MANAGUA, Nicaragua — The radical priest who once bucked the will of Pope John Paul II looks old and frail now, with his wintry beard and shuffling gait.
He's still wearing his beatnik beret, and when he speaks of the glory days of the '70s and '80s his eyes blaze with an apostle's ardor. But Father Ernesto Cardenal's fiery eloquence can't burn away this stubborn thought: that the Nicaraguan revolution, the cause that Cardenal served so devoutly, through so many years of sacrifice and spilled blood, is a ghost of its former self.
Sitting beside his living-room wall, with its eerie photo montage of fallen comrades, Cardenal offers a thudding assessment of what happened to that distant revolutionary dream.
"For now it would seem that it wasn't worthwhile, the death of anyone," says Cardenal, a Roman Catholic priest and one of the most renowned Central American poets of the last half-century. "But in that time it was felt that they had died for a better country, in order to create a better country."
The revolution that brought the leftist Sandinistas to power, and the civil war that followed, left tens of thousands dead and laid waste to this majestically beautiful land. As Cardenal, 80, chronicles in his latest volume of memoirs, "La Revolucion Perdida" (The Lost Revolution), revolutions sometimes have an odd way of turning the tables on their inventors.
The inventors in this case were the members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Born as a ragtag resistance movement, the Sandinistas in 1979 led a popular overthrow of the thuggish and corrupt Somoza family's four decades of dictatorship.
They then fought the U.S.-backed Contra rebels to a draw while founding a new government based on socialist principles: the redistribution of private property to the poor and increased financial support for education and public health.
Cardenal served as culture minister, organizing poetry and arts workshops for peasants, soldiers and factory workers. An advocate of liberation theology -- the left-wing Christian doctrine that Jesus' teachings support revolutionary action against entrenched social injustice -- Cardenal believed that his duties as priest, poet and Sandinista were essentially one and the same.
Marxism, in Cardenal's view, was compatible with a God-given natural order -- not the "dogmatic and metaphysical" Marxism of the Soviet Union, as he puts it in "The Lost Revolution," but the "flexible and pluralistic" Marxism of Nicaragua, which had grown organically from the heated soil of the country's volcanic inequalities.
