ABSTRACT
The contradictions that confront the Nicaraguan revolutionary process are multiple and complex. The derailment of the “transition to socialism” into nascent state capitalism has produced new contradictions between revolution and society. In truth, what the Sandinista Front offered was precisely what the Somozas had forced on the bourgeoisie for decades, and against which at least a part of the bourgeoisie had already rebelled: participation in the economic sphere and total exclusion from political power. Sandinista sympathizers must accomplish two things. First, they must represent the old regime in Nicaragua as more inegalitarian and more static, both economically and socially, than it really was. Second, they must explain how and why a broad-based, polyclassist democratic revolution against a dynastic dictatorship in 1979 became almost immediately an internecine struggle between various branches of the “revolutionary family,” in which the least numerous and least representative elements ultimately prevailed.
