Casa Museo Comandante Carlos Fonseca

The low-budget but heartfelt Casa Museo Comandante Carlos Fonseca honors Commander Carlos Fonseca, the intense and bespectacled architect of the Sandinista Movement. He grew up in this humble adobe with his single mother and four siblings, like Sandino, caught between abject poverty and relative wealth after his coffee-scion father finally admitted paternity when Carlos was in grade school.

At age 19, in 1955, Fonseca joined the PSN (Nicaraguan Socialist Party) and started publishing Marxist tracts. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution he was invited to a journalists' convention in Havana, where he ended up staying to host Sandino discussion groups. This sort of thing didn't sit well with the Somozas, who had him jailed when he returned, forcing him to sit still long enough to write the widely published letter, 'From Jail I Accuse the Dictator.' After a few years of exile in Costa Rica, Fonseca returned to the fight. In 1976, during a National Guard ambush in the tiny town of Zinica, Matagalpa, Fonseca was gunned down.

But, as with Che Guevara and Obi-Wan Kenobi, killing Fonseca only made him stronger. He was already the revolution's semiofficial philosopher; his heroic death made him its face (which is good PR, considering it could have been Ortega). His childhood home is dominated by his most famous image, a painting of him looking every inch the disco swinger that he absolutely was not. If you can read Spanish, you'll appreciate the two rooms full of newspaper clippings and water-stained original documents that chronicle this remarkable man's life; anyone can contemplate his glasses and typewriter. And machine gun. Curious? The best biography available in English is Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution, by Matilde Zimmermann.