Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution

2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-82-2-383

1527-1900

Jeffrey L. Gould,

Politics and Society in Latin America

During the mid-1980s, while doing research for my dissertation in northwestern Nicaragua, I became increasingly skeptical of Sandinista rhetoric. The use of imperial aggression as an excuse for the flaws, failures, and excesses of the government was rapidly turning anti-imperialism from a righteous cry against the obscenity of U.S. policy into the butt of popular humor. Similarly, Comité de Defensa Sandinista meetings typically ended with the phrase “Dirección Nacional ordene.” To my ears, nurtured in the antiauthoritarian ethos of the New Left, those words were deeply disturbing. The phrase, “Carlos Fonseca, presente!” also punctuated many rallies. Curiously, the figure of Carlos Fonseca resonated somewhat ambiguously with me and apparently with many others not directly tied to the Frente Sandinista de la Liberación Nacional. The anti-Sandinistas had a much harder time attacking the martyr Fonseca than they did with the all too human targets in the Sandinista leadership. I remember wondering how Fonseca would have viewed the depressing march of this revolution under siege. I had no clue because other than a few scattered writings on Sandino, Fonseca remained an enigmatic figure, obscured by Sandinista hagiography.Matilde Zimmerman’s masterful political biography, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Sandinista Revolution, goes a long way toward satisfying our need to know about the life and ideas of this twentieth-century Latin American revolutionary and about his decisive impact on the FSLN. The book follows a traditional approach to biography, yet successfully relates Fonseca’s life to the larger unfolding of the revolutionary process. Zimmerman achieves a convincing portrait of Fonseca as an individual and as a revolutionary thinker and actor.Fonseca, like his hero, Augusto César Sandino, was born out of wedlock to a domestic servant. In both cases, the extreme deprivation of early childhood was mitigated by the wealthy father’s recognition combined with a limited degree of financial support. Breaking with traditional Sandinista scholarship, Zimmerman points out that Fonseca’s relation with his wealthy Somocista father was an ambivalent one. The author shies away from probing more deeply into those familial relations and their impact on Fonseca’s early radicalism or on his revolutionary asceticism. Although this is understandable, given the adult-years focus of the book, I am still hopeful that historians will take the challenge of understanding the political and social impact of the hijos por fuera that dot the urban and rural landscapes of twentieth-century Central America.Fonseca’s radicalization process was not unusual. He went rapidly from anti-Somocista activist in high school to Partido Socialista Nicaraguense (PSN: pro-Moscow communist party) militant in the university. Immediately following the Cuban Revolution, he joined a guerrilla group that the National Guard soundly defeated in a battle in which Fonseca was seriously wounded. During his exile in Cuba, Fonseca distanced himself from the political positions of the PSN, rejecting their two-stage conception of revolution that emphasized alliances with bourgeois parties and their opposition to armed struggle. Within three years, he would become a founding member of the Frente Sandinista, a political-military organization that immediately launched a doomed guerrilla movement. Throughout the 1960s (with the exception of two years of semilegal political work) Fonseca and his extremely small group of youthful revolutionaries either organized guerrilla movements that failed, recruited clandestinely for future action, or endured prison. And they argued over strategy and tactics. One of the most crucial contributions of this biography is Zimmerman’s analysis of Fonseca’s role as this microscopic movement split into three factions. Uncovering new archival sources, Zimmerman demonstrates that Fonseca had a real grasp of the reasons for the split and fully addressed the weaknesses in each factional position. Yet, following his death in combat in 1976, the factional conflict became significantly worse.Until his death, the divided FSLN never had more than a few dozen members inside Nicaragua. In 1976, Fonseca resembled many other Latin American revolutionaries inspired by the success of Cuban Revolution, disgusted with reformist politicians marxist or otherwise, and ready to create “One, two many Vietnams.”Had the Sandinistas not triumphed in 1979, Fonseca would have simply joined the pantheon of unsuccessful revolutionary martyrs, such as Yon Sosa in Guatemala or Camilo Torres in Colombia. The reasons for their triumph, which Zimmerman ably recounts, include the history and constancy of this small revolutionary group guided by Fonseca. She shows how the Frente was largely responsible for provoking the revolutionary crisis in 1978. Moreover, she substantiates the interpretation that highlights the revolutionary group as the only political/military organization available for leadership, recognized by the growing masses of rebels and their supporters as uncompromising fighters against the regime.The epilogue is somewhat polemical. There is no space to enter into a discussion about the failure of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Zimmerman argues convincingly that the Sandinistas’ betrayal of the thought and (uncorruptable) personal style of Fonseca helped cause the demise of the revolution. Yet her argument that the revolution did not rely sufficiently on the Cuban experience is questionable. Indeed, given the backwardness and uneven development of Nicaraguan society, a popular revolution would have made gigantic strides had it instituted a radical redistribution of the land to individual peasants, permitted unfettered development of unions and other popular forms of organizations and called for early democratic elections. That such a program might have been, in part, antithetical to Carlos Fonseca’s perspective forces us to confront the historical limitations of national/popular revolutions and revolutionaries of the 1960s–80s. Such a revolutionary program would have run into much difficulty but it might have resulted in more tangible improvements for the Nicaraguan popular classes and better equipped them to deal with the grim realities of underdevelopment in a globalized world that always seems to have more pressing concerns. This difference of interpretation, however, should not obscure Zimmerman’s achievement. This is a fine biography of an important revolutionary thinker and actor.