Ben Grosscup, Nica Notes, Augist 13th 2026
https://afgj.org/nicanotes-despite-u-s-hybrid-warfare-and-sanctions-nicaraguas-socialist-government-is-building-infrastructure-and-providing-services-at-impressive-rate
Despite U.S. Hybrid Warfare and Sanctions, Nicaragua’s Socialist Government
is Building Infrastructure and Providing Services at Impressive Rate
I had just spent three weeks traveling in Nicaragua, most of that time with a delegation organized by Casa Ben Linder, a Managua-based organization dedicated to building the international solidarity movement with Nicaragua. Members of the Black Alliance for Peace, which promotes the anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-peace positions of the radical Black movement, were also essential in making the trip possible.
Nicaragua is not a wealthy country. It has been battered by U.S.-sponsored hybrid warfare, including punishing economic sanctions, military interventions, and more. Despite this, since the Sandinista Front returned to power in 2007, the Nicaraguan state is building public infrastructure and providing services for poor people who had been neglected for hundreds of years. This includes new water systems, affordable public transit, free university education, and rural electrification. Meanwhile, in the United States, our own public systems are crumbling or being sold off to private corporations.
During Grosscup’s stay, Bluefields was in the midst of an enormous project to add sewage pipes beneath the town’s old streets.
Over the course of a week, he witnessed the steady work of men digging up the block-long section of street adjacent to his hotel.
Participating in this delegation gave me a new perspective on the critical importance of the state in providing the basic services people need. Progressive forces in the United States have much to learn by comparing the role the Nicaraguan state plays in bringing about social change and what the U.S. state does.
Political Transformation in Nicaragua
Nicaragua was late to start developing modern infrastructure. While looking out on Managua from a tall perch, our guides explained that, for example, before the Sandinista Revolution overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, the city’s sewage was simply poured into Lake Managua, creating a major public health danger.
The revolution immediately led to a mass literacy campaign and free universal health care. During the first 11 years, the U.S.-sponsored Contra War killed 42,000 Nicaraguans. Washington’s death squads targeted literacy educators, healthcare workers, and Ben Linder himself, whose namesake organization arranged my trip. Linder was a circus artist and engineer who moved from the U.S. to Nicaragua in the 1980s to share his diverse skills with the country’s young revolution. He was widely beloved by children in the countryside for his juggling unicycle act, designed to encourage them to get the measles vaccine. He was working on a small-scale hydro-electric plant in a remote community in northern Nicaragua when the Contras—armed with U.S. weapons—murdered him in 1987. The Contra War significantly slowed, but did not stop, Nicaragua’s progress.
However, in the 1990 election, Nicaragua’s right-wing neo-liberal elite defeated the Sandinista Front, whose traditional supporters had grown weary from years of brutal war. The new government, which ruled for the next 16 years, was ideologically committed to supporting U.S. domination in Latin America—not building public infrastructure for people’s needs. They privatized public services and set back the progress of the 1979 revolution.
But in the past 19 years, since 2007, when the Sandinista Front returned to power, Nicaragua has seen slow but steady progress toward infrastructure systems that serve the whole country. One of the first steps was building a wastewater treatment plant for Managua, which has dramatically improved the lake. I observed a new public water system completed within the past five years that provides running water to people living on a mountain on the outskirts of Ciudad Sandino, near Managua. Previously, families on that mountain had to pay for an ox cart to pull water up the hill. With the new system, they pay a fraction of what they used to pay for water. Now water comes to their homes with the ease of gravity. The supply has also become more generous, leading one family to start a small tree nursery. The young trees are now helping to re-forest the surrounding hillsides.
In Managua, there are new reinforced concrete highways, which are more durable than the asphalt roads one typically finds in the U.S. They are also more expensive to build in the short term. A dedicated bus lane with covered bus stops is included. The state heavily subsidizes the bus fare to the point that one ride costs the equivalent of seven U.S. cents, quite affordable for Managua’s working-class population. The government is also building transit routes between regions of the country that were never previously connected.
For instance, throughout the 1934-1979 Somoza dictatorship, the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua was economically and culturally cut off from major cities like Managua on the Pacific coast. I learned that people used to joke about the Caribbean region being “a different country” than Nicaragua, even though it was officially incorporated into the national territory in 1894. The region has six major ethnic groups, including Indigenous and Afro-descended groups. They lacked legal recognition by the state until 1987 when Nicaragua adopted a new constitution that defined the nation as multi-ethnic. The Somoza dictatorship’s neglect in providing necessary infrastructure for the Caribbean coast cast a long shadow from which the region is only recently starting to escape. Our delegation spent two weeks in the Caribbean town of Bluefields.
We drove there on a road the government had completed just five years ago. Before then, travel between the two coasts required an expensive airplane flight or a slow bus ride followed by a long riverboat trip. The new road allows Bluefields and other Caribbean coastal communities to be economically integrated with the rest of the country, providing educational and economic opportunities that did not previously exist.
We visited three universities in Bluefields where young people are able to study and gain professional credentials, completely free of charge. Dr. Ilenia García, the Rector of URACCAN University (the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast) told us that, when it began in the mid-1990s, state support for public higher education was scarce because the right-wing neo-liberal government refused to abide by the 1987 constitutional mandate that 6% of the nation’s budget be allocated to higher education. She said that, in those early days, it would have been impossible for her to even imagine that her institution would grow to serve the 5,800 students it serves today. Since the Sandinista Front returned to power, the campus has grown with the enthusiastic support of the state. In addition to educating students at her own vibrant campus, URACCAN also sends professors to more remote communities on the Caribbean coast, providing college-level classes for students who would have a hard time moving to Bluefields to pursue on-campus study. The university leaders we met told us their curriculum is integrated as part of a larger development plan for the region and the country. They are preparing their youth for a different Nicaragua. They see poverty as the enemy. They are coordinating their educational curriculum with economic planning processes at the national and regional level.
Nicaragua’s recovery from its long period of state neglect has also played out with electricity. Before 2007, only 25% of the 20 municipalities on the Caribbean coast had functioning electrical service. The region as a whole has a low population density compared to the Pacific coast. Nonetheless, electrification today is close to 95% on the Caribbean side, although certain small remote communities like Orinoco, which we visited, turn off the generator for a few hours every night. Orinoco was founded in 1898 by John Sambola, a leader in the Garifuna community, an Afro-descended ethnic group present in Nicaragua as well as other Caribbean countries. The geography makes the town accessible only by boat. But even there, the government has provided solar panels plus a small diesel generator to support the community’s electrical needs.
While the community has already seen a great improvement in electrical service since the neo-liberal period, our local guide, Humberto, said they would like to get 24-hour electrical service soon. We stayed in Orinoco on a hot night, and some in our group were awakened when the fans pointed toward our sweltering bodies suddenly stopped in the middle of the night.
On our way to Orinoco, our boat had to slow down while passing the construction site for a bridge set to cross a river on the way to a new deep-water port that the Nicaraguan government is planning to build with financial support from China. Currently, Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast has no deep-water port, limiting possibilities for economic development in the region.
During our stay, Bluefields itself was in the midst of an enormous project to add sewage pipes beneath the town’s old streets. Over the course of a week, I witnessed the steady work of men digging up a one block-long section of street adjacent to our hotel.
They laid down sewage pipes and then covered up the holes with cement. Numerous walks around town revealed mended cuts in the old concrete, which were visible everywhere—evidence that this massive city-wide project had been under way for some time. I asked a few people living in Bluefields about the project. They told me that, without a modern wastewater treatment system, the norm has been that sewage from each home goes into an on-site septic system which, when crowded together with many other nearby systems, contaminates the ground water. This expensive project will dramatically improve ground water quality in the future.