Salman Rushdie: The Jaguar Smile

It’s ten years since The Jaguar Smile was published. It was my first nonfiction book, and I well remember the shock of emerging, for the first time, from the (relatively) polite world of literature into the rough-and-tumble of the political arena. In the United States, then deeply involved in the ‘low-intensity’ proxy war against Nicaragua, the tumbling was particularly rough. After my publication party in New York, I found myself at dinner at a wealthy uptown address, surrounded by the bien-pensant liberal élite. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on hearing that I’d written a book about Nicaragua, embarking on a debunking of the Sandinistas that focused wittily on their mode of dress and lack of good society manners. This was a warning sign. If American liberals were so casually dismissive, conservatives were bound to be worse.

And so it proved. A prominent radio interviewer, in a live broadcast, greeted me with the question: ‘Mr Rushdie, to what extent are you a Communist stooge?’ The New Republic gave the book an immensely long and rude review, perhaps the most vitriolic I’d ever received. It turned out to have been written by one of the most important figures in the Contra leadership. I was inexperienced enough, in those days, to be genuinely surprised that a respectable journal should so brazenly abandon the principle of critical objectivity for the sake of some controversial copy. I am more worldly now.

In the last ten years, the world has changed so dramatically that The Jaguar Smile now reads like a period piece, a fairy tale of one of the hotter moments in the Cold War. ‘The Soviet Union’ and ‘Cuba’ are bogeymen that have long since lost their power to scare us. And in Nicaragua, the Contra war finally took its toll. A war-weary electorate voted out the FSLN, electing, instead, the same Doña Violeta Chamorro whom I had rather caustically described in my pages. 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. (I have always wondered who ended up owning the comfortable Managua villa in which I was housed.) 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.

The FSLN sign on its hill overlooking Managua was altered, after the election, to read FIN. The End. In fact, Nicaraguan politics continued to be anything but straightforward. Dissension struck Doña Violeta’s ragbag anti-Sandinista coalition almost as soon as it took power, and on many occasions she was obliged to rule with the assistance of the votes of the Sandinista opposition. I had been struck, during my stay in Nicaragua, by the incestuous nature of the ruling class. Sandinistas and right-wingers had all gone to the same schools and dated each other. Now, it seemed, they were dating each other again.

But the stresses within the FSLN, what Marx would have called its ‘inherent contradictions’, did eventually arise to unmake it. During my visit I had been unable to meet the Sandinistas’ military strongman, Daniel Ortega’s brother Humberto, head of the armed forces. (The absence of any effective investigation of the hard-liners — Humberto Ortega, Tomás Borge — is a weakness in The Jaguar Smile . It seems probable that they were kept away from a non-Marxist like myself.) The differences between the Ortega brothers, and the group headed by Sergio Ramírez, whose key role it had been to persuade the urban middle class to support the revolution, became untenable. Ramírez left the movement, and the Sandinistas were hopelessly split. At the personal level, too, there were ruptures. Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo separated. Some of the people I had liked and admired left the country. The poet Gioconda Belli, for example, now lives in the United States. Her relationship with post-Sandinista Nicaragua is troubled and sad. And now a second election has been lost. Daniel Ortega has claimed that Arnoldo Alemán’s victory was achieved by widespread ballot-rigging, but the independent team of electoral observers has ratified the election results. Now it really does look like the FIN.

In 1986, the story of Nicaragua looked to me like a David-and-Goliath saga. The Sandinistas, for all their incompetences and faults (and, on re-reading, I am glad to find I said a good deal about those faults), seemed like U.S. cultural mythology’s quintessential little guys who stand up against the Mister Bigs of the world and refuse to admit defeat. It looked, too, like a tale of unrequited love. Nicaragua, which loved the music, poetry and baseball of the United States, was being crushed by its powerful, careless beloved. Politics is not often so poignant.

A decade later, romance has given way to what cynical commentators call reality: that is, the irresistible power of super-power itself. Just do as we say , as the White House emissary told Foreign Minister d’Escoto. Nowadays, in the epoch beyond the ‘end of history’, that instruction cannot be ignored. In 1986, Mario Vargas Llosa [1] Mario, who has been a stalwart friend and ally to me, has this at least in common with Daniel Ortega: that they both vociferously opposed the death threat of the 1989 Khomeini fatwa against my novel, The Satanic Verses . I should say, for the sake of objectivity, that it is Mario’s view, expressed on a French TV programme in which we both participated, that as I have grown older I have grown more politically sensible and therefore more conservative. I fear he may be right. I fear he may be wrong. had spoken of the silent majority of ‘anti-Sandinista democratic Nicaraguans’, a majority that then seemed more like a wish than a truth; now, that majority exists. Mario would say it always existed, and if I am wrong, then he is right, but one might also argue that it was created. After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price. Now that the economic blockade is over and the ruined Nicaraguan economy has begun its slow recovery, it is easy to blame the old rulers for that blockade. The power of super-power: first to describe a given leadership as unacceptable; then to create the circumstances in which it becomes unacceptable; and finally to obliterate the memory of its (the super-power’s) own part in the process.

I met Sergio Ramírez in a European hotel room a couple of years ago. He seemed heavier, more burdened. I have corresponded with Gioconda Belli. It is plain from these and other contacts that the story of which The Jaguar Smile is one chapter has not had a happy ending.

To re-read an old book is, inevitably, to have a sense of omissions, errors and regrets. There are one or two small howlers. In the account of the death of Julio Buitrago, I gave the impression that Doris Tijerino, among others, died with him. At the very moment I wrote this, Ms Tijerino was alive and occupying a prominent public position. Sorry, Doris.