Pablo Antonio Cuadra

Shortly after the triumph of the Sandinista-led revolution 12 years ago, Nicaraguan artist Alejandro Canales began work on what was to become his most public--if not his most famous--painting. Using the wall outside a cluster of government office buildings as his canvas, Canales produced a long, flowing mural depicting the Nicaraguan experience under foreign freebooters and domestic tyrants.

On a terrace overlooking Managua, sipping an after-dinner rum--better than brandy on a balmy tropical night--old friends reminisce, and their recollections lead to poetry. A top officer of the Central Bank and confirmed believer in free-market economics begins. Eyes moist, she recites the warning from Ruben Dario, her country's most famous poet, to Teddy Roosevelt after the fourth U.S. invasion of Nicaragua: "Be careful. Spanish America lives!

While Mikhail S. Gorbachev was visiting Washington, Oscar Arias Sanchez was receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. The Nobel committee probably made the right choice. The Central American peace process is certainly as much a breakthrough as the summit meeting, and Arias' idea of how to bring peace, democracy and development to Central America could start "new thinking" in much of the developing world.

Ask anyone in Managua for directions to "the little tree" and they will point confidently to a downtown intersection with a service station, Roco's Bar and the ruins of a two-story house, but no tree. Never mind that the tree has been gone for 17 years, that when city workers dug it up to pave the streets after the earthquake it was no longer a little tree but a great big tree, an Indian laurel. "It's a point of reference," said Rene Cano, 66, who has run the service station for 30 years.

It has been said that Nicaragua is a nation of poets, and it is a fact that, from President Daniel Ortega to humble farmers, thousands of Nicaraguans put their verses on paper. So, naturally, when the passions of Nicaraguans soar, so does the level of their poetic production. And passions excited by the Sandinista revolution have given rise to an outpouring of revolutionary verse.

Carlos Mejia Godoy, Nicaragua's foremost songwriter and folklorist, has been mixing music and politics for three decades. He's served as cultural ambassador of the Sandinista revolution in the 1970s and penned a rebel anthem condemning the United States as "the enemy of humanity." But in the past few weeks, the 59-year-old performer has been surprised to hear a new rallying cry rising spontaneously from fans at peace demonstrations around Managua.