Foreword
History contains many legends. And even the most absurd and preposterous legend, if it is repeated many times, acquires the status of an unquestionable historical truth. So many times, things turn into their opposite: heroes become villains and villains become heroes; truth becomes a lie and a lie becomes the truth. The memory of individual human beings is a fragile thing and it fades with age. The collective memory fades and becomes confused with the passing of time. In a generation or two those who participated in great events will die out, leaving no witness other than the history books. And history, as we know, is always written by the victors.
The purpose of the present work is to establish the truth about the Spanish transition. But this is no easy task. For the last four decades the truth has been buried under a mountain of lies, half-truths and deliberate distortions. The purpose of this is to provide a plausible justification for the betrayals of those years, to excuse the conduct of the workers’ leaders and to present in the most favourable light what can only be described as the fraud of the century.
This period was known as ‘Democratic Transition’ but in reality, it was a gigantic swindle. The monarchy that had been arbitrarily installed by Franco was retained, although the overwhelming feeling of the majority was for a republic. The Civil Guard and other repressive bodies were retained. The murderers and torturers who had operated with impunity under the old regime remained equally untouchable under the new ‘democracy’. They have been walking the streets of Madrid and Barcelona, rubbing shoulders with the men and women who were their victims.
For four decades the people of Spain have been fed a constant stream of propaganda in books, at school and in the media, which portrays the Transition exclusively as the work of a handful of wise and courageous protagonists: the leaders of the main organisations of the working class – the Communist Party of Spain (Partido Comunista de España, PCE) and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) – and the equally wise and courageous President Adolfo Suárez and King Juan Carlos I.
The purpose of this official version is to conceal from public view the real motor force of the entire process: the magnificent struggles of millions of working-class men and women who risked their jobs, their freedom and their lives in a heroic battle against tyranny and dictatorship. It was they and no others who overthrew the old regime. It was they and no others who frustrated the schemes of Franco’s successors to maintain the old regime by any means. And if they did not ultimately succeed in their aims, it was no fault of theirs. They were thwarted by the actions of their own leaders.
A personal note
Spain – its people, its history and culture – has always occupied a very special place in my heart and mind. For more than half my life, it has been my second home. For a period of eight years in the 1970s, I lived in Spain and got to know most of its regions and people. But unlike most people at that time, I did not go there for the sun and beaches, but to participate actively in the fight against the Franco dictatorship.
There I met extraordinary men and women and got to appreciate their courage and devotion to the cause of the working class, democracy and socialism. To this day, my admiration for the Spanish people, and particularly the Spanish working class and those nameless heroes who gave their lives in a selfless struggle for a better society is as strong as ever. This was the starting point of the present book.
My love of Spain began long before I set foot on Spanish soil. When still at school, I began to learn Spanish, and got to appreciate its wonderful flexibility and that musicality that makes it an ideal vehicle for poetry. At the age of sixteen I was already under the spell of the early Spanish poets, whose magical lyrical verses I believe have never been surpassed.
I purchased the Penguin Book of Spanish Verse, a little green book that I still possess, although in a sadly dilapidated state. This excellent volume contains a whole world of wonderful poetry in the original Spanish, with parallel texts in English. This gave me the key that enabled me, despite my very basic knowledge of the language, to read some old poetry (much of it anonymous), which caused a deep and lasting impression.
When I started to read the verses of Federico García Lorca at the age of sixteen, I entered into a magical world of words and images that I had not encountered in the poetry of any other nation. I cannot say that I understood it all. Even today I sometimes find the complexity of Lorca’s imagery bewildering. But what struck me was the element of continuity that connects Lorca to the early poetry of mediaeval Spain.
It is poetry that is rooted in the soil of Spain, and expresses better than anything else the spirit, the traditions, the sufferings, the very soul of Southern Spain. Here are the dreams and nightmares, the singers and dancers of Andalusia, the gypsies, the beautiful, mysterious women, the bullfighters, the drunken Civil Guards battering the doors, the blood and the death.
Here was a poet of genius, a priceless treasure not only for the land that bore him, but for the entire world. But his lovely voice was silenced forever one day in 1936, when he was dragged from his home by fascists, driven to some lonely place, a mountainside, a lonely dirt track leading to a village without a name, or a silent olive grove.
Many dark secrets of the past were buried in the bountiful soil of Spain. Beneath the beautiful green olive groves of Andalusia lie many of these forgotten people. One of these bodies is that of García Lorca, Spain’s most famous twentieth-century poet. Kidnapped and brutally murdered, his body has never been found to this day.
Nobody knows exactly what happened to him. But it is not difficult to imagine his fate, a fate that was shared by so many of his countrymen and women. He would have been beaten, insulted and tormented until his tormentors, tired of this sport, ended his suffering by putting a bullet into his brain.
Just as during his short life Lorca expressed the deepest hopes, dreams and aspirations of his people, so in the manner of his death he expressed the tragic fate of millions of people under the iron heel of fascism. Today, there is no grave to visit, no monument to Federico García Lorca, other than the most important one contained in his immortal verses. His body lies in an unmarked grave, where it was thrown by his executioners.
All these crimes are themselves supposed to be buried, like Lorca, in an unmarked grave – the grave of an imposed silence and official forgetfulness from which it is supposed that they must never be disturbed. ‘Why dig up the past?’ That is the message that has been drummed into the heads of the people of Spain for forty years. ‘You must forget, you must forget…’ But the people can never forget and must never forgive.
It seems monstrous to me that the people of Spain are supposed to forget the many people who were killed in the Civil War, the thousands who perished in Franco’s prisons, the violent suppression of the workers’ movement for decades. All these crimes were supposed to be wiped from the common consciousness as by the wave of a magic wand.
For four decades, this collective amnesia has led a whole people to stumble around in a kind of historical limbo, in which the truth was buried under a mountain of cowardly evasions and cynical falsehoods. But a new generation is coming into being, a generation that is no longer satisfied to be fed an unending stream of myths and legends. They demand the truth. And the truth eventually must prevail.
The heroes and heroines of this book have no names. They are the countless working-class men and women who fought and sacrificed to overthrow a brutal tyranny and build a new and better world. That they did not achieve more than they did was no fault of theirs. This will become evident to whoever takes the trouble to study the facts. I hope that the present book will contribute to such an understanding.
Whatever rights the people of Spain now enjoy were conquered by them through hard struggle. Yet they are forgotten, their names forever erased from the historical record, while the history books and television documentaries are filled with the images of imposters who harvested for themselves the fruits of the labour of others.
Quite a few people of my generation, including some who participated in that struggle, have gradually abandoned the revolutionary views they had then. I am pleased to say that I have not. I remain a Marxist, as committed to the cause of revolutionary socialism as I was over forty years ago, when I began to participate in the work of building the Marxist Tendency in Spain.
For obvious reasons, I rely heavily on my own experience, and also on the memories of others who participated in the struggle against the dictatorship. In addition, I have at my disposal the written material that I have managed to keep from that time, especially back issues of the journal Nuevo Claridad, of which I was the political editor. In some places I refer to my personal experiences. I make no apologies for this. For I, too, was a witness.
I hope that the present work, despite its somewhat limited scope, will shed some light into the hidden corners and help the younger generation gain a better understanding of what really happened. If I achieve one per cent of this aim, I will be more than satisfied.