Today I got home from dinner with my parents and grandparents and saw Arthur and Jeremiah for the first time in two weeks. Arthur asked me if I’d checked my messages. No, I’d been at dinner, I told him, and proceeded to do so. While I’d been at dinner, he’d forwarded me a text message from Ana, our producer in Nicaragua. This afternoon, Herty Lewites passed away.
Herty Lewites was our first interview. You can read what I wrote about it the day of here. What I didn’t write then, mostly because I was on a reasonably fast-paced principal photography shoot, but also because I hadn’t quite had time to fully absorb my experience yet, is this:
Herty spoke very little English. Ana accompanied us inside and sat in a chair behind me. The butterflies in my stomach became 747s and we started the interview. Ana translated my questions and Herty answered in Spanish. His blue eyes twinkled when he spoke, and he spoke very slowly, clearly, and deliberately. He reminded me, for some reason, of wet clay, images I’ve seen of potters shaping it on spinning wheels - the way he spoke, fashioned his words, but also something in himself.
I have to admit, as we left his house, I questioned myself: Maybe that’s just what politicians are like. They have to be good actors, good at making you believe their “image,” the mass-marketed version of themselves. But as I met with and interviewed more people, I realized I’d been wrong. They might have been actors, but Herty was the real thing.
Before the interview, Arthur and I naturally spent about an hour hashing out questions to ask. He was our first interview. We were nervous. Toward the end of our discussion, I had a thought. I knew that Herty had been labelled a “dissident Sandinista” in most of the news articles I’d been reading, and that he had been expelled from the FSLN. Did he still think of himself as a Sandinista, or did he want to distance himself from that label? In other words, who would he say was a true Sandinista: himself, or a member of the FSLN? So we asked him, toward the end of our interview, “What does Sandinismo mean today, to you?”
He answered. I regretted my lack of Spanish and turned to Ana. Her voice was somehow quiet. “He says that Sandinismo to him is like a song, but the singers have destroyed it, and that’s why it didn’t work before,” she roughly translated. If it’s possible to gasp without making a sound, I think I did it then. I know my eyes brightened, and I probably bit my bottom lip as I smiled and nodded for him to continue. The word “floored” had never seemed more apt. A month later, in dreary, rainy Boston, my friend Maria gave us a more complete translation of Herty’s remarks.
“Look, Sandinismo, let’s say is like a very beautiful song, but the performers destroyed it. They destroyed it, they sang really poorly and that is why people have turned away from it. I believe Sandinismo is a philosophy that serves to truly convince people that countries, no matter how small, have to keep their own sovereignty and their economic and political independence. If this does not happen, then why should we have elections if, in any case, we will be subject to the will of other, more powerful nations doing whatever they’ll have us do? Sandinismo is thus a national conscience that Nicaraguans are the ones that should define our own problems.”
In all the reading I have done about the Sandinista Revolution, it is always described - at least at the beginning - as a revolution of poetry. In Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile, the author quotes Daniel Ortega: “In Nicaragua, everybody is considered to be a poet until he proves to the contrary.” I had read it, but I didn’t believe it until that moment, my fear waning, my admiration growing, absolutely certain that I was in the presence of one of the most incredible people I will meet.
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