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My Car in Managua 

By Forrest D. Colburn

135 pages

Published in 1991 by University of Texas Press

My Car in Nicaragua was recommended by a friend and board member of FunLimon, our community development center in Nicaragua. It’s a small book, but it’s big on insights and observations about life in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution.

Forrest Colburn is an academic. This book is derived partly from dissertation work he did at Cornell on revolutionary Nicaragua. I expected it to be academic (dull & pompous). But it wasn’t. It was brilliant, insightful, and a pleasure to read. The approach to his subject and his prose is much closer to Bill Bryson than it is to Harold Bloom.

Except for the final chapter, Colburn’s thesis on the Sandinista revolution is told indirectly through anecdotes, many of which, as the title suggests, pertain to an old Fiat he bought while he was living there.

In one of many wonderful examples, he talks about the “adjustments” that a McDonald’s had to make:

McDonald’s Managua has responded to the difficulties with creativity and good humor. As one of McDonald’s managers explained, “When we don’t have yellow cheese, we use white cheese. When we don’t have lettuce, we use cabbage. And when we don’t have french fries, we sell deep-fried cassava.” Of course, there are occasional stopgap measures that do not work. For a while McDonald’s tried using Russian wrapping paper for its Big Macs. But by the time customers walked to their tables, the paper gave the Big Macs the odor of “wet cardboard.” The managers of McDonald’s Managua astutely quit using the wrapping paper.

 

Critical Reception 

I couldn’t find any “official” reviews for this book, but here are a few excerpts of reviews posted by readers on GoodReads:

* “The affection that the author feels for this impoverished, exhausted country is obvious. For a commonsense view of 1980s Nicaragua that is enjoyable, well-written, and insightful, you cannot do better than this book.”

*  “I’d read a much more political account of the Nicaraguan revolution before that showed what happened behind closed doors at the highest levels, but this shared sketches of a more personal nature, demonstrating how the revolution affected the day-to-day lives of normal people.”

* “Colburn is even-handed and remarkably non-judgmental: He notes the material shortages and inflation under the piecemeal socialism of the Sandinistas with the same disinterested clarity used when he describes the widespread jokes about former dictator Anastasio Somoza.”

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Kill The Messenger 

Released October 9, 2014

Available on multiple streaming services

Directed by Michael Cuesta

Starring Jeremy Renner, Robert Patrick, Jena Sims

A gripping political/crime drama based on the true story of Garry Webb, a journalist for the San Jose Mercury Newsthat stumbles upon evidence that that the CIA was involved in trafficking cocaine to the US to support the Reagan-supported counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua.

It’s an amazing story – shocking even to someone like me, who is willing to believe that our military and spy organizations are involved in all sorts of illegal and unethical activities all the time.

What’s even more stunning is the role the NYT, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times played in trying to discredit Webb’s s reporting after it became national news.

A final shock comes at the end. I won’t give it away. But it is true. As in, “Life is stranger than fiction.”

 

Critical Reception 

*  “Evokes the detailed energy and ennui of enterprise journalism, and thanks to Jeremy Renner’s best performance outside The Hurt Locker, Webb comes across as a more meaningfully complex character than most comparable crusaders, real or imagined.” (MidWest Film Journal)

* “Kill the Messenger does a credible if not dazzling job. In fact, the movie is a lot like the reporting that inspired it: a good introduction to a diabolically tangled tale.” (NPR)

* “It’s an engrossing portrait not only of government intrigue and crusading after the truth, but of media and their tangled motivations.” (Boston Globe)

* “Kill the Messenger is a David-and-Goliath story where truth is the slingshot – a fragile weapon that needs to score a fatal hit before the big guy gets mad.” (LA Weekly)

You can watch the trailer here.

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A Brief History of Nicaragua 

Nicaragua has always been an agricultural economy. Before the 1979 revolution, most of the productive farmland was owned by a handful of very wealthy landholders.

That said, Nicaragua’s GDP (gross domestic product, the total of goods and services produced) was among the highest in Central America.

After Somoza fled in 1979, the Sandinistas implemented the promise of confiscating these large farms and redistributing them among their supporters. Almost immediately, the GDP crashed. This was partly because private capital available to the large farmers dried up. But it was also due to the inefficiency of breaking the farms into smaller ones, and the disappearance of tens of thousands of managers and professionals that fled the country and resettled in the US, Costa Rica, and other Central American countries.

On the positive side, the ascendency of the Sandinistas was a welcome event for Russia and Cuba, which began sending foreign aid to the tune of half a billion dollars a year to buck up the declining economy.

Things were bad and getting better when, three years later, the US-supported counterrevolution began. Although the Contras (as they were called) were more interested in trafficking cocaine than fighting Sandinistas, the fighting that was done was an expense the Sandinista government could not afford.

Between 1977 (the year the Sandinista insurrection began) and 1989, when free elections returned the country to a democracy, the GDP declined by 33% and exports fell by half while the population increased by 30%. The purchasing power of agricultural wages – the most common form of income in this agrarian land – dwindled to one-fifth of its former level.

As for inflation: At the beginning of the Sandinistas’ rule in 1979, the córdoba was pegged at 10 to the dollar. By February 14, 1987, inflation was in the triple digits and there were five discrepant official rates of exchange. On the black market, córdobas were 40,000 to the dollar. To “fix” that, the government instituted new bills with familiar faces but different colors, exchanging them for old ones at a rate of 1 to 1,000.

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Postscript

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A peek inside Paradise Palms, my botanical and sculpture gardens in Delray Beach…

Fruit of a Blue Latan Palm (Latania loddigesii)

Native to Mauritius, these palms grow up to 30 ft tall and 15 ft wide, with large blue-green palmate leaves growing to be 12 ft long. Small yellow flowers are followed by these oblong greenish brown fruits which are about 2 inches long. They have a woody pit similar to a peach but are inedible.

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