neruda in d.c.
It was June 1966, five years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Neruda, a member of the Chilean Communist Party, was to speak at the IDB, but it was the height of the Cold War and anticommunist feeling ran deep among the bank's employees. The IDB president was forced to stand "in the doorway of the bank and, despite the protests and sirens, announced through a bullhorn that the ceremony would take place at the Hotel Mayflower." There, Castedo introduced the poet, and the reading was "a colossal success."
The Washington Post reports on the discovery of a long-lost recording of Pablo Neruda reading in Washington, D.C.