Neruda, page 46
a moment of darkness
as in a tunnel on a journey
and now, by trying to understand
I do not understand anything:
when we should be singing
instead we must knock upon a sarcophagus
and how awful it is that they hear you
and that the coffin invites you.
Throughout the book, Neruda purges his allegiance to Stalin in particular, as well as Soviet stances that followed in his wake. In “1968” he appeals “to the coming age / to judge my affliction / the company I kept / despite so many mistakes.” In these poems of repentance, it may seem that Neruda wants to be absolved too easily. In the second of two poems in the book aptly titled “The Worship,” he postulates,
I was unaware of that which we were unaware.
And that madness, so long lasting,
was blind and buried
in a demented grandeur.
But he had been aware and admitted as much. Aida Figueroa and her husband, Sergio Insunza, traveled with Salvador Allende to the Soviet Union in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death. “When we made that trip Pablo had already warned us of the excesses of Stalinism, verbally,” Aida explained in 2005. “Twenty million people had died, and he said so in conversations.” Yet he seemed to have said that only after Stalin died.
He was not “unaware,” but he had indeed turned a blind eye: in the poem “1968” he pleads, “I beg forgiveness for this blind man / who saw [the crimes of Stalin and the Soviets] and who didn’t see.” For a political poet so in tune with the metaphor of his eyes as his poetic vision ever since his adolescent poetry, this is a critical admission of change. Still, one must take all his remorse with a grain of salt.
In a literal example of how his former idealism had now turned into a sense of hopelessness, in a 1947 prose piece he had written, “Tyranny cuts off the singer’s head, but the voice from the bottom of the well returns to the secret springs of the earth and rises out of nowhere through the mouths of the people.” Now, he ends his poem about the Prague Spring:
The doors of the century close
on those left unburied
and again they will call in vain
and we will leave without hearing,
pondering the grandest tree,
the space of our happiness.
He is resigned, if not cynical. In another poem in the book, “Death of a Journalist,” also about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he writes, “Let us prepare to die / in the jaws of machinery.” Neruda had always fought against the machinery of materialism, unbridled capitalism, and fascism. Now he could find no escape.
The title of the intense book, World’s End, says it all. In it, Neruda critiques the fact that socialism—in Cuba, China, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere—had failed to create a truly fair society. By the end of the book, it seems he has given up his ardent faith that socialism would be successful. He is ready for the century to end, a century full of horrific war, which he labels the century of destruction.
* * *
Soon after Neruda’s sixty-fifth birthday party, in 1969, he went to the doctor complaining of irritation during urination. A biopsy discovered the cause: prostate cancer. He had a mass that would continue to spread until it metastasized to his bladder. He would go to the best French surgeons, the best Russian surgeons in the Soviet Union, but there was nothing anyone could do. Chemotherapy was not yet widely available as a treatment for cancer.
Despite his illness, Neruda would not give up his political obligations. The 1970 Chilean presidential elections were coming, and the Far Left did not yet have a clear candidate. There was Salvador Allende, but many thought that he was damaged goods after having already lost three presidential races, in 1952, 1958, and 1964. Neruda himself seemed ambivalent; perhaps he believed that Allende had aligned himself too much with Fidel Castro and would try to bring Castroism into Chilean politics.
The Left failed to find a consensus candidate to rally behind, so each party would, for now, run its own candidate in what would amount to a primary contest within the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity, or UP) coalition. The Socialists ran Allende. The Communists at first didn’t have a candidate, but as Sergio Insunza, who would be Allende’s justice minister, explained,
There was disagreement there about which candidate to choose . . . And then a voice: “Why not Pablo Neruda? Why not Pablo Neruda as the Communist Party candidate for the presidency?” And, curiously, it was a candidacy that began as a joke, without any expectations, naturally, that he would win. But it gathered quite a bit of steam, and even he got enthusiastic about it.
Neruda agreed to run, but only with the understanding that once the parties of the UP coalition came to an agreement, he would retire his candidacy. He ran an enthusiastic campaign regardless, touring the country, making proclamations, meeting with unions and organizations, speaking to crowds of all sizes in barns in the countryside and in town plazas. While he dispensed the ritual campaign rhetoric, the heart of his appearances was the recital of his own verse. Sometimes there was no stump speech at all, just poetry.
If he did make a speech, he would close it by saying, “I’ll just read you a poem, okay?” And then he continued to read poems for hours. People would say, “Read that one!” and he would reply, “If you’ve got it.” Inevitably, someone would hand him the poem or recite a few lines from memory. He read them, and often the crowd read along, out loud, reciting in unison with him.
Young Communists armed with guitars and art set out to spread propaganda. His friends saw Neruda quickly revived, acquiring a dynamism that actually surpassed the party’s own ambitions for his candidacy.
The people’s love for the poet took over Santiago on October 9, 1969, when four marches of Communists from different parts of the city rallying for Neruda converged in the working-class Barrancas neighborhood, where fireworks were set off above the multitude that crammed the streets. The crowd roared, “¡Neruda, Neruda, Barrancas te saluda!” “Neruda, Neruda, Barrancas salutes you!” “Viva the future president of Chile!” The poet gave a speech, ending with:
Victory depends on us, all of us together, on our ability to spend time together, argue and change minds, in order to change the historical panorama of our homeland, alter the course of history and bring about a people’s government, so that we can be proud of who we are as Chileans . . .
Neruda’s campaign fired up and mobilized the Communist and Socialist voting base. Once it was evident that he wouldn’t win, he (at least publicly) threw his weight behind Allende. Neruda’s energy and strategy helped to open the road for UP’s success in the general election.
* * *
Done with the campaign trail, the Nerudas began to travel again outside Chile, despite Pablo’s worsening illness. They went to Paris, Moscow, London, and Milan (for a performance of The Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta), with a stopover in Barcelona, an emotional visit for Neruda to Franco’s Spain. There he spent the day with Gabriel García Márquez, who would write a fictionalized account of the afternoon in his short story “Me alquilo para soñar” (perhaps translated best as “Dreamer for Rent”), published in Doce cuentos peregrinos (Twelve Pilgrim Stories). García Márquez caricatured his good friend Neruda roaming through bookstores on a “major hunt,” moving among the people “like a crippled elephant, with an infantile interest in the internal mechanism of everything—to him, the world seemed like an immense string toy in which he invented life.” When it was time to eat, he was “gluttonous and refined.” García Márquez writes that he ate three whole lobsters, all the while talking about other culinary delights, especially the “prehistoric shellfish of Chile.”
* * *
On their return from Europe by boat, Neruda and Matilde stopped first in Venezuela, where an elaborate afternoon banquet was held in his honor at El Nacional editor in chief Miguel Otero Silva’s contemporary mansion.
A twenty-two-year-old Columbia University graduate student, Suzanne Jill Levine, now an esteemed translator of Latin American literature, was at the party. She was traveling with the “wonderfully wry” Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who was teaching at Yale. The expansive, modern home was marvelously designed, built into a hillside, with three levels projecting outward, each with its own garden. Levine recalls standing in one of the gardens, admiring Henry Moore’s large sculpture of a reclining nude—a private possession of the Communist writer. When it was time for the banquet to be served, around three P.M., she was further impressed by the uniformed waiter who brought a lavishly adorned silver tray to serve to each guest. It was then that she learned the term “Champagne Communist,” a term that could often have been ascribed to Neruda—especially in his later years.
Neruda’s next stop on the trip back home was Lima, where Jorge Edwards was serving as the concierge of the Chilean embassy. Neruda gave a benefit reading for the victims of a recent earthquake in northern Peru, and the event was attended by an overflow crowd.
The Nerudas stayed at Edwards’s house, and he described the complex process of making things just right for the poet, including ensuring that expensive whiskeys and fine wines were always on hand: little luxuries, among others, that Neruda had come to expect wherever he went.
The exorbitant tastes and possessions of these literary Champagne Communists, especially at this point in the century, in their careers, and in their lives, led to much criticism. There was, however, theoretical justification that both Jill Levine, then and now, and Edwards could appreciate. As the latter put it: “No one was seeking absolute egalitarianism—which had been discredited in the early years of the revolution—but rather equality of possibilities. Among other things, socialism had been formulated precisely in order for poets and creators to consume a magnum bottle of Dom Pérignon once in a while. It wasn’t just for the empty-headed children of multimillionaires!” Neruda certainly held himself to this standard rather than a more modest lifestyle. Even his Nobel winnings would go toward acquiring another large home.*
Many of Neruda’s friends and peers, however, took issue with what they saw as a gulf between his words and actions. Stephen Spender, for instance, who worked with him supporting the Spanish Republic and championed his poetry in the English-speaking world, said, “I cannot really consider Pablo Neruda a communist at all. His kind of communism was almost entirely rhetorical; he was a sort of highly privileged propagandist.”
Even Matilde, who was so far from being a communist, played both sides. During the Allende years, Neruda helped in every way he could, giving readings, fund-raising, and making appearances. Matilde complained: “Listen, dammit, you know the Communists are screwing you over.” “Sure,” he answered, “but don’t you like it when you go to the Soviet Union and they treat you like a queen?”
* * *
The UP’s electoral agenda called for revolutionary changes in Chile’s political, economic, and social structures in order to overcome the misery imposed upon the working class by capitalism, exploitation, and class privilege. Allende promised a peaceful transition to socialism. The centrist Christian Democrats’ Radomiro Tomic was considered to be an uncompromising leftist by the Chilean Right, and the two groups were unable to form an alliance. The Right thus supported the Nationalist Party’s Jorge Alessandri (son of previous progressive president Arturo Alessandri). The Chilean vote was divided once again into thirds.
President Richard Nixon felt that “if Allende should win the election in Chile, and then you have Castro in Cuba, what you’ll in effect have in Latin America is a red sandwich, and eventually, it will all be red.”* The CIA had intervened in past elections, but not to the extent that it was doing so now. In fact, in the run-up to the 1964 presidential campaign, the CIA had spent an astounding $3 million on anti-Allende propaganda. It comprised the extensive use of the press, radio, even direct mailings, relying heavily on images of Soviet tanks and Cuban firing squads and targeting especially women.
With the centrist Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei’s victory in that election, President Johnson’s administration moved to support the government, trying to appease the Chilean people enough to prevent them from turning to the Left and Allende’s UP coalition. Suddenly, Chile was receiving more aid per capita than any other country in the hemisphere. Though Chile faced few, if any, security threats, the United States also upped its military aid, totaling $91 million from 1962 to 1970, trying to establish good relations with the highest generals. Meanwhile, the CIA continued to infiltrate Chile, spending over $2 million on propping up the Christian Democrats and diminishing support for the UP. It also now appears that the KGB spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in Chile leading up to the election, supporting Allende’s campaign.
Leading up to the 1970 election, with Allende appearing so strong, the CIA stepped up its game. But still its efforts failed, despite nearly a decade of experience in covert action against Allende.
Salvador Allende received the most votes on September 4, with 36.3 percent, just 1.4 percent more than the Right’s Jorge Alessandri. With almost three million votes cast, the margin between the two was just under forty thousand. Tomic came in a close third, with a strong 27.8 percent, reflecting just how divided the country was. According to the Chilean constitution at the time, if no candidate was elected with a 50 percent majority, the National Congress chose who would be president between the top two in the popular vote. In the three times this had occurred since 1932, Congress had always confirmed the candidate who earned the most votes in the popular election. The confirmation vote would take place on October 24.
Following Allende’s victory, in a meeting with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, CIA director Richard Helms, and Attorney General John Mitchell, Nixon issued explicit orders to foment a coup to prevent Allende’s inauguration or, failing that, to destroy his subsequent administration. The CIA took down Nixon’s directives in handwritten notes. They constitute the first record of a U.S. president ordering the overthrow of a democratically elected government.
Nixon ordered the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream” to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.” Helms cabled Kissinger, asserting that a “suddenly disastrous economic situation would be the most logical pretext for a military move.” The “only practical way to create the tense atmosphere in which Frei [still in power] could muster the courage to act is to see to it that the Chilean economy, precarious enough since the election, takes a drastic turn for the worse . . . At least a mini-crisis is required.” They conspired with right-wing groups and economic players, which above all included the International Telephone and Telegraph Co. ITT had holdings of $153 million in Chile, owning the phone company, two Sheraton hotels, and Standard Electric, among other entities. The firm collaborated with the CIA in an attempt to destabilize the economy through various means, including cancellations of loans and credits and stirring up panic among Chile’s private businesses. U.S. interests also schemed to covertly bankrupt savings banks and induce unemployment.
As the Church Committee report affirms, “at the express request of the President . . . The CIA attempted, directly, to foment a military coup in Chile.” The CIA funneled weapons to a group of Chilean officers who plotted a takeover, which was to begin with the kidnapping of René Schneider, the commander in chief of the Chilean army and a constitutionalist who had publicly stated he would support the proper transfer of power. U.S. ambassador Edward Korry had identified a retired general as a military figure who could move against Allende with Schneider out of the way. But two days before the congressional vote, a different group of right-wing extremists, not known to be tied to the CIA, tried to kidnap Schneider. General Schneider tried to defend himself and was mortally wounded in the exchange of gunfire.*
Nixon’s policies did not succeed in diminishing Allende’s popular support. Furthermore, the assassination so close to the congressional vote drew sympathy away from the Right. The Christian Democrats in Congress were already siding with Allende, aligning themselves with UP rather than the Right, thus maintaining Chile’s democratic precedent of confirming the candidate who won the most popular votes, no matter how slight the victory. First, though, they demanded and received a package of guarantees: UP would keep the multiparty system, would maintain civil liberties and freedom of the press, and would protect the armed forces from political purges. Allende wholeheartedly accepted the measures and was confirmed.
Among many on the Chilean Left, perhaps especially among the younger generation, Allende’s triumph brought the sense of a historic shift. The victory also reverberated throughout Latin America, where all eyes were turned toward Chile. This was the world’s first democratic election of a “Socialist parliamentarian,” as Allende described himself, who also held some Marxist ideas. The old orthodoxy of socialism and communism at that point maintained that the only way to create a new society was to take over the state, and the only way to do that was through armed revolution, as in Cuba. In order to establish a government that could implement socialism or communism, it was believed that it was necessary to impose terror on anyone who obstructed the necessary changes. Allende, and those who supported him, suggested and believed that democracy was another means to the same end, without violence.
After Allende’s inauguration, the UP government tried to establish socialism within a bourgeois state where the center and the Right controlled the judiciary and legislature. The UP’s strategy was to use the executive branch’s considerable strength to carry out some immediate economic reforms that would snap the economy out of the recession that Allende inherited. This included the nationalization of large industries, redistribution of income, and state hiring of the unemployed. The subsequent economic pickup was intended to be accompanied by mass political mobilizations, leading to a parliamentary electoral majority for the UP.
The CIA, as confirmed by a 1975 U.S. congressional investigation, covertly spent $8 million in the three years between 1970 and the coup in September 1973, sabotaging Allende’s government. Nixon blocked copper exports to the United States, which had been a staple of the Chilean economy. Meanwhile, those to the UP’s left, including organized Mapuche and the Marxist Movement of the Revolutionary Left (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, or MIR), were wreaking havoc with acts of political terrorism. The UP itself was a precarious coalition with little cohesion or agreement regarding the pace and character of change the government was to implement. Allende lacked a mandate while working within a democracy; unlike Castro, he wasn’t relying on a revolutionary army. The result was chaos and extreme political polarization.
