NICARAGUA 1984
Breakfast woodsmoke on the breeze --
On the cliff the U.S. Embassy
Frowns out over Managua like Dracula's tower.
The kid who guards Fonseca's tomb
Cradles a beat-up submachine gun --
At age fifteen he's a veteran of four years of war
Proud to pay his dues
He knows who turns the screws
Baby face and old man's eyes
Blue lagoon and flowering trees --
Bullet-packed masaya streets
Full of the ghosts of the heroes of Monimbo
Women of the town laundry
Work and gossip and laugh at me --
They don't believe I'll ever send them the pictures I took.
For every scar on a wall
There's a hole in someone's heart
Where a loved one's memory lives
In the flash of this moment
You're the best of what we are --
Don't let them stop you now
Nicaragua
Sandino in his tom mix hat
Gazes from billboards and coins
"Sandino vive en la lucha por la paz"
Sandino of the shining dream
Who stood up to the U.S. marines --
Now Washington panics at U2 shots of "Cuban-style" latrines
They peek from planes, eavesdrop from ships
Voyeurs licking moistened lips, ‘cause...
In the flash of this moment
You're the best of what we are --
Don't let them stop you now
Nicaragua
Known comments by Bruce Cockburn about this song, by date:
May 1984
"The day we go up to the Honduran border is the day they commemorateSandino's death. Racing through Managua streets in Sandino Day dawn.Fireworks at 5 a.m. Hope and hard work. Reconstruction. New housesmushroon slowly out of blasted ground. Fonseca's tomb is guarded by akid in sneakers with a Cheka machine-gun. Fields of fresh rice. Girldriving donkey cart. Small boy on horseback driving a cow across thehighway. Siren river, onion fields, tobacco coops. Flowering leaflessfruit tress. We're following the army to the Honduran border. Crowdedancient buses. A car with Salvadoran plates. Tobacco fields are raided,therfore constantly guarded. Ironically, Nicaragua reminds me of Israel in a certain sense -being surrounded by enemies. Everything is militarized and everyone isaware of the need for self defense. We pass an army barracks that lookslike a farm. A shot down Somoza aircraft is planted on a hilltop flyingthe FSLN banner on its tail. Banner in a rural village says, 'asNicaragua has children who love her she will always be free.' Womencarry firewood on shoulders up the hill. Palms and pines on denudedhills. Battered buses with fantastic paint jobs, jammed with people.People cling to the roof racks, hang from the doors and the windowshoping they won't have to get off and push. Hot roads, diesel clouds - the whole third world perfumedwith diesel. A fat man sleeps in the back of a pick-up, feet danglingover the bumper. Rugged budhy hills full of the smell of coffee.Occaisional pause for the crossing of beautiful milky white half-Brahmacattle. Around the bend and there it is - a chain across the road, acustom house and a garrison of half a dozen militia. Thirty metres awaya few Hondurans watch with suspicion and strut around like John Wayne.Their look outs hiding on the hill top watch us through field glasseswhile I watch them with mine. The main spokesman for the Nicaraguan garrison at theborder is a short plump pleasant guy with a bad leg. I ask him, 'whathappens when you have to fight?' For he walked with a severe limp andhad trouble getting around. He says, 'Sandinistas don't run anyway.' Warm night blanket floats down. Dim silhouette of trees infriendly dark. Headlights pick smashed sack of corn strewn overasphalt. A single tarantula stands guard. Rodrigo, the driver, keepschickens, so we jump out and spend ten minutes filling the trunk withdusty kernels. Later we have car trouble - limp into military truckdepot. Barbed wire gates glint in the moonlight. A hundred tiredsoldiers stretched out on the grass. Tired from a month on the cottonfields. We sing. They sing. Men and women, all young. Guitars and guns.Ballistic music blows open every heart. Passion bursts like rockets.Cotton bales bursting at the seams. Dignity and poems bursting out ofparched poverty trance - broken forever. Brilliant green birds over the lava hole. Volcanoes standaround like the gods of old, pumping incense of the earth into thetropical sky. Down on the beach, horses canter through the surf as warmas bath water. Emerald birds against flaming hills. Dry thunder and hot sky. Dust hangs in the air behing thefeet of a passer by. Scent of lilac in the dense night. Laughter from apassing jeep. I lean back against the cool wall. Too much heat. Thisnorthern body can't sleep. Returning to Toronto from Nicaragua is likecoming from colour to black and white."
- from "The Mark of the Beast: A Notebook on Central America" by Bruce Cockburn, Gaumut Six, May 1984. Submitted by Nigel Parry.
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