Salman Rushdie: The Jaguar Smile

I would like to have been clearer, too, about my difficulties with the Minister of Culture, Ernesto Cardenal. It was perhaps too polite of me to leave out the details of a speech I heard him give in Finland, in which he said that his beloved campesino poets were being given, as models, the poems of Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore ‘in simplified form’; and in which he claimed, heart-freezingly, that Nicaragua was the ‘first nation on earth to have nationalized poetry.’ (A long-time literary opponent of the Soviet Union, seated near me, muttered, ‘ Second nation…’)

The whole truth would also involve a clearer account of the Sandinista leadership’s strange susceptibility to the lure of international celebrity; more detail about the incompetence of much of their bureaucracy; more criticism of their treatment of the Miskito Indians; more, perhaps, about the widespread public dislike of the President’s compañera , Rosario Murillo, and her grand ways.

These are the failings of any book written quickly, and in the heat of a passion. But even with ten years’ hindsight, I stand by the fundamental judgments and attitudes of The Jaguar Smile , and feel, if I may say so, proud of my younger self for taking these ‘snapshots’ of that beautiful, benighted land; for getting more things half-right than half-wrong. And I mourn for Bluefields, already so poor when I saw it, and devastated since by one of the less-well-reported major earthquakes of recent years. I hope Miss Pancha the midwife and her pet cow are okay. I wish I had not run out of Flor de Caña rum. And I hope Rundown, the hot local band, are still singing Rub me belly skin with castor oil .

Ten years ago, when I was living in a small flat above an offlicence in SW1, I learned that the big house next door had been bought by the wife of the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The street was obviously going down in the world, what with the murder of the nanny Sandra Rivett by that nice Lord Lucan at number 44, and I moved out a few months later. I never met Hope Somoza, but her house became notorious in the street for a burglar alarm that went off with surprising frequency, and for the occasional parties that would cause the street to be jammed solid with Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar limousines. Back in Managua, her husband ‘Tacho’ had taken a mistress, Dinorah, and Hope was no doubt trying to keep her spirits up.

Tacho and Dinorah fled Nicaragua on 17 July 1979, so that ‘Nicaragua libre’ was born exactly one month after my own son. (19 July is the formal independence day, because that was when the Sandinistas entered Managua, but the 17th is the real hat-in-air moment, the día de alegría , the day of joy.) I’ve always had a weakness for synchronicity, and I felt that the proximity of the birthdays forged a bond.

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. I became a sponsor of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign in London. I mention this to declare an interest; when I finally visited Nicaragua, in July 1986, I did not go as a wholly neutral observer. I was not a blank slate.

I went to Nicaragua as the guest of the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers (ASTC), the umbrella organization that brought writers, artists, musicians, craftspeople, dancers and so on, together under the same roof. The occasion was the seventh anniversary of the ‘triumph’, as it’s known, of the Frente Sandinista. 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.

It was a critical time. On 27 June, the International Court of Justice in the Hague had ruled that US aid to la Contra , the counter-revolutionary army the CIA had invented, assembled, organized and armed, was in violation of international law. The US House of Representatives, meanwhile, went ahead and approved President Reagan’s request for $100 million-worth of new aid for the counter-revolution. In what looked like an act of retaliation, President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua had announced the closure of the opposition newspaper, La Prensa , and the expulsion of two turbulent priests, Bishop Vega and Monsignor Bismark Carballo. The storm was brewing.

I was in Nicaragua for three weeks in July. What follows, therefore, is a portrait of a moment, no more, in the life of that beautiful, volcanic country. I did not go to Nicaragua intending to write a book, or, indeed, to write at all; but my encounter with the place affected me so deeply that in the end I had no choice. So: a moment, but, I believe, a crucial and revealing one, because it was neither a beginning nor an end, but a middle, a time that felt close to the fulcrum of history, a time when all things, all the possible futures, were still (just) in the balance.

Nor, in spite of everything, did it seem, as I had feared it might, like a time without hope.

‘Cristoforo Colón set sail from Palos de Moguer in Spain, to find the lands of the Great Khan, where there were castles of gold, and the species were growing up in a wildly way; and, when walking on the ways, precious stones were frequently found. However, instead of that world, another, also rich, beautiful and plenty of fantasy, was discovered: America.’

I read this passage on a ‘tobacco map’ of Cuba at Havana airport, and to a traveller en route to Central America for the first time, it seemed like a propitious text. Later, however, as the plane wheeled over the green lagoon in the crater of the volcano of Apoyeque, and Managua came into view, I recalled another, darker text, from Neruda’s poem Centro América :

To understand the living in Nicaragua, I found, it was necessary to begin with the dead. The country was full of ghosts. Sandino vive, a wall shouted at me the moment I arrived, and at once a large pinkish boulder replied, Cristo vive , and, what’s more, viene pronto . A few moments later I passed the empty plinth upon which, until seven years ago, there stood the equestrian statue of the monster; except that it wasn’t really him, but a second-hand statue from Italy that had been given a new face. The original face had been Mussolini’s. The statue toppled with the dictatorship, but the empty plinth was, in a way, a deception. Somoza vive : chill, dark words, not much heard in Nicaragua, but the beast was alive all right. Tacho was assassinated in 1980 by an Argentine Montonero unit who found him in Paraguay, but there was his shadow haunting the Honduran frontier, a phantom in a cowboy hat.