I was searching for photos of Nicaragua on Flickr in hopes that they would jolt the deepest recesses of my memory of that indefinable country (I have no photographs of it because I didn’t have a camera with me while I was traveling there), and I stumbled upon this collection of the revolution (and also some photos of the proceeding years leading up to the Contra War) by Marcelo Montecino. This first one in particular, which immortalizes a soldier who had just returned from the front, is my favourite because of the juxtaposition of violence and innocence: the baby, and then the rifle; and the smile on the father’s face. The rest of the selected photos will show you that the revolution wasn’t just the story of men, but of their women and children, too.

However, history has clearly proven that revolutions tend to go wrong along the way, and the Nicaraguan revolution was hardly an exception, as was Cuba’s, no matter how many people go touting Che Guevara with his beret on their chests. As a reminder, I’ve got a t-shirt of the Che wearing Bart Simpson on his chest, a cartoon strip by Matthew Diffee for The New Yorker (you can buy your own here). I don’t have to tell you, I love the irony.

When all is said and done, there is a certain dangerous romance in the idea of revolution, the possibilities of change it induces you to want to believe in, which is obviously why so many people sign up to it in the first place. And well, I guess that’s what these following photos illustrate: the romance, the idealism and the camaraderie… but also the more inhumane parts of it, like putting rifles into the hands of children.

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