by Pablo Neruda
“The book doesn’t lose anything by it,” they replied, and I saw that they had made the cuts without malice. Still, they did make them.
How can these things be set right? Each day, I am less and less of a sociologist. Aside from my general Marxist principles, aside from my dislike of capitalism and my faith in socialism, I understand humanity’s persistent contradictions less and less.
We poets of this age have had to make a choice. The choice has not been a bed of roses. The terrible, unjust wars, the continual pressures, money’s aggressiveness, all injustices have made themselves felt with greater intensity every day. The decrepit old system has baited its hooks with conditional “freedom,” sex, violence, and pleasures paid for in easy monthly installments.
Today’s poet has looked for a way out of his anguish. Some have escaped into mysticism, or the dream of reason. Others are fascinated by the spontaneous and destructive violence of the young; they have become immediatists without realizing that, in today’s belligerent world, this experience has always led to repression and sterile agony.
In my party, Chile’s Communist Party, I found a large group of simple people who had left far behind them personal vanity, despotism, and material interests. I felt happy knowing honest people who were fighting for common decency, for justice.
I have never had any difficulties with my party, which, although modest, has achieved extraordinary victories for the people of Chile, my people. What more can I say? My only hope is to be as simple as my comrades, as persistent and invincible as they. We never learn enough about humility. I was never taught anything by individualist pride, which entrenches itself in skepticism so as not to espouse the cause of human suffering.
FIDEL CASTRO
Two weeks after his victorious entry into Havana, Fidel Castro arrived in Caracas for a short visit. He had come to thank the government and the Venezuelan people publicly for the help they had given him. This help had consisted of arms for his troops, and, naturally, it was not Betancourt (recently elected President) who supplied them, but his predecessor, Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal. Larrazábal had been a friend of the Venezuelan leftists, including the Communists, and had acceded to the act of solidarity with Cuba that they had asked of him.
I have seen few political welcomes more enthusiastic than the one the Venezuelans gave the young victor of the Cuban revolution. Fidel spoke for four uninterrupted hours in the huge square of El Silencio, the heart of Caracas. I was one of the 200,000 people who stood listening to that long speech without uttering a word. For me, and for many others, Fidel’s speeches have been a revelation. Hearing him address the crowd, I realized that a new age had begun for Latin America. I liked the freshness of his language. Even the best of the workers’ leaders and politicians usually harp on the same formulas, whose content may be valid, though the words have been worn thin and weakened by repetition. Fidel ignored such formulas. His language was didactic but natural. He himself appeared to be learning as he spoke and taught.
President Betancourt was not there. He dreaded the thought of facing the city of Caracas, where he had never been liked. Every time Fidel mentioned him in his speech, whistles and catcalls broke out, which Fidel’s hands tried to silence. I believe a definite hostility was established that day between Betancourt and the Cuban revolutionary. Fidel was neither Marxist nor Communist at the time; his words had nothing to do with either ideology. My personal opinion is that the speech, Fidel’s fiery and brilliant personality, the enthusiasm he stirred up in the multitude, the intensity of the people of Caracas listening to him, troubled Betancourt, a politician of the old school of rhetoric, committees, and secret meetings. From then on, Betancourt has persecuted with implacable brutality anything at all that smacked of Fidel Castro or the Cuban revolution.
On the day after the rally, while I was on a Sunday picnic in the country, some motorcycles came to us with an invitation to the Cuban Embassy. They had been looking for me all day and had finally discovered my whereabouts. The reception would be that same afternoon. Matilde and I went straight to the Embassy. The guests were so numerous that they overflowed the halls and gardens. Outside, there were swarms of people, and it was difficult to get through the streets leading to the building.
We crossed rooms packed with people, a trench of arms holding cocktail glasses high. Someone led us down corridors and stairs to another floor. Celia, Fidel’s closest friend and secretary, was waiting for us in an unexpected part of the house. Matilde remained with her, and I was taken into the next room. I found myself in a kind of servant’s room, a gardener’s or chauffeur’s. In it there was only a bed someone had hurried out of, leaving it all messed up, with the pillow on the floor, and a small table in a corner; nothing more. I thought I would be led from there to some cozy little sitting room to meet the Commandant. Well, that’s not what happened. Suddenly the door opened and Fidel Castro’s tall figure filled the frame.
He was a head taller than I. He came toward me with quick strides.
“Hello, Pablo!” he said, and smothered me in a bear hug.
His reedy, almost childish voice took me by surprise. Something about his appearance also matched the tone of his voice. Fidel did not give the impression of being a big man, but an overgrown boy whose legs had suddenly shot up before he had lost his kid’s face and his scanty adolescent’s beard.
Brusquely, he interrupted the embrace, and galvanized into action, made a half turn, and headed resolutely toward a corner of the room. I had not noticed a news photographer who had sneaked in and was aiming his camera at us from the corner. Fidel was on him with a single rush. I saw him grab the man by the throat and start shaking him. The camera fell to the floor. I went over to Fidel and gripped his arm, frightened by the sight of the tiny photographer struggling vainly. But Fidel shoved him toward the door, making him disappear. Then he turned back to me, smiling, picked the camera off the floor, and flung it on the bed.
We did not speak of the incident, only of the possibility of a press agency for all of Latin America. I think Prensa Latina was born of that conversation. Then we went back to the reception, each of us through his own door.
As I was returning from the Embassy with Matilde an hour later, the terrified face of the photographer and the instinctive speed of the guerrilla leader, who had sensed the intruder’s silent entry behind his back, came into my mind.
That was my first meeting with Fidel Castro. Why did he object so savagely to being photographed? Did his objection hide some small political mystery? To this day, I can’t understand why our interview had to be kept so secret.
* * *
My first meeting with Che Guevara was entirely different. It took place in Havana. It was almost 1:00 a.m. when I went to see him at his office in the Department of Finance or Economy, I don’t quite remember which, where he had invited me. He had set our appointment for midnight, but I arrived late. I had attended an interminable official ceremony for which I had been seated with the presidium.
Che was wearing boots and regimentals, with pistols at his waist. His clothes struck a discordant note in the banking atmosphere of the office. Che was dark, slow-speaking, with an unmistakable Argentine accent. He was the kind of man you talk with unhurriedly on the pampas between one maté and the next. His sentences were short and rounded off with a smile, as if leaving the discussion up in the air.
I was flattered by what he told me about my book Canto general. He would read it to his guerrillas at night, in the Sierra Maestra. Now, years later, I shudder when I think that my poems accompanied him to his death. Through Régis Debray I learned that, till the very end in the Bolivian mountains, he kept only two books in his duffel bag: a math book and my Canto general.
Something that Che told me that night threw me off quite a bit but perhaps explains his fate. His look wandered from my eyes to the darkened window of the office. We were talking of a possible North American invasion of Cuba. I had seen sandbags scattered at strategic points in the Havana stre
ets. Suddenly he said, “War … War … We are always against war, but once we have fought in a war, we can’t live without it. We want to go back to it all the time.”
He was thinking out loud, for my benefit. I was frankly startled, listening to him. For me, war is a menace, not a goal.
We said goodbye and I never saw him again. Afterward, there was his fighting in the Bolivian jungle, and his tragic death. But I keep on seeing in Che Guevara the pensive man who in his heroic battles always had a place, next to his weapons, for poetry.
* * *
Latin America is very fond of the word “hope.” We like to be called the “continent of hope.” Candidates for deputy, senator, President call themselves “candidates of hope.” This hope is really something like a promise of heaven, an I.O.U. whose payment is always being put off. It is put off until the next legislative campaign, until next year, until the next century.
When the Cuban revolution came, millions of South Americans had a rude awakening. They couldn’t believe their ears. This wasn’t in the cards for a continent that has lived hoping desperately against hope. Suddenly here was Fidel Castro, a Cuban no one had heard of, seizing hope by its hair, or its feet, and not letting it fly off but seating it at his table; that is, at the table and in the house of the peoples of America.
From then on, we have made great strides on this road of hope now turned into a reality. But we live with our hearts in our mouths. A neighboring country, very powerful and highly imperialist, wants to crush Cuba, hopes and all. The masses of all the Americas read the paper every day, listen to the radio every night. And they sigh with satisfaction. Cuba exists. Another day. Another year. Another five years. Our hope has not had its head chopped off. Its head will not be chopped off.
THE LETTER FROM THE CUBANS
Writers in Peru, among whom I have always had many friends, had long urged that I be given an official decoration by their country. I confess that medals of this kind have always seemed a bit silly to me. The few I had were pinned on my chest without love, for duties performed, for time put in as consul; that is, as an obligation or a routine. I passed through Lima once and Ciro Alegría, the great novelist of The Starving Dogs, who was then the Peruvian writers’ president, insisted that his country should give me a decoration. My poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu had gone on to become a part of Peruvian life; perhaps in those lines I had expressed sentiments that had lain dormant like the stones of that remarkable structure. Moreover, the President of Peru at that time, the architect Belaúnde, was my friend and reader. Although the revolution that later ousted him violently gave Peru a government that was unexpectedly open to the new roads of history, I still believe that Belaúnde was a man of irreproachable honesty, whose mind was set on somewhat chimerical goals that finally turned him away from terrifying reality and separated him from the people he loved so deeply.
I accepted the decoration, this time not for consular services but for one of my poems. Besides, and this is not the least of it, there are wounds separating the people of Chile and Peru that have yet to be healed. Not only athletes, diplomats, and statesmen must take pains to stanch that blood from the past, but poets also, and with all the more reason, for their souls have fewer frontiers than the souls of other people.
Around that same time I made a trip to the United States, where an international congress of the P.E.N. club was to be held. My friends Arthur Miller, the Argentines Ernesto Sábato and Victoria Ocampo, the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes were among those invited. Writers from almost all the socialist countries of Europe also attended.
When I got there, I was told that the Cuban writers had also been invited. At the P.E.N. club they were surprised that Carpentier had not come, and I was asked if I could clear this up. I went to see the representative of Prensa Latina in New York, who offered to cable a message to Carpentier. The answer given through Prensa Latina was that Carpentier could not come because the invitation had arrived too late and the North American visas had not been ready in time. Someone was lying now: the visas had been issued three months before, and three months before, the Cubans had known about the invitation and had accepted. Evidently there had been a higher-up, last-minute decision against attending.
As always, I did what I had to do. I gave my first poetry reading in New York, to such a large crowd that closed-circuit television had to be set up outside the auditorium so that hundreds of people who could not get in could see and hear. I was touched by the echo my poems, violently anti-imperialist, stirred up in that North American crowd. I understood many things there, and in Washington and California, when students and ordinary people showed approval of my words against imperialism. I learned on the spot that the North American enemies of our peoples were also enemies of the North American people.
I gave several interviews. The Spanish-language edition of Life magazine, edited by parvenu Latin Americans, distorted and mutilated my opinions. They did not correct this when I asked them to. But it was nothing very serious. They had suppressed a paragraph in which I condemned the war in Vietnam and another about a black leader who had just been assassinated. Only years later did the newspaperwoman who edited the interview acknowledge that it had been censored.
During my visit I discovered—and this does honor to my comrades, the North American writers—that they exerted relentless pressure to see that I was granted an entry visa to the United States. I believe the P.E.N. club even threatened the State Department with an open letter of censure if it continued to deny me an entry permit. At a public gathering where she received an award, the most respected figure in North American poetry, the elderly poet Marianne Moore, took the floor to say how happy she was that my legal entry into the country had been obtained through the united action of the poets. I was told that her words, which were vibrant and moving, drew a tremendous ovation.
The outrageous fact is that I had barely returned to Chile after that tour, which was marked by my most combative political and poetic activity, a major part of which was used to defend and support the Cuban revolution, when I received the well-known slanderous letter from the Cuban writers, accusing me of little less than submission and treason. I no longer remember the words used by my public prosecutors. I can say, however, that they set themselves up as instructors in revolution, pedantic teachers of the norms by which writers of the left must be guided. With arrogance, insolence, and flattering words they hoped to reform my poetry as well as my social revolutionary work. My decoration for my Macchu Picchu poem and my attendance at the P.E.N. club congress, my statements and my readings, my acts and words condemning the North American system, spoken right in the lion’s mouth—all this was called into question, falsified or maligned by those writers, many of them newly come into the revolutionary camp, and many of them justly or unjustly in the pay of the new Cuban state.
This bag of injustices bulged with signatures, requested with suspicious spontaneity from the committees of writers’ and artists’ associations. Delegates rushed about Havana looking for signatures from entire guilds of musicians, dancers, and artists. Artists and writers who were passing through, who had been generously invited to Cuba and filled the most fashionable hotels, were asked to sign. Some of the writers whose names were printed at the bottom of the unjust document later sent me surreptitious messages: “I never signed it; I found out what it was all about after seeing my name, which I never signed.” A friend of Juan Marinello’s told me that the same thing had happened to him, although I haven’t been able to check on that. I have verified it in other cases.
The affair was a ball of wool or snow or ideological skulduggery that must be made to grow bigger and bigger at all costs. Special agencies were set up in Madrid, Paris, and other capitals, whose sole job was to send out copies of the lying letter, in huge batches. Thousands of those letters went out, especially from Madrid, in bunches of twenty to thirty copies for each addressee. In a gruesome way, it was amusing to receive those env
elopes, decorated with stamps bearing Franco’s portrait, while inside the envelopes Pablo Neruda was accused of being a counterrevolutionary.
It is not up to me to ferret out the motives for that fit of rage: political chicanery, ideological weakness, literary spite and envy—and who knows what else—were responsible for this battle of so many against one. I was told later that the enthusiastic editors, promoters, and hunters of signatures for the famous letter were the writers Roberto Fernández Retamar, Edmundo Desnoes, and Lisandro Otero. I don’t recall ever reading Desnoes and Otero or meeting them personally. Retamar, yes. In Havana and Paris he tagged behind me constantly with his adulation. He used to tell me that he had published many essays and articles praising my work. I really never considered him important, just one more among the political and literary arrivistes of our time.
Perhaps they fancied that they could harm or destroy me as an active revolutionary. But when I got to Teatinos Street in Santiago to take up the matter for the first time with the party’s central committee, they had already formed their opinion, at least politically. “It is the first attack against our Chilean party,” I was told.
We were living through serious conflicts at the time. Venezuelan, Mexican, and other Communists were having ideological disputes with the Cubans. Later, in tragic circumstances but in silence, the Bolivians also dissented.
The Communist Party in Chile decided to award me, in a public ceremony, the Recabarren medal, which had recently been established and was to go to its best activists. It was a levelheaded response. The Chilean Communist Party endured this period of divergences intelligently, it stuck by its intention of analyzing our disagreements internally. In time, all traces of a fight have been wiped away. A clear understanding and a fraternal relationship exist between the two most important Communist Parties of Latin America.