source: afgj
A Utopian Experiment?
Improving the lives of Nicaragua’s people is not merely a question of infrastructure. Nor will such changes alone solve all the country’s problems. Nicaragua, like all countries, contains internal contradictions and divisions. Early in my life, I took inspiration from utopian theories about radically transforming social relationships away from that of the buyer and seller in the anonymous capitalist market. My sense of Nicaragua’s progress, before I arrived, was more modest. I knew there remains a capitalist class system in Nicaragua, alongside the socialist aspects of the state. Like any capitalist class, the Nicaraguan one exploits labor for profit. Gaudy commercial advertisements and billowing diesel fumes fill up the major roads, just like in the U.S. The government has made certain compromises with its local capitalist elite, which wants to undermine the movement toward a more socialist economy.
However, when I visited the Gloria Quintanilla Cooperative—a women-led, coffee-producing community in Santa Julia, in the mountains south of Managua—I saw that at least some parts of Nicaragua are undergoing a social transformation that is more radical than I had expected. The community was established in 2008 with support from the Rural Workers’ Association (Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo—ATC), just a year after the Sandinista Front returned to power. It has 90 families living at the end of a five-kilometer dirt road high in the mountains. The community has its own leadership structure, separate from the municipal government. The women are clearly in charge of the cooperative, which has legal right to the large tract of land.
We spoke with four women leaders in the community. All came from poverty and had survived domestic violence. Though alcohol is legal nationally, the cooperative prohibits it. The leaders told us this is essential to ending violence against women. One leader told us they have eliminated 90% of domestic violence within the community and are now working on the last 10%.
We learned that there is a gift economy within the community. Various members grow either avocados, or pineapples, or eggs, or chicken, according to agro-ecological principles. When they visit one another, the custom is to bring a portion of what each family produces as a gift.
The customs and leadership within the cooperative are essential to the well-being of its members, but this cooperative could not be thriving as it is without the support of the state. Health-care workers employed by the government regularly come to the community to support members with their health challenges. One of the women, Claudia, told us that she is the coordinator for chronic diseases. She keeps a comprehensive list of who is suffering from what condition. When the healthcare workers come by, she is present for the visits, helping to maintain communication and supporting community members with their health challenges.
The cooperative depends on income from its coffee sales, and the government provides support in marketing the coffee. The government supports basic infrastructure needs by improving the water well and the dirt road that connects the community to the rest of the region.
I am aware of several co-housing eco-communities in the U.S. practicing alternatives to standard home ownership. They are typically expensive to live in—especially given the unfavorable housing market in the U.S.—and, therefore, only available to the upper middle class. Like these experiments, the Gloria Quintanilla Cooperative aims to develop a healthier culture than the one surrounding it but, unlike them, this one was built by and for poor people with strong state support.
In the U.S., ideas like anarchism and libertarianism are attractive among people wanting to live an alternative lifestyle. “The state never does anything for us anyway, so let’s just do it ourselves,” is a sentiment I have encountered many times. But Doña Eloisa, president of the Gloria Quintanilla Cooperative, told us, “We are all Sandinistas here,” indicating that she sees the role of the current government as essential to her community’s well-being.
She told us that, in 2018, her community stood solidly on the side of the Sandinista government when the right-wing opposition was creating hundreds of roadblocks all over Managua in an effort to cause political instability. For months, masked men operating with financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an instrument of the CIA, sought to overthrow the Sandinista government. For her, what is at stake in whether or not the current government is allowed to continue or whether it is overthrown in yet another coup attempt is the very survival of the community to which she has dedicated her life.
A View from Home
Nicaragua’s history of colonialism and foreign intervention by the U.S. has put the country at a disadvantage compared to the U.S. in terms of providing the infrastructure required for a prosperous and dignified life for its people. In the mid-20th century, when Flint and Detroit were prosperous cities with a highly unionized working-class population performing complex industrialized labor, Nicaragua was still under the Somoza dictatorship. Back then, Nicaragua built infrastructure for the narrow purpose of fulfilling its role in the global economy as an exporter of raw materials and foodstuffs to industrial centers in the U.S. and Europe. The dictatorship had no need for skilled labor from a large part of its population. That is why it never provided the infrastructure and public services required to sustain a large and prospering middle class.
Seeing Nicaragua in 2026, however, revealed many improvements toward an economy that benefits the majority of its population. It also highlighted ways in which the United States is falling behind by comparison. Everywhere around me, I see the U.S. ruling class—represented by both major political parties—carrying out an organized neglect of our country’s roads, schools, hospitals, water systems and other essential services.
The water, electrical and transportation infrastructure of the United States has taken hundreds of years to build. Much to the nation’s shame, that process heavily relied upon wealth stolen from the Global South—including from Nicaragua itself—through slavery, colonization and exploitation.
But today the public wealth of the U.S. is being squandered. Basic infrastructure and services are either becoming dilapidated and dysfunctional or privatized and expensive. Public roads in many parts of the country—especially majority Black communities like Detroit—grow massive potholes, while motorists who lack quality public transportation options are individually burdened with the cost of vehicle repair. Old water delivery pipes in communities like Flint, Michigan, and Baltimore, Maryland, corrode and release lead into the water. This creates medical problems our health-care system will not address.
People are forced to seek private solutions, like buying clean water trucked in from somewhere else at great expense. When they get sick and their care is not covered by insurance, they rely on GoFundMe crowd-funding campaigns to meet medical expenses.
Students commonly graduate from U.S. colleges and universities with economically crippling debt and grim prospects for finding employment in their chosen field. In the U.S., individuals bear the burden of paying for education—a structure that incentivizes them to see themselves as individual consumers, not public servants. Many people are aware that something is profoundly wrong with the U.S. A TSA agent I met at the Miami International Airport is certainly among them.
Political Will and the Need for Change
Starting to reverse Nicaragua’s long history of social and infrastructural neglect from the Somoza dictatorship and the neo-liberal period has required a political commitment to invest in the people, manifested concretely through a political party wielding state power. The privatization of public assets has played out for centuries in the resource colonies from which the U.S. extracted much of its wealth. Today, the United States is suffering its own infrastructural and economic decline, as that same logic of privatization has been applied at home for decades by both major political parties. The TSA agent in Miami asked if Nicaraguans were poor. Many are. But they have something most Americans do not have: a state that treats health care, education and clean water as public goods—not commodities.
Nicaragua’s example suggests that political will—manifested through organized state power—can reverse decades of neglect. An urgent question for progressive politics in the United States is whether we have the courage to establish a new political formation and political consciousness outside the two-party duopoly, that is committed to providing the services and infrastructure the people of the U.S. need.
