Evgeny Evtushenko's Latin American tour (1968). Uruguay. Colombia. “The conquest of souls”

In 1967—1968. Yevgeny Yevtushenko was on a large Latin American tour, performing for five months in Chile, Uruguay, Colombia and Mexico. In the present article we continue to publish the poet's report from this tour with our comments. The report was written in the spring of 1968 for the internal use of the Soviet Writers' Union, which of course implied that the document would be passed on to the Central Committee, a fact of which the poet was well aware. After friendly Chile (see Latin America, 2024, no.5), Yevtushenko describes the countries less familiar to Soviet cultural diplomacy, Uruguay and Colombia, where “the conquest of souls who are subtly reaching out to us” was still to be achieved. He writes considerably less about both countries than about Chile: the former because of his short stay, and the latter probably because much of his time in Colombia was taken up by personal relations, which he could not in any way confess to the Writers' Union, let alone to the Central Committee.