Ernesto Cardenal—National Poetry Month 2020

Ernesto Cardenal in his signature black beret and beard,

Ernesto Cardenal, the renowned poet and Roman Catholic priest who became an icon of revolutionary verse in Nicaragua and Latin America died on March 1 this year in Managua at age 95..  A champion of  Liberation Theology he was publicly shamed by Pope John Paul  II while he was serving as Minister of Culture in Daniel Ortega’s first Sandanista government and was suspended from the priesthood in 1983.  He was finally reinstated by Pope Francis in February 2019 36 years later.

Pope  John Paull II scolding Father Ernesto Cardenal on the tarmac at the Managua airport when the priest knelt to kiss the Pontiff's ring.

Cardenal was born on January 20, 1925 in Granada, Nicaragua to a wealthy family. He attended both the University of Mexico and Columbia University in New York City he also  studied with Trappist, poet, and philosopher Thomas Merton in Gethsemani, Kentucky.  He finished his studies in Cuernevaca, Mexico, where he was ordained in 1965.   

By that time he was fully engaged in Liberation theology and an opponent of the harsh, repressive U.S. backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.  He founded a community of peasants, poets, and painters in 1966 on the Solentiname Islands in Lake Nicaragua.  Cardenal supported the insurgency of the Sandinistas through a long and bloody revolutionary struggle while he was becoming noted for his poetry. Cardenal recognized that poetry and art are closely tied to politics, and used his poetry to protest the encroachments of outsiders in Nicaragua and to promote his own brand of Christian Marxism. When the Sandinistas finally came to power in 1979 he was an obvious prestige choice as Minister of Culture and his brother, Fernando  was named Minister of Education.  During the same years he co-founded the Casas de las Tres Mundos (Houses of the Third World), an international literary and cultural organization  based in Nicaragua.

Ernesto Cardenal as a young man,

The Sandinista government fell from power in 1988 after elections brought a U.S. backed conservative government to power.  Cardenal never held public office again but remained a critical voice.  He traveled extensively reading his poems.

But when Ortega returned to the Presidency in 2007, Cardenal denounced what he called the beginning of a family dictatorship. And in 2018, when anti-government protests broke out that posed the biggest challenge to Ortega’s increasingly authoritarian hold on power, he quickly aligned himself with the opposition. “What we want is for there to be a different government, a democratic republic,” he said in a handwritten message of support, adding that dialogue with the Ortega camp would be useless.

Cardinal’s opposition led to personal and legal harassment by the government which also tried to erase him from history.  In 2015, when Cardenal turned 90, he was feted in Mexico  where he had lived and studied theology as a young man but the Sandinista government had nothing but silence for a man it viewed as a turncoat.

The poems of his earlier revolutionary period were collected in Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems published in English in 1980.  More recent work has included Golden UFOs: The Indian Poems/Los ovnis de oro: poemas indios  in 1992,  Cosmic Canticle in 2002, Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems in 2009 and Origin of the Species and Other Poems in 2011which examined science in the context of religion.

From Zero Hour

Tropical nights in Central America,

with moonlit lagoons and volcanoes

and lights from presidential palaces,

barracks and sad curfew warnings.

“Often while smoking a cigarette

I’ve decided that a man should die,”

says Ubico smoking a cigarette . . .

In his pink-wedding-cake palace

Ubico has a head cold. Outside, the people

were dispersed with phosphorous bombs.

San Salvador laden with night and espionage,

with whispers in homes and boardinghouses

and screams in police stations.

Carías’ palace stoned by the people.

A window of his office has been smashed,

and the police have fired upon the people.

And Managua the target of machine guns

from the chocolate-cookie palace

and steel helmets patrolling the streets.

Watchman! What hour is it of the night?

Watchman! What hour is it of the night?

The campesinos of Honduras used to carry their money in their hats

when the campesinos sowed their seed

and the Hondurans were masters of their land.

When there was money

and there were no foreign loans

or taxes for J.P. Morgan & Co.,

and the fruit company wasn’t competing with the little dirt farmer.

But the United Fruit Company arrived

with its subsidiaries the Tela Railroad Company

and the Trujillo Railroad Company

allied with the Cuyamel Fruit Company

and Vaccaro Brothers & Company

later Standard Fruit & Steamship Company

of the Standard Fruit & Steamship Corporation:

                        the United Fruit Company

with its revolutions for the acquisition of concessions

and exemptions of millions in import duties

and export duties, revisions of old concessions

and grants for new exploitations,

violations of contracts, violations

of the Constitution . . .

And all the conditions are dictated by the Company

with liabilities in case of confiscation

(liabilities of the nation, not of the Company)

and the conditions composed by the latter (the Company)

for the return of the plantations to the nation

(given free by the nation to the Company)

at the end of 99 years . . .   

“and all the other plantations belonging

to any other persons or companies or enterprises

which may be dependents of the contractors and in which

this latter has or may have in the future

any interest of any kind will be as a consequence

included in the previous terms and conditions . . .”

(Because the Company also corrupted prose.)

The condition was that the Company build the Railroad,

but the Company wasn't building it,

because in Honduras mules were cheaper than the Railroad,

and “a Gongressman was chipper than a mule,”

                     as Zemurray used to say,

even though he continued to enjoy tax exemptions

and a grant of 175,000 acres of the Company,

with the obligation to pay the nation for each mile

that he didn’t build, but he didn't pay anything to the nation

even though he didn't build a single mile (Carías is the dictator

who didn't build the greatest number of miles of railroad)

and after all, that shitty railroad was

of no use to the nation

because it was a railroad between two plantations

and not between the cities of Trujillo and Tegucigalpa.

They corrupt the prose and they corrupt the Congress.

The banana is left to rot on the plantations,

or to rot in the cars along the railroad tracks

or it's cut overripe so it can be rejected

when it reaches the wharf or be thrown into the sea;

the bunches of bananas declared bruised, or too skinny,

or withered, or green, or overripe, or diseased:

so there’ll be no cheap bananas,

                         or so as to buy bananas cheap.

Until there’s hunger along the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua.

And the farmers are put in jail for not selling at 30 cents

and their bananas are slashed with bayonets

and the Mexican Trader Steamship sinks with their barges on them

and the strikers are cowed with bullets.

(And the Nicaraguan congressmen are invited to a garden party.)

But the black worker has seven children.

And what can you do? You've got to eat,

And you've got to accept what they offer to pay.

                        24 cents a bunch.

While the Tropical Radio Subsidiary was cabling Boston:

"We assume that Boston will give its approval to

the payment made to the Nicaraguan congressmen of the majority   

         party

because of the incalculable benefits that it represents for   

       the Company."

And from Boston to Galveston by telegraph

and from Galveston by cable and telegraph to Mexico

and from Mexico by cable to San Juan del Sur

and from San Juan del Sur by telegraph to Puerto Limón

and from Puerto Limón by canoe way into the mountains

arrives the order of the United Fruit Company:

“United is buying no more bananas.”

And workers are laid off in Puerto Limón.

And the little workshops close.

Nobody can pay his debts.

And the bananas rotting in the railroad cars.

                   So there’ll be no cheap bananas

                   And so that there'll be bananas cheap,

                              19 cents a bunch.

The workers get IOUs instead of wages.

Instead of payment, debts,

And the plantations are abandoned, for they’re useless now,

and given to colonies of unemployed.

And the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica

with its subsidiaries the Costa Rica Banana Company

and the Northern Railway Company and

the International Radio Telegraph Company

and the Costa Rica Supply Company

                     are fighting in court against an orphan.

The cost of derailment is $25 in damages

(but it would have cost more to repair the track).

And congressmen, cheaper than mules, Zemurray used to say.

Sam Zemurray, the Turkish banana peddler

in Mobile, Alabama, who one day took a trip to New Orleans

and on the wharves saw United throwing bananas into the sea

and he offered to buy all the fruit to make vinegar,

he bought it, and he sold it right there in New Orleans

and United had to give him land in Honduras

to get him to break his contract in New Orleans,

and that's how Sam Zemurray abbointed bresidents in Jonduras.

He provoked border disputes between Guatemala and Honduras

(which meant between the United Fruit Company and his company)

proclaiming that Honduras (his company) must not lose

"one inch of land not only in the disputed strip

but also in any other zone of Honduras

(of his company) not in dispute . . ."

(while United was defeating the rights of Honduras

in its lawsuit with Nicaragua Lumber Company)

until the suit ended because he merged with United

and afterward he sold all his shares to United

and with the proceed of the sale he bought shares in United

and with the shares he captured the presidency of Boston

(together with its employees the various presidents of Honduras)

and he was now the owner of both Honduras and Guatemala

and that was the end of the lawsuit over the exhausted lands

that were now of no use either to Guatemala or Honduras.

—Ernesto Cardenal

Translated by Donald D. Walsh

Juan Diego, a Lady on the Hill, and Maybe a Miracle

An imagined rendering of Juan Diego unrolling his tilma for the Archbishop of Mexico.

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas, Patroness of the Americas, and most recently Patroness of the Unborn.  An image of her preserved on cloth in a Mexico City Basilica is the object of almost universal adoration in Mexico and among the large Mexican diaspora in the United States.  She has been called the “rubber band which binds this disparate nation into a whole.”  Mexican literary icons have attested to her importance.  Carlos Fuentes said that “you cannot truly be considered a Mexican unless you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe” and Nobel Literature laureate Octavio Paz that “the Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery.”

Yet among an educated elite there is widespread skepticism about the origin story of the image and its veneration is controversial among some Catholics and actively discouraged by a growing evangelical Protestant movement.

The origin story goes like this.

On December 9, 1531, just ten years after the conquest of Mexico by Hernando Cortez, Juan Diego, an Indian peasant and particularly pious convert to Catholicism, was walking by the Hill of Tepeyac then outside of the capital city.  A temple to Tonantzin, the Aztec goddess of love and fertility, had surmounted the hill but been razed in the Church’s campaign to obliterate traditional worship.  When he glanced up the hill he beheld a maiden who bade him in his native Nahuatl language to build a church on the site in her name.  He surmised that she must be that she must be the Virgin Mary although she did not identify herself.

Juan Diego hurried to Fray Juan de Zumárraga, the Archbishop of Mexico with his tale.  The Franciscan was impressed with his piety but skeptical of the story.  He instructed Juan Diego to return to the hill and ask the apparition for proof of her identity. The peon returned three more times to the hill over the next two days and the Virgin spoke to him each time. 

He first asked for a miraculous sign.  When he returned home he found that his uncle, who had been dying, was healed. 

On his final trip to the Hill the virgin commanded him to gather flowers at the summit.  These were not native flower, but red Castilian roses blooming out of season.  Juan Diego gathered them in his tilma or cloak and took the bundle to the Archbishop Zumárraga.  When he opened his cloak December 12, the flowers fell to the floor, and on the fabric was the image of the Virgin.

This was enough to convince Archbishop who ordered a chapel be built at the base of the hill where the cloak would be displayed.  Juan Diego, his wife, and his uncle were given leave to build a hovel next to the hermitage of Franciscan fathers sent to attend the shrine and to act as their servant.  He reportedly died there in 1548.

The trouble with the story is that there was no mention of any of this in any of the extensively preserved Church records of the period. It was never noted by Archbishop Zumárraga who wrote extensively of his work to consolidate Catholicism among the heathen natives.

The earliest known account of the story comes from an illustrated document dated from 1548 in Nahuatl transcribed in the Latin alphabet.  The document refers to an Indian by his Aztec name.  It features an elaborate engraved illustration of a kneeling peon venerating an image of the Virgin in the sky.  The document was discovered in 1995 but some scholars doubt its authenticity.   

There is greater faith in a mid-16th Century 16 page document in Nahuatl called the Nican mopohua believed to be composed by a native speaker educated by the Franciscans.   The text of this document was later incorporated into a printed pamphlet both the native tongue and Spanish editions which were widely circulated in the mid-17th century.

We do know from Church records that the image was on display at the chapel at the foot of the hill about twenty years later.  Church records indicate that there was a rising controversy over its veneration.  Indio peons were flocking to the church, inspiring hope in some that the conversion to Catholicism had been deep and successful.  But the Franciscans there were alarmed because the Indians seemed to be praying to the icon as if it were a pagan idol and seemed to expect miracles from it.  Many seemed to identify the Virgin with their old goddess Tonantzin.

Meanwhile, Dominicans had arrived in Mexico in great numbers and were eclipsing the rival Franciscans in power and influence.  They approved of the strategy of encouraging devotion by folding in aspects of traditional religion and re-defining it as Catholic.  One of the Dominicans, Alonso de Montúfar, succeeded Zumárraga as Archbishop of Mexico. In a 1556 sermon he praised the popular devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe—perhaps the earliest use of that name for the image on the tilma at the chapel of the Virgin Mary at Tepeyac.  He acknowledged “certain miracles had occurred.”  He thus put his official stamp of approval on the rising cult.

Fray Francisco de Bustamante, Abbot of the Franciscans at the church responded with a sharply worded homily just days later.

The devotion at the chapel... to which they have given the name Guadalupe was prejudicial to the Indians because they believed that the image itself worked miracles, contrary to what the missionary friars had been teaching them, and because many were disappointed when it did not.

The open dispute caused something of a scandal.  Archbishop Montúfar responded by opening an official inquiry, a timeless dodge of Church bureaucracy.  During the inquiry the Franciscans testified that the image did not have a miraculous origin but was the work of the “the Indian painter Marcos,” probably referring to the Aztec Marcos Cipac de Aquino who was still alive and active.  Despite this the inquiry unsurprisingly endorsed the view of the man who had commissioned it.

Montufar had the Franciscans removed from custodianship of the shrine and replaced them with diocesan priests under his direct authority.  Moreover he ordered the construction of a new and much larger church where the image was mounted elaborately for veneration. 

Franciscans kept up their criticism but were clearly on the losing end with the now firmly entrenched Dominican authorities and with the Indian masses.

The origin of the name Guadalupe has also become a matter of controversial.  Some scholars believe that it was a corruption of some Nahuatl description.  Tecuatlanopeuh, “she whose origins were in the rocky summit” and Tecuantlaxopeuh “she who banishes those who devoured us” have both been suggested as possibilities.

Most, however, agree that the name refers to Our Lady of Guadalupe, Extremadura, whose cult was important in Spain in the 16th century and had been brought to the New World.  

The tilma on display for veneration at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadelupe in Mexico City.

The revered image has been altered over the years, although not the central image of the Virgin on the tilma.  The figure of a dark skinned virgin is four foot eight inches high.  Her gown is a tawny rose tinted color said to recall the Mexican landscape. She is girded by a thin black sash which is taken as a sign of pregnancy. She wears a blue mantle traditionally associated with Mary.  Sharp beams radiate from her suggesting that she is “brighter than the Sun.”  One foot rests on the Moon and the other on a snake’s head.  This has been interpreted as her victory over darkness and triumph over the pagan Aztec feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl and/or the serpent of temptation from the Garden of Eden.

She may have originally had a crown on her head or that might have been added later.  Still later the crown was decorated with gold which deteriorated over the years.  In 1899 the crown was erased either because of the deterioration or to bring the image more into line with the republican sentiments of the people.  The tilma was reframed with the top being brought down just above the Virgin’s head to disguise damage in the process of the erasure.  Other additions over time included stars painted on the inside of her mantle representing the constellations of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, a supporting angel below her, and silver decoration which has also deteriorated.  Despite being centuries old on an unstable medium, however that central image remains remarkably bright.

The tilma and its image have never been subjected to the modern scientific analysis of given to the Shroud of Turin, but superficial examinations by experts shows that the material might be a coarse weave of palm threads,  the rough fiber called cotense , or a hemp and linen mixture rather than the traditional India agave fiber credited in legend.  A seam runs down the center of the tilma.

The image probably was painted using water-soluble pigments mixed with a binding medium of animal glue or gum Arabic.  This was a traditional native technique for painting on fabric called tüchlein.  Few, if any such paintings dating from so early, however, have retained their vibrant color and escaped cracking and deterioration.

The second church was declared a Basilica and remained the home of the Virgin for hundreds of years.   The interior was damaged by a bomb planted by an anti-clerical revolutionary in 1921 but the image remained undamaged.  The church, however, was sinking into the old lake bed of Mexico City.  Between 1974 and 1976 a modern circular shaped Basilica was built.  It is now the most visited Catholic site and the third-most visited sacred site in the world.

In recent years, as Rome has sought to shore up the loyalty of Latin American Catholics, Juan Diego has been elevated despite continuing doubt of his historic existence. Pope John Paul II began the process which led to his beatification on May 6, 1990 at the Basilica in Mexico City with the Pope himself presiding.  John Paul returned just three years later on July 31, 1992 for the canonization of St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin whose feast day is now observed on the anniversary of the first apparition, December 9.

The banner of Father Miguel Hildago's peon army of 1810.

Aside from its singular religious significance the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has become a rallying point for the national aspirations of the Mexican people, particularly for the indios and mestizos.   The peon army that Father Miguel Hidalgo after El Grito de Delores marched behind a banner painted with a representation of Our Lady and many soldiers of the Mexican War of Independence in 1810 fought with printed cards of her image stuck in their sombreros.

Although anti-clericism ran deep among many in the 20th Century Mexican Revolution, Emilio Zapata’s army of southern presents and Indians entered Mexico City in triumph behind a Guadeloupian banner.  More recently, the contemporary Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) also in the south named their mobile city Guadalupe Tepeyac in honor of the Virgin.

In the United States banners of Our Lady appeared in the marches and during the strikes of the United Farm Workers, whose leader Cesar Chavez was deeply religious.  More recently it has been carried in demonstrations in support of immigration reform. 

As I type these final sentences in the wee small hours of the morning an all-night vigil continues in Des Plaines at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  More than are in attendance for the largest such veneration in the United States.  This year newly installed Chicago Archbishop Blasé Cupich was expected to be in attendance, a sign of the importance of Hispanic Catholics to the American Church.