How It Is Now
HERRICK, WILLIAM
GOING BACK TO SPAIN? How It Now.. by William Herrick Barcelona I arrive in Barcelona on a Sunday afternoon, before the evening promenade is to begin, and check into a hotel off the Ramblas....
...Atrocities committed by both sides accounted for more than 150,000 of them...
...I was amused to learn that Spain has its Rolls-Royce Reds, just as we do...
...Better to avoid the danger of shedding even one drop of blood for fear of starting a hemorrhage...
...What is Monarch-ism...
...Leather goods...
...How strong the feeling of nostalgia—a gray, bitter sadness...
...The middle class, and the number of skilled workers, have multiplied enormously...
...In Madrid, Palmiero Tog-liatti, an Italian, lived quietly, calling the shots...
...But Right-wing ultras roam the streets at night burning bookstores, administering beatings, and Left-wing ultras are not about to stop their violence merely because Franco has died and democracy of sorts seems to have arrived...
...What is Social Democracy...
...A laugh...
...Magazine covers reveal female breasts, nipples faintly veiled (except on black African women...
...If Lister, who still prides himself on being a Stalinist, wishes to devote the remainder of his life to fighting Carrillo, perhaps the Anarchists will spare his life...
...Why should I believe that someone who gives up his personal freedom to the party will cherish my freedom when he gains power...
...and no revolutionary posters on the walls, but there is a holiday feeling in the city...
...Impatient, not waiting to unpack, I hurry out to walk the quiet streets...
...One can smell it in the air...
...Why start up the whole business again...
...What is Democratic Socialism...
...Also for the holiday spirit that lingered then, after the early victories in the streets over the Army and jalangistas...
...La Pasionaria (Dolores Ibaruri) waits in the wings in the Soviet Union...
...But they offer any book one wishes to read, newspapers for every taste, freedom...
...Mass production and competition are hard to beat, it seems...
...Democracy and motor cars and blue jeans...
...Democracy, democracy, that's all everyone seems to talk about...
...Is that really necessary...
...What is Marxism-Leninism...
...The honking is a horror...
...For an answer a smile, a shrug...
...At least in Barcelona...
...A series of paperbacks asks: What is Democracy...
...Those who live here will have to decide...
...Not the Fifth Column, but an alleged ally, the Communist party, which had abdicated its independence to professional foreign agents...
...Democracy and Autonomy...
...Will there be any who remember the murder of Andres Nin, of countless Anarchists, the destruction of a legitimate Spanish revolutionary party like the POUM by Stalin's agents and Lister's brigades...
...The newspapers seem to print whatever they wish...
...Slowly, the Spanish character asserts itself...
...The many bookstalls display more or less the same books, magazines and newspapers...
...The Civil War cost Spain over a million lives...
...Every issue of every paper carries long dissertations on democracy...
...This is partly because the only true Catalans are from the upper classes...
...Orlov from Russia...
...In the Basque, the reverse is true...
...Again one asks, does the CP mean what it says, that it is independent of Moscow, that it is for a pluralistic society...
...I wander from one to the other group, catching a word here, a word there...
...Carlos Con-treras (Vidali) from Trieste...
...Planned democracy or open democracy...
...Machine tooling...
...Stalin's National Question...
...to a Socialist the party is just a part of one's life...
...they ask for it by sheer habit...
...There are no banners flying now...
...Where do they get it...
...Bui suddenly the CNT, the old anarchist National Confederation of Workers, follows into the open, and hardly a Spaniard from any class is surprised to see workers joining in large numbers...
...Then why will the demonstration be mammoth...
...Poor, put-upon heroes of the working class...
...The streets answer, too, with motor cars, consumer goods, a large middle class...
...If he shows up in Spain, the Anarchists have vowed they will take his life...
...The illegal Communist party, if it hadn't come out for pluralistic democracy, would not stand a chance...
...The majority, and official, faction calls for "justice and democracy...
...William Herrick, whose most recent hook is Golcz...
...The Army, for its part, promises political neutrality—except with respect to the separatist movements in the Basque provinces and Catalonia...
...Food seems plentiful as well...
...Seat (Fiat...
...What is the Right...
...Not the anarchism of the Bader-Meinhoff gang, of Carlos the Jackal, of Ne-chaiev, but of Piotr Kropotkin, of Federica Montseny, of Francisco Ferrer, of communes and a libertarian life...
...Several polls show an election held today would give the CP a bare 10-12 per cent, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats a huge majority...
...The crowded stores of Barcelona, Seville and Madrid are filled with consumer goods, of good quality and bad...
...Thus the belief of most Spaniards that one forgets the past at great peril...
...Given legality, they will multiply for a time—their organization will help...
...wrote Hermanos!, a novel of the Spanish Civil War...
...Agreed...
...Nevertheless, democracy seems to be here to stay, and the competition will be tough...
...After 40 years of old-fashioned Nationalist dictatorship, they are not about to take up with 20th-century totalitarianism—not voluntarily, at any rate...
...Cement...
...Pedro (Emo Gero) from Hungary...
...This time I am only passing through...
...One can forgive the murder of one, perhaps five, 10 comrades, but there has to be a number where the forgiving stops...
...I say this half-sadly: Old Socialists die hard...
...Plastics...
...He now heads the Spanish Communist Workers party, loyal to Moscow and Stalin...
...Nor will most of the Spanish working class and peasantry...
...Laughter...
...In old Seville, where a sidewalk can be a foot and a half wide, and from curb to curb measures five feet, the autos brush past one's shoulders...
...No one seems to believe the Catalans really want autonomy...
...What is the Left...
...Everyone hopes the price for the first will be cheaper than the price for the other two...
...Yes, there are those who remember...
...The Army and the national police desire one nation, indivisible...
...Mao's Little Red Book...
...The Life and Death of Durutti (a famed Anarchist leader during the Civil War) leans heavily against Poems for Che, which in turn stands lightly against Private Conversations with Franco...
...Book titles read: Trotsky's Mi Vida...
...There are many who remember...
...When she is finally permitted to enter upon the stage of history, ta ra, the demonstration will be mammoth...
...One asks, "Do they mean it...
...The diehard Francoists are a minority...
...Will there be any who remember that during the Civil War she took her orders from Togliatti and Orlov, an Italian and a Russian agent...
...The CNT will not be run by power parties...
...The Life of Franco is rarely seen...
...The Falange has split into five parts...
...I want it to be as it was when I paraded down the boulevards in early January '37, the banners flying, red, yellow, purple, FAI, ONT, POUM, USC, IR, UGT, the sun blinding off the white camisas and red kerchiefs, a half-million people lining the streets, shouting U H P\ (Unios, Hermanos Proletarios...
...When I left a year later, Barcelona was a city engaged in a losing cavil war and not yet acknowledging it, its revolutionary fervor destroyed not so much by the cruel enemy without as by the cruel "friend" within...
...What is the Ultraleft...
...One sees no pubic hair so far, but when veils are removed bikini panties will soon follow...
...After all, he's an old man...
...Lenin's fractured face: Brezhnev or Mao...
...One nation, indivisible...
...As in the States, and London?which I had just left—everyone groans at the prices and goes right on buying...
...Both are expensive...
...Why do they still hold to democratic centralism...
...So-cialista, communista, anarchista...
...the other thousand do not only because they are tied down to a hospital bed...
...In a recent interview in the magazine Interviu, Lister said that Santiago Carrillo (general secretary of the Spanish CP) is a danger to Spanish democracy...
...the lower classes are first-, second- or third-generation Murcians or An-dalucians...
...Clothes...
...The peasants and workers are Basques and want to remain Basques—no Madrid for them-—while the upper classes couldn't care less...
...A propaganda-manufactured myth, a figment of Ralph Bates' fictional imagination...
...There will be trouble flrom the Army and the Civil Guard in the Basque...
...What is Imperialism...
...What is the Right...
...If the Communists have a membership of 50,000, then 49,000 turn out when a meeting is called...
...The Communists' illegality doesn't hurt them: Disciplined cadres function best underground...
...The shots...
...Again a knowing smile, questions answered with questions: "Why do they seem to have more money for propaganda than anyone else...
...Democracy, democracy...
...The Generalissimo is dead and buried...
...The working class...
...Sexual Inversions...
...There are more shops selling blue jeans than in New York, Albany or Boston...
...The nostalgia is for my youth, I suppose: I hadn't quite turned 21...
...To a Communist, the party is all life...
...Not having had democracy for most of their history, most Spaniards won't be sentimental about those who would take it away now that it is almost here...
...The first time I was in Spain I left some of my blood there...
...What does the future hold...
...Enrique Lister, a leader of the Spanish CP during the Civil War, led his own private little army at the front and at the rear, dividing his time almost equally between fighting Franco and fighting legitimate Spanish revolutionaries, whom he of course called Fascists...
...Soon the promenaders arrive, groups form to talk, to laugh, to argue in the famous Barcelona Ramblas, and the large bookstalls open...
...George Mink from the U.S...
...Even in France, in exile, Lister hides...
...And, of course, the Communists and their friends are masters of martyrology, with a highly skilled PR system...
...Anarchism...
...The bookstalls also answer with questions: What is Democracy...
...True, the Communists are emerging from the underground with a strong hold on the Workers' Commissions, previously a Catholic-Marxist coalition...
...The Socialists can have 200,000 members, but when they call a meeting only 20,000 show up...
...Though terribly expensive, and with gasoline over $2 a gallon, motor cars have chased pedestrians off the streets and onto the sidewalks...
...Yet who knows...
...Jacqueline Suzanne's Once Is Not Enough...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 1
