ABSTRACT
Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s Cantos de Cifar y del mar dulce and Ernesto Cardenal’s Vuelos de victoria outline the history of slow violence in Somocista Nicaragua through the Revolution. Select poems from both collections elucidate how contamination incrementally damaged the environment, as well as how the Sandinista government used their political victory as a moment to renegotiate human and nonhuman relationships. These works harbor ecological concern and illustrate how environmentalist thought, solidified in literature after the poetic subjects notice mysterious deaths and environmental damage, demystifies Nicaragua’s official discourse related to environmental history. Cantos de Cifar y del mar dulce expresses a latent worry for irregular changes in nature that do not coincide with a literary sense of place. This chapter examines how nonhumans emerge as actors in Nicaragua’s political history, first as victims of slow violence and later as corevolutionaries. The governmental transition from the 1970s Somocismo to the 1980s Sandinismo reflects a national shift in environmentalist rhetoric and policy that blamed capitalism for much of the ecological damage that nature sustained throughout the twentieth century. Works from Cuadra and Cardenal underscore the ecological trajectory of Nicaraguan politics throughout the Cold War.
