Dispatch 3 from Barcelona
in which we take a Spanish Civil War walking tour and make a rookie sunblock mistake on the Mediterranean
Let’s pretend I’m still in Europe, and you, dear reader, are with me. We finish a leisurely snack at the flat we’ve rented and head out into the Mediterranean light of a new day to make some discoveries and have adventures. The gray, flat sky and loud, smelly roads of America are in our rearview.
Notes on the Spanish Civil War Walking Tour
I met Catherine, one half of the pair of Irish-UK expat team that leads Barcelona walking tours of the Spanish Civil War, at an outdoor cafe near Las Ramblas. (Huge, grateful shout out to Jason L. of the Mount Washington Community Garden who put me on to this word-of-mouth opportunity!) Catherine held a battered copy of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and there turned out to be just three of us patrons on the tour. She was glad to see me, as I’d emailed ahead to say that I have an ancestral connection to the war — my grandmother and her brother were attorneys who defended several people who fought the fascists in the International Brigades in Spain after they’d arrived back in America in the late 1930s and were prosecuted as communists under the Smith Act. yes, the US punished its anti-fascist volunteers for being communists.
Notes from the tour:
Local media was censored, so George Orwell arrived from Britain in 1936 to get the word out. But he wasn’t well aware that there was already an anarchist revolution underway in Spain. In Catalonia, the four major factions fighting the fascists were the CNT, a revolutionary workers’ front; the POUM, a Marxist anti-Stalinist group (which Orwell was able to embed with and ultimately fight with); the duly elected Catalan government, who were republicans; and the PSUC, the pro-Stalinist and pro-Soviet communists.
Franco rose to power slowly and then quickly — his control of the most experienced and brutal portions of the military became decisive for the war. He’d been made a general by age 33, advancing the Spanish imperialist project into Morocco, which was a violent, dirty, failed project. By the ‘30s, his plans for a military coup against the duly elected republican Spanish government was an open secret.
Barcelona remained in anti-fascist territory until quite late in the war. Behind fascist lines, in places such as Madrid, the amount of pure violence was staggering; more than 250,000 Spaniards were murdered by the fascists by today’s estimates, although the true number remains unknown. The anarchistic revolution that Orwell was surprised and impressed to see in action was largely crushed by left wing infighting, as well as by the shadow of Stalin after the war.
There was a women’s liberationist front that was particularly of interest to anarchists worldwide; Emma Goldman visited and wrote articles applauding the revolutionary energy and real empowerment among Spanish women. Noam Chomsky called the anarchist revolution’s successes — sweeping, rapid reforms in factory hours and working conditions, mass election participation, mutual aid collectives distributing bread and wine, fixing tools — the greatest attempt at working class self rule in global history.
All that, of course, imploded and died once Franco took power. The war ended in 1939, with Franco murdering the leaders of the POUM and handing over republican supporters to Hitler to be sent to the work camps that the Nazis were already running. The loss reverberated through anti-fascist movements worldwide, and must have had a chilling effect on the resistance to Hitler and Mussolini in Europe.
The tour contained so much more detail than I can share here; it ended with an emotional moment between Catherine and me. I was moved by her passion for repairing the historical memory in her adopted home of Spain, especially setting the record straight about how the Catholic Church has covered up the atrocities of the Francoists, and has resisted attempts by the families of Franco’s victims to discover the truth of what happened to their loved ones.
Pro Francoism is a thing here, and it is really painful. Catherine’s truth telling isn’t a neutral act — the train is still moving.
After the tour I had to go home and sleep hard, for an hour. And I couldn’t get to a dinner spot before it was time to think about finding some live music. I found it at a jazz bar called Big Bang in El Raval. NOLA style hot jazz. The vibe was pretty chill, I had a very large Cuba Libre and hung out for 90 minutes while the band played. Thought I saw Carrie-Ann Moss ( of The Matrix fame) but it probably wasn’t her, at least according to my sister.
I went home from there picking over drunk people sleeping and pissing openly on the sidewalks. Raval is a filthy part of town, dirty but also teeming with life. Lots of folks were out walking well past 11pm.
Next morning I got up and ate homemade breakfast, fruit and cashew butter with day old bread and coffee, and half an avocado. Avocados here are 3-10 euros! I’d been determined to get one and found it in the 4th or 5th place I looked, an Asian grocery, for 2.5 euro. Fine. That’s more comparable to US prices. I made it to yoga class, a drop in place in the neighborhood. On my way there I passed a bakery and noted it, even though I wasn’t hungry. Well, thank god I did because daydreaming about buying a pastry on my way home from class is what got me through what turned out to be an advanced hot power yoga flow workout. It was all yang, no yin until the very end! The young man teaching the class kept us doing sun salutations with full plank pushups like 25 times, for an hour. I sweated and grunted and took many more mini-breaks than all the others, drank my water and got back into position. At one point a young woman in the back of the room shot me a look of total pity, and then shut the door behind her so that no more light or breeze entered the windowless yoga room. It was okay, but who builds a lightless yoga studio? Don’t think I would go back there. It ended with chanting & meditation.
(I am writing this while sitting on a beach on the Mediterranean and a young woman is on the phone behind me breaking up with her boyfriend. “You want a puppy,” she said. “I am not the girl for you.” Her friends are sitting with her going “Good for you!”)
Next stop, Portugal!
Love and warm wishes to you, dear reader!
XOXO
Mariya