Dennis Gilbert has written an excellent introduction to the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and its revolution. Although completed before the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat in February 1990, this book should be read both by people seeking a basic understanding of Nicaragua and by those desiring a more detailed understanding of the FSLN.
Gilbert is at his best when he is sorting out the Sandinistas’ contradictory messages. The formal outlines of Sandinista organization and theory, he correctly points out, suggest that the FSLN is a standard Leninist organization that has dominated Nicaraguan society. However, his closer look reveals that while Marxism and Leninism were crucial in forming Sandinista philosophy, a variety of other influences, including liberation theology, have molded the Nicaraguan revolutionary experience. He ultimately sees the Sandinistas as “a party of pragmatists, sometimes stubborn, but finally open to compromise” (p. 178).
While other authors, particularly Donald Hodges (Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, 1986), have given us a more comprehensive treatment of the development of Sandinista ideology, Gilbert makes his strongest contribution to Nicaragua scholarship with his chapters on “The Party” and “The Party in the State and the Mass Organizations.” Those areas have been generally neglected in previous studies of the Nicaraguan revolution. These chapters, based on extensive interviews with both leadership and rank-and-file Sandinistas, give the reader a fine grasp of the party’s inner workings.
A careful reading of this book provides an understanding of the surprising electoral defeat and transfer of power to the United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO). Gilbert describes well the revolution’s internal contradictions and, in the chapter “Yankees and Sandinistas,” its powerful external foe. Internally, party leaders tended to issue top-down commands and to lose touch with the activists at the base. Moreover, the FSLN attempted to court both the landowners and the landless peasants. Playing to both constituencies, the FSLN wound up rejected by both at the polls. Finally, the chapter on the United States and Nicaragua vividly demonstrates the difficult odds the Sandinistas faced as they pursued a dramatic transformation of a country long dominated by North American interests.