Margaret Randall: Sandinista Nicaragua 1979: Photographs

Margaret Randall's Reflection

Margaret Randall went to Nicaragua in 1979 just as the Sandinistas took control of that country. The following was written by Margaret regarding this collection of photographs from that period:

A young woman at SWOP sent me a note some weeks back, telling me the organization possesses 19 photographs of mine, taken in Nicaragua. She wanted to know if I was willing to sign new mats—the old ones are beyond repair—and perhaps write something about the collection. I had no idea which of my many Nicaraguan photographs these were, but was eager to find out. When she brought them over and I began going through them, one by one, the memories flooded back.

In 1979 I was living in Cuba. The year before I had apprenticed to Grandal, a fine Cuban photographer. So I wasn’t yet too experienced when, in August or September my old friend Ernesto Cardenal invited me to Nicaragua to do the fieldwork for a book about that country’s women. The book would become Sandino’s Daughters, and it would be read by thousands of young North Americans who found in it a history not being reported by the U.S. corporate press of the times. The Sandinistas had just taken power, in July, and I didn’t hesitate to accept Ernesto’s invitation to go see the new revolution first hand. From October through January of the following year I traveled the Nicaraguan countryside, interviewing women and making pictures.

I remember how excited Grandal was when I told him my plans. “You can use the diplomatic pouch to send me your exposed film,” he suggested, “and I’ll develop and print the pictures for you here.” It was a kind offer, and generous, but I was incensed. Didn’t my mentor trust me to develop and print myself? I rejected his suggestion, and of course made many mistakes—learning as I went along. More than one photograph in this set of 19 can no longer be reproduced because of my faulty developing and fixing techniques. The negatives no longer exist.

It is with a deep sadness and anger that I think back to that time in 1979 when the Sandinista revolution was new and hope was on everyone’s horizon. Nothing seemed impossible. Today it is devastating to think that men who have usurped the Sandinista dream are back in power, but without the intention of doing anything for their impoverished nation. These photographs bring back a flood of memories.

There was the day I spotted those lines from Leonel Rugama’s poem, jumped out of the jeep and raised my camera to capture the wall with the words “Los heroes, nuestros heroes, nunca dijeron que morían por la patria sino que murieron . . .” Three women carrying loads of wash walked into the picture plane, and turned and posed just as I snapped the shutter. Rugama had been a 20 year old seminary student when he was assassinated in 1967 by Somoza’s National Guard. Had he lived, he would have been one of his country’s finest poets. Many ordinary Nicaraguans know his poetry by heart.

The group of children crouched around the makeshift cross bearing the name "José" brings me back to the day I visited Doña Leandra in Estelí. She was a poor woman, who sold homemade sweets in theThe group of children crouched around the makeshift cross bearing the name “José” brings me back to the day I city market. I had asked her to help me trace the last hours of my friend José Benito Escobar’s life, and she took me to the spot where he’d been gunned down. José Benito and I had been friends in Cuba. Doña Leandra had the safe house from which he went to his death.

In several of these images one can see the writing on the walls: figuratively and also literally. Throughout the insurrectional period people often painted slogans on buildings and elsewhere, in memory of a fallen comrade, to encourage a difficult struggle, or as a promise of what liberation would be like. Two of the images were taken at the outdoor poetry reading honoring the birthday of Nicaragua’s great modernist poet, Rubén Darío. The small town of Darío was named after him, and the reading, sponsored by Ernesto Cardenal’s Ministry of Culture, took place for the first time in 1979. Hundreds of farmers from the town and its environs sat on walls or stood around listening to the poets read. This was characteristic of the emphasis the new revolution placed on art.

Another event brought back by these photographs is Carlos Fonseca’s funeral. Carlos was the undisputed leader of the Sandinistas, gunned down in the mountains in 1976. Until victory, a local peasant tended his grave. After victory, his body was moved to Managua to be interred in a monument specially constructed in Revolution Square. In one of the photographs we see his coffin being guided to its final resting place by members of the Sandinista leadership, among them Víctor Tirado and Daniel Ortega.

Perhaps my favorite of all these photographs is the one in which we see a house put together with scraps of wood and corrugated metal. A young man has painted the figure of a Sandinista fighter on the wall. He proudly shows us his handiwork, as his sister—a prostitute who can already envision a different kind of life—looks from the doorway. There is so much spontaneity in this image, and so much promise. I have often wondered what became of this family. I don’t remember where I made the photograph of the broken doll lying in the earth of some roadside field. But although the precise place has vanished from my aging memory, I will never forget the feeling seeing that doll evoked, nor the act of pressing my camera’s shutter.

By the way, all these images were made with a Pentax K-1000, probably the cheapest 35mm. camera on the market at the time. I rolled my film myself, from the ends of Cuban newsreel given me by one of the filmmakers of the era. Today I note with a certain wistfulness the paper on which these pictures were printed: it was Agfa Potriga, a warm-toned semi matte that I used to love. I don’t think they make it anymore, and in any case—like most photographers—I’ve long-since gone digital.

I am so glad that SWOP is auctioning off these images for such a worthy cause: that of helping to send people to the U.S. Social Forum to be held in Atlanta. We so desperately need new analyses, ideas and forms of action capable of extricating ourselves and the world from where Bush and company have put us. Events such as the Social Forum provide the coming together so badly needed in these times.

--Margaret Randall, Spring 2007.

Margaret Randall: Sandinista Nicaragua 1979

Photographs

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Margaret Randall's Reflection