desde nicaragua

sounds on a breezy managua night

We were running late and running out of the house, in typical Nicaragua fashion. I'm walking out of the gate, following Menchú, who will shortly be playing a show at the chill Sandinista bar Antología. Abruptly, he turns around and starts running back to the house to grab some cables he'd forgotten.

In the middle of the street, it looked like he'd forgotten something else: his mother Feliciana.

A receptive, cheerful crowd turned out for the performance by Ecos del Sur. The band played the requisite Sandinista popular anthems, sung by the blushingly shy bassist whose low and powerful voice makes him sound like a fierce guerrilla warrior.

But Ecos del Sur is an Andean folk music band, and the majority of their songs were traditional hymns from South America. By far, the best part of the evening was when Feliciana, an indigenous Guatemalan wrapped in a colorful reboso, began dancing alone on the floor. Everybody in the bar stared in amazement, clapping. "Tengo 78 anos," she tells me later, "pero bonitos mis pies." ("I'm 78 years old but my feet are pretty.")

My gringo friends and I cut out early. We told the cab driver to take us to Traffic Bar, where an electronic music dance party had begun an hour earlier with DJ Revuelta Sonora and Clara Grun. "Está full," he tells us, pronouncing it "fool." By "full" he really meant "full," as the English word is preferred here to the Spanish "lleno."

I'm not a music critic, but the sound was fantastic, and backed up by cool mod-art videos on a giant screen on stage. I'm going to see these kids again next week, I think, at the hip Fresh Hill Bar.

The only weird thing about dancing there, or wanting to dance there, is that the guy-girl ratio was about 5:1, and the average age was 16. I learned this the embarrassing way, eventually getting into laughable conversations with beautiful 20-year-old boys who insisted they were old enough to be my boyfriend or offered their numbers should I ever need the opinion of a Managua youth for a story.

Of course, no age restrictions or ID checks at the door. Simply a 50 córdoba cover (around $3).

Like Managua itself, there was no continuity, nothing that obviously connected the hundreds of people there together. You had the pot-smoking hippies and ninja-style dancers, the hipsters and fresas, the gangsta thugs and rockeros, the club goers and sk8Rs. I guess what connects them all is money — these were the children of Managua's middle to upper classes.

Later we ran into the kids from Bluefields Sound System and blueEnergy, where in the back of a Scooby-Doo Mystery machine plans were made for further adventuring tonight.

"y ahora vos sos nica"

It was one of those moments when you feel absolutely star-struck.

I followed the man with the crazy hair and a white cane (for scaring away dogs, he explained) into a deserted street corner after Menchú told me his name: Salvador Bustos, one of Nicaragua's popular musicians during the revolution.

He made me laugh, slowly plucked at a borrowed guitar and then sang in front of a crowd of recovering drug addicts. I dripped mandarin juice on my shirt and responded unintelligibly when he asked me simple questions.

But he invited me out for beers and stuffed potatoes, so I think there is a real possibility that we'll become friends?

Nicaragua's music scene is cooler (and bigger) than I originally thought.

live music, for a change

Friday night. El Garabato Cafe y Antojitos. Managua.

The only black man in the room sits alone, next to the stage while the headlining band plays. His own three-song set ended a few minutes before to polite applause.

It isn't that the crowd — upper-class, light-skinned Managuans (you can call them fresas) — doesn't like Philip Montalbán's music. Perhaps it's that they don't feel any connection to him, the way they might with the man they came to see,  Mario Sacasa.

Montalbán sings reggae, mostly in English. (You can watch him at a different performance on YouTube here.)

Unlike Sacasa — a talented, light-skinned Nicaraguan whose catchy songs have a decidedly Cuban feel — Montalbán wasn't approached by excited fans or friends after his set. I found him in the back while the pretty white boy played.

Introducing myself as a journalist, I explained that I'd be interested in writing about him for La Prensa or the Miami Herald.

"Oh, well, yeah, the Miami Herald usually writes a story about me once a year, for some Afro-Caribbean day or something," he says, drawing out his words and slightly rolling his eyes.

He asked me to please write a review for the local newspaper, not Miami. He's made a name for himself in this country, but it seems to me he wants to be more than the token reggae artist in Managua.

That Afro-Caribbean peg annoys him. I'm confused about why he chooses to live here. Montalbán is from Pearl Lagoon, a city on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast which was once a British colony.

(This is a picture I took off the coast of Pearl Lagoon last March.)

People who live in the Autonomous Region of the Southern Atlantic are, for the most part, Afro-Caribbeans who speak English. There is a contentious history here, and a general distrust and dislike between the people from Nicaragua's two coasts: the poorer, non-Spanish-speaking Caribbean autonomous regions, and the Pacific, Spanish-speaking and more populated part of the country.

"The blacks on the coast hate us," several Managuans have told me. "They call us Spaniards. They are racist."

The folks I've met from the Caribbean say it's the Nicaraguans who live on the Pacific side who are racist.

I side with them. The Nicas I meet on this side too easily say things like, "I worked like a little black boy today" when they mean they're tired. Or they'll warn me to stay out of the sun so I don't turn black, because then I'd turn ugly (more than I already am).

On Wednesday I'll see Montalbán play in León. I hope to learn what he thinks about race relations in Nicaragua.

* * * * *

Let me know what you think about this: Hugo Chávez: Latin America's Money Man. This story about Venezuela's increasing presence in Bolivia is the first in a package that began today in the Miami Herald. Nicaragua's turn comes soon.

Is it unethical to hum along to Danny O's theme song?

I'll begin with something light.

A very cool note in the Chicago Tribune about presidential hopefuls and their theme songs: In Latin America, politicians feel the beat. (You can see videos here!) It covers the songs of now-presidents in Latin America like Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Nicaragua's Danny O during their campaigning, along with those of folks like Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee back home.

You can't run a campaign in Latin America without a song (or better yet, an album's worth) that lets supporters dance while extolling your virtues.

In Nicaragua, ex-dictator Daniel Ortega applied his own version of John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" to a 2006 political comeback based on reconciliation ... The songwriters kept the melody of the chorus but substituted new lyrics to soften the former Marxist rebel's image.

"What we want / Is jobs and peace. / Together we achieve / Reconciliation."

In Latin America, these songs become part of the candidates' political biography, a less offensive way to trumpet themselves. And for voters who don't have the education or access to read detailed platforms, the music is a convenient shorthand.

The best jingles burrow into the consciousness.

Danny's "Reconciliación" jingle is definitely burned into my consciousness. Whenever he gives a little speech in a barrio or public plaza, his theme music plays on repeat for hours, since events tend to start some two hours after they're "scheduled" to. (Nica time, Meli, get used to it.) People know the words, sing along. I have to stop myself from mouthing the words.

A friend promises to get me the CD.

Something interesting about this story is that in the first mention of Ortega is paired with the word "ex-dictator." I guess that's all a matter of interpretation, but it was just sort of an unexpected word coming from the Tribune.

Along those lines, my friend Tim Rogers has a story in today's  The Miami Herald about how legislators who formed the "Bloc Against the Dictatorship" plan to challenge President Daniel Ortega using reforms — which he himself had pushed through in 2005 — that transfer power from the presidency to the National Assembly:

Opposition lawmakers, who claim that Ortega's authoritarian ways have marginalized the legislative branch in the past year, now hope to regain some political muscle by reenacting his own reforms against him. The law that temporarily suspended the reforms is due to expire Jan. 20, and lawmakers say they won't renew it.

''The bloc against the dictatorship will not [extend the suspension] . . . of the constitutional reforms, and the president will have to comply,'' said Liberal party lawmaker and National Assembly secretary Wilfredo Navarro. ``[Ortega] is going to fall into his own trap.''

Apparently, the president met with some opposition last night to try to work out a deal. One solution the "bloc" has it to delay approving the annual budget. We'll see if anything comes from it.

Other than that, another fairly slow news day. This may be due to the fact that 1) it's Sunday and nobody — politicians and journalists included — likes to work on Sundays, and 2) There are fewer reporters at media outlets. From what I know about La Prensa, people are leaving for jobs in government, and they aren't being replaced. The editors tell me this is because of lack of cash, something directly blamed on the government's cutting of advertisement.

This doesn't bode well for the quality of journalism being produced in Nicaragua, something compounded by the general antagonism between private media and government. (Read a recent La Prensa article here, which is actually belated coverage of an October country report by the Inter American Press Association.)

Like most things in Nicaragua, truth changes depending on where you're standing. The Sandinista cab driver who picked me up from the airport Friday night asked me whether I thought there was freedom of the press in his country. I hesitated for a few seconds, then said it's too much of a mess to say a simple yes or no. Neither media or government play the game fairly. One is not objective, the other is secretive; it's hard to know whether the chicken or egg came first. Both are mean and vindictive. One wants money from the other. One spews propaganda and happily feeds friendly media. Journalists are regularly bought out, independently fighting for their party, or sleeping with sources.

The driver nodded at me. "At least government doesn't censor stories like it did during the Contrarevolución of the 1980s," he says finally.

That's one way of looking at it.