Nicaragua

they had an earthquake in managua a couple of days ago. also, from an email from a friend who's there now:

I have been here for about 5 days now. I picked up the spanish again pretty quick. I´ll be here for about 5 weeks, I´ll also make a quick trip down to Costa Rica and Panama.

Las mujeres son muy bonita aqui en Matagalpa (I went to school here). I feel at home here but I´ve been hearing some scary stuff that the Sandinistas are doing here. It´s making people angry and I´ve been hearing that some people are heading to the mountains to arm themselves. Many people think that another war will happen in a few years because Sandinastas are trying to confiscate land from people...rewriting property laws in doing so. Anyways, this stuff is in its early stages, but its the same Sandinistas in power and they´re up to the same things. Castro, Chavez, and even the president of Iran are working closely with Ortega.

for a short, if v. biased, history of the sandanistas in the 80s and 90s you might try william blum's "killing hope." chomsky has written a lot too.

http://history.enotes.com/images/peoples/tpc_0003_0001_0_img0353.jpg

HI DERE

but its the same Sandinistas in power and they´re up to the same things

I never thought what they were up to before sounded too bad.

It is not an official presentation without listing their major imports & exports straight from the World Book Encyclopedia. I can tell you right now, without looking, that a major export is bauxite.

You can source me, as....a source.

me neither, but i only know the broad strokes/chomsky narrative of what happened -- establishing democratic elections, etc. i suppose if they're already implementing land reforms a la mexico they may be compromising their initial revolutionary tenets, and so might presumably have been moving that way since originally gaining power?

xpost

then again, it's hard to tell from the email who's worried, but it could well be the middle class, so, i guess it depends on perspective...i don't know. i just noticed this thread is supposed to be about culture, sorry.

just talk about the corn islands and machetes and surfing on the pacific side versus the caribbean side.

just go to the lonely planet page on nicaragua or trip advisor.

ha, i just realized i still have the lonely planet book on nicaragua/el salvador that was supposed to be used for a trip that turned into india.

oh, i know lake nicaragua has sharks in it and is the largest something something lake.

I've always thought the Blufields area was interesting because I heard English was the main spoken language and I wondered how that came about. I wikied it and found it was founded by pirates, initially populated (partially, at least) by a wrecked slave ship from Africa, and protected by the English for a while. I thought it was isolated from the rest of the country and that's why it remained non-Spanish, but the article says it's the major Caribbean port so that's probably not the case. Still interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluefields

Thanks for all the ideas! I'll let you know how it goes (did I mention that the presentation is in Spanish?)