Interview with Ernesto Cardenal

On May 3, 1985 at the PEN American Center in Manhattan, the following interview was conducted with Father Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaragua’s most celebrated living poet and since 1979 its Minister of Culture. The interview was held prior to a reception for Cardenal and present were Jonathan Cohen, one of his official translators and Robert Vargas, from the Nicaraguan Embassy, along with interviewers Mary Morris and Richard Falk.

Ernesto Cardenal is not only celebrated in Nicaragua but he is also well-known among Latin America’s intellectual elite and is one of the most widely read poets writing in Spanish today. He is an important spokesperson for the new ideology—a mix which typifies the unique character of the Nicaraguan revolution—that synthesizes Christianity and Marxism.

Indeed Cardenal is as unique as the revolution he espouses. His greatest influences have been two North Americans—Ezra Pound for his poetics and Thomas Merton for his beliefs. Cardenal has always been deeply interested in North America, in how the American experience is exported abroad. His life, and his poetry, have been very much shaped by the United States’ involvement in Nicaragua, his country’s struggle for self-determination and the overthrow of Somoza.

Cardenal was born in 1925 in Granada on the shore of Lake Nicaragua. In 1930 his family moved to Leon, the city where Ruben Dario, father of modern Spanish American poetry, lived. After study at the University of Mexico Cardenal came to New York in 1947 to study at Columbia University, where he was influenced by North American poetry. From 1957 to 1959 he was a novice under the spiritual guidance of Thomas Merton at the Trappist Monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky. After completing training for the priesthood in Mexico and Colombia, he returned to Nicaragua in 1966 to found a church and commune on the Solentiname archipelago on Lake Nicaragua. For many years Cardenal preached Mertonian non-violence until arriving at the realization and conviction that unjust existing social structures were not going to be transformed by peaceful means. In 1977 the Nicaraguan government under Somoza ordered the destruction of the revolutionary Solentiname commune, Cardenal went into exile and became a spokesman abroad for the guerillas who toppled Somoza in 1979. In the new revolutionary government Cardenal was named Minister of Culture, the post he holds today.

Cardenal’s work spans from the 1940’s to the present. Among his eight books are: Apocalypse and Other Poems; Marilyn Monroe and Other Poems; and With Walker in Nicaragua. Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems, New Directions, 1980, is a selection of some of Cardenal’s best work and features a useful introduction by Robert Pring-Mill, giving broad outlines of Cardenal’s political development and discussing the documentary, collage and didactic effects of his poetry. Pring-Mill quotes from Cardenal’s “Epistle to José Coronel Urtrecho”:

They've told me I talk only about politics now.
It's not politics but about Revolution
Which for me is the same thing as the kingdom of God.

* * *

Mary Morris: How has your work changed since the Revolution in Nicaragua on July 19, 1979? Do you feel you are writing differently in the post-Revolutionary society?

Ernesto Cardenal: I believe there’s been a slight change in the political poetry I have written since the victory of the Revolution. I have always tried to write poetry that people can understand, but since the Revolution it has become even plainer and simpler than before. It doesn’t represent a great change of any importance, but a certain change.

Morris: One of your major influences is Ezra Pound. His poetry though is hardly what you would call accessible. Yet your recent poetry is much more accessible than your earlier poetry. Is this a conscious choice you have been making in your work?

Cardenal: No, this is because my poetry may be simpler now. By no means has it been intentional, though it may appear to be. It’s unconscious. I just want people to understand me. As for Pound, the most important thing about The Cantos is that you don’t have the references to facts and people he’s talking about, the poetry is hard to understand. But it becomes very clear once you have the references because it is very concrete. Plenty of books have been written about The Cantos, and when they tell you who the people are in The Cantos and they explain the historical facts or characters, then you find that the poetry is perfectly clear. I don’t want, or rather, have never wanted to be inaccessible like Pound, because if I am in some way the reader has to guess about what I am saying.

Morris: The theme of indigenous peoples appears often in your work. What about the Miskito Indians? Have you written about them or do you plan to write about them?

Cardenal: I have tried several times to write about the Miskitos, but have never found enough material for a good poem. The indigenous poems I’ve written were possible after I found enough material about some indigenous culture, or tribe, having researched a great deal about Indians throughout North, South and Central America. And I haven’t found enough material about some cultures, or I haven’t gotten enough inspiration to convert this material into poetry. I really have had a special interest in writing about the Miskitos—I just haven’t found what I need yet. All of a sudden, in a flash, I may find a theme or two or three together that would serve for a poem. I am doing research about the Sumo Indians, and I feel that, having already written a very short poem about them, I will be able to do a longer poem about them with this same material . . . There’s an account written by an English sailor who was a captive of the Sumos for several months. I discovered his book in the New York Public Library, when I was a student at Columbia University, and I wrote a short poem about this Englishman’s captivity, “John Roach, Mariner,” but at the time I wasn’t writing especially about Indians, and so I left out the rest of his description of them. I think that an interesting poem can be written with the rest of the material . . . There are many books and publications about the Miskitos, but almost all are by missionaries, and what’s more they all deal with their efforts to make the Indians Christians. They talk about their customs, at times about their traditions, but generally the descriptions they gave are much too sterile and in my case they have not lent themselves to a poem. As I say, all of a sudden you may be lucky enough to find something full of poetry. My poetry about the Indians is a poetry I get out of the text—I don’t invent it.

Morris: To what extent were you aware of the situation of the Miskitos before the Revolution? Or is this something that has come to your attention within the last five years?

Cardenal: We have been ignorant of the ethnic groups along the Atlantic Coast. The Miskitos, the Sumos and the Ramas are three indigenous cultures and peoples, and there are also the blacks—Creoles—who speak English. The landscape of the Atlantic Coast has interested me as well, but not the ethnic problem so much as the one that is, above all, Nicaraguan. While on the Atlantic Coast as Minister of Culture, I was approached by a young black who told me he was a seaman and had read Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s book The Nicaraguan, about the Nicaraguan character. He said that in the whole book Cuadra never mentions a single thing about the Atlantic Coast, and I told him he should ask the author about this. I didn’t want to give the real reason, that it wasn’t interesting to Cuadra because he was ignorant about it . . . because we Nicaraguans weren’t aware that we had another Nicaragua and that it was made up of other cultures and other languages—and they didn’t feel Nicaraguan either. That is the reason why Revolution has had problems with these different ethnic groups, because historically there has been a separation. And not until the Revolution came did we grow aware of the other Nicaragua, and then problems arose with this other Nicaragua.

Morris: The problem is in part geographical, isn’t it?

Cardenal: Yes, the only contact with the coast used to be by plane. Now there are highways and Managua has telephones to it. Before you could only get there by plane, so that I too was unfamiliar with the coast, the north part of the Atlantic Coast, the true Miskito reform, until as Minister of Culture I went there for a cultural program.

Morris: Nicaragua has a tradition of love poetry. It also has a tradition of socially-committed poetry. Is most of the poetry being written revolutionary or political poetry?

Cardenal: I would say that there have been these two traditions, love poetry and poetry with social and political themes, and likewise now, it can be said that half of the poems being written, more or less half, are intimate love poems and the other half, social and political poems.

Morris: Is it just as easy to publish love poetry in Nicaragua as it is to publish political poetry?

Cardenal: Yes, absolutely, yes, because no importance is given to the themes that are treated, but to the quality of the poetry. The same is true for painting: what’s of interest is the artistic quality. A picture may be abstract, another concrete, or realist—and that’s okay. It can be said that there is a certain tendency in Nicaragua to produce socialist realism, but we don’t favor it and it is not officially approved because we have seen that it has created bad art. And the official line clearly expressed by the leaders of the Revolution is that there is no official line on art or literature.

Morris: We hear a great deal in this country about press censorship in Nicaragua. But is there literary censorship? Can any writer publish what he or she wants to publish?

Cardenal: Censorship is imposed only on La Prensa, the newspaper which follows to the letter the line of the Reagan Administration and the arguments of Reagan, Schultz and the C.I.A. It is continually printing fierce attacks against the Revolution and sometimes certain things in it are censored, usually in matters pertaining to the military and the economy. For example, once La Prensa announced that there was a shortage of sugar, and all the housewives bought five or six times what they normally would buy. Naturally, then there was a shortage of sugar. Given the artificial shortages, stores began to sell sugar at very high prices and created a serious problem. So at times when economic harm can result from alarming news, especially false news that’s meant to be subversive, then it is censored. But concerning poetry, in no way is it censored. If you read the literary supplement in La Prensa, you will find poems there against the Revolution, mostly by Pablo Antonio Cuadra, who writes very bitter poems against the Revolution . . . very hostile to the Revolution, and there you’ll find no restriction at all, none . . . What’s happening is that the papers that are with the Revolution don’t get upset if the censorship office says that something shouldn’t appear, because they understand it wouldn’t be proper to publish it. I imagine that if papers that are in accord with the Reagan Administration are told that something shouldn’t be said because it would be harmful, then the papers would voluntarily omit it. And now La Prensa is an enemy paper, so when it gets censored it makes a scandal—sometimes the paper closes that day in protest, and a cable is sent to the whole world that it has been censored . . . As I say, there are two grounds for censorship, with the exception that sometimes the person in charge [of censorship] at a given moment may be a fool who can censor what occurs to a fool needs to be censored. But the policy deals with military news or economic news that can alter the economy of the country. It can just as well be applied to a paper of the Revolution that is printing a news item, for example, about battles that are taking place, when it is not yet proper for that to get around because they haven’t ended, not proper to explain the situation or whatever the case may be, or when an investigation that’s being conducted hasn’t been finished, etc. That is, when the Ministry of Defense or the army has some reason for the public not to know about it yet.

Morris: But good poets regardless of their political perspective can continue to publish good poetry, right?

Cardenal: Naturally that’s true. As I say, this has nothing to do with literature.

Morris: The role of the church and religion in the Revolution in Nicaragua has made it a very unique revolution in history. Have you ever found the Revolution to be incompatible with your beliefs as a priest? And can you talk about the current role of the church in the Revolution?

Cardenal: We should say that there is a divided church. There’s a regional church and a revolutionary church. The regional church is represented mainly by the bishops, not all, and the other by a great number of Christian priests, monks, and laypeople who are with the Revolution and who make up what, as you say, may be a unique case in history: the first revolution in history with widespread support from Christians. It is actually the only government in the world that has priests in its cabinet and in government positions very important to the Revolution, such as, for example: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the Maryknoll priest, Father D’Escoto; the Ministry of Education, which is basic to the Revolution because it is responsible for educating the young people, the future of Nicaragua; and the Ministry of Culture which is the ideological ministry of the Revolution. They all have priests in positions of responsibility, too. Besides this, more than half of the cabinet members, ministers and vice ministers, are practicing Catholics, so that not only do we find nothing incompatible with the faith, but to the contrary, we find that in the Revolution we can realize ourselves perfectly well as Christians and those who are priests as priests. And the Sandinista Front considers the Revolution’s union with Christians to be an essential part of the Sandinista Revolution, not something accidental or temporary that is allowed for nothing more than a certain time, but an essential part of the character of the Revolution in Nicaragua.

Morris: So there is no contradiction for the Government?

Cardenal: By no means—there is only union, a union that one of the commanders of the national leadership has called indissoluble.

Richard Falk: There is a great political effort in this country to present the Sandinista experience as a Marxist-Leninist experience and thereby to discredit it. Even the liberal perspectives—the New York Times and so on—are very hostile on that basis. Therefore the whole role of the spiritual and religious significance in the Sandinista movement is very important to the politics here and anything you could say specifically about how the religious element has influenced the specific character of the Sandinista Revolution would be very important.

Cardenal: Okay, I have just said that there indeed is a revolution with a Marxist orientation, but at the same time with a union with Christianity, which makes what may be an original revolution distinct from previous revolutions that have been in the world. And on the other hand, now in Nicaragua neither the population nor the Government cares whether someone is a Marxist or someone is not a Marxist. Just as when it once mattered if you were a Jew or a Christian—and for that reason there were wars in the world—now in a civilized society no one minds if someone is a Jew or a Christian. Later in time there was a split among Christians into Protestants and Catholics, and there were wars because of that split. Actually, among civilized people nobody cares about knowing, that is, there is no special interest in knowing if someone is a Catholic or a Protestant. The same is true among us, and so it doesn’t matter to us if a person who is serving in the army of the Sandinista Front or who is the Government is a Marxist or not. I, for instance, don’t know who is or isn’t a Marxist in the Ministry of Culture, generally because nobody ever raises the question . . . because they generally don’t go around talking about it or also because many times the person himself doesn’t know if he is a Marxist or not, or to what degree he is, because that takes reading a lot of Marx. And if someone wants to be known as a Marxist or a Leninist, he has to have read enough of Lenin’s books, and be very clear about it all, to say that he understands Marxism or Leninism very well, and that he is convinced of it. Other people perhaps have a vague idea about what it may mean, and emotionally they can feel close to that ideology which they don’t really know well scientifically. Above all, what I am saying is that there’s no interest in knowing whether someone serving in the army is so inclined, even for joining the Sandinista Front as a member or a soldier. He isn’t asked if he’s a Marxist or not, nor is he ever asked indirectly. The only thing we care to know about someone is whether or not he’s a revolutionary—that’s the only thing that matters. The matter of whether someone is a Marxist or not is is quite small because we have three Marxist-Leninist parties opposing Sandinism in the recently elected Congress, together with President Ortega. There are six parties in opposition to the Sandinista Front, three of the right and three of the left. The left’s three parties are Marxist-Leninist, one of them having a certain leaning toward Maoism, besides Marxism and Leninism, and these three are enemies of the Sandinista Front, so that to us someone’s being a Marxist doesn’t mean that he is one of us—he may be an enemy of ours. For example, these parties maintain that the Sandinista Front is not the true revolution, that it is a bourgeois revolution, that it is not the true proletarian revolution and they are the ones who represent the proletariat and that they should be in power because they are the vanguard of the workers and peasants, or rather, they call themselves the vanguard. They are actually a very small minority. What’s more, they are very dogmatic, very orthodox in the sense that the texts, not reality, guide them. Commander Tomas Borge once said about one of these parties that they believed it was necessary to assume power the way Lenin did, by storming the Winter Palace, but the problem was that in Nicaragua there is neither winter nor a palace.

Morris: You have said in another interview that for you poetry is above all prophecy in the Biblical sense of guidance. How would you guide your people now in the face of recent events in Nicaragua such as the trade embargo? What do you see in the future?

Cardenal: For the moment I still don’t know what we should do in Nicaragua. The Bible’s prophets never were so specific about things as concrete, feeling that the prophecies they gave the people were ample guidance. In every concrete case it is more difficult to launch into a prophecy because a mistaken prophecy may come about.

Morris: What about your own future. What are you writing now?

Cardenal: Now I am writing poetry of a cosmic character, which has elements of mysticism and politics as well as deeply personal feelings about my life, but it is framed especially in cosmologic language about the problems posed by time and space, matter, the atom, the stars and human evolution. It’s likely to be long—I can’t work on it much now . . .