Waking Nations

As the brassy sun signals noon each day. Central America is a place that O. Henry would still recognize. A fly-buzz quiet settles over the cobblestone streets of Tegucigalpa. Honduras; the weary bell of the city's crumbling, weather-stained cathedral gives out a few clunks, and toothless crones in black shawls shuffle inside. In Managua, Nicaragua, scrawny men, their shirttails out, flop gratefully in shady places in the plazas. In El Salvador, leaving some ornate mansion, a member of one of the 14 families that run the country glides by limousine to his club for an afternoon of bridge high above the sewer stink of acres of shacks. But before and after siesta time, the five sleepy nations of Central America are stirring with new hopes. By jolt or by shout, Central America is being kicked out of bed.

In 1821 when Central America found itself independent of Spain as a by-product of the Mexican Revolution, the region's liberators tried to turn it into a single nation. Instead, the United States of Central America quickly split into backwater statelets. The backwaters are still backward, but new currents are flowing in them. Since World War II, peasants and Indians have learned that hunger and disease need not be normal, that poverty and ignorance are not man's natural lot. In every presidential palace in Central America, new or remodeled Presidents show themselves aware of the pressure.

President Mario Echandi, 44, of Costa Rica, is far ahead of the rest, mostly because of a head start. Coffee-based Costa Rica was settled by an industrious Spanish middle class of artisans, farmers and shopkeepers, forced to do their own work after warfare and disease wiped out the Indians who provided indolent grandees with slave labor throughout the rest of Central America. Now it is the isthmus' most prosperous, democratic, law-abiding and literate country. It has the only siz able middle class. Proudly it shuns militarism. Echandi. who recently sold off most of the country's already slim supply of arms, says: "We have 600 schools and 600 policemen. Of 19,000 government employees. 10,500 work for the Education Ministry.'' With the aid of a $10 million loan from the Chase Manhattan Bank.

Echandi is diversifying the one-crop economy and attracting new small industry.

Closest behind Costa Rica is Guatemala, which has the most heavy Mayan population in Central America. President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes has succeeded a pair of abbreviated administrations--the Communist-infiltrated regime of Jacobo Arbenz, overthrown in 1954 by Carlos Castillo Armas with U.S. help, and Castillo Armas' corrupt regime, cut off by an assassin's bullet. With quiet humor and calculated eccentricity, President Ydigoras. 64, has made himself a popular figure. Refusing to live in the presidential palace, he has installed himself--along with a twittering aviary, a pet deer and a dwarf footman--in a remodeled museum.

Ydigoras is staying on top in Guatemala by blithely stealing his opponents' most popular promises and adapting them to his own pattern. Over breakfast of papaya and Rice Krispies, he reports: "The masses are very content, as they should be. because force is not being used." He is quietly pushing for an income tax, for agricultural diversity, and for industrialization. The pushing is paying off in such tangibles as a new fruit-juice plant, expanded textile and plastics plants, a new paint factory, and Central America's first oil refinery. Cement production has doubled since 1952, lumber production has tripled. But 70% of Guatemalans are illiterate, and more than 50% of the workers are subsistence farmers.

Liberal President Ramon Villeda Morales, 51, successor to a junta that overthrew a military-backed dictatorship, calls Honduras the "country of the four yos--70% are illiterate, 70% are illegitimate, 70% are rural, 70% of deaths are caused by avoidable sicknesses." Struggling with wildly fluctuating banana revenues, harassed by gadfly rebellions, and hampered by a terrain chopped by helter-skelter mountains into countless inaccessible valleys, Villeda measures progress in inches. Villeda yearns to close a deal with a U.S. combine of National Bulk Carriers. Inc. and Crown Zellerbach Corp. for a $50 million pulp and paper industry in the empty northeast, but has been blocked by opposition Congressmen who say that would "denude" Honduras of timber.

In Nicaragua, President Luis Somoza, 37, and National Guard Boss Anastasio ("Tachito") Somoza Jr., 35, run the government as a brother act. Nicaraguans hope the brothers will keep President Luis' promise to give up control of the country in the 1963 elections, but Luis blandly says that he will be "getting into politics every now and then," and Tachito says: "I don't have any plans of resigning." Except for Somoza enterprises, the nation stagnates; illiteracy is 80%. But the Somozas are at least saying the right things nowadays, even if their countrymen would like more than words. "My biggest worry is the guy who hasn't got a piece of meat in his belly," says Tachito."I'm like Marx. I think everything is economic."

In El Salvador, where the lush coffee-land is cultivated up to the very lips of volcano craters, the gulf between haves and have-nots is broadest. Peasants jam the land at the rate of over 300 per sq. mi. The President, Infantry Colonel Jose Maria Lemus, 47, is proud that "you cannot get a common laborer here nowadays for less than 80-c- a day." Last year he built 571 housing units, but to keep up with the population increase of more than 3%, 17,000 units were needed. El Salvador has lured foreign enterprise. Plans are under way for a $10 million fertilizer plant and a $15 million Esso refinery. A new paint factory and cardboard-box factory are going up; a cigarette plant and an aluminum-extrusion mill are in production. A 58-boat fishing fleet has been launched.

Prosperity Pool. Once again, the five nations are thinking of a unified Central America, or at least a common market.

Not one of the five nations is as big as Florida, and all of them would fit into Texas with plenty of Texas left over. The region's total population is about 12 million, with a per capita annual income of $239, which is at least double China's or India's. To take advantage of this market and to pool resources for overall development, the five nations agreed in 1951 to a progressive freeing of trade. Last year they standardized import duties on 5% of their imports, thereby built a Central America-wide protective tariff wall around these items. Early this year El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, each under heavy pressure at home to speed development, met to form a Central American "inner three." They agreed to shoot for a customs union in five years.

Fidel Castro's ambassadors on the isthmus are diligently stirring discontent with skillful propaganda, lending films, arranging free trips to Cuba, organizing "Friends of Cuba Associations," befriending labor unions. But so far, his implicit encouragement to revolution has not caught on in Central America. The five nations seem content with the progress that they can see--and the long siestas they still cherish.

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