The stirring strains of “Nicaragua, Nicaraguita” played over the loudspeakers as thousands poured into the Plaza of the Revolution on July 19, 1983. Young people with raised fists and red-and-black bandannas, peasants in crisp white guayaberas and wide-brimmed straw hats, women in military uniforms rifles on their shoulders. They cheered when President Daniel Ortega spoke about the literacy campaign, the free health clinics, the new agricultural cooperatives on land seized from Somoza’s cohort of oligarchs.
The author with Nicaraguan musician Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy at the “Breaking the Blockade of Ideas” event in 1986, held at the Calvin Simmons Auditorium in Oakland in 1986. Photo by Rick Rocamora