Surfaces the Jaguar Smile

By Pico Iyer

With its huge vacant lots and denuded downtown, modern Managua resembles a blank screen onto which outsiders can project their most wishful fears or fantasies.

The latest foreign observer to peer into the void is Salman Rushdie, author of two fantastical novels, Midnight's Children and Shame, that tell the recent history of India and Pakistan. As an Indian who grew up with his independent motherland in its infancy, and as a fabulist whose bravura acts of invention bring to mind the "magic realism" of Latin American fiction, Rushdie felt himself obscurely allied with the revolutionary government in Nicaragua. Last summer he accepted the invitation of the Sandinista leadership to inspect the seven-year-old revolution. For three weeks he attended rallies, journeyed to the Honduran border and hung out with the comandantes, eating turtle and chatting about literature.

The account that emerges from that brief visit is, as one would expect, quickened by a novelist's eye. Rushdie the symbolist notes that the wife of the deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle was named Hope and that the Ministry of Culture goes by the acronym MINICULT. Rushdie the ironist observes that the campesinos battling "U.S. imperialism" dine to the radio accompaniment of Born in the U.S.A.

Rushdie the polemicist, however, tends to dart about these surfaces, fluently gliding over complexities. The dictator the Sandinistas overthrew, he asserts, was a rapist and a castrator; therefore, to call the Sandinistas totalitarian is "obscene." Somehow, the syllogism does not quite scan. Even criticisms of the leadership the visitor takes to be compliments, signs not of dissent but of democracy in action.

Here and there, Rushdie does note a few flaws in the revolutionary state. His most vexing concern is that a government of writers -- both President Daniel Ortega and his wife have published verse, while Vice President Sergio Ramirez produces fiction -- has also become a government of censors. Nor does he flinch from recording the naivete of teenage soldiers eager for battle. Yet such imperfections are not enough to prevent him from rooting for what he regards as a brave Nicaraguan David up against the North American Goliath. "Were these dictators in the making?" he asks of his ostentatious hosts. "No. Emphatically, no. They struck me as men of integrity and great pragmatism."

Since his own views seem largely unchanged by what he encounters, the tourist is unlikely to change the views of his readers. Those who share his assumptions will be reassured by his brief; those who do not will be outraged by it. His book is most compelling when he leaves politics behind to examine the Caribbean-flavored Atlantic coast. There, old black women shake their hips to reggae rhythms, and a dreadlocked poet reflects, during an incessant downpour, "In the old days, if Somoza told the rain to stop, it stopped. I don't know what's wrong with these Sandinistas." At such moments, The Jaguar Smile enjoys some of the charm of a tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- or for that matter, Salman Rushdie.