On How Some Fellows Travel

...In the same context Rushdie makes a kind of political declaration: "[U.S.] pressure and a phone call to Moscow...

...Yet there again, instinctively or maybe at the suggestion of the capital, he ended up "befriended" by a Nicaraguan diplomat and invited by the top government official in the region to a party organized for Cuban doctors...

...My enemy's enemy becomes, eventually, my friend...

...Would it have been more accurate to subtitle this book "Journey to the Comandantes...

...In the case of Nicaragua— "violently sweet" as Julio Cortazar called it—it is perhaps difficult but surely not impossible to provide an understanding image without yielding to idolatry...

...Reviewed by Anna Husarska Former Central American correspondent, Buenos Aires "Herald...

...Against such docile interlocutors the author emerges as a hell-raiser...

...Personal contacts with his high-ranking hosts, far from allowing a more intimate perspective, turned the author into a respectful transmitter of otherwise well-known ?fficial statements and (tousehiswords) party lines...

...By far the most interesting argument in this book is the one Rushdie has with himself...

...Blinded by his desire to see the Sandinista experiment succeed, Rushdie suppresses virtually any criticism he might have and at times turns into a panegyrist: After the inauguration of an Inter-Sputnik telephone line with the USSR in the presence of "Soviet ministers,"everybody "burst into smiles...

...Rushdie knows about "starting with idealism and romance and ending with betrayed expectations...

...Rushdie's sole approach to the Nicaraguan opposition is a conversation he had with Violeta Chamorro de Barrios at the by then closed daily La Prensa...

...Is there a line between well-intentioned forgiveness and distorting naïveté deserving of derision...

...He describes a most confusing discussion of censorship (via double translation) with two tight-lipped Nicaraguan writers, a Bulgarian poet and a secretary of the Soviet Writers' Union...

...His heavy prescribed agenda left Rushdie little time to experience life in Nicaragua beyond the "spacious verandahs" of the ruling elite...

...The visitor's claws (and memory) are sharper where the targets are easy...

...As the journal of ajourneyitis almost embarrassingly limited...

...Other people on the staff, including editorin-chief Jaime Chamorro (her brotherin-law), are known to be more knowledgeable...

...The title of the chapter is, by the way, "On Catharsis...

...But now, Cubans and Nicaraguans dancing together are a proof that "all that strain had vanished...

...The Jaguar smile here is thus an inoffensive grin...

...Rushdie notes that in September 1980 there had been a Creole demonstration against Cubans on duty in Bluefields and relations between the two groups were strained...

...President Daniel Ortega, Vice President Sergio Ramirez and Foreign Minister Miguel d'Escoto received him several times at their homes...

...Never mind that only certain Nicaraguans are invited to parties honoring Cubans...

...And when he did ask an awkward question, he got an awkward answer that he hardly ever challenged...

...Censorship is the leitmotif for Rushdie-therebel, who cannot accept the violation of his cherished values...

...The epigraph for his portrait of Nicaragua could well be a verse by the Hindu poet Sir Rabindranath Tagore, who is frequently evoked in The Jaguar Smile: "I do not love him because he is good, but because he is my little child...

...He was obviously more at ease on the English-speaking Atlantic Coast, and even enjoyed some casual encounters that are colorfully described...

...Dependent on an interpreter, he had few chances to hear the vox populi...

...Then he wrote a book...

...While accompanying them on various official occasions, he also encountered other persons mostly belonging to or friendly with the ruling group...

...seeing signs of it he feels "depression," "confusion," "unhappiness"—nothing more truculent than that...

...When that was written, at his new-found friend's house glasnost was still in the closet, Anna Akhmatova's Requiem was in the censor's drawer, and Iosif Z. Begun was in a labor camp—not precisely perfect qualifications for a duet-partner...

...That is what Salman Rushdie has failed to do...

...contributor, New York "Times Book Review" Salman Rushdie spent three weeks in Nicaragua last July, at the invitation of the Sandinista Association of Culture Workers...

...On one side there is the perceptive observer of unpleasant sights—food shortages, high prices, overcrowded buses—and the angry intellectual outraged at hearing a journalist from the Sandinista newspaper Barricada term freedom of the press as "cosmetic...

...He is slightly aggressive in bringing up attacks on writers in Cuba with Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal, but when he is about to score his point by mentioning the case of Heberto Padilla, a lapsemost unfortunate, indeed—makes him ask about the head of the Cubans Writers' Union, Nicolas Guillen...

...He demonstrates that she distorts facts, has no proofs to sustain attacks on the Sandinistas, and to top it all wears jewelry which "announced"—says he— "that there were no concessions being made to the spirit of the 'new Nicaragua.'" At La Prensa, however, Dona Violeta's primary function is to receive delegations paying homage to her late husband, the Somoza opponent Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, or expressing support for the spirit of thenewspaper...

...On the other side there is the Bombay-born "child of a sucessful revolt against a great power," the committed enthusiast always mindful of Sergio Ramirez' admonition that for a poet "it is a tragedy to end up playing a duet with Reagan...

...Not really, either...

...Also much harder to argue with...