The black beret and white hair made him a symbol, seemingly mild. In fact he was a wildly ardent, revolutionary soul
1983 Ernesto Cardenal, then Nicaragua’s minister of culture, found himself on the broiling tarmac at Managua airport, waiting for the pope. John Paul II had no love for the left-wing Sandinista regime, but the minister—a priest as well as a revolutionary, for all his collarless shirt and black beret—was eager to see him. As the pope approached, he knelt and pulled off his beret for a blessing. What he got was a finger-wagging lecture.
Many years before in Solentiname, in a remote southern corner of Lake Nicaragua, he had worked to prove that slogan true. He arrived there in 1967, after Trappist training under Thomas Merton at Gethsemani, to start a contemplative community. Almost at once it became something else. He had grown up as a rich boy, in a mansion at the other end of the vast lake. Here, though, he was among poor fishermen and farmers who had never before been sent a priest.
He had written that way for a long time. Hate alternated with love, especially, in his early “Epigrams”, in lyrics addressed to girls his pleading kisses could no longer reach. Later, both God and rebellion took him over. In the 1950s he supported a coup, yelling for liberty in the street, but fled when it failed.
For nine years he tried, establishing cultural centres and poetry workshops all over the country, restoring Solentiname, launching a literacy drive and selling the Nicaraguan revolution abroad. His white hair and black beret made him its symbol, seemingly mild, until he raised his oracular voice in poems. But there was never enough money in the ministry.
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