Sunday's revolutionary fun in the sun in Managua was nothing short of bacchanalian.

Sandinista supporters celebrating the anniversary of the 1979 revolution danced deliriously, sweating through red and black party bandanas and downing light beer and cheap rum like water.

There was a euphoria that was contagious, which made me wonder how close to the feeling this came to the actual moment, 30 years ago to the day, when the Sandinistas swept to power, having toppled one of Latin America's wealthiest and longest ruling dynastic dictatorships, the Somoza family.

I hadn't reached my first birthday. My earliest memory of this whole situation comes not during the revolution, but rather the counterrevolution. It was a march on Washington sometime in the 1980s, and I could hear protestors yelling "1, 2, 3, 4, We don't want your Contra war!"

On Sunday, a 26-year-old reveler, Roger Vílchez, acknowledged that he hadn't even been born when his president, Daniel Ortega, marched onto Plaza de la Revolución. He grew up a child of the first generation in nearly half a century that didn't have an oppressive Somoza in power. "This day is really important, not just for me but for all the Nicaraguan people," he said. "This is a celebration of the cultural heritage of Nicaragua ... a free land."

Temporarily tattooed on Vílchez's back was a black silhouette of the man after whom the Sandinista party is named, Augusto César Sandino — who looks like a Latino hero out of an old country-western movie. Young children also had their faces painted with Sandino.

Not every Sandinista was celebrating at the Plaza de la Fé. Fecerico Aguado, who was 17 when he joined the armed struggle against Somoza's National Guard, refused to attend. "Some of us who fought in the revolution didn't go to the plaza," he said. A number of former comrades of Ortega have split from the party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, claiming Ortega has betrayed the revolution by clamping down on civil society, criticism and the media, and taking unlikely bedfellows like the Catholic Church and a conservative former president to secure his power.

However, as first lady Rosario Murillo boasted on Sunday, the FSLN boasts more than 1 million members. Nicaragua's population is estimted at a little less than 5.8 million.

Top officials from Nicaragua's ally nations like Cuba, Venezuela and the recently deposed Honduran government spoke with revolutionary verve, thundering before a crowd that seemed to revel in it.

But the event crescendoed into a speech by one leader in particular: Daniel Ortega. His talk still struck familiar notes with anti-imperialist pronouncements, lambasting the U.S. for maintaing military bases in Latin America and even accusing the superpower of somehow assisting in the coup that ousted Honduras' Manuel Zelaya on June 28.

The Ortega administration, and allies in Hugo Chávez's left-wing trade and aid bloc ALBA, call the interim government in Honduras "gorillas," and refuse to pronounce the name of Zelaya's de facto successor Roberto Micheletti correctly. In an interview this week with the Nicaraguan guerrilla hero Edén Pastora, he mocked the Honduran with his new nickname "Gorilletti."

But making perhaps the most headlines, Ortega reiterated a call to change the Nicaraguan Constitution to extend presidential terms — the same taboo topic that reached close enough to tipping point in Honduras to topple President Zelaya.

Last week, the Liberal Constitutional Party leaders promised to block any attempt by Ortega to remain in office beyond his term ending in 2012. However, judging by the excitement on Sunday, it remains to be seen whether they can.