Agustín Comotto - The Weight of the Stars: The Life of Anarchist Octavio Alberola

by Octavio Alberola

in one of lifes strange coincidences, I was born the very same year as Che Guevara and Noam Chomsky, albeit several thousand kilometers away from them. I was born in Minorca, Spain, on March 4, 1928, Che shortly after that, on May 14 or June 14 (depending on which source one goes by) in Rosario, Argentina, and Noam Chomsky on December 7 in Philadelphia. There was nothing to predict how we would turn out, much less, the meetings of minds and disagreements that we would have.

A lot of years went by and a lot happened around the world before my path crossed with Ches in Mexico in 1956. That was shortly before he set sail on the Granma with Fidel Castro to embark upon a guerrilla war in Cubas Sierra Maestra against General Batistas dictatorship. Later, quite some time after that feat of liberation and its institutionalization as a revolution, after Ches epic demise, and after he had been turned into a revolutionary icon, I met his grandson Canek Snchez Guevara At the beginning of the second millennium, Canek came to Paris intent on helping us with the publication of the Cuba libertaria bulletin. When, towards the end of 2015, Canek unexpectedly died in Mexico, it fell to me to write his obituary notice.

As for Noam Chomsky, our paths crossed in Paris in the mid-1970s during one of his lectures at the University of Vincennes, the free university that had arisen out of the May 1968 student unrest (even then it was on its last legs as a libertarian forum). Many years would pass before I took issue with him for having, in 2013 in Caracas, endorsed the socialist rabble-rousing of Colonel Hugo Chvezs Bolivarian revolution.

I mention those two instances of synchronicity linked to my birth date because, ever since I was very young, Ive had the impression that each historical moment shapes the way that each generation sorts out its contradictions and leaves its mark on history. And also because, not only is there a close connection between the individual and his surroundings, but on certain occasions the simultaneity of seemingly unconnected events is not chance but the effect of the causal impact of each ages episteme. In other words, such exceptional eventsgenerally chalked up as coincidence, luck, and even magicare the outworking of the historical determinism that governs our lives and triggers the events that amount to human history.

It strikes me, therefore, that in my own case such synchronicities are telling in that they are suggestive, right from the very opening of my autobiography, of the direction that my life was to go through, the upheavals in the history of these past ninety years: both the ones that it fell to me to live through as a more or less consciously implicated witness and the ones I witnessed at some distance and, occasionally, sheltered from their disastrous consequences.

Of course, what such upheavals meant to me during my childhood days and the awareness I acquired of them later, I can only recount on the basis of what I learned from subsequent study or from what I was told by my parents and friends. Broadly speaking, we all have great difficulty remembering the events of our childhood days; this is a phenomenon explained by the unrelenting creation of new neurons, neurogenesis, which enables children to learn more and more things but that wipes away their memorieseven their most personal ones. This is all the more true of the memories that might be left behind by the upheavals generated by the class struggle and the survival instinct in childish minds before the onset of adolescence.

Being cognizant of that difficulty, how can I sum up the most important events from my childhood yearsafter my parents, a father from Aragon and a mother from Catalonia, conceived me on the island of Minorca, where they had set up a year or two before my birth, driven by my fathers passion for rationalist education and a sort of an instinctive calling to a social apostolate that my mother shared with him? How am I to explain, from memory, how that apostolate was marked throughout by an advocacy of freedom and equality for all?

Later, as an adolescent, as my own conscious life was starting to assert its autonomy, I began to understand that influence on my developing mind, how my thinking and self-awareness and the feelings were shaped by them. Nevertheless, the likeliest thing is that those events and their meaning took shape as recollections in my mind after what I learned later or heard said about my parents, and it was on the basis of such neuronal synthesis that I have been able to remember them.

There isno question about ita passing-on such as occurs between one generation and the next, which also requires a written and oral record before it can constitute a remembrance. Consequently, being certain that anything I might recount from those times would be a construct rather than an authentic memory, it strikes me as more logical to leave the responsibility there up to Agustn Not just out of honesty, but also for consideration of coherence, the aim being the sort of transparency that should govern the drafting of an autobiography.

My autobiographical narrative opens, therefore, in my adolescent years, when I was a student at secondary level and at preparatory school in Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz state in the Mexican Republic.