Stuck in the Past? WaPo Champions Poet of the 'Beautiful Revolution' of Communists in Nicaragua

May 31st, 2011 8:50 AM

Why must The Washington Post promote communists with more ardor than they could muster for any American Republican? Tuesday’s front page of the Post oozed: “‘El Padre,’ still preaching.” The subject was Ernesto Cardenal, a defrocked Catholic priest and the culture minister of the Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Surrounding a huge photo on the front of the Style section was the headline “Radical beat goes on: At 86, poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal is still talkin’ about a revolution.”

The Washington Post somehow still finds luster in the poetry and no objection to the communist dictatorship, mass murder, and civil war. From Baltimore, Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia is championing “the revolution” of 1979:

“It was a beautiful revolution,” the man in the beret says one night over dinner. “A beautiful revolution.”

On other lips, those words might ring campy and downright spoof-goofy a la Woody Allen in “Bananas.” But the man in the beret pulls it off, as he has for decades.

At 86, Ernesto Cardenal can still muster passion for revolutions past and future. It’s the present that confounds Nicaragua’s cosmic poetic stylist, a towering figure in Latin American literature absorbed in the winter of his life with a kind of eco-poetics swirling with the earthly evils of greed, corruption and exploitation.

Cardenal the poet and Cardenal the religious iconoclast and Cardenal the political figure cannot be delinked. He was and is all three. In a life seldom free from controversy, “El Padre,” as friends call him, became a Catholic priest, championed Marxism and the Sandinistas and evolved into a pillar of the liberation theology movement, which centered on wresting the poor from unjust social conditions.

That's the usual boilerplate for "a theology replacing God with the Soviet Union."

The most persistently ridiculous pose in Roig-Franzia’s article is that Cardenal is the “iconoclast” and his communist sympathizers are “rebels against conventional thinking,” as if communist dictatorships allow anything of the sort. Meanwhile, Western capitalist society is responsible for all the murder.
The occasion for all this celebration of a unrepentant communist was a speech at Baltimore’s Loyola University.

The students, some of whom are tapping messages into their phones as he speaks, break into applause when Cardenal reads from a poem that asserts multinationals are responsible for countless deaths in Africa related to mining minerals used for cellphone production.

“You talk on your cellphone?/ and talk and talk?/ and laugh into your cellphone?/ never knowing how it was made?/ and much less how it works?/ but what does that matter?/ trouble is you don’t know?/ just as I didn’t?/ that many people die in the Congo?/ thousands upon thousands?/ for that cellphone?/ they die in the Congo.”

Roig-Franzia reported “the beautiful revolution” toppled “dictator Anastazio Somoza,” but somehow didn’t replace it with a dictatorship. (The Sandinistas were turned out when they finally held a real election in 1990.) Ironically, Nicaragua voted the dictator Daniel Ortega back in , but now Cardenal complains it’s communist enough now, so he calls it “a family dictatorship.”

Cardenal’s communism is much more orthodox than his alleged Catholicism:

Cardenal says he always supported the Cuban revolution, even though it had “flaws.”

What sort of flaws?

“I’d rather not say,” he responds.

He’d rather talk of dreams for a “perfect society, without classes, the perfect communism.” It’s still achievable, he says, still reachable through some future revolution, but not anytime soon. “In the short term, I have no hope.”

Inside the paper, the headline on page C9 was "Life, the universe and insurrection." There was one paragraph of conservative and Catholic rebuttal, which was also the pull quote in bold text. John Ritchie of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (or simply TFP) insisted "Inviting Fr. Cardenal to speak at a Catholic university is like welcoming a wolf into a hen house....His radical Marxist views are not only flawed, but are detrimental to the faith and incompatible with the teaching of the church."