Honduras’ religious intellectual is Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, AKA ‘vice Pope,’ he was born in Tegucigalpa in 1942. At 19 he joined the Salesians and went on to receive three doctorates. The first one was in philosophy at the “Don Rua” institute in El Salvador, then a doctorate in Theology from the Salesian Pontifical Institute in Rome and Lastly, yet another doctoral title in Moral Theology from Pontifical Lateran University. A bit oddly he also received a diploma in clinical psychology and psychotherapy and has become a professor of moral theology and ecclesiology at the Salesian Theological Institute.

In one of his more significant statements Cardinal Maradiaga pressed for debt forgiveness by financial controllers such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. His eminence Maradiaga doesn’t shy away from controversy, he states that politicians that publicly support abortion excommunicate themselves. Yet another one of his more quoted statements is: “to divert attention from the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, Jews influenced the media to exploit the current controversy regarding sexual abuse by Catholic priests.”

Cardinals to Pope Francis, has also a dark side and was forced to flee a mob at Toncontín International Airport. The Honduran Cardinal has been accused of corruption. The Vatican launched an inquiry into allegations of financial misconduct against Maradiaga, including large sums received from the Honduran government through a Church-controlled agency. In other words, Maradiaga is no stranger to controversy. Like him or not, he is the leading intellectual Honduran voice of the current times.

Independent artists and thinkers shape Honduras’s soul.

Not many Honduran musicians could be called intellectuals, but one exception was Guillermo Anderson who performed dozens of times on Roatan. Guillermo Anderson was in many ways the national musician of Honduras and the voice of the country’s soul.

He composed the lyrics of his songs about ecology, landscape, social ills and Honduran idiosyncrasies. Guillermo Anderson, 1962-2018, was perhaps the most widely known Honduran singer and musician. His musical group played Garifuna percussion and emulated the sounds of Honduras’ Caribbean coast. He combined reggae with salsa and Garifuna Punta and parranda music.

His song “En Mi País” for example, became practically a second national anthem in Honduras. “En mi país rumor de mar, selva y quebrada. Están el sabor de la naranja y la guayaba. Está el color de la flor que no marchita. Está el olor a café en la tardecita,” Anderson nostalgically sang.

Honduras is home to Copan, the ‘Athens’ of Mayan Civilization, and home to Honduras’ premiere archeologist Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle. This renowned archeologist was born in 1952, in Tegucigalpa, hailing to decadence to French ancestry.
Agurcia graduated from Duke University and received his MA from Tulane University. In 1989 he discovered the fascinating Rosalila Temple in Copán. Agurcia’s research focuses on the founder of the dynasty YaxK’uk Mo’ and the uniquely preserved Rosalila Temple, has a cave and a symbolic passageway to the world of the dead. He specializes in the temple number 16 associated with K’inichYaxK’uk’ Mo.’

Rosalila Temple sits in the middle of a long sequence of constructions built over 400 years by the ancient Maya. It is built in the year 571 AD by Moon Jaguar, the 10th ruler of Copán. Just like all the other buildings in the central axis of the Copán Acropolis, it is dedicated to the memory of the founder of the dynasty, K’InichYaxK’uk Mo’.

Agurcia is also the director of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History. He developed a hypothesis that the wood used in the construction on the temples caused a major deforestation of the area. With Virginia M. Fields and Dorie Reents-Budet he authored “Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship.”

Honduras is full of stories; stories that defy belief, stories that hold the key to understanding history and geopolitics of the western hemisphere. Fortunately there are several writers that write down these stories. Writer Julio Escoto was born in San Pedro Sula in 1944. He studied at a Teaching University in Tegucigalpa and at the University of Florida and in 1976 he moved to Costa Rica where he founded CSUCA (Asuntos Culturales del Consejo Superior Universitario Centroamericano).

Escoto received an MA degree in Spanish American Literature at the University of Costa Rica, and in 1986 he returned to Honduras to take the position of the literature professor at the UNAH. He was an editor of a literary journal “Imaginación.” He writes a column for El Heraldo and is the director of the National University of Honduras.

Escoto is a Honduran short-story teller, a novelist and an essayist. His notable novels include El árbol de los pañuelos, Días de Ventisca, Noches de Huracán, El General Morazán marcha a batallar desde la Muerte, and Rey del Albor.

Honduras is full of stories; stories that defy belief.

Poetry gives us an insight into a human soul and poets give us a glance at what is the Honduras soul. Poet Roberto Sosa, born in Yoro in 1930, was considered the greatest living poet in Honduras. While it is Nicaragua that is the cradle of Central American poetry, Sosa has brought a Honduran voice to the top of poets of the region.

His poems were translated into several foreign languages and he was awarded the Adonais Prize in Spain, and Casa de las Americas Prize in Cuba, and the prestigious Order of the Arts and Letter in France. Sosa was an editor of Presente Magazine and was president of the Honduras Journalists’ Union.
He also taught literature at the UNAH.

His poems: The Common Grief and The Return of the River were some of his most known. “Nothing flickers now but pain… In this instant that is already eternity… And a day,” eloquently wrote Sosa in The Common Grief. While he passed away in 2011, his presence is still felt.

Poet and Teacher with Roatan Roots Shines on the Mainland

As a child she was always interested in the written word” I remember reading Dr. Seuss’s “Cat in The Hat” and “Walk About” by James Vance Marshall. She read the little Red Hen and the Never-Ending Story among others and by the age of 16 she had already published her first journalistic article and has been writing ever since.

A dedicated writer whose work reflects everyday issues and concerns realized that she wanted to be a writer when she started loving herself. “I realized I wanted to write when I started loving myself… and realized that the written word has the power to generate ideas, inspire revolution and change the way we see ourselves and even our place in history”, she says.

The realization that she wanted to be a writer was re-enforced by the works of prominent African American poets Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes; Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer as well as her favorite Honduran poet, Robert Sosa.

As a poet, essayist, novelist and writer, she has published numerous books of poems, short stories and essays. She has also won numerous awards for her works including “El Premio Nacional de Literatura y Poesía” an award she has received three times. One of her recent books titled “Poesía, Cantos, Ceremonias y Vestimentas de La Cultura Garifuna” details the cultural and traditional aspects of her ancestors.

Though she believes that everyone has some creativity and that can be developed, extended and fertilized, becoming a great poet is not easy. “To be a great poet”, she says “takes inspiration, constant motivation and professional attitude”.

As perhaps the most recognized and read black poet in Central America, Xiomara Cacho Caballero has learned many lessons on her journey to becoming the first Garifuna woman to ever publish a book in Honduras. The most important lesson she has learned: “Is that in our development as human beings, we reach for auto determination when we realize that honor is much more important than finances and that everyone, without exception, and we most advocate respect and all other moral values,” she says.

Honor is much more important than finances.

Being both a poet and writer is no easy feat, and Ms Caballero sometimes find it personally difficult to write poetry, “One of the most difficult things about my personal journey as a black poet was to get started and give rise to the Honduran black poetry, to balance the verbal and structural experimentation with traditional ways; to consolidate the words of a marginalized people, and to integrate ethnic thoughts into Honduran poetry…”.

Poet and writer Xiomara Cacho Caballero could also be defined as an activist for social change as she writes about the social and economic problems facing the black community and is inspired by those issues, I’m inspired by social, educational and religious injustice, the socio ethnic inequalities that puts the predominant ethnocentrism perspective in crises she said.

Hailed by “La Tribuna”, one of Honduras leading newspapers, as “The Voice of the Garifuna Homeland”, Xiomara Cacho Caballero is an alumna of the historical black university Harris–Stowe State University in St. Louis, Missouri as well as of the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional Francisco Morazán, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She speaks four languages including Garifuna, Spanish, French and English; some of her poems are written in those languages.

The poet, who has been teaching at university for more than 25 years, also believes that each time a poem is written a poet is born and she hopes that someday society will give poetry the fundamental importance that it had in earlier times.

As a constant advocate for change and improvement in education and everyday living for the black community and Hondurans in general, “My current project involves supplying the libraries of the Bay Islands with documents, books, and historical, educational, inter-ethnic materials that strengthen bilingual intercultural Education.

As a scholar of her culture and the reality of black existence in Honduras, she attempts to share her experiences and those of her people in her writing; an opportunity she uses to depict the black veracity in the Bay Islands and the country. “Literature creates identity. Through my writings I try to materialize the black presence. Through memory, and literary imagination in which I show today, black identity as a culture that can’t be ignored… Literature is a way of fighting discrimination…” Says the poet whose favorite poem is one she wrote about her mother entitled “My Island Mother.”

“My island mother,                                                    
 Spent her existence
 Cooking and baking coconut bread
 Giving food to her chickens
 And taking care of the family garden
 She sold conchs, fish, crabs and shells,
 She cleaned her white sand beach
 Sailed in tornadoes,
 Hurricanes, high and low tides
 Between rains, drizzles
 Thunder and lightning,
 She walked to work in Jonesville…”