To Claribel Alegria, Sergio Ramirez Mercado, Ernesto Cardenal, to my brothers Enrique and Carlos Mejia Godoy, and to Carlos Fernando Chamorro

By Jorge Dalton*

HAVANA TIMES – Today, just hours before 2018 comes to an end, somebody asked me: what do you want the most next year? And I replied: I wish for Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo’s government in Nicaragua to end immediately, for this is a government that has lost all credibility and has become a UNIVERSAL EMBARASSMENT.

It has become corrupt to its very core and has led to a violent dictatorship that kills its youth without mercy, that represses the mothers of those it murders, which arms evil paramilitary forces to the teeth (true criminals on the government’s payroll) who work alongside a sinister and anti-popular police force who are trying to crush Nicaraguans’ longing for freedom.

They are trying to wipe freedom of speech off the face of the Earth, with all of their might, by abusing journalists and trying to silence and put a muzzle on the country’s most prized intellectuals, musicians, filmmakers, poets and poetry.

Closing down media outlets left, right and center, at their whim, and imprisoning and torturing dissidents in living hells such as “El Chipote”, a foul and dark prison, one of the symbols and the pride and joy of this much-hated regime. A compound which will need to be razed to the ground, very similar to the jails that took so many thousands of valuable lives in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, El Salvador, Guatemala and other countries during that dark period when military dictatorships took hold of Our America for a good part of the 20th century.

My greatest wish is that the Nicaraguan people build long-lasting peace, putting an end to a new bloody family dictatorship, which doesn’t differ much anymore from the one imposed by the Somozas.

I understand that it is very easy to say this from the comfort of my home, while good Nicaraguans are bleeding their lives away and giving them up, but this is my greatest wish as a citizen of this world who has always wanted justice.

These are my words of encouragement for this wise and brave people who have known how to face the worst situations throughout history.

I am more than convinced that the Nicaraguan people will know how to rescue the legacy of Augusto C. Sandino, the “General of Free Men”, that of Rigoberto Lopez Perez, and the dreams of everyone who gave the most valuable thing they have, their lives, in pursuit of a better world. This great dream of those who have fallen is now being trampled on by this discredited government, who act with impunity.

I know that despite the government’s criminal nature, the Nicaraguan people are making every possible sacrifice they can to exploit every peaceful means they have, and prevent a civil war from breaking out in the country.

I wish peace for Nicaragua, but in order to wish for peace, it’s also neccessary to wish for freedom and like the apostle of Our America, Jose Marti, once said: “Freedom is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.” “Freedom isn’t a flag where the victorious devour the defeated in its shadow and overwhelm them with their relentless resentment: freedom is a stout madness that has a father, the sweetest of all – love -, and a mother-, the sweetest of mothers, -peace.”

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*Jorge Dalton is a Salvadoran-Cuban filmmaker.