The People United Will Often Be Defeated: A short story by Michael Fine

by Michael Fine

© Michael Fine 2020

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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There was no one waiting when Raul Santiago landed in Managua in October of 1984. The Cuban bulldozers, or, to be honest, the Russian bulldozers sent by the Cubans, were lined up next to the terminal, ready for the work-day to begin.  Raul’s plane had been delayed in Miami and was nine hours late. It was 6 AM. The first red light of daybreak showed in the eastern sky.  Raul hoped that Tuli, the brigatista he had been writing to, had checked his arrival time and would be there to meet him even though he was late.  But no dice on that score. He would have to make this revolution on his own. No mucho espanol, but suficiente to talk to a cabbie or to tell a hotel clerk that he needed a room for the night.

FSLN red and black everywhere. Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation,  the rebels once and the government now, the vanguard of socialistic revolution, scaring the pants off old Uncle Sam and little Ronnie Reagan. Right in our back yard.  Red and black. Communist and anarchist colors, together in one little revolution. Never gonna see that in the good old US of A.

Immigration was a sleepy woman in a uniform that was too heavy for the weather. The letter from Tuli got him around the American passport.  You are who you are.  You just can’t change where you were born. Crazy at Customs though. Lots of questions from the border security people but then he was carrying plenty of what might look like trouble to border security types: carpenter’s tools, nails and screws, joist hangers, donated medical supplies, stupid stuff like aspirin and expired antibiotics. Letter aside, they were trying to make him out to be CIA or somehow pro Contra.  But no reactionary in their right mind would travel with the crap Raul was carrying.  The Contras and their friends like guns.

A Latino gringo coming to build a health clinic for the people of a little village in Nicaragua with a cart-load of baggage and no place to go. At least Uncle Sam hadn’t started bombing the airport yet.

Then another plane landed, this time from Houston.  All gringos.  Doctors and nurses, in Managua for a medical conference.  Documenting the health effects of the Contra war.  Not helping anybody, of course.  Not going up to Estelí, not dodging bullets so they could immunize kids and treat the wounds of the fighters who were being hurt and killed.  Going to look.  Going to document.  Raul hit on the hottest nurse, his comfort zone. What’s the story? They got us at a hotel across the street, she said. Some kind of army barracks run by the government.  Why don’t you come too?

Old habits die hard.

But somehow, somehow, by some miracle, Raul got up to Chitteaga anyway.  Tuli appeared late in the day in a beat-up white pickup truck, all and only business, and got Raul up to Chitteaga so he could prepare for the arrival of the others.

Chitteaga was a village of three or four hundred people, snuck in a little valley, next to a stream.  The people in the village were dirt poor.  They lived in shacks, just four walls with roofs that were part tin and part banana leaves, with dirt floors and no electricity.  They dressed in cast off clothing from the US – old tee shirts and worn out jeans — washed their clothes in the stream and hung their wash from the branches of the trees on the slope that rose beyond the stream. They kept pigs in pigsties attached to the houses. Their chickens clucked and scratched in the dirt between the houses and ran in the rock and dirt road that snaked between the shacks, and their children played in that street or tottered in the little dirt yards in front of the houses, some in diapers and some wearing nothing at all.

There was a little store in the middle of the village that actually had a real door with real glass windows, even though three of the four windows were cracked and were covered with cardboard that had bright red and blue printing on it.  You could buy rice and beans in the store, and Coke.  Sometimes plantains.  Sometimes oranges that were green, not orange, but not much else. Nothing happens in the universe anymore without Coke.

The location of the new health center in Chitteaga was marked, even if it hadn’t been prepped.  The norte americanos had been given the site of an old nursery school that had been run by nuns in the days of Somoza.  Most of the nuns had been run off when the Governor found out they were into liberation theology.  The remainder left when the war started, except for Sister Martha, who had gone native and was living with the son of the Mayor in a little coffee and banana finca just out of town.  The site had been stripped when the nuns left – the local people liberated the tin roof and most of the cinderblock from the walls so all that was left was the concrete pad, and that was cracked, with weeds and even some young trees pushing their way through the cracks. No repairing the pad.  They were going to have to break it up with sledges, haul off the rubble and re-pour the concrete before they laid on walls and a new roof.

Raul knew the risk of being norte americanos brigatistas in a contested area, but the risk they were taking was part of the point. There was Contra activity in this part of the country — right wing guerrillas, recruited, trained, supplied and directed by the CIA, who were shooting up police stations and villages in the outlying hill country in the north.  Ronnie Reagan’s little war, designed to make sure that no government of, by or for the people was ever going to survive in his hemisphere.  Sometimes Raul heard the clatter of horse hooves at night, which he took to be either Contra raiding parties or Sandinista patrols.  Occasionally Raul heard volleys of firing in the hills.

The buildings in Matagalpa, the nearest place where there were actual buildings and not shacks, were pock-marked by bullet holes. Bring it on. Solidarity. Power to the people. No Contra rebel in their right mind was going to hurt any American in Nicaragua because the Contras were an American creation. They didn’t exist without the CIA, and everybody knew it. The CIA already had plenty of trouble with Congress, and the CIA would get blamed in a second if the Contras showed up and hurt or killed any Americans.  Raul and his crew were building a health center, by god, for poor people in a place with no health care. Just let the goddamned Contras try to mess with them.

The Sister City crew showed in stages as they had planned it.  Raul first, to locate supplies and hire a couple of Spanish speaking co-workers.  Christie and Janine second, to secure housing for the volunteers and stage the delivery of supplies.  Then ten days after Raul arrived, the whole crew arrived, all eleven, this crazy little melting pot of people who could bend your ear for hours about US policy in Central America but who didn’t know nothing about birthin buildings:  two nurses, a printer, a labor union organizer, an out of work Vietnam vet, a respiratory therapist, a high school teacher, two Brown students and a kid from Providence College.  The new People’s Health Center in Chitteaga.  To be a presented to the People of Chitteaga Nicaragua by the People of Pawtucket, Rhode Island USA.  Sister cities.  Shoulder to Shoulder.  Hip to Hip.  The People United Will Never Be Defeated.  Ser presentado.  To be presented. They just had to build it first.

It only took three days for Heather: nurse, gay woman, 5’10” and wiry, curly black hair — to emerge as the leader of the more or less loyal opposition, and another day for Artie, the organizer, 5’6” stocky with a paunch, curly red hair and a short frizzy beard, face, neck and arms covered by red freckles, Jewish from Detroit, to emerge as the organizer of the disaffected masses. They had to break up the old pad and cart the rubble away.  Hot dusty, thankless work. Swinging goddamn sledge hammers. Really sucks.  What Raul and everyone else wouldn’t give for a jackhammer and an air compressor to drive it.  Sledge hammers.  All they had was sledge hammers. But the work had to be done.  There was nothing fair or unfair about it.  It was work, that’s all.  You want scheduled two hour breaks, we’ll do scheduled two hour breaks.  But that means a day or two days more breaking up concrete.

If Raul said A, Heather said B.  Then Artie went around getting people to sign a petition in support of B. They had meetings. Criticism sessions.  Raul offered to step down.  Begged to step down.  He heard all sorts of shit about being supported by his father-in-law, a left wing lawyer from New York, and about how that cut him off from the mass of working people.  Mass of working people?  You lift a hammer, you are working people.  You swing a hammer.  The work gets done.  Or not. Nobody actually wanted him to step down, of course.  Or couldn’t want him to.  They just wanted to complain, to spend hours talking and listening to themselves talk. Token Latino, maybe.  It turned out he was the only person there who actually knew how to think, wasn’t afraid of work, and wasn’t afraid of his own shadow. Raul didn’t ask to be that one.  It just was what it was.

But the sun was strong, the sky incredibly blue, and the air from the mountains clean and sweet.  It was way too hot at midday, and the dust from their work rose in the hot air, choking them, so they could each only swing the hammer for twenty minutes at a time before switching off.  They tied bandanas to their heads to sop up the sweat but the sweat got into their eyes anyway, and the sweat mixed with the dust so after working for an hour each of the norte americanos were covered by a crust of dirt and sunburn.

First they got the old floor broken up and the rubble out of the way.  Then they measured and graded the new floor.  They built and placed section forms and got ready to pour cement.  There was no cement mixer, of course.  They were in the middle of deep nowhere Nicaragua and in the middle of a little civil war.  You ever mix concrete by hand, in wheelbarrows?  Sledge hammers suck.  Mixing concrete sucks worse.  They had to run five wheelbarrows at a time so they could mix and pour fast enough to get each section poured before the cement set.  The warring tribes wanted water-bottles and breaks every twenty minutes and before long the assembled multitudes demanded an afternoon siesta. Raul was waiting for someone to ask for a string quartet playing Beethoven.

Two nights after the whole crew arrived there was gunfire from the hills again; close enough that you could make it out but not so close it was going to keep Raul from sleeping. Heather wasn’t going to let that one alone, not for one second.  She pounds on his door at one o’clock in the blinking morning with five other people in tow. We are hearing gunfire, she says. We need more security, we need to train to protect ourselves.  Okay, said Raul, let’s walk this out.  Whoever gets overnight guard duty is useless the next day, so we have to add a few days, and maybe a week, to the construction schedule. And what do we do in case of trouble? Call the police?  Face it, we are in a war-zone and there are risks.  Raul walked the political calculus again.  It’s too dangerous for the Contras to mess with us.  They know we’re here and what we’re doing, I promise.  But they have other fish to fry.  You don’t like the odds, you shouldn’t be here.  There’s a flight out through Mexico City every day; flights three times a week to Miami and twice a week to Houston. Now, let’s get some sleep.

Then somebody left the bags of concrete uncovered before the afternoon rains.  Heather?  We don’t talk down to people.  We are excited to have meetings. We carefully analyze our collective errors and learn from our mistakes.  The ruined concrete went on to the rubble pile, one bag per wheelbarrow, one wheelbarrow at a time. The moon got full and rose each night, first yellow and then white.  It took a week for another load of concrete to arrive.  In bags.  They listened to the howler monkeys at night, and one of two of them wrote poems about the moon.

Yes Janine started coming by to check on Raul in the middle of the night. Her idea, not his.  Old habits die hard.  He would have been content to let it alone until they were done, this time.  But it was what it was.  She was always gone before dawn.  Didn’t fool anyone, though. That was far from the only drama within the group, of course. Raul just left the rest of it alone.  Don’t ask, don’t tell.  That that goes around, comes around. It would all come out in the wash.

They were mixing the new cement when two armed men and a woman on horseback and three men on foot rode and walked into the construction site.

Trouble, Raul thought, when he saw them.  Faded olive green shirts, fatigues really, and jeans. Two men and a woman on horseback, three men on foot. Nobody’s army.  Just a band, a ragtag band of something or somebody, looking to get over. Maybe banditos.

One of the men dismounted.  Real trouble now, Raul thought. The one who dismounted was heavyset and had a broad face with small eyes. He walked toward Raul, leading a paint horse with blue eyes.  He had a holstered sidearm and a rifle in a leather scabbard lashed to his saddle.

The man and woman on horseback were both armed, and both horses also carried scabbarded guns.  The men on foot carried rifles and had holstered side-arms.  They might look raggedy, but they were raggedy with firepower. They meant business.

It isn’t supposed to work this way, Raul thought.  The Contras were supposed to leave us alone.

But then he saw red and black patches on the fatigues, and a couple of red and black bandanas tied around the necks or arms of the likely banditos.  They had dark red skin from being so much in the sun, and they, like the norte americanos, were covered with dust.  But red and black.  Tuli’s people. Sandinistas.  Brothers and sisters.  In solidarity. Maybe coming to help.

“Hola, amigos.  Come estan?” the horseman now on foot said. He led his horse by the reins, and the horse followed him reluctantly, the horse’s head angled forward.

“Muy buen,” Raul said, and stepped out of the cluster of wheelbarrows and sweating people so that the visitors could see who they were talking to. “Y tu?”

“Somos buenos,” the man said. “Bienvenido a Nicaragua. Estas construyendo una casa?” We are good. Welcome to Nicaragua. Are you building a house?

“Estamos construyendo una clinica de salud por el gente para Chitteaga, un regalo del la gente de Pawtucket, Rhode Island en los Esatados Unidos,” Raul said, feeling suddenly foolish. “No hablo mucho espanol.” We are building a health clinic for the people of Chitteaga, a present from the people of Pawtucket, Rhode Island in the United States. I don’t speak much Spanish. But Raul spoke without an accent so he wasn’t sure they believed him.

“Muchas gracias,” the man leading the horse said. “Es hora de que tengamos algo mas que balas y bombas de nuestros primos en el norte.”  Many thanks. It’s about time we got something besides bullets and bombs from our cousins up north.

“Te gustaria una gira?” Raul said. Would you like a tour?

“We can see,” said the one man still on a horse.  He was thin with long black hair that was tied in a little ponytail behind his head and had only a hint of an accent when he spoke English, “and hear, and yes, your Spanish sucks. We will stay here the night.” He dismounted.

“Cena?” the man on the horse with the pony tail said. Dinner?

“Cena en tres horas,” Raul said. Dinner in three hours.

“Cena ahora,” the broad faced man leading the paint horse said, and he tied his horse to a wheelbarrow. Dinner now.

“I carry a letter…” Raul said.

The man on the horse with a ponytail waved him away.  “I know who you are and who you know. You are in my country now.  For tonight, yo y mis companeros somos la Sandinista revolution in Chitteaga. “You can write your congressmen manana.” For tonight I and my companions are the Sandinista revolution in Chitteaga.  You can write your congressmen tomorrow.

The North Americans stopped their work and stood next to their wheelbarrows, some with shovels in hands.  They were a dirty, sweaty, sunburned brigade.

“Dinner break,” Raul said. “Those of you who have a finished segment, stop work and form the kitchen crew.  If you are in the middle of mixing or pouring, finish your section. Kitchen crew, we have six guests for dinner.  Plan accordingly.”

“But it’s three…” Heather said.

“Dinner break,” Raul said.

“We have a right…” Artie said.

“At the moment we have no rights,” Raul said.  “Our comrades here are exactly the people we are here to support, and they are requesting our assistance. Remember, political power is found in the barrel of a gun.” Raul had no idea if what he said actually meant anything, but he figured a quote from Mao would keep Heather and Arnie quiet until they got dinner on the table, until he could figure out who was who and what they needed to do next. His job had just become making sure no one got hurt or killed, now that the Sandinistas, or whoever they were, had arrived.

The norte americanos had four picnic tables built right after they arrived, using plans from a book of simple home building projects Raul had bought used and carried with him, a how-to book for tables and chairs, fences and gates, doors, ladders and staircases.

They had a routine.  Kitchen crew used one of the tables for prep, laid out the food on the prep table, cleaned up after themselves as they cooked, and then ate at the prep table after the meal was served.  Everyone else did cleanup after the meal, and no one went to bed before all the dishes were washed and their food stores were back in the duffels and hanging from the trees.  They bought eggs, fruits, and vegetables every day from the tiny store in town and just as often from local people who came by selling bananas, plantains, and nuts.  Pennies.  They ate for pennies. They all got the shits once and all recovered.

That night the kitchen crew cooked for twenty, not fourteen.

The Sandinistas crowded around the prep table the moment the crew laid out dinner. They ate standing up, and didn’t use utensils. They wolfed down plate after plate, as if they hadn’t eaten in days. Before long it was clear that the crew would have to cook a second time if the North Americans wanted anything to eat at all.

“Cerveza?” said the broad and flat faced man who had been the first to speak.

“Beer?” said the man with the pony-tail.

“No tenemos,” Raul said.  We don’t have. It was a small lie.  A few of them kept a bottle or two of Tona to drink in their rooms at night.  But there was nothing at the campsite.

“Too bad,” said the man with the ponytail.  “It helps us sleep.”

There was a brief, violent evening rain.

The Sandinistas unsaddled their horses and hobbled them, while the norte americanos prepared a second round of dinner, ate, cleaned up and made a campfire.  They didn’t usually have a campfire at night, but something told Raul that this night was going to be different, and that he and the others would do well to stay together and try to stay awake.

As soon as it got dark, the Sandinistas each chose a place nearby that was close but not too close to the fire, unrolled a bedroll, and fell asleep.  One of the walkers, a man with a broad chest and sad eyes, sat up watching the horses. The broad and flat faced man snored.  The others barely moved in their sleep, as if they hadn’t slept in days.

The norte americanos stood near the fire in little groups of two or three. They kept glancing at Raul, like it was his fault the Sandinistas had come, and his fault they were still there. He could feel another meeting coming.

Then Raul heard a horse snort. It was in a different direction from where the Sandinista horses were tendered. He listened. He heard movement in the bush, movement coming from four or five different places at once.

The Sandinista watching the horses stood up, pulled out his gun, and kicked one of his sleeping companeros awake.

Someone was out there in the jungle, watching them.

Suddenly Raul understood why the Sandinistas had come.  They knew what Raul knew – that the Contras would never raid a party of norte americanos.  The noises in the jungle were Contra noises.  There was a little brigade of Contras in the woods around them, as big or bigger than the little Sandinista band.  The Sandinistas were out manned and outgunned.  They had come to the worksite looking for protection, for sanctuary.  The Contras had come in right on the Sandinista tail, and now the worksite and the village were surrounded. The norte americanos had stuck their hands into a wasp’s nest. But these wasps shot live ammunition and played for keeps.

“Let the fire go out,” Raul whispered to the others.  “No lights tonight.  No reading after dark, even by flashlight.  Stay close and don’t go walking in the dark on your own.”

For a moment, the others thought he was crazy.  Then they heard what Raul heard.  Hoof-steps on dirt.  Leaves and branches rustling. They saw the two Sandinistas, who had taken up positions behind trees, guns ready.

They were surrounded by somebody.  Maybe Raul was not so crazy after all.

It was not possible to know who was out there, or how many they were. The norte americanos stayed awake listening in their rooms or in their tents but it wasn’t clear to any of them what they would do in case of trouble. Then, one by one, the norte americanos fell asleep in their beds.

Raul did not sleep.  Sometimes he sat on the cinderblocks that were stacked on pallets at the worksite.  Sometimes he sat at a picnic table near their improvised kitchen.  Sometimes he stood next to the mango tree, just staring into the night. Finally, as dawn broke blue and then pink and orange, Raul snoozed, sitting at a picnic table, his head on his bent arm.

The Sandinistas were already up when the norte americanos awoke. They squatted next to the mango tree and talked, sketching in the dirt with sticks. They came over in a group for coffee as soon as the water boiled.

“What’s the plan?” Raul said.

“No hablo inglis,” the long haired leader said.

“Cual es el plano?” Raul said in bullshit Spanglish. What is the plan?

You maumau me on language, Raul thought, I can Spanglish you to death. You speak perfect English, dude. Don’t fuck with me.

“We protect you,” the leader said.

“Nice,” Raul said. “And we feed you?”

“Si. We share with you the bounty created by the people of Nicaragua, which is coaxed from the soil and the sun by the labor of our compesino brothers and sisters, picked with their sweat and carried to you on their backs.”

“Got it. How long do we feed you?”  Raul said.

“As long as it is necessary,” the leader said. “We are hoping to be joined soon by the brothers and sisters in the revolution.”

“And when will that be?” Raul said.

“Whenever it is necessary,” the leader said. “The Revolution will not be televised.”

“We’ve got work to do,” Raul said.

“We will stand guard.”

Fuck you, Raul thought. His head hurt from lack of sleep, his neck hurt because he slept sitting up, and his brain pounded from trying to think.

The norte americanos went back to pouring concrete.

About three in the afternoon, when the sun was starting to dip but the day had not yet cooled, the Sandinistas stood up together and turned to look at the road they had ridden in on. A man wearing a yellow tee shirt from Port Washington, Oregon, faded blue jeans, and beat up brown cowboy boots came walking down the road waving a white flag, which was really a soiled handkerchief tied to a twig.

The Sandinistas shouldered their rifles and unholstered their handguns.  The norte americanos, who still had two hours of work in front of them, stopped work where they stood. Some stood next to the buckets of water they carried from the stream.  Others stood with shovels in their hands, or next to wheelbarrows they had just emptied. A little wind blew over the mountains from the Pacific and cooled the skin of those who moments before been dripping with sweat and were covered with dust.

“Ola Miguel,” shouted the Sandanista leader with the ponytail.

“Ola Ramon,” shouted the man carrying the white flag.

“Pablo esta saliendo,” shouted Ramon, the man with the ponytail, whose name the norte americanos now knew. Pablo is coming out.

The broad faced Sandanista who had been the first to walk into their camp leading the paint horse now leaned his rifle against a tree and walked out to the road. Now the norte americanos knew two names.  He talked for a few minutes to the man carrying the white flag, who gestured with his arms. Then Pablo returned, and the man carrying the white flag turned and walked away. The Sandinistas talked amongst themselves for a few minutes. Then they walked out together to the jobsite, to where Raul was standing with a shovel in his hands.

“You don’t have to worry any more. They won’t come into the camp,” Ramon said.

“But they won’t let anyone leave, yes?” Raul said.

“They will let us leave, yes,” Ramon said. “They just won’t let you leave. But, however, it would be unwise for any of us to leave at this time, as they are many more than us. They say fifty. We counted twenty.”

“I didn’t see…” Raul said.

“You are not educated in seeing,” Ramon said. “We have the PhD in seeing fighters among the trees.  It is not wise for us to depart right now. We await our brothers and sisters in the revolution.  And we will protect you until then.”

Then Heather, crazy fucking Heather, laid herself out on one of the picnic tables.

“Everyone who eats here must work here,” Heather said.

Oh god no, thought Raul. The last thing I need now is a sit down strike.

“They said they might come for the women,” Ramon said. “At night.”

Heather sat bolt upright.

“We protect you tonight. And we work with you tomorrow,” Ramon said.

Ramon is full of shit, Raul thought.  But he’s good at it.

Raul lifted each food duffle that the kitchen crew lowered from the trees and looked inside. Three days of food, he thought.

“Half rations tonight and from now on,” he said. We have plenty of water.  We can last a week.”

“Until the brothers and sisters in the revolution arrive,” Ramon said.

“Until the brothers and sister in the revolution arrive,” Raul said.

 

Artie and Heather didn’t stir or say one word.  Raul couldn’t believe it.  For the first time in two weeks nobody gave him any shit about what was beyond his control.

It rained.

The Sandinistas watered their horses in the stream before nightfall and then moved them to new grazing closer to the work-site.  They squatted behind trees.

No one ate much dinner.

Night fell.

No one slept.

A gunshot woke them from their restless sleep just before dawn, when the air was still blue and the dark trees could be seen folding out of the mist. A single shot, so quick it might have been dreamed, but wasn’t.

Then Adrian, the high school teacher from Central Falls, ran into the kitchen area, two white plastic buckets thudding and clattering together as he ran, out of breath, his face smudged and one side of his shirt and jeans thick with red mud.

“Water detail,” he said. “They’ve got the stream.”

“You hurt?” Raul said.

“Just muddy,” Adrian said. “I fell into the mud next to the stream when I heard the shot.”

“Get some… coffee,” Raul said, as he realized that there wasn’t any water so there wasn’t any coffee, and that they were in deep shit after all.

Suddenly there were many more shots: first one or two, and then many – people firing at one another back and forth, from a distance away.  The shots that were fired from the nearby trees, close, were answered by gun-fire from further away.

“The brothers and sisters in the revolution!” Ramon said. “Our companeros have arrived and will vanquish the dirty dog Contras! Viva Nicaragua! Venceremos!”  We will win!

Raul now understood that the mess they were in had just gotten worse.  They were sitting in the bull’s eye of a target.  The little Sandanista band they had been feeding stood among the norte americanos, shooting at the Contras in the woods.  Surrounding their Sandanistas was a ring of Contras, who fired at them and also away from them, at them and at the second band of Sandanistas who had just arrived and who surrounded the Contras.  The new band of Sandanistas, who Raul couldn’t see, were shooting at the Contras, but the bullets that missed were perfectly aimed, right at the little brigade from Pawtucket, Rhode Island.  Everything that could go wrong was going wrong, and all at the same time.

The Sandinistas aimed and fired at targets the norte americanos couldn’t see. The Sandanistas walked forward together, taking cover as they advanced.

The Contras shot back at them.

Gunfire popped and cracked from every direction.

Bullets hissed around them and thudded into the trunks of nearby trees.

‘Take cover,” Raul yelled, and thought, goddamn it, no one in this group knows jack shit about taking cover. We should have drilled like Heather and Artie said.

Then the Contra sniper across the stream started firing. Two of the Sandinistas turned and fired back.

Raul stood next to the big mango tree, just a few yards from the worksite.  Three of the norte americanos crouched behind palates of cement block that they were going to use to build walls.  Two people knelt behind palates of cement bags, which were covered by a blue tarp.  Three more were behind the picnic tables, which didn’t seem very smart, because there was plenty of air between the tops and the benches of those tables, until the norte americanos tipped the tables on one side and made a little improvised fort, a space protected by picnic tables and building material.

Gunshots rang out in bursts, ebbing and flowing.  Men shouted to and at one another, cursed and moaned. The shooters near the stream fired every so often from behind them. A bitter smell hung in the air, harsh, like almonds.

Then Ramon stumbled out of the woods.

He fell on the road just a few yards from Raul.

Heather, crazy fucking Heather, dashed out to him.  She threw him over one shoulder and carried him back to where the others were taking cover.  His right shoulder was dark and wet, and he sat up, leaning on a stack of cement blocks.

“Now I am ready to work,” Ramon said.  “I am reporting for duty. The others, not so much ready to work now.”

“What do you need us to do?”  Raul said.

“Go back to building when the shooting stops. Finish your clinic,” Ramon said. “Eventually, the brothers and sisters in the Revolution will wear down the resistance and liberate this zone.  For now, unless you can build a hospital in one hour, either I survive or I bleed to death. Welcome to Nicaragua.”

“I want a meeting,” Heather said. “I have an idea.”

Ten minutes later the norte americanos left their improvised fort and walked in a circle toward the gunfire.

Ramon lay on an improvised stretcher that Arnie and Janine made out of a hammock they cut down from a tree and the handles of two rakes. Ramon was propped up on a rolled sleeping bag and covered by a second sleeping bag that had been unrolled and unzipped.

Heather, Arnie, Adrian, and Janine each held one corner of the stretcher at shoulder height. The others walked in a circle around the stretcher so there was no way to shoot at Ramon without hitting one of the norte americanos.

They walked slowly on the road and talked in loud voices so the fighters in the woods could see them and hear them coming.

Raul led the little group as he always had, but he had no idea where he was going or what he, and they, were going to do if someone tried to stop them.  He also had no idea about what he would say or what they would do should they find their way through the little zone of territory now occupied by the Contras and should they reach the famous brothers and sisters in the Revolution.  But doing something was better than doing nothing, and way better than just sitting back to watch Ramon die. Heather was crazy, to be sure, but some days she was crazy like a fox.

The fighter behind them near the stream fired in bursts, but he, or they, shot high over the heads of the norte americanos.  They heard the whoosh of bullets and the strange whisper as those bullets tore through leaves and branches of the trees they walked under. Raul winced when he heard the first burst, figuring the shooter just missed them, and he steeled himself, expecting one or more of them to go down in a second round.  But when the second burst went high as well, Ramon relaxed a little.  Heather was right, damn her.  It was intimidation fire, not lethal fire.  All they want to do is scare us, to keep us pinned down.  They aren’t going to risk a goddamn international incident by shooting to kill or even to maim.

They walked half a mile.  The shooting from behind them stopped.  The sun was strong now and in their eyes. Then the shooting in front of them stopped.  They can all see us now, Raul thought.  We just can’t see them.  Raul was sweating a little, and he turned to make sure the litter carriers were holding up.  They were all sweating a little like Raul was, but they looked straight ahead.  They looked okay. How the hell am I going to know when we are safe? Raul thought.

There was a gunshot, and the dust kicked up about ten feet in front of Raul.  He stopped in his tracks, and the others stopped with him.

Miguel, the Contra wearing the yellow tee shirt from Port Washington, Oregon and beat up brown cowboy boots, stood behind a low tree branch forty feet in front of them, his rifle resting on the branch and pointed in their direction.

“No puedes pasar,” Miguel said. You may not pass.

“Miguel, siempre has sido un idiota,” Ramon said. “Comete mi polvo.”  Miquel you have always been a stupid asshole. Eat my dust.

“Let’s move,” Raul said. He stepped forward and the others walked with him. They came closer to one another, so they were no more than a forearm’s length apart, the outer circle just a step away from the litter and its bearers, the litter completely surrounded by norte americanos, who all had looks of grim determination on their faces. I fucking hope this works, Raul thought. We are sitting ducks.

“Let’s jog,” Raul said. They were just a few yards from Miguel.

The group began to run, slowly enough so that they stayed together in tight formation, but quickly enough that Ramon bounced up and down on the litter and their feet raised a little dust.

“Tus companieros estan tirados en la tierra. Quein es el idiota mas grande ahora?” Miquel said, as they were passing the tree where he was standing, not more than ten feet away. Your colleagues are all lying in the dust.  Who is the bigger asshole now?

“Cojete a tu madre, imbecil,” Ramon said. Fuck your mother, you idiot.

 A shot cracked from behind Raul.

Miguel fell backward. He collapsed and his gun rolled off his body into the dirt. Raul glanced behind him. Ramon was holding a handgun he had pulled out from under the sleeping bag that covered him.

The norte americanos ran faster.

The body of Miguel lay behind them. They ran a little faster yet. Ramon winced as his body bounced up and down, up and down, on the improvised litter. They had to be close to the brothers and sisters in the revolution, to safety. They just had to be.

Miguel rolled over as soon as the norte americanos ran past him.  He found his rifle in the tall grass and shouldered it. There was no clean shot. Miguel’s head was spinning and he could barely see. But he was through with all this US and Sandinista bullshit.

There was another shot. Then the gun fell from Miguel’s hands, and he died.

Someone grabbed Raul‘s left shoulder and tried to turn him around. His back spasmed, a terrible time to throw out your back. He kept running.

Then Raul fell in the road. Their little caravan stopped.

Ten men with guns came from behind the trees. They wore camouflage shirts and jeans.  Red and black insignia on their shirts. Red and black bandanas.

“Los idiotas dispararon a un voluntario estadounidense desarmado,” Ramon said, as the norte americanos set the litter down in the tall grass beside the road, in the shade of tall trees. The idiots shot an unarmed American volunteer. “La brigada de norte americanos esta aqui solo para construir una clinica y poder atender a los campesinos  pobres.”  The North American brigade is here only to build a clinic to serve our farmers and the poor.

“A todos ustedes,” Raul said. Fuck all of you.

Then he passed out.

–

I came back to Nicaragua in the spring of 2018 to clear my head, to sit on the beach and to hang out with Ramon.

Nicaragua is still the second poorest country in Central America – only Haiti is poorer– which means Nicaragua was a dirt-cheap place to go for a holiday. A decent room was twenty or thirty bucks a day.  Dinner in a restaurant was three or four bucks.  Drinks were a dollar.  So you could sit on the beach, sip a rum and coke, and watch the sun set for a dollar or two.

People were poor, but the country was developing.  The airport was filled with neon, stainless steel and glass.  There were cell phones, televisions, motorcycles and cars everywhere – but plenty of donkey carts as well. You could still hear cocks crowing before dawn. Scrawny red and orange chickens ran loose, and lots of people still kept pigs, even in the cities, their pens just off the kitchens, so they could be fed leftovers and other kitchen waste.  Donkeys brayed from the barrios at dusk. Babies cried.

The Sandinista came and went and had come back again.  Daniel Ortega, their leader, got the rules changed, was re-elected President in 2006, and was re-elected two times after that, though many of the original Sandinistas had already broken with him and accused him of abandoning the revolution in favor of personal power.  In the 2016 election, Rosario Murillo, Daniel’s long-term partner and now wife (they got married after twenty-five years together to appease the Church, with whom Daniel reconciled, once he banned abortion) got elected vice-president with him and was thought to be the actual ruler the country.  She liked fuchsia. So, many government buildings, historic houses, and even baseball stadiums are a funny shade of red pink, which is supposed to bring love and harmony to the nation, even as the regime tramples on human rights.

People said that Daniel and his family owned or controlled all the newspapers and televisions stations, the oil company, most of the import and export businesses, and the new solar farms and windmills springing up all over the country.  In 2014, Daniel got the constitution changed to remove term limits of his presidency – he can stay president as long as he keeps being re-elected, which is likely to be the rest of his natural life, but that may not be too long – he’s 79 (what a co-incidence!) and is reputed to be fairly ill.  In 2024 the constitution was changed so that Ortega and his wife became “co-presidents” and so one automatically succeeds the other on the death of the first. In the 2016, 2021, and 2025 elections, he, and Nicaragua, refused to admit international observers to assure the fairness and impartiality of Nicaraguan elections, not a good predictor of a healthy democracy. (Note to self: when was the last time the US admitted international observers to watch over one of our elections?) Somehow Ortega keeps getting re-elected with 75 percent of the vote.

Ramon and I spent almost a month together in the fall of 1984, in the hospital. We got stuck in the hospital in Matagalpa first, which felt more like a train station than a hospital with big airy wards with twenty or thirty beds and all sorts of people – nurses and the very occasional doctors, families with kids, but also people selling newspapers, oranges, mangos, cashews, pecans – walking in and out.  Not a very sterile looking place, but they gave Ramon enough blood and me enough morphine to keep both of us from dying acutely, and as a result we survived a very bumpy ambulance ride out of the mountains and around the lake to the military hospital in Managua.  And then we had a month to talk.

For Ramon, the Revolution was pretty simple.  Everyone learns to read and gets free education through college.  Everyone gets free health care, with health clinics in every neighborhood.  The Church and other people with money don’t get to suck down all the county’s resources, or breathe all the country’s air, or control the political process.  Democracy matters, so no one gets locked up for saying what they think, and no one gets fired for speaking the truth.  It sucks that I have to fight for those rights, and that I am liable to die for them, Ramon said.  I like life.  I’m not a politician.  I’d rather be drinking a beer or be with a woman than be playing soldier boy or cops and robbers. But until everyone is ready to stand up, a little bit, for what is ours together, then no one will be able to have anything for themselves or a decent life, and no one will be able to sleep safely in their own beds.

I thought about our talks in the hospital while I was sitting there on the beach, waiting for Ramon.  The Nicaragua I was seeing and hearing about was different from what it was in 1978, when the Revolution started, but it wasn’t at all like the Nicaragua Ramon imagined.  Now, everyone is supposedly guaranteed a free education and everyone supposedly has access to free health care, but lots of poor families still pull their kids out of school before they have learned to read. While there are little clinics in most towns and barrios, those clinics don’t have enough doctors and nurses, so people wait there for hours, sitting on white plastic chairs or wooden benches, fanning themselves in the hot afternoons.

There were now more than one hundred Pali stores, which are Wal-Marts. renamed for the new socialist reality. Young Canadians and Americans come for the inexpensive life (they were able to live well on $20 a day) and because, of all things, Nicaragua has become a place where it was easy for foreigners to buy and own property, and Nicaragua was said to have an excellent business climate, so many young North Americans not only came to hang out and live on the cheap, but also to start businesses. Craft breweries. Yoga studios. Surf shops.  Be influencers.  Make TikTok videos.  I kid you not.  San Juan del Sur, where I was waiting for Ramon, felt more like Brooklyn or Austin than it did like any developing nation I’d ever been in. A brave new world of baristas and surfers. So much for Yankee Imperialism, or the old Sandinista critique thereof.  Looked like Daniel would now take as much capitalism as he could get. As long as he got his cut and got to be in charge of it and everything else, more or less.

The cabbie who drove me from the airport told me about all the corruption in the government.  He told me about how Daniel’s family owned the grove of windmills we passed along the highway between Masaya and Rivas, and how they owned all the newspapers and TV stations. Even so, he was talking as a proud member of a free opposition, not a resistance fighter.  He talked with pride about how there was no gun violence in Nicaragua yet, as compared to the US, because Nicaragua had sensible gun control, in which no one can own more than 5 guns, everyone with a gun has to have a permit, and how in order to get a permit you had to have a yearly examination by a doctor and a psychiatrist. He told me that Daniel still had the support of the campesinos, the poor farmers, who would mobilize in Daniel’s support. So while that cabbie wasn’t too happy about Daniel, he also said he could live with Daniel if he had to, because there wasn’t a reasonable alternative — all the opposition parties ever did was fight amongst themselves, which sounded too much like another country I know well, a country to Nicaragua’s north.

I showed up in San Juan Del Sur on a Monday, as the town was recovering from Sunday Funday, one of its locally famous raucous weekends, where young Americans, Canadians, and Europeans go from hotel swimming pool to hotel swimming pool, drink themselves stupider, and have sex in the water or out on the beach.

The Euro trash was slowly sobering up. Most of the backpackers were clearing out, headed to Grenada or Peru, so the beach was pretty deserted.

Ramon was supposed to show the following day.  He was up North, on the coast near Leon. There was a story, something about an agricultural commune that had imploded, leaving a couple of hundred hectares of prime undeveloped beach land up for grabs. Ramon talked Daniel and the Free and Independent (if you don’t count Madura’s Venezuelan oil and Russian jets) Socialist Nation of Nicaragua into giving him a concession to honor his contribution to the Revolution. There was always a story, with Ramon. Every time he showed up in Miami, looking to disappear for a couple of months until things back home in Managua settled down, there was a story.  In every story, only Ramon was true to the Revolution.  Everyone else was a Yankee running dog. But I had to hand it to the guy.  He had survived, and was looking pretty tanned and relaxed when he pulled into town three days later, two days after he was supposed to show.

I had developed a little friendship with a Canadian Yoga teacher/barista named Lisa while I waited, and we were drinking rum and cokes and the cocktail of the day in the little second story balcony bar on Rivas Street, just a block away from the playa, where you can drink, smell the ocean, watch the action on the street – watch the drunk or stoned backpackers stumble about and watch bare-chested young Nica guys with backwards baseball caps and cigarette butts hanging off their bottom lips rumble around on crotch-rockets, popping wheelies as they looked for backpacker action. Ramon texts.  I text back and pretty soon he’s in the bar with us, his long black hair now silver, thinner up front than it used to be but still pulled back into a pony tail. Now he was one ear pierced and wears a diamond stud.  Some things change.  Most other things stay the same.

This was in April of 2018, just three days before Nicaragua blew up again, and thousands of students in Masada, Leon and Managua took to the streets, protesting a change in social security imposed by Daniel. Before that protest turned into a general revolt against Daniel and the Sandinistas, who had become the oppressors, not the liberators.  Tens of thousands of students ended up in the streets, carrying forward the spirit of the Sandinista Revolution itself, but were shot down by Daniel’s police.  More than 300 were killed, and thousands fled the country, as Daniel became the man he once claimed to hate.

But that day I had no sense of what was coming.

That day, Ramon is my new old best friend.  He’s really glad to see me.  He talks about Trump and about how he hopes that Trump’s wall will keep the US north of the border, where we can only hurt ourselves.  He tells us about his kids.  There are five, and he’s a grandfather 3 times over.  I know, but don’t say anything about the four mothers who raised those kids more or less on their own.  He checks in with me.  He knows about my trading up, about my move to New York, what we are building off Southern Boulevard and in Castle Hill.  He tells me he hears from my friends in City Hall from time to time, from economic development people who meet up at international conferences and always have a hustle going, their ideas more hallucinations that dreams, but ideas with an upside.  He doesn’t know yet that I got trapped in the crossfire between the Mayor and the Governor, but I’ll save that for another day.  My kids are also grown and calmer than I was, and you can see he’s impressed by the World Bank stuff I tell him about, not that I had much to do with my son, Danny’s, success.

“Now I’m building windmills and solar farms,” Ramon says. “We’ll make Nicaragua the first place in the world that is entirely free of fossil fuels, and make electricity free, at least for working people and the campesinos, like we made health care free and brought education to all Nicaraguans.”

“Tell me more about that,” Lisa says.

“We have a plan to put solar collectors and solar hot water on the roof of every house in Nicaragua.  And we are working with a certain technology company to our north to place whole house batteries in every choza in the country.  Everyone already has a television.  Now everyone will watch for free.”

“Wait, the batteries are expensive, aren’t they?” Lisa says. She puts her hand up, as if she were a policeman stopping traffic, so she can get a word in edgewise.  Only a part of my brain notices that when she puts her hand down again, she puts right next to the back of Ramon’s hand, as if nudging him to get his attention.

“We have a financing deal,” Ramon said, “so the cost is split between the campasino and the government, and spread out over 36 years. Over 36 years, it will cost each person 1500 pesos, $50 dollars a year.  You have a cell phone? Text me the number and your email address.  I’ll send you the full prospectus.  The deal is done.  The billboards go up next week.”

Lisa pulls out her phone as Ramon gives her his number.

“So you and Daniel are okay?” I say.

“Better than it was,” Ramon says. “Mutual respect.  We don’t see eye to eye on everything.  But he understands who I am, and gives me the space in which to operate.  Everyone laid down their arms twenty years ago.”  I listen, remembering that this was the man who once took a band of guerillas into the hills to fight against the Sandinistas once they started to become corrupt, and who helped engineer Daniel’s first political defeat, in 1990.

“Remember we go back, Daniel and I, to childhood.  Roots run deep, in my country.”

“We know each other a long time, Ramon.  Watch your back,” I say, and leave it at that.  I feel concern and even a little love for this man.

I think I know what he’s up against, and I don’t want to see him suckered and then drawn-and-quartered.  Too many comrades have fallen that way, over the years.  More that way than by bullets or roadside bombs.  Sweet-talked, and then sucker-punched by a companero, all under the banner of solidarity.

But Ramon is a hustler like me and knows the risks.  We live for those risks and the little high you get when you have to disappear suddenly in the middle of the night, escaping yet again by the skin of your teeth

Ramon turns his attention to his cell, perhaps to send Lisa what he promised to send.

I am feeling the impact of my third Tona, and excuse myself for a moment.

When I return, Ramon and Lisa are gone.

___

 

 

 

 

 

 All of Michael Fine’s stories and books are available on MichaelFineMD.com or by clicking here.