Historia de Barcelona

Blog

  • Comunismo, separatismo, anarquismo

    Companys & Co.

    The Spanish spotlight, focused for the past month on the Basque capital at Bilbao, swung last week to Barcelona, greatest industrial city in Spain and chief port remaining in Leftist hands. Catalan Barcelona, like Basque Bilbao, is the capital of a group of Spain’s 50 provinces, which since the Revolution have tended to become more & more autonomous. Unlike Bilbao, Barcelona has not been seriously threatened by Rightists since the first weeks of the civil war.

    Rugged individualists like most Spaniards, the Barcelonians have decked their buildings with many a discordant banner: the five-barred red-&-yellow flag of Catalonia, the red-yellow-&-purple of the Valencia Republic, the red flag of Communism, the black-&-red banner of Anarcho-Syndicalists. There are a number of other parties of varying opinions, all demanding a share in the Government. Nowhere else in the world are Communists so decisively ranked among the conservatives. That is because in Catalonia, Communists believe in discipline, as opposed to the free-for-all philosophy of the pure Anarchists, largest and most troublesome group in the state. The main reason that government is possible at all in Catalonia is due to the extraordinary talent for compromise of Catalonia’s president, excitable Luis Companys. President Companys has been in & out of jails much of his political career, has long fought for Catalan independence, speaks of Spain as «the Iberian Peninsula.» His technique with his spluttering allies is to promise them everything with the greatest goodwill. This worked moderately well for many months in keeping peace in Barcelona, but did nothing at all to help the hard-pressed Leftist armies fight the war. President Companys was too busy keeping peace at home to send many men to the front.

    Suddenly last week the Companys technique did not work at all. Late at night telephone communications with France were mysteriously cut. Hours later the story began to filter out of Barcelona that Anarchists had revolted against the Companys Government. Almost instantly jumbled barricades sprang up along the tree-lined Ramblas. The streets echoed with the Carong! Carong! of machine guns, the Hahp! of light artillery. Immediate objective of the Anarchist Black-&-Reds was the Barcelona telephone exchange, a building almost as imposing as the telephone skyscraper of Madrid. This they seized and held for seven hours. Hero of the revolt then became Barcelona’s Police Chief Rodriguez Sola, who personally led a frontal attack on the building, captured the first floor, methodically started mopping up from stair to stair.

    Loudly President Companys called for peace and unity to face the common foe, warned that the Catalans were leaving the way open for a raid from General Franco’s Rightists. No such raid came, but before peace was restored over 300 people had been killed and according to reports the Valencia Government, to police Barcelona, had had to withdraw 12.000 badly needed troops from the Aragon front. Heretofore careful to avoid mixing in local Catalan squabbles, Valencia also moved in General Sebastian Pozas to be military commander of Catalonia.

    […]

  • «Prohibido hablar en catalán»

    El día 4 algunas barriadas barcelonesas se hallaban en manos de la F.A.I. Tal ocurrió en Sants, donde los ‘bakunistas’ se habían apresurado a proclamar el comunismo libertario y a la entrada de la cual, frente a la misma Plaza de España, ondeaba un gigantesco cartel con esta leyenda: ‘República Independiente de Murcia. Aquí termina Cataluña. Prohibido hablar en catalán.

  • Subida en la reputación del POUM

    [Cita de Lois Cusick (1979). The anarchist millenium, memories of the Spanish revolution, 1936-37. Unpublished.]

    [On Tuesday], the city was in the grip of a complete work stoppage.

    The Patrols of Control took Montjuic fortress and trained its cannon on the Palau de la Generalitat … The block-long Popular Army poster on the communist Karl Marx House came down to reveal machine guns controlling the Passeig de Gracia, which the defense committees took over … Tuesday morning, the C.N.T. printers allowed only two papers to appear, Solidarida Obrera and the P.O.U.M.’s La Batalla … The Friends of Durruti and the genuine Trotskyites (Munis and Moulin) separately printed handbills calling for a revolutionary Junta to take over the government buildings. Josep Rebull’s P.O.U.M. left wing tried to win over the syndicalists at the barricades in another part of town for a march on the government buildings. Nothing came of these isolated initiatives … But the reputation of the P.O.U.M. shot up in the anarchist ranks. C.N.T.-F.A.I.-P.O.U.M. was the password at the barricades.

  • La CNT pierde el control sobre sus miembros, que se pelean con la UGT

    [Cita de Lois Cusick (1979). The anarchist millenium, memories of the Spanish revolution, 1936-37. Unpublished.]

    Wednesday morning the general strike continued. The workers stayed at the barricades and ignored Casa C.N.T.’s orders [to abandon the strike and leave the barricades]. The city’s life was suspended in a will conflict between the anarchist masses and their leadership … The communists tried to take advantage of their truce with Casa C.N.T. to put the city’s bus system back to work. They used U.G.T. members the anarchists had always said were scabs from a big strike years ago. The sight of their red and black pointed trams run by communist scabs started the fighting all over. Barricades went up across the tracks, and the trams stopped running.

  • Asesinado el secretario general de UGT y consejero de la Generalidad, el sindicalista estalinista Antonio Sesé

  • Largo Caballero y Companys, decididos a derrotar a los anarquistas

    The entire effectiveness of the Leftist Government has been in the series of compromises making it possible for a mixed salad of political parties to work in some sort of harmony. Immediately behind last week’s Cabinet crisis was the brief Anarchist revolt in Barcelona of fortnight ago (TIME. May 17). Premier Largo Caballero and President Luis Companys of Catalonia are both secretly determined to put the Anarchists, most hot-headed of Leftist groups, in their places, but the Anarchists are politically potent.

  • PSUC y la Generalidad intentan de hacer olvidar las Jornadas de Mayo

    [Diario Lois Cusick] In the wake of the May tragedy, «the P.S.U.C. and the Generalitat mounted one … event after another … We had a week devoted to the Battle of the Egg (La lluita de l’ou). This was a four-year plan to make Barcelona self-sufficient in eggs by having a chicken on every balcony. Then, the first week of June, we had Book Week. The carnival revolutionists filled the Ramblas with colorful bookstalls selling old parchment manuscripts from the burnt-out churches and new bright paperbacks of communist-approved authors. No more Kropotkin or Bakunin. This was the week we learned the Russians had arrested Bob Smillie of the P.O.U.M.’s [English] I.L.P. column while he was in Valencia.»

  • La Batalla del Huevo causa problemas de convivencia

    [E]n esta Barcelona en que hoy vivimos, en la Barcelona de «la batalla del huevo», en que cada galería, cada balcón, cada terrado, se ha convertido en gallinero incipiente, los gallos cantan cuando les da la gana, cada uno a hora distinta o todos a coro a todas las horas, desde que anochece hasta que sale el sol…

    ¡En fin!… Es molesto… pero soportable. En la retaguardia de una guerra tan atroz como la nuestra, no se puede hablar de molestias, sino es burla, burlando, más para señalarlas, que para quejarse de ellas… Ahora: esa multiplicidad de corrales improvisados, esa aglomeración de gallinas, y pollos, y conejos en espacios reducidos, en núcleos ciudadanos de gran densidad, sin las indispensables condiciones de espacio y aireación, ¿no nos traerán, ahora que entra, de lleno, el verano, consecuencias más graves, más irreparables que la molestia del canto de los gallos al amanecer? Ya se advierte en Barcelona una invasión de moscas digna de los valles andorranos y se perciben emanaciones poco gratas… «Evitemos que la batalla del huevo se convierta en la guerra del tifus» nos dice un lector. Y su advertencia nos parece atinadísima.

    Pues la campaña de la «batalla del huevo» tuvo, sin duda, otra intención que la de convertir en corrales todos los balcones y todas las galerías. Y a esa intención—estricta—debe limitarse el ciudadano celoso, a un mismo tiempo de su alimentación… y de su higiene.

  • Companys deniega permiso a los anarquistas para conmemorar el aniversario del inicio de la Guerra Civil

    Catalonian anarchists supporting the Leftist Government of Premier Dr. Juan Negrin asked leave to stage anti-Fascist rallies and parades on the first birthday of Spain’s civil war last week, but were sternly repressed. Catalonia’s President Luis Companys cared to risk no street riots among his Communist, Anarchist, Socialist and Republican supporters, and anyhow Leftist Spain was grimly straining every resource in its first large offensive of the war.

  • 52 muertos en bombardeos aéreos

    52 muertos en bombardeos aéreos, de los cuales 48 identificados y 4 no.

  • Langston Hughes: un bombardeo aéreo

    HUGHES BOMBED IN SPAIN
    Tells of Terror of Fascist Raid
    Women, Children Huddled in Fear as Bombs Explode
    By LANGSTON HUGHES
    MADRID, Spain–I came down from Paris by train. We reached Barcelona at night. The day before there had been a terrific air raid in the city, killing almost a hundred persons in their houses and wounding a great many more. We read about it in the papers at the border: AIR RAID OVER BARCELONA.
    «Last night!» I thought, «Well, tonight I’ll be there.»
    […]
    It was almost midnight when we got to Barcelona. There were no lights in the town, and we came out of the station into pitch darkness. A bus took us to the hotel. It was a large hotel several stories hight which, before the Civil War, had been a fashionable stopping place for tourists.
    We had rooms on an upper floor. The desk clerk said that in case of air-raids we might come down into the lobby, but that a few floors more or less wouldn’t make much difference. The raids were announced by siren, but guests would be warned by telephone as well. That night there was no bombing, so we slept in peace.
    [The next day.]
    At midnight, the public radios began to blare forth the war-news, and people gathered in large groups on corners to hear it. Then the cafe closed and we went to the hotel. I had just barely gotten to my room and had begun to undress when the low extended wail of the siren began, letting us know that the fascist planes were coming. (They come from Mallorca across the sea at terrific speed, drop their bombs, and circle away into the night again.)
    Quickly, I put on my shirt, passed Guillén’s room, and together we started downstairs. Suddenly all the lights went out in the hotel, but we heard people rushing down the halls and stairways in the dark. A few had flashlights with them to find the way. Some were visibly frightened. In the lobby two candles were burning, casting weird, giantlike shadows on the walls.
    In an ever increasing wail the siren sounded louder and louder, droning its deathly warning. Suddenly it stopped. By then the lobby was full of people, men, women, and children, speaking in Spanish, English, and French. In the distance we heard a series of quick explosives.
    «Bombs?» I asked.
    «No, anti-aircraft gun,» a man explained.
    Everyone was very quiet. Then we heard the guns go off again.
    «Come here,» the man called, leading the way. Several of us went out on the balcony where, in the dark, we could see searchlights playing across the sky. Little round puffs of smoke from the anti-aircraft shells floated against the stars. In the street a few women hurried along to public bomb-proof cellars.
    Then for a long while nothing happened. After about an hour, the lights suddenly came on in the hotel again as a signal that the danger had passed.

  • Citando a Ignacio de Loyola, el gobierno español se muda a Barcelona

    … for the first time in modern history, a Spanish Government moved to Barcelona, the second move of the Leftist Government since the war started. Plenty of government bureaus remained in overcrowded Valencia. Signaling the move, Minister of the Interior Julian Zugazagoita made a radio speech containing two statements, neither of which would have been possible year ago when the Leftist Government first moved to Valencia:

    «The Government planned to go to Barcelona as early as last November but decided temporarily on Valencia. . . . Barcelona now in its turn has the significance of showing the clear fidelity of the Government toward Catalonia.

    «The Government is not obliged to appeal for obedience, but has the right to impose it. … We have come to agree with the sage formula of that exceptional captain of Christ, Saint Ignatius de Loyola, who imposed on his disciples silent obedience ‘until death.’ The task must be accomplished. We must win by our own strength alone.»

    Last November an admission that the Madrid Government dared not move to the then anarchist-ridden Catalan Barcelona, or words of praise for the founder of the powerful, much-feared Jesuit order, would have been tantamount to treason.

  • Pérdidas en Teruel, misa secreta en Barcelona

    Feia més dun any que la guerra durava. Cada dia que passava les privacions eren més grans, i la fe de molts trontollava. Havíem ja vist caure i desaparèixer a tants dels nostres millors!

    Per acabar-ho d’adobar, els diaris i les ràdios d’aquells dies anaven plens de la batalla de Terol, que es desenrotllava sota uns elements completament desfavorables. El fred i les nevades més terribles s’havien ensenyorit d’aquells paratges erms, i la lluita era ferotge, apocalíptica… Els diaris parlaven de conquestes i d’avanços que a voltes resultaven imaginaris. El Mansueto, l’estació del ferrocarril, el seminari, fins es parlava ja de la plaça «del Torico», aquella plaça irregular, porticada, amb tant regust de poble, on encara unes setmanas abans d’esclatar la revolta, m’hi havia passejat per sota les seves voltes tant plenes d’encisos, enmig de la jovenalla riallera i sorollosa que sempre han estat els aragonesos.

    No ens ho crèiem… Terol resistiria, Terol no es podia perdre… I amb aquesta esperança vàrem passar aquell Nadal, trist també, perquè encara no vèiem la fi de la nostra tragèdia.

    Un consol inefable vareig tenir enmig de tanta tribulació. En la tarda d’aquell Nadal, gràcies a un de tants sacerdots a qui no s’agraïrà mai la serena valentia en complir la seva santa missió en aquells dies de dol i de misèria, vareig pogué rebre la sagrada Comunió.

  • Nieva

    Grandes olas de frío entre finales de este año y febrero de 1938, memorables en la zona turolense en medio de la Batalla del Ebro. En Barcelona nevó el día 31 de diciembre, acumuló 5 centimetros.

  • Aurora boreal vista desde Tibidabo, confusión en el frente de Aragón

    The 1938 aurora borealis

    The «aurora borealis» is a luminescent meteor, a phenomenon that frequently happens in areas close to the North Pole and which can also be seen in rather exceptional circumstances in regions of Central Europe. So the aurora borealis that could quite clearly be seen from the Pyrenees, and even from the top of the Tibidabo hill in Barcelona, on the 25th of January 1938, was an absolutely unusual occurrence. It was in fact a unique experience. There are no known accounts of any other event of that kind at such meridional latitudes.

    Furthermore, the phenomenon took place in the midst of war, thus causing terrible confusion and shock among the soldiers who were fighting on the Aragonese front. (…)

  • Cuatro días de nevada

    Empezó el 15 de febrero, con tormenta y una acumulación de 13 centímetros. Siguió al día siguiente aunque más ligeramente y los dos días siguientes también nevó pero poco.

  • Edwin Rolfe: los bombardeos de principios de marzo

    [March 10, 1938, carta a su mujer, Mary]

    Less than a week ago there were nine air bombardments over the city in a period of 25 or 26 hours. They come at night these days, when it’s hard to sight them. In the evening mostly – and the first thing you hear is the muffled sound of an explosion, maybe two or three – the first bombs. Then the much sharper crack of anti-air guns is heard, and the worst sound of all, the warning signal begins to screech. If you go downstairs to the entrance of the house, which most of us do, you see the flares in the sky, and the momentary splotches of light; and the sky is criss-crossed with light beams trying to locate the bombers. And then the central power control shuts off all the light in the city, and we’re in complete darkness… [Aerial] bombardment is a little more terrifying [than the artillery barrages he had experienced in Madrid]… You never know where they are and in which direction they’re going. And even the tougher-minded remember what a building looks like after a 400-pound bomb has struck. You have to be calm about it; and you remember that there are 1,600,000 people in this refugee-swollen city, and that it will take more bombs than the fascists have to even make a dent in a city as large as this and on a population as big. But young women and old women can’t take it calmly; they cry in a soft, low, terribly-scared sort of whimper. Sometimes the kids cry too, but not so often; they generally play around with each other as if there’s nothing going on, and if their mothers let them, they go out to watch the searchlights in the sky.

  • Edwin Rolfe: los bombardeos del 16 de marzo

    A week later [Edwin] Rolfe writes (without mailing) a long letter to Leo about another series of raids. Given the risk of being in a collapsing building, the people where Rolfe is living dig a makeshift trench in the yard, some seven feet deep at points. It would be of no use in a direct hit, but it gives some sense of security. When the air raid sirens sound, they go downstairs and lie in the trench looking up at the sky:

    The moon was full again, and enabled us to see the planes, thousands of feet high, on one of the raids. Another time they descended so low that we could hear their motors. They hit a church, about a block and a half away from us, and we went over and saw them remove a dead body and two women, one with her foot amputated, the other with her thigh ending in a stump of blood at the knee… This morning’s paper says 400 dead and 600 wounded, and that’s only a preliminary count… The sound of an explosion close by, or the sight of a man lying on the street covered with a blanket, blood slowly oozing away from him, or the whistle of a bomb descending, is horrible.

  • Llegan 10 aviones de Stalin

    Thrifty Joseph Stalin belatedly bet another blue chip on the Spanish Loyalists last week in the form of ten splendid Soviet warplanes. Tons of other Soviet war paraphernalia have reached the Leftists in the past month via France. Amid wild cheering in recently bombed Barcelona, Soviet war birds in mass formation darkened the sky and last week the Leftist Cabinet reorganized itself for a last-minute effort to crawl between the jaws of defeat and wrench out the tonsils of victory.

  • El futuro líder de los conservadores británicos habla en Radio Barcelona

    I did not quite know what I was going to find, as this was our first experience of actual warfare … I imagined we might come to a wrecked city and find a terror-stricken people, haggard and worn … with rioting and looting and feelings running high … What we did find surprised us all … Everything is perfectly normal, life is going on almost as usual … people thronging the streets, sitting in cafes, laughing and talking with far from long faces … the liberty of the individual has impressed me greatly … There are no secret courts here. During the raids the same calmness and normal behaviour continues … people go quietly to a shelter, there is no sign of panic. But they realise what it all means, as people who have never seen them never can realise … the destruction of defenceless men, women, and children, bombed in unprotected villages, is most ghastly … I have seen the planes 200 feet above my head, heard the bombs, and the village I had passed through five minutes before was in ruins … Yet still the morale of the people is untouched.