My baptism of fire in Sandinista Nicaragua 20 years ago was an evening with Sofia Montenegro, a dark-haired beauty with sparks in her eyes. We met in the bar of the InterContinental hotel, a pyramid-shaped building that Howard Hughes, the eccentric American tycoon, had made his home until much of Managua was destroyed in an earthquake in 1972.

The Sandinista rebels marched into the city in 1979, having overthrown Antonio Somoza, the American-backed dictator, and things had been deteriorating ever since. On some days there was no running water or electricity. Going into the breakfast room at the InterContinental one morning I saw a large rat chewing a muffin left on one of the tables.

Sofia, 33, blamed the chaos on counter-revolutionaries, or “contras”, the American-trained and funded rebel army waging war on the government of Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandinistas. Many of these rebels were soldiers of the previous regime who had been taken prisoner by the Sandinistas, only to be released after their triumph.

“Our big mistake,” Sofia told me, after a few “Nica Libres”, the national cocktail, “was not to put them up against a wall and” — she held two jerking fists in front of her as though firing a belt-fed machinegun — “trac-a-trac-a-trac-a-trac.” At the time I did not realise that she was joking.

Later we became friends and in the three years that I lived in Nicaragua I became attached to the eccentricities of a country renowned for poets and beauty queens: the smouldering volcanoes seemed a perfect match for its rash and muscular politics.

The Nicaraguans’ fiesta-loving genes conspired against too slavish an observance of Marxist dogma, even if that was the creed that inspired them. As Sofia explained: “Communism in the tropics just doesn’t work. We do things our own way.”

Unlike the former barbaric regimes of neighbouring Guatemala and El Salvador, the Sandinistas were not known for torturing or killing their political foes. Their romantic appeal helped to turn the ramshackle city of Managua into the world headquarters of revolutionary chic, a place where any self-respecting left-wing celebrity had to be seen.

I returned to Managua last week to find Sofia, these days attached to a liberal think tank and distinctly depressed. Ortega was just about to be voted back into the presidency after 16 years — an astonishing political comeback, sullied by allegations of financial and sexual impropriety.

Ortega, Sofia said, had cynically sacrificed every principle he once held dear to win back power. He had embraced the Catholic church, anathema to his Marxist followers, and even done deals with former contra enemies: one of them was now a vice-presidential running mate.

This she could understand. What was unforgivable was Ortega’s support for a law passed recently banning abortion, even if a woman’s life was in danger. “That is how revolutionaries are born,” she said. “Hundreds of women will die. The day they passed that bill I wanted to put the deputies in front of a wall and . . .”

Sofia, at least, had not changed.

In the early 1980s I lived in an abandoned oligarch’s mansion down the road from the InterContinental with a parrot called Dan who did a good imitation of Ortega, having heard so many of his anti-imperialist rants while perched on top of the radio.

Ortega then was a lean firebrand in combat fatigues, the head of a junta whose different guerrilla factions had bonded in the revolutionary struggle. He would inveigh on national radio each day against Ronald Reagan, warning his countrymen to prepare for an imminent “yankee” invasion.