A first-hand account by the oldest surviving comandante of the Sandinista revolution, Tomás Borge’s memoirs are filled with hitherto unpublished details of his formation as a revolutionary and of the FSLN’s history before coining to power, including biographical sketches of the Sandinistas he admires most. Politics may be Borge’s vocation, but literature is his avocation. His pages are littered with literary allusions, with references to what he read as a youth and later as a political prisoner, with discussions of their artistic quality and political relevance. A poem by Gioconda Belli is here published for the first time, as well as a discussion of the “new poetry” of José Coronel Urtecho and an appreciative chapter devoted to the founder and poet of La Prensa Literaria, Pablo Antonio Cuadra. Virtually every major figure in modern French literature is mentioned, along with Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe, as shapers of Borge’s esthetic sensibilities. As much as revolutionary politics, literature would seem to be a great passion in his life.
The fundamental thesis of Borge‘s memoirs, never directly stated, is that revolutionary impatience needs to be controlled. In Costa Rica an armed movement of Nicaraguan exiles led by Pedro Joaquín Chamorro emerged in 1959 aimed at overthrowing the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. But for the intervention of Silvio Mayorga, Borge would have dissipated his energies in that venture. Mayorga convinced him of the need to be patient, to wait for an opportunity to risk his life in a project that would be “really revolutionary” (p. 109).
In the ensuing guerrilla war, Borge needed still more patience to endure hunger and disease at the hands of nature along with imprisonment and torture by the National Guard. More than once he vacillated. Only gradually did he and his companions come to understand that the struggle would be hard, painful, and protracted.
If there is a subtheme to this work, it is devotion to the truth. Like Augusto C. Sandino, Borge believes that a successful social revolution hinges on self-knowledge as well as knowledge of the enemy. Revolutionaries must acknowledge their character failings, he insinuates, not just their mistaken judgments. A telling example is his confession of having betrayed a comrade from fear of being tortured and the lies he told about being tortured, accentuating the vicious cycle of his shame.
The most singular failing of the work is Borge’s literary license in backtracking and lunging forward in time as it suits him, so that the book repeatedly lapses into disconnected narrative. Nonetheless, Borge intends his memoirs to be a contribution to literature as well as history, and by and large he succeeds. With good reason this informative, emotionally packed, and well-written volume was awarded the premio Casa de las Américas in 1989.
