"Ana Gutiérrez, a forgotten resistance hero"

My friend, the wonderful British writer and journalist David Baird shared his knowledge of the maquis in the Frigiliana area of Malaga province (where he has lived since the 1970s) to help with this radio documentary.

From the source:

"The protagonists of history do not always appear in textbooks. Some have joined the ranks of those who anonymously give the best of themselves to change the course of life. This is the case of Ana Gutiérrez, "la Tangerina," tireless fighter for freedom in the darkest of the Francoist night.

RNE [Spain's Radio National] explores her eventful life and her whose determination in the defense of her ideals, like something out of a movie script.

Born in Tangier, Ana Gutiérrez was already a member of the Unified Socialist Youth before she came of age as an adult. For this she was arrested and paid for it with two years in prison and exile.

Forced to leave her hometown, she took refuge in Malaga, where she continued her militancy and took on more risky assignments, including spying and propagandist. Another two years in prison were the price to pay for her insistence on maintaining her struggle.

After being freed, Tangerina returned to the underground, this time as a supporter of the maquis settled in the mountains of the Axarquia in Malaga. There she also experienced a romance with Roberto, the legendary leader of the anti-Francoist guerrillas. For her it meant again two years in jail; but for Roberto, the [execution] wall.

After leaving prison, Ana Gutiérrez, still young, decided to rebuild her life, went into exile in Switzerland, got married and started a family. 

She lived there until, after her retirement, she returned to Spain and went to live in Nerja, in a house whose terrace overlooks the mountains where she risked her life for her ideals.

This documentary, with the agreement of Ricardo Aguilera, has had the invaluable collaboration of Salvador Magaz, son of Ana Gutiérrez, who has preserved a valuable body of documentation, key to the development of our work, and which is already the object of desire of historians. 

We are also accompanied by José María Azuaga, professor and researcher of the anti-Francoist guerrilla. 

In addition, we have counted with neighbors in the area and experts in the history of the maquis, as Adolfo Moyano or the British journalist and writer David Baird, both based in Frigiliana, who expand our knowledge about the guerrilla and its international context. 

The writer Mariví Ledesma, author of "La memoria olvidada" (Forgotten Memory), explains the harshness of those years. Vicky Fernández, neighbor of El Acebuchal, one of the villages that suffered the most repression during the war against the Maquis, gives us her testimony, as well as other elders of the area such as José Ávila, from Cómpeta, and Sebastián Martín, from Frigiliana, who keep a vivid memory of all that.

Thanks to all of them we have been able to recreate the circumstances in which Ana Gutiérrez, the Tangerina, wrote her story of courage and dedication that does not appear in any book."

Under time and feet

A street manhole from the Catalan town of Sant Cugat Sesgarrigues (where l've lived for more than a decade) with its altered former Spanish name under the dictatorship.

The date of 1970 is when running water was installed, I suspect.

Podcast: The surprising Spanish connection: Black Music in Europe (The 1970s)

Clarke Peters uncovers...Black flamenco in Spain, talking to Raul Rodriguez and Black-British flamenco dancer Yinka Esi Graves about how Seville's Triana area, where 15% of the population were once Black and why the dictator Franco used flamenco as a false national symbol.  

Listen here (for the first 6 minutes.)

(Photo: Clark Peters. Credit:: Alexandra Quinn)

Video: I talk and listen about this week's national and international stories

This week I was a guest again on Matthew Tree's English language discussion program on El Punt Avui TV. 

We covered topics including Trump's latest actions, the current Spanish government's insistance on preserving Europe's largest fascist monument and their threats of legal action against any company making ballot boxes for the Catalan government.

For a video of the show click here.

"Portrait of an Asturian miner" - My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

The coal miner's wife wakes him and he coughs. He shuffles to the small bathroom sink and spits black liquid, washing it away with with the brown tap water.

Last night he slept badly, suffering from stomach cramps, diarrhea and vomiting again. He had been working in the zinc mine at Arnao in Castrillon but the Belgian company who own the site have let him go to the San Juan mine. He felt himself to be quite lucky. At least there they had a river pool for the miners to wash in.

As he leaves for another day under the earth the miner looks for a last time at the mountains, at their ferns and the tall groups of eucalyptus - – pencil thin, not quite straight, just like the trees in a Dr Seuss book. He sees the houses with their sharp pitched roofs in front of deep gorges and is comforted by the roll of the hills across this green land.

Our miner is living before the era of the chemical plants and big metal factories. He knows others who dig for iron and knows it’s vital for tinned food because electricity and refrigeration have not yet arrived to this part of the world.

His mine, like many mines, is close to a river: a means of transporting the coal for trading this raw material with British towns like Cardiff and Newcastle-upon-Tyne [where my own father was born and also grew up next to a polluted river.]

This miner's children will one day see the construction of chemical industries, thanks to the mines, thanks to his labour. In fact, he thinks, as he makes the walk to the pits, the story of Asturias is the story of the miner and the story of the miner is the story of Asturias. It is one of hardship and scant reward, of growth but also ill health. It is a tale of the deep earth's hidden secrets and humanity’s immeasurable suffering with the open spaces of the valleys and their claustrophobic confines - as unforgiving and back-breaking as any imagined hell in those greedy shafts penetrating ever downwards into the planet.

Today, like thousands of other days, he will launch his body into the ground and probe for hour after hour for that black rock. Finally, at the end of the day our miner will take aspirin for his aching bones, smiling at the ironic fact that it has ingredients made from the very coal he has been digging for. He does not yet know though that, decades later, his children are going eat kiwi-fruits and chestnuts that will come to grow particularly well in the carbon-coloured soil left from abandoned open-cut mines scattered across the nearby hills.

As the miner eats his simple lunch with his hands still blackened by coal dust, he remembers his father, who was also a miner. He too worked to extract the iron that was in such high demand for both twentieth century century world wars – a metal that helped the rich become richer. His father started life as a rural worker and had to adapt from the rhythms of the seasons to the very different rhythm of an industrial timetable. He had to learn to accept days and nights with no sky or trees, down in the mines which lay right next to his cramped terrace house.

Like every other subterranean labourer, his father and he both wondered if life could ever be different for them. He’d heard that things were a bit better at the only mine run by a trade union. But it was on the other side of Asturias and he had never even visited there.

Our miner lives in Bustiello town where all of the aristocrat Marques de Camilla's workers have their neat little houses below everyone else, at the bottom of the valley. It is an orderly, rectangular village and each house has a small garden. Up the hill above them live the engineers and above them is the church, then God of course. This is what he knows: the planning of the town exactly reflects the social and spiritual hierarchy. The Marques is a conservative man. He fears the progressive men who want social change.

Further on in the mountains there are mining zones that suffered from “special measures” during Franco's dictatorship. Around Pozo Fortuna trade union activists were assassinated and their bodies were thrown down an old pit-hole. Our miner speaks about this sadly with his friends and later falls asleep hoping that the bad times will end.

In the morning, he rises and faces another day.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2016.]

Paying now...or not all

Temporarily ignoring today's election in Catalonia - obviously an extremely important event - I found this little gem of an editorial on a completely different subject:

"The somewhat quixotic idea of an extra payment for the workers, the paga extraordinaria – now extended to two payments in June and December – began as a Christmas bonus (known as un aguinaldo) of a week’s wage to workers, ordered by Franco’s Government in the winter of 1944. The edict was extended the following year and declared to be permanent. Two years later, in 1947, a similar payment was ordered to celebrate what would now be May Day, but was then the 18th of July (the date of the 1936 Coup d’état). Later, after Franco’s death, this second payment was moved to June. In 1980, a new agreement with the unions, never changed to this day, changed the system of the ‘fourteen payments’, which could, as agreed by the workers, be paid either as twelve regular monthly or fourteen (irregular) payments, but, from a previously accorded annual payment. In reality, the workers are no longer paid more, but by spreading the payments in this way, the tax paid by the employers is actually slightly reduced. Further, as the Government dropped the extra payments for the funcionarios in 2012 (part of which they promise to make up just after the December 2015 elections), workers are effectively having the wool pulled over their eyes. One thing which we can expect from the Troika sooner or later will be an end to this odd system originated as a workers’ bonus by Franco."

More from this very well-informed source here.

"Why Does Spain Have the World's Highest Concentration of Elevators?"

Marcelo del Pozo/Reuters

An article that answers this question [Franco is a big reason] but also so much more...

"The way we are" - My latest article in the 10th Anniversary edition of Catalonia Today

I was a reader of Catalonia Today before I was a writer for Catalonia Today. 

My first memory of it (at that time published as a weekly newspaper) was being impressed by (now Editor) Marcela Topor's wonderful interview with the Catalan novelist Vicenç Pagès Jordà in an edition from October 2006. 

"Bad readers make incomplete citizens" was the title of the article and I kept it filed away. I also continued archiving all the editions when my own work began to be published. 

Last week, at random, I pulled out a copy and, as it it turned out, this one from November 2008 was the final weekly edition before the newspaper became a monthly magazine. 

In it I had an article about Barcelona teenagers addictions to mobile phones (which is maybe even more timely today) but it is the content of the other pieces in this thirty two page publication that really impresses me still. 

Catalonia Today then had such a great variety of voices, news stories and current information. In that particular issue a reader could open up the paper and be greeted with 'Long Term Resident' Matthew Tree railing against Franco or caressed with a softer story about the comeback of local Catalan donkeys (and here the focus was the beast of burden, not any political asses.)

Flicking through "The Week" section, anyone with decent English could learn about the situation of homeless people here or they might also read an update on the saga of Judge Garzon and his efforts to allow the opening up of mass graves from the Civil war times. 

Equally, this issue also gave the opportunity to get well-informed about pollution and Co2 emissions in the Tarragona region or to try and understand the reasons for 30,000 Valencians taking to the streets over the use of English in schools there. A special double-page report by Gabe Abeyta Canepa delved into the world of the Mormon church in this part of the world and detailed the work of the 132 missionaries who walk their shiny black shoes across Barcelona's streets.

Towards the back of the newspaper in the Review section Joseph Wilson did some fine work in the arts, culture and language areas. Apart from the original interviews also there, I was always struck by the page which gave a round-up of the fairs, festivals and other events across the whole of Catalonia. 

This made an impact on me because it showed that there was life (and even cultural life) outside Barcelona - a fact that is largely overlooked by both visitors and English language media. Catalonia Today was, and still is, the only print publication that routinely acknowledges the existence of a wider Catalonia outside the capital. It does this in a magazine that you can touch. 

It was the first Catalan newspaper in English and I am proud to be a regular part of it. Catalonia Today deserves at least another ten years,...if not more.

Review of "Between Two Fires" by David Baird

This book is exactly the kind of thing you would hope to find when you are aimlessly looking through the shelves in that slowly dying place called a bookshop.


Focusing mainly on the area around his adopted home town of Frigiliana, David Baird has used immaculate research to write in compelling detail about the "people of the sierra" - those who took to the mountains, some to escape, some because they had little choice and some because they had strong political opinions that could then only be expressed in a way that led them to be tagged by Franco's cronies as "bandits."


Here, we find a Spain that is almost impossible to recognise in the modern version of this country. As Baird points out, at the start of the 20th century the average person there lived not much longer than 30 years. 

It was an almost feudal land where even subsistence farming was only for the lucky ones. There was no public hospitals or public transport and mules and donkeys were the only way of getting any distance without walking in bare feet or simple shoes. 

It was a time of smugglers, travelling repairmen, mass illiteracy and child labour (often starting at 6 years of age.) Progress took the form of a single 30 watt bulb being installed in a house. After Franco's victory this part of the country also became the land of night-time curfews where anyone found in the streets after dark was automatically arrested.


It is unsurprising then that there was a significant level of support for the men who fought against authority. While some townspeople were kidnapped for ransom by the rebels it was the civil guard who were more hated but both sides were feared, and for good reason. 

To help the guerrillas, such as providing them food or clothes, was enough to be thrown in prison but to not help them at times meant to the outlaws that you were collaborating with their enemy and could then be a target for recriminations. It is in this sense that ordinary people were caught "between two fires."


Apart from the clarity of Baird's writing and his even-handed approach (which is a relatively rare thing in the highly-politicised arena of Spanish history) half of the book is given over to those who were intimately involved in the events of the time to simply tell their own versions. Their first-hand accounts are vivid, illuminating and often poignant.


In short, this book plays a crucial part in making sure that this war is not a forgotten one, at least to English language readers. 


This review was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2014.

[...and also published at Good Reads and Amazon books.] 

An Asturian coal miner

The coal miner's wife wakes him and he coughs. He goes to the small bathroom sink and spits black liquid, washing it away with with the brown tap water.

Last night he slept badly because he had stomach cramps, diarrhea and vomiting again. Until last year he was working in the zinc mine at Arnao in Castrillion but the Belgian company let him go to the San Juan mine, where he considered himself quite lucky because at least there they had a river pool for the miners to wash in.

As he leaves for another day under the earth he looks for a last time at the mountains, their ferns and the tall groups of eucalyptus - pencil thin, not quite straight, but just like the trees in a Dr Seuss book. He sees the houses with their sharp pitched roofs, the deep gorges and is comforted by the roll of the hills in this green and pleasant land.

But it is only a pleasant land for some.

The miner lives before the era of the chemical plants and the big metal factories. He knows others who dig for iron and he knows it is vital for tinned food because electricity and refrigeration has not yet arrived to this part of the world.

His mine, like many mines, is close to a river and the river is a means of transporting the coal for trading this raw material with British towns like Cardiff and Newcastle-upon-Tyne (where my father was born and grew up next to a river also.)

This miner's children will see chemical industries grow, thanks to the mines, thanks to his labour.

In fact, (he thinks to himself as he makes the walk to the pits) the story of Asturias is the story of the miner, and the story of the miner is the story of Asturias. It is one of hardship and scant reward. Of growth and ill health. It is the deep earth's hidden secrets and bountiful suffering, the open spaces of the valleys and the claustrophobic confines - as unforgiving and back breaking as any imagined hell in those greedy shafts penetrating ever downwards into the planet.

Today, like thousands of other days he will throw his body into the ground and probe for hour after hour for that black gold. At the end of the day he will take aspirin for his aching bones, smiling at the ironic fact that it has ingredients made from the very coal he has been digging at.He does not yet know though that his children will one day eat kiwi-fruits and chestnuts that grow particularly well in the carbon-coloured soil left in the abandoned open mines that are scattered across the nearby hills.

As the miner eats his simple lunch with his hands still blackened by coal dust, he remembers his father, who was also a miner. This man worked to extract the iron that was in such high demand for both 20^th century world wars – a metal that helped the country become richer. His father had started his life as a rural worker and had to adapt from the rhythm of the seasons to the very different rhythm of an industrial timetable. It was necessary to learn to accept days and nights with no sky or trees when he was underground in the mines, which sat right next to his tiny terrace house.

Like every other subterranean labourer, his father and he both wondered if life could be different for them. He had heard that it was a bit better at the one and only mine run by a trade union. But it was on the other side of Asturias and he had never even visited there.

Our miner lives in Bustiello town and all of the Marques de Camilla's workers have their neat little houses below everyone else, at the very bottom of the valley. It is an orderly, rectangular village and each house has a little garden.

Up the hill above them live the engineers and above them is the church then god of course. This is what he knows. The planning of the town exactly reflects the social and spiritual hierarchy because the Marques is a conservative man - not in the least progressive.

Up in the mountains though, there were some mining zones that suffered from “special measures” during Franco's dictatorship. Around Pozo Fortuna trade union activists were assassinated and their bodies were thrown down an old pit-hole.

Our miner speaks about this sadly with his friends and falls asleep hoping that the bad times would end.

In the morning, he rises and faces another day.

The colours of Asturias: a poem

the flag of the region should be green, black and red

Asturias is certainly verdant green, but it is also black

the black of the miners lung

and the almost permanent colour of his spit

it is also that sightless place of no mercy

at the bottom of the pit where

another of Franco's victims is thrown  

Asturias has a history the color of carbon

the same earthy tint as the blood sausage

that has fed its people

and black like the hide of a cow

who has quietly ruminated on its grassy hills .

and there is that black of a thousand widow’s dresses

mixed with that black of the children’s despair

at their fathers early death

the same dim shade of the early morning forest where

the dictators enemies hid shivering, hungry, but unbroken

and the crucial Asturian black

the lump of its freshly-mined coal

or that frivolous fully-rotten apple

as dark as the night-time ocean that empties itself

into rivers like the Nalón

as brutally stark as an unlit mine

and it might too have been

the charcoal feathers of a bird

that watched all this great grim past

with its darting granite eyes 

and Asturias has a culture full of red

red like some of those ripened apples

that make the people's everyday cider

not as red as those huge painted silos that hold it all

the enflamed red too of the wild flowers that grow here

and the smoky paprika powder that is sprinkled

on yet more cooked potatoes

but it is also the red of the dead

the civil war corpses and the slaughtered soldiers

that ruby rich hue that also inhabits the church wine

and the vino tinto waiting on the table

or even red like the double bars of the Spanish flag

with that saffron yellow lying

in between those royal stripes

and also that arterial red

of those painted iron trains

the ferrocarill

that opened up

the heart

of Asturias

"My name change saved my life." - The last British soldier to fight Franco dies at age 94

On his 18^th birthday David Lomon (real name David Solomon) left the UK to join the Republicans in the fight against Franco.

 

"They advised me to change my last name to one less Jewish because to go fight the fascists, if I had the misfortune to be caught, it could help me to survive," he wrote in a memoir only a month ago.

After the Battle of the Ebro, Solomon was captured by Italian troops and sent to a POW camp in Palencia, mostly populated by the international brigade [of which George Orwell was also a member.]

 "The Gestapo came every few weeks to take German citizens and especially Jews away. My name change saved my life. " 

As a result of his altered name Solomon was put on a list of prisoners for exchange and release. He then went on to have a very long life, dying only last week.

Solomon was one of the few international brigades still alive, and the last of the British. In total, there were 35,000 “brigadistas internacionales” who came from 55 countries and  from a wide range of jobs including miners, lawyers and even leftist politicians such [German] Willy Brandt.

When Solomon first left home he believed that Spain would win the war.

 "We were good," he recalled with a smile. But once here he discovered that it was in fact the weaker side he had chosen. 

"We had to make do with old weapons, mostly from before the [first world] war and with old Russian machine guns. The food was not much better: donkey-meat, sardines and beans were our staple diet. But we were so determined to overcome all the difficulties that we just accepted what they gave us and we carried on. After all, we had not come to Spain to eat, but to fight. " 

Solomon was impressed by the Spanish: "I was fascinated to see people so poor and yet so proud," he said.

He fought in the Battle of Teruel and the Aragon offensive against Franco. A bomb just about killed him and the explosion left him unconscious for no telling how long. When he woke up, he realised he was a prisoner in a truck guarded by the Italian division of Blue Arrows. It was March 1938.

He and others were taken to the former monastery of San Pedro de Cardena. Crammed in the basement, many of his comrades died from a lack of medical care and food.

"It was awful. When you get into a place like that it’s as if you have left the world, "he recollected.

Solomon was proud of the Spanish passport he obtained due to to the ‘law of historical memory’ which granted citizenship to those from the International Brigades. Losing the Civil War was "a blow" for him but he claimed that it also served as an "inspiration" because when he returned to England, after being swapped for four prisoners Italians, he joined the Army and fought against Hitler after.

 "We won that war" he stated.

A month ago he came to Madrid (for the final time as he was) invited by the Friends of the International Brigades to participate in events for the 76th anniversary of the defense of the capital city.  

Almudena Cros, from that association, recalled how he walked "with admirable verve" along the same streets that he had marched in…76 years ago when he first joined the XI International Brigade.

[My translation from an article by Alvaro Garcia in El Pais.]

Franco's censored books live on

[Spain-shaped hole. 
Photo: Javier.]

He died almost 40 years ago but somehow he’s never quite gone.

This month Dr Jordi Cornellà-Detrell, a Welsh academic, has discovered that “scores of popular novels censored during the dictator’s reign are still being published – in their Franco-era form.”

Those books that continue to bear cuts imposed by censors under General Franco’s dictatorship include James Bond novels, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and JM Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

Read more here.