There is risk in crossing disciplinary boundaries. As a historian, therefore, I tread carefully when reviewing a work on literature and cultural studies. With that caveat, I read this book as a history of twentieth-century Nicaraguan thought as revealed in political discourse and literature. As such, it is excellent.
Cursed by authoritarianism for most of the twentieth century, Nicaragua produced an intellectual elite whose literature remained firmly in the Hispanist, Catholic, and conservative camp while other Latin American writers turned to critical stances. According to Chávez, social commentary did not appear in Nicaraguan literature until the 1940s (97). Included in its cohort are the men who followed Rubeń Darió: Luis Alberto Cabrales, José Coronel Utrecho, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Joaquiń Pasos, Alberto Ordóñez, and José Romań.
In that milieu, Anastasio Somoza Garciá, the first of three Somozas in power until 1979, represented the twentieth-century modernizing dictator, but his authoritarianism was nevertheless not in sync with the nation's literati. Chávez calls his rhetoric “utopian,” the first in a wave of idealistic discourses he traces through the Sandinista Revolution (1979-90) and the neoliberal governments of the 2000s. Thinking about Walt Rostow's modernization theory as utopian was jarring at first, but Chávez convincingly shows that in the 1930s Somoza Garciá's “conservative utopia” (20) was different from that of the traditional elites in that he took the United States and its thinkers as his models. His utopia had three components: order (social and political), stability (economic), and modernity (technological), resting on a monopoly of violence exercised as necessary for capitalist development to bloom.
In opposition to conservative dreams, a third utopia emerged in the 1930s: sandinismo, with its uncompromising nationalism, its profound anti-imperialism, and its romantic naturalism. The kind of discursive opening that Ceśar Augusto Sandino made possible was followed by the Generation of 1940, which now criticized Somoza but from a conservative political stance based on Social Christian or Christian Democratic perspectives. In the 1950s the second Somoza, Luis, chose fewer speeches and more modernization. Chávez sees Luis as a “pragmatist,” but still utopian in his belief in the ideal of Central American economic integration, including a dose of Alliance for Progress reform as inoculation against revolution, and his staunch adherence to US foreign policy objectives. Meanwhile, a generation of Nicaraguan writers, including figures like Sergio Ramírez, Ernesto Cardenal, and Lizandro Chávez Alfaro, became true critics of the regime, introducing Sandino into their work and finally catching up with Latin American literary currents that dialogued with leftist discourses.
The third strongman of the clan, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, developed his own version of utopia, also in the authoritarian capitalist mold but packed with “national security” and anticommunist language. With the overthrow of Somoza Debayle in 1979, the Frente Sandinista de Liberacioń Nacional attempted to implement a “revolutionary utopia.” Chávez follows the integration of writers into the revolutionary government and their attempts to create a new cultural subject, “the new man” and “the new woman,” using all modes of cultural production at their disposal: poetry, the novel, cinema, and literacy itself. Chávez pays close attention to testimony, too, as an expression of utopian thinking, including Omar Cabezas and Tomaś Borge. Women—Gioconda Belli, Michelle Najlis, Vidaluz Meneses, Daisy Zamora, and Rosario Murillo, in particular—are highlighted for their special contributions to utopian praxis.
The revolutionary experiment collapsed after one decade, under relentless US opposition, leaving in its wake “pessimism” (295) and an open door for the return of conservative utopias. This time, it was a neoliberal utopia with strong somocista historical echoes, but with buy-in from the conservative elites.
Although this is not a book for beginners, it makes an important contribution to Nicaraguan history and Latin American literature and culture.
