“Just this past May 4, Saramago, the author of An Essay Upon Blindness, had also posted a text message titled simply “Benedetti”, in which he expresses his worry over the health of the poet: ‘What could we do?. . . Offer up a prayer for his quick restoration, if with that we’d only be provoking Mario’s secular ire? What in truth was Mario Benedetti, who had all his life — so much much more than the multiple professions he pursued — been a poet? If that’s so, we drag his poems from the immobility of the page and make from them a cloud of words, of sounds, of music that set out across the Atlantic Ocean (the words, the sounds, the music), in a dream that abruptly stops, like some protective orchestra, just outside the window that it has been forbidden to open, and mints a new dream and causes it to smile upon awaking.’
“Separately, Eduardo Galeano, himself Uruguayan, said this Monday that ‘the world obliges us to distrust our fellow man; that our fellow man is a danger that threatens us.’ But, added the author of The Open Veins of Latin America ‘Mario Benedetti believed in another possible world, and was that rare case of a generous writer who celebrated the success of others.’
“Meanwhile the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal and writer Sergio Ramirez respectively lamented the death of their friend and ‘brother’ Benedetti. Cardenal, a priest and the Minister of Culture of Nicaragua in the 1980’s, declared himself dismayed by the news because ‘I loved Mario a great deal, he was like a brother to me. I can’t say anything now, nothing more than that I am very grieved.’
“Cardenal and Benedetti met during the 1970‘s in Cuba. Cardenal affirmed that ‘Benedetti and I became quite bound together in a long friendship.’ ‘I wrote a lot about him, and he about me,’ the priest asserted in a statement to the Nicaraguan Daily La Prensa. He described Benedetti as a ‘simple, humble person, a supporter of the Sandinista revolution.’ Like many Latin American writers that were allied with that revolution, Benedetti visited Nicaragua after the Sandinistas defeated the right-wing government of Anastasio Somosa in 1979.
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