“Perhaps I didn’t live just in my self, perhaps I lived the lives of others.”

--Pablo Neruda

Hemingway, Marquez, Pablo Neruda...The writers who were close to Fidel Castro and overtly admired the Cuban leader.  Neruda’s Song of Protest contains a poem `To Fidel Castro’, which users  widely shared on social media after the death of the Cuban leader on Saturday. 

'To Fidel Castro' is from a poet who wrote about his works thus:  “My poetry rejected nothing it could carry along in its course; it accepted passion, unraveled mystery, and worked its way into the hearts of the people.” (P-170 Memoirs). 

 I understand that in the late 1950’s his work began to move away from the highly political stance it had taken during the 1930s.  Neruda died in 1973. But whether he would have written `To Fidel Castro’ or regretted writing it if he had lived several more years, has no relevance, because Neruda, who became a member of the Chile’s Communist party on July 15, 1945, admired the pattern of the typical South American dictator, who "at least were leaders who braved battles and bullets," in contrast to Gonzalez Videla (President of Chile from 1946 to 1952), who does not the fit the pattern and was the "product of smoke-filled back-room politics, an irresponsible and frivolous clown, a weakling who put on a tough front.” (Memoirs).

So even as one might  admire Neruda the poet it’s difficult to put up with a man who refused to publicly condemn the Soviet repression of dissident writers like Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky and did not speak out against Juan Peron (President of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and 1973 to 74) because, according to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, he was "afraid to risk his reputation."

"During the late 1960s, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was asked for his opinion of Pablo Neruda. Borges stated, "I think of him as a very fine poet, a very fine poet. I don't admire him as a man, I think of him as a very mean man." He said that Neruda had not spoken out against Perón because he was afraid to risk his reputation, noting "I was an Argentine poet, he was a Chilean poet, he's on the side of the Communists, I'm against them. So I felt he was behaving very wisely in avoiding a meeting that would have been quite uncomfortable for both of us." (Wikipedia).