Word: managua
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...briefcase is needed to collect the exchange on a $100 bill -- unless the exchange is in small-denomination notes, when a suitcase might be more useful. "The Sandinistas have made all of us millionaires," jokes a vendor at the Masaya bus terminal in Managua, pocketing a 5,000-cordoba bill for two lemonades. "The trouble is, even millionaires can't make ends meet here...
While the government blames the war for its economic ills, many Nicaraguans blame a centralized economy modeled after the Soviet system. Though Managua controls only 40% of the economy, prices and wages in the private sector are also set by the Sandinistas. The Soviet Union has underwritten most of the direct costs of the war against the contras, but it has been less willing to fill what might be called the Micawber Gap, the expanding gulf between income and expenditure. Exports have fallen from $636 million in 1977 to an estimated $230 million this year. Imports have remained fairly constant...
Glimpses of daily life like this invite comparisons to Poland or Czechoslovakia, Angola or Ethiopia, Libya or Iran. It is a question of style as much as of substance, and the style is apparent upon arrival at Managua's Sandino Airport. The traveler is confronted by immigration officers in high, completely enclosed wooden booths with thick glass windows and heavy curtains. Out of sight, the officer rustles mysteriously through what seems to be a thick book. Then he appears to scribble furiously for a minute or two. After a final scrutiny of the traveler's face, the passport is pushed...
...ride from the airport to downtown Managua calls to mind those almost forgotten revolutions in Africa, from Angola through Zaire, where the rhetoric has marched quickly away from reality. An aging Chevrolet Impala with a cracked windshield and an oil light that glows menacingly in the dark rattles down a potholed road. Bouncing headlights pick out clumps of stoic people waiting for buses that arrive infrequently and full. The bus fleet, local wisdom has it, has almost been run off the road because its mechanics are employed fixing the army's Soviet T-54 tanks. Many people resort to walking...
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra occasionally tries to reconcile his rhetoric with the spirit of the Guatemala accord, but the message is not always clear. FORWARD WITH THE FRONT, shouts the party's official 1987 slogan from billboards and walls around Managua. HERE NO ONE SURRENDERS. The government has in fact surrendered some ground since signing the peace agreement, but the real issues at the root of the conflict have not been addressed. Nicaragua is at war with itself, as it has been before in a history as violent as the tropical storms that sweep across the isthmus...