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From Solidarity to Class Struggle: Ten Years of Post-Somozan Nicaragua

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AID THAT COUNTS: THE WESTERN CONTRIBUTION TO DEVELOPMENT AND SURVIVAL IN NICARAGUA. By BARRACLOUGHSOLON, BURENARIANE VAN, GARIAZZOALICIA, SUNDARAMANJALI, and UTTINGPETER. (Amsterdam and Managua: Transnational Institute and Coordinadora Regional de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales, 1988. U.S. distribution by the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C. Pp. 157. $5.95.)
WOMEN AND THE NICARAGUAN REVOLUTION. By BORGETOMÁS. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1982. Pp. 30. $.75.)
NICARAGUA: POLITICS, ECONOMICS, AND SOCIETY. By CLOSEDAVID. (London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1988. Pp. 221. $35.00 cloth, $12.50 paper.)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Kenneth J. Mijeski
Kenneth J. Mijeski*
Affiliation:
East Tennessee State University
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Type
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Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , 1991 , pp. 247 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. See John A. Booth, “Celebrating the Demise of Somocismo: Fifty Recent Spanish Sources on the Nicaraguan Revolution,” LAR 17, no. 1 (1982):173–89; and Laura J. Enriquez, “Half a Decade of Sandinista Policy-Making: Recent Publications on Revolutionary Policies in Contemporary Nicaragua,” LAR 22, no. 3 (1987):209–22.

2. Two of the best known anti-Sandinista works in English are Shirley Christian's Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family (New York: Random House, 1985), written from the standpoint of complaints lodged by well-to-do Nicaraguans; and David Nolan's FSLN: The Ideology of the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Coral Gables, Ha.: University of Miami Press, 1984), a cold war “exposé” of the Sandinistas' communist plot.

3. For a glimpse of the early stages of Reagan policy, see Nicaragua under Siege, edited by Marlene Dixon and Susanne Jonas (San Francisco, Calif.: Synthesis, 1984). For a comprehensive examination of Reagan policy toward Nicaragua, see Reagan versus the Sandinistas: The Undeclared War on Nicaragua, edited by Thomas W. Walker (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987).

4. Recent examples of such work beyond what Laura Enriquez examined in her excellent review are The Political Economy of Revolutionary Nicaragua, edited by Rose J. Spalding (Boston, Mass.: Allen and Unwin, 1987); and Nicaragua: Profiles of the Revolutionary Public Sector, edited by Michael E. Conroy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987).

5. See among others, Nicaraguan Women: Unlearning the Alphabet of Submission (New York: Women's International Resource Exchange Collective, 1985); Gary Ruchwarger, People in Power: Forging a Grassroots Democracy in Nicaragua (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1987); and Phillip Berryman, The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in the Central American Revolutions (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1984).

6. Walker's Nicaragua in Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1982) and Nicaragua: The First Five Years (New York: Praeger, 1985) are both edited works that present various analyses of politics and public policy before and after the revolution. His most recent edited work, Reagan versus the Sandinistas, presents the work of fourteen scholars who assess the dimensions of U.S. policy toward revolutionary Nicaragua.

7. English-language general introductions to the Nicaraguan Revolution include the following titles: George Black, Triumph of the People (London: Zed, 1981); John A. Booth, The End and the Beginning: The Nicaraguan Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1982; revised and updated, 1985); Carlos Vilas, The Sandinista Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985); and Henri Weber, Nicaragua: The Sandinista Revolution (London: Verso, 1981). Like the first edition of Nicaragua, the Land of Sandino, the Black, Vilas, and Weber volumes basically analyze the insurrection and the first year of the revolution. Booth's revised version is more detailed and comprehensive than the Walker volume under review here and has become a favorite among scholars in the United States. Finally, an excellent work that appeared recently is Dennis Gilbert's Sandinistas (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Gilbert's work focuses on the tensions between the Sandinistas' Marxism and their pragmatism in policy-making.

8. Carlos M. Vilas, “Troubles Everywhere: An Economic Perspective on the Sandinista Revolution,” in The Political Economy of Revolutionary Nicaragua, 236–37 See also Maria Veronica Frenkel's “The Evolution of Food and Agricultural Policies during Economic Crisis and War,” in Nicaragua: Profiles of the Revolutionary Public Sector, 201–36; and two essays in Spalding's Political Economy of Revolutionary Nicaragua: Peter Utting, “Domestic Supply and Food Shortages,” 127–50; and Rose J. Spalding and Laura J. Enriquez, “Banking Systems and Revolutionary Change: The Politics of Agricultural Credit in Nicaragua,” 105–26.

9. In this regard, while Vilas and Forrest Colburn approach Nicaragua from widely divergent political perspectives, both note that agricultural workers are comparatively worse off than are workers in other sectors of the Nicaraguan economy. See Vilas, “Troubles Everywhere”; and Colburn, Post-Revolutionary Nicaragua: State, Class, and the Dilemmas of Agrarian Policy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

10. See in particular, Laura O'Shaughnessy and Luis H. Serra, The Church and Revolution in Nicaragua (Athens: Ohio University, 1985); Teófilo Cabestrero, Ministers of God, Ministers of the People (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, 1983); Michael Dodson and Tommie Sue Montgomery, “Churches in the Nicaraguan Revolution,” in Nicaragua in Revolution, 161–80; and the Rev. Carlos Escorcia, “Las Asambleas de Dios en Nicaragua,” Amanecer: reflexión cristiana en la nueva Nicaragua nos. 38–39 (Dec. 1985):22–25.

11. All translations are by the reviewer.

12. Interview with Tom Jelton for National Public Radio, aired 1 May 1989.

13. Colburn, Post-Revolutionary Nicaragua, 122.

14. Aid That Counts makes a good companion piece to the collection edited by Michael Conroy on policy-making in the domestic public sector. See Nicaragua: Profiles of the Revolutionary Public Sector.

15. Vilas, “Troubles Everywhere,” 244–45.

16. Andrew Reding, “‘By the People’: Constitution Making in Nicaragua,” Christianity and Crisis 46, no. 18 (8 Dec. 1986):434–41.

17. Recent titles include Eileen Haley, “Nicaragua/Women/Revolution,” Hecate 9, no. 1 (1983):80–110; Jane Deighton et al., Sweet Ramparts: Women in Revolutionary Nicaragua (Rome and Santiago, Chile: Isis International, 1983); Margaret Randall, “Now That We Can Speak Freely: Three Women Tell Their Personal Stories of the Nicaraguan Revolution,” Mother Jones 6 (Apr. 1981):39–42; Richard Columbia, “Women in Nicaragua: A Study of the Women's Movement,” Crosscurrents 1 (1987):1–17; Anne Sisson Runyan, “Nicaragua Is to Feminism as the U.S. Is to Patriarchy,” Atlantis 13 (1987):148–53; Joanna Passaro, “Conceptualization of Gender: An Example from Nicaragua,” Feminist Issues 13 (1987):49–60; Maxine Molyneux, “Mobilization without Emancipation? Women's Interests, the State, and Revolution in Nicaragua,” Feminist Studies 11 (Summer 1985):227–54; and Beth Stephens, “Women in Nicaragua,” Monthly Review 40 (Dec. 1988):1–19.

18. See, for example, Runyon, “Nicaragua Is to Feminism.”

19. See Molyneux, “Mobilization without Emancipation?”

20. Ibid., 233.

21. Kathleen Logan, “Women in the Nicaraguan Revolution: Some Implications for Women's Studies,” paper presented at the meeting of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies, 15 Apr. 1989, Myrtle Beach, S.C.

22. Exceptions include Andrew Reding, “‘By the People”‘; Jules Lobel, “The Meaning of Democracy: Representative and Participatory Democracy in the New Nicaraguan Constitution,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 49, no. 3 (1988):823–89; and Max Azicri, “The 1987 Nicaraguan Constitution: An Analytical Commentary,” Review of Socialist Law 15, no. 1:5–29. A book-length work is in preparation that will include previously published essays as well as new material on the constitution. See The 1987 Nicaraguan Constitution, edited by Kenneth J. Mijeski (Athens: Ohio University Press, forthcoming).