On [Monday] May 3, with fighting at the Telefónica, the open conflict began. [Cusick] points out the somewhat enthusiastic reponses of Barcelona’s anarchist masses to the provocation of Erno Gerö: «At last there was something to DO, something to release the unbearable tension … Again time slowed down and sped up simultaneously.»
Etiqueta: Federación Anarquista Ibérica
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«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.
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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 Unpublished.]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.
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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 Unpublished.]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.
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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.
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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.
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Ejecutado Justo Bueno, «asesino de los hermanos Badia»
Cumplimiento de sentencias
[Hoy] á primera hora de la mañana, sé cumplieron, en el Campo de la Bota, las sentencias dictadas por los Consejos de Guerra celebrados en Barcelona contra José Guía Cruceta y Feliciano Blaya Junta, autores de robos a mano armada, y contra Miguel Arenas Pons, Justo Bueno Pérez y Alfonso Palau Font, autores de varios delitos de sangre durante la dominación marxistá.