The Jaguar Smile Read Online Free PDF

just called the Sandinistas ‘Stalinists’. Stephen Kinzer, the paper’s man in Managua, had belatedly filed a report (without visiting the scene) on the most recent Contra atrocity, the mining of a road in northern Jinotega province, near Bocay. The mine had blown up a bus and killed thirty-two civilians, including several schoolchildren. Kinzer’s report suggested that the FSLN could have planted the mine itself, in a bid to gain international sympathy.
    Pressure, and a phone call to Moscow. My enemy’s enemy becomes, eventually, my friend.
    There was a shortage of beans in Managua. (Imagine Italy running out of pasta.) Some days it was hard to get corn to make tortillas. Inflation was close to 500%, and prices had gone crazy. It could cost you six head of cattle to get your truck serviced.
    The economy was hugely dependent on imports. Nicaragua produced no glass, no paper, no metal. It was also very vulnerable to attack. The economist Paul Oquist described it to me as a ‘one of everything economy’ – one deep-water port, one oil refinery, one international airport. US ‘surgical strikes’ would have little difficulty in paralysing the country. ‘Maybe they would spare the refinery,’ said Oquist, a norteamericano himself, ‘because it’s run by Exxon.’
    In the five years of the war, the Nicaraguan economy hadsuffered an estimated $2 billion-worth of damage. In 1985, Nicaragua’s total exports had been valued at $300 million; imports ran at $900 million. Two billion dollars was roughly the same as one year’s gross national product. So Nicaragua had lost one entire year’s production in the last five, with most of the damage occurring in the second half of that period.
    When the International Court at the Hague ruled against the US, it also upheld Nicaragua’s claim that the US was liable to pay reparation for the economic damage. The Court also rejected the US argument that Nicaragua was the ‘regional aggressor’, and that states in the zone were therefore entitled to defend themselves against it. (The judges who voted for the majority verdict came from Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, China, France (two), India, Italy, Nigeria, Norway, Poland and Senegal. The three who dissented from the judgment were from the United States, Britain and Japan.)
    The Reagan administration wasn’t interested in international law, at least not when its custodians found against the US. The situation was surreal: the country that was in fact acting illegally, that was the outlaw, was hurling such epithets as totalitarian, tyrannous and Stalinist at the elected government of a country that hadn’t broken any laws at all; the bandit was posing as the sheriff.
    Daniel Ortega finished talking to Moscow and put down the phone. Everybody, Russians, Nicaraguans, escritor hindú , burst into smiles. It was, after all, the Day of Joy.
    And after the Day, the Night. In a large, green circus-tent donated by Cuba, musicians from all over Central America were playing in a festival of contemporary music, the nueva canción . Salsa-rhythms and protest songs alternated. Managua had become quite a centre for liberal American musicians. As well as the artists in the circus tent, the Carpa Nacional , there hadbeen recent concert performances here by Peter, Paul and Mary. Jackson Browne had been down, too.
    Meanwhile, across town, seven women poets were reciting in the ruins of the Grand Hotel. Most of the hotel had collapsed in the earthquake. What remained – a central courtyard overlooked by balconies and open, now, to the sky – served the city as a cultural centre. The ruins were crowded with poetry-lovers. I did not think I had ever seen a people, even in India and Pakistan where poets were revered, who valued poetry as much as the Nicaraguans. At the back of the open stage, the seven women clustered and paced, all dressed up to the nines for the occasion, and all clearly nervous. They came forward in turn, to be introduced by the