Playa Hermosa
Nicaragua
I’ve had plenty of surreal and oddball experiences in my journalistic career around the world. I once played nine holes of golf with Muammar Gaddafi dressed in plaid Bermuda shorts and an Arab keffiyeh sipping fermented camel’s milk and driving from hole to hole using an air-conditioned Humvee as a golf cart. I’m not quite sure how Muammar rationalized that garb and behavior with the teachings of the Koran, but it didn’t seem to weigh that heavily on his conscience.
On another occasion, I was doing a story on the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan back in the 1980s and had to seek refuge in a mountain cave for six hours with a half dozen Mujahedeen fighters while the Soviets rocketed our positions from MI-24 attack helicopters. My Islamic comrades-in-arms spent the entire time watching porn movies on a tiny VHS video player powered by a 6 kW Kubota diesel generator located in the same cave. The screen was barely visible through the choking fumes, and the swarthy, bearded Mujahedeen were making me nervous with their lustful glances in my direction. I was grateful when the bombardment ended, and I was able to escape from the cave with my posterior virginity intact.
For just straight-up weirdness, though, the day that had begun so peacefully in San Jorge, Nicaragua just a few hours ago was a strong contender for the title, and it was getting wackier by the minute. An hour after my face-to-face encounter with Ortega, I was a passenger in the blue and white MI-171 presidential helicopter frantically putting on surf trunks and a rash guard that one of Ortega’s personal assistants had rummaged up in the bodega of the Pacific Marlin villa. I hadn’t surfed regularly since I was a 16-year-old, bleached blond grom in San Diego, longboarding at Old Man’s, but I had been informed brusquely that the comandante had requested my company to surf Playa Hermosa, a short helicopter ride south of San Juan del Sur. The president of Nicaragua is going surfing with me? What the hell was going on?
In an amazed stupor, I watched the former head of Nicaraguan internal security, Lenin Cerna, waxing up the comandante’s high-performance Stewart Hydro Hull 9’-2” with Sandinista-colored black and red Sticky Bumps surf wax. The comandante himself was looking sporty in red surf baggies and a short sleeve black rash guard, tie-dye headband, and aviator sunglasses. He gazed intensely out the window of the helicopter at the surf beaches we passed heading south just 100 feet above the water. Playa Hermosa, according to the comandante’s personal assistant, was the president’s favorite break. Ortega’s bodyguards were also in surf gear with waterproof semi-automatic weapons strapped to their backs, and as we neared Playa Hermosa, I saw several Nicaraguan military gunboats in the vicinity. Ortega either really hated for other surfers to drop in on him, or the Sandinistas took security issues very seriously.
Our surfboards were strapped to the skids of the helicopter, and as we hovered over Playa Hermosa, a beautiful long, deserted beach with glassy chest to head high waves that day, the presidential bodyguard contingent scrambled out on the skids and began deploying the longboards into the water below. The rest of us shinnied down nylon ropes to the cool water and swam to our respective boards. This was fucking unbelievable. Revolutions just weren’t what they used to be.
I’ve got to hand it to the comandante, though. For a man in his sixties, he could surf. Ortega was a classic longboarder...he surfed without a leash and didn’t try to ride it like a short board, like the new generation of ‘progressive’ longboarders do in Santa Cruz these days. He walked the board, cross-stepping to the nose, and clearly hung five on several waves that I personally saw. He surfed with passion and commitment, with a huge smile on his face and obviously used the freestyle sport of surfing to forget about politics, the opposition, his own corruption and hypocrisy, and perhaps his wife, a cross between an unshaven hippie and a gypsy fortune teller. I myself, a barely competent surfer under the best of circumstances, felt a little intimidated under the watchful eyes of Ortega’s heavily armed bodyguard entourage and chafed at the snickers of the young toughs when I wiped out on a perfect chest high wave as the peak peeled off to both the right and left. Christ, it had been a long time, but the exhilarating freedom and rush of the steep drop-ins made me wonder why so many years had gone by without paddling out to the lineup. When even a corrupt, murderous bastard like Daniel Ortega was able to get in touch with his conscience, soul crouching high in the curl with his hand tickling the wave, I wondered what I had been thinking all these years, or perhaps, what I had forgotten.
We surfed for over two hours. Three helicopter gunships hovered over us the entire time, the watchful eyes of the gunners scanning the tree line on the beach for possible danger. I couldn’t imagine what this surf session was costing the Nicaraguan treasury.
I had always considered Ortega a political prostitute who betrayed the Sandinista revolution when he got to power and installed the same type of repressive, authoritarian regime he had replaced. Today I had seen a human side to Ortega that was as astounding as it was improbable.
As we were hoisted back into the hovering helicopter after the session ended, Ortega’s personal assistant whispered to me that El Gringo had taught the comandante to surf in the 1980s even as the Contra war was raging. I can’t say I believed that unlikely scenario although I immediately recalled the famous photo of Sloane surfing with his Sandinista bodyguards when he was supposed to be the unofficial U.S. envoy to the Nicaraguan government. Sean O’Keefe had even told me during one interview in prison that there had been more to Sloane’s relationship with the Sandinistas than met the eye. In fact, during our last interview he hinted that Ortega was heavily indebted to Sloane for a favor he had extended to the comandante. Unfortunately, my access to O’Keefe had been withdrawn before I could follow up on this tantalizing bit of information.
Ortega still had not said a word to me since our initial encounter at the villa, and he didn’t break his silence during the short hop in the helicopter back to San Juan del Sur. After we arrived at the presidential villa by SUV from the helicopter pad, however, I saw the comandante take Cerna aside with a brief sideways glance at me and whisper a few instructions in his ear. A few minutes later a couple of Cerna’s boys had me by the elbows again and were escorting me to the colonel’s Toyota Land Cruiser. As we drove down the hill from the villa and exited Pacific Marlin, my head was still spinning at the fantastically zany turns the day had already taken.
The drive back to San Jorge was uneventful, and not a word was spoken by Cerna or his thugs. I was preoccupied with thoughts about a possible personal relationship between Sloane and Ortega and barely noticed when we arrived in Rivas and turned right at the traffic circle toward the lake and San Jorge. Instead of stopping at the hotel, we threaded our way through a maze of dirt streets, dodging old men on bicycles, stray dogs, and half naked, barefoot children playing in the dusty streets. Finally, we stopped in front of a modest dwelling constructed of cement blocks with a zinc roof, and Cerna turned around and stared at me expectantly.
My keepers roughly ejected me from the Land Cruiser as Cerna followed me with his little pig eyes and in passable English said, “Here’s what you were looking for. She’s inside.”