Citizen Smith

Sunday 31st January 1988

We awoke feeling well rough and hungover. Declan went for breakfast with the mob and Paul apologised for last night, even though Declan brought it on himself, but the atmosphere at the hotel was unsettled. Declan was sporting two black eyes and a swollen nose.

We walked down to the Mercado Israel Lewites Bus Terminal where we found three buses crammed full of humanity and huge queues for the ticket windows which were not open yet. The Mercado was named in honour of a hero of the Sandinistas.

Israel Lewites’ father was tortured by former dictator Anastasio Somoza’s National Guardsmen when he was 16, his uncle was martyred by the Guardsmen’s bullets during the famous assault on the Masaya barracks, and his other uncle, the rogue Sandinista gunrunner-turned Mayor of Managua, Herty Lewites, died mysteriously during his 2006 presidential campaign against President Daniel Ortega. That’s a lot of rebel blood.

A son of the Sandinista revolution, Israel Lewites, 32, was born into the very Kafkaesque heart of Nicaragua politics. He reminded himself of that that fact in October, when he suddenly set off to run across the country like a Nicaraguan Forrest Gump in a lone journey to protest what he says is the current government’s return to dictatorship. The three-week rain-soaked pilgrimage, on which Lewites embarked in order to honour his martyred uncle of the same name, was documented in photos in local newspapers. Yet unlike Forrest Gump, no fans united with Lewites in his cross-country trek.

We returned to the hotel to sleep and fully sober up. We lay on our beds dozing and sweating alcohol while the Citizen Smith brigade sat outside talking of anarchy and revolution. Citizen Smith is a British television sitcom written by John Sullivan, first broadcast from 1977 to 1980.

It starred Robert Lindsay as "Wolfie" Smith, a young Marxist "urban guerrilla" in Tooting, south London, who is attempting to emulate his hero Che Guevara. Wolfie is a reference to the Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone, who used the pseudonym Citizen Smith in order to evade capture by the British. Wolfie is the self-proclaimed leader of the revolutionary Tooting Popular Front (the TPF, merely a small bunch of his friends), the goals of which are "Power to the People" and "Freedom for Tooting". In reality, he is an unemployed slacker and low-life criminal whose plans fail through his own laziness, cowardice and incompetence.

At 16:00 hrs. we paid for our room and walked unenthusiastically back to the Bus Terminal. The houses were mainly wooden shacks in this part of Managua and the local kids played baseball on the dirt roads between them.

At the Bus Terminal we greedily drank fizzy cherryade with ice from plastic bags and discovered that buses to Rivas left from elsewhere. Our next destination, Rivas is a city and municipality in southwestern Nicaragua on the Isthmus of the same name. The city proper is the capital of the Department of Rivas and administrative centre for the surrounding municipality of the same name.

We wandered back past the church where this morning they were enthusiastically letting off rockets but now they were singing “Haleluiyah”! We crossed the road to avoid some dodgy looking dogs. Most of the locals were sitting in their rocking chairs watching television.

We vowed not to drink so much again! Everything is very quiet on a Sunday evening. We sat about in the hotel courtyard while small birds with long thin tails (long tailed tits?) flitted about above us. Not the Nicaraguan Grackle or Quiscalus nicaraguensis which looks like a rook.

We then spent the evening in a vain search for the fruit juice bar that we had been in on Friday. When we did finally find it, it was closed. We trudged up to the La Ronda Bar for some much-needed refrescos (soft drinks) and an excellent chicken meal.

We went to bed early, awoken only briefly when the Socialists returned drunk at 23:00 hrs yacking loudly. The streets are dotted with “gravestones” in memorandum of heroes that fell in the revolution.