Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  Felisa UNAMUNO: He had hardly spoken for more than a few minutes when General Millán Astray, also on the platform, shouted out: ‘Let me talk, let me talk.’ My father hadn’t addressed himself to the general at all …

  Juan CRESPO: From the door I saw the general, founder of the Foreign Legion, stand up and turn towards Unamuno. As always, Millán Astray’s manner was exaggerated. Everybody fled from him in the street when they saw him coming – with his one arm, one leg, one eye – because he was such a bore with his patriotic harangues. He’d take one by the arm and talk on and on. But now he was plainly angry and stammering …

  Felisa UNAMUNO: He started saying things it was impossible to follow. He was a madman. Anyone who heard him in the Plaza Mayor shouting, ‘Everyone kiss, everyone embrace,’ was aware of that. But then suddenly he shouted: ‘Death to intellectuals! Long live death!’ … 8

  Eugenio VEGAS LATAPIE: ‘Death to the treacherous intelligentsia!’ There was an outburst of cries so loud that although I was sitting close by, I couldn’t hear what he said next. Army officers brought out pistols. Everyone obviously thought the shout was directed at Unamuno. Suddenly there seemed the possibility that the latter’s life was in danger …

  Juan CRESPO: Millán Astray’s bodyguard, a short, pot-bellied Legion warrant officer, who had been half dozing behind the general, suddenly sprang up when he heard his general shout. Automatically, he aimed his sub-machine gun at Unamuno …

  Eugenio VEGAS LATAPIE: Then Millán Astray shouted: ‘Unamuno, take the arm of the head of state’s wife!’ …

  Juan CRESPO: Franco’s wife stood up with an aloofness, an elegance which I doubt she could repeat. With one hand she gestured to the legionary to deflect his machine-gun, and with the other she took don Miguel by the arm. Unamuno looked on the point of collapse. His head was sunk in his shoulders. With her other hand she made a gesture which we understood to mean she was summoning her guard. We formed up round the couple. Our lieutenant, perhaps on doña Carmen’s instructions, took up a position on Unamuno’s other side and placed an arm round his shoulder. We had to use our rifle butts to control the spectators who pressed forward. There were shouts and cries ‘¡Rojo! ¡Cabrón!’ Franco’s wife opened the door of her official car and told the lieutenant to take Unamuno home while she walked back to the palace …

  Felisa UNAMUNO: I felt a great rage in me. To hear my father insulted, to hear, in the very university, someone shout, ‘Death to the intelligentsia,’ and only one person, professor Bermejo, protest, was intolerable. But I wasn’t worried that the incident would have serious repercussions for my father. That much they wouldn’t dare. They already had on their hands the stigma of Lorca’s assassination …

  At lunch, Unamuno was excited and nervous. The family already tried not to tell him too much of what they knew was going on because he didn’t want to hear it. ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ he said. He had been summoned to see Franco not long before and had protested about the assassinations and executions. Almost every day he visited the daughter of Filiberto Villalobos, education minister in the pre-war centre-right government, who had been imprisoned. ‘The reds,’ he told her one day, as she later related, ‘are the colour of blood, they say; but these people here are the colour of pus – and I don’t know which is worse.’

  After lunch, as usual, Unamuno went to the casino for his tertulia – the customary chat with his regular circle of friends. His appearance provoked cries among the members: ‘Red! Traitor! Throw him out! He’s not Spanish!’ His son, Rafael, heard the shouts and immediately went to accompany his father from the place; the old man insisted on leaving by the main door.

  For the next two and a half months, until his death, Unamuno remained at home. A policeman was put on duty, allegedly to protect him. The casino cancelled his membership; the university senate met and ‘withdrew its confidence’, agreeing to ask General Franco to appoint a new rector. Two months after his dismissal by the republican government, he was dismissed by the nationalists.

  Felisa UNAMUNO: Morally, if not materially, they killed him. When my brothers, who were in Madrid, heard the news they imagined the nationalists were responsible for his death, and both volunteered for the red army. One of them was wounded, losing an eye, almost as soon as he reached the front …

  Falangists asked the family’s permission to act as pall-bearers. As the coffin was placed in the niche, a falangist gave the fascist salute and shouted: ‘Comrade Miguel de Unamuno!’ ‘¡Presente!’ cried the others, saluting.

  Rafael UNAMUNO: I think they did it to show that the new regime, the Falange especially, was not responsible for my father’s death. There were falangists who considered themselves on the left, and they were aware of my father’s intellectual stature. In my opinion, they wanted to show solidarity with him and prevent his death being used against the regime …

  It was a final irony, none the less. In the last months of his life he had made little or no attempt to hide his hatred of the Falange, which he held mainly responsible for the assassinations in the rearguard.

  In two letters to a correspondent in the month before his death, he called the new state a ‘stupid regime of terror’, the war ‘an imperialist-pagan African-type militarization’, a ‘campaign against liberalism, not bolshevism’. While retaining his faith in Franco, he now feared that the dictatorship would come to mean, as in Italy, ‘the death to freedom of conscience, freedom of investigation, the dignity of Man’.9

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  COLLECTIVIZATION DECREE

  The criminal military uprising of 19 July has produced an extraordinary upheaval in the country’s economy … The accumulation of wealth in the hands of a continually smaller group of persons has gone hand in hand with the accumulation of ever greater poverty by the working class; since the former had no hesitation in unleashing a cruel war to protect its privileges, the victory of the people must mean the death of capitalism.

  Barcelona, 24 October 1936, First Councillor, Josep Tarradellas. Economics Councillor, Joan P. Fàbregas.

  Diari Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya (28 October 1936)

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  The collectivism we are living in Spain is not anarchist collectivism, it is the creation of a new capitalism, more inorganic than the old capitalist system we have destroyed … Rich collectives refuse to recognize any responsibilities, duties or solidarity towards poor collectives … No one understands the complexities of the economy, the dependence of one industry on another.

  Horacio Prieto, former CNT national committee secretary (6 January 1938)

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  It is not a question of proclaiming the failure of collectivization but of doing everything possible to ensure that the profound socializing significance of the Decree and its complementary dispositions are understood by the majority of workers, that they adapt themselves to it and become capable of directing their own destiny …

  Albert Pérez-Baró, unpublished article (November 1937)

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  BARCELONA

  The revolution – a word so often taken to have but one meaning – was being given a variety of definitions in its day-to-day organization in Catalonia. The militants, whose drive in taking over factories and enterprises had got Barcelona running ‘normally’ within a few days, interpreted the revolutionary moment in their own fashion. Collectivization, socialization, cooperativization – few people could give a precise definition of what was meant by the different terms being used. But one thing dominated the libertarian revolution: the practice of self-management – the workers’ administration of their factories and industries. To have tried to take that right away, reflected Albert PEREZ-BARO, a politically independent civil servant with a long past in the working-class movement, would have been like standing defenceless in front of a flood.

  —But, at the same time, it wasn’t possible to leave each factory and enterprise to be run at the whim of the workers who had taken them over, or by their private
owners: it could lead only to chaos. A structure had to be given to what had happened …

  This structure was to be Catalonia’s Collectivization and Workers’ Control Decree, approved on 24 October 1936. The decree was unique in the Popular Front zone; nowhere, outside Catalonia, were industrial collectives given legal status.

  Under the new law, industrial and commercial firms (the law did not apply to banks or the land) employing more than 100 workers, or whose owners had fled or been declared insurgent, were automatically collectivized. Firms with fewer workers could choose to collectivize if the majority of the workers and the owner(s) agreed – in firms of between 50 and 100 workers it required the decision of 75 per cent of the workforce. Works councils, elected by an assembly of the workers and representing all sectors of the enterprise, were to administer the collectivized factory, ‘assuming the functions and responsibilities of the former boards of directors’. A Generalitat representative was chosen, in agreement with the workers, to sit on each council. Collectivized enterprises (and private firms under workers’ control) in each sector of industry would be represented in an Economic Federation, in turn topped by a general industrial council which would closely control the whole industry. Fifty per cent of a collectivized firm’s profit would go to an industrial and commercial credit fund which would have to finance all Catalan industry; 20 per cent was to be put to the collective’s reserve and depreciation fund; 15 per cent to the collective’s social needs, and the remaining 15 per cent to be allocated by the workers as they decided in a general assembly. Small businesses were not to be collectivized; a workers’ control committee had the task of controlling production, working conditions and finance.

  The decree, in PEREZ-BARO’S view, did no more than legalize the existing situation, for the collectives already existed. It attempted to coordinate, codify and unite in a single practice what previously had been open to the interpretation of every trade union or workers’ committee.

  —And there were any number of interpretations. For many unskilled CNT workmen, the attitude was simply: ‘¡Ja està bé! (Everything’s fine now!) The revolution has been made.’ And they waited for manna to fall. Then there were the militant workers’ committees which ran the enterprises as though they owned them, while others left the owner in virtual control, simply changing his title to manager. Then again, there were committees which – using a demagogic measure the Generalitat had decreed, by which it committed itself to pay workers wages for the time they had been on strike after 19 July – simply continued to present their weekly wage lists to the Generalitat, which went on paying them, instead of seeking to get their businesses going.10

  By the time the decree was approved, three months after the start of the revolution, a great number of small businesses – artisanal enterprises in the main – had already been taken over by the CNT (and even UGT). These were not returned to their owners, and this later provided the pretext for the petty bourgeoisie’s representatives on the Economics Council to launch heavy attacks and delay the decree’s application …

  PEREZ-BARO, who was appointed secretary of the commission overseeing the decree’s application, believed that the new structure represented an attempt to seek points of concurrence between the anarchists, communists and petty bourgeoisie.

  —Neither total collectivization, socialization nor nationalization. Ownership of industry lay not in the hands of the unions, the workers or the state. It belonged to society in general. Capitalism was not totally abolished, but its role was very much minimized. The basic premise of the decree was that the working class was to be supreme …

  From the beginning, the CNT supported different solutions, both locally and nationally. At the latter level, Madrid had called for the ‘classic’ anarcho-syndicalist line of socialization of large industry, business and transport (by which it meant that the unions should run, but not own, them), workers’ control in other private enterprises and the planning of large industry. Barcelona, on the other hand, proposed collectivization of all enterprises without distinction, with profits to be handed over to a common fund administered by the Economics Council of Catalonia, which had been created in mid-August (under the auspices of the militia committee), to bring order to the Catalan economy.

  It was doubtful that the CNT had seriously envisaged collectivization of industry (as opposed to agriculture) before this time. Joan FERRER, who as secretary of the CNT commercial employees’ union was involved in the takeover and running of Barcelona’s department stores, attended a plenum of the Catalan CNT regional committee in September, at which there was a heated discussion between the advocates of socialization and cooperativization. The bigger, more powerful unions, like the woodworkers, the transport workers, the public entertainments union, all of which had already socialized their industries, wanted to extend their solution to the rest of industry. The smaller, weaker unions wanted to form cooperatives, arguing that the latter would retain the identity of each firm.

  —As the meeting was unable to come to a decision, an ad hoc committee was formed, of which I was a member, to thrash out the problem. We spent thirty hours without rest or sleep; finally the concept of collectivization was suggested, by Fàbregas, I think. Up to that moment, I had never heard of collectivization as a solution for industry – the department stores were being run by the union. What the new system meant was that each collectivized firm would retain its individual character, but with the ultimate objective of federating all enterprises within the same industry …

  Fàbregas, who was one of the CNT’s three representatives on the Economics Council and was soon to become the economics councillor in the Generalitat government, put forward the proposal as a sort of ‘neutral ground’, on which all could agree, FERRER believed. In this he was successful; but it didn’t prevent those unions which had socialized – and this included the barbers and bakers who had closed down small shops and regrouped the industry under union management in big shops – from continuing their socialization rather than heeding the collectivization decree.

  —To say that there was ever a general CNT policy about what to do in the new situation would be saying a great deal. It was ambiguous about the collectivization decree itself, in PEREZ-BARO’S view. While it sent its representatives to the Economics Council – and there were those among them, like Andreu Capdevila, who did everything they could to see that the decree was implemented – the CNT at the same time pursued its own, unilateral objectives which were different.11 Syndical collectivization or syndicalized collectives, I would call those objectives; that’s to say, collectives run by their respective unions, as though they belonged to them. The CNT’s policy was thus not the same as that pursued by the decree – and this caused innumerable problems.12 None the less, in giving a legal structure to collectivization, Catalonia embarked on a revolutionary social experience whose only antecedents were the Paris Commune and the Russian revolution of 1917 …

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  Militancies 6

  ANDREU CAPDEVILA

  CNT textile worker

  A worker in the Fabra and Coats Spinning Company’s factory in Barcelona, he had been called by the CNT’s regional committee to take up a political post on the Economics Council of Catalonia which was drafting the collectivization decree. He, who had never had the slightest contact with any political party, who on election days always made a point of leaving the city at dawn for a hiking trip in the mountains ‘to avoid the farce, the bribery and coercion, the trickery of the people who were being used by political parties’, was now being called on to participate in an official organization.

  He told the regional committee that he was doing a better job at his workplace than he could do on the council. Problems were beginning to arise in the factory where sales had fallen sharply as a result of the loss of a large part of the country – and market – to the insurgents. Full-time work was continuing, but the bulk of the production was being stock-piled. Although the workforce had joined the union in the past cou
ple of years (where previously there had been no more than 125 CNT members in the dyeing section), the factory’s 2,000 workers were known for their ‘conservatism’ and did not want to hear of collectivization. Conditions, he knew, were relatively better than in other textile plants; the British-owned company had made concessions: a 55-instead of a 6o-hour week, crèches for women with young children, Christmas presents for all the workers’ children. There was a long tradition of father-and-son workers which made the factory like a large family.

  —I knew my fellow-workers’ psychology, I could be useful there. Wishing to satisfy their aspirations, I didn’t want the factory collectivized. We had set up a workers’ control committee at the start, which had sorted out a number of problems, but the technical side of things remained in the old management’s hands. However, with sales reduced by half, and the company’s bank account almost depleted, we had to confront the imperative necessity of ensuring the workers’ wages. The English owners gave no sign of life. We went to the local management and were informed that the British parent company expected us henceforth to work only three days a week …

  The workers’ committee called a general assembly which decided to send two of the local managers to Marseilles for discussions with authorized representatives of the parent company to put forward three alternatives: either the factory worked three days and the workers were paid for a full week; or worked a full week and output continued to be stock-piled; or surplus production from a full week could be sent to England for re-export. Whichever it chose, the company had to agree to pay full wages while the present abnormal situation continued.