![]() After 30 years, Nicaragua is Sandinista ![]() E-mail: mmenendez@jrebelde.cip.cu July 19, 2009 - 00:53:16 GMT A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann. Good idea, that of celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution with the proclamation of Nicaragua, for the second time, as an illiteracy-free territory. Such an achievement suffices to underscore the thread tying the process started on July 19, 1979 to Daniel Ortega’s return to the Presidency after stringing together once more his knitting and building needles. Nicaragua’s life in the last two years fully confirms that the Revolution does go on. The purposes he’s taken up again reveal the devastation left behind by the harsh neoliberal policies imposed by conservative governments that ruled ever since the Sandinistas’ undeserved defeat at the polls in February 1990. Poverty is so firmly established today that giving peasant families a cow, a pig and seeds is an outstanding event that gives them back the chance to work and eat. The very literacy campaign now coming to an end was already a fait accompli back in the time of the ten-year-and-two-month-long Revolution that toppled dictator Somoza and set itself the goal, in very difficult circumstances, of teaching the then-illiterate to read and write, share out land and houses, provided health services and fought against child labor, a common practice with deep roots among families as a result of a lifetime of poverty. It had also laid down a new Constitution to reinforce those efforts in favor of justice. Those who will graduate on Sunday are precisely a part of the living legacy left by 16 years of liberalism that unraveled the fabric of progress, rolled the yarn back around its spool, and left it there, unmoving. Nicaragua certainly has plenty to celebrate these days, as some popular leader has remarked. Around ten social programs have been set in motion to provide citizens with a say in domestic matters, eliminate hunger and make sure the sight of children begging a coin from drivers whose windshields they just wiped remains nothing but a bitter image taken by a camera. It’s about recovering what was destroyed and save what was gained. However, thinking about past events also helps understand today’s problems. Stopped in its tracks by means of an election tainted by the attacks of the so-called contras and Republican president Ronald Reagan’s undeclared, two-pronged war based on political and economic harassment, the Sandinista Revolution was attacked by force of arms and coerced, bleeding to death, into holding an election. Nicaragua was also the Empire’s testing ground for the dirty methods it later used against other processes in America and Europe, not to mention the assistance it underhandedly gave to the country’s homegrown enemies and its decades-long interference in, and manipulation of, its internal affairs. And what’s even more outrageous, those behind the above aggression are the reactionary forces now weighing down on Honduras’s Constitution. Nonetheless, Latin America will never put up with any action intended to hinder its advance to real independence, let alone a return to the brutal times when the Sandinistas were lured into an ambush. Hence the importance of joining with the Honduran people in their struggle against the coup... and the reason why Nicaragua is alive and celebrating the 30th year of its Revolution. http://www.juventudrebelde.cu/opinion/2009-07-19/nicaragua-30-anos-despues-sandinista/ |
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![]() Bien pensado
el celebrar los 30 años del triunfo de la Revolución
Sandinista con la proclamación de Nicaragua, por
segunda vez, como territorio libre de analfabetismo.
Ese derrotero cumplido basta para subrayar el hilo
que enlaza al proceso iniciado el 19 de julio de
1979 con esta vuelta a la presidencia de Daniel
Ortega, que ha enhebrado nuevamente la agujeta de
tejer y construir.
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