
          Consorting with the Enemy
          By Witt, EliseElise Witt
          Vol. 7, No. 2, 1985, pp. 15-21
          
           February 3. Miami, the cultural
intermediary. Tropical vegetation, flowering bushes in
February. Sultry air and a heavy, full moon. Spanish signs on Cuban
stores, Spanish being spoken. We share a Cuban seafood meal by the
Miami River.
          In the bilingual airport we try out the Spanish we have studied the
last few months. The Aeronica gate and our flight are filled mostly
with Nicaraguans. Three North Americans are aboard to meet a cotton
brigade. There are two students from Boston and California and an
older Mexican American woman who tells us she grew up picking
cotton. "Going to Nicaragua to help with their harvest is the least I
can do to lend support," she says.
          After two hours of flight, someone spots land. At the moment of
arrival in Managua a huge space within me lights up.
           February 4. We get to know our hosts at the
Managua Center for Popular Culture (CPC). The country wide CPC's are
community arts centers which will serve as our sponsors in each town
we visit on our sixteen-day tour. We meet with Arelhy Suarez, head of
International Cultural Exchange, and Cleopatra and Janet, staff
members at the CPC National Office.
          With Cleopatra, we eat our first Nicaraguan lunch. Tortillas,
salad, including pickled cucumbers, carrots and squash, plantains,
beans with cream--my two favorites--and a huge pile of queso
fresco--fresh, white cheese, similar to that my father makes out of
goat's milk in North Carolina.
          After lunch, we decide on a walking tour of Managua. Straight out
from the Hotel Intercontinental--the center for visiting foreign
"dignitaries"--we wander through blocks of empty grass and concrete,
vestiges of the 1972 earthquake and Somoza's bombs. Skeletons of
buildings are everywhere. Populated neighborhoods ring a vast, empty,
city center. Somoza pocketed most of the world-donated relief funds
after the earthquake.
          The Palacio Nacional is now the Palacio de La Revolucion. At the
Plaza Carlos Fonseca Amador the stone reads, "His body is dead, but
his spirit lives on in every Nicarguan." Fonseca, a hero of the
revolution, founded the Sandinsta party.
          The city of Managua is quiet on this first day of our visit. People
have gone to the countryside to pick coffee. The Ministry of Culture
is in the mountains, lending a hand.
          We walk to the Plaza Park, an outdoor amphitheater. On Election
Day, November 2, 1984, all of Managua gathered here for a fiesta. The
great cathedral in the middle of Managua was also ruined by the tremor
of the earthquake, but the frame still stands and we climb to look
over the sanctuary and catch another view of the city.
          From the cathedral we ride the bus. It is as crowded as everyone
told us buses would be. We lose Mary, Rick and Steve when we get
off. They have to ride a stop further before they can make their way
to the back door and step out.

          Walls are covered with folk art and graffiti. And there are the
billboards:  "In Construction Is the Solution." "In
Five Years We Have Built 1500 New Schools. This Is What We Are
Defending." "After the First Step We Will Never Stop Walking."
           February 5.  We leave Managua for the
countryside in a minibus driven by the CPC's Don Felix. In sight of a
large lake and volcanos, one still smoking, we head northwest toward
Leon. Beside the road, trees hang with coconuts, mangos,
grapefruit.
          We are met in the university town of Leon by Carlos Sanchez, the
city's CPC director. The Leon CPC is the former home of a rich
somocista who has fled the country. A huge garden is surrounded by
terraces. Much of the house is roofless and unused but the core of the
CPC is comfortable and well kept. In the library I notice technical
books for workers and a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Spanish. Children
come every afternoon for folk dancing lessons. Many people use the
center for rehearsing, playing music, painting, and as a gathering
place.
          CPC worker Enrique Sandoval takes my guitar and shows me a new
song: "La Consigna," which tells about the struggles the Nicaraguans
have gone through before and since the triumph in 1979. It's a
singable song that everybody in the country seems to know.
          Enrique says he has a guitar but no strings. I had heard that there
was a shortage of strings-indeed of almost any kind of musical
supplies. Before leaving Atlanta I had gotten a donation from GHS
Guitar String Company in Michigan, and now Enrique has a new
set. Together, we play and sing "Guantanamera" by the Cuban, Jose
Marti, and "Flor de Pino," a Nicaraguan song about Sandino.
          Late in the afternoon we walk over to a Leon bank where the workers
are sitting in class listening to a professor of literature from the
University. At first I don't understand a word. Slowly, the Spanish
starts making sense. The professor is telling of Ruben Dario, the poet
laureate of Nicaragua who gave a new identity to Nicaraguan literature
and thought. "Hispanic culture must not be swallowed up by English
culture. The two must live side by side in the Americas."
          The bank employees have been at work all day and, afterwards, like
Nicaraguans throughout the country, they've sat through a
class. Nonetheless, they receive us enthusiastically.
          We start with "Yo Solo Quiero" which is upbeat and carries a
message of international solidarity.
          At last we are making music and our sense of purpose and belonging
seem clearer. This is our first concert in Nicaragua. The introduction
of the songs, in Spanish, begins to flow. The audience, at first
quiet, becomes warm and responsive.
          The program is balanced between our North American
songs--particularly lively jazz tunes--and our international repertoire:
"Bella Ciao," a revolutionary Italian song which is understandable in
Spanish, and "Paidu Vyidu," a Russian acapella love ballad. We end
with "Flor de Pino" which we don't know well yet, but which we know
means much to our audience.
          The best part of the concert comes afterward. People step up to
talk, at first shyly, hesitantly, then more enthusias-

tically. A
half-dozen conversations jumble together. A group of five bank workers
take up where Enrique had left off in leaching me "La Consigna."
          Afterwards, we walk out of town to the University where we share
the women's dorm with students who are there. They rise at four in the
morning to pick cotton until noon, then return for school work all
afternoon.
           February 6.  George King has the video
equipment out today and is shooting a walking tour of Leon led by
Enrique. Since George asks him to repeat explanations and descriptions
several times, I'm really understanding most of what Enrique is saying
about Leon's history and its importance during the revolution as the
center of the student movement. He shows us the Cathedral, the Virgin
of Guadalupe, the prison of the Somoza guards.
          We walk in the cells where barbed wire hangs in vines through the
open roof. Here, prisoners were packed a hundred to a cell. Tomas
Borge, now one of the leaders of the government, was held in such a
cell for six and a half years.
          That afternoon, aboard a truck used for hauling crops, Small Family
Orchestra and a group of young folk dancers ride to where the students
are picking cotton. Along the way we see parakeets and small, bright
yellow birds called gorriones sitting in orange, flowering
trees. "Zopilotes" (turkey buzzards) float over us for several
minutes, following the truck. We pass chacara seca (dry banana), a
small group of houses that belonged to a somocista, but is now a state
farm.
          Oscar, the leader of the student volunteers, asks me if I know "El
Arado" ("The Plow") by Victor Jara. We begin to sing it together on
the bumpy, dirt road to the cotton plantation at Miramar.
          At Miramar young students who have come from the fields sit around
us as we rehearse. Five lie in a hammock--which later breaks with
their weight. Others stretch out on the ground. They clap and sing
along.
          We try out "El Arado," then "Quincho Barrilete," a song about a
ten-year-old boy, killed in the revolution. Sitting in front of me is
a boy who knows all the words.
          At the evening concert, we share the stage with the wide-skirted
folk dance group who came with us from Leon. We sing a Carter Family
song and "Save the Bones for Henry Jones," the sound echoing over the
audience and against a volcano up into the starry sky.
           February 7 . Before we leave the dorm this
morning, Maribel, one of the students gives me a red and black
Sandinista scarf which she sewed herself, then ironed carefully. I
trade her a Photosouth baseball cap from Atlanta.
          We drive from Leon to Granada.
          At an evening concert at Estado Mayor we are proceeded by a solo
singer who sings in a rich full voice the new songs of Nicaragua. Two
folk dancers and a comedian, Jose Senteno, follow. Then we sing. At
the end we are given a copy of The Living Thoughts of
Sandino and a kiss from the companero who presents it to
us. Before the bus takes us home we sit around and share American
songs--North, South and Central.
           February 8.  We practice an Appalachian
spiritual, "Bright Morning Star." An Indian word in the Nahualt
language calls the morning star Nixtayolero, after the corn (nixtayol)
tortillas are made from. So we have translated "Bright Morning Star"
into Spanish. The harmonies fill up the huge room, the high ceilings,
the balcony of the Granada CPC-a former social club for the rich.
          Walking down the street in Granada, we hear that a young doctor
from that city at work in the north of the country has been killed by
contras only hours before. Flags in the city go to half mast.
          In the afternoon we ride by open jeep to Jinotepe, to celebrate the
return of brigades of coffee and cotton pickers. Nearly four thousand
student-aged brigadistas, just arrived, are gathered on the town
square. Each brigade has its own name and group spirit and there are
prizes for the best pickers. There is a parade and fireworks, and
children everywhere.
          Knapsacks are piled on the sidewalks and coffee beans are being
tossed into the air. A truck passes by decorated 

with stalks of
cotton. Between speeches by various brigidistas, we are introduced,
the norteamericanos. After we sing and play there are more
speeches. We sit and talk with a group of children. These ten and
eleven year olds tell us about studying Spanish, English, history,
natural science, mathematics, music and drawing in their school. They
all have on red and black scarves. One of them, Karen, gives me the
button that she earned during the Literacy Campaign. I give her a
figurine of a horse that I have from Germany in my guitar case.
          On the way back to Granada we stop at a fiesta where a band from
the Atlantic Coast, Dimencion Costena is playing. An eight man group,
they play music from the black-Creole, Atlantic Coast culture of
Nicaragua--a mix of reggae and calypso. This is a band that we hope to
bring to the US as the other half of our cultural exchange.
           February 9.  As we drive to the mountain
town of Boaco, we are joined by our new guide, Cruz, from Rivas in the
south of Nicaragua. Even in the mountains, we are traveling through
palm trees and tropical vegetation.
          The microbus is having problems carrying a fifty-five gallon drum
of gas, five musicians with instruments, a video producer with three
packs of gear and from three to fifteen Nicaraguans. On several of the
hills, we get out and push.
          our evening performance is at the movie theater of Boaco, where
we've replaced the evening's feature film. It's the first full length
concert we've done since the one for the bank workers. We include many
Spanish songs as well as our new Southern songs. The faces in the
audience give back a lot and many mouths are singing the Spanish
words. At the end, after "Flor de Pino," we invite the audience to
come and talk, ask questions, offer criticism. We are quickly
surrounded.
          A man with a sleeping daughter draped across his shoulder asks many
questions. He is a schoolteacher who, with his students, is collecting
regional history and folklore.
          "What do the people in the United States think of Nicaragua?," he
asks. "What news do they receive?" "Upon your return, you must speak
at every concert you play, with every person you talk with, about what
we are trying to do here. We want peace and the freedom to develop our
lives and our own history. We feel a kinship with the people of the US
and want to maintain bonds of friendship, not be separated by
misunderstanding."
           February 10.  Norman, a twenty-three year
old architecture student who speaks beautiful English that he learned
in Nicaraguan schools tells me, "Someday I would like to travel to
visit the United States and many other countries. But who knows when
that will be possible. Who knows if that will ever be possible."
          Norman is in the middle of his university studies. But he has to
wait a year, two years. For now, he must pick cotton and coffee and go
to the mountains to protect schools, hospitals and towns from contra
attacks. "Please tell your people, " he says, "that we want to
continue our development as a young country."
          By the time we left Nicaragua, it felt like everyone we met had
lost a relative or a best friend, either during the revolution or
fighting the contras.
          "At least one student from every classroom has fallen," says
Norman. "When you hear that the three most promising students in your
class have been killed, what else can you do but step forward and take
their place? When a child sees his parents killed by the contras, what
else can he do but join the fight himself, even though he is 'too
young.' They put these children in service as cooks or other
non-combatant duties, but they usually wind up in combat by
choice."
           February 11.  We have breakfast with
Eunice, Nelly, Roberto and the other CPC workers who have been
traveling with us. My sister Mary is giving Mateo a crash course in
reading music. Conversations buzz around the table.
          Abel, the regional director of the CPC's in the mountains, thanks
us for our visit with a brief speech and presents each of us with a
copy of a book by Ahmed Campos, a young poet, a friend who was killed
in the early 1980s by the contras. With a heartfelt speech, I thank
them for the three days that we have shared.
          A long bus drive takes us to Matagalpa, into the northern
coffee-growing mountains of Nicaragua, near the combat zone.
          At the Matagalpa CPC we meet Jose Manuel Chamorro Rios. Forty-eight
years old, Chamorro has six children. In our presence, he rarely
speaks without guitar accompaniment. It seems there is no music he
cannot play. He begins with a beautiful Nicaraguan folk melody, then
blithely changes to an intricate "As Time Goes By," followed by a
B.

B. King tune, then punctuates his last sentence with a Flamenco hot
lick. Students are coming in and out, asking advice, playing duets
with Chamorro.
          Although he is one of the best players I've met anywhere, he is
playing a beat-up guitar. Many of his students come in with
instruments missing strings, machine heads, screws and other parts. We
promise to send parts and art supplies to the CPC's we visit.
          We sleep at the National Training School for Theater
Instructors. There were supposed to be twenty-three people in this,
the first, class, but only twelve are here now. The others are away in
the military.
           February 12.  In the evening we play a
concert at a small art gallery where there is a show of Nicaraguan
paintings. People wander in from the streets, look at the paintings
and hear some of our quieter songs.
          We return to the theater school and stay up talking with the
students. "Every night I dream of a white devil who flies over and
swoops down attacking me," begins Oscar, who is studying to be a
theater instructor. "I have a lot of trouble sleeping. I was on the
front for a year. It has made me very nervous. For that year I could
not eat hot food because that would have required a fire. We lived on
canned milk and had to be on our guard every minute. You would enter a
home or school that had been attacked by the contras . . . young
children killed and mutilated. You were there, but you really didn't
see, you couldn't bear it."
          We trade songs with the students. Beth and I sing Joyce
Brookshire's "Whatever Became of Me?: Ballad of Cabbage town," and Tim
Krekel's Kentucky love song "In My Heart." A Bolivian student sings a
ballad from his country, then one of the wilder students cranks up the
favorite "All the Nations Like Bananas." Soon, we're all singing and
dancing.
           February 13.  We spend the day at the farm
of the theater collective, Nixtayolero, outside Matagalpa. Alan Bolt,
the director of Nixtayolero, is also the director of the Nicaraguan
national theater. "People come to this farm," he says, "from all over
the country to participate in theater workshops. We make plays with
them which deal with community problems. And while they are here, they
learn to eat vegetables."

          The rice, beans and corn which make up much of the Nicaraguan diet
are full of protein but lack necessary vitamins and minerals. Bolt's
collective uses theater to teach nutrition. 
Nixtayolero's farm,
besides growing grapefruit, oranges, bananas and coffee, has
introduced many new vegetables into the familiar agriculture.
          That night we play a concert in town on the recreation
square. People are lined up on the edges at first, but as we play,
they move in closer. Afterwards I sit and talk with three girls named
Maria. They sing a song they've learned in school. It's one I learned
in German as a child, "Ach du lieber Augustin." My friends are your
friends. Cuando somos juntas me sientofeliz.
          February 14.  The Matagalpa CPC is
organizing the festivities for the town's 123rd birthday party. This
evening there is to be a street dance. Claudia and Cruz have spent the
afternoon teaching us several Nicaraguan folk dance steps and showing
us how to salsa.
          At the dance two bands play on opposite ends of the main street. We
wander between the bands and the waves of dancers.
          I'm dancing with Chamorro's son Ernesto and Orfilia, one of the
workers from the Managua CPC who has come up to pick coffee. As we
approach, each band seems to be playing "Acarizieme," a Latin pop song
that we have heard often on the radio.
          As a slight drizzle falls we move to sit on the steps under the
roof of a little house that looks out onto the festival. The door is
wide open and we can see several generations of a family inside. They
invite us in for coffee and bring out their photos. Their grandmother
has 120 grandchildren.
           February 15.  We go to San Ramon to pick
coffee. As we arrive, food is being prepared to take to the
pickers. We ride in a truck piled high with tortillas, enormous pots
of beans, coffee and milk.
          The coffee bushes grow on steep slopes and I feel I could fall
straight down. I wear the basket tied around my waist and peel the
beans off the branches. I prop my feet against the trunk of the tree
and lean against the slope of the mountain. Usually only the red beans
are picked, which means going through the trees on several different
days.
          "Today we've started picking every bean-from the greenest to the
most rotten," explains Marcia, a volunteer worker from Canada. "A
coffee picker was killed by contras five kilometers 
away last week,"
she says, "and then, day before yesterday, a Honduran cigarette
package was found just two kilometers away. So we're getting
everything we can."
          Three days later we read in the newspaper that workers and children
had been killed three kilometers from that farm. It was now a war
zone.
           February 16.  We return to Managua,
Nicaragua's city, and feel the trip almost over.
          That evening Beth and I attend the Misa Campesina at the church of
Santa Maria de los Angeles. The church was destroyed in the earthquake
and rebuilt by the community. Every panel of its octagonal shape is
painted with a mural expressive of Nicaragua's history. The mural in
the front arches up over the altar set up in the middle of the
church. The people sit all the way around.
          The priest wears a black cassock with a brightly colored, woven,
Latin American band around his neck. He directs a small group of
musicians near the altar and leads the singing, moving easily around
the church. Over six hundred people are here tonight.
          The Misa Campesina was written by Carlos Mejia Godoy. It contains
some of Godoy's own songs as well as traditional Nicaraguan
melodies. The mass is interspersed with speaking and celebrants'
rising to talk.
          This evening the mass is also a funeral service for a young boy
killed by the contras only two days earlier. The mother of the boy
gets up to speak. In tears her words flow forth. Someone plays a tape
of the son before he went to combat. He speaks of his dedication to
the church, to the 

cause of Nicaragua, to the people of his family and
his neighborhood.
          Beth and I are asked to sing. We choose John McCutcheon's "No Mas,
No More," a song that insists that the people of the world can no
longer be separated by our governments' economic and political
interests. As I sing, I look around the church and see faces from
Scandinavia, Europe, from the Orient, from Africa and all the
Americas.
          It is our last night in Nicaragua.
          
            "I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, find
that the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua
constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national
security and foreign policy of the United States and hereby declare a
national emergency to deal with that threat."-From the executive order
of May 1, 1985. 
            Editor's note:
            The Reagan Administration's Mayday embargo on US-Nicaraguan trade
was accompanied by an even more belligerent action: an ordered end to
direct travel between the two nations.
            By closing US ports and airfields to Nicaraguan ships and planes,
the Administration diminishes the opportunities and makes the means
more difficult for US citizens and Nicaraguans to visit each
other. Reagan's executive order seeks to control and shape public
perceptions, knowledge and discussion about Nicaraguan life and the
Sandinista government. Beyond this, the Administration's unilateral
actions take us a step backward from any ideal of unrestricted travel
across international borders. In this instance, Nicaragua becomes the
more open, welcoming society.
            Prior to Reagan's measures of May 1, many North Americans of
varying political persuasions had traveled to Nicaragua and returned
with views and interpretations of everyday life and national spirit in
that country which consistently contradicted official US
pronouncements. Among the passengers aboard an Aeronica Airlines
flight from Miami to Managua one day in February were the five members
of an Atlanta musical troupe--Elise Witt and the Small Family
Orchestra, on their way for two weeks of performances throughout
Nicaragua. Accompanying the group, camera-ready, was independent video
producer George King. Excerpts from Elise Witt's journal of the trip
(printed below) suggest the sort of personal cultural exchange that
the embargo has now taken away--as have other, related, actions such as
the recent denial of a US entry visa to Nicaragua's Minister of
Culture, the poet Ernesto Cardenal.--AT
          
        