In 1949, Franco Sent Four Poets to Latin America

In "The Poetic Embassy," for Hazlitt, Aaron Shulman explores what happened when four poets from Franco's Spain were sent to Latin America. "The four poets saw their trip as good-hearted cultural diplomacy, a handshake across an ocean," writes Shulman, "while the many detractors they would encounter during four eventful months abroad saw only the invasive political propaganda of a foreign dictatorship." And on:

...A poet who declined at the last minute to participate in the trip later called it a “rotund failure,” while the regime would spin it as a triumph, in spite of the fact that it ended abruptly because of a political assassination. And yet it was another assassination, carried out more than a decade earlier in dramatically different circumstances, that truly defined the trip—the murder of the poet Federico García Lorca.

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While all four poets came from the victorious Nationalist side of the Spanish Civil War, they weren’t a political monolith. In fact, they were a good reflection of the varied right-wing coalition that had united to defeat the Second Republic, a grab-bag that had included everything from die-hard fascists, to wealthy aristocrats, to Catholic traditionalists. The oldest member of the “embassy” was forty-three-year-old Count Agustín de Foxá, an aristocratic bon vivant and the author of Madrid de Corta a Checa, a novel about a young man’s conversion from right to left during the war. A diplomat posted in Argentina, he was also the biting wit of his generation, known for his celebrated mot, “I’m a count, I’m fat, I smoke cigars, how am I not going to be a right-winger?”

Continue at Hazlitt.