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.” [↩]

The war correspondent has his stake - his life - in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute… being allowed to be a coward, and not be executed for it, is his torture.

— War photographer Robert Capa,
killed by a landmine in French Indo-China, 1954

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I don’t have any aspirations of being a war reporter per se, but since it’s an offshoot - or perhaps the seed - of global journalism (which I’m interested in), I guess that’s why I’ve always tried to follow the whereabouts and stories of a number of conflict journalists. And with all of them, what amazes me is how they seem not to comprehend the reality of their own mortality - or maybe it’s exactly the opposite, maybe it’s because they do that they take chances with their lives. So when I came across Chris Ayres‘ memoir, so intriguingly titled, I had to pick it up. It was a great read, but I must say, however, that it wasn’t what the book cover set it up to be. I was only anticipating a laugh-out-loud, omg-that’s-so-stupid-this-guy-is-a-joke kind of read. But it wasn’t. For all his professions of being a coward, Chris Ayres really isn’t one at all.

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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