Chuchu, Diederich and I should have left the next day for Nicaragua as guests of Tomás Borge, but first I had to see the El Salvador guerrilla leader, Marcial. The General explained that Marcial was in Panama for a conference between the five guerrilla groups to plan what they believed then would be the final offensive.
Marcial came to my hotel with a young G-2 officer. He was a very small elderly man in glasses with tiny twitching hands and tiny feet. If there was something merciless in his eyes, this was understandable – he had a long personal history behind him of imprisonment and torture. Almost at once he admitted that his real name was Cayetano and he suggested that we should move into the bedroom, leaving the G-2 officer behind. Seated on my bed he came directly to the point. ‘I understand from Mexico that you are interested in the fate of the South African Ambassador.’
I was aware of how weak my cards were. ‘For humanitarian reasons,’ I said. ‘His wife is dying of cancer.’ I had already played these cards too often on the telephone to Mexico to have any confidence in them. He listened, however, with courtesy, and afterwards there was a long embarrassing silence while I tried to think of just one more card I might play and failed to find it. It was a relief when he spoke. He assured me that everything was going, as he put it, all right, and there were only a few small details left to be arranged – the ransom, for example. I suggested the names of two South African millionaires who might be prepared to help. He had not heard of them and made a note. He was becoming more human every moment: he gave me an occasional smile and I thought that I detected a gleam of friendship in what had seemed his cold eyes. He told me he had four friends down below and I remembered that there were five guerrilla groups in El Salvador. Could he ask them to come up and speak to me? I agreed and we rejoined the G-2 officer in the sitting-room.
All four turned out to be young men, and Cayetano called on one of them to speak to me in English. He spoke very dully and at great length: a propagandist exercise. When it was over I asked them about the killing of certain peasants. I said that in the eyes of the West these killings, which had been reported in the press, had injured their cause. Cayetano replied, ‘In such cases you must put the word “peasant” in inverted commas. They were informers.’
My thoughts were with the kidnapped man. I tried to think of some way to help him. If they could be made to believe that I might be of some use to them, then perhaps . . . Rather unconvincingly I suggested that they suffered from ‘disinformation’ supplied by their enemies to the European press: if they would send me accurate information, not propaganda, I would try to have it published. With that we parted. I received no news from them, the final offensive failed to be final, and months later confirmation came to Europe of the Ambassador’s death. He was a sick man and he had been dragged here and there as a hostage for months. Mr Shearer wrote to me from Pretoria: ‘We are inclined on balance to think he was not “executed” as claimed by FMNL [the organization of all five guerrilla groups], but that he died as naturally as possible in the circumstances. There is, of course, no proof. The body and its whereabouts have never been revealed.’ Two years were to pass before I saw Cayetano again and then the meeting was in Nicaragua on the eve of his own mysterious death.
4
Next day Chuchu, Diederich and I flew in Omar’s private jet to Managua. He was determined to continue my education for better or worse, and for that reason he had arranged the invitation from Tomás Borge.
Managua is an almost non-existent city without any centre, the whole centre having been destroyed by the earthquake which so enriched President Somoza, for he pocketed all the international aid which was sent to Nicaragua instead of squandering it on rebuilding the capital. In the centre of the former city there remain only the cathedral which is half in ruins, the Inter-Continental Hotel, a small Mexican restaurant, the National Palace which had been seized by Eden Pastora, and the Bunker where Somoza had spent his last days of the presidency under fire. Life existed only on the periphery of Managua, so that to visit anyone there involved a drive of nearly half an hour.
We were due to arrive on a day of great importance. In an attempt to improve the illiteracy rate of fifty per cent the Sandinista government had despatched five thousand schoolchildren from the upper forms to live and work with the peasants in the country for six months, and in the evening to teach them reading and writing. There had been casualties. About fifty children had died from disease and seven had been murdered by the remnants of Somoza’s National Guard who were operating as guerrillas from the safety of Honduras, but the result of the exercise was spectacular – the illiteracy rate, it was claimed, had been reduced from fifty per cent to thirteen per cent. On this day the children were to return to a public welcome, which was to be spectacular too. The earthquake had fashioned a vast open-air theatre capable of holding 600,000 spectators – standing room only, of course.
It was explained to our little party that the Inter-Continental Hotel was full of visitors for the occasion and we were driven to a very comfortable house beyond the periphery with two charming and pretty maids to look after us. We had been welcomed at the airport – to Chuchu’s dissatisfaction – by María Isabel who, separated now from Camilo, had become an assistant to Tomás Borge and in her military uniform looked even prettier than two years ago. Our maids served us a simple and excellent lunch, but I felt disgruntled, for I believed myself to be separated from what I mistakenly thought to be the centre of things. I had not realized the emptiness of that centre. Indeed, I was quite unfairly suspicious, feeling that there must be a purpose in this separation, which I was ready to regard as a luxurious house arrest. However, to comfort me Diederich telephoned to the manager of the Inter-Continental, whom he knew well from civil war days, and arranged our transfer there for the next morning when the spectacular would be over and the visitors gone. I felt happier to think that we would be paying for our own rooms and be no charge on the Sandinistas. After lunch we drove back to Managua.
We had seats on the platform at the sunny end and the heat was blistering. But the heat seemed not to have deterred the enormous crowd below who had hardly elbow room. On the platform were ministers of government, members of the Junta, the President of Costa Rica. The schoolchildren marched below to shattering applause, each group with its own banner, and afterwards we had to suffer three hours of speeches. A successful revolution seems always to be marked by long speeches, just as war is marked by long periods of waiting for action.
The President of Costa Rica spoke first. Like a good social democrat he pleaded earnestly for early elections. Those on the platform listened to him in a glum, disapproving silence, and so did the crowd below. There was no sign of enthusiasm. After a victory in arms against heroic odds ‘early elections’ is not a rousing slogan in Central America. Another outsider spoke next – the Bishop of Cuernavaca, popularly known in Mexico as the Red Bishop. He too failed to arouse interest. Then came the army leader and Minister of Defence, Humberto Ortega. He began by proclaiming frankly that there would be no elections before 1985, and these words were greeted with enthusiasm by the packed crowd below and even stronger enthusiasm by the middle-class types on the platform who were thus able to show their disapproval of the President of Costa Rica. It was as though the men on the platform were reassuring the crowd of their loyalty by their applause and the crowd cheered them back, reassuring them in return. ‘No elections before 1985’ – that was a revolutionary slogan which they could understand.
I was puzzled by their response until I remembered what the word ‘elections’ meant in Nicaragua. During his long reign Somoza had frequently called elections and had thus legitimized his dictatorship, if only in the eyes of the United States, by winning all of them with huge majorities. So ‘election’ for most people in the crowd was a word which meant trickery. ‘No elections’ was a promise to them of no trickery.
After that popular beginning Ortega spoke for too long. His speech lasted more than an hour, and he was no Castro.
He lost the attention of the crowd. They began to move restlessly around and a murmur of innumerable conversations rose towards the platform. One could watch the crowd thinning. Many were struggling out to go home. Then the small intense figure of Tomás Borge took Ortega’s place, the crowd sprang to attention, all faces turned again to the platform, the murmur ceased. He spoke only for five minutes, but he was speaking to an audience who listened to every word.
The sun was unbearably hot. A small cloud which promised rain came and went. We decided to wait for only one more speaker. She was worth waiting for – a peasant woman of middle age. She was one of those who had been taught to read and write by the schoolchildren in their crusade against illiteracy, and now she read out to the huge hushed audience something she had composed, and that something was a poem. Nicaragua, I remembered Chuchu telling me, was a country of poets.
Down below the platform we found Chuchu’s children: the boy was still limping after the accident with his rifle, and the girl argued fiercely with her father about her wish to leave school and join the army.
There too, wandering alone – he had not been visible on the platform among the chiefs of the revolution – was the hero who had captured the National Palace, Eden Pastora, or Commandant Cero as he had been called when I met him in Panama after inheriting the title from Camilo’s brother. His handsome actor’s face gave an impression of loneliness, sadness, disappointment. I was not surprised when I heard a year later that he had turned against the Sandinistas and gone into exile. He had achieved the most spectacular feat of the civil war, and now he was in charge of training the local militia. An honourable situation, but can an actor who has once played Henry V to the world’s applause be content afterwards with the part of Pistol?
Next year he left the country claiming that he would never fight against his late companions; and after that he wandered restlessly from Panama to Mexico, from Mexico to Costa Rica. Supported by whom? Perhaps by certain characters in Miami, the Valley of the Fallen, or by the CIA. His promise was later modified – though he rejected the Sandinista government he would never fight on the side of the Somozistas, and that promise I can well believe that he intended to keep. The scent of glory was still in his nostrils – the sense of battling against great odds with a few chosen companions, and now, as I write, he is said to have formed a commando of about five hundred men across the frontier of Costa Rica on Nicaraguan soil with which to defeat his former comrades. His commando will certainly prove a dangerous nuisance, but if they succeed it will inevitably be as a small unit fighting with the United States, the El Salvador death squads, the Honduran army, and the men in Miami against the same enemy.
Pastora is a tragic figure. With his courage and charisma (a dangerous quality when a man becomes conscious of possessing it) he has been doomed to disillusion. If the Marxist Left should be defeated, he will inevitably fall out with the conservatives and the capitalists who find him useful now, and who will afterwards despise him for his simplicity and even his heroism. I find myself still haunted two years later by the memory of that solitary man wandering along alone below the platform where all the other leaders sat facing the enormous crowd who had come to welcome what he as much as any man had helped to bring about.*
After the parade, the speeches, the crowd, the enthusiasm, it was odd to find myself drinking whisky that evening in a rich bourgeois home belonging to a member of the Chamorro family, who owned the conservative newspaper La Prensa. La Prensa would soon become a strong opponent of the Sandinista government, but the Chamorro family, as so often happens in civil war, was divided, and Xavier Chamorro, in whose house Tomás Borge had made a rendezvous to meet and talk with me, was editor of El Nuevo Diario, a pro-Sandinista paper. All the same, it seemed strange to meet the leading Marxist in such very un-Marxist surroundings. Perhaps he felt as ill at ease as myself, but polarization had not yet fully set in – for the moment the Sandinistas’ victory was welcomed by almost the whole country. The future was only hinted at in the sad eyes of the neglected hero below the platform.
This was a brief, only too touristic visit to a country struggling back to normal life after a long civil war, yet I had no desire to stay longer. My personal problems in France called me back. Next day, after booking in at the Inter-Continental Hotel, we drove to the small town of Masaya which had been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting and which still bore the scars, then on to the beautiful city of Granada – a very conservative city – where Chuchu had a fierce interchange with an intrusive journalist from La Prensa.
The days in Nicaragua equalled the days in Panama for frustrations and delays. We had planned to return to Panama on a certain day, and it was lucky that we checked and found that María Isabel had somehow managed to book us on a flight which didn’t exist – we were not to be much luckier with the flight to which she changed us. In order to pass the time we drove to León, a less beautiful city than Granada, and up to the fort above the city where Somoza’s men had been besieged, and we visited a small tradesman’s house where a Sandinista supporter showed us where he had successfully kept arms concealed from the National Guard under the false floor of a wardrobe.
Back in Managua, we chose badly for dinner – at a restaurant called Los Ranchos which served poor and expensive food with a false elegance. Here my sympathies for the Sandinistas became strengthened, for I felt myself surrounded by their opponents, men in ties and waistcoats who had dressed up in spite of the heat for an evening out and who regarded our open shirts with a suspicion shared by the waiters who deliberately delayed our meals. Here we were on enemy territory, and I was glad to get away as soon as the bill could be prepared.
We were up early next day because we were uncertain of our seats on a Panamanian plane since María Isabel had performed a second difficult feat of getting us tickets but no reservations. The plane was there all right, but there was an indefinite and unexplained delay in boarding. Tomás Borge arrived with an armed escort to say goodbye and he wanted photographs of the occasion, but my camera had been stolen from my hotel room (a great relief to me, for it rid me of the responsibility of taking photographs, though I regretted the loss of some rather good pictures of vultures in Panama City). However, Tomás Borge had the necessary authority to borrow a camera from a duty free shop, so that I have a record of our affectionate farewell.
Finally we succeeded in getting on the plane, the plane began to move down the tarmac, and suddenly there was nothing to be seen through the windows but smoke. The plane stopped abruptly and we got out. We were told, as it proved untruly, that the plane would not leave that day. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The only other plane was Salvadorean and would not leave until six in the evening. We transferred our reservations to it. I went on a half-hearted search for my camera (luckily unsuccessful), and after lunch at the hotel we drove up to the volcano which dominates Managua, into which Somoza is said to have dropped the bodies of some of his opponents. A thin trail of smoke like that from a crematorium coiled up towards us from the crater and down below in the heart of the crater itself dozens of parakeets flew here and there like coloured kites manoeuvred by an unseen hand. I was sad to leave them to return to the airport, where nothing seemed to go right. It was 4.30. The Panamanian flight after all had left at three, and the Salvador plane, it was said, would be forty minutes late. That proved to be an optimistic reckoning – later it was announced that the plane had not even left Miami and might not arrive at all.
Politics can be a distraction from boredom, and politics entered the lounge now in the person of a distinguished black in a Mao suit who was followed by a wife – or secretary or mistress? – and a retainer. He took his seat firmly beside us, leaving his companions on two less comfortable chairs behind him, and silence descended after an initial greeting. I felt we were suspect – perhaps because I was an Englishman, an ex-colonialist. For how long, I wondered, were we to be condemned to this aggressive silence?
I remembered the bottle of whisky whic
h I always carried in my handbag, and I suggested that since we had an indefinite wait ahead of us, we might ask for some water and broach the bottle. The stranger accepted for himself, though he refused for his companions, and the whisky had an immediate effect. Volubility succeeded silence. He had been visiting Nicaragua as the representative of Mr Bishop and the Grenada government. A stream of Marxist clichés came pouring out of him with his life story. He was a lawyer and he had taken his law degree in Dublin (it was hard to picture him walking on the banks of the Liffey or sitting in an Irish pub). Afterwards he was called to the Bar in London. He asked my name and said that he had been made to read some of my books at school. After a second whisky he invited me to come as a guest of his government to Grenada, and I asked for a rain check. I described him later to Omar. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I know the man. He’s to the right of the President, and a good deal to the left of me.’
In the end the plane did turn up from Miami and it contained the Canadian Archbishop of Panama. ‘For God’s sake, let’s avoid him,’ I said to Chuchu, but there was no danger of his seeing us. Immediately on landing the Archbishop dived into the duty free liquor store, open to arriving passengers as well as departing, while we preserved our thirst for a little shabby Jamaican restaurant to which we had become attached, the Montego Bay, kept by an old jovial black, whose rum punches were almost as good as Flor’s. Drinking them, I had the usual thought: ‘Well, I’ve seen a little of Nicaragua, thanks to Omar – a first and a last visit,’ and again as always in Central America I was to be proved wrong.