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The Death of Leonel Rugama

Back in the day on January 15th, 1970, Nicaraguan guerrilla poet Leonel Rugama was killed in battle. Born of a father who worked as a carpenter and a mother who was a teacher, the young Central American wordsmith enrolled in the National Seminary in Managua where he struck a friendship with famed poet and liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal. Decidedly a leftist, Rugama then went on to join with the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 1967 and later organized students in revolutionary solidarity at a University in Leon. Three years later, the twenty-year old poet found himself engaged in a fierce battle with a National Guard battalion of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. He died alongside his fellow young comrades only to have his poetry live on. Rugama’s most famous poem “The Earth is a Satellite of the Moon” is noted in Latin American literature and his life was eulogized in Eduardo Galeano’s “Memory of Fire” Trilogy.

Foreshadowing his own demise, the slain soldier-poet penned his epitaph in a poem by the same name when he penned, “Here lie the mortal remains/ of one who in life / searched without relief for / one by one / your face on every bus in the city”

For Uprising, this is your truth professa’ saying it’s no mystery why they conceal our people’s history