Incipient nationalists like Hostos in Puerto Rico, Martí in Cuba, or Aguinaldo in the Philippines acted independently of North Americans in the 1890s. Between 1927 and 1933, Augusto Sandino successfully resisted Marine-imposed order in Nicaragua.
Sergio Ramírez has collected previously scattered documents which complement Neill Macaulay’s Sandino Affair as he presents the ideology of the Nicaraguan guerrilla. Although the chronological arrangement of the documents is meant to emphasize the conditions which produced them, the reader, nonetheless, discerns several repeated themes. Sandino was a nationalist with a sense of Indo-Hispanic fraternity. In response to American aerial attacks, the Sandinistas dispersed and became self-sufficient units. Sandino viewed Nicaraguan vendepatria politicians as agents of Wall Street, but his appeal to “workers and peasants” is a vague, late development balanced by naive religious mysticism. An introductory chronology and a concluding historical dictionary orient readers to the career of this precursor of national liberation movements.
