The Patient Impatience: From Boyhood to Guerrilla: A Personal Narrative of Nicaragua's Struggle for Liberation

A founder of the Sandinistas and Nicaragua's former minister of Interior, Borge blends history, reportage, autobiography and an account of his decades of anti-Somoza struggle in this rambling montage. The most effective sections describe the Somoza dictatorship's bloody repression, the author's harrowing years in prison and his precarious existence as a guerrilla. Borge, whose mother's land was confiscated by Somoza, glorifies Fidel Castro, Che Guevara (``Che is as impertinent as Christ'') and Carlos Fonseca, principal founder of the Sandinistas. He chronicles direct U.S. interventions in Nicaragua from 1854 onward and paints a heroic picture of the Sandinistas as a political vanguard that awakened the masses. Interleaved with manifestos, news articles and poems, his often lyrical, impassioned narrative includes cameos of such figures as novelist Julio Cortazar, comrade Daniel Ortega and poets Jose Coronel Urtecho and Ernesto Cardenal. (Apr.)