To the Poet Ernesto Cardenal and His Nicaragua

I remember when I was around 16 years old, I still lived in Bluefields with my parents and on a trip to Managua I bought Ernesto Cardenal’s Epigramas. I was in love with a young intern, she worked with my mother in an indigenous rights non-profit organization, but the girl would never go for me. For my own mental health and to make sense of that impossible love I would constantly repeat the Al perderte yo a ti epigram in my mind and it would soothe the pain.

Years later I met the poet on different occasions and he was always very nice to me. Once I was going to Bluefields and I saw him in the airport (he was going to the remote San Carlos) and I gave him a copy of my book, I felt so happy. Poets in my generation, we behave like sarcastic grandchildren; unfortunately, we are accustomed to freedom of speech and as a result make wise cracks about anything. “Yo, this old timer showed up in pijamas” I once remember saying to the person next to me in a book presentation; of course, with playful warmth for the legendary versifier.

These days, the infamous Daniel Ortega, is taking his lack of personal responsibility and shame out on this globally admired Nicaraguan artist. As if Ortega being a deranged pervert who gets rejected anywhere that has people who respect women and little girls; is somehow poor Father Cardenal’s fault. It’s understandable that Fernando Lugo as a liberation theologian, would want to meet with figures like Cardenal and that the poet express himself is at the end of the day what he’s supposed to do.

Ortega has never cleanly earned anything in his whole life (much less the right to be president) and he’s surrounded by people who do not feel sick in the presence of a deviant of that calibre. Many of his closest collaborators have to be like him or worse than him, or at least misogynist sociopaths who limit themselves to fantasizing about the kind of cowardly aggressions that Ortega has taken to practice.

This insane reality is evident when watching the Ortega family owned Chanel 4’s psicophant “news”; sometimes the narration makes absolutely no grammatical sense because of the superhuman effort to maximize the possibilities of fitting insults into a sentence structure. For Christ’s sake, the only thing missing is a turning spiral with ultrasonic frequencies to further idiotize the toothless zombies in FSLN hats who watch this televised garbage. Alberto Mora’s morning show is a 7:00 AM King Midas who turns everything he touches into feces; from the Catholic Church's Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo to Roberto Rivas, the electoral authority who always give the scoop to this panflet aberration of “journalism”.

The reason Ortega and his gargoyles go against not only Ernesto Cardenal but also against: the media that isn’t on their payroll, the NGOs, women’s organizations, multilateral organizations, the Sandinista Renovation Movement, the Nicaraguan parliament, the Conservative Party, the Let’s go with Eduardo Liberal Movement, electoral observers, the OAS, the European Union, the Police and the Military (in short, Nicaraguan society), is because what they hate most is people thinking.

In Honduras when the women’s movements bravely expressed their rejection for this child rapist of recent history; Hugo Chavez said: let’s look towards the future. But when it’s time to trash colonialism he and his buddy the paedophile-president are number one at losing their voices from screaming so much bile. This (common sense) is what they want to take away from Nicaraguans with Murillo's cheap witchcraft and media censorship. And on top of that, they want to pay the disinformation campaign with our peoples’ money.

All the rotundas in Managua have been recently taken by “mothers of heroes and martyrs” whose hunger forces them to sell the memory of their fallen children, to defend the dignity of a lunatic rapist. The government provides tents, porta-potties, music and three meals a day; in exchange, they intimidate a people with fresh scars from all the murders on this gangster's and his spinner's (who also happens to be the mother of the little girl Ortega raped for two decades) consciences.

It seems like the new fasion is to victimize senior citizens, inside the FSLN that this machiavellic marriage has hijacked, and in the Sandinista dissent; this second case is the well respected poet Ernesto Cardenal’s case. It must be dreadful to wake up in the morning and realize that for the next 16 hours you have to be Daniel Ortega or Rosario Murillo, nobody likes them. People tolerate them out of hunger and fear.

I applaud Ernesto Cardenal’s bravery and I am happy that the best plumes in Nicaragua and the World are putting this pair of degenerates in their place. I feel joy that the most prestigious Nicaraguan figures with the best criteria have come together to defend the poet and his battered people.

I am even prouder that the youth, especially artists and provokers like Augusto Mejia and Israel Lewites, from the very beginning have been combating with the use of civilized methods against all the infamy that this dirty sexual assailant promotes. I feel enormous gratitude with the anonymous graffiti taggers that filled the streets of Managua with phrases we all think. Let’s hope that we, the Nicaraguan society, will once and for all fight the battle that saves our democracy.