Authors: Salman Rushdie
The Jaguar Smile
Praise for
The Jaguar Smile
“Written with a novelist’s eye for irony and metaphor … [Rushdie] is able to make us see that the factual reality of this country already verges on the surreal.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
“To say of
The Jaguar Smile
that it is a work of art is to take full note of its literary allusions, its uncompromising sensitivity to death and destruction, its ready political eye for the funny and grotesque, and above all its understated and gripping eloquence.”
—E
DWARD
W. S
AID
“A look at intelligence struggling, with limited success, not to be entirely extinguished in the service of faith … an account of the confusion any one of us might feel if we visited Nicaragua and gave it a chance to affect us, because it is an inescapably affecting land, crashing through abrupt change that escapes the easy categories of ideologues … good reading.”
—
The New York Times
“The account that emerges … is, as one would expect, quickened by a novelist’s eye.… Compelling.”
—
Time
A
LSO
BY
S
ALMAN
R
USHDIE
FICTION
Grimus
Midnight’s Children
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
East, West
The Moor’s Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Fury
Shalimar the Clown
NONFICTION
Imaginary Homelands
The Wizard of Oz
Step Across This Line
SCREENPLAY
Midnight’s Children
ANTHOLOGY
Mirrorwork
(co-editor)
2008 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1987, 1997 by Salman Rushdie
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
T
RADE
P
APERBACKS
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., and in London by Pan Books in 1987.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Marxist Educational Press for permission to reprint the English translations of the poems that appear on
this page
–
this page
,
this page
–
this page
,
this page
,
this page
–
this page
, and
this page
. All translations were originally published in
Nicaragua in Revolution: The Poets Speak
, edited by Brigit Aldaracia, Edward Baker, Ileana Rodriguez, and Marc Zimmerman (Minneapolis, MN: Marxist Educational Press, 1980). Reprinted by permission of Marxist Educational Press.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78666-1
v3.1
For Robbie
There was a young girl of Nic’ragua
Who smiled as she rode on a jaguar
.
They returned from the ride
With the young girl inside
And the smile on the face of the jaguar
.
A
NON
Map of Nicaragua
CONTENTS
14 Miss Nicaragua and the Jaguar
PREFACE TO THE 1997 EDITION
I
t’s ten years since
The Jaguar Smile
was published. It was my first nonfiction book, and I well remember the shock of emerging, for the first time, from the (relatively) polite world of literature into the rough-and-tumble of the political arena. In the United States, then deeply involved in the ‘low-intensity’ proxy war against Nicaragua, the tumbling was particularly rough. After my publication party in New York, I found myself at dinner at a wealthy uptown address, surrounded by the
bien-pensant
liberal élite. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on hearing that I’d written a book about Nicaragua, embarking on a debunking of the Sandinistas that focused wittily on their mode of dress and lack of good society manners. This was a warning sign. If American liberals were so casually dismissive, conservatives were bound to be worse.
And so it proved. A prominent radio interviewer, in a live broadcast, greeted me with the question: ‘Mr Rushdie, to what extent are you a Communist stooge?’ The
New Republic
gave the book an immensely long and rude review, perhaps the most vitriolic I’d ever received. It turned out to have been written by one of the most important figures in the Contra leadership. I was inexperienced enough, in those days, to be genuinely surprised that a respectable journal should so brazenly abandon the principle of critical objectivity for the sake of some controversial copy. I am more worldly now.
In the last ten years, the world has changed so dramatically that
The Jaguar Smile
now reads like a period piece, a fairy tale of one of the hotter moments in the Cold War. ‘The Soviet Union’ and ‘Cuba’ are bogeymen that have long since lost their power to scare us. And in Nicaragua, the Contra war finally took its toll. A war-weary electorate voted out the
FSLN, electing, instead, the same Doña Violeta Chamorro whom I had rather caustically described in my pages. Daniel Ortega surprised, even impressed, many of his international opponents by accepting the voters’ verdict. But at the same time, the Sandinistas were harshly criticized for pushing through, on behalf of many of their most prominent members, a last-minute land-grab of valuable real estate. (I have always wondered who ended up owning the comfortable Managua villa in which I was housed.) It was a characteristically contradictory Sandinista moment. When in power, they had acted,
simultaneously
, like people committed to democracy and also like harsh censors of free expression. Now, in their fall, they had behaved, once again simultaneously, like true democrats and also like true Latin-American oligarchs.
The FSLN sign on its hill overlooking Managua was altered, after the election, to read FIN. The End. In fact, Nicaraguan politics continued to be anything but straightforward. Dissension struck Doña Violeta’s ragbag anti-Sandinista coalition almost as soon as it took power, and on many occasions she was obliged to rule with the assistance of the votes of the Sandinista opposition. I had been struck, during my stay in Nicaragua, by the incestuous nature of the ruling class. Sandinistas and right-wingers had all gone to the same schools and dated each other. Now, it seemed, they were dating each other again.
But the stresses within the FSLN, what Marx would have called its ‘inherent contradictions’, did eventually arise to unmake it. During my visit I had been unable to meet the Sandinistas’ military strongman, Daniel Ortega’s brother Humberto, head of the armed forces. (The absence of any effective investigation of the hard-liners – Humberto Ortega, Tomás Borge – is a weakness in
The Jaguar Smile
. It seems probable that they were kept away from a non-Marxist like myself.) The differences between the Ortega brothers, and the group headed by Sergio Ramírez, whose key role it had been to persuade the urban middle class to support the revolution, became untenable. Ramírez left the movement, and the Sandinistas were hopelessly split. At the personal level, too, there were ruptures. Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo separated. Some of the people I had liked and admired left the country. The poet Gioconda Belli, for example, now lives in the United States. Her relationship with post-Sandinista Nicaragua is troubled and sad. And now a second election has been lost. Daniel Ortega has claimed that Arnoldo Alemán’s victory was achieved by widespread ballot-rigging,
but the independent team of electoral observers has ratified the election results. Now it really does look like the FIN.
In 1986, the story of Nicaragua looked to me like a David-and-Goliath saga. The Sandinistas, for all their incompetences and faults (and, on re-reading, I am glad to find I said a good deal about those faults), seemed like U.S. cultural mythology’s quintessential little guys who stand up against the Mister Bigs of the world and refuse to admit defeat. It looked, too, like a tale of unrequited love. Nicaragua, which loved the music, poetry and baseball of the United States, was being crushed by its powerful, careless beloved. Politics is not often so poignant.
A decade later, romance has given way to what cynical commentators call reality: that is, the irresistible power of super-power itself.
Just do as we say
, as the White House emissary told Foreign Minister d’Escoto. Nowadays, in the epoch beyond the ‘end of history’, that instruction cannot be ignored. In 1986, Mario Vargas Llosa
*
had spoken of the silent majority of ‘anti-Sandinista democratic Nicaraguans’, a majority that then seemed more like a wish than a truth; now, that majority exists. Mario would say it always existed, and if I am wrong, then he is right, but one might also argue that it was created. After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price. Now that the economic blockade is over and the ruined Nicaraguan economy has begun its slow recovery, it is easy to blame the old rulers for that blockade. The power of super-power: first to describe a given leadership as unacceptable; then to create the circumstances in which it becomes unacceptable; and finally to obliterate the memory of its (the super-power’s) own part in the process.