Passion, liberty, death: a song of Nicaragua

There are a few countries in the world that, through some seeming magic beyond our normal senses, are able to enchant us despite their utter misery and propensity to violence. For me -- and I suspect many others who have been there -- Nicaragua is such a place. Dirty, sweaty, seemingly cursed and wounded in many ways, this little land is at the same time physically stunning and inhabited by people with a strength of character, passion and humanity that washes over you like a wave, engulfs you and, for those unable to resist that seductive current, carries you away. I have spent some of the saddest times of my life in the mountains and steaming coasts of Nicaragua and some of the most beautiful.

Reading Gioconda Belli’s affecting memoir, “The Country Under My Skin,” brought all this back and more. In a way that is utterly Nicaraguan, she recounts a true tale of passion, poetry, insurrection, death and seeming liberation, followed by an ugly ending that is mediated by a personal coda that is both salving and humane. It is a hell of a story, recounting the fate of her country and her self, told with tenderness, honesty and humor.

Reading it also brought back just how mean and relentless the Cold War was. Nicaragua and the Sandinistas fell into the final chapter of that confrontation and were crushed by it. Nicaragua is struggling still to recover from the toll inflicted by decades of dictatorship, revolution and counterrevolution. But that is not the level at which Belli tells her story. This is a much more personal account of taking lovers and becoming an independent woman in a land of pure machismo -- after marrying as an innocent bourgeois virgin at 18 in the Nejapa Country Club. It is an account of having children and trying to be a mother while becoming a revolutionary and a poet, of forced exile, of mourning the loss of too many friends, of returning home only to find further struggle and disappointment. In this unexpected life, the final irony is that this Sandinista revolutionary poetess winds up living in Santa Monica married to an American. It feels like an odd but logical resolution to a life in which love ultimately proves deeper and stronger than politics.

Such frank humanity allows Belli to write tellingly of learning to fire a gun and hating it. There are many Mata Hari episodes as she secretly ferries senior Sandinista underground commanders around Managua in the ‘70s while Anastasio Somoza still ruled. Later she runs guns, carries secret documents and tens of thousands of dollars in cash and turns her exile home in Costa Rica into a Sandinista military training center and weapon depot while tending to her children in the back room. She rises in the Sandinista ranks and travels the world, meeting Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Panamanian leader Gen. Omar Torrijos, Hanoi military commander Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap and waging politics in Algeria, Libya and the former East Germany and Soviet Union, among other destinations. Torrijos tries to force her to bed and fails miserably. She is tailed and nearly intercepted by Somoza’s secret police, in the final encounter only narrowly escaping while holding her pistol in her lap, prepared to die shooting if captured. She falls hard for the head of the Sandinista underground, who sleeps with a pistol, hand grenade and his shoes on. And she mourns him achingly here as she looks at his bullet-riddled body on the front pages after the National Guard caught and killed him.

Through it all she insists that she is first and foremost a woman and a mother. She is compelling in recounting her sexual education and the difference between love and passion. Her accounts of womanhood, of giving birth and of motherhood are penetrating and unflinchingly honest. “Without renouncing my femininity, I think I have also managed to live like a man,” she says convincingly. Her story of nearly dying while giving birth to a premature son in a dirty public hospital ward and being told that her baby boy was dead, only to find later that he was alive, is a tear jerker. “Life never surrenders,” she writes, quoting a Vietnamese poem, expressing part of the essence that makes Nicaragua and Nicaraguans so affecting and such survivors of suffering that would break most of us.

Belli is also a pretty straight shooter on matters political. She is honestly self-critical on the failings of the Sandinistas that contributed to their downfall -- their naivete, arrogance, extremism, corruption and the inability to find a working synthesis between revolutionary demands and democratic claims -- and in the end, she shows us how, pressured by the Contra war and United States hostility, they were caught in a Catch-22, forced to take harsh measures in order to survive, alienated from many Nicaraguans because of those measures. Their decline and fall were brutal and ugly and can still provoke bitter divisions. Belli argues that, without the confrontation with Washington, time might have tempered the Sandinistas’ worst instincts and nurtured their better natures but the Cold War did not tolerate such dispensation. The Sandinistas were simply broken in its iron grip.

But history and human beings have a boundless capacity to surprise and recover in unexpected ways. As terrible as the cost was, the Sandinistas achieved significant gains that helped lay the foundations of a modern and more democratic Nicaragua. They ended a 40-year repressive regime and, after a cruel counterrevolutionary war that destroyed their popularity, they held free elections; when they lost, they respected the outcome and gave up unfettered power. They then passed control of the military peacefully from one commander to another. Despite deep rancor and anger, they largely refrained from abuse and bloodletting in the years that followed. Each of these steps was an unprecedented advance, allowing the Sandinistas to unexpectedly become midwives of a fragile Nicaraguan democracy. The test now is whether democracy and markets can address the overwhelming poverty and inequality that still ravage Nicaragua and many of its neighbors.

At a terrible cost to themselves and their revolution, the Sandinistas also unwaveringly supported their rebel comrades in El Salvador. Part of this was calculated realpolitik: the hope to have a brother revolutionary state as a neighbor. But part of it also was simple solidarity with another struggle against decades of military rule and injustice. In another irony of history, this Sandinista support gave the Salvadoran rebels the strength to force negotiations to end the war that, in their turn, also laid the foundations of a modern, democratic state in El Salvador. Again, revolution and war birthed something unexpected and better than the past had been: not perfect, not by any means, but a much better society than one ruled by colonels, death squads and coffee plantations.

Her decision to fight, to defy convention and become an independent woman makes up most and the best of Belli’s book. Then, unpredictable and ornery as ever, this Sandinista militant falls in love with an American journalist and moves first to Washington and then to Santa Monica with him. They conceive and lose a child, then adopt a Nicaraguan girl. This journey, from revolution in Managua to middle-class domesticity in the country that so often has dominated Nicaragua, raises countless personal and political questions that, for once, Belli seems unable or unwilling fully to pose and answer. It may simply be too personal and difficult to write of these things, but I wish she had.

Not many people get the chance, or seek, to create history and change their world. Belli did, and “The Country Under My Skin” is a full telling of what that feels like. One could easily criticize this book and her for a kind of tropical romanticism and endless tumbling into bed and insurrection, for causing as much pain at times as she and her comrades sought to assuage. But it is too honestly told to deserve a simple ironic lashing. Belli writes that she and others like her “held a fervent belief in the inherent nobleness of the human species.... [W]e were never afraid to dream and we had little respect for cynicism.... A cause is not hopeless just because its objectives aren’t reached in one’s lifetime.” Many of those she recalls here who believed these things died for them. Today in another, colder age, few seem ready to hold or express such sentiments. And maybe the world is not a better place as a result.

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From ‘The Country Under My Skin’

Two things decided my life: my country and my sex. Perhaps because my mother went into labor when she was at a baseball game in Managua’s stadium, it was my destiny to be drawn to the warmth of crowds. My response to the multitude was an early indication I would fear solitude and be attracted to the world of men.... Outside the stadium from which my mother rushed to the hospital, there stood in those days an equestrian statue of Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the dictator who installed a family dynasty in Nicaragua in 1937. Who knows what signals got mixed up in the amniotic fluid in my mother’s womb because .... I ended up taking up arms against the descendants of that horse-riding despot, drawing on every resource I had, to join in my country’s struggle to free itself from one of the most enduring tyrannies in Latin America.