Then Neruda writes of Nicaragua. “Tacho” was the nickname of the murderous Anastasio Somoza García, who brutally ruled from 1936 until he was assassinated in 1956. Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said of him, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch.” After his assassination, his two sons carried on the family’s reign until the Sandinistas’ 1979 revolutionary victory.
Honduras’s Tiburcio Carías Andino, who ruled from 1932 to 1949, is next. Carías Andino gained the support of the banana companies by crushing strikes and the labor movement, outlawing the Communist Party of Honduras, and cracking down on the press.
Neruda continues to El Salvador: the Fascist general Maximiliano Hernández Martínez seized control of El Salvador in a 1931 coup. A year later, in response to a popular uprising, he presided over a horrific massacre that some estimate killed up to forty thousand peasants.
Last came Guatemala. Under Jorge Ubico’s dictatorship from 1931 to 1944, United Fruit became the most important company there. It received enormous tracts of real estate and tax exemptions, making it the largest landowner in the country, and it also controlled the country’s sole railroad, electricity production, and main Caribbean port, while, as Neruda writes, “the indigenous were collapsing in their poverty.”
* * *
In July, his one-month suspension was over and Neruda took up his position as cónsul general again. He needed the money. The drama over Neruda defying orders in the Siqueiros affair had no enduring repercussions; knowing how desperate he was for it, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs even ended up reimbursing Neruda his docked salary. However, since Germany’s June 22, 1941, invasion of Russia, war had broken out in earnest across Europe. For Neruda, this meant that he could no longer allow diplomacy to constrain his literary political activism.
And then the reality of the fight against fascism hit Neruda quite literally. Just after Christmas 1941, Neruda, Delia, and his consular secretary were in a park in Cuernavaca. As they toasted Roosevelt, who had just declared war on the Axis powers following the December 7 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; Mexico’s new president, Ávila Camacho; Winston Churchill; and Stalin, a group of ten to thirteen Nazi sympathizers who had been sitting nearby suddenly attacked the festive group with fists, chairs, and bottles—“in military formation,” according to Neruda—and yelled “Heil Hitler!” with their arms raised in Nazi salute. The poet suffered a four-inch wound to his head after being struck, he said, by a blackjack. The assailants fled when the police arrived.
The Associated and United Presses circulated a photograph of Neruda and his wound around the world, along with an account of the incident. (The short reports from the wire services, which appeared in the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and others, identified Neruda as a Chilean consul but interestingly made no mention that he was a well-recognized poet.) Neruda received hundreds of telegrams wishing him well from around the world.
His head wound didn’t impede his New Year’s celebrations with his friends, which had grown to include a new group of European exiles. That night they sang the Socialist and Communist anthem, “The Internationale,” in Spanish, French, German, Polish, Romanian, and Czech. Many of the guests would later recall how it was at this party that they last saw the legendary Italian Communist photographer, actress, and activist Tina Modotti alive. She died five days after the fiesta, supposedly of a heart attack, though many believe she was murdered. Modotti was an inspiration to Neruda; she bore witness to fascism and other injustices through her photographs, just as Neruda was now doing through his poetry, and she often put her camera aside to do grittier work for the Communist Party, as Neruda would also do. “I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art,” she wrote. At her funeral, Neruda read his elegy “Tina Modotti Is Dead”:
In the old kitchens of your country, on the dusty
roads, something is said and passes on,
something returns to the flame of your golden people, something awakes and sings.
* * *
It was not all peace and harmony in this social sphere, and personal discord began to arise between Neruda and others within his orbit of poets, intellectuals, and the like. One such clash erupted with Octavio Paz. At the time, Paz was the director of the literary journal Taller (Workshop). Neruda gave Paz a short essay to publish, in which he took some jabs at Juan Ramón Jiménez, his rival back in Spain. Through an “unforgivable error,” Neruda wasn’t mentioned as a contributor on the cover. In that same issue of Taller, Paz published poems by Rafael Alberti, which Alberti had dedicated to José Bergamín, a poet with whom Neruda had had a separate feud. Neruda became furious with Paz for publishing the dedication to his enemy: “You have been an accomplice in a plot against me.” (For all the commotion this perceived slight would set off, Taller was a little-known publication, and Paz—though he would go on to win the 1990 Nobel Prize—was not yet an important literary figure.) Neruda was prone to paranoia regarding other artists, a problem that would continue throughout his life.
At the same time, Paz and Bergamín were editing a new anthology of modern Hispanic poetry, Laurel. Bergamín was in charge of selecting two Mexican and two Spanish poets to include. Neruda was further incensed when Bergamín didn’t choose his friend Miguel Hernández, then jailed in one of Franco’s prisons, as one of the Spaniards; in Neruda’s Canto General poem “To Miguel Hernández, Murdered in the Prisons of Spain,” he takes a swipe at Bergamín and Laurel, as he pays homage to his lost friend:
And
