one?” I asked without thinking. “I don’t know, I didn’t stop to look., It's war out there," he answered. He was also of a thick build, with clear, hazel eyes in an educated face expressing an almost artist-like intensity that sharpened perceptibly when he pronounced words like im- perialismo or Sea-ya (C.I.A. in Spanish). He wanted to know what were Americans’ feelings towards Nicaragua, would Reagan be re-elected, the size of our army, etc. Then we got into the merits of the AKM (it fires underwater), the odds of a Sea-ya invasion, the strength of the Sandinista Army (“We could easily go all the way to Guatemala but they have to do it on their own.”), the best Nicaraguan beer (Victoria), the amount of leave time he was permitted (“I just ask my com- madante permiso whenever I want. ..”). Finally, with no antipathy, he asked specifically why we were supporting the contras. I attempted to extract a facsimile of motivation for such activities until my feeble explanations were drowned in laughter. The musician had commandeered the bus and was taking us all the way to Managua. When we arrived the musician came up and, placing his hand rather sexually on my arm, he asked me where I wanted to go. A bit surprised, I disavowed his information and spent the next two hours in a cab trying to reconstruct his directions. And finding a location in Managua is no moot point. A real city hardly exists, there are few marked streets and no house numbers. Addresses are merely the estimated distance east or west, towards or away from the lake in comparison to a known landmark. In testament to the graft ability of Somoza and the THE MANAGUA MACDONALDS IS DOING A LANDOFFICE BUSINESS, RETURN OF THEJEDI IS PLAYING DOWN THE BLOCK AND CAMPESINO LAND HOLDINGS HAVE JUMPED FROM THREE TO 44 PERCENT IN FIVE YEARS. non-documentary film making of Under Fire there is absolutely no city center. It disappeared, along with some 15,000 people, just after midnight Dec. 23, 1972 in the massive earthquake, and was never rebuilt. Somoza pocketed the overseas relief and merely bulldozed the rubble off the streets. All that remains of the 200 or so square blocks of three and four story structures is an eerie pastiche of overgrown lots, slices of walls, the cracked half-collapsed super-structures of a few apartment buildings and the intact Bank of America and Central Post Office. Now, poor families “squat” in servicable sections of wreckage, horsemen herd cows to pasture from one block to the next, and the city has spread out in a vast network of suburbs. It just happened to augment another income for Somoza whose cement and road-building companies built the connecting highways. With no inner city congestion, traffic isn’t bad and in spite of the lack of spare parts the streets are full of buses, trucks, taxis, private cars—even a sprinkling of Mercedes-Benzes. Apparently, it was a bourgeois revolution. Once I got my bearings and adjusted to the heat—it’s three-showers-a-day- plus-siesta weather—I headed out. Nicaragua’s status as this hemisphere's second or third poorest country became obvious, even though the dogs, who are generally the first to go, looked alright. The bright green foliage grows before your eyes in the heat and hides the garbage, small lizards sunbathe on the piles of brick, men relax in open porches on slat walled bars, women with umbrellas drag children sucking sodas from the corners of tied-off plastic bags, businessmen in guayaberas with purses tucked under arm hurry on, while kids— many with Japanese mitts—play sandlot baseball' everywhere. Judging from the faces, the original Spanish were not prudes and black and Indian features are well represented. Rafael Stevens, a Miskito Indian I met at a bus stop, did lower his voice and switch to pidgin english whenever a Sandinista soldier walked by, but he insisted racism was minimal, female equality has been embraced by the Sandinistas and they even decreed that men must help with the house work. If sparks of the indefatigable latin machismo still fly, they are s » At Clinton St. Quarterly 49
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