Ernesto Cardenal

Ernesto Cardenal Martínez (born January 20, 1925) is a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet and politician. He is a liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived for more than ten years (1965–1977). A member of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, a party he has since left, he was Nicaragua's minister of culture from 1979 to 1987.

Was born into an upper-class family in Granada, Nicaragua, Cardenal is a first cousin of the poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra. Cardenal studied literature first in Managua and from 1942 to 1946 in Mexico. Later, from 1947 to 1949, he continued his studies in New York City and traveled through Italy, Spain and Switzerland between 1949 and 1950.

In July 1950, he returned to Nicaragua, where he participated in the 1954 April Revolution against Anastasio Somoza García's regime. The coup d'état failed and ended with the deaths of many of his associates. Cardenal subsequently entered the Trappist Monastery of Gethsemani (Kentucky, United States), under the other poet-priest Thomas Merton, but in 1959 he left to study theology in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

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