The Soul of a Lost Cause

The radical priest who once bucked the will of Pope John Paul II looks old and frail now, with his wintry beard and shuffling gait.

He’s still wearing his beatnik beret, and when he speaks of the glory days of the ‘70s and ‘80s his eyes blaze with an apostle’s ardor. But Father Ernesto Cardenal’s fiery eloquence can’t burn away this stubborn thought: that the Nicaraguan revolution, the cause that Cardenal served so devoutly, through so many years of sacrifice and spilled blood, is a ghost of its former self.

Sitting beside his living-room wall, with its eerie photo montage of fallen comrades, Cardenal offers a thudding assessment of what happened to that distant revolutionary dream.

“For now it would seem that it wasn’t worthwhile, the death of anyone,” says Cardenal, a Roman Catholic priest and one of the most renowned Central American poets of the last half-century. “But in that time it was felt that they had died for a better country, in order to create a better country.”

The revolution that brought the leftist Sandinistas to power, and the civil war that followed, left tens of thousands dead and laid waste to this majestically beautiful land. As Cardenal, 80, chronicles in his latest volume of memoirs, “La Revolucion Perdida” (The Lost Revolution), revolutions sometimes have an odd way of turning the tables on their inventors.

The inventors in this case were the members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Born as a ragtag resistance movement, the Sandinistas in 1979 led a popular overthrow of the thuggish and corrupt Somoza family’s four decades of dictatorship.

They then fought the U.S.-backed Contra rebels to a draw while founding a new government based on socialist principles: the redistribution of private property to the poor and increased financial support for education and public health.

Cardenal served as culture minister, organizing poetry and arts workshops for peasants, soldiers and factory workers. An advocate of liberation theology -- the left-wing Christian doctrine that Jesus’ teachings support revolutionary action against entrenched social injustice -- Cardenal believed that his duties as priest, poet and Sandinista were essentially one and the same.

Marxism, in Cardenal’s view, was compatible with a God-given natural order -- not the “dogmatic and metaphysical” Marxism of the Soviet Union, as he puts it in “The Lost Revolution,” but the “flexible and pluralistic” Marxism of Nicaragua, which had grown organically from the heated soil of the country’s volcanic inequalities.

But the Vatican didn’t see it that way, particularly not Pope John Paul, whose life in Poland had been shadowed by the specter of Soviet communism. In Latin America, the pontiff began replacing left-leaning bishops with conservatives who cracked down on social activism within the church. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI last week, was John Paul’s point man on doctrine, denouncing liberation theology and working through his Vatican office to silence its leading practitioners.

During a visit to Managua in 1983, the pope wagged his finger at the priest and publicly scolded him. As chanting Sandinistas and their supporters drowned out the Holy Father, an open-air Mass dissolved into chaos. Cardenal was pressured by the church to resign his government post but refused.

Cardenal eventually was barred from performing holy sacraments. His brother, Fernando Cardenal, also a priest, served as education minister. He was suspended from the Jesuit order but later readmitted.

In “The Lost Revolution,” Ernesto Cardenal maintains that John Paul’s condemnation of the Sandinistas showed a basic lack of understanding of Nicaragua’s long-suffering citizens. “The people lacked respect for the pope, it’s true,” he writes, “but it’s because first the pope had lacked respect for the people.”

Asked about the new pope in an interview last week with a Nicaraguan publication, Cardenal described Benedict as an “inquisitor” and called his election a “fatal” decision by the church.

Now the Sandinistas, who lost Nicaragua’s presidency in 1990, are struggling for political relevancy and John Paul lies entombed in St. Peter’s. As for the revolution, Cardenal believes, it lost its moorings years ago. He is especially incensed at Daniel Ortega, the Sandinistas’ former military leader and president, whom Cardenal has accused of acting like a dictator by quashing dissent within the Sandinista party and cutting cynical deals with the party’s former opponents.

Ortega is seeking the presidency for the fourth time. And Cardenal is backing businessman and former Managua Mayor Herty Lewites, who once spent a year in U.S. federal prison for gun-running to the Sandinistas. “I hope that Ortega will not be elected president,” Cardenal says. “It would be a disaster for our country.”

Even before losing power, Ortega and the Sandinista leadership had alienated many of their followers. While top party officials were allowed to live in the confiscated mansions of Somoza’s cronies, ordinary Nicaraguans were still mired in poverty and despair.

Cardenal’s memoirs have little to say about other costly errors of the Sandinista regime, such as its forced relocation of the coastal Miskito Indians, for which it was roundly condemned.

Meanwhile, liberation theology has fallen from favor in Latin America. Conservative evangelical Protestantism, not Marxist Catholicism, is the new spiritual growth engine. Across the hemisphere’s southern half, a new generation of business-suited, left-leaning leaders in countries such as Argentina, Chile and Brazil has supplanted the bearded, fatigue-wearing comandantes. “Capitalism won. Period,” Cardenal conceded in a 1999 interview with the Miami Herald. “What more can be said?”

What then becomes of Cardenal’s argument that the meek, if they are to inherit the Earth, can’t always afford to turn the other cheek? Is the revolutionary era over in Latin America?

“Well, no, it hasn’t passed,” Cardenal replies, “because the conditions that made the previous revolutions exist -- now they are even worse, the social injustice, the inequality, the poverty and the misery of the people, and they still make the revolutions more necessary.”

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Cardenal’s life is one of active solitude. He spends much of his time reading and writing. He receives visitors at home but doesn’t use the Internet, entrusting a secretary with his extensive correspondence. He still sculpts, a passion that began during his student days at New York’s Columbia University in the late 1940s. With satisfaction, he points to an elegant abstract piece modeled after a tropical plant.

And he still writes poetry.

In a country where poets are treated like movie stars, Cardenal is admired for his plain-spoken candor, technical innovations and sheer productivity. His wide-ranging intellect, epigrammatic style and blank-verse emotional immediacy recall such key influences as Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.

In his longer narrative poems such as “With Walker in Nicaragua,” about William Walker, the Tennessee soldier of fortune who invaded Nicaragua in the 1850s and tried to transform it into a slave society, Cardenal uses the canto form to spin history into verse. Reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” in its lush, symbolic imagery and haunted, backward-glancing point of view, “With Walker in Nicaragua” is a masterpiece of historical re-imagination.

Only in some later works does Cardenal occasionally fall into polemics. “He can be such a superb poet,” critic Richard Elman wrote in the Nation in 1985, “that his occasional wordiness and heavy-handedness is all the more unforgivable.”

Cardenal’s emphatically mixed feelings about the United States surface in many of his poems, as well as in his latest memoirs. As a young man he honed his beliefs while living in a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, where he became a disciple of Thomas Merton, the monk who was a poet, theologian and social justice advocate. Though his spoken English is limited, he has read widely in that language and has translated English poetry into Spanish. “American poetry has influenced me more than that of any other country,” he says.

But he draws a distinction between the American people and their culture, which he admires, and the “imperialist invader” that he believes has brought his country so much grief. “The government of the United States is the most terrorist government of the world,” he says, citing the embargo during the 1980s that devastated Nicaragua’s economy.

He also separates “good globalization,” which he defines as the shrinking of the world into a more neighborly place where “humanity encounters itself more and interrelates more,” from the purely economic type of globalization that exists to expand consumer markets. A spurt of foreign investment failed to lift Nicaragua’s lower classes, he says, despite a handful of new malls, banks and gas stations squatting at otherwise barren intersections.

But he’s not lingering on the past, not this afternoon, anyway. In a few hours, he announces, he is leaving for the town of Masaya, a Sandinista stronghold about 40 minutes southeast of Managua, to give a reading at a rally for presidential hopeful Lewites.

Under a broiling Sunday afternoon sun, a fervent crowd decked out in army camouflage jackets and Che Guevara-logo hats swarms around a large stage, eating watermelon slices and waving red and black flags. Someone dropping onto the scene might think he’d stepped back 20 years in time.

One Lewites supporter, Manuel Carlos Lopez, 30, sits on a stone wall with his back to the dark waters of the Laguna de Masaya, listening to an old Sandinista anthem. “Nicaragua needs democracy,” Lopez says. “We don’t need communism. We’re fed up with war. We don’t believe in war. We believe in peace.”

A rap group takes the stage to warm up the crowd. One of its members, Marvin Blanco, 20, says Cardenal’s passionate poems influenced his country’s hip-hop generation. “I listen to him about the tierra Nicaragua, about our landscape, our water, our story.”

As Blanco speaks, a cavalcade of cars pulls up behind the stage, unloading Cardenal, Lewites and an entourage of aides. An announcer introduces “our signature revolutionary poet, the pride of the Nicaraguan people,” and Cardenal steps up to the lectern.

Then he launches into some verses from “Canto Nacional,” a lengthy work dedicated to the Sandinista Front that alternates slangy wordplay with scathing references to General Motors and “los Money Managers” of Wall Street and verses from the Book of Jeremiah.

“Go away, go away, go away, Yankees!” Cardenal intones in his best Old Testament prophet’s voice. As Cardenal finishes, the crowd breaks into cheers and applause.

From the old priest’s lips, the message is still lyrical and loud: The revolution is dead -- viva la revolucion!