Herty Lewites, a longtime Sandinista who doesn't seem like one, plans to run for president of Nicaragua next year.

BY TIM ROGERS
Special to the Herald

MANAGUA, Nicaragua - Herty Lewites doesn't really fit the stereotype of a Marxist guerrilla, or even a Nicaraguan.

A Jewish businessman who owns the popular Hertylandia amusement park and occasionally dresses in wide-collar, disco-era shirts, Lewites ran guns in California for the Marxist-led Sandinista guerrillas in the early 1970s.

And now the still well-liked ex-mayor of Managua is challenging Sandinista hardliners and seeking the party's presidential nomination in 2006 -- against party boss Daniel Ortega, who has lost three of the last four elections.

''I don't want my party to lose again in 2006,'' said Lewites, 65, who will officially launch his campaign today. ``I want us to win.''

He describes himself as ''Sandinista lite'' and insists that he was never a Marxist -- like Ortega and other leaders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front guerrillas that toppled the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. Ortega served as president of Nicaragua until he lost the first post-revolution democratic elections in 1990.

Lewites says he, not Ortega, has his finger on the pulse of Sandinista party supporters, and independent polls over the last six months show him to be the country's most popular politician.

But he must first go through Ortega, who has said he plans to run in 2006, and an inner circle of Sandinista hawks who control the party and many parts of the government, including the courts.

The party's Ethics and Judicial Commission has already ruled Lewites ineligible to win the presidential nomination because he broke briefly with the Sandinistas to form an independent political movement in 1996.

And Sandinista congressional leader Edwin Castro last week blasted Lewites as a ''traitor'' -- an accusation that Lewites fears will encourage fanatical revolutionaries to attack him. Lewites recently requested added police protection.

LOYAL PARTY MEMBER

Lewites insists that he has been a loyal Sandinista for 35 years and will remain in the race until the country's 600,000 Sandinista party members decide on their presidential candidate at primaries late this year or early next.

''If a party member achieves an 85 percent approval rating across the country, what could be better for that party than to have a candidate who could win the elections?'' he said in an interview. ``But my party has it backwards. They want to get rid of the person who can win the elections and promote the person who is less popular.''

The Nicaraguan-born son of a Polish immigrant, Lewites joined the movement against the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1960. He was briefly jailed and tortured, joined the Sandinistas in 1969 and left Nicaragua to help the guerrillas from abroad. In 1972, he was caught in California smuggling guns to the Sandinistas and served a year in a prison there on weapons-trafficking charges.

When the Sandinistas seized power in 1979, Lewites was named minister of tourism and put in charge of 43 state enterprises, including several ''diplomat dollar stores'' that sold consumer items that had disappeared from shelves under the Sandinistas' disastrously socialist economic policies.

Lewites now boasts that the businesses he ran grossed $10 million a year. Nicaraguans used to joke that Lewites was the only man who ever made money out of communism.

He served in congress in the early 1990s, then opened the Hertylandia amusement park and a car rental agency. He says he is now worth close to $1 million, and insists he received ''absolutely zero'' from the Sandinista property-grab after they were voted out of power in 1990, known as the Piñata. Lewites returned to government in 2001 as the first democratically elected Sandinista mayor of Managua.

Lewites is not alone in his current dissatisfaction with Ortega and the other hardliners who control the party.

Other disaffected Sandinistas -- from war heroes such as Luis Carrión and Henry Ruiz to cultural icons such as poet Ernesto Cardenal and songwriter Carlos Mejía Godoy -- are backing him.

PRAISE FOR ORTEGA

And he has been careful to insert disclaimers in his political speeches that Ortega will always be the uncontested Sandinista party boss and man he admires deeply.

''At no time have I challenged the leadership or Daniel Ortega,'' Lewites said.

''We [Sandinistas] just consider that Herty Lewites should be the candidate in 2006. We are not saying who is better or worse,'' he said.

If he wins the nomination, he added, he believes he can ``modernize the party based on a new world reality of globalization, free-trade, and Central-American unification.''

But he's careful not to pigeonhole his model of Sandinismo as either socialist or capitalist.

''We are Sandinistas,'' he said. ``We don't need another label.''