Poet, priest, activist, Ernesto Cardenal is 94 years old and just out of a serious illness recover. In his house in Managua, he speaks with DW about the situation in Nicaragua.
“I feel very comfortable. I only cough at night a little, but nothing Serious. It has to do with age.” Ernesto Cardenal sitting next to a rustic Desk in a ascetically furnished room of his home in Managua, the capital of his home country of Nicaragua. He is wearing a white peasant shirt, baggy Jeans, and his black beret on the grey mane. So you get to know him.
In addition to his wide leather armchair, a hospital bed. Three nurses take care of the 94-Year-old round-the-clock, to help him with readings, and remind him to take his medicine. Around two weeks he spent recently with a kidney infection in the hospital, many supporters feared for his life. Next to the bed in a blue hammock hangs: his favorite place to Think and Relax, he says. A small, old typewriter is ready for use on the Desk.
Manifesto against the government
The liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal is the most famous living Poet of his country, awarded the peace prize of the German book trade. His literary work has been translated into more than 20 languages.
When he thinks of the political crisis in his country, dampened his mood. “The Situation has become worse. We want to get out of here. We want a real change in the country, a real social change.”
Almost a year ago he wrote a Manifesto in which he denounces the Repression of the government against the protesting students. Their protests against the government began on 18. In April of last year and led to fight the bloody street. Cardenal spoke against a dialogue of the Opposition with President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice-President, Rosario Murillo,.
Protests against Daniel Ortega, Ernesto Cardenal: “He needs to go. There is nothing to negotiate”
“And I’m sticking to it: no to a dialogue. We just want the President couple. There is nothing to negotiate,” he replies to the question, according to the new rounds of talks. The Opposition and the government have been trying for the 27. February to solve the for more than eleven months of the ongoing political crisis.
How would the writer outside to describe what’s going on in Nicaragua? Not at all, he says: “you should know what is going on here, and I’ll tell you. I don’t have the freedom to say it to you. Here there is no freedom of any kind. for me, Too.”
But as the crisis in Nicaragua can then be used to solve? “I don’t know,” says Cardenal. “But the people know and to change, especially young people, have tried up to now unsuccessful. But we continue to hope. It is the hope that keeps us alive.”
The priest of the Revolution
Ernesto Cardenal began as a child writing poetry. To inspired his first poem over the grave of the eminent Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916) to his father, who used the verses Daríos to read aloud. “Oh, this poem was a little childish and primitive. It was not really poetry, but I called it poetry,” he recalls with a Smile.
With the same passion with which he loved poetry, he turned to Religion. In 1965 ordained a priest, he founded a little later, a Christian commune on an island in lake Nicaragua, which became a nucleus for guerrilla groups in the struggle against the dictator Anastasio Somoza.
Ernesto Cardenal, Pope Francis: “He is like a miracle, a blessing from God”
During the Sandinista Revolution, he was Minister of culture of his country – in the first government of Daniel Ortega from 1985 until 1990. Due to his political commitment, the Pope suspended the theologians in 1984 of his priesthood.
The papal punishment lasted for 35 years, although Ernesto Cardenal a long time previously from the Sandinismus had distant. As of 2007, after Daniel Ortega’s return to Power, turned Cardenal to a relentless critic of what he calls “the new dictatorship”.
In the middle of February 2019, as Cardenal health was in a critical condition, said Pope Francis the sanction. On the same day, the author of the “gospel of the peasants from Solentiname” (1975) celebrated visibly weakened in the hospital, a trade fair, together with the papal Nuncio in Managua.
Admiration for Pope Francis
Ernesto Cardenal has for Pope Francis, a lot of admiration. “He is like a miracle, a blessing from God: He has initiated a Revolution in the Vatican and in the Church and in the world.”
Nevertheless, Ernesto Cardenal followed the recent cases of sexual violence against children and young people in the Catholic Church with horror. He takes you back to the forced celibacy, which he considers “unnatural”.
“Saint Paul said that he had chosen celibacy because he wanted it that way. But he has forced anyone to live,” explains Cardenal. “And the other apostles have not lived in celibacy. So there should be no mandatory celibacy.”
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Ernesto Cardenal: the revolutionary Poet and
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