Robert Kagan, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990 (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 903 pp., $37.50.
Fidel Castro warned the Sandinistas not to hold real elections. "The people can make mistakes", he told them, acidly. But the "comandantes" thought they knew better. They convinced themselves that the mass organizations of the Sandinista party would deliver a crushing victory in February 1990, in spite of all that had happened since the Revolution.
The Bush administration assumed that the Sandinistas would win too, writes Robert Kagan in his massive study A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-90. President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker had pushed for the elections as a graceful way to disengage from a nasty dispute that had consumed far too much time and passion in Washington. They hardly expected the motley and chaotic opposition to mount a real challenge. Practically speaking, they had written off Nicaragua.
It was the first election ever held in which a Marxist regime was voted out of power. The whole world was watching, and the whole world got it wrong, especially the pollsters. A month before the vote in February 1990, the American firm of Greenberg-Lake released a poll showing President Daniel Ortega ahead of the benevolent matriarch, Violeta Chamorro, by a margin of 51 to 24 percent. It was surely the biggest fiasco in the history of the polling business, proof alone that Nicaragua had become such a closed society that a large chunk of the population was too frightened to tell strangers the truth. I was in the press room in Managua when the results came through, and I have to admit enjoying the ash-white faces of my colleagues as they began to realize that the Nicaraguan Revolution they so loved had been rejected by a landslide.
