The jaguar's smile: a Nicaraguan journey.

• Author: Lane, Charles

The Jaguar's Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey

Aquick trip into the heart of revolutionaryNicaragua has become something of a rite of passage for the literate left these days. For their counterparts on the right, it's a few days in a contra rebel base. I took one of these "If it's Tuesday, this must be Matagalpa' tours of Nicaragua back in 1985. After eight days I came home with some dandy souvenirs and a rough sense that, on the spectrum of Marxist tyrannies stretching from Pol Pot's Cambodia to Tito's Yugoslavia, Nicaragua fits somewhere in the middle, on the mild side of Cuba. But my strongest impression was that such a short, casual visit, much of which was unavoidably spent in the company of eager Sandinista flacks, contained enough visual and anecdotal material to support any case I might have wanted to make about the place.

This helps explain how both supporters andcritics of the Reagan administration's Nicaraguan policy can offer such unlikely and mutually exclusive visions of that country and its future. Contra fans continue to nurse the "Founding Fathers' illusion, despite well-documented reports of contra atrocities and a distinct lack of evidence that their leaders have in mind anything Americans would recognize as democracy. Sandinista fans pretend that the United States has no legitimate strategic interest in Nicaragua or anywhere else in Central America, and that our meddling is the source of all that country's economic woes, pro-Soviet leanings, and political oppression. If we would just quit fighting it, the revolution would resume the business of securing freedom, independence, and social welfare for the Nicaraguan people.

Turtle meat heroes

The acclaimed author of Midnight's Childrenand two other novels, Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay and now lives in London. His new political travelogue* is based on the usual pilgrimage: jet to Managua (via Havana), "briefings' with the Ministry of Culture, rum-and-Coke by the pool at the Intercontinental Hotel, Jeep rides through the land-reformed countryside. In London, Rushdie belonged to a "Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign' out of a "deeper affinity with that small country in a continent [sic] (Central America) upon which I had never set foot.' A child of India's revolt against the British raj, he felt naturally sympathetic with the Nicaraguans. He and they share "some awareness . . . of how it felt to be there on the bottom looking up at the descending heel.'

* The Jaguar's Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey. Salman Rushdie.Viking, $12.95.

This was tempered by just enough doubt tomake the trip necessary: "I was familiar with the tendency of revolutions to go wrong . . . I knew about starting with idealism and romance and ending up with betrayed expectations.' But Rushdie needn't have worried. After three weeks in the country in July, 1986, he was content. "For the first time in my life. . . . I had come across a government I could support, not faute de mieux, but because I wanted its efforts (at survival, at building the nation, and at transforming it) to succeed.' The Sandinistas, he writes, are "men of integrity and...