ERNESTO CARDENAL MARTINEZ (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.
He is the co-author, with Thomas Merton, of:
From the Monastery to the World: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal