August 6-9 -- We docked in Corinto, the only Pacific port in Nicaragua. There is a small town here, but not very big.
Nicaragua is a very poor place. They are barely recovering from a long war. In fact, we could see no middle class, only a lot of poor people and a very few very rich people living in beautiful houses protected by barbed wire and guards. 40% of the people are unemployed. The Ortega government, elected in Dec. 2006, has only had about 8 months to work on the problems here, and so far, according to some people we talked to, not much has changed.
It was very hot and humid in Nicaragua. My first trip was to León, a city that is called the cultural center of Nicaragua. It was bombed by the Samosa faction during the war, and evidence of the destruction is still apparent. I, and several of the other people on the trip, thought it was a sad place. The "beautiful central plaza" was a concrete slab with a few trees scattered about. The Cathedral in León was lovely and peaceful inside, but desperately needing cleaning and repair outside. It is in this Cathedral that the great Latin American author, Rubén Darío, is buried.
We also visited Darío's childhood home here in León, about four blocks east of the Cathedral. Typical of most of the other buildings we saw in Nicaragua, the house is situated right on the street; the exterior walls have a minimum of windows. The entrance takes you into an inner courtyard or garden, and the interior rooms are placed around the garden, each a door to the next room and a door to the courtyard. This home is preserved as a Darío museum, but there is no air conditioning or climate control to protect the books and papers on display. (It made the librarian in me shudder!)
The third place we visited in León was an art gallery of the
Fundación Ortiz Gurdián. This museum (also not air conditioned! -- in fact, many of the galleries have open air gardens in the center of the room with the art displayed on the walls of the walkways) displays art by Latin Americans, both ancient and modern. This was the highlight of this trip. The first couple of rooms housed Baroque and later-style religious art "in the style of" or "from the school of." I'm told this demonstrates that the indigenous artists were learning the European styles of art even from the very earliest times. There were madonnas (La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Virgen de Carmen) with so much gilding that they looked like Greek Orthodox icons.
The most impressive works to me, however, were the modern Latin American works, which were creative and skillfully done. My favorite was a large canvas that had as a background Picasso's "Guernica" in greys. The foreground was a copy of Velasquez's famous painting, "Las Meninas," done as if the figures were in a museum standing in front of "Guernica," with small changes that put them in a Latin American context. I was most impressed. Unfortunately, this gallery did not have a gift shop with reproductions of any of their paintings.
Another trip I went on in Nicaragua was to the Flor de Caña Rum Distillery in San Antonio, Nicaragua. This particular trip had the potential for disaster, in that we were to have a rum tasting after the tour. However, all of the participants, even the lifelong learners, were well-behaved, and I think we all had a great time. Flor de Caña's claim to fame is that their rums are 100% barrel aged, so that when you see a bottle that says "aged 18 years" on it, it really means the rum is as old as a college first-year. Apparently this is not the case for some other rums, in which only a percentage of the rum in such a bottle is actually that old. Flor de Caña is trying to expand into the United States, so we will probably see it being sold all over the U.S. in a couple of years.
