Nicaragua
March 2011
It’s difficult to hate someone who just pulled your chestnuts out of the fire. I looked at Cerna and was puzzled at the tranquil, relaxed expression on his face; as if he did things like this every day. Actually, he probably did. I wondered how many prostitutes and tranny hookers were on his payroll. Still, I felt much more comfortable with him now than I had during our first encounter, and in an odd way, I enjoyed the feeling of omnipotence I felt, chilling with the former head of Nicaraguan state security. In a lawless land like Nicaragua, it helped to have some of the badest asses in the country on your side, even though they might be under investigation by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. I didn’t know what the colonel had planned for today, but I knew it would be memorable. I wasn’t wrong about that.
We retraced yesterday’s route to San Juan del Sur, but instead of turning into La Talanguera as we did the day before and heading up to the comandante’s Pacific Marlin villa, we continued on the Chocolata along a narrow dirt road with dry jungle on either side. We roared past a few motorcycles and smaller SUVs driven by American and European surfers on their way to Playa Madera to surf one of the best breaks in the immediate vicinity of San Juan del Sur. After about fifteen minutes, Cerna pointed to a pulpería on the left side of the road where a white-faced capuchin monkey was chained to a catwalk under the eaves of the zinc roof. He wore a thick iron collar around his neck, and his chain slid along a track above him, allowing for about 5 yards of lateral movement. A group of Nicaraguan campesinos sat in plastic chairs in the shade of a largegenícero tree drinking cold Victoria, the local brew of choice. As we pulled over and stopped, Cerna handed a handkerchief to one of his cohorts in the back seat and pointed to me. The ruffian beside me carefully folded the handkerchief and started to blindfold me as I caught what seemed to be the sympathetic gaze of the monkey. The bright, sunny day then turned into darkness for the rest of a bumpy ride along winding dirt roads, and my illusions of having been accepted into the social life of the Nicaraguan government elite vanished abruptly and without much ceremony. My head beat a staccato rhythm against the Land Cruiser’s right rear window as our driver made no effort to avoid the washboard ruts and deep pot holes in the dirt road. The ride was interminable and hot, and by the time we arrived at our destination, I had a splitting headache.
As we exited the Land Cruiser, Cerna personally removed the blindfold and actually apologized, referring to ‘security measures’ and ‘established procedures.’ He once again tried to smile, but it came across as an unaccustomed emotion, and the effect resembled more a grimace than an expression of friendship or conviviality. Once my pupils had adjusted to the harsh sunshine, I gazed around at our surroundings and was taken aback by the magnificent view of five different bays below along the coast. No wonder the comandante chose this spot to relax. Although I couldn’t have retraced our steps, we seemed to be directly above Playa Madera, high above the beach, and you could even see surfers in the water and track the swell lines approaching the beach. Cerna gestured for me to follow him, and we entered a modest beach house with security guards posted at intervals of 10-15 meters around the house.
The most prominent feature of the house was a huge projection room that took up almost the entire second floor with a truly gargantuan screen encompassing the entire east side of the house. A full-service bar with a well-supplied liquor cabinet stood in the back of the room, and comfortable woven-back rocking chairs were spread throughout the viewing area in Nicaraguan style. The colonel led me into the room and whispered in Spanish, “He wants to talk, but he’s a little fucked up right now.”
I walked into the smoky room and saw Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua, sprawled out on the only sofa in the room watching Riding Giants on the screen with Spanish subtitles and listening to an eclectic compilation of old surf music by the Del-Tones and Surfaris from the early 1960s. I even heard one tune I recognized by Manuel and the Renegades, a very obscure group from the early days of surf music. He was wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt and had on a black and red bandana tied around his head. The smell of marijuana was heavy in the enclosed space, despite the size of the air conditioned mini-auditorium, and a half-empty bottle of 12-year Flor de Caña stood on the bar alongside cans of Coca-Cola and a plate of sliced limes. An elegant cut-glass bowl contained ice cubes, most of them already melted in the warm, humid air. The walls were decorated with enlarged framed photographs of surfing greats of the past such as Rabbit Kekai and Bob Simmons from Hawaii. I saw on the coffee table in front of Ortega’s sofa a Spanish-language version of Laird Hamilton’s Force of Nature. Jesus! When did this obsessed man find time to deal with Nicaragua’s myriad socio-economic problems?
Ortega heard the door shut behind me and glanced in my direction. He motioned me over to the sofa and held out a joint. I took it and pretended to take a hit. I didn’t think it would be very politic to turn down the comandante’s hospitality. Ortega took the joint back and muttered in English. “This is bad-ass weed! It’s from Costa Rica. Got it in the diplomatic pouch.” Then he broke into an ironic laugh that turned into a coughing fit that he couldn’t shake. He turned to look at me, smiled broadly with glassy eyes and asked hoarsely, “I guess you want to know what happened to the revolution?”
Ortega put out the joint in an ash tray and got up unsteadily from the sofa. He paused for a moment to get his sea legs back and then walked hesitantly over to the bar. He shook his head, smiled, and muttered once again, “Bad ass weed.” He looked at me and smiled that ear-to-ear grin that I used to see so often on the faces of my friends in high school when we’d get super stoned before going to English literature class to study Nathanial Hawthorne and that dreadfully boring nineteenth century classic The Scarlet Letter. I had no trouble using a crutch to make it through Hawthorne, but I did wonder what spiritual malaise the comandante was treating.
Ortega asked if I wanted a Cuba Libre and started to mix a healthy slug of 12-year-old Flor de Caña with some Coke. He squeezed in some fresh lime juice, added ice, and handed me the glass without waiting to hear my answer. He then coughed out some ganja residue and launched into an explanation of the origins of the rum and coke cocktail.
“So much of what we do, think, say, and even drink comes from you fucking gringos. Take something as simple as this rum and coke. It’s supposed to have been invented during the Spanish-American War in Cuba around 1898. You gringos brought Coke to Cuba and mixed it with Bacardi rum. Called it ‘Cuba Libre’ after the battle cry of the Cuban freedom fighters. The poor Cubanos just didn’t know they were turning in one form of colonial servitude for another. Then, years later when Cuba became communist, the reactionary Cuban exiles in Miami started to call the drink a Mentira, a lie, because they said there was no such thing as a Cuba Libre. No free Cuba. Yeah, I appreciate good propaganda. That was clever and sounded good. But whenever I hear that story or even think about a rum and coke, I think, wait a minute, Cuba’s changing; it’s on the right track. It will be free soon. Even Fidel is having his regrets now. The real lie is Nicaragua, not Cuba. Can you imagine the freakin’ president of Nicaragua saying this, bro?”
Ortega threw English slang into the conversation without hesitation, punctuating his heavy Nicaraguan accent in Spanish with English words that had no good equivalent in his native language. This weird kind of hip Spanglish added to the surreal quality of the meeting, and I kept looking over my shoulder for something to wake me up from this absurd dream that clashed with my perceptions of what real life was supposed to be. Nothing in my two decades as a foreign correspondent could have prepared me for this.
The comandante spoke clearly without slurring his words even though he was going through the Flor de Caña at an alarming rate. He opened a leather pouch hanging from his beaded, leather belt and took out a roach clip in the shape of a surfboard. He took what was left of the joint he had been smoking and put it in the clip, lit it, blew it out, and snorted the column of smoke rising thickly from the butt of the joint.
“Bro, see this thing? El Gringo gave it to me, man. Mako Sloane himself. It’s a reminder of what we went through together and what we taught each other. You know that motherfucker was supposed to kill me in Havana thirty years ago? Instead, we were stoned for three days and talked about everything. We discussed Che Guevara, that crazy Argentine whose stupid ideas on the revolutionary nature of the campesinos got him killed in Bolivia. We talked about revolution in Latin America and whether the Soviet model could be applied. We talked about Sandino and the U.S. occupation of my country, and how that crazy Nicaraguan patriot stood up to the Empire, beat your marines, and inspired a revolutionary movement. We talked of Marxism—Leninism and whether it was relevant in the context of the late 20th century, and then we talked about how none of it meant shit to a tree. Then we went out with the mulatto hookers. Now that was real.”
“What is revolution anyway, except foreplay? And the result of revolution is the same as the result of foreplay. Someone gets fucked!” At this bizarre analogy, the comandante threw back his head and guffawed obscenely. Then he stood up as if transformed, and assumed a pose I had seen innumerable times on Sandinista political propaganda posters throughout the country.
“Thirty-one years of triumphs with the FSLN!” he cried out, paraphrasing one of the dozens of Sandinista political billboards currently on display in most public places in Nicaragua. He turned his head and spit derisively in no particular direction. He sat back down in a heap and looked up at me with a mischievous grin on his face. “And it gets even worse, man.”
Sipping lightly from his Cuba Libre, Ortega began a sarcastic, self-deprecating monologue about the ideological pinnings of the Sandinista revolution. Every now and then he would take a hit from a new joint he had lit up or pause and watch a scene from the surf video still playing on the large screen.
“You know, there’s not a lot of difference between revolutionary ideology and religion,” Ortega said, and looked up at me to see my reaction, exhaling a thick, billowing cloud of ganja smoke. “Each is ultimately based on a myth. You either buy into the myth, or you don’t. Some people believe the myth, and others use the myth for their own agenda. That’s me, bro. You think I believed this shit about class struggle and the revolutionary consciousness of the peasant and worker classes? In Nicaragua? Are you shitting me, dude? That’s why Carlos Fonseca got killed so early in the revolution up in the mountains. That’s why Che died ridiculously in a Bolivian jungle! The peasants don’t have a revolutionary consciousness. They ratted out Che. They want frijoles, not some irrelevant set of ill-conceived bullshit rules about what path to revolution is best for Nicaragua or Bolivia. Arguing about ideology back then, especially when most of the country was illiterate and hungry, was like jerking off. Didn’t help anyone, and you just wasted your seed. Ideology cannot put rice and beans on your plate!” Ortega paused and took a long draw on his ice-cold cold rum and coke. I joined him and was soon feeling a pleasant rum buzz in the dark auditorium, listening to the cynical rant of the stoned president of Nicaragua.
“Man, at first it was a way to get laid, I’ve got to admit. I was poor. Hell, I couldn’t compete with the rich dudes from Managua at the university. So, I grew my hair long, wore dark glasses, and talked about Marxism, Sandino, anything that set me apart from the rich crowd. It worked! The girls I was sleeping with weren’t great beauties and didn’t even have good hygiene. Actually, they stank. That was okay: I did too. They called themselves intellectuals, and I pretended to be a revolutionary.”
“You know what, bro?” Ortega puffed himself up a bit and sat straight up on the sofa. “I did more than pretend. They sent me out to rob a bank with a machine gun. Bank of America. Was going to finance the revolution with the loot. Ended up in prison for seven years. Know what that’s like? No, you bourgeois journalists wouldn’t know what that’s like, would you?” Ortega had made his point and put me in my place. He took another deep hit off the joint and held his breath.
I knew Ortega had been in prison. He was only 23 at the time and wrote a poem there called, I Never Saw Managua When Miniskirts Were in Fashion. Pretty cool, I had always thought. His recollections of that time and his cynical views on the revolution’s ideology were good stuff, but I was hoping that he would get around to talking Mako Sloane. That’s why I was really here.
Ortega got wound up talking about the revolution: the daring raids by the Sandinistas, the reprisals by the National Guard, the women that fought side by side with the men.
“Those bitches were hot, I’m telling you. Something about getting shot at...it makes you want to have a woman; maybe out of gratitude that you didn’t get hit, out of the knowledge you could die at any moment, but I would get a hard-on any time I heard the Sherman tanks open up with their 50 caliber machine guns. It meant they were near enough to hunt down, and we did it too. I once made love to a woman during an artillery bombardment. It had the same effect on both of us. One of the shells hit the building we were in, and the thrill of it made her have an orgasm. I thought she was going to claw me to death. The next day she was killed, but at least she had that orgasm. It was her first and last one. She was only 16 years old.” Ortega tossed down what was left of his cocktail and smiled at the memory!
I wasn’t sure where Ortega was going with this rambling monologue. Every now and then he would look up at me just to see if I was listening. He talked a little like some women do, making long, seemingly unconnected digressions but usually finding his way back to the topic at hand. I knew part of this was his ganja buzz, but some of it had to be the way this man’s mind worked.
Whatever this revolutionary has-been was now, he did have balls and had been the only national leader in Latin America to stand up and wage war against Ronald Reagan’s simplistic and naively American perception of good and evil. Ortega asked legitimate questions at the time. He offered the alternate reality that maybe the U.S., and not the USSR, was the Evil Empire and Reagan the devil. Who’s to say he wasn’t right. The jury’s still out on that one.
“So look, imagine this….” Ortega stood up with the surfboard roach clip in his hand. The comandante had no problem hopping from talking surfing to talking revolution, but he made you pay attention at least. He turned down the retro surf music and said, “Then Sloane showed up, and he opened my eyes.” Ahh, this was more like it. Sloane and Ortega. This was going to be priceless.