AMNESTY APPEAL
• A world-wide campaign is being conducted to compel the Franco regime to free what have become known as the Carabanchel Ten — 10 arrested leaders of the Spanish Workers' Commissions, the organizations created by Spanish workers to defend their interests and fight for the trade union rights they are denied. Earlier this month Carlos Elvira, leader of the Workers' Commissions in exile in Paris, visited Vancouver to speak at a public meeting and this interview was obtained for The Fisherman during his visit.
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By SEAN GRIFFIN
FROM the platform of the Ironworkers' Hall Isabel Alonso read Marcos Ana's poem, A Short Letter to the World, translating the fluid Spanish into English:
You do not know what a man is
torn and bleeding in a snare. If you realised you would come
on the waves and on the wind out of every borderland come to rescue what is yours.
Carlos Elvira remembers those words well: they are the voices from Burgos jail, the voices of the unofficial Spain, the Spain that will not capitulate to Franco.
For him they symbolize his own 23 years spent behind the cold walls of fascist prisons.
For the veterans of the Mac-kenzie-Papineau Battalion who came to hear Elvira in Vancouver, they recalled the inspiring struggle of the Spanish people 37 years ago when 1,200 Canadians boarded trains with passports marked "Not Valid for Spain" and stole across the Pyrenees, like fugitives, in darkness, to defend the people's Republic alongside men and women from "out of every borderland."
For Carlos Elvira, as for thousands of others, the struggle in Spain did not cease with the seizure of power by Generalissimo Francisco Franco. It goes on even in the prisons — in Burgos, Carabanchel, Alicante and a score of others. And as Elvira rose to pay homage to the 600 Canadians buried in the scarred Spanish earth, he assured the Mac-Paps that "when we were defeated in 1939, it was not a defeat — it was a parenthesis of history that was opened and will be closed in a short time."
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That parenthesis is being drawn ^rnore boldly with the struggle for release of the Carabanchel Ten who epitomize the world-wide campaign for amnesty in Spain and on whose behalf Elvira is calling for solidarity all over the world.
Led by Marcelino Camacho, the 10 are guilty only of the crime of trying to organize Spanish workers. Their imprisonment is the futile act of a crumbling regime, for everywhere it has sparked massive strike movements, particularly in Barcelona where only two weeks ago, thousands of workers virtually occupied the city.
That Elvira could even come to speak for the 10 was itself in spite of Franco. Arrested for his participation in the Civil War on the side of the Loyalists, he was condemned to death following the fall of Madrid.
In 1942, his sentence was commuted to 30 years imprisonment — but not before 300,000 had been executed by Franco's firing squads.
In a country still shocked by the horror of the civil war, Franco stayed many of the executions, rounded up thousands of political prisoners and herded them together in Burgos jail where he hoped they would die, forgotten, in stone cells and freezing temperatures.
"In Burgos jail, the temperature went below freezing in winter and we survived with no
Carabanchel Ten symbol of Spain
heating except the heat of our own bodies," Elvira recalled.
Though many did die, of starvation, freezing to death, a movement grew and was consolidated even within the formidable walls of the prison.
During the terrible repression of the forties, there were many small but significant actions on the part of workers throughout the country. And much of the leadership for those actions came from within Burgos itself.
"We studied and learned during the years in prison and — Elvira held up a penny package of matches — many of the books which we read were no bigger than this." Elaborately copied by a few artists in miniature, they were read with a magnifying glass. Even classes were clandestinely held in prisoners' cells. •
The year 1951 heard the first whispers of a national protest and by 1956 it had swelled to a thunder echoing to the very centre of the regime. Despite the threat of execution hanging over any strike action, strikes broke out in Pamplona and Vizcaya and elsewhere.
The strikes were organized by plant committees consisting of rank and file workers. The breadth of the struggles soon assumed a national character and by the beginning of 1961, the first permanent Workers' Commissions were established.
In the same year, in November, Carlos Elvira was released from prison, already a leader of the workers' movement.
Not long after his release he was married — to a girl who had waited 15 years for him.
She had been bringing food to the jail for her brother, and without the food supplied by families most of the political prisoners in Franco's jails would not survive. When her brother was released, he asked that she continue bringing food to Elvira. After her first few visits, she promised to wait for him. He was then 31. He was 45 when the jail doors were opened and the years, of waiting ended..
For five years after his release he continued to work in Spain and during those years the Workers' Commissions emerged as the only genuine organization of workers in Spain, pushing aside the vertical syndicates — Franco's official labor associations — to become the nucleus of a national movement of opposition to Franco.
Finally, Elvira was forced to flee and he was smuggled out of Spain to continue his work, as head of the Workers' Commissions in exile in Paris.
In the years since Elvira heard the chilling sentence of death pronounced upon him, the struggle in Spain has changed utterly. Where once lawyers were among the staunchest supporters of Franco, now they, too, have felt the iron fist of repression. In Barcelona, three lawyers face sentences of five, eight and 11 years for unlawful assembly — more than 20 clients were in their offices at one time.
And they have moved over to opposition. "One lawyer refused to sit on the Court of Public Order (Franco's court for political trial)," Elvira said, "and when Marcelino Camacho comes to trial, he can count on his defence being taken up by 10 of the best lawyers in Spain."
In that is one of the ironic reversals of history. Even before the days of Franco, thousands of trade unionists were imprisoned and intimidated in the period 1933-35, the period which Spaniards call the "two black years" of the Republic or the "Bienio Negro." It was ushered in, with the fanfare of reaction, by a right wing political realignment led by the Confederacion Espanola de Derechas Auto-nomas (Clerical Party of Catholic Action) under the leadership of Gil Robles.
And today, one of those who will be defending Camacho and the Carabanchel Ten before Franco's judges is . .. Gil Robles.
The Catholic Church, for generations a pillar of the regime, whose hierarchy con-
• Carlos Elvira (front left) talks with supporters following his public meeting in Ironworkers Hall, Vancouver on April 10.
sidered the civil war against the republic a holy crusade, is breaking with the fascists. In January of this year, the Episcopal Conference, with 298 representatives attending, made the decision to sever its ties with Franco. Little by little, it is passing over to opposition.
Elvira grimly remembers the divisions of the civil war when the Church exhorted its followers to lay down their arms and greet the victor, Franco — even during the heroic defence of Madrid. "To those of you who have read Don Quixote, we 'have stumbled over the Church'. To clash with the Church in Spain is terrible — and Franco will know it," he warned.
And in the workers' movement itself, the rifts of the pre-civil war days have had to be forgotten in the face of fierce repression. That is the strength of the Workers' Commissions — in embracing all workers regardless of their political alignments or their religion. •
The anarchist CNT and the socialist UGT — the trade union federations of the past — have been destroyed by Franco but in their place there are the Workers' Commissions which have laid the basis for a future mass federation of united Spanish labor.
What of the future of the regime after Franco dies? Elvira laughed, for it is a question that has been asked him all over the world.
"The only thing that is certain is that, if there is a hell, Franco will go there. No, in Spain, the death of Franco is of little concern; the only people that are worried about it are the fascists.
"They hope to have Juan Carlos replace him and they have been taking him around the country. But the more they take him around, the more people find that he is an imbecile. And they know that it is merely a different face on the same regime.
"We are not basing our struggle on whether or not Franco is going to die (I say whether or not, because Franco has already declared that he is not going to die).
"We are basing our struggle against the system — but we hope to achieve victory before Franco dies because for many of us, it would be a great joy."
It would be a great victory, too, for workers in Canada and for those who fought in the International Brigades. For only then would the 600 Canadian dead not sleep cold in the Spanish earth.
• This prison scene was drawn by Agustin Ibarrola, a political prisoner in Burgos jail. In 1962 he was sentenced to nine years' imprisonment by a military tribunal after he and several other artists organized an exhibition in support of striking Asturias coal miners. The son of an industrial worker, Ibarrola obtained his training through an art scholarship, but he came into conflict with
the fascist regime when he was commissioned to paint murals which, because he depicted the lives of workers, were declared subversive and destroyed. His drawings, done in black ink on flimsy paper, have been smuggled out of prison and reproduced in a booklet, In Burgos Jail, published by Appeal for Amnesty in Spain.
THE FISHERMAN — APRIL 27, 1973/5