the juxtaposition of violence and innocence: the baby, and then the rifle; and the smile on the father’s face. The rest of the selected photos will show you that the revolution wasn’t just the story of men, but of their women and children, too.

However, history has clearly proven that revolutions tend to go wrong along the way, and the Nicaraguan revolution was hardly an exception, as was Cuba’s, no matter how many people go touting Che Guevara with his beret on their chests. As a reminder, I’ve got a t-shirt of the Che wearing Bart Simpson on his chest, a cartoon strip by Matthew Diffee for The New Yorker (you can buy your own here). I don’t have to tell you, I love the irony.

When all is said and done, there is a certain dangerous romance in the idea of revolution, the possibilities of change it induces you to want to believe in, which is obviously why so many people sign up to it in the first place. And well, I guess that’s what these following photos illustrate: the romance, the idealism and the camaraderie… but also the more inhumane parts of it, like putting rifles into the hands of children.

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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.

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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.” [↩]

From Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey:

In Bluefields it was often difficult to remember I was still in Nicaragua. The west coast was, for the most part, racially homogenous, but here, as well as mestizos, there were Creoles, three different Amerindian tribes, and even a small community of Garifonos who shouldn’t have been there at all, according to the textbooks, but up in Belize. And that wasn’t the only difference. The majority of the inhabitants here were not Catholic, but belonged to the Moravian church. And a large proportion of them were English-speaking, to boot.

The culture of Bluefields felt distinctly West Indian, but it was more or less totally cut off from contact with the rest of the Caribbean - excepting Cuba. It wasn’t very closely in touch with the Pacific coast of Nicaragua itself, come to that. In Bluefields you couldn’t receive Nicaragua’s ‘Sandinista Television’, so you watched Costa Rican programmes instead. It could take all day to get a phone connection to Managua, and even then you might not manage it. There was no road link between the coasts. The few air flights filled up weeks in advance, and the only other route involved travelling 100 kilometres by slow ferry down the Río Escondido (the ‘Hidden River’ that used to shelter pirate ships in the Days of Yore) as far as the township of Rama, where the 400-kilometre road from Managua came to an abrupt halt. The ferries had been frequent targets for the Contra. About a month before my visit they had burned the penultimate boat. The banks of the river were thickly jungled, and the ferries were sitting ducks; but the people, having no option, continued to use the route.

What would happen when the Contra burned the last boat? The only answer I ever got to this question was a fatalistic shrug. To live in Bluefields was to accept remoteness, just as it was also to accept rain. It was one of the wettest places I had ever been in.

The second paragraph doesn’t ring quite as true today, but it’s still as wet.

© David’s Unusual Destinations - It’s always raining in Bluefields

I remember my first ride on a chicken bus through Nicaragua because of something I saw.

I was on my way to Granada, having boarded a bus from Masaya in the thick dust that blew from the dirt road, encrusting the sidewalks and the streets. I liked to have my hair wrapped up in a bandanna when when it got too dusty; the particles lodge into your hair like glue.

While I was bumbling along on the bus, I looked out the window and saw a stuffed man dangling from a tree, hanging by his neck. He was wearing what looked like a grey suit.

Then I thought it was a scarecrow, and didn’t think much else of it. But recently I picked up Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, a slim volume of reportage he wrote while he visited Nicaragua in the mid-1980’s when the current President Daniel Ortega had first come into power.

In his novel, he’d described stuffed men exactly like the one I saw hung by the neck from trees, and he’d explained that they were the campesinos’ way of decrying Ronald Reagan, who had led the effort back in his presidency to crush ‘the communists’ of Nicaragua, defying international law.

Years later, I guess still nobody sees the need to take the Reagan doll off the tree. Or maybe somebody’s holding a very strong grudge.