SOURCE: Cardenal, Ernesto, and Michael T. Martin. “On Culture, Politics, and the State in Nicaragua: An Interview with Padre Ernesto Cardenal, Minister of Culture.” Latin American Perspectives 16, no. 2 (spring 1989): 124–33.

In the following interview, Cardenal discusses his role as minister of culture in Nicaraguan politics and his opinions on popular culture.

In this modern day it's a vulgarity to call yourself a modern man or woman if you are not a revolutionary.

[June Beer, in LaDuke, 1986: 39]

Before the triumph on July 19, 1979, of the popular Sandinista revolution, cultural expressions of social criticism and protest developed as a concomitant and then a central mode of resistance in the armed liberation struggle against the 45-year dictatorship and the four hundred years of underdevelopment in Nicaragua. During Sandino's war (1926–1934) of national resistance to imperial aggression, popular mythology was used “as a tool of resistance and rebellion by functioning as a unifying element in...