ASTURIAS
Some of the questions that the Catalan revolution posed were being answered under different conditions in Asturias. Less than two years after the October insurrection, the industrial and mining region was again in the throes of revolution. In many aspects it was, initially, a repeat of the October commune. In the mining villages the workers took control of the mines, sent men to the front only a few kilometres away, organized the distribution of food and set up their own workers’ patrols. As everywhere in the Popular Front zone, power was dispersed in dozens of local committees, but here a particular proletarian tradition was at work. Not for nothing had socialists, anarchists, dissident communists of the BOC, trotskyists and communists of the PCE (Partido Comunista de España) risen and fought together in October to the cry, UHP.
Oviedo, the capital, had fallen to the military without fighting on 19 July, thanks to the stratagem of Col. Aranda, the military commander. An attempt to duplicate his success in Gijón, the Atlantic port and CNT stronghold, had failed. The combination of armed workers and police forces beat back a poorly executed sortie from the Simancas barracks to which the troops retreated; besieged in the convent turned barracks, 200 defenders held out for over a month. But the rest of this mini-Barcelona of the Atlantic, with its 60,000 population, was in the hands of the workers under a war committee dominated by the anarcho-syndicalists.
To the south, in the mining valleys, a Popular Front committee under socialist domination held sway in Sama de Langreo. For a couple of months, these two different proletarian-led organizations – on which the same parties and trade unions were represented – ran their respective zones barely 40 km apart. The working class had taken power. The absence (in contradistinction to Catalonia) of a politically influential petty bourgeoisie outside beleaguered Oviedo and rural western Asturias, made the question of power more easily answerable. Between the two proletarian zones, in the midst of the densest working-class concentration of all Spain, Col. Aranda was landlocked in Oviedo at the head of the insurgents.
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Militancies 7
RAFAEL HERNANDEZ
Socialist railwayman
As soon as the CNT set up its war committee in Gijón, he had been appointed its secretary and Labour representative. The anarcho-syndicalists had not doubted for a moment that all political forces who stood against the military rising had to be represented. The war committee took over everything. His first act was to call a meeting of all trade union representatives. Each industry should appoint a delegate, he told them, and the delegates should form a sort of Economics Council to look after all production which was to be entirely in the trade unions’ hands.
The syndicalist response, unorthodox in socialist thinking, was none the less not exceptional among socialist trade unionists. And perhaps even less so in a strongly anarcho-syndicalist town of small workshops and artisans’ enterprises like Gijón. Hernández had gone to a school run by Eleuterio Quintanilla, the great anarchist leader, and there had become friendly with many who later became outstanding CNT militants. Although his father, a railwayman, was a member of the UGT, this made little difference in his relations with anarcho-syndicalists.
—Although there were fights between the two unions, there was a personal level at which we all got on; because of the constant battles with the employers, we in Asturias were always aware of the class struggle and the common enemy in front of us. It was that which bred a tradition of unity …
He had become well known in Gijón for his combativeness in organizing the workers on the Gijón–Langreo colliery railway. In his early twenties, he had joined the company after military service in the air force. He had been involved in the abortive republican rising against the monarchy in December 1930, at Cuatro Vientos airfield outside Madrid, been court-martialled and sentenced to twelve years in a disciplinary battalion. Released only four months later, on the republic’s proclamation, by none other than Ramón Franco, General Franco’s aviator brother who had taken part in the rising, he returned to Gijón. The impossibility of getting work there made him think of returning to Argentina where he had spent five years from the age of fifteen. On the point of emigrating, a job on the colliery line turned up. Of the 2,000 workers in the strongly antiunion company, a dozen, he found, belonged to the UGT, eight to the CNT and thirty to the company union. He had fought that, and with others had managed to unionize the line and affiliate the union to the UGT. It was this struggle which, at the age of twenty-seven, made him well known to the anarcho-syndicalists, and led to his post on the war committee.
—The revolution was fabulous. In the first days, committees sprang up in every barrio quite spontaneously, setting up communal eating places, requisitioning food, issuing vouchers and so on. They demonstrated the instinctive sense of initiative derived from so many years of proletarian struggle – but they were a bit chaotic. It got nearly to the point of there being a committee in each house …
Although fundamentally in favour of the committees, he had to go round to tell them that the war committee would handle the town’s affairs and that their existence only added to the confusion. At the same time, the war committee re-established the police force, dismissing those chiefs and men whom it distrusted, but otherwise leaving the force intact. It took over the 17 million to 18 million pesetas in the Bank of Spain in Gijón in order to prevent the money being stolen.
—Pillaging was a problem we had to confront immediately. I remember the money being counted and checked before it was handed over to the Popular Front committee in Sama de Langreo. The other banks were put under our control and we appointed delegates in each …
His revolutionary initiatives included some urban renewal. Bathing huts, belonging to a local property owner, which blocked traffic on the front, were ordered to be knocked down and burnt; all the town’s old wooden newspaper kiosks met the same fate. Then it was the turn of a block of houses belonging to the bathing-hut owner which stood in the way of traffic, followed by the old hospital, and finally the church of San José.
—All my life, I’d heard how the municipal authorities had wanted that church built to one side so that it wouldn’t block the street. But the all-powerful ecclesiastical authorities had resisted such moves and built it in the middle of the street. So I had it knocked down …
The ruling classes of Spain had always seen only their own immediate interests, he thought. In historical perspective they were dwarfs, pygmies who had failed their mission: to care for the future of the nation. They had failed to see what was needed – an agrarian reform, above all, to give the starving peasantry land to work; they should have taken the nobility’s land for the hungry labourers, should have modernized agriculture to bring it up to the level of that of France and England. But the ruling classes always refused. ‘October 1934 was the awakening of the two great forces that were to fight out the civil war –’
Along with thousands of other militants, he had spent from October 1934 to February 1936 in prison as a result of his participation in the insurrection. The revolution then had been transitory; now there was time to prove what the working class was capable of.
As a railwayman, the most inventive of his revolutionary innovations concerned, appropriately, the railways. Three track sizes existed in Spain: the international gauge, used on only two railways, one out of Barcelona, the other the colliery line on which he had worked; the mainline Spanish wide gauge, the same as the Russian; and a narrow gauge used on coastal and inter-provincial lines, such as the one between Oviedo and Bilbao. The latter was an important rail link at that moment, as Asturian coal had to be freighted to Bilbao to fuel the steel mills.
—It meant loading the coal on to the international gauge colliery line out of the coalfields, and then unloading it, wagon by wagon, on to the narrow gauge rolling-stock to continue, via Santander, to Bilbao on the only direct rail link. This manual unloading and reloading was costly, slow and inefficient. The head of the railway works department, whom I had
appointed, came to see me and said there was a possible solution – the laying of a third rail within the international gauge track to convert it to a narrow track …
He saw the possibilities immediately and set out to implement them. It required manufacturing special points and switching gear. The third track was laid and the narrow gauge wagons were able to reach the pit-head at Langreo directly. It worked well, and later in Barcelona, he thought of introducing a similar solution.
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Meanwhile, despite constant attacks, the Simancas and engineers’ barracks of El Coto continued to offer resistance in Gijón. The war committee’s major efforts were aimed as much if not more at reducing these strongholds than at organizing the revolution. Finally, artillery was brought in. Positioned behind sandbag parapets on an open field that served as a football pitch within machine-gun range of Simancas, they opened fire at point-blank range. On the roof of the Hotel Asturias, where he had gone to watch, Dr Carlos MARTINEZ, former parliamentary deputy, saw several rounds fired without effect. Then a shell hit the roof and very soon flames began to leap up. ‘It was a lucky hit which set light to the wooden rafters.’
Earlier, in a daring sortie, Rafael HERNANDEZ had crawled to a transformer in full view of the barracks and cut off the electricity supply. Then he and the anarchist militants Carrocera and Onofre García and others raced from the last houses facing the barracks; knocked out a machine-gun nest protecting it with dynamite, and blasted holes in the ex-convent walls.
—Under fire from ground level and with a fire in the roof above their heads, the defenders retreated inside. We started to attack through the holes in the walls …
In a last heroic gesture, the defenders called on the insurgent cruiser Almirante Cervera to open fire on the barracks itself. ‘Defence is impossible, the building is burning and the enemy is coming in. Fire on us,’ said the last radio message. Within a short time, amidst scenes of slaughter, the barracks had fallen. It was 21 August. For over a month, a couple of hundred defenders had tied down the Gijón militiamen and kept them from joining the siege of Oviedo or from combating the insurgent columns coming from Galicia to Oviedo’s relief. Precious time had been won and lost.
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The revolution in the predominantly socialist mining valleys did not follow the same trajectory as in Gijón. The powerful socialist Mineworkers’ Union did not lay claim to the mines.34 Instead, miners’ committees controlled work in the pits under the same foremen and technicians as before.
—The control committees’ functions were what their name suggests – it was not their task to operate the mines. We didn’t dispute the technicians’ and foremen’s right to direct the work, most of which, in any case, consisted in maintenance, recalled Paulino RODRIGUEZ, a socialist miner in Sotrondio in the Nalón valley. There were large stocks of coal at the pit-heads; English dumping before the war meant that Asturian coal couldn’t compete in its home market …
Eventually the mines came to be run by mixed committees of technicians, administrators and miners; decisions taken by the manager responsible for running the colliery had to be approved by the workers’ delegates appointed by the mineworkers’ union.35
In the neighbouring steel town of La Felguera, a traditional CNT stronghold, the anarcho-syndicalists made no attempt to collectivize the Duro-Felguera iron and steel works, which employed nearly 4,000 workers. As in October 1934, a workers’ control committee was set up, composed entirely of CNT militants, who soon discovered that production was impeded by the loss of engineers who had fled or gone into hiding. Two politically uncompromised engineers from the works were found in Bilbao and returned when asked to by the workers’ committee, which did not technically manage the works but exercised considerable weight on those who did.
—We made no attempt to introduce libertarian communism, we didn’t want to collectivize everything, recalled a leading FAI militant and steelworker, Eladio FANJUL. We were fighting the war and making our revolution at the same time. But we did nothing that we felt might prejudice final victory in the war …
But while striving for victory it was necessary to create the bases of the revolution which, after victory, would remain to be completed, he thought. There could be no doubt that it was necessary for the workers to feel that they were fighting to shape their own destinies, for them to feel that they were making the revolution at the same time as the war, if they were to contribute every effort to final victory.
Mario GUZMAN, a blast furnaceman at the works and president of the CNT metalworkers’ union in La Felguera, while at the same time a POUM militant – a combination no longer acceptable to the CNT in Barcelona – concurred. The working class would not mobilize to defend petty bourgeois leaders like Azaña and Companys; the proletariat needed assurance that after the war the revolution would be consolidated in ways which were not possible during the war.
—But that didn’t mean trying to achieve the total revolution; it meant laying the bases. The Catalan CNT made a big mistake – and so too did my own party – in wanting to make the revolution immediately in Barcelona. The CNT here wasn’t like that …
While collectivization of industry, mines and the land was not the order of the day – the Asturian CNT standing in any case for socialization of all the means of production – domestic consumption tended to be collectivized. In Sama de Langreo, where the socialist-led Popular Front committee had originally established itself, daily life was being organized on much the same lines as during the October commune. It was, thought Ignacio IGLESIAS, a student and POUM militant, who had been called from the siege of Oviedo to take up the post on the revolutionary supplies committee he had held in October 1934, a kind of war communism. All the shops were taken over and combined into one store.
—Everyone received ration vouchers for free food, household supplies, and clothing. Money wasn’t officially abolished, but soon there was nothing to buy – since the food and clothes shops had been taken over (and at that time there wasn’t much else in the way of consumer goods); then money lost its use. Bars closed down. To be seen drinking in one would have been considered counter-revolutionary – it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone, it would have been a moral betrayal of the revolution. And since no one went to them, they closed …
This war communism did not extend to the producers of food, the peasantry of Asturias. No attempt was made to collectivize them.
—It would have been totally counter-productive to have tried to do so in the middle of a war, stressed FANJUL of the FAI. Smallholders are jealous of their property, they want to work their own land, be their own masters. The land here was well divided, there were no great problems on that score. All efforts had to be bent to winning the war … 36
The centralization of power in the hands of the provincial Popular Front committee, which in September moved from Sama to Gijón, and two months later took the title of council, was achieved with relatively little friction. Though the Gijón war committee resisted dissolving itself for a couple of months, other local committees were replaced by new town councils. Unlike their Catalan, Aragonese or Madrid counterparts, the FAI in Asturias had no hesitation in joining what was in effect a government under a president who was appointed by the central government as its delegate.
Differences over revolutionary positions caused tensions within the council but these were less sharp than in Catalonia. The problem, as in Barcelona, of the expropriation of small traders and shopkeepers arose, particularly in Gijón, which was a city of small commerce and industry. The socialist party here came to the defence of the petty bourgeoisie, and tried to have such businesses as the bakeries which the CNT had taken over returned to their owners.37 Though the polemic was sharp, the CNT attempted to resolve the conflict by persuasion rather than force.
—We didn’t want to have tests of strength with the socialists although we disagreed with them. Our policy was to stay on good terms with them until the war was won; then we would see, commented Ramón ALVAREZ, t
he former CNT regional committee secretary who had become fisheries councillor …
In effect, the socialist-led Council of Asturias on which, after December, the libertarian youth joined the CNT and FAI, supervised union control of any industries socialized on anarcho-syndicalist lines. The fishing industry, after livestock-rearing the most important source of wealth in Asturias, with coal in third place, was a case in point. As fisheries councillor, ALVAREZ oversaw the industry which the trade unions had taken over and were running as a socialized enterprise.
—Not collectivized, as has often been said. Although the CNT was by far and away the majority union, we set up a commission of three CNT and three UGT delegates to direct and administer the industry. Each of these had a different responsibility. My job was to supervise the administration of an industry which, basically, was being run by the trade unions …
He managed to persuade the Council that the canning industry should be incorporated into the socialized fishing so that the profits – ‘canning was the most profitable side’ – were returned to their rightful source, the fishing industry in its totality.
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