a269  2024  27 Mar 90
AM-One-Time Ferry, Adv 03,1097
$Adv03
For Release Tuesday AMs, April 3 and Thereafter
Awaiting the Revolution in a Tropical Backwater
By CANDICE HUGHES
Associated Press Writer
    PEARL LAGOON, Nicaragua (AP) - Along the grassy streets of Pearl
Lagoon, on the edge of its lonely dock, in hammocks swaying in the
shade, people are waiting for the Revolution, a ferry boat as elusive
as a campaign promise.
    It sailed into the lagoon on the Sunday after Nicaragua's election,
spent an hour or so, then sailed away.
    A few people rode on the ferry, many just heard of it, but everyone
seems to have an opinion about it.
    ''Some people think it is progress,'' said Irma de Sosa, a
schoolteacher who has become an authority on the subject by virtue of
being one of those who rode.
    ''Some feel like the government is just fooling the people, that the
boat won't come back,'' she said, spreading her hands and smiling.
    ''We'll just have to wait and see.''
    The Sandinista government, far away in Managua, had long promised
Pearl Lagoon a ferry for the 30-mile run to Bluefields port, the link
to the rest of the world for Nicaragua's thinly populated Atlantic
coast.
    That single visit by the Revolution, a 150-passenger vessel, is the
only evidence residents have seen.
    In many ways, the ferry symbolizes the region's long fight for
autonomy, for some control of its own fate.
    Places like this town of 1,900 are the essence of the Atlantic
coast, an English-speaking area so isolated from the rest of
Nicaragua that it seems like another country.
    Not a shot was fired here when the Sandinistas overthrew the late
President Anastasio Somoza in 1979, and the Atlantic coast was
largely untouched. More than a decade later, there still is no road
between it and the Spanish-speaking Pacific side of Nicaragua.
    It was not the first time revolution passed the region by.
    When the rest of Central America was fighting for independence from
Spain, the coast was a British protectorate with Miskito Indian
royalty. British buccaneers raided the Spanish fleet with ships built
in Pearl Lagoon.
    The Atlantic coast region is home to one-tenth of Nicaragua's 3.3
million people, a rich mixture of Creoles, Latinos and Sumo, Rama,
Garifona and Miskito Indians. It includes half the national territory
of about 50,000 square miles.
    Pearl Lagoon has a couple of Toyota trucks, but the green streets
look more like the fairways of a golf course. It doesn't receive
television from Managua, 200 miles to the west.
    As with most hamlets dotting the coves, inlets and rivers, water is
Pearl Lagoon's only link to the world.
    A regular ferry, a boat of its own, would mean a measure of
independence and an end to the balmy isolation that envelops the
lagoon like a daydream.
    The Atlantic coast is the poorest region of one of the hemisphere's
poorest nations, but Pearl Lagoon is a fortune in the raw.
    It rests on the banks of one of the richest breeding grounds of the
succulent white shrimp, on the edge of rich lobster beds. It is the
kind of place that feeds the dreams of entrepreneurs.
    A businessman remembered simply as The Chinaman, the lagoon's last
success story, dried and exported shrimp. The Sandinistas confiscated
his shrimp plant, fishing boats and rice mill, and drove The Chinaman
into exile.
    ''The boats went to Bluefields,'' said Leslie Hunsack, a 60-year-old
fisherman. ''It did us no good here in Pearl Lagoon.''
    After the Sandinistas nationalized the fishing industry, Pearl
Lagoon was left with a single customer that set its own price: the
government.
    Fishermen say months sometimes pass between the visits by boats from
outside to pick up the catch. ''We have our nets out and we catch
this fish and we can't do anything with it,'' said Linton Fox, a
community leader.
    At least two young fishermen have died trying to make an extra
dollar a pound on their lobster. They were shot by government agents
while on smuggling runs to the Colombian island of San Andreas, 110
miles southeast of Pearl Lagoon.
    ''We have always felt like a colony inside a country,'' said labor
leader Alvin Guthrie, a Creole from the coast elected to the new
National Assembly. ''Under the Sandinistas, it was like having
Spanish viceroys around.''
    In the northern Atlantic coast region, the Managua government's
attempts to enforce its policies provoked a bloody uprising of
Miskito Indians.
    Finally, the Sandinistas admitted they had made mistakes and passed
a regional autonomy law that, at least in theory, was the most
sweeping in Latin America.
    Autonomy remains a promise, however, not a reality.
    Members of the first autonomous councils, one for the north coast
and one for the south, where Pearl Lagoon and Bluefields are located,
were chosen in the Feb. 25 general elections.
    Still to be negotiated is the relationship between the regional and
central governments, at heart a question of control over gold, lumber
and fishing resources.
    ''We don't know much about autonomy,'' said Fox, a member of the
regional assembly. ''But we'd have the rights to our property. Our
lumber, our fish, our shrimps would go to build up our little town,
not to build up Managua or Bluefields.''
    The Sandinistas failed to overcome the suspicions and hostilities of
the coast with the autonomy project. Like the rest of Nicaragua, the
coast voted against them in the February election.
    Sandinista leaders predict autonomy would die under the government
of President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, which takes office April
25.
    Her conservative alliance's platform does not mention autonomy and
Sandinista leaders say its goal of privatization is incompatible with
local control of the region's riches.
    ''The backbone for autonomy is the natural resources, what is in the
sea and what is in the forest,'' said Johnny Hodgson, a Sandinista
leader in Bluefields.
    British and American companies that exploited the coast, the Somoza
dictatorship, the Sandinistas - none brought prosperity or gave the
coast a real say in its affairs.
    Hunsack, the fisherman, picked up his saw and prepared to cut
another board.
    He is tired of waiting for the Revolution, and is building his own
boat.
    ''This autonomy the Sandinistas had, they were using people as a
tool,'' Hunsack said. ''We expect better. We couldn't get worse.''
    End Adv for Tuesday AMs, April 3
    
 
 
AP-NY-03-27-90 2305EST
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