Etiqueta: Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya

  • Escaramuzas rompen la tensión

    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.»

  • 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.

    […]

  • 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.

  • 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.»

  • 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.

  • Tras el 23-F, más de 250.000 personas y casi todos los partidos se manifiestan en la lluvia en defensa de la libertad, la Constitución, y el Estatuto de Autonomía; elogios de Jordi Pujol al Rey y al Ejército

    Más de doscientas cincuenta mil personas, según la Policía Municipal, participaban a las ocho de la noche en la manifestación en defensa de la libertad, la Constitución y el Estatuto de autonomía convocada por la práctica totalidad de los partidos políticos y centrales sindicales.

    Encabezaba la marcha una pancarta con el lema de la convocatoria, sostenida por líderes de las citadas organizaciones. La manifestación comenzó media hora más tarde, en razón de la lluvia, que prácticamente no ha dejado de arreciar en todo el día en Barcelona. Los gritos más frecuentes eran los de ¡Libertad, libertad! y ¡Dictadura, no! En la plaza Tetuán, donde comenzó la marcha, y por todo el paseo de San Juan, fueron constantes los aplausos de los vecinos que presenciaban el cortejo en las aceras y en las ventanas de los edificios. Hasta el momento no se han registrado incidentes.

    Convergencia Democrática, Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC-PSOE), Centristas de Catalunya (CC-UCD) y Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya han hecho público un comunicado en el cual acusan al PSUC de extralimitarse con criterios partidistas ante la manifestación unitaria de ayer.

    Por otra parte, la Comisión Permanente del Ayuntamiento de Barcelona ha acordado por unanimidad darle el nombre del Rey a una plaza de la ciudad, según han manifestado a Europa Press fuentes municipales. La resolución ha sido adoptada a propuesta del PSC-PSOE.