This is from an article in WikiPedia. Jorge Louis Borges was one of the greatest writers I have ever read. Neruda was a great poet himself, however he was a supporter of Stalin and the Soviet Union, and the stone-cold NKVD assassin Vittorio Vidali was a good friend of his। It's no use to try and simply see Neruda as this avuncular old dear and great poet, creator, especially, of his wonderfully erotic love poems which I love myself - without running square into his shocking approval of mass murder for the State (so long as the State is the Communist State. He decried it in any Rightist State even though friends of his, other writers and poets, were in the jails of his heroes even as he spoke (but never mentioned them!).

You will have to decide for yourself whether you think this Wiki article is biased against Neruda. I have read it and I don't see any bias either way here. Nonetheless, with all this recent revival of Neruda's work and the concommitant ooutpouring of love for the poet, I believe that any 'worshipping' of any artist should be done with eyes wide open.

Here is the excerpt:

During the late 1960s, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was asked for his opinion of Pablo Neruda। After describing a brief meeting with him when both were young, 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."[43] When asked for the reasons for this, Borges continued,

"Well, he wrote a book -- well, maybe here I'm being political -- he wrote a book about the tyrants of South America, and then he had several stanzas against the United States। Now he knows that that's rubbish. And he had not a word against Perón. Because he had a lawsuit in Buenos Aires, that was explained to me afterwards, and he didn't care to risk anything. And so, when he was supposed to be writing at the top of his voice, full of noble indignation, he had not a word to say against Perón. And he was married to an Argentine lady, he knew that many of his friends had been sent to jail. He knew all about the state of our country, but not a word against him. At the same time, he was speaking against the United States, knowing the whole thing was a lie, no? But, of course, that doesn't mean anything against his poetry. Neruda is a very fine poet, a great poet in fact. And when they gave Miguel de Asturias the Nobel Prize, I said that it should have been given to Neruda! Now when I was in Chile, and we were on different political sides, I think he did the best thing to do. He went on a holiday during the three or four days I was there so there was no occasion for our meeting. But I think he was acting politely, no? Because he knew that people would be playing him up against me, no? I mean, 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."[44]