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While he was in prison, Ortega and Rosario Murillo, one of the leading poets in the Sandinista movement, exchanged poems. (Poetry is a national passion in Nicaragua.) Murillo, who was educated in a British convent school, helped Ortega stay in contact with other prisoners and the outside world. She later became his common-law wife.
Ortega and Murillo have a big family. Murillo, in her early 30s and a high- ranking Sandinista in her own right, has two children by her first husband, whom she married when she returned to Nicaragua at the age of 15. Ortega reportedly has one child from a previous relationship. The Ortegas have had five children together, ranging from seven months to five years.
Daniel Ortega is often called shy, soft-spoken, retiring: "the reluctant ruler." Not Murillo. The First Lady maintains the kind of profile that goes with $300 glasses. A darling of the radical chic, the articulate, outspoken Murillo counts Bianca Jagger (also a Nicaraguan) and Harry Belafonte among her friends. In New York City for January's large international writers' congress, Murillo was escorted by Little Steven Van Zandt, a rock songwriter who produced the antiapartheid anthem Sun City. She had planned to attend an antidrug seminar in Atlanta last week at which Nancy Reagan was hostess, but did not obtain a visa.
"Daniel is a simple man who doesn't like pretension," said a close Ortega adviser. When he visited New York City last fall to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the United Nations, Ortega kept to his usual running schedule and took an early-morning jog through Central Park. He generally runs from five to six miles a day. For dinner, he sought out local Chinese restaurants.
"When I was in prison, I never thought I would see the triumph of the revolution," Ortega recalls. "All I thought about was the fight against Somoza and how to get out of prison." It is common wisdom that the Sandinistas have had difficulty getting used to governing rather than opposing. Says Ortega: "I never thought about being President of Nicaragua." But now he is, and in the hard months ahead, as the U.S. vacillates on the question of contra aid and the Nicaraguan economy sputters, Ortega faces tough tests not as a revolutionary but as a politician.