Following the post below I did some more digging around....
Strummer quoted from an interview here:
What are your feelings about filming in Nicaragua?
"For me, it was a long winter in Britain and pretty depressing, right? So I was feeling generally fed up, and I came down here and it was just what I needed to see people who�ve really got nothing, but are coping and laughing and still enjoying life. On the back-lot here in Granada, I was walking along with another actor, Jack Slater, and we saw these kids playing baseball with homemade balls and hand-carved bats, and basketball with a cardboard box attached to a telegraph pole, and there was this little girl with a plastic bag filled with air, which she was throwing up and catching. And even though they had nothing, they were all having a really good time.
"I've been here about two months, and just in that time you realize that this is just a normal country that happens to have a leftist government that is trying to sort its problems out. Things aren't so black and white here as I've found from looking from far away with a pro- or anti-Reagan or Thatcher stance. When you get here, all that hardly seems to make any sense. It just seems like that the country's a helluva lot better off than it was under Somoza, when there wasn't any education or medical care and half the population was kept illiterate. Compared to those days, they've made vast progress any human being would surely be in favor of that."