Howard Fast - Spain and Peace

Spain and Peace

Howard Fast

Spain and Peace

By Howard Fast

H OW will people describe Spain when the story of our time is told? Are there cold facts, figures, statistics to measure the heart of the Spanish people, to define their passionate love for freedom, to measure their dignity, to weigh their strength? It is such a long time since the Spanish struggle began that sometimes it seems as if all our lives have been lived against the background of their unending resistance. And as so many here in America surrender their consciences, the role of the Spanish people becomes even more glorious and more accusing of those who abandoned them.

Spain fights on, and in those three words there is a miracle. It is my purpose here to tell something about this miracle and what it means to us; for there is no question but that it has meaning. There is no Spanish worker, professional, intellectual or peasant who strikes a blow for freedom without our being intimately concerned. We must understand this.

On the 12th of March, in 1951, an event occurred in Spain that was without precedent in our era. That is a good point to begin any story about Spain today.

Yet there must be a background.

You cannot simply say that on the 12th of March, 300,000 Spanish workers downed their tools in one of the strangest, most militant and most glorious strikes of modern times. It wasnt simply a strike in the terms we know and understand. It was a strike in a land where strikes had been outlawed for years, a land of terror, fascist dictatorship, a land of the firing squad, the whip and the concentration camp.

Yet in this land for two days and for two nights, beginning in the early morning of March 12th, 300,000 strikers paralyzed the industrial and commercial life of Barcelona, Badalona, Sabadel, Tarrassa, Mataro, Pueblo Nuevo, and other Catalonian cities.

Anyone who has ever participated in a strike knows that such things cannot arise spontaneously. They must be planned, calculated, deliberated upon, organized down to the last detail. How does one plan, deliberate, organize, and lead such a mighty movement as this in a land which has lived under the official hood of fascist darkness for twelve years? The answer is contained in the great heart and soul and the indomitable spirit of the Spanish people.

THE SPANISH PEOPLE AND AMERICA

One cannot write, even in passing, about Spain and the Spanish struggle without linking it with America. There is a mighty interconnection in mans struggle for freedom, a singleness of purpose and endeavor which binds together those who struggle for human liberation, whatever land they live in, whatever tongue they speak, whatever race bears them. But particularly is this true of the Spanish struggle and the place it occupies in the hearts of the American people. The Lincoln Brigade, enlisted here in the United States, and which went to fight on the soil of Spainso many of them to die on the soil of Spain in the cause of Spanish freedomwas not an accident of history. Quite to the contrary: the Lincoln Brigade was part of the deepest and the most splendid logic of the history of the United States. It was proof apparent and proof absolute that the heritage of American freedom was part of the heritage of all free men, and this proof was spelled out in blood and signed with the death of many gallant young Americans.

There is hardly a town or hamlet in all of our land that did not give one of its sons to this unforgettable group. And when Franco, like a bloated spider who feasts on human blood and human hopes, took over with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini the whole of Spain, the cause of the Spanish people was not forgotten here in America. When the monstrous hoax of non-intervention was invented by the governments of the West, including our own, to prevent the Spanish Republic from buying arms to defend itself against this aggression of fascism, the cause of Spain had become woven into the fabric of our lives. It was deeply understood by the simplest and most isolated of Americansbecause it was a cause akin to that for which their own ancestors had fought and died in their own struggles for liberation.

In the years that followed, a national organization was created to bring aid and relief to the hundreds of thousands of Spanish fighters, workers and intellectuals and mothers and children too, who had never laid down their arms, never surrendered, but had fled across the Pyrenees into southern Franceso that at some future time they might fight again in the cause of freedom. This organization became known as the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and for a full decade it has occupied a singular and fine place in American history. It was an organization which involved in its work tens of thousands of the best Americans. It built hospitals; it sent an unending flow of medical supplies, food and clothing to the Spanish Republican exiles. But more importantly even than these very important things, it has kept alive in the hearts of the American people the glory and the wonder of Spanish resistance to tyranny.

For many years I had the honor to be associated with the executive board of this committee. To them as to me, it was no surprise when in 1946 the Government instituted its present terror with an attack against the board members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. In the years that followed, our case became internationally known, and many thousands of the American people came to our support. In spite of this, we were sentenced to prison; and thirteen of us served prison terms because we had persisted in the cause of Spains freedom.

I mention this in terms of the continuity I spoke of before. The Spanish struggle and the American struggle are inseparable. Since the first moves of the House Committee on Un-American Activities against the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, a whole series of actionscalculated actionshave been instituted by the Truman government to build and cement an alliance between Franco Spain and the United States of America.

Today as I write, this alliance is quite complete. American military and economic missions are swarming all over Spain, checking on bases, reviewing Falangist troop maneuvers, studying plants, mines, statistics. Airfields have been built in every corner of the land and ports on all coasts have been widened and modernizedunder U.S. military direction. American money pours into Spain in an endless stream so that Franco and his satraps may live in ease and comfort, regardless of how their people suffer. And through the less direct labyrinth of high finance, American corporations have won commanding positions in the Spanish fields of petroleum, the production and distribution of electric power, the communications and transportation systems and the production of strategic metalstungsten, zinc, wolfram, mercury and aluminum. Before World War II the Nazis controlled the chemical, pharmaceutical and metallurgical industries of Spain; today control of these industries has passed to their conquerors, the Americans. Slowly, the British and French beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan are being pushed out of their monopolist positions in Spain.