Word: nicaragua
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WHEN ASKED by friend to describe his visit to Nicaragua, Indian novelist Salman Rushdie replied, "I've been taking snapshots....There's not much more one can do in a few weeks." He was right. In The Jaguar Smile, the result of his three week stay in the embattled country last summer, Rushdie attempts to bring reality to a controversy too often plagued by abstraction. But while his two-dimensional snapshots do not make for a convincing political argument, Rushdie does succeed in injecting a startling dose reality into the otherwise hollow debate over U.S. Central American policy...
...observer rather than critic, Rushdie performs brilliantly, transforming a spot on a map into a sweating, struggling panorama of life. He shows us a Nicaragua whose leaders use poetry as a shield against death, in which "liberation" theology challanges traditional Vatican primacy and Bruce Springsteen blares above the cries of sunbronzed street vendors...
McDonald's next frontier is the rest of the world, where it has already * made considerable progress. The company boasts some 2,140 foreign outlets in 42 different countries ranging from Nicaragua to the Netherlands. Today the golden arches grace some of Europe's most expensive real estate: next to Westminster Cathedral in London, on the corner of the Boulevards St. Michel and St. Germain in Paris, and opposite Parliament in the Hague. The biggest Mac branch of all, with 575 restaurants, is in Japan, where the company is known as Makudonarudo, or Makku-san for short...
...recent history of India and Pakistan. As an Indian who grew up with his independent motherland in its infancy, and as a fabulist whose bravura acts of invention bring to mind the "magic realism" of Latin American fiction, Rushdie felt himself obscurely allied with the revolutionary government in Nicaragua. Last summer he accepted the invitation of the Sandinista leadership to inspect the seven-year-old revolution. For three weeks he attended rallies, journeyed to the Honduran border and hung out with the comandantes, eating turtle and chatting about literature...
...people of Nicaragua, however, there is little cause for optimism at the moment. The five-year war effort has badly battered the economy. As much as 60% of the country's budget is now committed to defense, and the remaining funds are sorely mismanaged through a combination of inexperience, corruption and political rivalries. Last year, as runaway inflation neared the 800% mark, wages remained frozen, making it virtually impossible for workers to live on their take-home pay. Government bureaucrats at the clerical and technical - levels make an average of about $20 monthly. Not surprisingly, such conditions have given rise...