The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  ‘It is an order from the honoured guest,’ I assured her. ‘You have nothing to fear.’

  Graham enjoyed the lunch and the proletarian table immensely. But the servants did not. They eyed each other in confusion, as if intimating, ‘These crazy gringos’

  The table conversation was strained and contrived, to say the least. And it was only later that Graham realized he had forgotten to invite the young guard on the stoop with the tommy-gun.

  Fearful of what might happen next, with Graham fretting about being stuck away from the action, I telephoned the InterContinental Hotel and had no trouble finding rooms for us the following day. Graham was pacified. I warned him that there was no such thing as a city centre in Managua, only the ruins from the devastating 1972 earthquake. Nevertheless he wanted to see things and hated being cooped up in an outlying villa.

  Waiting for us to be picked up for a Sandinista rally dedicated to the completion of the literacy campaign, Graham talked of his latest book, Ways of Escape. ‘It’s autobiographical,’ he explained, ‘about escaping boredom.’ It had been published in England on his seventy-sixth birthday and he was particularly happy about having given the Canadian rights to his niece, Louise Dennys (daughter of Graham’s sister Elisabeth), whom he said had her own publishing house, Lester and Orpen Dennys, in Toronto. In an uncharacteristic display of familial feeling, Graham said he relished the thought of his niece receiving the book. He was also proud of her sister Amanda who had taken the photograph for the jacket of the new book. He also told me he had more than one unfinished manuscript that he was still carrying around. One was entitled ‘How Father Quixote Became a Monsignor’. ‘I don’t expect I’ll finish it,’ he said. A California company called Sylvester and Orphanos, which specialized in publishing attractive limited editions, had produced seventeen pages of the unfinished book. He didn’t care to autograph books, but he had signed all 330 copies of this special edition. On the Way Back was another novel he was working on. It was set in Panama and had been going nowhere until now.

  We were interrupted by the arrival of María Isabel, who drove us to the new Nineteenth of July Plaza the Sandinistas had built outside the city. (The name commemorated the date of their takeover in 1979.) They had simply paved a huge field and set up reviewing stands. As invited guests, we were shown to wooden bleachers on a roofless stand where we were to sit for the next five hours. Thousands — the official figure was three hundred thousand — had gathered in the new plaza to celebrate the end of the literacy campaign. Nearly half were brigadistas (members of special cadres), some as young as thirteen years old, who during the campaign had been granted special leave from their schools to help teach over seven hundred thousand people, a quarter of Nicaragua’s population, to read and write.

  In spite of the hard wooden bench and the blazing sun, Graham was in good spirits. He spent a lot of time shading his eyes from the sun while scanning the crowd. He sighted a little Roman Catholic nun weaving her way through the multitude. Her presence symbolized the liberal clergy’s support for the Sandinistas, although a higher-ranking prelate who was on hand — Bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo of Cuernavaca, Mexico, whom some Mexican conservatives called the ‘Red Bishop’ — kept his words brief. The guest of honour was the president of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Carazo. The Sandinistas owed this wartime ally a debt of gratitude, but his plea for elections during his speech did not sit well with the assembled comandantes or with the crowd. Defence Minister Humberto Ortega’s answer in his discourse, punctuated by revolutionary hyperbole, was that there would be no elections before 1985. (Elections were actually held in November 1984 and his brother Daniel was elected president.) When the applause died down Humberto Ortega droned on for more than an hour and eventually lost the attention of even this fervent crowd.

  To display his displeasure with Ortega’s long-winded rhetoric, Graham heartily applauded the shortest speech from the podium, delivered by Interior Minister Tomás Borge, whom Graham gave top marks for a rousing brief five-minute discourse.

  The heavy politics of the moment failed to spark Graham’s interest. The Sandinistas had promised pluralism; that was enough, he said. Even if some hard-liners wanted a single-party Marxist-Leninist state, the revolution would work itself out — they always do. Graham preferred watching the reaction of the crowd to listening to a translation of what the speakers were saying. Tired of shading himself from the sun, he began talking of the first translation of the Bible from Latin to English. He mused on, recalling that the first book he had learned to read was entitled Reading Without Tears. Then he pretended to be reading it once again, reciting, ‘A dog ate a frog …’ However, I had gathered earlier that Graham had been traumatized by his school days at Berkhamsted, where his father had been headmaster. ‘The fears and pain of childhood,’ he reflected, looking out at the young Nicaraguan faces, ‘stay with us.’

  He said there had been an awful article in the Daily Telegraph by Robert Moss, whom he described as a right-wing Australian who thinks of himself as an expert on espionage. Moss had attacked the Nicaraguan literacy crusade, saying it had been used for political indoctrination and that the teaching students involved had been forced to go to the hills to participate. ‘It is a shame Moss is not here to see this … They do look so happy and proud,’ he said as we watched the youths parading before us.

  Whatever its political objectives, the literacy crusade had not been a picnic. It had been tough, arduous and dangerous. At least fifty-six youths lost their lives in various ways. Several had died in accidents, eight had died from illnesses compounded by primitive living conditions — some youths had contracted diseases such as mountain leprosy and malaria, and seven had been assassinated by counter-revolutionaries, the forerunners of the US-backed Contra army.

  ‘The Catholic Church once considered the Bible too dangerous to put in the hands of the people,’ Graham observed as he looked over a copy of the 126-page Sandinista textbook, Dawn of the People, used in the literacy crusade. The textbook material was developed by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator. It was known as ‘conscientization’ or ‘liberating education’.

  Since I was doing a story on the crusade for Time Graham was helpful in offering all kinds of suggestions. ‘We bring up our children on fairy stories, but it doesn’t mean that they are going to believe in fairies all their lives,’ he said, contending that concern over the political content of the textbooks was misplaced. He found no reference to Karl Marx or Communist Cuba in the book. It did stress the history of the ‘New Nicaragua’, depicting Augusto César Sandino as the father of the nation. Sandino was the Nicaraguan guerrilla leader who fought the US Marine occupation forces in the 1920s and 1930s, only to be assassinated in 1934, reportedly on orders of Anastasio Somoza García, Tacho I, founder of the family dynasty. (He was assassinated himself by a young poet in 1956.)

  ‘Surely,’ Graham said, ‘it is better for them to read Marx than to have it expounded to them. If one is taught to read by reading Marx, that person is able to criticize Marx.’

  A woman from the mountains who had learned to read and write during the crusade recited a poem she had written, proving once again that Nicaragua is indeed the land of poets. As the parade finally ended and the sun dipped below the horizon we were escorted to the neighbouring grandstand to meet the Sandinista comandantes. We found Chuchu near the stand with his son, who was still hobbling from his self-inflicted leg wound. With them was Chuchu’s pretty young daughter with whom he was angry, adamant that she had to first complete her college studies before enlisting in the Sandinista army. The comandantes were too euphoric for anything more than a quick salutation to Graham and me.

  Dangerously dehydrated by sun and weary of rhetoric, we were happy to accept an invitation to dinner at the home of Xavier Chamorro, a close friend of Borge who had only recently launched his own pro-Sandinista newspaper, El Nuevo Diario. As we left the rally Graham said, ‘I like [Eden] Pastora’s face, not Borge.’

  ‘So does Omar,’ I
replied. It was interesting how Graham managed to sort out the various actors in any situation and categorize them.

  We were intrigued as to why Torrijos had sent Graham to Managua, since Omar’s own relationship with the Sandinistas had soured considerably. He had decided against attending their 19 July celebration a month earlier. Perhaps dispatching Graham in his personal jet was his way of sending a message to the Sandinistas that relations were not that bad. Torrijos was always careful to lard his public statements on Nicaragua and the Sandinistas with so much ambiguity that few could understand what his message really was. In private, though, he could be devastatingly blunt. Prior to the trip with Graham, when I had asked him about his relations with the Sandinistas, Omar grimaced and moved his head as if the subject had given him an instant headache. They were, he said, screwing up fast. They were too young and reckless to govern. They were playing with fire, ‘pulling the monkey’s [United States’] tail too hard’ by bringing the Soviets, Bulgarians and Cubans into the United States’ sphere of influence. ‘They only listen to themselves. They don’t even listen to Castro,’ he said.

  Chuchu was working furiously to keep relations between Panama and Nicaragua on an even keel, and Graham and I began to wonder whether it hadn’t been Chuchu’s idea for Graham to visit Managua under Omar’s auspices.

  At the end of 1979 when a delegation of Sandinistas had visited Panama everything seemed cordial enough on the surface, but there was an undeniable rift in relations over policy towards the Communist bloc. The Sandinistas, for example, said that only Cuba had a reservoir of doctors, teachers and technicians to loan to a sister country. Most other Central American countries were in dire straits themselves and could ill afford to help a neighbour on any significant scale. There was never any mention of an early US offer to help Nicaragua which was rejected by the Sandinista Directorate on the grounds that the United States would use its humanitarian volunteers to infiltrate CIA agents into the country.

  Torrijos had made it seem to the Sandinistas that he had no qualms over the presence of thousands of Cubans in Nicaragua, but the Sandinistas had to realize, he cautioned, that they were making the military in neighbouring El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala nervous. As far as he was concerned, he had told Panamanian television viewers at the end of 1979, it didn’t matter if there were one thousand or five thousand Cuban teachers in Nicaragua helping in the literacy campaign because the ‘alphabet has never overthrown anyone, nor has it destabilized anyone in the civilized world’. Along with other volunteers dispatched from Cuba, two thousand Cuban teachers participated in the crusade along with eight hundred Cuban medics. The Nicaraguans reported that, although their goal had been to reduce illiteracy from over 50 per cent to zero, they had managed to bring it down to an astounding 12 per cent.

  The Sandinistas had drawn support during the war from several international political sectors and countries, but both Cuba and Panama were recognized as the main sources of the military hardware that allowed the Nicaraguan rebels to out-gun Tacho II Somoza in the end. (In Washington the Carter administration had also helped by cutting off Somoza’s arms supplies.) Torrijos had even sent a Panamanian brigade to fight on the Southern Front with Edén Pastora, and they tied down some of Somoza’s best troops during the conflict. And when, shortly after the Sandinistas’ victory, a Nicaraguan delegation attended a 26 July celebration in Cuba, its members presented Fidel Castro with an Israeli-made Galil automatic rifle, the preferred weapon of Somoza’s élite National Guard troops, and damned Israel as the dictator’s chief arms supplier. When Omar had been invited to Managua a month after the rebel victory, the Sandinistas had also presented him with a Galil, but mindful of his close relations with Israel and the fact that his wife’s father was Jewish they said nothing about Israel’s role as arms merchant to the Somoza regime.

  Moreover, the last shot had hardly been fired in the Nicaragua civil war, and Somoza had barely fled, before Omar dispatched a training team under Colonel Rubén Darío Paredes, known in the Panamanian National Guard as a lumbering right-of-centre officer. Paredes’s task was to help organize the new Sandinista police force. The Cubans had arrived even earlier, speeding across the border from Costa Rica. Then, following the graduation of the first class of the new Sandinista police, Torrijos ordered the Panamanian instructors, as well as the remaining members of his expeditionary brigade, to pack up and return home to Panama. Some Sandinistas complained privately that the Panamanian police instructors were teaching the neophyte rebel police how to extract a mordida (bite) or bribe.

  Xavier Chamorro and his wife Sonia were gracious hosts. A bottle of whisky was placed before us, and we quickly quenched our thirst. I had known Xavier since the late 1960s. He had worked at the newspaper La Prensa with his brother Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, whose assassination in January 1978 was the catalyst for the revolt against Somoza. Graham could not get over the lovely bourgeois setting of their home. Whenever we were left alone he signalled with his hands and eyes his impressions. Tomás Borge finally arrived with his cadre of bodyguards. He sat opposite us, across a low, round wooden coffee table, and ordered milk. Graham looked shocked; in disgust he refreshed his glass of scotch.

  Short and Mayan-looking, with a head that appeared too large for his body, especially in his smartly tailored olive-green uniform, Borge wore the star of comandante of the revolution on his lapel. As the only surviving founder of the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional he had already, at forty-nine, entered Nicaraguan folklore. He could be eloquent, verbose and often poetic. In fact he was a good poet. He had also been a Marxist, at least initially. Upon his release from a Somoza prison in August 1978 he had declared at a Panamanian press conference: ‘Yes, I am a Marxist-Leninist.’ Three months later in Mexico City, where I interviewed him, he was no longer so sure. ‘Somoza painted us Marxist. We have some Marxists with us, but the FSLN is much wider,’ he answered. The concept of the ‘prolonged people’s war’ (advocated by his faction), he maintained, was ‘not Marxist, but a military concept which will lead to taking advantage of the favourable moment’.

  During the early days after the Sandinista victory Borge was the most public of all nine rebel comandantes. He had personally forgiven the man who had tortured him during his long years of imprisonment. In his office on the top floor of what had been the electric company building in Managua there were fourteen crucifixes on the wall, by my count, and in the reception room were four more sculptured crucifixes of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, he had praised the Catholic Church and asserted that the Church’s virtues and Sandinista ideals were one and the same. It was an interesting reflection of the philosophical parallels between a dogmatic religion and a doctrinaire political ideology.

  A Borge show was often the best show in town, if for no other reason than for being refreshingly frank. However, whether it was the milk or the audience, that night was not a typical Borge show. He droned on about the divisions within the FSLN and discussed each of the Sandinista factions in exhaustive detail. Most of what he described was public knowledge. In Time we had treated the subject thoroughly, and I had included an analysis of the rebels’ divisions in my book on Nicaragua, which E.P. Dutton in New York was about to publish.

  Listening without comments to Borge’s remarks, translated by Xavier, Graham’s demeanour was that of a patient visitor, exhibiting outward calm. His face reflected too much sun, and even his eyes had turned red. Flor de Caña rum and Scotch whisky were flowing freely on our side of the round coffee table — in fact, far too freely. I decided that just in case the comandante said something new I should tape the conversation in order later to provide Graham with a clearer picture of the evening. I went out to the car and retrieved my little bag with my tape-recorder. I placed it on the coffee table before Borge. As he was totally absorbed in his monologue I thought it would be rude to interrupt and request permission to tape him. In fact I had taped him on numerous occasions before. However, paranoia was alive and well in the Sandinista ranks
. Hardly had I set it down than one of Borge’s bodyguards bent down and whispered in my ear, ‘You are not recording the comandante, are you?’ I reached over and shut off the recorder.

  Later that night when we returned to our VIP villa and discussed the day’s activities Graham said he hadn’t noticed the glares I had received from Borge’s vigilant bodyguards. It was then that I opened my tape-recorder to find the tape that I had placed in it was gone. A sleight of hand by one of Borge’s bodyguards had evidently confiscated the cassette. I was angry but also embarrassed and humiliated. I half expected Graham to say with his characteristic acerbity, ‘Bad show.’ Instead his only reaction was to declare it a bloody boring evening. He really wasn’t interested in the divisions within the ranks of the Sandinistas, he said. Noting that Borge, as Interior Minister, was in charge not only of the police but also of prisons, Graham observed that there was probably still room for me in one of his crowded penitentiaries. When Chuchu came to fetch us the next day and I told him about Borge’s bodyguard’s having seized my tape, he was not happy. Nor was he happy to hear from Graham that we were moving out of the ‘secure’ villa to Managua’s Hotel InterContinental.

  After we checked into the hotel that morning, Borge showed up with his entourage of bodyguards. We met at the hotel reception desk, and I immediately brought up the subject of the missing tape. He was not in his usual buoyant mood. In fact, he was angry. He told me I should not have taped him without permission. I explained that I didn’t want to interrupt his talk by asking for permission. I had taped him, I explained, in order to give Graham a good briefing on his talk later that evening and requested the return of my cassette. He ignored my request and joined Graham, who had been explaining to Chuchu why we had moved to the hotel. Borge, I realized, was clearly upset that we had moved to the InterContinental and out of his VIP villa, insulting his hospitality; he probably suspected it was all my doing.