Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution
Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution

Author: Margaret Randall

Publisher:

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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"The controversy within the Catholic Church over the concept of liberation theology raises the questions: is there room in Christian philosophy for a socialist society? And is there a place in a socialist society? Nicaragua's recent experience, says Margaret Randall, shows the answer to these questions to be "yes". The dominant role Christianity played in the Nicaraguan revolution both before and after the 1979 overthrow of the Somoza regime shows that the concrete goals shared by the two ideologies, Christianity and Marxism, outweigh their theoretical contradictions. The main part of Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution consists of long narratives by members of two Christian base communities with key roles in the Nicaraguan revolution. Solentiname is the retreat founded in the mid-sixties by Father Ernesto Cardenal -- now Nicaragua's minister of culture -- on a remote island in Lake Nicaragua. El Riguero is an urban community, founded in 1972 by father Uriel Molina in a Managua barrio. Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution features the voices of "ordinary" believers as well as those of well-known religious and political leaders" -- Back cover.

Nicaragua, Revolution in the Family
Nicaragua, Revolution in the Family

Author: Shirley Christian

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9780394744575

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Journalist Christian's masterful, evenhanded account of Nicaragua's Sandinistas derives from years of interviews and on-the-scene observations. Beginning with the last days of the Somoza regime, she details the morass of political intrigue through November 1984. The problem is, she argues, that the success of ``sandinismo'' turned the people from instigators of change into objects of change, both in the eyes of the church and of the state. As the center of the struggle flew out of control onto the battlefields of Havana, Washington, Rome, and Panama, democratic principles were subordinated to other peoples' needs, a no-win situation for the peasants. To draw conclusions about Nicaragua, Christian emphasizes, is a lot more difficult than superficial U.S. policy would imply.

Breaking Faith
Breaking Faith

Author: Humberto Belli

Publisher:

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13:

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From the John Holmes Library Collection.

Before the Revolution
Before the Revolution

Author: Victoria González-Rivera

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-06-17

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0271068027

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Those who survived the brutal dictatorship of the Somoza family have tended to portray the rise of the women’s movement and feminist activism as part of the overall story of the anti-Somoza resistance. But this depiction of heroic struggle obscures a much more complicated history. As Victoria González-Rivera reveals in this book, some Nicaraguan women expressed early interest in eliminating the tyranny of male domination, and this interest grew into full-fledged campaigns for female suffrage and access to education by the 1880s. By the 1920s a feminist movement had emerged among urban, middle-class women, and it lasted for two more decades until it was eclipsed in the 1950s by a nonfeminist movement of mainly Catholic, urban, middle-class and working-class women who supported the liberal, populist, patron-clientelistic regime of the Somozas in return for the right to vote and various economic, educational, and political opportunities. Counterintuitively, it was actually the Somozas who encouraged women's participation in the public sphere (as long as they remained loyal Somocistas). Their opponents, the Sandinistas and Conservatives, often appealed to women through their maternal identity. What emerges from this fine-grained analysis is a picture of a much more complex political landscape than that portrayed by the simplifying myths of current Nicaraguan historiography, and we can now see why and how the Somoza dictatorship did not endure by dint of fear and compulsion alone.

Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution
Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution

Author: Donald C. Hodges

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-02-04

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0292777280

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In this critical study of the thought of Augusto Cesar Sandino and his followers, Donald C. Hodges has discovered a coherent ideological thread and political program, which he succeeds in tracing to Mexican and Spanish sources. Sandino's strong religious inclination in combination with his anarchosyndicalist political ideology established him as a religious seer and moral reformer as well as a political thinker and is the prototype of the curious blend of Marxism and Christianity of the late twentieth-century Nicaraguan government, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional.

Sandinistas
Sandinistas

Author: Robert J. Sierakowski

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2019-12-31

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0268106916

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Robert J. Sierakowski's Sandinistas: A Moral History offers a bold new perspective on the liberation movement that brought the Sandinista National Liberation Front to power in Nicaragua in 1979, overthrowing the longest-running dictatorship in Latin America. Unique sources, from trial transcripts to archival collections and oral histories, offer a new vantage point beyond geopolitics and ideologies to understand the central role that was played by everyday Nicaraguans. Focusing on the country’s rural north, Sierakowski explores how a diverse coalition of labor unionists, student activists, housewives, and peasants inspired by Catholic liberation theology came to successfully challenge the legitimacy of the Somoza dictatorship and its entrenched networks of power. Mobilizing communities against the ubiquitous cantinas, gambling halls, and brothels, grassroots organizers exposed the regime’s complicity in promoting social ills, disorder, and quotidian violence while helping to construct radical new visions of moral uplift and social renewal. Sierakowski similarly recasts our understanding of the Nicaraguan National Guard, grounding his study of the Somozas’ army in the social and cultural world of the ordinary soldiers who enlisted and fought in defense of the dictatorship. As the military responded to growing opposition with heightened state terror and human rights violations, repression culminated in widespread civilian massacres, stories that are unearthed for the first time in this work. These atrocities further exposed the regime’s moral breakdown in the eyes of the public, pushing thousands of previously unaligned Nicaraguans into the ranks of the guerrilla insurgency by the late 1970s. Sierakowski’s innovative reinterpretation of the Sandinista Revolution will be of interest to students, scholars, and activists concerned with Latin American social movements, the Cold War, and human rights.

Risking a Somersault in the Air
Risking a Somersault in the Air

Author: Margaret Randall

Publisher: New Village Press

Published: 2022-05-24

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1613321848

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First revised edition of interviews with 14 prominent activists whose writings influenced the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution and help us understand present-day Nicaragua Margaret Randall presents a dynamic collection of personal interviews with Nicaragua's most important writer-revolutionaries who played major roles in the 1979 revolution and the subsequent reconstruction. This revised first edition includes a new preface and additional notes that frame the narrative in high relevance to the present day. The featured writer-activists speak of their work and practical tasks in constructing a new society. Among the writers included are Gioconda Belli, Tomás Borge, Omar Cabezas, Ernesto Cardenal, Vidaluz Menéses, Julio Valle-Castillo, and Daisy Zamora. The work also features 50 evocative photographs from the era by Margaret Randall.

What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution
What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution

Author: Dan La Botz

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-09-07

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 9004291318

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This volume is a valuable re-assessment of the Nicaraguan Revolution by a Marxist historian of Latin American political history. It shows that the FSLN (‘the Sandinistas’), with politics principally shaped by Soviet and Cuban Communism, never had a commitment to genuine democracy either within the revolutionary movement or within society at large; that the FSLN’s lack of commitment to democracy was a key factor in the way that revolution was betrayed from the 1970s to the 1990s; and that the FSLN’s lack of rank-and-file democracy left all decision-making to the National Directorate and ultimately placed that power in the hands of Daniel Ortega. Pursuing his narrative into the present, La Botz shows that, once their would-be bureaucratic ruling class project was defeated, Ortega and the FSLN leadership turned to an alliance with the capitalist class.

Sandinista Narratives
Sandinista Narratives

Author: Jean-Pierre Reed

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-10-21

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1498523501

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Sandinista Narratives is an analysis of the role of agency in the Nicaraguan Revolution and its aftermath. Jean-Pierre Reed argues that the insurrection in Nicaragua was shaped by political contingency, action-specific subjectivity, and popular culture. He also examines how Sandinista ideology contributed to state-building in Nicaragua while tracing the role of post-revolutionary Sandinismo as a political identity.