White Shirts and Skinny Horses

My first visit to Managua in 1988 was a watershed life event.  My previous travels had thus far comprised developed nations in Europe and the Soviet Union. Even Moscow’s endless blocks of huge apartment buildings crammed full of tiny flats left me unprepared for the living conditions I found in Nicaragua for so many of its citizens. The sight of kids playing baseball using sticks for bats, wads of electrical tape for balls, paint can lids for bases, and fielding around the corpse of a dead dog inspired me to organize a project to send sport equipment to San Isidro, Pittsburgh's sister city. 

Then, a teacher may have earned about $50 per month. She lived in a two- or three-room house of corrugated steel and wood or clay bricks, with earthen floor and unglazed windows. She owned few articles of clothing, yet miraculously managed a spotless white blouse and dark skirt at school each day. She cooked on a fire pit behind the house, and had no indoor plumbing. Or, if she owned a toilet, it had ceased working years ago and could not be repaired due in part to the U.S. embargo in place since 1985, when Ronald Reagan tried to undermine the 1979 leftist revolution that broke the grip of the dictator Anastasio Somoza.

In rural areas, conditions were less sophisticated. Yet daily, thousands of children donned their own clean white shirts and dark pants or skirts and headed off to school. Education was widely regarded to be both a fundamental right and the means to vouchsafing the country’s future.

A quarter-century later, there is ample evidence of progress on many fronts in Nicaragua. Roads that once resembled lunar landscapes are paved, and serve legions of modern trucks, buses, and late model cars. Street lighting and improved electrical service now illuminate nighttime Managua. New construction and multi-story buildings (once rare, due to earthquake fears) are everywhere. Still, those smooth roads also serve rustic carts piled high with firewood, drawn by skeletal horses and ponies. Many people still use firewood for cooking, and those poor beasts never enjoy grain rations.

Students still wear white shirts, and teachers in private schools find better salaries than their public school counterparts, in contrast to the U.S., where the reverse is most often the case. Poverty is still rife, despite a growing middle class. Opponents of the Sandinista party still rail against corruption, and all but two of the available television channels are now government-owned.

Throughout the city, billboards display air-brushed images of President Daniel Ortega exhorting his people to move upward and onward—“Vamos adelante!” His once handsome face is now rendered as unlined as a baby’s. Gone are the oversized glasses and the luxuriant black mustache, which has thinned along with his hairline. His grave countenance has been replaced by an empty grin that seems to plead, “Take the picture, already!”

I met him, once. In 1989, I invited Vera Clemente, widow of the great Pittsburgh right fielder Roberto, to come to Nicaragua. Vera had collected aid for Nicaragua’s victims of Hurricane Joan, much as her husband had done following the 1971 earthquake, losing his life in the effort. Her visit was the first opportunity most Nicaraguans had had to connect with their national hero Roberto, and her presence was treated with the pomp of a state occasion. President Ortega invited us to accompany him to the opening of a hydroelectric plant in Asturias, to the north. We were driven by car, and he flew in via helicopter. After the ceremonies and speeches, we sat with Ortega after lunch, and he asked many questions and listened carefully. I was impressed by his demeanor and warm smile—and no silly grins.

Another billboard around town shows Daniel and his best bud, Hugo. Well, his late best bud. Hugo Chavez is now memorialized as a rotunda behind the Intercontinental Hotel. His portrait, rendered in thousands of tiny colored lights, is a garish reminder that leftist governments gotta stick together in the shadow of the superpower al norte.