Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution
Submitted by oncidiumfan on Mon, 2012/03/05 - 11:14.
in
The author, Matilde Zimmermann, had access to unpublished Fonseca papers and photographs. The book places Fonseca in the context of Nicaraguan History and sympathizes with him, though not uncritically. The writer had little patience with the Third Tendency headed by the Ortega brothers which was much more sympathetic to Sweden than to Cuba.
Fonseca is Nicaragua's second famous illegitimate son -- Augusto Calderon Sandino was also the son of a rich man and a much poorer woman, though Fonseca's mother was not indigenous. Both men were helped by their fathers and in Fonseca's case, given a good education. Fonseca came to his left political beliefs as a student in Matagalpa and later in Leon, and visited the Soviet Union and Cuba.
The book points out that most of the original FSLN leaders were middle class college boys -- and that recruitment from the peasantry, aside from German Pomares, came late, and with much condescension and misunderstandings. The Marxists and Third Tendency saw the farm workers as equivalent to industrial workers -- more needing labor organizing and protection, possibly on collective farms or privately owned farms as they were rather than grants of the land they'd been working; the peasants saw things differently and one of the conditions for ending the Contra War was giving their soldiers land grants, too.
The other thing that struck me was the futility of force beyond a certain point in controlling populations. The first Somoza was brutal to some (Sandino's followers were killed); the second Somoza seems to have been more reasonable; the third Somoza appeared to believe that with sufficient force, the resistance to him would collapse.
Many colonial regimes followed the same procedure -- if the guy they wanted escaped them, kill the family (Ho Chi Minh's in the French example). As with all of these, beyond a certain point, violence tended to make the people subjected to it feel that the regime must be destroyed at any cost.
Fonseca discovered Sandino while in Cuba and resurrected a legend to be the inspiration for the FSLN. Fonseca's Sandino was cleaned up a bit from the historical reality (the mistress disappeared along with the more spiritually cranky beliefs), and the FSLN, almost all middle class university educated men, began reaching out to the peasants and industrial workers, but from this book's account, the people in Managua's and Masaya's barrios were taking actions ahead of any FSLN leadership, and the FSLN scrambled to keep up (one of the Ortega brothers was killed in Masaya as he joined an action already in progress).
The book points out that the FSLN's win was not certain and that through most of its history, it was a small group of people living in safe houses and in small encampments in the mountains. They ended up winning the peace through being more organized than other groups, but were not necessarily, at least according to this book's author, decisive in the battles other than the assault on Leon, lead by a woman who is now a member of an opposition party, Dora Maria Tellez.
The author's conclusion is that Fonseca's death (wounded, captured alive, then killed the next morning according to the farm folk who buried the bodies) eliminated an strong opposition voice to the Social Democratic and pro-private capital plans of the Third Tendency. Whether anyone agrees with this as a loss will depend on individual politics. Fonseca comes across as a tad humorless (the author even compares his photographs to Che Guevera's who was more often seen smiling) and puritanical.
An interesting book for those who want to know about the players -- goes well with the biography of Daniel Ortega.
hey all..u all got to
get a real life down here..enjoy the country..go see things..life must be boring if u got to read some one elses opinion of nicaragua..talk to real people they will tell u about nica...
I also talk to real people
I've also compared oral histories to written records and most oral histories and personal recollections are amusingly self-serving and often not all that honest about the past. Helps to both talk to real people and read archival documents, but if you can't read archival documents, reading something that was well-researched is useful. Calibrate for the biases of the writer as you would calibrate for the biases of someone telling you a story.
Rebecca Brown
most writers write something..
to sell or serve a purpose..its like statistics u can make archival documents say what they want to push..i would rather talk to several different people and form a opinion..and i get to get out and see the world..most people i see sitting with a book in front of them are board or have no one that will talk to them..or just scared to go out and meet nicaraguains becuse they might get robbed..but then too i live in managua..which most people bad mouth as dangerous
The trick is to adjust for the biases
Everyone, including the people you talk to and you, yourself, has biases.
The other thing is that you can't go back in history and talk to people and history tends to affect the present. Reading books that aren't about March 7, 2012 Jinotega is a way of learning how March 7, 2012, Jinotega came into being.
Reading raw archival material tends to be just about your biases and the people who wrote the memos biases, without an intervening set of biases.
The other thing is that often the most interesting and accurate information is when the writer's focus was on something else, like Rushdie's comment about the FSLN leadership and the Guardia coming from the same social class, having gone to the same universities and even having dated each other.
A friend of my mother's said that my mother took books too seriously -- but that friend also had a huge library in her home. The advantage of a good education is learning how to read books through, not with, the author's biases, and learning to recognize your own. Good educations aren't always formal.
Rebecca Brown
maybe i aint got a good..
education..but,,i live a pretty GOOD LIFE DOWN HERE..AND I DONT WORRY ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT..worry about getting robbed,,worry about taxis..i just enjoy it,,a little reading is good..but a person who has there nose in a book too much..to me is bored..i would rather..do things..i found out a long time ago..i'll take a person with good common sense over a person with a good education
I found robbery in Jinotega
...tends to be friends and family. Pick friends carefully and hope they have sense enough to pick their friends carefully and all is well. Most of the attempts here are very amateurish. A friend recommended a brand of lock because the local guys keep trying to get it off his storage shed and fail.
Today, I did some laundry and took pictures in the backyard, playing with a polarizing filter on one lens and just playing with the other lens. I also moved furniture so Lola could find her toys.
I've known people who were teaching at universities as full tenured professors with light course loads who didn't finish college or more than a BA; I've known people who had graduate degrees who were also extremely sensible. I've known people who dropped out of grade school who were doofus as moles, too.
I don't find reading boring. If you do, don't do it. I found working for other people to be a colossal waste of my life hardly worth the money. Now I can live down here on less, so I don't do that anymore either. I'd rather walk and read books, and write a bit, so that's what I'm doing now. Putting yourself through grief because that's what you're supposed to do is silly if you can avoid the grief. Time is all you have in this life, so do whatever makes you happy and I'll do what I enjoy doing, which is reading and writing, and taking photographs.
Had what the local Nicaraguan Italian restaurant sold me as a Philly cheese steak. It was interesting, but not a Philly cheesesteak as I knew them in Philadelphia. Bunch of very cute couples out on dates there, some nice people watching.
Rebecca Brown
If Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borgé
had not decided to go the Marxist route when they put the FSLN together in Honduras this piece of history might have been totally different. It's easy to understand how any student of the time could not resist the romance of Cuba and Che Guevara, and hate the imperialist yankee pigs but the consequences of that puppy love have been hard on Nicaragua and the Nicaraguan people.
A simple people's uprising without the Marxist tilt would have had the full support of the US. We were the ones who told Somoza to leave, after all. The current Nicaragua/CR economic positions would probably be opposite today, with Nicaragua and its beautiful country a tourist and investment mecca, and Nicaraguans prosperous and well-educated like the Costa Ricans. It seems that this is a hallmark of the Marxists: they destroy their own.
Guatemala, El Salvador, were also tinderboxes with Marxist tilts. It's easy to understand how the US, still in the Cold War with the Soviets, reacted as it did in Nicaragua. CR was defenseless, and there goes the Panama Canal was undoubtedly one scenario depicted on some wall in the CIA.
With the stand down of the Soviets in Cuba recent history, the Sandinistas should have forseen how their connection with the Soviet Union would play out. Once the Soviets were in CA the outcome was inevitable.
I think you seriously miss the point.
The Third Tendency people, in the persons of the Ortega brothers, won the match and are back in today. Ortega often wondered why Reagan went after him (Ortega was, as the author of this book points out, a Social Democrat early and late) and decided he was Reagan's black pet.
The problem with simple people's uprisings is they tend not to have a plan beyond getting rid of the dictator (see Egypt for a contemporary example).
El Salvador is now ruled by its revolutionary party. I could tell what had happened in Bolivia when they began promoting the Che Guevara trail.
I think one of the things that I've also been thinking about is the underlying sadism of people who insist they must help other people.
Tourism eventually will be a problem if it's dominant here. It's causing a rise in crime in Costa Rica, which really isn't as uniformly prosperous as all that since most of what I've heard about it are that the prices are 90% of US prices but the average and median incomes are not. You don't get child prostitution in prosperous countries.
I don't think the average of Nicaraguans want more gringos here, and of the ten Jinotegans who are interested in tourism, the smartest one said he's realized it's not going to happen.
The US has never been known to support simple uprisings unless it had a candidate for the next leader. As one of my friend's military officer father (US) said, any order is better than chaos. It takes some group with a structured way of working intra-group to actually take over running a country where alternative political parties have been eliminated or marginalized. Or a MacArthur, who took the Japanese CP under his wing as the loyal (to him) opposition when he dismantled the great Japanese estates that had been supporting the Emperor.
I think the meanest thing the CIA could have done to Guevara would have would have been let him live into old age.
You should read the book, and the one on Ortega. The US propaganda in defense of its actions was not really the entire story.
Another book that I haven't reviewed yet covers the peace treaty and the standing down of the revolutionary armies in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua -- the Contras wanted as much land as did the country folks who were pro FSLN.
The theory that the US and UK had about the colonial and sphere of influence countries was that these countries would be under one great power or another, and better the US and the UK than the Soviets, Imperial Germany, the French, the Japanese, or maybe the Mongols, should they reorganize.
The thing is that history proved this not to be the case. Sandino wasn't under communist control even though the Mexican CP came courting. And the CP in Nicaragua was under Russian control and Russia was playing its foreign policy interests over the revolutionary aspirations of any colonial nation since the 1920s when Lenin nixed helping the Indians gain their independence. The USSR was actually, both in Che's case in Bolivia and in Nicaragua, not eager to see armed rebellion, or to associate itself with it. The USSR was attempting to hold onto its own sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Most of the CPs in Latin America were encouraged to work through the ballot box or to work on getting legalized. The Soviet Union didn't really do that much to get popular revolutions started, though it did seem to be there with military equipment to sell when the thing got rolling.
The book on Ortega goes into the Russian connections in some what greater detail and the author was able to look at declassified papers in Russian archives.
It's always more complicated on the ground than in the propaganda of both left and right.
Carter tried to negotiate a settlement that would have left the National Guard in place; Reagan went against US public opinion and funded the Contras with drug dealing money when the US Congress cut off funds.
The FSLN is back in power. I suspect that Ortega's more egregious political ambitions will be taken care of within the FSLN, but I suspect he'll be the candidate once again as other FSLN elements position new leadership for the future. My impression is that most of Nicaragua is farther to the left than not. I think the social democratic tendency was the most reasonable one, if only the Reagan faction had been equally sensible. Sweden was the model, not Cuba. Same as in Venezuela -- private enterprise and public enterprise, mixed economy, the only one that works over the long haul (Chavez may be skewing the mix in the public enterprise direction, but I don't trust US sources to be completely honest about alternative economic systems).
The other amusing bit of history is that the Kabul Marxist regime that the Soviet supported lasted longer after the Soviets left than did the South Vietnamese regime, and was actually not a bad government.
Cuba certainly has outlasted the collapse of its patron state, but Nicaraguans point out that it does restrict citizen travel and migration and that Nicaragua never did, even through the 1980s. The Nicaraguan I know who was in Russia during the 1980s were also not particularly favorably impressed by the system there, and at least one Russian took the opportunity to move to Jinotega during that era.
Rebecca Brown
Consider that a good 'Bollocking' Key West :)
I figure Rebecca would respond like a Saskatchewan snow storm....you know its coming, you just don't know how many inches you're gonna get. 15" on my screen.... Now where is that scraper.
I Can Take
the heat and if you read carefully there are a lot of contradictions in the blizzard.
There is much of history yet to be learned about this period. And we are all limited in understanding, as Kant described in his Kritik der reinen Vernuft, by where we have been and how we got here. A more familiar analogy is the parable of the elephant and the blind men. I will never see the same world quite the way Rebecca sees it.
I used to be a liberal and spent some time in a Washington state crack house as a counselor trying to help my small bit of humanity. Perhaps my abject failure made me bitter; or perhaps there IS a piece of humanity who will always be crack heads -or be addicted to the drug du jure. We had two floors: The alkies kept to themselves on the first floor and looked down on the crack heads; the crack heads who were much younger despised the alkies as old losers. I empathize with those Mormon missionaries who labor a year or two without a single convert. They probably get to feel the same way I did about the crack heads and alkies.
I see the video of the Finca Linda Vista coffee development and appreciate the investment, planning and hard work by the owners. Rebecca will see the laborers making $5 /day and wonder why they don't share in the bounty of the harvests (I would give them a bonus in profitable years, if that helps my standing here, and insure that they had protective clothing when dealing with chemicals). I realize that if not for the investment of the Finca owners the laborers wouldn't be getting the $5 /day. I do appreciate the social considerations of the Nicaraguan government in insuring that the workers get medical coverage, a Christmas bonus, and some paid vacation time. Now if the schools would just offer a more robust education and less propaganda . . I would see a government more invested in its people than in its survival.
Any steady money is a blessing when there is no alternative and your children are hungry; Rebecca sees exploitation. There is a bit of truth in both views.
The finca owners probably saved their money for years, perhaps educated themselves to this end, and spent many sleepless nights worrying about their decisions and whether the investment would eventually pay;. The laborers took their daily $5 and put themselves to sleep with a bottle of agua diente. No worries. That succinctly describes the concept of capitalism; the mechanics are much more complex.
Ortega's first stop wasn't Moscow. It was Washington and a meeting with Jimmy Carter, who promptly gave him $75 million to help him get his country back on its feet. Not a bad first response from the imperialist pigs. Somoza had looted Nicaragua of anything he could take with him, including the Nicaraguan treasury. Ortega made IMO the wrong decision and that cost Nicaragua a lot of innocent lives. Like Castro, Ortega probably realized that he could never be his own man if he kissed US butt, and threw the dice. He probably wouldn't have survived if he had made any other decision. From his point of view he made the right decision: He and his family are prosperous, and like Somoza, own a big piece of Nicaragua.
So,, who's right and who's wrong?? No one. It would be a boring world if the truth were that simple.
Incompetance & Theft
Anyone interested in the period should read the book,"Blood of Brothers" which details how the FSLN usurped The Council and removed all non-FSLN revolutionaries which comprised more than half on July 19, 1979. Violetta was the last big name to leave in 1980 I think.
Always was intention of Danny and his brother to establish a Cuban style Marxist dictatorship as they were trained there and worship Castro. They destroyed the economy by putting the business class on the run-some of whom did support Somoza but not all. They stole the property and still today there are 1000 properties in dispute. Businesses that stayed and allowed to continue had to give up homes or other assets. Then they destroyed the rich agriculture sector by appointing Jaime Wheelock as agriculture minister who by his own admission had never been on a finca! They seized farms and made thousands of poor people work as serfs. Price controls followed which was the final nail that sank the economy from which it never recovered.
San Marcos had thousands of old growth mahogany trees worth millions of dollars: All cut down and sent to Moscow. At the end they were setting up "Dollar Stores" to get much needed hard currency. They proved way ahead of their time as here in USA we have Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, Dollar Star, etc.
Even these days they allowed the goon squads to attack a rival hotel and have supported Qaddafi at critical time which I am sure the Libyan people will not soon forget.
No doubt the dictatorship of Somoza was terrible and had to be overthrown-but the overreach destroyed this country and ran off 500,000 people. Lots of crummy books written in the 1980s-Firestorm is another good one. Lots of movies as well-many made by leftist Europeans who supported the revolution in the early 80s. ALSINO Y EL CONDOR was praised as great cinema and it is but I believe was filmed in Cuba. These movies have some appeal today as I do not have to invest as much time as reading a crummy book. "The Uprising" is one of the best movies if you want to see what the Somoza regime and Guardia was really like. The battle scene at the end is almost as good as Babes in Toyland!-Filmed in Leon 1982 but released in 1985.
I read a lot of different books
What made the writer of this book angry was that the Ortegas had not planned to do anything other than a mixed economy along Swedish lines, ever. This matches what was said about him in the biography.
Jaime Wheelock screwed up, but confiscation by force hasn't always been for leftists in Nicaragua (the Coffee Wars, Somoza declaring war on Germany to be able to seize the German-owned coffee fincas). The Somoza family holdings were equal in land area to El Salvador.
What the people who worked the land for other people wanted was land of their own -- whether they were FSLN or Contra. Wheelock did want to treat them as a proletarian workforce. About anyone who has looked at the issues around land redistribution says that it should have been done more cleanly, as MacArthur did in Japan, away from the landowners who'd supported Somoza and given as titled individual parcels to the people who worked that land, none of the state farm nonsense. If the people who had small holdings wanted to form cooperatives, then that was their choice, and if the state could help them, fine.
Would Fonseca have done better if he'd lived? I'm not convinced he would have.
Rebecca Brown
Try 200,000 not 1,000
According to Hernán Estrada, The Attorney General of the Republic of Nicaragua, who estimates that almost 200,000 lots were not properly legalized after the property disputes of the 1980′s, and are still not.
How much of that was the people getting land
..not getting it in the form of individual owners with titles to individual parcels of land? If I remember correctly, some of the problems came from trying to have new systems for land ownership: collective, cooperative, that didn't put land in any one individual's hands. If the coop or collective fell apart, then nobody really owned the land.
Rebecca Brown
Drug people are a whole different category of people
I never tried to save any wholesale, but found out that if people were bound to self-destruction that way, not much would stop them, and their economic origins didn't seem to matter -- one was born into money, one wasn't, another was a bar owner's son.
The history of the Coffee Wars is worth taking a look at. People here were also doing the sort of complex multi-plant subsistence living that is discussed in the book 1491. Recent discoveries in the Amazon show that the whole place was much more artificial than previously believed. These traditional indigenous farmers lost their land by violence to the coffee growers (about 17% of whom were from the US and a large percent of whom were not Nicaraguan). Later Somoza used WWII as an excuse to seize the German coffee fincas. In living memory, the Matagalpa Indians drove out most the Danes (two families remained), 1930s. In the 19th Century, the government outlawed growing plantanos in some area to force the people who'd been living off the land to work as pickers. I believe pickers were even force drafted under Somoza, but that's a stack of books to wade through. This area wasn't intensively settled by the "Spanish" until the late 19th Century.
There's still friction between the central Mestizo culture and the indigenous culture -- some of which I've heard about first hand.
The finca owners got grants from whatever government and shot the indigenous people off the land, basically, not that different from the US South using Indians for slaves until they got hardier stock from Africa (indigenous folks had something like a 90% die off when exposed to Eurasian diseases).
Any steady food is a blessing --- what coffee growers did was break up the indigenous farming communities and put the land in coffee. Fortunately, shade grown (and that is more or less depending on the finca) allows some growing of other crops along side the cash crop. And coffee can be grown for money on steeper land than normally used for anything else. But the development of coffee plantations required the destruction of what was there before.
I think the Fonseca book covered the Coffee Wars; I think it came up in another book also. The establishment of coffee as a cash crop was not a matter of bringing money and food to previously starving people. It was a matter of breaking up subsistence farming so the fincas would have workers. The destruction of the original Sandino settlements was a continuation of that.
From the perspective of agriculturalists, the rest of us are parasites unless we give them something that they didn't have before that helps them. Agriculturalists are very vulnerable since they have crops in the field and unless they also take up raiding other agriculturalists, they're quite vulnerable and often have paid one set of armed people on horses to protect them from the other roving bands of armed people on horses who stole stuff for a living until they found their own agriculturalists to exploit.
For probably most of history, the agriculturalists didn't get much from the bargain, with payments to the armed guard ranging anywhere from 10% to 50% of the crop. Sometime in the 19th Century, technology began giving agriculturalists more than they'd put in to their cultures, maybe.
The advantage of coffee is that it's dry season work (if only; we had rain last night) and probably could be cash for people who spent the rest of the year growing their own food or food for market (some of the small farms sell their produce door to door here). But if the people working the coffee farms don't have access to their own land for growing the beans and corn in the off-season, for whatever number of reasons, then they're really going to live badly.
Coffee prices collapsed a few years back before I moved here, and people who had been expecting to work as pickers were begging in the streets. A bad year for coffee is hard on the finca owners, but it's very bad for people who don't have access to land to grow their own staples. And most fincas hire in most of their pickers, don't have them living on the land year round.
I'm all for Nicaragua improving education. All cultures propagandize -- it's just more noticeable when it's not what you were lead to believe by your culture. SC tried its best with me and failed, so I don't really believe propaganda per se is a problem. All cultures use it less than honestly in education.
Capitalism is about eliminating the competition -- if you can do that by under-educating the people who might produce smarter people than you, then that's what you do. I've seen it in practice in the South. My mother never believed that blacks were genetically inferior; she didn't want them to be well-educated because they'd compete with whites for jobs (see Obama). If you can bribe congressmen,you do that. If you can persuade people to consume crap that's not really healthy for them or the environment, you do that.
If a country is going to have a cash crop, something addicting is going to bring in more money than beans. Coffee isn't a bad cash crop as cash crops go, but export agriculture tends to wreck local farming (especially bad if the export crop is relatively low value staples).
Jinotega has 60 varieties of beans and 60 varieties of corn, and there's a movement to conserve the original breeds for a number of reasons. Nicaragua lost its native weaving traditions along with its native cotton varieties (destroyed in the 1940s by the Guardia at US request to preserve their market -- from the bio on Fonseca).
The bio on Ortega pointed out that when he came back to power, the Nicaraguans were less well-educated and in worse health than they'd been when he left office.
There are problems with subsistence farming -- it's extremely fragile as an economy -- but people who can grow all their own food do no go hungry because they lack cash money. And in Guatemala, they don't go unclothed either (a friend was just there and was amazed by the traditional clothing which is time-consuming but not cash-requiring).
Some of the fincas did better by their work forces than other. They tended not to have had their land confiscated during the 1980s. The families who did still have traditions of trying to cheat their help (recent case here).
I've worked for someone whose grandmother gave him two million dollars to start his own business and who would have lost all of it if one of his employees hadn't stepped in to improve the finances. The people who worked for him suffered far more from his lack of business abilities than he did (one friend lost $20K, all his savings, investing in the company).
Rebecca Brown
Aaah...
The sun is up, the snow has cleared and we are all off to start a new day.
Nice response Key West and yes, there is no 15 inch, 15 foot or 15 metre answer to this.
"We were the ones who told Somoza to leave, after all"...
But until then he was propped up like Cornish tin mine.
BTW...you wanted the National Guard to stay!!
Fonseca, Presente!
I remember thinking after I read that book what a different place Nicaragua might have been if Fonseca had lived. I did not read the prior posts/lectures verbatim, but I think it was a huge loss that the man did not survive to help shape Nicaragua after the revolution.
"if you see someone who has lost their smile, give them one of yours"
Um, I'm not sure
I went in expecting to like him better, but I'm not sure he wouldn't have been rather rigid in power.
Rebecca Brown
We will never know
I see him as a thinker and do-er. I felt he had a certain raw intellect that could have helped in ways of both style and substance.
"if you see someone who has lost their smile, give them one of yours"
No doubt he was an extremely smart man
I think people who are smart often forget that very few people who aren't themselves quite bright appreciate intelligence in others. My dog isn't smarter than I am, but she expects to get her way.
The book also made me think about the contradictions in Che Guevara -- the "a revolutionary must love" statement vs the executions that Che did personally in Cuba. Che was the product of a middle class leftist family, somewhat the same as some of the Weather Underground people in NYC (I knew Kathy Boudin's mother).
The other thing, watching some tapes of events from 1979 and earlier was how young they were, and how eager to explain themselves.
A UK leftist said that what the left in Europe learned is that if you pick up the gun, you live and die by the gun, and the people in the Arab countries are working more from non-violence (though not all). If everyone in a country wants things to be done differently, they will be done differently. The worst conflicts seem to be when both sides are more evenly matched (sometimes the weapons are better on one side and the ideas are better on the other).
In a conflict between idealists and pragmatists, bet on the pragmatists.
Rebecca Brown