the people. ‘Too often we fall into using a language that puts them off, that creates a gulf.’ He looked like a bookworm who had done a body-building course; his manner, too, combined a bespectacled blinking, mild-voiced diffidence with an absolutely contradictory self-confidence. You wouldn’t kick sand into his face any more.
Talking to the people was a priority for his administration. He regularly took his entire cabinet to meet the people in popular forums, making himself accountable in a way his main Western critics never would. I tried to imagine Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher agreeing to submit themselves to a monthly grilling by members of the public, and failed.
Today, however, was about a different kind of communication. The phone call Ortega was on his way to make represented the ceremonial inauguration of the ‘Inter-Sputnik’ communications link between Nicaragua and the countries of the socialist bloc. We arrived at the dish antenna, which sat in the Managua hills not far from the wooden FSLN sign, and listened to speeches from Russian dignitaries. The new installation had been paid for by the USSR, and the US was already calling it a spy base. It looked like a telephone system to me.
As Daniel Ortega telephoned first his ambassador in Havana and then Nicaragua’s man in Moscow, the stupidity of US policy seemed glaringly obvious. In Nicaragua, there were old Jack Nicholson movies on the television, Coca-Cola did great business, the people listened to Madonna on the radio, singing about living in a material world/and I am a material girl ; baseball was a national obsession, and people spoke with pride of the number of Nicaraguans who had made the major leagues inthe United States. In the old Somoza days, when the newspapers were censored, they would print photographs of Marilyn Monroe and other Hollywood movie stars in place of the banned articles, creating what may be a unique alliance of Hollywood with radical protest. In Nicaraguan literature, too, the US influence was of enormous importance. The country’s poetry had been profoundly affected by the work of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound.
Now, however, there was the economic blockade. A shipment of Dutch cranes, en route to Nicaragua, had been impounded by the US authorities in the Canal Zone. IBM had withdrawn all service facilities from Nicaragua, obliging an already impoverished country to change, at great expense, from IBM computers to other, less ideologically motivated brands. (What would become, I wondered, of the IBM word processor Sergio Ramírez had shown me with all the eagerness and pride of a new-technology nut?) Most recently, Oxfam America had been prevented by the Reagan administration from sending a $41,000 shipment of seeds, hoes and farm equipment to Nicaragua.
It was impossible to spend even a day in Nicaragua without becoming aware of the huge and unrelenting pressure being exerted on the country by the giant standing on its northern frontier. It was a pressure that informed every minute of every day.
In the morning paper, Nicaragua’s leading cartoonist, Roger, had drawn a gigantic Uncle Sam, who was bending over and peering through binoculars at a tiny Nicaraguan house the size and shape of Snoopy’s dog kennel. ‘Yes,’ read his speech balloon, ‘I can see it clearly: they’re definitely planning to invade.’
The ‘Peanuts’ strip, by chance, had just run an American variation on the same theme. Linus, Snoopy, and, if memoryserves, Lucy sat watching TV, dressed up in camouflage combat fatigues. ‘What’s he saying now?’ the girl asked. Linus replied, ‘The same thing he said yesterday. He says there are people out there who want to destroy our way of life.’ ‘I don’t trust him,’ said Lucy or Patty or whoever it was. ‘Really? Why is that?’ ‘I don’t trust anybody.’
The Soviet ministers stood beside Daniel Ortega as he made his call to Moscow. The New York Times , in a leader article, had
Alice Clayton, Nina Bocci