Videos EFE Latam

Sergio Ramírez refuses to give up ‘hope’ on Nicaragua’s future

Panama City, May 23 (EFE).- The Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez refuses to lose “hope” for the future of Nicaragua, a country that lived through a revolution that would manage to overthrow the dictatorship thanks to idealism of certain young people, but that then he came “with a stone in his teeth” from reality. Ramírez knew the revolutionary process firsthand. After a long exile, he was one of the main civilian leaders who would support the armed uprising that overthrew Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, but the triumph of the Sandinista revolution would be followed by years of bloody civil war, facing the so -called “contras”, side which in the middle of the cold war had the support of the United States. After serving on the National Reconstruction Board, Ramírez would assume the vice presidency of Nicaragua during the first Sandinista government (1985-1990), accompanying President Daniel Ortega. Electoral defeat and the break with Ortega would follow, who would return to power in 2007, where he remained. Ramírez, winner of the 2017 Cervantes Prize, received the EFE this Tuesday at the residence of the Spanish Ambassador in Panama, where he is to promote the possibility of celebrating the Centroamérica Cuenta literary festival next year in the Isthmic country. YEARS OF IDEALISM The Nicaraguan writer reviews in the interview the revolutionary years that he left reflected in his memoirs “Adiós muchachos” (1999), a time marked by an idealism that seems to be becoming rare. “Each generation has its own ideals. (…) I would say that in the 70s of the last century we had more integral ideals, we thought that the revolutions, which overthrew the old regimes when they were dictatorial, could bring a new life, creating what was called the new man, and starting from scratch, abolishing the past and creating a totally different future”. “But in the mechanics of life, great disappointments come after ideals, and we tried a revolution that would change the reality of Nicaragua from a very romantic, very idealistic point of view, and we ended up hitting the rocks in the teeth. The harsh reality taught us that reality has its shortcuts and now the reality of Nicaragua already sees the shortcut where it went”. But what was wrong? “It seems to me that the ideological prejudices were very strong, more than a model of social change, they sought to establish a model of closed ideological rules, in imitation of other regimes and it seems to me that this was the great failure, that that is, to bureaucratize ideals through ideology. Everything got worse. Since April 2018, Nicaragua has been going through a political and social crisis that worsened after the controversial general elections of November 7, 2021, in which Ortega was re-elected for a fifth term, the fourth in a row and the second with his wife. . Rosario Murillo as Vice President. . Ramírez is part of the list of 317 people whose nationality was withdrawn by the Nicaraguan judicial authorities, among which are other well-known writers such as Gioconda Belli, as well as former comrades in the Sandinista armed struggle such as Dora María Téllez, known as “Commander 2”. TRIBUTE TO THE DEAD After the triumph of the revolution in 1979, a maxim accompanied the victors, the memory of those who had fallen by the wayside. “When you are applauded when you go up to the podium / think of those who have died”, said the poet and religious Ernesto Cardenal. Did they fail? “It seems to me that it is a great duel that we have not yet finished dealing with, that is to say so many lives lost for an ideal that has not worked. It is a duel in which we always have to come back, not only the generation that went to overthrow Somoza, but rather the generation that later defended the revolution with arms and that today a young man from Nicaragua, when told of those years, would not want remember. It is a phase which, as I saw it then, in a romantic and idealistic way, is perceived today with much bitterness and disappointment.” Ramírez, exiled, cannot return to Nicaragua. He keeps “stocked” there, without wanting to give more details about the place, his “little museum”, with memories of his illustrious friends such as an engraving of the German Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass, who visited him at his home, or books signed by Gabriel García Márquez, also Nobel laureate, or even a “bag of sickness from the plane” with a surrealist sentence written by Julio Cortázar. WRITING Also in the Central American country is the hand-made writing table made by his grandfather, a place where he plans to “rewrite when he returns to Nicaragua”. In this creative process, Ramírez says he needs “the mnemonic of writing itself”. “Arranging the pencils, the papers at a certain angle, putting the keyboard, the computer mouse, turning it on at a certain time, the music I’m going to listen to while I write… all this is preparation of the very intimate, very personal writing script, a closed door. When I close the door, I isolate myself in this world of writing, without which, without this isolation, it seems to me that writing is Not possible”. Also, although he did not become a musician like many of his relatives, he maintains rhythm as a fundamental element of writing. “I inherited the musical ear to follow the rhythm, the melody, the measures (…) the prose must have it, and it often depends on the place that the word takes in the register or the sentence, on the way it is laid out, like a room”. And in the meantime, at 80, he is not giving up. In his novel “Tongolele could not dance” (2021), the character of the fortune teller Zoraida appears. Have you consulted Zoraida on the future of Nicaragua? Ramirez bursts out laughing. “I would like to find a white magic, instead of a black magic, that could tell me what the future of Nicaragua is. I consult with hope. There is a poem by Rubén Darío where he talks about Pandora’s box , hence all the misfortunes (…), but deep down there is hope. I know there is hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box”. Moncho Torres (c) EFE Agency