Historia de Barcelona

Etiqueta: Estalinismo

  • 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 Unpublished.]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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Proceso de Alphonse Laurencic, interiorista de cabarets y chekas espantosamente vanguardistas

    Yugoslav faces death sentence for thirteenth time in Spain. Accused of torturing Nationalist prisoners during war. Decorated weird cells which drove inmates to insanity.

    Barcelona, June 13 (AP) A Yugoslav architect, 12 times sentenced to death by Spanish Republicans, faced possible execution by strangulation tonight by Nationalists who charged he built and decorated weird cells in which prisoners were tortured to blindness and insanity.

    The military prosecutor concluded the trial of Alfonso Laurent Cik, 33, in a crowded court room of the Palace of Justice with a demand for his death by garroting. The court withheld sentence pending approval from Burgos, General Franco’s capital.

    The prosecutor declared it had been conclusively proven Cik directed the construction of little [odd?]-shaped concrete cells four feet high and «decorated» them with diagonal yellow lines, red-white-blue-yellow spots and black and white cubes in such a way that the figures changed shape before the stares of prisoners dazed by high-powered rays from multi-colored lamps.

    «Never in the history of Spain has there ever been such refined devices of the most horrible tortures,» declared Colonel Jose Ungria, chief of the Nationalist secret services, who estimated that at least 2,000 had been held in such cells in a few months before Barcelona was captured.

    The prisoners were stripped of their clothing and flogged, and steel rings were placed in their eyes to keep them open, Nationalist witnesses said.

    Others told of raised cement blocks placed in cell floors so the prisoners could not walk about, and of cement chairs and beds built at a slant so the prisoners could not sit or lie down with comfort.

    There was one cell built like a drum, it was declared, so that prisoners’ steps echoed as they were forced to walk in circles for hours.

    In an impassioned 90-minute plea for his life, Cik declared, «I am innocent. I ask only justice.»

    «I had no participation whatsoever in the construction of the torture cells,» he told the tribunal.

    The defendant testified that he came to Spain in 1933 [?] from America and sought work as an architect in Barcelona cabarets. He later became a lieutenant in the Spanish Republican army.

    While serving as an agent of the counter-espionage service of General Franco, he related, he was arrested by the Republicans in May of 1937, was sent to a concentration camp and sentenced to death.
    He escaped, however, and then joined the Syndicalists.

    Altogether, Cik testified, he was sentenced to death on 12 occasions under the Republican regime.

    The Syndicalists then forced him to paint the fantastic designs upon the walls of the little concrete cells which the prosecution charges caused many Nationalist prisoners, tortured to extract military information, to go blind and insane.

    The architect’s attorney asked that the court give him a 30-year sentence on the ground that his client «only aided a rebellion.»

    Cik said he was arrested by the Republicans before he could carry out a plan to «blow up» Republican Checa (secret police) headquarters.

    He had built a subterranean mine and placed 300 pounds of dynamite in it, intending to ignite the explosive under cover of one of the aerial bombardments of Barcelona, he claimed.

  • Llegan en el Semíramis repatriados republicanos y de la División Azul

    TEARS SALUTE

    Barcelona mobs Blue Division

    After absence of a decade and more, 286 Spaniards came home from Soviet prison camps and were greeted amid scenes of delirious emotion. Most of them were hard-bitten veterans of Franco’s Blue Division, captured when fighting for Hitler on the Russian Front. There were also a few sailors, some supporters of the old Spanish republic, even four wizened little old-young men who were children when they were sent to Russia during the Spanish civil war. All, friends and foes of Communism alike, had been in slave labor camps for periods ranging from 10 to 16 years. There were probably 200 Spaniards still left in the camps.

    From the Liberian ship Semiramis, carrying them from Odessa to Barcelona, the returning prisoners made radio-telephone calls to relatives, and these heartbreaking conversations were broadcast to the country. Spain’s tears welled up. When the ship docked, a hysterical mob stormed aboard.

    It was a truly Spanish scene, wild and emotional. Men fell into each other’s arms and sobbed. Women fainted. A cameraman [Carlos Pérez de Rozas y Masdeu] dropped dead of excitement. But it was just as truly Spanish in the irony that came out amid the emotion. «Communism?» mused a repatriated Socialist of the old Popular Front days. «Cabbage, hard work and everyone for himself.» And a veteran of the Blue Division, peering into the sobbing face of Minister of War Agustín Muñoz Grandes who commanded the division in Russia, murmured wryly, «My general, you don’t know how much we missed you.»