Essays
Nica Dreams
from The City Paper
18 September 2008
“En Nicaragua, no vive, sobrevive,” says Francisco, an affable and warmhearted pharmaceutical delivery man in his 40s. In Nicaragua, we don’t really live, we merely survive. It’s a mantra I’ve heard various times these past three weeks here in the largest nation in Central America, where almost 50 percent of adults are underemployed. In this nation of earthquakes and volcanoes, of gentle people and smooth coffee and smoother rum, of hammocks and rocking chairs, of vultures and machetes, of mellifluous Edens and raucous enclosed or open-air markets, where everyone — everyone — works, the overwhelming sense is that the government is out of solutions.
(Nicaraguans have indeed survived: an earthquake in 1972, which destroyed the capital; 60 years of the often-brutal Somoza dictatorship; revolution and the U.S.-backed Contra war; the 1998 Hurricane Mitch, which destroyed 70 percent of the nation’s infrastructure; and the presidency of Arnoldo Aléman, who was convicted in 2003 for embezzling $100 million from the treasury. A remarkable succession of local and national leaders, including current president and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, have used high office for financial reward.)
“I’m hiding from my boss,” Francisco says as I sit in the passenger seat of the car he’s driving. He’s skipping out on work to drive my family and me to the highlands of Matagalpa, a small northern city and scene of critical battles during the revolution. “In Nicaragua, work barely pays,” so you do what you can to get by.
The first time I met Francisco, he asked if I was Republican or Democrat, but before I had the chance to answer, he tapped his chest and said, “Soy Republicano.” Jimmy Carter, he explained succinctly, had aided the Sandinistas. “This Daniel,” he said, referring to Ortega, had ruined the country, once the richest in Central America. In this regard, Francisco’s views are pretty standard conservative fair. He’s an evangelical Christian, doesn’t drink or smoke, and supports foreign investment at any cost, including the expansion of sweatshops in free-trade zones.
At the Granada headquarters of the Liberal Constitutional Party (PLC), one of two powerful conservative parties whose fracture has led to the re-emergence of the Sandinistas, an ancient security guard invites me in to photograph “the portrait of the president.” I dutifully follow, understanding that he doesn’t plan to show me a picture of Ortega, but rather of Aléman, who lives today under house arrest. It’s the current right-wing fantasy. The old man tells me the U.S. is supporting Aléman’s return, a line amplified last month by The Miami Herald. The paper says that the disgraced former president, powerful as ever, is brokering the upcoming municipal elections.
Yet outside of certain loyalist circles, politics here have entered a twilight zone of shifting alliances, flying insults and ridiculous promises, resulting in what feels like a vast electoral ambivalence. The real story isn’t the old man’s fantasies; rather it’s the melancholy written outside, on the PLC building’s walls: Ortega, Aleman, and Somoza are all the same thing; no more dictators!
In his loving 1987 portrait of Nicaragua during the Contra war of the middle 1980s, The Jaguar Smile, Salman Rushdie gave broad credence to the Sandinista cause. Rushdie dearly wished to give the Sandinistas his most certain approval. Still, instincts told him to be skeptical of Daniel Ortega:
Maybe, in the end, it came down to this, I thought as I left Miguel d’Escoto’s home: Who did I think these people really were beneath the public positions and military fatigues? Father Miguel, Sergio Ramirez, Daniel Ortega: Were these dictators in the making?
Nowadays, as the graffiti hints, having observed Ortega’s heavy-handed and ham-fisted regime, many Nicaraguans are ready to believe it.
At the entrance of every major town or city is a large pink billboard with a photograph of Ortega. Up with the world’s poor! it declares, confounding most and soliciting derision from others — so much so that on several billboards Ortega’s image has been splattered with black paint. What’s interesting is that paint isn’t being thrown by the right. In some cases it’s the traditional left, Ortega’s old allies, who worry now about dictatorship. Old alliances have busted apart and strange new ones have formed, such as that between the Roman Catholic cardinal and former Somozaite Miguel Obando y Bravo and Ortega.
“This sort of [political maneuvering] isn’t unusual in Nicaragua,” says Managua-Philadelphia filmmaker Alberto Chamorro, a scion of one of this country’s ruling families. In the 1970s, “a lot of different kinds of people (including members of the Chamorro family) became Sandinistas.”
With all the jockeying, what seems clear is that no one knows what to do. Nearly every aspect of life here benefits from a donation — one observer told me foreign governments cover 30 percent of the federal budget — so much so that it feels like Daniel Ortega isn’t the president of a country, rather of a nonprofit, surviving on the whim and generosity of donors.
The question is, can survival end and living begin?
There are signs. With fields of cacao trees, until recently Nicaragua produced no chocolate, instead importing M&Ms and other factory brands. Now a Dutch entrepreneur, working with local growers, has formed El Castillo del Cacao, whose outstanding chocolate is intended to build wealth and create jobs. Others here, on private initiative, protect and enhance sensitive natural areas, building trails and erecting signs and keeping poachers out. Still others build schools, open museums and, in the north particularly, work cooperatively to raise fair-trade coffeefor the widening export market. There, where campesinos have clear-cut patches of forest threatening the water supply (a particularly adverse effect of the Sandinista initiative to give land to the poor), forward-looking coffee growers use sustainable practices as economic development. Entire communities are learning to benefit from a combination of environmental stewardship and tourism, and the number of good, rewarding jobs is growing.
All of these efforts require foreign assistance, but they’re the result, foremost, of love of country. “I just want Nicaragua to do well,” says the filmmaker Chamorro. When we meet in a gringo bar in Granada, Chamorro, who graduated from Penn in 2005, is wearing a vintage 1979 Phillies cap and a checkered shirt with a tiny, old-school embroidered Eagle. He has genuine Philly cred — his great-grandfather, the aptly named Filadelfo Chamorro, took a medical degree from Penn in the 1890s and since then someone from each generation has attended, including his two younger sisters, who are enrolled now. “I love Philly,” he says, explaining that it’s the workaday ethic he admires. “It’s my city.”
The Chamorros are one of a handful of families that form a persistent oligarchy here. One observer likens them to the Bushes, a comparison that simplifies and understates their role. The 1978 assassination of Chamorro’s great-uncle Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the publisher of the national daily La Prensa, ignited the revolution. Pedro Joaquín’s wife, Violeta, became the reconciliation president after the fall of the first Sandinista government, the first period of peace in more than a dozen years.
Chamorro, who attended film school at USC and then worked for producer/director Jon Avnet and theater maven Christopher Renshaw, wants to jumpstart a film industry here. (He also tells me he’d love to make a movie in Philadelphia.) His first film, Café Chavalos, which showed in June at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival and had its Managua première Aug. 7, is a documentary about the eponymous project that gives drug-addicted Granadine street kids — chavalos — a chance to right themselves by running a restaurant. Café Chavalos is the invention of Donna Tabor, a 68-year-old Pittsburgher and former Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood producer who quit regular life to join the Peace Corps. While living in Granada five years ago, she befriended a group of chavalos and invited them into her kitchen, where she and a friend taught them how to cook. Now, the café, supported by Tabor’s nonprofit Building New Hope, occupies a bright corner in one of Granada’s central neighborhoods. There, while making gazpacho and black bean soup, 10 young men reinvent themselves (with indefatigable pride and cash from Tabor’s pocket), and perhaps the life of their city and country.
For Chamorro, the film was an effective way to begin a filmmaking career and to confront one of the most debilitating issues facing his country (and an interesting chance,which he embraced, to bridge the class divide). In Rushdie’s book it’s observed that poetry, the Nicaraguan passion, is the only art form the beleaguered country can afford. Now, 20 years on, Chamorro’s project — to make Nicaraguan films for a Nicaraguan audience — would allow the nation to indulge itself. Having discovered that a high-quality film can be made cheaply here, Alberto is thinking big about an industry that could transform the nation. He’s working on three scripts, including an animated feature on street dogs. If he’s successful these next few years, Chamorro will have cornered an untapped market, of course. But critically for Nicaragua, that isn’t his only goal.
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