In Kinnock's flightpath
Richard West
Miami-Managua-Miami To fly from England to Nicaragua, with an overnight stop in Miami, all you need is a valid United States visa and this, I discovered on New Year's Day, I did not possess. The black Immigration lady was kind but firm: my visa was out of date. I was taken to see a senior Immigration official who, like most people one meets in Miami, was a 'hispanic'. Where was I going? Managua, to cover Neil Kinnock's visit. His eyelids flickered slightly, since Nicaragua is one of the left-wing countries from which so many Miami hispanics have fled. Did I have a confirmed flight to Managua tomorrow? The ticket said clear- ly 'request'. At this point I remembered that Mr Graham Greene, on his travels to Central America, makes a point of avoid- ing Miami and taking a long circuitous route that always begins with eight hours. drinking gin at Amsterdam airport — or so he says in his latest book Getting to Know the General. Better still, I could have gone to New York's Kennedy airport where I believe they have a transit lounge, and where, anyway, all the Immigration offi- cials read the Spectator. The hispanic Immigration men at Miami airport were very polite but they were not Spectator readers. They said I would have to spend the night under guard with two other people whose papers were out of order, an Indian who spoke no other tongue but his own, and a bossy Iranian girl.
We were put in the charge of two young women hispanics, wearing the stars and stripes on one arm and a gold badge saying 'security guard' on the other. We waited about in an airport lounge, then an office, then another lounge. We went through customs, then through 'agri', the people who check on farm produce, where it was found that the gloomy Indian had a trunk full of strange edible roots and nuts, wrapped up in towels. However, these passed inspection. The two girl guards asked me where I was going and, when I said Nicaragua, they too gave me an odd look. I asked them where they came from. Nicaragua. They had left there six years ago 'when the Communists took over', because of 'the trouble in our country'. Later I was to understand why they no doubt thought that any journalist who goes to Nicaragua is a friend of the Sandinista revolution.
One of the Nicaraguan girl guards took the Iranian and myself to a nearby hotel which is also the Miami headquarters of Mr Hugh Hefner's Bunny Club. The bunnies were taking the New Year off but anyway, as the waitress said in the coffee shop, 'What man would wanta see girls with a bit of fur on the ass when he can see them nude down the street?' I ate some junk food and drank some junk beer with the two women, who were both on different diets. 'You shouldn't eat all that salad,' the Iranian scolded the Nicaraguan guard, 'It won't make you skinny and it's got crawly insects on it; they don't wash it properly.' The Iranian girl said that Frankfurt, where she was living, was full of live sex shows. The Nicaraguan guard became indignant. 'That is very bad for the mothers,' she said, 'and for the young people.' She said that in her job as security guard she did not get overtime pay but 'they need us'. She will never lack work while there are so many other hispanics trying to settle in the United States; and Europeans like me who neglect their visas.
Next day the Nicaraguan guards escorted me to the plane for Nicaragua, where I fully expected to meet more trouble. The South American Handbook warns that 'Nicaraguan customs and bor- der formalities can take three hours or more (but sometimes much less)'. It was in
fact only an hour. The currency regulations are much less strict now that dollars are widely accepted. Security is intense but that is understandable in a state of some- thing like civil war. What surprised me was a special table at the customs reserved for 'Diplomats and Journalists'. There is something wrong with a country that sucks up to the press by giving them privileges. We feel more comfortable when the politi- cians accuse us of lying, intrusion into their private lives, taking bribes or even spying. We should not, at all costs, be 'responsible', especially to a foreign government.
After a few days in and around the Intercontinental Hotel, I came to see why the Sandinistas dote on the foreign journal- ists: almost all that I met were vehemently on the side of Nicaragua against the United States. There was at the same time a visiting group of 64 American 'communica- tors' (or 'intellectuals' as they used to be called) including such veteran gasbags as Abbie Hoffman and Betty Friedan. They were starry-eyed about Nicaragua. I won- dered, not for the first time, why so many American Jews go on seeking a Promised Land, when they already have Israel which for all its faults is a much more decent country than any that has been taken over by Communists, quite apart from the natural appeal to Jews of its language, religion and culture.
On Thursday the 64 communicators joined with the resident journalists in a conference given over to the denunciation of the United States government and the 'media'. Speaker after speaker described how his coverage of Nicaragua was sup- pressed or twisted in a way unfavourable to the Sandinistas. It reminded me of a meeting in London some 12 years ago where all the journalists complained that the 'media' were biased against the Repub- licans in Northern Ireland. You could have fooled me. My guess is that the 'media' editors, like the general public, are bored with revolutionaries and their acronyms and doctrinal disputes. They no doubt garble the stories, but more from incompe- tence than political prejudice.
At Managua airport, waiting for the Miami plane, I was approached by an American in a crimson T-shirt that read something like: 'Join the army. Travel to exotic, distant places, meet interesting people, and kill them.' He said 'Hi, my name's Dana. I worked for Mother Jones. , Have you heard of it? Well, it's a paper that kinda knocks you over the head. . .
He was on his way back to the USA to write more attacks on his government.
I know it is an old, old argument but nevertheless its worth pointing out once more that if you were flying to Moscow, you would not meet a Russian journalist in a T-shirt saying: 'Join the red Army, travel to exotic Afghanistan, meet interesting people, and kill them. Nor, if your Rus- sian visa was out of date, would you spend an evening in a hotel guarded by friendly girls who were themselves political re- fugees from the United States.
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