Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle was known for his cruel and iron-fisted rule, but also for hospitality on a grand scale. Among his personal retreats was a coconut and sugar plantation on a beautiful stretch of beach on his country’s Pacific coast. Guests would land at the estate’s private airfield to be entertained at Somoza’s lavish cliff-side home, where they enjoyed plush accommodations with commanding views of the sea and the seemingly endless beach.
After the Sandinistas ousted Somoza in 1979, they occupied the estate as a kind of high-end military barracks. Then came Herty Lewites. Always more of an entrepreneur than a revolutionary, Lewites (who died in July) was an arms smuggler during the revolution and a minister of tourism in the Sandinista years. He looked at the beach house being used as a barracks and thought it would better serve the country’s interests as a resort that would bring in foreign money. To the chagrin of some military people and diehard anti-capitalists, Sandinista president Daniel Ortega liked Lewites’ idea. After all, Nicaragua badly needed hard currency, even if bourgeois European and North American tourists were to be the source of it.
