Managua Coming to Terms With Past, Future : Nicaragua: An earthquake and an insurrection forced changes on the capital.

Ask anyone in Managua for directions to “the little tree” and they will point confidently to a downtown intersection with a service station, Roco’s Bar and the ruins of a two-story house, but no tree.

Never mind that the tree has been gone for 17 years, that when city workers dug it up to pave the streets after the earthquake it was no longer a little tree but a great big tree, an Indian laurel.

“It’s a point of reference,” said Rene Cano, 66, who has run the service station for 30 years. “For everyone, this corner is the little tree.”

The invisible tree is the key to many Managua addresses, including Cano’s--”five blocks down from the little tree and one block to the lake.” But Cano cannot fathom a stranger’s interest in the tree and, furthermore, he considers it one more example of how little foreigners understand his country.

Another example, he says, is the fact that multitudes of observers on hand for last month’s presidential election failed to foresee the sweeping opposition victory.

“You have to know the idiosyncrasies of the Nicaraguan people,” Cano said.

Right. Except that this is like trying to understand Managua, which is hurtling through change at lightning speed while holding onto its past by means of landmarks that ceased to exist long ago.

The earthquake of Dec. 22, 1972, leveled Managua. Seven years later, the Sandinista guerrillas led a popular insurrection that brought down the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, and this was followed by the Contra civil war.

After a decade of revolution and civil war, Nicaraguans booted the Sandinistas out of office in an election that was one of the Sandinistas’ greatest achievements--the first free and competitive election in the country’s history.

All those changes notwithstanding, younger generations still refer to Cano’s corner as “where the tree used to be.” They say it’s down the street from Las Delicias del Volga, a cantina that is also gone.

For 10 years, the Sandinistas’ battle cry was “Free Fatherland or Death,” and that is what they taught in Managua schools. Sandinista Youth spent their summers in the countryside picking coffee and teaching adults to read.

Now, under the new government of the National Opposition Union (UNO), children are to learn that free enterprise is the law of the land.

“The law of supply and demand is like the law of gravity,” UNO leader Carlos Hurtado said in the flush of victory. “It is inexorable.”

But even gravity is sometimes different in Managua, where the four points of the compass are “up, down, to the lake and to the mountains.” On any given block, up may be downhill, and the lake may be nowhere in sight.

How is an outsider to understand this?

Easy, says Maria Elena Castro, a resident of the neighborhood known as July 19th: “Down is where the sun sets, and up is where it rises.”

After their triumph, the Sandinistas renamed many of Managua’s streets and neighborhoods to honor the heroes, martyrs and battles of their uprising. July 19th, for example, is the day they celebrate their rise to power. Under the Somozas, the July 19th neighborhood was called “The Redeemer.”

Those who oppose the Sandinistas have steadfastly refused to accept the new names, so that many places have two names. Castro calls the square in front of the crumbling Metropolitan Cathedral the Plaza of the Revolution, but her anti-Sandinista husband calls it the Plaza of the Republic.

They both know what they are talking about. And by means of these labels, any Nicaraguan can identify which side of the political landscape they occupy.

Castro wonders whether the new government will try to erase the Sandinista names.

“I think they should stay the same,” she said, “because this was a historic process. These people spilled their blood, and that cannot be in vain.”

Her husband said, “I think they should go back to the way it was before the revolution.”

Before the revolution, Managua had the Anastasio Somoza Garcia National Baseball Stadium, named for Somoza’s father. The Sandinistas renamed the stadium after Rigoberto Lopez Perez, a tailor and poet who assassinated Somoza Garcia and was killed in the process.

Names, according to the opposition’s premier poet, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, are not all that important, but monuments are. The government of President-elect Violeta Barrios de Chamorro plans to build two monuments, Cuadra said, one to Gen. Augusto Cesar Sandino, who fought off a U.S. Marine occupation of Nicaragua in the 1920s and 1930s, and another to poet Ruben Dario. They are Nicaragua’s political and cultural heroes.

Although they take their name from Sandino, the Sandinistas never put up a statue of him, Cuadra noted. Instead, they erected a towering statue of a muscular worker raising an AK-47 rifle overhead. The opposition refers to it disparagingly as “the hulk.” Even Sandinistas privately malign the oeuvre that they feel obliged to defend in public.

“That statue should remain as a monument to July 19th,” Cuadra said. “The less a civilization tears down its statues, the more it advances. If people always took down their monuments, you’d never have a Paris or a Salamanca.”

Cuadra does not pretend to compare Managua to Paris, calling Managua “the ugliest city in the world . . . a volcano with a black hole in the middle.”

Definitely, the city is diffuse, divided by blocks of overgrown lots and the rubble of buildings that crumbled in the earthquake. Every lamppost and wall is a chaos of political graffiti and campaign banners. Thin palm trees bend and whip in the wind.

The new government, Cuadra says, must call an urgent meeting of builders, urban planners and seismologists to construct a post-earthquake, post-revolutionary Managua.

“You cannot govern from a disperse city that is without syntax,” he said, with distaste. “You end up with disperse, dehumanizing politics. It leads to mental disorganization.”

Indeed, there is a maddening quality to Managua. Streets that are paved are potholed; the rest are dirt. Water is scarce and electric power is erratic, as is the telephone system. But the inconveniences are tempered by the character of the Nicaraguans.

Most Managuans are poor. Men push carts, and horses pull them. As in any Latin American city, a gaggle of little boys surrounds any car stopped at a traffic light. They reach in with long and grubby arms, not to steal a purse but for the thrill of sounding the horn.

In neighborhood after neighborhood, Managuans gather at the end of the day in the living rooms and on the front porches of their one-story houses. In high-back rockers called “little grandmothers” they debate television soap operas and national politics with equal fervor.

Nicaraguans do not always tell outsiders exactly what they think--as in whom they think they will vote for. But the language they use can serve as a guide to their politics.

Sandinistas frequently use the word companero --companion--an affectionate term for anyone from a lover to an army buddy to a waiter in a restaurant.

The opposition, on the other hand, is enamored of the word fanatic , by which they mean Sandinista, and for which they have created a verb, to fanaticize, which is what they insist the Sandinistas have done to Nicaragua’s youth.

Sandinistas call the opposition burgueses --bourgeoisie. They prefer army fatigues and tropical guayabera shirts, but Chamorro’s American-educated preppie crowd is expected to bring back the suit and tie. Already, upper-class women are chattering about the floor-length dresses they will wear to the inauguration.

Few Nicaraguans are willing to predict what other changes the new government will bring. Businessman Pablo Vijil hopes to lure a pizza chain to Managua. The elimination of a U.S. trade embargo lifts an economic cloud from Managua, but Vijil is not expecting a flood of new investment.

“Expectations will not necessarily coincide with reality,” he said. “There are many unknowns.”