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he said. ‘But not now.’ I asked a few more questions – what about Armando Valladares’ book, Against All Hope , which speaks of over two decades in Cuban prisons, two decades of being made to eat shit and drink soup containing bits of glass? But it was like hitting a wall.
    When I left the Ministry of Culture I noticed that theNicaraguan fondness for naming their ministries acronymically had created, in this instance, an unfortunately Orwellian resonance. Cardenal, chief of MINICULT. I went away feeling depressed.
    I had lunch with a man from the FSLN’s newspaper, Barricada . He was responsible for the ‘Editorial’ page, and I have forgotten his name, which is perhaps just as well, because he made the most chilling remark I heard in Nicaragua. I was arguing with him about censorship in general and the recent closure of La Prensa in particular. He seemed, at first, genuinely opposed to censorship – ‘of course, as a working journalist, I hate it too’ – but then he said this: ‘A worker I met recently put it very well. If a mother has a sick child, very sick, she takes it to the hospital without first putting on her make-up.’
    My depression deepened. ‘So,’ I asked unhappily, ‘are such matters as the freedom of the press just cosmetic?’
    His face lit up, and he nodded enthusiastically. ‘Cosmetic, that’s the word. Yes.’
    ‘Everybody censors the press in wartime.’ That was the official line on the subject, and I heard it from my anonymous Barricada friend, from Daniel Ortega, from all quarters. It wouldn’t do. I remembered being in Pakistan during the 1965 war with India, and how it felt to be fed information about which the only certain thing was that it was hopelessly and deliberately misleading. I remembered learning to divide Pakistani claims to have shot down Indian planes by ten, and to multiply the admitted losses by the same factor. Then the two figures began to balance up, and you had the illusion of truth. I remembered, too, my outrage at the British government’s manipulation of the news media during the Falklands/Malvinas war. What had been unacceptable to me there was also unacceptable here.
    The issue of press freedom was the one on which Iabsolutely parted company with the Sandinistas. It disturbed me that a government of writers had turned into a government of censors. Largely because of this issue, a kind of silent argument raged in my head throughout my stay. I would tell myself that something remarkable was being attempted here, with minimal resources and under great pressure. The land reforms, and the health and literacy campaigns of 1980 and 1981, the years before the start of US aggression, showed what could be achieved. The literacy campaign, for instance, had brought the percentage of illiterate Nicaraguans down from more than fifty per cent to less than twenty per cent in two years. Now, however, the diversion of manpower into the war effort meant that the initial campaign had not been properly followed up, and illiteracy was creeping forward once again, like a jungle reclaiming a neglected clearing … Then I would argue back: those campaigns are all very well; but they think that dissent is cosmetic. And Barricada is the worst paper I’ve seen in a long while.
    The argument usually ended in the same place. Nicaragua was an imperfect state. But it was also engaged in a true revolution: in an attempt, that is, to change the structures of society in order to improve the lives of its citizens. And imperfection, even the deep flaw of censorship, did not constitute a justification for being crushed by a super-power’s military and economic force.
    Mario Vargas Llosa wasn’t in Nicaragua, but in the quiet of my room I would dispute with him, too. He had written and spoken so frequently, and with such skill, about the importance of supporting the democratic process in Latin America; he insisted that it was the only way to break the cycle of revolution and