Graham Greene’s “Human Explanation”—Or, the Need to Hear Both Sides of a Story

Every truth has two sides; it is as well to look at both, before we commit ourselves to either.
Aesop

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet


Mario Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie, and Graham Greene have each commented, in writing, on the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the town of Cuapa, Nicaragua—"a true event” that took place between May and October of 1980. The understanding these writers express regarding the "miracle" ranges from the analytical to the cynical. As for myself, the apparitions and the seer’s story are the foundation of my novel Bernardo and the Virgin.

Recently, I reread Graham Greene’s interpretation of the “miracles.” The English author writes about it in Getting to Know the General. I first encountered Greene’s take on the happenings of Cuapa several years ago, long before I’d ever heard of the apparitions or of the little town in which they transpired. And I smiled while rereading Greene’s account only a few days ago. The author of The Power and the Glory clearly reveals, unwittingly, of course, how Bernardo Martínez’s story became a highly politicized battleground in the ideological, as well as theological, clashes of the 1980s between the Sandinista government and the Catholic Church.

Between 1976 and 1981, Graham Greene visited Panamá on five occasions—the first four at the invitation of General Omar Torrijos, the country’s strongman who guaranteed for himself a place in posterity for successfully negotiating the turnover of the Canal. Greene and Torrijos became intimate friends, and out of these experiences came Getting to Know the General, the engaging account of the Englishman’s relationship with Torrijos and of his visits to Panamá and other Central American countries.

Getting to Know the General ranks among my favorite books, and it has become especially meaningful since I moved to Panamá, five years ago. Occasionally, I’ll pick it off the bookshelf to leaf through my favorite passages. It’s like visiting a venerable friend. But at least nine years had gone by since I last read Greene’s Central American memoir from cover to cover, until recently.

Greene’s story of his friendship with Torrijos and the poet/soldier Chuchu Martínez is enjoyable and touching. And, as is usually the case with Greene, his sympathy for Latin America is gratifying. What’s more, now that I’ve come to know Panamá better, I was able to join him—through my reading, that is—on the trips he took throughout the country with full appreciation of the places he writes about.

Greene’s fifth and final voyage to Central American took place a year after Omar Torrijos’s death. The English writer’s melancholy on this last visit is palpable as he sorely misses his friend.

Throughout their relationship, General Torrijos used Greene as an emissary—with the writer delivering messages from Panamá’s leader to the leaders of Belize and Nicaragua, among other nations. On Greene’s last visit, with Torrijos now dead, General Rubén Darío Paredes, Panamá’s new strongman, sends the author to Nicaragua as his envoy to advise the Sandinistas against adopting hard-line leftist rhetoric in their troubled dealings with the United States.

While in Nicaragua, Greene spent considerable with the more liberal members of that nation’s Catholic clergy. The split in the Nicaragua’s clerical ranks was marked, as priests, nuns, and the faithful were forced by beliefs or politics to either side with Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo, or rebel against his authority. It is while discussing the Archbishop’s “conservatism” that Greene tells his version of what happened in Cuapa, as told to him by clerics that had fully embraced liberation theology. The passage I’m about to quote is rather lengthy, but certainly worth reading:

Next morning I visited the Centre for Ecumenical Studies. Apart from one American Presbyterian minister, the young government representative at the Vatican and a translator, they were all Catholic priests and they were even more severe critics of the Archbishop than the monsignor. There was, for example, the strange story of the ‘sweating Virgin’ at Cuapa.

In 1981 the Archbishop inaugurated a Marian campaign, consecrating the country on 28 November to the ‘Immaculate Heart of Mary’, a rather unnecessary campaign, it might be thought, to wage in Nicaragua, which was quite as Catholic a country as Poland. The campaign was promoted by La Prensa, the conservative opposition paper, and there was a distinct smell of politics about it.

In December La Prensa reported on the ‘miracle of the Virgin that perspires’. A wooden image in the church at Cuapa was seen to be sweating and soon pious Catholics were gathering at the improvised altar built for the statuette to collect the sweat with cotton wool. Later the sweat become known as tears (sweat was regarded perhaps as undignified), tears wept for poor Nicaragua under the rule of the Sandinistas. It was strange that she had never wept for Nicaragua under the rule of Somoza.

Usually the Church is very suspicious of miracles and any ‘miracle’ undergoes strict investigation. No such investigation was made. The Archbishop visited the statuette and his conservative henchman Bishop Vivas announced that there is was no human explanation for the perspiration (or the tears).

However, the human explanation was soon found. Each night the statuette had been submerged in water and then put in deep freeze, so that quite naturally it sweated during the day. The discovery of the fraud, however, received no publicity from La Prensa or from the two bishops. Indeed, at the end of 1982 the bishops were planning to make Cuapa an official shrine.

While it’s true that the more conservative members of the Church used the apparition to galvanize the faithful, the story that the liberal Catholic wing fed Graham Greene does not even remotely resemble the version of events commonly accepted today. (In the three years I spent researching the story I didn’t hear a single mention about the “miracle of the Virgin that perspires.”) And the sad thing is that Greene, who invariably strives to be a truthful chronicler, fully swallowed the government’s attempts to discredit the apparition—hook, line, and sinker. I believe that if he had made an effort to investigate the other side of the story, he probably would’ve written a novel about the apparitions (so perhaps, for me as a writer, it’s best that he never did take the time to learn more about the events of Cuapa).

What’s also interesting to note is that not once in Greene’s version are the apparitions, nor the seer, Bernardo Martínez, mentioned. That those who were threatened by Bernardo’s visions left the central elements out of the story serves as testimony to the seer’s ability to relate, and most convincingly, his experiences with the divine. And with regard to the absence of an official investigation by Church authorities, the Vatican conducted an in-depth inquiry and, after twenty-five years, just last October in fact, sixteen years after the Contra War ended, declared the apparition of Cuapa to be legitimate—a very, very rare occurrence indeed.

Regardless, Graham Greene still remains one of my literary heroes and, if he were alive today, I’d send him a copy of Bernardo and the Virgin so that, through this novel, he could look into the other side of the story.