Sandinistas Speak

The best selection in English of historic documents of the FSLN and speeches and interviews from the opening years of the 1979 Sandinista revolution.

This book explores Protestant-Sandinista relations in revolutionary Nicaragua, demonstrating how and why most Protestants vigorously opposed the revolution, tracing Sandinista irritation with Pentecostal belief and practice, and identifying how brutal Sandinista repression of Pentecostals led many to join the Contras.

Through the fall of Anastasio Somoza, the rise of the Sandinistas, and the contra war, the United States and Nicaragua seemed destined to repeat the mistakes made by the U.S. and Cuba forty years before. The 1990 election in Nicaragua broke the pattern. Robert Pastor was a major US policymaker in the critical period leading up to and following the Sandinista Revolution of 1979. A decade later after writing the first edition of this book, he organized the International Mission led by Jimmy Carter that mediated the first free election in Nicaragua's history. From his unique vantage point, and utilizing a wealth of original material from classified government documents and from personal interviews with U.S. and Nicaraguan leaders, Pastor shows how Nicaragua and the United States were prisoners of a tragic history and how they finally escaped. This revised and updated edition covers the events of the democratic transition, and it extracts the lessons to be learned from the past.

Sandino's Daughters, Margaret Randall's conversations with Nicaraguan women in their struggle against the dictator Somoza in 1979, brought the lives of a group of extraordinary female revolutionaries to the American and world public. The book remains a landmark. Now, a decade later, Randall returns to interview many of the same women and others. In Sandino's Daughters Revisited, they speak of their lives during and since the Sandinista administration, the ways in which the revolution made them strong--and also held them back. Ironically, the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas at the ballot box has given Sandinista women greater freedom to express their feelings and ideas.

Following the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, young bohemian artists rushed to the newly formed Nicaraguan national film institute INCINE to contribute to "the recovery of national identity" through the creation of a national film project. Over the next eleven years, the filmmakers of INCINE produced over seventy films—documentary, fiction, and hybrids—that collectively reveal a unique vision of the Revolution drawn not from official FSLN directives, but from the filmmakers' own cinematic interpretations of the Revolution as they were living it. This book examines the INCINE film project and assesses its achievements in recovering a Nicaraguan national identity through the creation of a national cinema. Using a wealth of firsthand documentation—the films themselves, interviews with numerous INCINE personnel, and INCINE archival records—Jonathan Buchsbaum follows the evolution of INCINE's project and situates it within the larger historical project of militant, revolutionary filmmaking in Latin America. His research also raises crucial questions about the viability of national cinemas in the face of accelerating globalization and technological changes which reverberate far beyond Nicaragua's experiment in revolutionary filmmaking.