Dictadura (1939 - 1960)

When the war was ending my father was a frontier officer for the POUM. In Colera, to be specific. He had already received orders to cross the border. But first he did have to get across it. The elderly, women and children crossed on January 28 and 29, so he had to wait until February 5. Then my father sent a car to get my mother and me all the way to Colera. From Colera, there was a train to Portbou But before we could reach Portbou, fascist planes were bombing the train and the train had to scurry from tunnel to tunnel, taking cover, all the way to Portbou. When my mother and I reached Portbou, we were struck by great darkness. Soldiers had stowed away on the train. They’d gotten on, in spite of orders to wait. There was a terrible panic as people tried to find one another. For a while, my mother was even unable to find me. And then she…there’s this anecdote. From one of those wounded soldiers she was able to get a backpack containing jars of powdered milk which she kept. But next to her there was a woman, badly wounded. a poor woman, not in agony, but very sick. She left the milk to help this woman with the crossing. Meaning, we were, from Portbou to Cerbère, on foot. Then, in Cerbère, a train picked us up, which took the aged, women, and children to Poltiers, to a refugee shelter. My mother and I were only there from February, 1939 to September, 1939. Because the French authorities, upon seeing the German invasion of Poland, they assumed the Maginot line into France would be breached. Upon seeing the country’s difficult road ahead, they asked, practically demanded, that people return to Spain. So my mother sought assistance from the French and we returned to Spain.

I was educated under Franco’s regime because I was born in 1943 and I started school when I was 5 years old. I obviously went to a Catholic covent school that was near my home and the workshops. Even if the school was totally ruled by the nuns, we still had to follow Franco’s guidelines. At 6 or 7 AM, we had to sign Cara al Sol [the anthem of the Spanish Falange party] in the playground. The exercise routine was, as well, imposed by the Sección Femenina [women’s branch of the Falange political movement in Spain.] In Batxillerat, there was an horrible subject named Formación del espíritu nacional, which you obviously had to pass. It included the guidelines of Franco’s coup and Franco’s reign worship. It was abominable. A friend and I decided to burn the books when we passed the subject. I have always been sort of a rebel. We threw it to the school’s pond.

And then, of course, a lot of people used to write postcards without an envelope, of course… I have this, so you can see about the language, I’ve brought this, my father was a doctor, I’ve said it before, he’d do this receipts when someone visited him and I have this one here, well, they let him use some papers he had… here, Miquel Civil, doctor, Sabadell and it just said Mr. and 10, the amount of pesetas that they owned him, here you have So well, he had to go to an office in Sabadell, and they needed to stamp ‘Arriba España’ on top of it, because as there wasn’t much paper, there was a misery after the war, they had burned or they were ruined, so they let him use it and one says ‘Arriba España’ and it says ‘Temporary authorised form for its use in the official Spanish language’ I mean, it’s not important, but it is this kind of things…

Well, yes, this was the biggest emotion that I have had in all my life Because it is a big emotion when you get married or when you have a kid, but when you’re in a war and people leave you for dead, as they did with me And all my family and a big part of the village, they went to my funeral and it turns out that a year later I show up and they see I’m alive, a lot of them fainted because think they had been in my funeral, and they saw me alive… it was a big emotion They even opened the church and everyone went to mass, it was very emotional, I’ll never forget that.

There are those who say that Francoism is a fascist dictatorship, like Hitler’s and Mussolini’s. There are those who say, no, it’s an authoritarian regime. Not totalitarian, authoritarian. There are even some, specially during Franco’s life, who say, no, it’s a regime of limited pluralism. Because inside Francoism, there were different political families, not everyone was the same. There were monarchists, Carlines, Falangists. Then, there was a certain pluralism. But limited, right? I, in this topic, always say the same. If the Francoist regime could be defined or described with a single label, it wouldn’t have lasted 40 years.

The technocrats represent the second part of Franco’s regime. We could divide Franco’s regime from the end of the civil war to approximately 1959, and from 1959 to 1970, the transition, until the death of the dictator, as I said, in bed. Basically, it answers to the need the dictador had that his country moved forward. Spain was a very impoverished country, besides the war wounds and its implications, it had a very weak economic position and therefore what the dictatorship does is to try to attract specialists in their fields of work and put them in the government so that they develop plans to raise the country again, especially from an economic and employment perspective. Those were the so called technocrats. Some of them belonged to the Opus Dei, and they contribute with the technic expertise, both at a private and at a public level. And so not letting the military manage the public affairs. Putting this responsibility on hands of experts, people with studies, with experience. This is obvious when you look the economical indicators of Spain during Franco’s regime. The second part is absolutely different from the first one. It’s nothing more but an answer to the need that the dictator had in order to maintain the power. If Spain had continued being as poor as it was, governed by the military in all areas, another revolution would have taken place, and so, another civil war. The need for survival the dictatorship had, made them take these decisions. At the end they were good for the society, but of course, they were based on a system where people couldn’t decide who governed them. The Opus Dei is a religious movement created by José Maria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder. It’s a fraternity of people that understand catholicism in a very concrete way. It’s a version of the church obviously more conservative. They establish very important links between them and the power. And the results are present in today’s society, and not in a negative way. Opus Dei has contributed to the society with good things through his members. I don’t defend them nor I’m a part of them. I don’t feel close to them, either. But I don’t think it’s necessary to criminalize them.