2. ‘The revolution was so many things’

Fernanda Soto

That day we woke up with electricity. In 2006, in Mulukukú, such luxuries could not be regarded as good news – it meant a wake was taking place.¹ In the early morning, all the members of the household gathered in the kitchen.² We all wanted to know who had died the previous night. Guillermo, while serving himself a cup of coffee, announced the news: ‘Somebody killed Don Julio Hernández.’ Don Chinto, a neighbour who had just arrived from downtown Mulukukú, added: ‘I heard a mozo killed him. Well, that old man was arrogant.’³ Guillermo, taking his place at the kitchen table, said: ‘ Mozos are not like they used to be, when people would yell at them and they would keep silent.’

Julio Hernández was one of the richest men in town. Some said he had made a lot of money by not paying back loans he received during the 1980s and by taking his poor neighbours’ land. His death seemed an act of poetic justice: as punishment for all the harm he had done, one of his workers had finally killed him. According to Don Chinto ‘He shot him three times and then fled to Paiwas … the police are after him but I doubt they will get him.’ After hearing the story, I wondered: was it because of the revolution that ‘ mozos are not like they were before’?

That question stayed with me during most of 2006, when intense discussions about the Sandinista Revolution dominated public debate. Memories were particularly relevant at that time, an electoral year when it seemed the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) might return to power (as it eventually did). As Nicaraguans debated whether or not they should vote for the FSLN, their choices were guided by their memories of the revolutionary years, memories that were highly contested. Sandinistas, particularly those linked to the FSLN, described the revolution as a moment of profound positive change, while opponents described those years as the dark night of Nicaragua’s history. For those who saw its legacy as positive, the revolution had led to the construction of new political subjects characterised by solidarity, strong organisation and a politicised analysis of the world. Those on the opposite side referred to another legacy, one of economic backwardness and authoritarian rule.⁴ For both Nicaragua was exceptional, that is, exceptionally better or worse than other Central American nations.⁵

1 In 2006, Mulukukú was not yet connected to the national power grid, and the town had electricity from 9 am to 9 pm.

2 I was living with a group of nuns and we shared our meals with the people who worked with them in a local educational programme they ran.

3 All the names used in the article have been modified. In Nicaragua a mozo refers to a rural labourer.

Having myself been raised in a Sandinista family, I grew up with positive and romantic renditions of that past. Those memories were problematised later on, while working in the countryside. There I heard about the ‘many other things’ the revolution was, which are part of the ‘forgotten’ episodes of the hegemonic Sandinista memory. They are kept outside of the Sandinista narrative because some preceive them as a possible threat to the party and, thus, to the revolution itself. This does not mean that they are absent from public debate. On the contrary, in 2006 reports of these episodes were ubiquitous in Nicaragua, repeatedly reiterated by the FSLN’s opposition.⁶ As you will see in this chapter, a few Sandinista supporters also gave voice to more critical memories, but they tended to do so only in private.

For Beatriz Sarlo, the forgotten episodes that are remembered ‘establish a hierarchy of value: what matters and what doesn’t matter’.⁷ For her, giving a significant place to politics entails discussing such hierarchies.⁸ The forgotten episodes buried in the memories of the Sandinistas draw attention to the hierarchies that were at play in the past and, thus, to the politics of memory in Nicaragua. I agree with her that to give a significant place to politics when analysing Sandinista memories entails discussing its hierarchy of value. To reflect about what is remembered, who remembers and how they ought to remember in public can guide us in that endeavour. First and foremost, those questions invite us to discuss who gets to define such arrangements and the issues that move them.

Alongside the forgotten, we find the ‘silent lessons’ of the revolution: they are what we – individually and collectively – make of that moment. These lessons are sometimes maps, but they can also be thought as binoculars that we use to gaze at the landscape and choose the safest route to take. We can get a glimpse of these lessons by paying attention to what people say – or do not say – about the past, but, mostly, by taking a close look at how they choose to voice these memories.⁹ These lessons speak about our relationship with the past and today’s dominant hierarchy of value.

4 E.g., since 2006 government campaigns have referred to the post-2006 period as Nicaragua’s second Sandinista Revolution. They emphasise words like ‘solidarity’, ‘unity’ and socialism as well as Christianity (as religious values are equated with revolutionary ones). The FSLN’s political opponents, in contrast, highlight government corruption and repression. Roberto Orozco, an independent researcher, analysed the assassination of peasant leaders in the Ayapal region; he says: ‘Remember that the population is denouncing arbitrary detentions, selective assassinations, disappearances. All this is sending a message about the serious situation lived in Ayapal; this is a surge of activities, and they [the FSLN] are applying the same prophylaxis (as they say in their jargon) used in the eighties.’ I. López and E. Romero, ‘Asesinan a productor de Ayapal que denunció en La Prensa maltrato del Ejército’, La Prensa, 18 Apr. 2016.

5 Carlos Vilas offers a ‘balanced’ political analysis of that decade in El legado de una década.

6 Among the opposition parties was la Resistencia, known as the Contras (counterrevolutionary forces) in the 1980s, and the Conservative party – the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS) – formed by Sandinistas who had broken with FSLN.

7 B. Sarlo, ‘Los intelectuales, la tierra fértil del kirchnerismo’; 21.

8 Ibid.

I understand the forgotten and the silent lessons not as providing evidence of the failures or achievements of the revolution, but as part of the fabric of social change. Together they tell us a story, one about plans that unfolded in unforeseen ways and the red flags that appeared along the way. They reveal the untouchable creeds of the revolution: a belief in the primacy of the vanguard, in the responsibility to uplift the ‘poor’, the conviction that all opposition from below was the result of ‘a lack of revolutionary consciousness’, and the overconfidence of revolutionaries who assumed they knew it all. They also speak about people touched by solidarity and generosity, by dreams, faith, hope and the committed attempt of thousands to change Nicaragua’s society.

This chapter is about the ‘many other things’ the revolution brought. It relates the stories of three peasants (a woman and two men) who supported the revolution. These accounts of the harshness of revolution in the midst of a war and its aftermath are permeated by the expectations awakened by revolutionary discourse and memories tarnished by the revolution’s inability to live up to those expectations. They are also stories of social change, which offer a more nuanced and complex perspective on the past. This introduction is followed by a historical contextualisation of the region in which I collected the narratives, the three testimonies and the conclusion.

The revolution in the countryside

November 2006 marked what Sandinistas in Nicaragua have called the beginning of its second revolution. In 2006, after 16 years of what were known as neoliberal governments, the FSLN (popularly known as El Frente) was elected to rule the country. Seven months before the elections I moved to Siuna and then to Mulukukú.¹⁰ The first is an ex-mining town in the Northern Caribbean Autonomous Region of Nicaragua, 318 km to the north-east of Managua. The second is a mid-size peasant town, 70 km southwest of Siuna. Mulukukú was famous during the 1980s because it was the base for the largest military training school of the Sandinista People’s Army (EPS by its Spanish acronym). People from this region, like most rural habitants in Nicaragua, did not overwhelmingly support the revolution. On the contrary, most joined or were sympathisers of the Contras (the counterrevolutionary forces).¹¹

9 Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes a valuable and intellectually remarkable analysis of the making of silences in and about Haiti’s history, and their impacts on the present for both Haitians and those of us and born on this side of the Atlantic: Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.

10 Both towns are now capitals of municipalities that hold the same name.

During the 1980s, for many Nicaraguan peasants the revolution meant a substantial increase in state interference in their lives. While programmes such as the literacy campaign were welcomed, agrarian reform was a source of conflict. The Sandinista government wanted to transform peasant practices – deemed ‘backward’ – and modernise the countryside through the formation of state-owned agricultural enterprises and rural cooperatives.¹² State policies pushed peasants into rapidly changing their organisational strategies.¹³ However, the logic of collective work promoted by the state was in direct opposition to local conceptions of prosperity based on the idea of intense individual work, especially among small farmers and peasants.¹⁴

The Siuna-Mulukukú region was no exception. At the time, it was part of the agrarian frontier, a region of recent colonisation where peasants deforested the area in order to have access to land for agriculture and ranching. As Larson stresses, historically the agrarian frontier has been characterised by a lack of infrastructure and minimal state presence.¹⁵ In Siuna-Mulukukú, the spatial organisation of communities (in some places it can take an hour to reach your closest neighbour) reflected a preference for less collective forms of life, shaped by ‘conquest narratives’ that emphasised the domestication of nature by men’s hard labour.¹⁶

In the 1980s, rural inhabitants of the agrarian frontier felt that cooperatives not only threatened their well-being but also disrespected their way of life. Not surprisingly, peasants in those regions were reluctant to participate in cooperatives. Only Sandinista sympathisers (many of whom had collaborated with the guerrillas) and landless rural workers willingly joined the first cooperatives.

By 1982, as a result of pressure from the Sandinista state, cooperatives had been organised in most rural communities of Siuna-Mulukukú. They were small, made up only of community members, and they followed the Credit and Saving Cooperatives model (CCS by its Spanish acronym): their members shared a government loan but worked their land individually. In 1983, with the increase of Contra armed groups in the countryside, the government decided to move people to larger cooperatives that were closer to roads or towns. The goal was to offer protection, facilitate access to basic services like healthcare and education, and to exert better control over the population. At that time, cooperatives in Siuna were no longer centred on productive activities – they became Cooperativas de Auto-Defensa (Self-Defence Cooperatives).¹⁷

11 Alejandro Bendaña has compiled testimonies of the peasants who joined the Resistencia and the reasons that moved them to do so in Una tragedia campesina: testimonios de la Resistencia.

12 See: INRA, ‘Marco estratégico de la Reforma Agraria’. Paper presented at the Latin American Sociology Congress, Departamento de Propaganda y Educación Política del FSLN, Managua, 1981; V. Rueda Estrada, Recompas, recontras, revueltos y armados: posguerra y conflictos por la tierra en Nicaragua 1990–2008; M.J. Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development, 109; E. Baumeister, Estructura y reforma agraria en Nicaragua (1979–1989). See also the chapter by Jose Luis Rocha in this book.

13 CIERA, La mosquitia en la revolución.

14 See L. Horton, Peasants in Arms: War and Peace in the Mountains of Nicaragua, 1979–1994, for a similar analysis about people from another rural community in the agrarian frontier of Nicaragua.

15 A. Larson, Tendencias actuales de la frontera agrícola: las contradicciones entre conservación y desarrollo, 7. See also ibid. for a description of the agrarian frontier in the northern region of Nicaragua.

16 F. Soto, Ventanas en la memoria: recuerdos de la revolución en la frontera agrícola.

If the government had faced difficulties in convincing people to work collectively, it was even harder to persuade them to leave their land and move to Self-Defence Cooperatives. Most had to be forced to do so. The Sandinista army led the displacement, exacerbating frictions between peasants and the army. The first to move were those peasants who had already been threatened by the Contras, followed by those who feared the army. Many others believed the process was a plot to take their land away and either decided to stay put on their ranches or to join the Contras.

Lupe, a peasant who stayed in his community until mid 1984, said:

Even though compulsory military service was not officially introduced until September 1983, male cooperative members in rural areas like Siuna were drafted as early as 1980, in order to create the Sandinista Peoples’ Militia. They formed the first battalions sent to the Coco River and the Puerto Cabezas region in 1981 (where the ‘Red Christmas’ Operation took place) and many of them remained in the Sandinista army until 1990.¹⁹ The military draft only increased tension in the region and accelerated rejection of the revolution. Many peasants preferred to join the Contras voluntarily, rather than be forced to join the Sandinista army. By 1984 most men were fighting and only women, children and elderly people lived in the Self-Defence Cooperatives. Unable to produce their own staples and dependent on state aid for food, medicines and tools, they were also the main target of Contra attacks.

The region’s rural areas became a war zone and most people migrated to towns, cooperatives or Honduran refugee camps. At great personal risk, some families decided to stay on their ranches to defend their property. They had no access to education or healthcare (as teachers and nurses were targeted by the Contras), they could not move freely around their property, and they lived in constant fear of being taken by either army. To survive, they had to navigate between the two armies, the Sandinistas and the Contras.

17 See the chapter by David Cooper in this book.

18 Interview, 26 May 2007.

19 This is the popular name for the Sandinista operation that forced the displacement of 39 Miskitu communities from the Río Coco, in the wake of counterrevolutionary attacks along the border with Honduras.

By the mid 1980s it had become clear that those in the region who supported the Sandinista government were a minority. Many of these Sandinistas had been guerrilla collaborators who were satisfied with the social programmes offered by the government. And while most resisted leaving their ranches for as long as they could, in the end they agreed to join the cooperatives in the hope that when the war was over, the revolution would fulfil its main promise of a better life for all. In 2006 Don Chepe, a guerrilla collaborator, summarised their experiences in the 1980s and 1990s:

As in the past, hopes were placed in the FSLN – but people like Don Chepe were the exceptions and they were the ones whom I was interested in understanding. I wanted to know why some peasants supported the revolutionary process and the FSLN in a region where most either joined the Contras or fled to Honduras. Their stories differ from the idealised, hegemonic Sandinista memory which cast solidarity as an ever-present aspect of processes promoted by the revolution. Nevertheless, the more negative parts of their accounts do not invalidate their positive memories of that time, nor have they precluded their continuing support for the revolution.

‘Many things’

Concha

Concha, the daughter of a guerrilla collaborator, was 12 years old when her family migrated to Siuna. They were originally from Boaco, but had to leave their land because ‘there the poor could not live in peace’. In the 1970s all her family supported the Sandinista guerrillas. She proudly recalls: ‘My two sons were very small and they also supported the Frente.’ In 2006, Concha was a 65-year-old widow, her husband having died during the war. When recalling her life in a Sandinista cooperative she said:

20 Interview, 6 Dec. 2006.

For Concha the years in the cooperative were hard. The leadership was corrupt and took advantage of its power to make money from collective resources. She later added: ‘I don’t blame the Frente for what happened in the cooperative, I blame the cooperative leaders. They were the ones who took away all we had, they were the ones who lied to us.’ Her story was quite different from official stories, narrated by men, about the Sandinistas cooperatives. These referred to solidarity, companionship, communal support and protection. In contrast, women like Concha recalled the difficulties they had faced during that time. In the end, it was they who had spent the most time in the cooperatives.

Jacinta, a nun with whom I lived in Mulukukú and who had worked in Concha’s cooperative during the 1980s, partially agreed with her. She knew about the difficulties people experienced in the cooperative, and she considered the FSLN to carry most of the responsibility for them. Jacinta thought the FSLN should have trained and assisted people in better ways. She said:

According to Jacinta, the cows were not eaten by a tiger but sold by the cooperative leaders. For her, the FSLN’s political project was not wrong in itself, but making it a reality was the challenge. Her story underlines the difficulty of calling for solidarity at a time when war requires rapid and aggressive action. It also speaks to the complexities of managing collective projects on Nicaragua’s agrarian frontier, especially projects that were designed by state functionaries who did not always understand or value people’s knowledge and ways of life. Today ‘rural change’ continues to be an important leitmotif in the FSLN’s narrative. ‘Solidarity’ remains part of this political discourse, but the emphasis is on employment and access to individual loans, rather than on attempts to create cooperatives in the countryside.²⁴

21 Interview, 9 Dec. 2006.

22 In Nicaragua jaguars are known as tigers.

23 Interview, 25 May 2006.

24 Discussions concerning the FSLN’s current relations with cooperatives and initiatives are linked to what is called ‘economía social’. See S. Cáceres, ‘Somos protagonistas del desarrollo rural, Envío, no. 385, Apr. 2014.

Guillermo

At the time I met Guillermo he was in his late fifties. Originally from a small community close to Siuna, he spent most of the 1980s in the Sandinista army. In the 1990s he started working with a group of nuns in Mulukukú in various educational projects. He lived close to the nuns’ house and we shared most of our meals together. He almost never talked about politics. What he really liked to do was recall stories of his youth – at such moments he would sometimes touch on the war in the 1980s. He described the places he was sent to fight, the rivers he had to cross and one could see through his stories that he still felt the weight of the dead bodies he had carried then.

His community became a cooperative in the early 1980s, but by 1984 most of its members had been relocated to a larger one because of the war. When I asked him about his experience of working collectively he told me: ‘In the cooperative we had a good harvest and a bad harvest and after that I don’t know because I was drafted.’ I asked him once: ‘Guillermo did you ever think of joining the Contra?’ He told me what nobody else had dared to say:

Unfortunately, I’m unable to translate this violent episode with all the comic undertones he gave it in the telling. Guillermo’s narration made us both laugh at times, especially when he described the astonished faces of the policemen. He was not carrying his ID or wearing his uniform because he feared being intercepted by the Contras on his way to Puerto Cabezas. If they had found him with a military ID, it would have meant a death sentence.

Guillermo never publicly said that he was a Sandinista or supported the Frente. He did not like to participate in political activities nor to offer his political opinions: ‘because people get upset when talking about politics’. However, when people asked him for his thoughts, he was open and sincere. When recalling the revolution, he spoke with great passion at times, while at others making light of the sad moments he had endured. And often preferred not to say much at all about certain matters. Without fear, he also recounted the things he thought were wrong. An example of this was his experience of police aggression, one that made him think about joining the Contras. However, in his stories it always seemed that, despite the mistakes, something made up for them which led him to continue supporting the revolution, such as the one about the return to his ranch.

25 Interview, 15 Nov. 2006.

When Guillermo told his superior that he wanted to leave the army and return to his community, he was sent to jail again. He spent a couple of weeks there until his superiors completed an internal investigation which confirmed that he was not leaving the army to join the Contras. They authorised his return, but when Guillermo got to his ranch, he found another family in residence there. A man told him that the government had given them that land and he had a piece of ‘paper’ (a title) to prove it. Guillermo, who also had a title, went to the Agrarian Development Ministry in Siuna.²⁶ He made an appointment with the director and told him:

Laughing at the story, Guillermo said, ‘That young woman was very smart.’ Although he got his ranch back, his wife had not waited for him during the war. He later started working for the Church and decided to finish high school. His stories never showed resentment towards the police, the Sandinista army or the Sandinista government. He did not overlook the unfair treatment he had experienced at the hands of the police and the army’s or the government’s mistakes. But in his stories one could see that he still believed the revolution was a better option. He could defend himself, he entered state offices and was heard by those in authority.

The abuse of power by the Sandinista police and army in the 1980s forms part of the forgotten episodes of the FSLN narrative, in much the same way that the Contras’ abuse of power comprises part of their forgotten episodes.²⁸ Unlike Guatemala and El Salvador, in the 1990s Nicaragua’s government did not create a truth commission to investigate human rights abuses committed by both armies. The peace agreement concluded at the time involved legally condoning these occurrences. It was argued that if peace was to be achieved, then forgiveness was needed from both sides.²⁹

26 Ministry of Agrarian Development and Institute of Agrarian Reform (MIDINRA).

27 Interview, 20 Nov. 2006.

28 See Vilas, El legado de una década, 43.

29 Rueda Estrada, Recompas, recontras, revueltos y armados, 404.

Raul

Raul’s views regarding the Sandinista government were different from Guillermo’s. He was born in Matagalpa and he migrated to Siuna with his family in the late 1970s, fleeing Somoza’s Guardia. In Matagalpa he became involved with the Socialist party and supported the guerrillas. He liked to recall: ‘I was not from the 19 of July generation, I’m from the Pancasán generation’, underlining that his relationship with the FSLN dated from the 1960s and not from 1979, like most peasants in the region.³⁰ When he recalled the late 1960s he said: ‘We [peasants] ignored our rights, we lived in the montaña and spent perhaps ten years there, working. Nobody would visit us to teach us anything.’³¹

Most of his stories revolved around the war and the defeat of the revolution in the 1990s. In his recollections, one could see a strong critique, frustration and even resentment towards the FSLN. He said he was dissatisfied with the way the party had treated them – the peasants – after the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat in 1990. He mentioned once that he thought some of the FSLN members had lost their Sandinista values, that many ‘thought they were “too important” and forgot about the rest’.

The root of Raul’s complaints was what the opposition called the ‘piñata’: the distribution of state goods among FSLN members after its 1990 electoral defeat.³² The FSLN argued that these appropriations were necessary to ensure that the party had economic resources in the future. However, the decision exacerbated the economic gap between Sandinistas and led to ethical contradictions. Raul’s comment that ‘after giving my youth to the FSLN, I was left broken’, while other Sandinistas acquired properties and became rich, made this all too evident. His words were bittersweet. Contrary to what he had been told and believed – that the peasants would always come first – when I interviewed him in early 2007, he felt that they had been left with the ‘dregs’. He told me: ‘You can see it, there are no peasants in the FSLN directive, nor in other governmental positions. During the time the FSLN ruled [in the 1980s], only one, Benigna Mendiola, got to be a deputy.’

He recalled how he had left his land in the 1980s to join the cooperatives and how, later, he left the cooperative to work with the party. In 1990, when the FSLN lost the election, he tried to return to the cooperative to claim a piece of land but its leadership did not accept him back. He then visited an FSLN political leader in Siuna and, with his support, was able to get a house with a title in his name. Raul said: ‘If they had not given me that little house I would have been left without anything.’ Afterwards, he was able to recover part of the land he had abandoned before joining the cooperative. He told me:

30 Pancasán is a mountainous region located in the municipality of San Ramón, Matagalpa. In 1967, the National Guard uncovered a guerrilla column in the area and assassinated almost all of its members. The guerrillas had built a strong alliance with a local peasant union and an intense repression of peasants in the region followed, leading either to their assassination or their forced migration to regions such as Siuna. Soto, Ventanas en la memoria, and M. Baltodano, Memorias de la lucha Sandinista (Managua, 2010).

31 In Nicaragua, ‘montaña’ is a synonym for ‘the bush’, that is, a space not yet ‘conquered by agriculture’. The montaña was the place where the Sandinista guerrillas hid from Somoza’s National Guard in the years before 1979 and it was also the place where the Contra War was fought in the 1980s.

32 A piñata is a clay pot filled with sweets. At children’s parties, the piñata is broken and the sweets shared out.

Raul was referring to Jaime, an ex-guerrilla member, with whom he had worked before 1979 and during the 1980s. In the 1990s many cooperative members returned to their ranches to find that new owners had taken over their land. Many others did not dare to return, fearing retaliation from the Contras. The economic conditions of the 1990s were, for many, more complex than those that pertained in the 1980s, made worse by the fears raised by the uncertainty of the post-war period. Raul concluded:

Raul was upset – he was not poorer than other Sandinista peasants in Siuna, but he felt he deserved more political and economic recognition from the FSLN. He was not unhappy with the enrichment of party members, but because he had been left out of the division of spoils. I asked him once, ‘Would you do it again? Would you participate again in the guerrilla and the revolution?’ His answer was categorical:

During the early 1990s, the distribution of goods among FSLN members and the unequal privileges some of them enjoyed were controversial issues, which continue to be controversial today. Questions are constantly raised about how government resources are used, how they are distributed, and how decisions are taken at the national and local levels.³⁶ In this book, Cooper and Francis’s chapters analyse how different communities participate in decision-making processes at the communal and local levels. Their work is extremely important for gaining an understanding of issues such as participation, local conceptions of social and economic rights, communal agency and government responsibilities in present-day Nicaragua.

33 Interview, 11 June 2007.

34 To tell a chagüite is to give a speech full of empty promises. Interview, 11 June 2007.

35 Ibid.

36 S. Martí i Puig, ‘Nicaragua: la consolidación de un régimen híbrido’; also Vilas, El legado de una década.

Remember Julio Hernández?

Returning to the story with which this chapter began, ultimately we heard the news that the person who killed Julio Hernández was not a mozo but a mandador.³⁷ The police never caught him.

But the question remains: did the revolution ensure that mozos were not as passive as they had been before? The answer is both yes and no. Certainly, before the revolution there were courageous mozos who confronted their arrogant bosses, but there is no doubt that the revolution upset Nicaragua’s ‘social balance’ for Sandinistas and anti-Sandinistas alike. In 1991, Dora María Téllez, a revolutionary comandante, said: ‘The Nicaraguan peasantry’s struggle has gone beyond my expectations; although it was counterrevolutionary, it took the FSLN’s political programme. The Contras ... are out there, demanding their rights as peasants.’³⁸ Lynn Horton makes a similar argument when she asserts that: ‘Among peasants who fought with the contras in defence of pre-revolutionary values and relationships, the struggle itself and the example of the FSLN transformed their attitudes and expectations. Anti-Sandinista Quilalí peasants of the postwar period were no longer the quiescent peasantry of a decade earlier.’³⁹

Indeed, the Sandinista Revolution made many Nicaraguans feel like ‘architects of their liberation’, as the lyrics of the FSLN’s hymn reminded the population. Peasants were not excluded, whether they were Sandinistas or anti-Sandinista. Many felt they were constructing their own history, one where they were not subjects any more, but rather active participants in a project. The challenge was to make that project a reality, to change an unequal society in the midst of a war and an economic embargo, to navigate internal disagreements about how change might be achieved and to overcome entrenched structures of hierarchy and privilege.⁴⁰

In that context, it is no surprise that the revolution’s attempt to overturn Nicaragua’s social balance was filled with contradictions, both personal and collective. As Concha’s testimony shows, some peasants were given leadership roles in state projects defined by people who had preconceived ideas about who the peasants were, what they ‘needed’ and how to ‘support’ them. While some local leaders ended up doing the best they could, others took advantage of those opportunities to reproduce traditional conceptions of leadership. As the case of Guillermo shows, peasants were able to enter official spaces where many had not been welcomed before; at the same time, many were repressed by the Sandinista police and army. Finally, as Raul recalled, few peasants had political leadership roles as the FSLN reproduced inequalities within its own party structure, and those few leaders did not participate as equals in decision-making nor in the redistribution of wealth. In the end, inequalities coexisted alongside social changes – these are the ‘many other things’ the revolution represented.

37 Also known as capataz, or the boss of farm workers. He worked for the ranch owner.

38 Envío, ‘Los recontras: campesinos armados con amplia base social’, no. 119, Sept. 1991.

39 Horton, Peasants in Arms, 17.

40 A nuanced analysis of Cold War geopolitics is necessary here to understand Nicaragua’s situation at that time.

As mentioned above, the memories recorded in this chapter are forgotten episodes and within them we find the silent lessons of the revolution. These are visible in political initiatives, personal understandings and collective actions. One does not always find a causal relationship between the forgotten and the silent lessons, and examples of the latter often lack moral ‘grandiosity’. However, both speak about ways in which some people make sense of the past, as well as the complexities of social change.

For some, the main silent lesson is that one must work within the dominant economic structure in the hope that, eventually, part of the revolutionary dream can be made a reality – a tactic made more complex by the fact that everyone interprets the revolutionary dream in their own way. For others, the silent lesson is to constantly recall those years, or to choose to keep their revolutionary memories to themselves. One colleague, noting the lack of discussion about the Sandinista Revolution in university classrooms in Nicaragua, recounted how surprised one of her students was to learn about the Sandinista patriotic military service of the 1980s. The student later found out her father had been drafted and spent two years of his youth fighting in ‘the montaña’ without ever mentioning that experience to his children.

For yet others, the silent lesson entails a profound scepticism about any attempt to remake Nicaraguan society, sometimes accompanied by considerable anger about the revolution itself. Perhaps, as Rancière states, ‘The current scepticism is the result of a surfeit of faith.’⁴¹ In some cases, that faith endured and was passed on to the next generation. I saw that faith in my parents’ eyes but also in Concha’s, Guillermo’s and Raul’s. I could see the gleam in their eyes when they remembered the revolution. To me, it was the gleam of remembering not just dreams, but a collective attempt to make those dreams come true. As Sofia Montenegro says when recalling those years:

41 J. Ranciere, ‘La imagen intolerable’, 103.

42 S. Montenegro, ‘¿Es revolucionario el FSLN?’, El Nuevo Diario, 14 May 1994, 9.

The Sandinista Revolution, despite its successes and failures, despite its pains and glories, opened up a space for Nicaraguans to imagine themselves and their society in new ways. In the end, the revolution is about forgotten episodes and silent lessons, but also about collective attempts to make dreams a reality. It is the vibrancy of that collective endeavour that, for many, made the revolution exceptional.

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