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The biography I've written of Carlos Fonseca, the founder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), that led the 1979 Nicaragua revolution. It was published by Duke University Press in 2001 and is coming out in Spanish in the first half of 2003. You can buy it at your local bookstore, from amazon.com, or any online bookseller. |
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American Historical Review, 107:4, October 2002 Scholarship that examined the Sandinista Revolution was once voluminous. During the mid-1980s, in the aftermath of Anastasio Somoza Debayle's collapse and the ensuing Contra war, substantial attention was paid to the root causes of the revolution, the ideological framework of the Sandinistas, and America's role in the revolutionary process. Historians from Richard Millett to Thomas W. Walker contributed to a significant body of work. With the passage of time, however, academic attention diminished, almost mirroring the declining fortunes of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua over the past decade. Important work continued nonetheless, with studies such as Mark Everingham's Revolution and the Multiclass Coalition in Nicaragua (1996) that explored unrecognized facets of the Nicaraguan conflict. Matilde Zimmermann's book revisits the foundations of the Sardinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) by examining the life and times of the person most responsible for its creation and survival. Zimmermann's use of biography as history has been attempted many times by historians interested in the Somoza family. However, her work stands in sharp contrast to these efforts in being the first sustained effort in the English language to discuss Carlos Fonseca Amador not simply as a revolutionary ideologue but as a Nicaraguan reacting to his own life and times. Zimmermann's goal is to demonstrate that much of Fonseca's life
served as a template for his ideology. Key personal moments are
placed in parallel to significant historical events throughout the
work. As a young boy, Fonseca experienced a world "dominated
by sharp and sometimes violent contrasts" (p. 12), an upbringing
that applied to his own relative poverty, politics, and understanding
of the Nicaraguan people as well as his later attitudes toward women
and monogamy. Mother-child metaphors populated his later writings.
As a student, Fonseca was transfixed by Soviet Communism during
a 1957 visit to Moscow. As a young revolutionary in the 1960s, he
struggled with his cohort of guerrilla revolutionaries to overcome
inexperience and ignorance of rural Nicaragua while translating
Sandinista ideology into a workable doctrine. One of the most interesting issues discussed in the book is the evolution of the Sandinista Revolution as a distinct social movement within its leadership. Zimmermann's narrative illustrates a self-contained group of men and women whose lives were shaped by the mountains, barrios, safehouses, and prisons of Nicaragua. The dictates of survival created within this group a circumspection that became second nature. Conversely, the close proximity their quarters demanded also mandated a degree of intimacy. This was especially true for Sandinista women, who existed within the sometimes awkward confines of Nicaraguan machismo, Marxist ideology, and Fonseca's own puritanical approach to gender. The true value of the book is its ability to humanize a revolutionary icon and explain the process that eventually transformed Fonseca into a Sandinista martyr. Zimmermann has adopted an almost forensic approach to Fonseca's lifetime of writing, utilizing an impressive collection of work that stretches back to his student days in the early 1950s. The author's extensive use of interviews establishes an important counterbalance to Fonseca's evolving mental blueprint for a post-Somoza Nicaragua. Childhood neighbors, political associates, and friends accompany more important figures such as Ernesto Cardenal and Fonseca's wife María Haydée Terán to flesh out the biographical picture and offer important contextual information regarding the roots of Fonseca's ideology. Further bolstering this body of work is an unprecedented array of documents drawn from the Nicaraguan National Guard and the Office of National Security, institutions that monitored Fonseca's activities for more than two decades. Taken as a whole, this book represents some of the best scholarship
produced on the Nicaraguan Revolution in the past decade. Zimmermann's
ability to transcend existing standards of research and analysis
has raised the bar for future historians interested in understanding
a pivotal event in modern Central American history. Similarly, Zimmermann's
aptitude in dissecting Fonseca himself marks the book as a standard
for historical biography as well. Michael D. Gambone
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Hispanic America Historical Review, 82:2, May 2002 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. Jeffrey L. Gould
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The Americas, 59:1, July 2002 This fine biography of Carlos Fonseca Amador, founder of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN), recreates the origins of a revolutionary organization whose project has been defeated, whose reputation has been tarnished, and whose Utopia has dissolved into the prosaic local administration of global capitalism that seems the only post-Cold War possibility for the Latin American nation-state. In his recent memoir, Sergio Ramírez, once vice president of revolutionary Nicaragua, declares that intellectuals have done the revolution a grave historical injustice by so quickly forgetting about Sandinista Nicaragua. Matilde Zimmermann's book proves his point, showing that a fresh analysis of the Nicaraguan experience can illuminate questions central to the emerging social history of the Latin American Left in the second half of the twentieth century. In the process, she tells a life story that is, like the larger story of the revolutionary Left itself, as compelling and admirable as it is melancholy and pathetic. Along with published materials, Zimmermann bases her biography on the Fonseca dossier at the Nicaraguan military archives, much of it built up over twenty years by Somocista military intelligence, and she shades in the portrait using interviews with Fonseca's family, friends, and fellow revolutionists. Even so, Fonseca remains rather elusive, in large part because he spent virtually his entire adult life in hiding or in exile, devoting himself to intense study, endless political debate, and micro-management of operational detail. Rather than produce a volume that would have been as slim as Fonseca himself, Zimmermann quite legitimately turns the story of Fonseca into the story of the FSLN as an organization, legitimately because during Fonseca's lifetime it rarely numbered more than a hundred militants, and its condition could always be diagnosed in terms of the state of Fonseca himself. Besides founding it, Fonseca made two major contributions to the Sandinista Front. Best known is his tireless retrieval of information about Augusto Sandino, which he then wove into FSLN literature and doctrine. This proved vitally important for two reasons. It gave the FSLN cadre the romantic nationalist and pan-Latin Americanist idiom of Sandino which, along with the myth of Ché-Cuba-Fidel, infused their generic Marxist-Leninism with historical depth and legendary power. Perhaps most importantly for the FSLN's fortunes in the eventful years after Fonseca's death, his relentless raising of Sandino's ghost insured that "Sandino", whether word or image, was essentially "copyright FSLN" by the time the insurrectionary masses needed an instant symbolism of resistance in 1978-79. No would-be vanguard party riding a series of spontaneous social rebellions could have asked for a better way of registering their authority over events. Fonseca's second great contribution, brought out very effectively by Zimmermann, was the ascetic intensity that was so alluring to young militants, and seemed sufficient to maintain the unity of the organization during long periods of underground existence and near total political irrelevance. Indeed, Zimmermann's study shows that the first organic association the FSLN had with a successful popular mobilization was the solidarity movement that grew up in the late 1960s to demand that the dictatorship respect the rights of jailed FSLN activists (including Fonseca) who had been arrested for largely adventurist guerrilla acts that had no ties to any popular struggle. Besides these, Fonseca's revolutionary achievements are hard to measure, precisely because he spent so much of his life rendered relatively ineffective by a notoriety that constrained his movements and left him rather stranded in Cuba. Zimmermann recreates a vivid picture of the awful final days of Fonseca. In 1975 he returned to Nicaragua to mend the rift between the FSLN's three factions, and to re-validate his leadership. He entered the jungle in March 1976. His eyesight so deteriorated that he was essentially blind; his tactical judgment was so dubious that it made him a hazard to the young militants who led him by the hand along jungle trails (and who were mostly killed in short order). Fonseca died, probably wounded in a fire-fight and then executed in cold blood, on his way to a jungle "summit meeting" he had delusionally called with the intention of bringing together all the leaders of the factions. Fortunately for the future of the FSLN, the leaders did not take Fonseca seriously enough to attend. Had they obeyed his orders they, too, would likely have been cut down by a National Guard operation of unprecedented size, directed by US advisors, which had been deployed to eliminate the FSLN foco which Fonseca had joined. This is the pathos of Ché Guevara's last days without the tragedy. And indeed, in many respects Zimmermann's book offers us a portrait of the other pole, the "anti-Ché," of the Latin American revolutionary: ascetic, compassionate, courageous and totally committed, yes; but awkward, plodding, and short on charisma, humor, and luck. Sandinista is full of pioneering forays into a new social history of the Left in Latin America. Zimmermann explores the emergence of prison literature as a genre of revolutionary writing. She offers suggestive treatments of the culture of clandestinity and the social history of the safe-house (including the daily gender politics played out over the legitimacy and role of women's participation in revolutionary organizations). She subtly outlines the tensions that arose between militants suffering extreme danger and deprivation underground in Nicaragua and the exiled leadership enjoying the freedom, stimulation and revolutionary glamour of Havana. Her portrait of Fonseca reveals the ultra-conservative mores that, ironically, undergirded the self-discipline and commitment of revolutionaries like Fonseca, while making him something of a lovable, "square" father-figure to the "New Left" militants who started to rejuvenate the organization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Armed Left-wing revolutionary movements in Latin America are now essentially historical artefacts. For this very reason, the significance of the Nicaraguan revolution will grow rather than fade, since the FSLN will almost certainly go down in history as the only group of revolutionaries in the hemisphere who were able to reproduce the Cuban road to state power and social transformation. Zimmermann's biography of Fonseca tells us a great deal about how the organization survived long enough to get the chance to do so. The suggestion that the FSLN leadership would not have "sold out" the Nicaraguan revolution had Fonseca remained alive is as questionable as it is moot (one might just as legitimately suggest that the FSLN would not have been able to lead the revolution had Fonseca remained alive), though the author's intriguing reflection that the popular sectors' faith in Fonseca's particular revolutionary vision outlasted the Sandinista government's use of him as a Marxist-Leninist martyr perhaps warrants an empirical study.
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