Managua, Nicaragua is a Beautiful Town,
You buy a hacienda for a few pesos down
Managua, Nicaragua is a heavenly spot
There’s coffee and bananas and the temperature’s hot.
The lyrics to that 1930’s song by Irving Berlin hummed monotonously in my brain in the weeks approaching my first visit to Nicaragua. I was 20 years old in that summer of 1996 when my Mother and Abuelita decided to break their 15-year self-imposed exile and revisit the old country. Due to the relative stability the country had enjoyed since the Sandinistas had been voted out of power six years earlier, Mama and Abuelita decided that it was finally safe for me to come along. In the time that led to that first “pilgrimage” I started to mentally revisit the images that haunted my childhood when Nicaragua was little more than a mythical place that I heard the adults talk about with longing: …te acordas de cuando ibamos en lancha a San Miguelito…cuando viviamos cerca de la Iglesia San Antonio???...cuando jugabamos beisbol en la explanada... I used to spend hours perusing my Abuelita’s photo albums with faded black and white photographs of Managua, a city that was virtually destroyed by an earthquake on 23 December 1972 and was now a mere shadow of its’ former self. As a child I frequently heard the word terremoto come up in conversation amongst my parents and uncles and aunts but it wasn’t until much later when I realized what the word meant: earthquake. And it was a little bit after that when I learned what an earthquake can be capable of doing. When I found out that one of my uncles had been trapped under rubble for hours before being pulled out the following morning by other relatives, I was captivated and thereby determined to get him to describe every minute detail, as well as he could remember, so that I could come one step closer to understanding what it was like to survive the cataclysmic tremor that killed 10,000 people and flattened Managua in a matter of seconds. As a child I would ask Tio Rolando, with morbid curiosity, to describe that night over two decades earlier. While he talked I would listen intently and try to imagine myself in that environment as he described the events of the previous day, the oppressive heat, the preparations for el 24, the chickens that were set on top of the refrigerator so that Mita Tina could make Gallina Rellena for Christmas Eve dinner, his going to bed on the night of the 22nd, his being yanked from sleep, his being thrown on the floor and immediately being buried under the remains of his home. He would tell me about the shouts and moans of others trapped under fallen debris and how finally after dawn Tio Frutos and Tio Mario came along with shovels to rescue him and Mita Tina. While he described that long night under the rubble, wondering if he would make it to sunrise, I was moved to tears by the thought that these people should have had to suffer so much right before El Niño Dios was supposed to deliver presents…
Back in those days it was rather hard to come by any literature about Nicaragua in the United States, much less about the earthquake. Most of what I came across in libraries or bookstores consisted of news articles from the 1980’s that played out the Contra/Sandinista drama that crippled Nicaragua during that decade, and any mention of the 1972 earthquake was in reference to Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s illegal siphoning of relief funds---but little else other than that, let alone any photographs of the old city center. Therefore, my imagination was primarily dependent on my Abuelita’s photos and the memories of my elders: “…Managua era muy bonita, ahora no es ni sombra de lo que era antes…” I relied greatly on the names of streets such as Avenida Roosevelt, Calle Colon, la Calle Momotombo, and names of neighborhoods, or colonias like La Salvadorita, Barrio Frixione, and La 27 de Mayo to feed my active imagination. I imagined what the city’s grand cathedral of Santiago de los Caballeros looked like when it was still intact with its marble altars and stained glass windows, before street kids started using it as an indoor baseball field. I envisioned walking along Managua’s crowded narrow streets and peering into shops that no longer exist, or stopping to admire the neoclassical architecture of El Palacio del Ayuntamiento and El Club Social Managua. I dreamed of stopping at La Carne Asada del Gran Hotel, Managua’s best known sidewalk fritanga of yesteryear for some good old street fare of gallo pinto and maduro frito. Or maybe I would wander into the Gran Hotel itself and take a dip in the swimming pool with all the other “chicos bien”. One night I even had a vivid dream in which I wandered through this mysterious city on that hot and balmy December night in 1972, as its denizens prepared to celebrate another Christmas and New Years, before many of them, along with their city, passed into eternity.
These were the souvenirs that I guarded that were not even my own but someone else’s, a “golden era” that was as dead as those 10,000 who died with “La Vieja Managua”. Memories I could never claim as my own but to which I clung with the devotion of a grieving mother who laments the premature death of her child. I always felt disappointed by the fact that this “wonderful town” was now history and that I would never experience those swinging days of the 1940’s and 50’s, when Latin American superstars like Maria Felix, Jorge Negrete, and Celia Cruz would descend on Managua to perform at El Teatro Gonzalez or frolic poolside at El Gran Hotel and shop at the Carlos Cardenal department store, or to rub elbows with the capital’s social elite at El Club Terraza. The fact that I was so fascinated by Managua’s troubled past was compounded by my desire to have been a native son of “La Novia del Xolotlan”, or Bride of Xolotlan, as some Managuas refer to their capital.
Nowadays the pretty bride that had once been Central America’s most modern capital was an overgrown conglomeration of neighborhoods, shanty towns and markets; hardly worthy of any capital city and no doubt a result of Daniel Ortega’s “Revolution of the People”. Managua, having been victim to both natural and man-made disasters bore the scars like no other Nicaraguan city. I would always see the same thing on the news (when the American media even bothered to talk about that troublesome Central American country: red and black Sandinista flags, green military vehicles, spray painted political slogans scrawled on walls peppered with bullet holes, lines of people waiting to receive their daily ration of rice and beans….In other words: I was being fed the North American vision of Nicaragua, but all of these setbacks did little to diminish the fairy tale land I had conjured up in my mind.
All of these images haunted me and followed me through my youth…all to climax on 10 August 1996 as the airplane descended over Managua, a black carpet of twinkling lights. My first trip to Nicaragua; I was 20 years old. My feelings were a mixture of excitement and nervousness that my childhood fantasies were about to come face to face with reality-- a concept I wasn’t too crazy about.
Would Managua live up to my expectations or had I merely set myself up for disappointment? Certainly I knew about the poverty and the corrupt government, but being the closet optimist that I am, I still harbored the fantasy in a small corner of my mind.
So I stepped off the plane onto the runway and the first thing that hit me was the extreme heat and humidity. For some reason my imagination had omitted this detail…we were in the midst of the tropics after all. Suddenly there was an added detail to my Nicaraguan fairy tale. Another detail, one that pleased me, was the strong scent of firewood that I would later come to associate with Nicaragua. A smell that would follow me anywhere I went: whether it be the a cobbled street in Montmartre, a housing tract in Orange County, or a tube stop in Hampstead Heath, I would be flooded with memories of the Motherland.
As if in a dream, I walked toward the small terminal, a 1960’s structure that I recognized from photos that were taken at arrivals and departures of my family in years gone by. The further I walked the more my clothes stuck to my body and the more I hoped my uncle had central air conditioning at his house. Somehow, this idea seemed farfetched. I tried to keep my feelings in check, I knew that this was only the airport and it would be unreasonable to make any harsh criticism at this point.
I cleared customs and claimed our luggage off a carousel that surely was the same one my Abuelita found her suitcases on when she visited from the States back in the ‘60s. My boat was rocked further when the luggage started to emerge and the passengers began to scramble like children around a piñata. My mother urged me to jump in if I wanted to reclaim our suitcases in one piece. If anything the whole baggage claim experience got points for quaintness…
As we made our way into Managua I was reminded of what Tia Salvadora told me a few weeks earlier: Managua no tiene centro; todo se cayo en el terremoto…Managua has no downtown; it all came down in the earthquake…and it all started to make sense, for all I saw were shantytowns that led to more shantytowns…Despite my aunts’ warning I tried to find some semblance of a center, an agglomeration of shops, offices, whatever, but all I saw was a pharmacy here and there and a handful of general stores advertising Coke and Flor de Caña, the local rum. After several left and right hand turns that made me lose my bearings, we went deeper and deeper into what appeared to be a working class residential area. One thing that seemed uniform about Managua was that all the homes were behind bars…Although I knew my sheltered American upbringing was making itself obvious, I had expected tiled roof homes with flowers spilling out from windows and horse drawn carriages, not this prison row of flat roofed houses. My Mama tells me now that she remembers worrying about what I was thinking during that drive from the airport to El Dorado, the Colonia where my uncle Luis lived. I was so silent and my face had become an unreadable blank that she was afraid I was too much of a Gringo to have any appreciation for the Motherland. She needn’t have worried, for while I was very quiet and observant at first, I was thrilled beyond words to finally be in the mythical country that inhabited my childhood fantasies. Little did she know, or anybody else for that matter, that a love affair was being born…
After hearing all of these tales of destruction and former glory I expected to find a wasteland that was once Central America’s most modern capital. What I didn’t realize, along with my Mama and Abuelita, who themselves hadn’t been back in years, was that Managua was a city that was very full of life indeed. Her former arteries like Avenida Roosevelt and la Calle del Triunfo had been severed, but new ones had either been formed or recovered new life, like La Carretera a Masaya, which may have once been a mere two-lane road leading out into the countryside south of Managua and was now “El Nuevo Centro” Managua’s new hub, lined with gleaming new shopping centers à la Orange County and several big name chain hotels; maybe not a Spanish style town like Granada or Leon, but a city that was determined to grow and move ahead. While not the swinging Havana-like city I imagined, I was happy to see that my capital city was not dwelling on the past and diving head-first into the future. After that first visit I grew more familiar with this chaotic city that was home to nearly two million Nicaraguans and I grew to love her and be proud to be her son. Soon after arriving at my uncles’, I was introduced to my primos Isaac, Milton, and Francisco, cousins that I didn’t grow up with but with whom I forged and profound friendship. Many a night was spent with them and some other amigos bar hopping in Altamira and Los Robles. It may not have been El Country Club Nejapa, but I was sure having a grand old time at places like El Chamàn or La Taberna…living up the joys of partying in my capital city…Now I could sing with more conviction:
Managua es maravillosa, con su lago de cristal;
Por algo estoy orgulloso de mi linda capital!
Once I became more familiar with modern-day Managua, I started to seek out pieces of the old city that stood lonely and forgotten near el Lago Xolotlan. Like most Managuas of my parents’ generation, I was filled with cavanga, or longing for this past that constantly seemed to beckon from just over la Loma de Tiscapa, away from activity of Metrocentro, far from el Mercado Huembes, and light years from the trendy nightclubs along Carretera a Masaya. Frequently I would beg one of my primos to drive me down Avenida Bolivar so that I could try to imagine what this street was like three decades earlier, before Mother Nature and El Gobierno had taken their toll. When we would arrive at the Plaza de la Revolución, I would descend from the car and stare in awe at the vast emptiness of what was once Managua’s epicenter. La Catedral de Santiago de los Caballeros looming before me, empty and desolate, El Teatro Nacional Ruben Dario, constructed in the late sixties, was like a reminder of what Managua could have been, and here and there a two or three-story building that had survived the quake was now a shelter for squatters. These avenues and plazas that were once populated by everyday people going about their daily business were now trampled on by some glue-sniffing homeless teen or the occasional tourist, no doubt trying his or her best to imagine the past like I was.
Managua es mi Linda tierra, la Novia del Xolotlan
De Terciopelo es su Sierra, y su Laguna de Celofan… Managua is my Beautiful Land, The Bride of Xolotlan
Her Mountains Are like Velvet, Her Lagoons like cellophane...
As my first trip to Nicaragua reached its end, my primos took me to el Mirador Tiscapa, a restaurant overlooking the Crater Lake just south of Managua’s old center. My cousin Isaac, who seemed to know me very well, chose this location as the setting for my despedida because he knew it would please me with its vintage atmosphere, with its strolling mariachis and trios, he knew that this would be a small piece of the Managua that I loved, a memory I could take with me that would leave the perfect impression. As the evening wore on and more and more bottles of Flor de Caña passed through our table, I realized that I could definitely concur with Irving Berlin’s song and say that Managua was, indeed, a beautiful town.
Yo se lo aseguro! No Tiene Rival!
En la América Central!!!