path that failed but would succeed under the correct path, making use of the masses. Carlos Fonseca adopted many of the Sandinista military goals from Che Guevara in 1959. Just as Guevara had implemented his guerrilla foco in the Sierra Maestra mountains of the Oriente province, Fonseca believed Nicaragua's Revolution would begin with mass insurgency in the countryside. Populism and guerrilla warfare Carlos Fonseca is considered the principal ideologue of the Sandinistas because he established the fundamental ideas of Sandinism. Many aspects of Sandinismo are similar to tendencies in other forms of political thought in Latin America like its appeal to the largest mass of the population and its anti-imperialist rhetoric. The most important attributes of the ideology make it solely a Nicaraguan creation. In Sandinismo, there is an emphasis that revolution begins in rural regions among Nicaragua's oppressed peasantry, Sandinista ideas are rooted in the symbols of Augusto César Sandino and there is an effort to develop conscious growth through education. Carlos Fonseca adopted many of the Sandinista military goals from the Cuban Revolutionary experience led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in 1959. Just as Guevara had implemented his guerrilla foco in the Sierra Maestra mountains of the Oriente province, Fonseca believed Nicaragua's Revolution would begin with mass insurgence in the countryside. However, Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Fidel Castro had themselves studied Sandino's war against the American Marines in Nicaragua during the late 1950s. Fonseca's early experiences with student activism led him to declare himself a Marxist in 1954. In the 1950s at the National University of Nicaragua in Leon, Fonseca began developing his radical ideology by studying the Marxist classics. As a student in the 1960s, Fonseca split from the Pro-Moscow Communist Party of which he was a member of due to their unwillingness to commit to armed warfare. This began Fonseca's ideological move toward scientific socialism and revolutionary nationalism following the foot steps of Che and Fidel. Fonseca's own writings began mentioning Sandino in 1959 and in the context of the Cuban Revolution during his stay in Havana [this is incorrect: the Front was founded in Honduras in 1961] where the Sandinista Front was created. In Cuba, where he found a biography called "Sandino: General of Free Men", Fonseca was able to study Sandino freely and to begin constructing what he saw as a uniquely Nicaraguan revolutionary ideology. Fonseca's biographer, Matilde Zimmermann, argues that the year