Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  “Where are you guys from?” I asked.

  “Vee ahh frum Tex-aahs.”

  Texas? The accents and the Russian vehicle made them East Germans. Maybe they were “private contractors” from that side of the game. But it was funny. Their attempt to pass themselves off as Americans was ridiculous. They were reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator, right down to the man’s biceps bulging from cutoff sleeves. Maybe they were from Texas, as Arnold is from California.

  Yanqui wake up

  You know it’s time to go

  The sun is almost up and we want to be alone

  Yanqui head spin

  Better get some rest

  Tomorrow we can talk about the way you insulted the guests

  Ivan’s outside

  Sulking in the yard

  Everyone got bad communication when the time gets hard

  Not a nice guy

  But he’s got troubles of his own

  Anyway it’s best if you both just leave the rest of us alone

  Yanqui go home

  You had too much

  Better go sleep it off

  Party’s over —

  Time to meditate on it

  Time to tally up the cost

  Yanqui wake up

  Don’t you see what you’re doing

  Trying to be the Pharaoh of the West bringing nothing but ruin

  Better start swimming

  Before you begin to drown

  All those petty tyrants in your pocket gonna weigh you down

  You’re my friend but I say

  Yanqui go home

  You had too much

  Better go sleep it off

  Party’s over

  Time to meditate on it

  Time to tally up the cost

  “YANQUI GO HOME,” 1983

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/49.

  During my last trip to Nicaragua, in late 1988, I looked up Susan Johnson, the point person for the Canadian organization Tools for Peace, which was shipping construction equipment, tractors, and other supplies to the country after an embargo was imposed by the Reagan administration on May 1, 1985. We had met on the first trip, in 1983. Susan was headed to the northeastern coastal town of Puerto Cabezas to track down some missing zinc roofing that had never arrived at its destination. It was supposed to have gone to Miskito Indians, the indigenous people of that side of the country, living near the Honduran border. She invited me to go with her. We flew in a rickety DC3 to the Atlantic coast. The aircraft was so old that the rivets holding the fuselage together rattled. From my seat, which was a metal bench, I could see daylight around the edges of the rivet heads. The engines sounded in tune, though, and it got us where we wanted to go.

  Puerto Cabezas is the principal seaport at the north end of the Caribbean side of Nicaragua. The Sandinista mayor was a tall, thirtysomething black man with a bushy Afro. He put Susan and me in the front of a big blue Toyota pickup with his driver, then jumped in the back, and off we went up the highway through largely deforested terrain toward the Río Coco, which defines the border with Honduras. Security was less of a problem than it would have been even a couple of weeks previously. The majority of the Miskito element of the Contras had signed a truce agreement with the government, so there was a reduced risk of coming under attack. We were told that there were, however, a couple of splinter groups that had not signed on. It was thought that one of them was operating somewhere in the area. About halfway to the border, we found Susan’s zinc roofing.

  The road ended abruptly at the edge of a brown and brimming river. A hundred yards away it started up again on the opposite bank. If there had been a bridge, it was not in evidence. Either it had been sabotaged or it had never existed. Any traffic had to be ferried across on a flat barge. All around where the boat landed on the far shore were makeshift shanties with grey corrugated roofs. This was as far as the shipment had gotten before being appropriated by the locals.

  The mystery solved, there was no need to go farther. We sat near the river and consumed the sandwiches and a couple of the beers we had brought, contemplating the roofing, watching the comings and goings of a few vehicles and a surprising number of pedestrians. After a while the atmosphere turned weird. People around us seemed nervous, as they muttered together.

  The drive had taken about four hours, and on the way we had passed a large group of people trudging back south toward town with what looked like pillowcases filled with their belongings, as if they were refugees. These people, it turned out, were a sign. As we sat eating, the mayor came over and said, “We’ve got to go right away. Now.” We scrambled into the truck, and he told us that the people we had seen walking on the roadside had been passengers on a bus that was attacked by the rogue Contras, who killed the driver and sent the passengers packing before torching the vehicle.

  The mayor, as an official of the Sandinista government, was clearly vulnerable, and he knew it. He drank practically all that was left of our case of beer in the rear of the truck on the drive back to Puerto Cabezas. He almost started to convulse when we got to the spot where the ambush had taken place. We didn’t see the bus—it was gone—but we knew that it had been at this crossroads and that close by, there was a whole platoon of Contras out looking for trouble.

  I was nervous myself. I began to strategize. What’s the best card I can play if they capture us? Wanna hear a song? I’m a good hostage! I’m worth something to you guys! Don’t torture me and drown me in shit. Just ask people for money for me. Then I thought maybe I could pose as a Moravian missionary. They were the only non-Hispanic- or non-native-looking people likely to show up in that area. I didn’t have a beard. I had earrings and a nontraditional haircut. I mentioned this ploy to Susan. She gave me a brief look and said drily, “I don’t think you’ll pass.”

  * * *

  Women of the town laundry. Warm night blanket floats down. Dim silhouette of trees in friendly dark. Headlights pick out smashed sack of corn strewn over asphalt. A single tarantula stands guard. Rodrigo, the driver, keeps chickens, so we jump out and spend ten minutes filling the trunk with dusty kernels. Later we have car trouble—limp into military truck depot. Barbed-wire gates glint in the moonlight. A hundred tired soldiers stretched out on the grass. Tired from a month in the cotton fields. We sing. They sing. Men and women, all young. Guitars and guns. Ballistic music blows open every heart. Passion bursts like rockets. Cotton bales bursting at the seams. Dignity and poems erupting out of parched poverty trance—broken forever. Brilliant green birds over the lava hole. Volcanoes stand around like the gods of old, pumping incense of the earth into the tropical sky. Down on the beach, horses canter through surf as warm as bath water. Emerald birds against flaming hills. Dry thunder and hot sky. Dust hangs in the air behind the feet of a passerby. Too much heat. This northern body can’t sleep.

  * * *

  Toward the end of this trip, we went to a party in the capital with a bunch of Canadians and some other internationals. On the way Susan delivered a message she had received earlier in the day as though she were a Graham Greene character:

  “To be confirmed later: President Ortega would like to meet Mr. Cockburn. Tonight.”

  She told the president’s people where to look for us. We had been at the party an hour when the call came. Susan was invited to interpret, and we drove to Daniel Ortega’s headquarters. He was in one of Managua’s few central office buildings left standing after the 1972 earthquake. We pulled into the back parking lot because the front was all rubble. There was a little guardhouse, and the sentry asked Susan what we were doing. He said, “Just go to the loading dock. Security will meet you there.”

  A half-dozen of the toughest-looking guys I could ever remember meeting lounged around the loading bay. They were scarred and wiry, scruffy as a pack of feral dogs. They didn’t seem particularly tense or wary. We pulled up and told them we were expected. They were friendly and hospitable, though they remained vigilant. Later we lea
rned that before the fall of Somoza, they had all been in prison with Ortega. They had a unique bond. He knew he could trust them.

  The president’s office was small and modestly furnished. We talked with Ortega for half an hour. He said he preferred to work when it was cooler, when nobody would bother him, typically arriving at 10 P.M. and staying until dawn.

  Ortega wanted to say thank you to Canada. He said, “You know, when we started we were so focused on the U.S. that we didn’t even think about Canada. We wanted the support of people in the U.S. We worked at that because we knew the administration wasn’t going to support us.” He paused and looked at something, or maybe nothing, on his desk. “We were very surprised when all this support came from Canada, and I just wanted to say thank you.”

  Of course, being typically Canadian, I said, “Canada will do whatever the U.S. tells it to do. Don’t count on anything from us. But it’s great we’ve been able to do what we’re doing.” It was a somewhat awkward exchange.

  Ortega appeared vulnerable. There were times during the conversation when it seemed as if he would cry. He had the vibe of an ex-con, of having been robbed of personal sovereignty. It wasn’t weakness, just vulnerability.

  And he was vulnerable. Less than two years later, on February 25, 1990, a decade after the Sandinistas took power, Ortega lost the Nicaraguan presidential election to Violeta Chamorro, who had received $9 million in campaign money from the United States. Chamorro won by a wide margin, 54 percent to 40 percent. People were worn down by endless low-intensity warfare. They didn’t have the heart to keep going. Besides, the Sandinistas had been in power long enough for their inevitable human failings to show.

  In the lair of the Communist threat, Daniel Ortega, 1988

  Throughout the 1980s it was clear, from even a cursory glance at the evidence, that the United States was striving to maintain control over Central America for the benefit of American business, as it had since the days of the Monroe Doctrine. After 1990, though, deeper, more somber truths escaped into the public realm, one of which was the bombshell that the CIA had been complicit in the trafficking of drugs to pay for the illegal Contra war. The website of the National Security Archive, an independent research institution located at George Washington University, contains a trove of declassified documents that demonstrate the “dark alliance” between U.S. officials, mercenary leaders seeking to unseat the Sandinistas on behalf of the United States and their own interests, and drug traffickers. (“The Dark Alliance” was the title of a series of investigative reports filed in August 1996 by San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb, which incontrovertibly documented the Contra-CIA-cocaine connection, linking it even to the flooding of American inner cities with crack cocaine, which was epidemic during the Reagan administration. Government officials and the mainstream press pilloried Webb for his courageous and well-researched series. He was said to have killed himself in 2004, though that interpretation came under question, as he suffered two gunshot wounds to the head.)

  At the same time, the administration launched the now familiar “war on drugs” that has continued to be waged by its successors. In thirty years it has been largely responsible for quintupling the U.S. prison population, from 500,000 to 2.5 million; a win-win both for drug dealers and for the prison-industrial complex.

  Breakfast woodsmoke on the breeze —

  On the cliff the U.S. Embassy

  Frowns out over Managua like Dracula’s tower.

  The kid who guards Fonseca’s tomb

  Cradles a beat-up submachine gun —

  At age fifteen he’s a veteran of four years of war

  Proud to pay his dues

  He knows who turns the screws

  Baby face and old man’s eyes

  Blue lagoon and flowering trees —

  Bullet-pocked Masaya streets

  Full of the ghosts of the heroes of Monimbo

  Women of the town laundry

  Work and gossip and laugh at me —

  They don’t believe I’ll ever send them the pictures I took.

  For every scar on a wall

  There’s a hole in someone’s heart

  Where a loved one’s memory lives

  In the flash of this moment

  You’re the best of what we are —

  Don’t let them stop you now

  Nicaragua

  Sandino in his Tom Mix hat

  Gazes from billboards and coins

  “Sandino vive en la lucha por la paz”

  Sandino of the shining dream

  Who stood up to the U.S. Marines —

  Now Washington panics at U-2 shots of “Cuban-style” latrines

  They peek from planes, eavesdrop from ships

  Voyeurs licking moistened lips, ’cause. . .

  In the flash of this moment

  You’re the best of what we are —

  Don’t let them stop you now

  Nicaragua

  “NICARAGUA,” 1983

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/50.

  13

  When I returned to Toronto from the first trip to Central America, I fell flat on my face. Judy’s father had died while I was away. I had never met him. He abandoned the family long before I came on the scene, fleeing his life as a Toronto musician to become the proprietor of a bar in Tokyo. Not a good business for a heavy drinker, though it may have worked for him to some degree in Japan, where drunkenness is considered a semisacred state. No one in the family had a single good thing to say about him. His daughters, especially Judy, mentioned him only with bitterness.

  Judy contacted me about his passing while I was in Managua. She wanted me to cut the trip short and come home. I couldn’t make sense of that—couldn’t see leaving my companions in the lurch, and ending the adventure I was having, because this guy had finally left the planet. I didn’t get why she would care. The man had given her next to nothing. I failed to appreciate how much of an impact his death had on Judy. I was neither experienced nor alert enough to understand, among other things, that now she could never have the real relationship with her father that had been taken from her, that now the rent in the weave of her life could never be repaired.

  No one in my family had died while I was still close to them. My grandparents, certainly, but I had had relatively little contact with them from my midteens on. Our family’s disinclination to share emotions carried over into the area of death. I was raised to have a kind of hard-ass, unsentimental attitude toward the subject. When my father’s mother passed away in Ottawa in 1970, I was living in Toronto. Nobody got around to letting me know. A month after the fact I happened to answer the phone when my mother-in-law called. “Sorry to hear about your grandmother,” she said. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  The one or two acquaintances among my peers who died had taken their own lives. That was tragic enough, but a step removed from my heart. I was baffled by Judy’s pain and had no idea how to address it. I did my best to offer what support I could, but I didn’t have the tools. We eventually moved on, but it was an issue that never completely faded.

  Judy had more family than anybody I’d been involved with up to that time. She was one of three daughters of a single mother, Peggy, from Liverpool, England. And sometime after her divorce, Peggy hooked up with a man named Harry and they had another girl.

  With Judy and her family, I enjoyed an immediate and unexpected support group for the going-out-and-loving-my-neighbour project. Not long after Judy and I got together, her sister Kelly started dating Jonathan Goldsmith, a brilliant pianist and composer. Jon became very important to my music in the eighties and onward. He and Kelly, Judy and I, and Hugh Marsh made up a little tribe of friends who often shared food and music.

  Judy and my mom, mid-eighties

  In 1981 Judy and I moved into an eccentric two-floor apartment above a fish store at the corner of College and Clinton Streets, the intersection that subsequently became the epicentre of the College Street Strip. Upon enterin
g, you had to ascend a flight of stairs past the shop’s storeroom. The funk of generations of dead seafood formed a sensory surf you had to fight through. Anything left too long in the stairwell—clothing, potted plants, and so on—acquired the aroma. But once upstairs, the place had a faded charm. There was a high-walled third-floor deck at the back. On the College Street side you could get out onto the fishmonger’s roof, which gave a fine view of the goings-on below. This was especially good on religious holidays, when there was always a parade coming from the Portuguese church a couple of blocks away: the scourging of Christ reenacted in less-than-realistic costumes, accompanied by a brass band emanating music of wondrous mournfulness.

  Neither of us was inclined toward marriage. I had had enough of that, and in my newly politically aware state, I felt that authority in the form of church and state had no business involving itself in my personal life. We were committed to each other, and that was sufficient.

  During the preceding few years I had become acquainted with a group called Jesus People USA (JPUSA). Based in Chicago, they constituted a church whose congregation was the lost youth of the urban mean streets. Charismatic and outwardly hip, they saved a lot of young people from a lot of sordid things. I attended a couple of their services when I played the city. I liked the folks, but was uncomfortable with the theatricality of raising my hands skyward in praise as they did, and I found myself being stared at disapprovingly by my scruffy fellow worshippers. Under the rock-and-roll hair and heavy metal music, the group’s ideology was decidedly conservative, though they seemed to regard me as at least a fellow traveller.