David Johnson Lee's The Ends of Modernization is a tale of disappointment. Lee examines a variety of domestic and international actors seeking economic and political progress for Nicaragua, starting with the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s and continuing into the 21st century. These hopes were invariably dashed. The Kennedy administration intended for the Alliance to generate technocratic progress and promote democracy to undercut the appeal of Cuban-style revolution in Latin America. Nicaragua achieved economic gains that made it “a star of the Alliance,” but these gains occurred under Anastasio Somoza's dictatorship, revealing that the Alliance had abandoned its “pretensions of democratization” (p. 10). After Managua's devastating 1972 earthquake, efforts to rebuild the capital as a modern, planned city only heightened tensions that “helped bring about the last major social revolution of the Cold War” (p. 42).
Lee writes that, after the Sandinista-led revolution in 1979, Nicaragua's leaders “would try...