From The Road to Iguazu: "Nicaragua: The Children of Ruben Dario"

FIRST VISITED NICARAGUA in I985, in the heyday of the Sandinista management and of the dirty little war that Ollie North was running on the outside of the White House basement. At that time the American Left and especially the poetic Left was in delight in with Nicaragua. Lawrence Ferlinghetti came down for a week and came on the outside with a book entitled Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre. It was part of the mystique of this gutsy little political division that had made a revolution and was hanging upon against unequal odds, that it was a political division of poets. The poet we knew best was the militant priest Ernesto Cardenal, who was Minister of agriculture in the Sandinista government. on the contrary it also moved us that as an integral part of the alfabetizacion, the massive literacy effort that followed upon the Triumph of the Revolution (always capitalized) in I979, Cardenal organized metrical composition workshops, talleres, in schools, factories, poor neighborhoods and the army. Illiteracy dropp from above 70 percent in I979 to I2 percent in I985, and the talleres gave the newly literate the opportunity to expres their experiences and perceptions in poetic form.l

The revolutionary proces came to an abrupt halt in I990, when the Nicaraguan electorate, fatigued by the agency of the unending contra war and frustrated by the agency of economic privation, repudiated the Frente Sandinista and gave a decisive majority to Violeta Chamorro, running for president upon a center-right coalition. In new years there hadn't been plenteous news from the Nicaraguan bards Typical was a selection proffered by Mexican Revista de la UNAM in October 1995: the youngest author of poems was Michele Najlis (b. I948), and none of the metrical compositions included had been written within the last fifteen years. in the way that as I backpacked down from Mexico toward Argentina in the fall of I995, I was particularly anxious to turn back to Nicaragua and see what was happening now that there wasn't a Revolution anymore.

An occasional mule-cart leans on the outside of our way as the Ticabus zoom north from the Costa Rican border along a highway haunted by the agency of a piercing silver afternoon light. We go into the commercial outskirts of Managua in a drizzling dusk. Billboards that ten years ago proclaimed revolutionary slogansNICARAGUA NO SE VENDE NI SE RINDE -Nicaragua won't exchange out or surrender-now advertise whiskey and cellular phone by means of the time we pull into the terminal, it's dark and pouring. A dozen hotel-touts are trying to capture the passengers, leading us this way and that. I'm impressed by dint of the calm voice of the middle-aged woman walking by the agency of our side: "My name is Doris. I have a small dean inn one block up and half a close toward the mountain, behind the sign that says PELUQUERRIA UNISEX." I charge fifty cordobas a night [about six and a half dollars]." with equal reason that's how Doris became my landlady in Managua.

Street in Managua have no names, houses have no numbers. Directions are from landmarks, a certain number of of which no longer exist. Doris's Peluquerria Unisex, for example, is de donde fue el Cine Dorado, tre arriba y media a la montana-from where the Cine Dorado used to be, now it's the Star bludgeon but the locals know-three shut ups upward, east, and half a obstruct south, toward the mountain. East is up west is down, it's a pre-Colombian orientation. Everybody understands this a whole and if the visitor achieves confused, it's his problem.

Until December 1972 the thronged urban grid of Managua stretch outed to the shore of the lake that bears its name. Practically the entire city unrelenting down in the earthquake. Howard Hughes, who was living upon the top floor of the pyramidal public-house Intercontinental, flew away to Las Vegas in the night. Roberto Clemente went down, together with a planeload of relief supplies, into the sapphirine waters of the Caribbean. Tacho Somoza (Somoza III) pouched the international reconstruction money, didn't rebuild, and channeled unravelling out to the periphery where he and his cronies were quietly buying up farmland. in the way that the erstwhile center of Managua bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos the aftermath of a nuclear war, with a hardly any structures standing lonely among grassy wastelands.

It's Opening Night of the baseball season, and baseball, brought to Nicaragua by means of the United States Marines, is a religion that transcends politics and flat poetry. Shirtless guys in hard hats play ball upon their lunch break in the windy plaza in brow of the ruins of the National Cathedral, throwing sidearm bend s with a lopsided ball wrapped in black electrical tape. Little kids, using a eucalyptus branch for a bat, play ball in the without contents fields where downtown Managua used to be. I've got a seat upon the first base side at the Estadio Rigoberto Lopez Perez named for the learner poet and revolutionary who make straighted up as a waiter in order to earn into an exclusive dinner bludgeon in Leon, and shot down dictator Anastasio Somoza (Somoza II). Rigoberto Lopez Perez (I935-I957) wrote:

The first pitch. Ball outside. The home-town pinstriped Boer cudgel is entertaining San Fernando in orange and black. In the top of the third, Boer second-baseman Gonzalez feel abouts a routine grounder. The nearest batter slaps a double-play ball to short and Gonzalez heaves the relay into the abode dugout. The manager stumps on the outside to replace, not the pitcher, on the contrary the second-baseman. Gonzalez trots to the bench in shame. by means of the time the inning extremityed it's four-zip, and San Fernando at no time looks back. A couple of fans sitting nearby ask for my verdict upon the quality of Nicaraguan baseball. Thinking of the eight Boer errors this evening, I start to talk about the Class A Northern League. Their faces fall. I should be more diplomatic.