Fallece a los 100 años el último voluntario de la Brigada Lincoln

Del New York Times (3.3.16)

Delmer Berg, the last known living veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which vainly fought against Fascism’s advance into Spain in the late 1930s, died on Sunday at his home in Columbia, Calif. He was 100.

His death was confirmed by Marina Garde, the executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives in New York, who said Mr. Berg was believed to have been the only survivor left of the nearly 3,000 quixotic young Americans who volunteered for the Spanish Civil War in a bloody prelude to World War II. About 800 of those who volunteered were believed to have been killed.

Documental y entrevista sobre mujeres estadounidenses en la guerra civil

Into the Fire (2002) es una película documental, dirigida por Julia Newman y disponible para ver en Google Video, sobre las 80 mujeres estadounidenses que se juntaron con los casi 3.000 hombres voluntarios en la guerra civil. El documental incluye entrevistas con Martha Gellhorn, corresponsal conocida de guerra y tercera esposa del escritor Ernest Hemingway. Bajo el vídeo he puesto una entrevista extensa entre la directora y Amy Goodman, que dirige el programa radiofónico Democracy Now. Se puede escuchar y descargar el mismo programa en un archivo mp3, que fue emitido el 30 de abril de 2007. Un dato interesante es que los padres de la directora apoyaron la causa republicana en la guerra civil, y fue, en parte, lo que le motivó a investigar las historias desconocidas de estas mujeres valientes.




De: democracynow.org

Fighting Fascism: The Americans–Women and Men–Who Fought In the Spanish Civil War

In July 1936, rightwing military officers led by fascist General Franco attempted to overthrow the newly elected democratic government of Spain. Hitler and Mussolini quickly joined in support of Franco. In response, nearly 3,000 Americans defied the US government to volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War, they called themselves Abraham Lincoln Brigade. We speak with two surviving veterans, Moe Fishman and Clarence Kailin. We also play excepts form the documentary “Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War” and speak with filmmaker Julia Newman.

“No man ever entered the earth more honorably than those who died in Spain.” Those are the words of Ernest Hemingway. He was referring to the Americans who volunteered for the Spanish Civil War, the first major battle against fascism.

In July 1936, rightwing military officers led by General Franco attempted to overthrow the newly elected democratic government of Spain. Hitler and Mussolini quickly joined in support of Franco. The Spanish Civil War lasted until 1939. Half a million people are believed to have died on all sides.

Yesterday in New York, hundreds gathered to honor an exhibit at the museum of the City of New York called “Facing Fascism.” Among those there was Julia Newman who made the film, "Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War. The film begins with Martha Gellhorn, a world-renowned war correspondent. She was the third wife of Ernest Hemingway.

* “Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War”–excerpt of documentary. Courtesy, First Run Features.

Ruth Davidow–one of the nearly 80 American women who fought in the Spanish Civil War. They joined over 2,700 of their countrymen in defiance of their government to volunteer for what was known as the “Good Fight.” The Americans who fought fascism in Spain called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Today, an hour on the Spanish Civil War and the Americans–women and men–who fought in it.

* Julia Newman, producer and director of “Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War”.
* Clarence Kailin, one of the surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
* Moe Fishman, one of the surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He is executive secretary of the * Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades*.

AMY GOODMAN: “No man ever entered the earth more honorably than those who died in Spain.” Those are the words of Ernest Hemingway. He was referring to the Americans who volunteered for the Spanish Civil War, the first major battle against fascism.

In July 1936, rightwing military officers led by General Franco attempted to overthrow the newly elected democratic government of Spain. Hitler and Mussolini quickly joined in support of Franco. The Spanish Civil War lasted until 1939. Half a million people are believed to have died on all sides.

Yesterday in New York, hundreds gathered to honor an exhibit at the museum of the City of New York called “Facing Fascism.” Among those there was Julia Newman, who made the film, Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War. The film begins with Martha Gellhorn, a world-renowned war correspondent. She was the [third] wife of Ernest Hemingway.

MARTHA GELLHORN: I was in Germany in 1936 and could not avoid seeing these headlines about the “red swine dogs” in Spain. I had been in Spain, but I knew nothing about what had happened, that the king had gone, that there was a republic, but all I needed was to read in a German paper that it was the red swine dogs to know whose side I was on: theirs.

VIRGINIA COWLES: “In spite of numerous and conflicting political terms used to classify the Spanish conflict, the fundamental issue lies neither between republicanism and fascism nor between communism and monarchism. Mainly and simply it is a war between the proletariat and the upper classes.”

MARTHA GELLHORN: The Spanish called it “la Causa”—the cause—and it was the cause. It was the place where, of course, the Second World War could have been stopped, because it was a tryout for both Hitler and Mussolini.

RUTH DAVIDOW: By nonintervention, we were actually helping the fascists, because they were getting materials from everywhere. Everybody knew that. And to me, we didn’t really believe in our democracy. It really shattered me. So I made that decision almost overnight.

AMY GOODMAN: Ruth Davidow, one of the nearly eighty American women who fought in the Spanish Civil War. They joined over 2,700 of their countrymen here in the United States, in defiance of the US government, to volunteer for what was known as “the Good Fight.” The Americans who fought fascism in Spain called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. That clip was from an excerpt of Into the Fire, that began with the third wife of Ernest Hemingway, the premier war correspondent Martha Gellhorn.

Julia Newman is the producer and director of that film, joining us in the studio today. Explain the significance of these women joining US men in going to fight for Spain, why you did this documentary.

JULIA NEWMAN: They were extraordinary people, but they were ordinary people who had found their way to a cause that caught their heart. And this is part of my own background. My parents were supporters of the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and they had friends who fought and died in Spain. And I realized that I knew nothing about the fact that there were eighty women who had gone to Spain as volunteers to serve, primarily as medicals, in support of the international brigades. And I wanted that history to be known.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who Martha Gellhorn was.

JULIA NEWMAN: Martha Gellhorn was a writer and correspondent and a novelist who was quite well known in this country for a book she had written about the sufferings of the Americans under the Depression called The Trouble I’ve Seen. And Spain was her first foreign war, her first war of any kind, and she went there to see what was happening to the Spaniards in that war. She went there with Hemingway. Actually, she followed him there. They had agreed to go together. And she began reporting from the fronts. She had never been a war correspondent before and was very caught up in the cause.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go now to another clip of the film. The most famous attack in the Spanish Civil War came in 1937, almost seventy years ago to the day in the town of Guernica. At 4:40 p.m. on the 26th of April, 1937, German and Italian war planes carpet-bombed the Basque town. Three-quarters of Guernica was destroyed, and as many as 1,600 civilians were killed. The attack was immortalized in Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” one of the most iconic paintings of the twentieth century. Franco claimed the attack on Guernica never took place and was, in fact, republican propaganda. This is how Virginia Cowles, a correspondent for the New York Times, described the incident. Her words are read by an actor.

VIRGINIA COWLES: "Dictators will keep agreements only as long as they are profitable. They will maintain order only as long as might forces them to. They will talk peace only until the day when they think they can make a war and win it.

"When I arrived, a press officer asked if I had been subjected to the Guernica propaganda, declaring that everyone knew that Guernica was not bombed by the whites, but burned by the reds.

“Guernica was a lonely chaos of timber and brick. One old man was inside an apartment house that had four sides to it, but an interior that was only a sea of bricks. I asked him if he had been in Guernica during the destruction. He nodded his head and declared that the sky had been black with planes. ’Aviones,” he said, ‘italianos y alemanes.’ The press officer turned pale. ‘Guernica was burned,’ he contradicted. The old man stuck to his point, insisting that after a four-hour bombardment, there was little left to burn. The press officer moved me away. ’He’s a red,’ he said.

“When later in the day we ran into two staff officers, he brought the subject up. ‘Guernica is full of reds,’ he said. ‘They all try to tell us it was bombed, not burned.’ ‘Of course, it was bombed,’ said one of the officers. ‘We bombed it and bombed it and bombed it. And bueno, why not?’ The press officer never mentioned Guernica again.”

AMY GOODMAN: Virginia Cowles, she was writing for the New York Times. This, from the film Into the Fire. Julia Newman, the significance of what was being said at the time?

JULIA NEWMAN: Well, Virginia Cowles got to Guernica right after the bombing and was shown around Guernica by a press agent, and Franco was putting out propaganda that said that anarchists had burned, had set fire to the city and that the Italians and the Germans had nothing to do with the destruction of the city. And Virginia Cowles got there and put the lie to that. She said what she saw, and what she saw was that the town had been just destroyed by German aircraft, primarily. And it was a revelation.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting that recently in the New York Times, in reference to the exhibit, “Facing Fascism,” that they put the term “international fascism” in quotes, when you have here Virginia Cowles so powerful in describing fascism.

JULIA NEWMAN: It’s a bizarre thing to do all these years later, to say that international fascism is something that you would even begin to put in quotes. It was very real, and for a lot of people it continues to be that.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, the “Guernica,” the famous painting by Pablo Picasso, is also in reproduction in a tapestry at the United Nations. And listeners and viewers may remember right before the invasion of Iraq, when Colin Powell came to the United Nations to push for war, February 5, 2003, the tapestry of “Guernica” was shrouded so that that famous image of war, Picasso’s antiwar painting, would not be the backdrop of the news conferences of the US officials. When we come back, we’ll be joined by two survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Robeson singing “Freedom,” the great singer Paul Robeson, a great supporter of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and those who went to fight in Spain, on this seventy-first anniversary of the beginning of that war, the seventieth anniversary of the bombing of Guernica. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

I want to turn to the words of one of the surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Clarence Kailin. He’s ninety-two now. I interviewed Clarence a month ago at the Barrymore Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you a pacifist?

CLARENCE KAILIN: Oh, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: But you fought in the Spanish Civil War?

CLARENCE KAILIN: Yeah. Well, that takes a bit of an explanation, that we were fighting against fascism. And we were political enough to understand that, so it wasn’t for an adventure, and it wasn’t for money. It was fighting against Italy and Italian fascism and German Nazism, is what it was about. And we felt that if we lost the war, that World War II was pretty much inevitable, which is what happened. And it happened because Britain and France and the United States refused to give us any help at all. And so, we fought bare-handed at times.

AMY GOODMAN: Why didn’t the US intervene? And why did you go over as an American citizen without your government?

CLARENCE KAILIN: Well, yeah, our passports were stamped “not valid for travel in Spain,” so we had to go quietly, not tell people we were going. And we went because we understood what was happening over there, that Germany and Italy were both invading Spain and—two fascist countries—and so we went to stop fascism. This is what it was about.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you go with anyone you knew?

CLARENCE KAILIN: Yes, I did. I went with—there were six of us: two from Madison, two of us, and four from Milwaukee. And we went together.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you come back together?

CLARENCE KAILIN: No. I came back alone. It was sad, because I lost my best friend, who was a very famous scientist, even at a young age. And he was killed right at the end of the fighting. It was a very—it was a great shock to everybody.

AMY GOODMAN: You were injured also?

CLARENCE KAILIN: Yeah. I had a machine-gun bullet in my right elbow.

AMY GOODMAN: In the same fight where you lost your friend?

CLARENCE KAILIN: No. He died later on, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What was his name?

CLARENCE KAILIN: John Cookson. Yeah, well, I wrote a book about him. And, well, his story is in there.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s the book called?

CLARENCE KAILIN: It’s called “Remembering John Cookson,” yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: How old was he when he died?

CLARENCE KAILIN: Huh?

AMY GOODMAN: How old was he when he died?

CLARENCE KAILIN: Oh, about twenty-four. And the Spanish people felt that this book was so important that it was translated into Spanish, and they published it there, a Spanish edition. So I was happy with that.

AMY GOODMAN: When you came back to the United States, how were you received here?

CLARENCE KAILIN: Well, that depends. Coolly in many areas and, you know, our friends were very supportive. It was nice, but difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: Why coolly, and by who?

CLARENCE KAILIN: Well, you know, there was so much propaganda against us. And, well, that’s how public opinion was affected, you know? Although during the war, I think that about two-thirds of the public was supportive of what we were doing there. Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Why was it called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade?

CLARENCE KAILIN: Well, I guess they thought—the people who named it, I think they thought Lincoln was one of the great leaders, one of the best presidents we’ve had. And I agree with that.

AMY GOODMAN: Clarence Kailin, he’s ninety-two. He’s a survivor of the Spanish Civil War. I spoke to him in Madison, Wisconsin, though he was here in New York for the major event yesterday honoring those who fought in the Spanish Civil War. It happened at the City University of New York in the Museo del Barrio. And in a moment we’re going to be going to Harry Belafonte, who spoke there, but right now, one of those who attended is another Abraham Lincoln Brigade survivor: Moe Fishman, executive secretary of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, joining us in the firehouse studio. Welcome.

MOE FISHMAN: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us, Moe. Talk about that time seventy-one years ago: the significance of the Spanish Civil War and how it relates to World War II. Do you think World War II would have happened if the outcome in the Spanish Civil War had been different?

MOE FISHMAN: I say no, and I’m reinforced by the fact that all of the Lincoln Brigade veterans felt the same way and all of the International Brigade felt the same way. The International Brigade, of which we were a part, consisted of about 40,000 to 45,000 volunteers from fifty-two countries who came to the aid of the Spanish Republic, and I want to emphasize “came to the aid of.” It was the Spanish Republic and their people who fought this war and deserved the major credit for the big fight that they put up, which gave the democracies a two-and-a-half-year window of opportunity to change from a policy of appeasing fascism, led by Chamberlain of Britain and subscribed to by Roosevelt, to one of actively fighting fascism. If they had actively fought fascism in 1936-1939, we would have stopped Hitler, and there would have been no World War II.

AMY GOODMAN: How would you have stopped Hitler? This was Spain. This was Franco. How would you have stopped Hitler?

MOE FISHMAN: Well, Hitler had been appeased by—they permitted him to rearm Germany, and it was done with the finances of both Britain and the United States, the financiers—financed it on credit—that permitted Hitler to march into Austria. And then Spain came along, and they were letting him do as he felt in Spain with this policy of appeasement. If they had turned to fighting fascism and opposing what he was doing, Hitler would not have attempted a two-front war, which he was trying like mad to avoid. He would not have been armed as much as he became armed, when he conquered one country after another and built a war machine that almost succeeded in conquering the world. And he would have been stopped if there had been a conflict, and there might have been. He might have been rash enough to start something there. He would have had a two-front war to confront, and it would have been a minor kind of war. It would not have been World War II, where fascism almost won, and 60 million dead and destruction beyond compare. And, no, there would have been no Holocaust, if Hitler had been stopped in Spain in 1936-39.

AMY GOODMAN: Moe Fishman, I want to turn to another excerpt of the film Into the Fire. This clip begins with a narrator reading the words of Eleanor Roosevelt and ends with the words of Ernest Hemingway.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: “Three very interesting people came to dine with us last night: Ms. Martha Gellhorn, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, both writers, and Mr. Joris Ivens, a [inaudible] maker of films. After dinner, the two men showed us a film which they made. The profits are going into the purchase of ambulances to help the sick and dying in a part of the world which is at present war-torn.”

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: The men, who never fought before, who were not trained in arms, who only wanted work and food, fight on.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the voice of Ernest Hemingway in this film called The Spanish Earth. But Roosevelt would not arm the Spanish government.

MOE FISHMAN: He joined in the Non-Intervention Committee. He didn’t join the committee, but he agreed with them, and he enforced an embargo in the United States which called for no arms being sold to the republic. Let me remind you, the republic didn’t want volunteers. The republic didn’t want anybody to join them. All they asked for is what was happening normally in the world at that time, where a democracy could just buy arms for money from another democracy. And this Non-Intervention Committee, formed by Chamberlain, agreed to by Roosevelt, so Roosevelt has an embargo and will not sell arms to Spain, will not sell them any trucks, and so on and so forth. And this—if they had simply sold the arms, the Spanish Republic would have beaten the fascists.

AMY GOODMAN: Julia Newman, Eleanor Roosevelt disagreed with her husband. Eleanor Roosevelt was a close friend of Martha Gellhorn, the war correspondent.

JULIA NEWMAN: Yes. She did everything she could to help convince FDR to go against the embargo. Ultimately, he was too politically frightened—I guess isn’t too strong a word. He was a consummate politician, and he did not want to alienate what he saw as a collection of powerful lobbies in this country who were primarily Catholic, but who were pro-Franco. There was a strong movement here that was pro-Franco, along with the fact that most Americans were not.

AMY GOODMAN: Led by a powerful radio talk show host.

JULIA NEWMAN: Named Father Coughlin, yes. Father Coughlin was the radio priest, and he was quite rabid in rallying his listenership to Franco, to the right.

AMY GOODMAN: Moe Fishman, you are ninety-one years old right now. You fought in the Spanish—

MOE FISHMAN: A young ninety-one.

AMY GOODMAN: Very young. You fought in the Spanish Civil War.

MOE FISHMAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: When you came back, it was World War II, yet many of you were vilified. The FBI called you “premature anti-fascists”?

MOE FISHMAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: What does that mean?

MOE FISHMAN: It means that you understood fascism before everybody else. They tried to make it a nasty word. For, unfortunately, most American historians, World War—fascism, the fight against fascism in the United States doesn’t begin—World War II doesn’t begin until Pearl Harbor. This way, they avoid dealing with the Spanish Civil War, dealing with the fact that Roosevelt, President of the United States, was wrong on this question, that World War II could have been prevented. He could have been one to do it. And secondly, we were dubbed “reds.” It’s not true that all who fought against fascism were reds then, were reds while the fight was going on in World War II, and are reds today.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of that, I want to turn to another clip of Into the Fire: the women who fought. Into the Fire includes the voices of many American women who volunteered for the Spanish Civil War. Decades later, they described why they joined.

EVELYN HUTCHINS: I couldn’t be a nurse. I wasn’t a nurse. I couldn’t be a doctor, because I wasn’t a doctor. And I wanted to go. And I was doing a lot of driving. I helped to collect clothes and to advertise what was happening in Spain. And that’s what gave me the idea in the first place. If I could do that here, I could do it in Spain just as well. And that would replace some man who would then be able to do what I really wanted to do, which is go up front.

HELEN FREEMAN: I met some friends and went to a meeting. And the meeting was called to aid Spanish democracy. All the different unions were supporting the group. They asked for nurses and doctors and volunteers to go to Spain. And so, I volunteered. They called us in and started organizing the trip. Meeting with the different people who were going, like Fredericka Martin, Lini DeVries, and my friend Anne Taft, who was graduated from the same school that I did. People had to resign from their jobs. Most of us were young nurses. And so, that’s why they had meetings to teach the young people what to expect when they get over there. How are you going to cope under these difficult situations? Can they do a good job while they leave responsibilities at home? Anyway, January 16, 1937, we left for Spain.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I think, basically, it was because I was a nurse that I was very upset about the kind of things that were happening, not only to Jews in Germany, people in Spain and people in Ethiopia. And, you know, for a while, I thought this had nothing to do with us, that these people had to fight their own battles. I was against another world war. I was sort of an isolationist without thinking about it. But as things got worse, and when they went into a country that just had democratically elected a new government, and our own government, which said they were democratic and believe in elections, put an embargo on them. I was terribly upset.

SALARIA KEA: I was not a political person, because you shifted too much.

See, I didn’t know about fascism. Here’s the thing that brought everything to me. It was the way Germany was treating the Jews. I never really thought that white people do against white people, because we don’t look at you as French or Italian. You’re white. I have met a lot of Jewish people who had left Germany, and they told us about what Hitler was doing to them. It was like the Ku Klux Klan. So now, we’re matching what is happening in Germany to the Jews to us here in the United States. So I went downtown to this meeting, and the meeting was all these people from foreign countries, and they said to me that they hoped to go to work with the republican side. So they said, “Would you like to go with us?” I said yes. The next thing I knew, I was accepted to go to Spain.

CELIA GREENSPAN: Personally, I went because my husband was there, and I got to Madrid early in October. And I felt I had a skill and I could work there, I could do or contribute to the fight against fascism that we knew was taking place.

ESTHER SILVERSTEIN: Oh, it was all around me, from the time the war started. By that time, I wasn’t exactly politicized, but I was certainly aware. And I was in the United States Public Health Service, the Marine hospital that took care of the various trade unions from the waterfront early in 1937. I volunteered to the Spanish War Relief Organization. I had to pass an examination. And they wanted to be sure that they weren’t sending out an adventurist. I was sort of overweight, and I wore glasses. I wore my hair in a bun. And it’s hardly likely I would look like an adventurist, but just the same. And they all passed me, and I went on to New York and joined up with a group of people from Chicago and here and there.

IRENE GOLDIN: Somebody mentioned that nurses were needed in Spain, and I decided I would apply. And I was accepted immediately, and I was to leave in one month. There was one question that asked, “Why do you want to go to Spain?” And I all I wrote was, “To fight against fascism.” And I was accepted.

AMY GOODMAN: The voices of women. Almost eighty fought or went to Spain to participate in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. Moe Fishman, we heard an African American nurse describing her experience. What about the forces, the veterans being integrated, those who fought, the volunteers?

MOE FISHMAN: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was the first American military unit that was completely integrated. We had officers, we had ordinary soldiers, sergeants, etc. It didn’t happen in World War II, where the black brothers from the United States fought so valiantly with white officers, and it didn’t happen until Truman in 1948 integrated the United States Army by an official decree. He didn’t dare go to Congress to do it.

I want to make one more point. Fascism, the word has been bandied about a lot, and I want people to remember that it is not just the racist aspect of fascism. If you want to understand fascism, it is the negation of everything that is democratic. It makes it impossible to have a trade union, a neighborhood organization, to fight for civil liberties. It is a system that is terrible.

And in conclusion, I would like to tell you that there is a monument that we’re very proud of that’s going up in the San Francisco on the Embarcadero, and if you would like to send some funds, get on your computer and contact www.alba-valb.com. And thank you. We’d appreciate any contribution you make.

AMY GOODMAN: Dot-org, is that?

MOE FISHMAN: Yes, dot-org.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you so much, Moe Fishman, executive secretary of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, and Julia Newman, who directed and produced Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War. When we come back, Harry Belafonte, he honored the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade here in New York yesterday.

Documental: "Almas sin fronteras"

De: Kaosenlared.net via Teimagino.com

Homenaje a las Brigadas internacionales: La historia de la Brigada Abraham Lincoln
Almas sin fronteras, un documental de Alfonso Domingo y Anthony L. Geist que rescata de la memoria a los brigadistas norteamericanos que lucharon en España durante la Guerra Civil con los republicanos

Pacogarabato | Para Kaos en la Red | 26-11-2009 a las 10:03 | 347 lecturas

Este documental ha localizado a 12 de los 2.800 voluntarios norteamericanos que lucharon en España contra las tropas de Franco. Embarcaron en Nueva York en diciembre de 1936 y el Gobierno de la República, cumpliendo acuerdos internacionales, los despidió en marzo de 1938 en Barcelona. En la Guerra Civil española murieron más de mil. El resto del contingente, el primero en la historia de los Estados Unidos donde negros y blancos lucharon sin ningún tipo de segregación racial, fueron muriendo a lo largo de los últimos setenta años. Este documental recorre la geografía norteamericana buscando a esos únicos supervivientes, protagonistas de una gesta que luchaba en España junto a otros 30.000 voluntarios procedentes de 54 países de los 66 que en aquel momento estaban reconocidos por la Sociedad de Naciones. En sus intervenciones en Almas sin fronteras los brigadistas norteamericanos narran fundamentalmente las motivaciones que les llevaron a luchar contra el fascismo en España. La crisis del 29 en Estados Unidos les hizo conscientes de que algo estaba ocurriendo en Europa. Se embarcaron para luchar en un país que ni siquiera conocían, pese a que el Gobierno estadounidense les había prohibido expresamente tomar parte en la guerra española para luchar contra el fascismo emergente en el Viejo Continente. Estaban convencidos de que si lograban detener a Franco evitarían la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Junto a los ancianos brigadistas participan en el documental dos de los historiadores norteamericanos que más han estudiado el fenómeno de las brigadas: el profesor Peter Carroll, de la Universidad de San Francisco, y el profesor Anthony L. Geist, de la Universidad de Washington.

En la Guerra Civil Española, las Brigadas Internacionales eran unas unidades compuestas por voluntarios extranjeros de 54 países de todo el mundo que lucharon junto al ejército leal a la República española frente al dirigido por el general Franco, que era ayudado por los ejércitos regulares de Alemania e Italia.

En total, según los datos manejados por los estudios realizados en Estados Unidos por los amigos de la Brigada Lincoln, llegaron a participar 59.380 brigadistas extranjeros, de los cuales murieron 9.934, aunque en realidad el total de militantes fue de 35.252, no habiendo nunca más de 20.000 hombres en total. La nacionalidad más numerosa fue siempre la francesa, con una cifra cercana a los 10.000 hombres, buena parte de ellos de la zona de París. La mayoría no eran soldados, sino trabajadores reclutados por los partidos comunistas voluntariamente o veteranos de la Primera Guerra Mundial.

Su base se encontraba en Albacete. Las Brigadas participaron en la defensa de Madrid en 1936, las batallas del Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete, Belchite, Teruel, Aragón y el Ebro, siendo retiradas a partir del 23 de septiembre de 1938, a fin de modificar la posición ante la intervención extranjera del Comité de No intervención.

"Los brigadistas ocultos"

Oliver Law, brigadista afroestadounidense

De: La Vanguardia
Visto en: Rebelión

El comandante Oliver Law fue el primer afroamericano al mando de un batallón norteamericano; muchos de los brigadistas negros que combatieron en España procedían del Partido Comunista estadounidense

Los brigadistas ocultos

Cumplidos ya los setenta años del fin de la Guerra Civil, quedan todavía episodios oscuros de aquella contienda que apenas son conocidos. Entre estos, la peripecia de los brigadistas negros que, procedentes de Estados Unidos, se enrolaron para luchar en defensa de la República española. La fotógrafa, ensayista y crítica de arte Mireia Sentís (de cuya obra se presenta una retrospectiva en el Arts Santa Mònica, hasta el 10 de enero) descubrió el rastro de estos brigadistas en Nueva York, investigó su historia y la relata ahora para 'Cultura|s'

MIREIA SENTÍS | 07/10/2009 | Actualizada a las 03:31h | Cultura

En el año 2002, en un garaje de bicicletas del Lower East Side de Nueva York, encontré un par de cajas abarrotadas de libros. Un letrero de cartón, con letras a lápiz, rezaba: "50 centavos". Entre ellos, descubrí Mississippi to Madrid. Memoirs of a black american in the Spanish Civil War. A lo largo de sus páginas, James Yates (1906-1993) relata el camino que le condujo desde las tierras sureñas estadounidenses hasta la guerra civil española. Polizón a bordo de un tren, llegó a Chicago en plena adolescencia. El intenso frío que padeció como trabajador en las cámaras frigoríficas de un matadero le enseñó la primera lección de supervivencia.

Pero el interés de su libro no radica únicamente en la singular peripecia de Yates, ni en sus comentarios acerca de personajes como Carrillo, Negrín, Companys, Durruti, la Pasionaria o Malraux, sino en su propósito de rastrear la participación de los afroamericanos alistados en la brigada Lincoln, primera fuerza armada estadounidense no segregada de la historia. Muy al contrario de lo que ocurría en la vida diaria de su país, los brigadistas negros no se hallaban apartados de la colectividad.

En busca de documentación, acudí a la sede de la brigada Lincoln en Nueva York, un pequeño despacho decorado con carteles de la España republicana. Allí me recibió Mosess Fishman, secretario de la organización, uno de los muchos judíos - casi un tercio de sus integrantes-que combatieron en la Lincoln. Mientras seleccionaba libros y desgranaba recuerdos, sonó el teléfono. Al cabo de un rato, leoí transmitir su pésame y unas palabras de consuelo: "Dedicó toda su vida a luchar en favor de causas justas". Tras colgar el auricular, se levantó de su silla cojeando - otro recuerdo español-y se dirigió hacia el lugar donde colgaba la lista con los nombres de los veteranos. Tachó uno de ellos, y suspiró: "Pronto me tocará a mí". Fishman murió en el 2007, a los 92 años.

La participación de los negros estadounidenses en la contienda española apenas se comenzó a investigar a mediados de los años ochenta, coincidiendo con la publicación de Mississippi to Madrid. Hasta entonces, fueron los brigadistas menos visibles, no sólo en España, sino en su propio país. Desde una perspectiva histórica, las Brigadas Internacionales representan la primera experiencia de una fuerza voluntaria global movilizada por un mismo ideario. En total, cruzaron nuestra frontera unos 38.000 soldados, procedentes de 53 países. Los norteamericanos, congregados en la brigada Lincoln, sumaban unos tres mil. Su media de edad, 27 años, hacía de ellos los más jóvenes e inexpertos. Alrededor de un centenar eran negros, y aproximadamente la mitad de estos murieron o desaparecieron en las batallas del Jarama, Brunete, Belchite, Teruel y el Ebro. Unos cuantos reposan para siempre en tierra española.

Oliver Law fue sin duda el más destacado brigadista negro. Había luchado en la Primera Guerra Mundial y marcó un hito en la historia de su país cuando, en el curso de la Guerra Civil, se convirtió en el primer afroamericano al mando de un batallón norteamericano. Durante su visita a la brigada Lincoln, un coronel del ejército estadounidense le miró extrañado: "Veo que lleva usted uniforme de comandante". Hasta 1950, en la guerra de Corea, Estados Unidos no procedió a la integración de sus tropas. Law murió en uno de los episodios más sangrientos de la batalla de Brunete, cuando al frente de sus voluntarios intentaba tomar el cerro del Mosquito, en julio de 1937. Su sucesor, Doug Roach, no logró sobrevivir a la pulmonía que contrajo en España.

Cuando Franco encabezó el golpe de Estado contra la República, Estados Unidos continuaba sumido en la Depresión. Por todo el país proliferaban las hunger marches, manifestaciones contra el hambre, en solicitud de trabajo y ayudas estatales. En tales circunstancias, el Partido Comunista crecía con rapidez. Dentro de él, los afroestadounidenses constituían un grupo relativamente pequeño, pero muy comprometido. La mayoría de los voluntarios que combatieron en España procedían de sus filas. Los comunistas estaban convencidos de que toda posición radical contra la explotación exigía la unidad internacional.

En 1927, tras la celebración en Bruselas de una conferencia de la Liga contra la Opresión Colonial, en la que intervino una delegación afroamericana, no fueron pocos los que se pasaron a las filas comunistas. Además, el partido prestaba apoyo jurídico a la comunidad negra -como en el famoso caso de Scottboro Nine, en el que nueve jóvenes negros fueron acusados de violar en 1931 a dos mujeres blancas en Scottboro (Alabama)-, y auxiliaba a los desahuciados que de la noche a la mañana perdían su hogar y pasaban a poblar las aceras de las ciudades industriales. Por último, el partido patrocinaba la publicación de The Liberator, portavoz de los internacionalistas afroamericanos, cuyas páginas ponían de manifiesto las raíces comunes de la pobreza y el racismo.

El bombardeo de Etiopía durante la invasión de Mussolini en 1935 -poco antes de que Hitler rehusara entregar la medalla de oro al atleta negro Jesse Owens durante los Juegos Olímpicos de Berlín de 1936- supuso la plataforma de unión definitiva para la gente negra. El avance del fascismo en la antigua Abisinia afectaba directamente al conjunto de la comunidad afroamericana. La Iglesia Baptista Abisinia de Harlem, fundada en 1809, era una de las más importantes, y la invocación al país africano figuraba también en el himno de la Universal Negro Improvement Association, instituida en 1917 por Marcus Garvey bajo el lema "Regreso a África".La decisión de no intervención adoptada por la Sociedad de Naciones impulsó a muchos afroamericanos, ya fuesen nacionalistas, panafricanistas, internacionalistas, socialistas o comunistas, a alistarse como voluntarios. Sin embargo, Selassie, emperador de Etiopía, desistió de la idea de aceptar tropas extranjeras, al mismo tiempo que Estados Unidos declaraba ilegal, bajo pérdida de la ciudadanía norteamericana, el alistamiento en ejércitos de otros países. Los voluntarios decidieron entonces recaudar medicinas y alimentos, pero pronto comprobaron que tampoco la ayuda llegaba a su destino.

Aunque algunos líderes rechazaban la idea de que España y Etiopía formasen parte de la misma lucha, muchos intelectuales y artistas afroamericanos acogieron la causa republicana como propia. Veían a nuestro país como una extensión del problema etíope: el avance del fascismo. Periódicos negros -The Courrier, de Pittsburgh; The Afro-American, de Baltimore; The Daily World, de Atlanta; The Defender, de Chicago, The Amsterdam News, de Nueva York…- se declararon partidarios de la República española. Las colectas y campañas de apoyo a Etiopía fueron desviadas hacia nuestro país, y famosos músicos -Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Count Basie, W. C. Handy, Eubie Blake…- celebraron conciertos benéficos. Incluso Paul Robeson se trasladó a España en 1938, para dar ánimos a unas tropas ya por entonces bastante agotadas. Acerca de la revolución española, fue el título del primer escrito de James Baldwin, con sólo 12 años; al igual que Noam Chomsky, con apenas 10, oficiaría su bautismo literario con un artículo dedicado a la caída de Barcelona.

El corresponsal más seguido por los afroamericanos fue Langston Hughes, quien publicaba en The Afro-American, pero colaboraba también en el boletín de las Brigadas Internacionales, Volunteer for Liberty. Hughes se interesó especialmente por los marroquíes que peleaban al lado de Franco. Su poema Carta desde España muestra la perplejidad que le causaba el hecho de que un pueblo colonizado luchara junto a los insurgentes: "Hoy capturamos a un moro herido / Era tan oscuro como yo / Le dije, chico qué haces aquí / peleando contra gente libre?". Conoció a Lorca, a quien tradujo, y a Nicolás Guillén, junto al que viajó por primera vez a España; hablaba castellano, pues vivió parte de su adolescencia en México, país en el que residía su padre. Tras visitar Barcelona, Valencia y algunos frentes, se instaló durante seis meses en Madrid, donde coincidió, bajo las bombas, con Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender...

Aparte de Yates, otro brigadista afroamericano publicaría una autobiografía centrada en su experiencia española: Harry Haywood, autor de Black bolshevik. Se conserva, además, una importante colección epistolar de Kanute Frankson, nativo de Jamaica, así como un libro de poemas póstumo: Take no prisoners, de Ray Durem, a quien Hughes incluyó en la antología New negro poets. Durem se enamoró de una enfermera norteamericana en el hospital que la brigada instaló en Villa Paz, la antigua residencia de verano de Alfonso XIII en Saelices (Cuenca). Tuvieron una hija nacida en España, a la que llamaron Dolores, en honor de Dolores Ibárruri, la Pasionaria.

Alonzo Watson, el primer brigadista afroamericano caído en combate, fue rebautizado por sus compañeros como Crispus Attucks, nombre del primer negro caído en la guerra de la Independencia norteamericana de 1776. Algunos soldados procedían de familias mixtas de afroamericanos y nativoamericanos, como Oscar Hunter o Frank Alexander, siouxhablante. Salaria Kee, la única mujer negra presente en España, era una enfermera a quien la Cruz Roja había rechazado por prejuicios raciales. Hubo dos pilotos afroamericanos: el universitario Jim Peck y el diseñador aeronáutico Paul Williams. George Waters, el más joven, tenía 18 años y conducía ambulancias. Luchell McDaniels se ganó el sobrenombre de el Fantástico, porque lanzaba granadas como si se tratara de pelotas de béisbol. Burt Jackson, topógrafo y dibujante, colaboró a su regreso en las mejores publicaciones afronorteamericanas. Admiral Kilpatrick, que había estudiado durante cuatro años en la escuela Lenin de Moscú, perdió la pierna izquierda. A Tom Brown le salvó la vida el ser confundido con un soldado marroquí cuando por error se introdujo en las líneas enemigas.

Además del contingente afronorteamericano, unos dos mil afrocaribeños se integraron en diferentes batallones de las Brigadas Internacionales, incluida la Lincoln, caso de Pierre Duval -considerado cubano, a pesar de nacer en el sur de Francia, de padre africano y madre vasca, emigrantes primero a Cuba y luego a EE. UU.- o el puertorriqueño Carmelo Delgado, capturado y ejecutado por los sublevados. Arnold Donowa, odontólogo oriundo de Trinidad, fue el único médico negro de la brigada, y cuando regresó a Norteamérica continuó arreglando gratis los dientes a los veteranos. No quiero dejar de mencionar al californiano-nipón Jack Shirai, un cocinero sumamente apreciado, capaz de preparar los invariables garbanzos de tan diversas maneras que parecían cada vez un plato diferente. "Cuando volvamos a casa, montaré un restaurante en el que ninguno de vosotros tendrá que pagar", decía. Pese a las protestas de sus camaradas de la Lincoln, Shirai quiso probarse en la línea de fuego, encontrando la muerte en su primera contienda.

Acerca del trato que recibieron en España, los brigadistas negros coinciden: aunque por todas partes despertaban la curiosidad de la población nativa, nunca fueron tratados de modo diferente a sus compatriotas de piel blanca. Vaughn Love, oriundo de Chatanooga (Tennessee), relata que en cierta ocasión un campesino le ofreció un pañuelo para que se limpiara la cara. Cuando le explicó que era negro, el campesino le abrazó con estas palabras: "¡Ah, sí, los esclavos negros! Nosotros sólo estamos a un paso de serlo".

La perspectiva que aguardaba a los supervivientes -regresar a un país segregado, con un historial izquierdista y casi siempre sin pasaporte- no era precisamente halagüeña. Sin embargo, los ex combatientes de la brigada Lincoln formaron un grupo cohesionado, que ayudó a resistir el intenso acoso sufrido por sus miembros durante la era McCarthy. Los valb (Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade) mantuvieron una línea política clara y constante: permanecieron en contacto con los prisioneros políticos republicanos, se implicaron en la lucha contra el ejército nazi, combatieron por los derechos civiles, se opusieron a la guerra de Vietnam, a las intervenciones militares en Latinoamérica, al apartheid de Sudáfrica…

Al enrolarse, Yates lo hizo como los demás, es decir, de forma ilegal, e incluso con mayor dificultad que otros: "En Mississippi, a los negros no nos daban pasaporte". Ante la imposibilidad de obtener el visado norteamericano para España, la mayoría de los voluntarios pasaban por el despacho de las Brigadas Internacionales en París, dirigido por Josip Broz, el futuro presidente Tito de Yugoslavia. Luego, cruzaban clandestinamente los Pirineos al amparo de la noche. Aparte de conducir ambulancias y camiones de víveres, Yates fue chófer de Hughes y de Hemingway. Repatriado junto a otros heridos, tenía previsto alojarse con sus compañeros en unas habitaciones reservadas por la brigada Lincoln en Manhattan.

Al ser rechazado por el color de su piel, el resto del grupo, en solidaridad, se negó a alojarse en el hotel. La dura realidad del retorno, confiesa, le golpeó más fuerte que una bala española. Yates llegaría a dirigir la sede neoyorquina del Greenwich Village de la Asociación Nacional para el Progreso de la Gente de Color (NAACP), en la que Obama pronunció en julio del 2009 un importante discurso con motivo del centenario de su fundación. El autor de Mississippi to Madrid aún regresó en 1986 a España, donde pudo besar a una Pasionaria de 91 años y decirle: "¡Aquí estamos!". Era su respuesta a las palabras que la dirigente comunista pronunció en otoño de 1938 como despedida a las tropas internacionales: "Volved a nuestro lado. Aquí encontraréis patria los que no tenéis patria".

Entrevista con Dan Bessie, hijo de Alvah Bessie, brigadista del Lincoln

En El País:
ENTREVISTA: ALMUERZO CON... DAN BESSIE
"Pasé 40 fabulosos años en el cine sin ganar ni un duro"

J. M. MARTÍ FONT 14/10/2009

Dan Bessie (Vermont, 1932) es hijo de Alvah Bessie, personaje legendario donde los haya; miembro de la Brigada Lincoln en la Guerra Civil española, y uno de los llamados Diez de Hollywood, guionistas e intelectuales víctimas de la caza de brujas al inicio de la guerra fría, que acabaron en la cárcel y en la lista negra de los estudios cinematográficos por defender sus derechos democráticos; concretamente al silencio cuando fueron acusados de comunistas.

Está en Barcelona para ir al estreno de Hollywood contra Franco, el documental dirigido por Oriol Porta basado en el recorrido vital de Alvah Bessie que rescata el eco que la contienda española tuvo en la meca del cine. Un relato que pasa por la forzada "neutralidad" de los treinta a la euforia antifascista de los años de la II Guerra Mundial, para desembocar en la negra represión del macartismo.

A Dan, el forzado destierro a que fue sometido su padre, no le influyó a la hora de labrarse una carrera en Hollywood; primero como dibujante de animación, en los estudios MGM; luego con su propia productora. De esta parte central de su vida ha salido un libro que sintetiza en "cómo pasé 40 fabulosos años en el mundo del cine y nunca conseguí ganar ni un duro". Un tipo de vida que ha dejado atrás para instalarse junto a su esposa Jeanne Johnson, una inglesa que conoció por Internet, en la Francia más bella, en el pueblo de Brantome. Disfrutan de la vida. Los extraordinarios rovellons (níscalos) y el plato de chanquetes que abren el almuerzo son saboreados con parsimonia y delectación.

"Estoy más orgulloso de haber participado en la Guerra Civil española que de cualquier otra cosa que haya hecho en mis ochenta años", proclama el narrador, que no es otro que Alvah Bessie, al inicio de la cinta. Dan tenía cinco años cuando su padre partió hacia París, primero, y luego hacia España para unirse a la Brigada Lincoln. No tiene memoria de ese momento, pero sí de cuando regresó, hacia la Navidad de 1938. Era una familia de activistas. "Recuerdo aquel día con precisión. Mi padre quería contarlo todo en una hora".

La lubina salvaje y la ternera con setas obtienen una ovación. Joanna es adicta a la crema catalana, Dan opta por una sublime mousse de Jijona. "La mejor crema catalana que he probado", suelta Dan, "la comí en Hawai, aunque parezca mentira".

Durante el rodaje del documental, Dan estuvo en los parajes en los que tuvo lugar la batalla del Ebro.Estuvo donde El Campesino dirigía a las tropas republicanas. "Mi padre me contó que en un viaje a Francia, ya jubilado, fue al castillo de Chinon, donde Juana de Arco reconoció al delfín de Francia". Llovía a mares, explica, pero la verja estaba abierta. "Según bajó del coche, se abrió un claro y salió el sol. Visitó el lugar durante dos horas. Volvió al coche, las nubes se cerraron y volvió a diluviar". "Exactamente lo mismo me sucedió en el Ebro, en el balcón de El Campesino", asegura.

Entrevista a Oriol Porta, director de "Hollywood contra Franco"

Gracias a A.N., mi colega americano-valenciano, por esta noticia.

El filme documental Hollywood contra Franco, dirigido por Oriol Porta (prod. Francisco Boix, un fotógrafo en el infierno), se estrena el 16 de octubre en Madrid, y ya tengo ganas de verlo. Según la sinopsis en el sitio oficial de la película, Hollywood contra Franco "es un largometraje documental sobre el impacto que ejerció la Guerra Civil española en el cine americano. Desvela el apoyo de la mayoría de los artistas a la República y se muestran algunas de las más de 50 películas que Hollywood produjo con referencias a nuestra contienda."

El filme cuenta con la participación de figuras como la actriz Susan Sarandon, que, junto con su pareja Tim Robbins, es una notable voz activista en este país. Pero lo que es más significativo promete ser la indagación en la figura de Alvah Bessie. Bessie era brigadista, novelista y guionista de cine que luego fue perseguido e investigado por sus actividades supuestamente anti-estadounidenses. Bessie, que formó parte del llamado "Hollywood Ten," tuvo que aparecer ante el Congreso y su comisión de "Anti-American Activities" (¡la manía que tenemos por declarar lo que es patriótico o no!), pero se negó a "cantar" y fue sentenciado a pagar una multa de $1.000 y un año de prisión (fuente de información). El sitio oficial del filme nos ofrece una página especialmente dedicada a Bessie.

En cuanto vea la película, escribiré un post más detallado. Pero de momento os dejo con una reseña en inglés, de la revista Variety, y una entrevista en español con el director.

A War in Hollywood
Hollywood contra Franco (Documentary -- Spain - U.S.)
By DENNIS HARVEY

An Area de Television production in association with TVC, TVE, ICAA, ICIC. (International sales: Area de Television, Barcelona.) Produced by Lisa Berger, Cristina Mora. Executive producer, Oriol Porta. Directed by Oriol Porta. Written by Porta, Llorenc Soler, Isabel Andres.

With: Walter Bernstein, Dan Bessie, Moe Fishman, Roman Gubern, Arthur Laurents, Patrick McGilligan, Susan Sarandon, Lluis Soler.
(English, Spanish dialogue)

"A War in Hollywood" chronicles both the U.S. film industry's shifting portrayals of the Spanish Civil War and the unique life experiences of Alvah Bessie -- surely the only volunteer American combatant in that conflict who later suffered the brunt of the House on Un-American Activities' witch hunt as one of the notoriously blacklisted Hollywood Ten. First feature directorial effort by Spain-based docu producer Oriol Porta is a solidly crafted mix of personal narrative, archival clips and latter-day interview commentary that's well-suited for international broadcasters.

Pic paints the Great Depression as a period during which hardships and FDR's leadership encouraged liberal activism, though the many drawn to Communist Party membership (then at its peak of popularity Stateside) later found their youthful ideals used to tar and feather them. Bessie (who died in 1985) was among numerous Abraham Lincoln Brigade members who eagerly journeyed to battle fascism in Spain, returning from that dangerous, enthralling if unsuccessful sojourn to write scripts for Warners (including Oscar-nominated "Objective, Burma!") in the '40s.

But that career died when he was called before HUAC in 1947. After a prison term, he turned to journalism and print fiction. In 1967, he visited Spain for the first time in three decades to work on Jaime Camino's "Spain Again," the fictionalized tale of a U.S. doctor likewise returning to the country long after fighting Franco's forces there.

Interspersed with this life saga are excerpts from Hollywood's various takes on the Spanish Civil War and analysis of the politics behind them. "Blockade" (1938) was the only such feature made during the conflict itself, one that met with considerable opposition from U.S. conservatives inside and outside the industry. During WWII, it became much less controversial as a narrative element, since fighting fascism was now a nationwide patriotic concern.

Leading international anti-Franco voice Ernest Hemingway didn't like the film adaptations of his "For Whom the Bell Tolls" or "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," the latter notably suffering from new "friendly" U.S. attitudes toward Spain, which forced a watering-down of its political content. Arthur Laurents discusses "The Way We Were" (admitting Streisand's character was "a semi-disguised version of me") and Walter Bernstein talks about "The Front" -- two movies that dealt with '30s radicalism and McCarthyism.

"A War in Hollywood" also deploys considerable archival news footage to illustrate the times. Excerpts from Bessie's letters, diaries and books on the matter are read by Lluis Soler. Assembly is pro.

Camera (color/B&W, HD), David Garcia; editor, David Gutierrez; music, Carles Pedragosa; sound, Javier Garcia, Fernando Novillo, Pere Aguilar. Reviewed at Montreal World Film Festival (Documentaries of the World), Sept. 5, 2009. Running time: 92 MIN.

Entrevista a Oriol Porta from Amiconi on Vimeo.

Web sobre estadounidenses en la guerra civil

Americans in the Spanish Civil War es una web sumamente detallada, cuyo propósito es servir de catálogo íntegro para aquellos voluntarios estadounidenses que defendieron la causa republicana en la guerra civil. La web aún está en proceso de agregar datos biográficos de los voluntarios, pero de momento el autor del blog ha podido incorporar más de 400 fotografías y según sus propias estadísticas, ha podido confirmar más de 2.500 voluntarios en sus listas.

La web también cuenta con unos enlaces interesantísimos a documentos íntegros relacionados con las Brigadas Internacionales. Uno de los textos es el "Full Text of 'Investigation of Communist Activities in the New York City Area. Hearings," que documenta la persecución de comunistas en Estados Unidos en la década de los 50. Haciendo una búsqueda con la barra de herramientas y el botón de "Find," puse la palabra "Spain," y encontré una entrevista sobre la participación de un tal sr. Gladnick en la GCE. Las entrevistas revelan que más de una década después de la retirada de las Brigadas Internacionales de la GCE, aún se perseguía a "comunistas" que habían servido en la GCE en contra de tropas franquistas. Es decir, el miedo al comunismo era más importante que luchar en contra del fascismo. ¿Qué habría pasado si Estados Unidos hubiera ejercido un papel más activo en la lucha contra Franco, una vez instalado su régimen?

El autor del blog ha emprendido un trabajo enorme, pero ya ha creado un punto de referencia muy valioso para el estudio de estadounidenses en la guerra (no digo "americanos" como el título del blog, porque no parece que se trata de nadie menos voluntarios de Estados Unidos). En la página de "Updates" (actualizaciones), se puede estar al tanto con la información nueva que se va incorporando. El blog es en inglés, pero os lo recomiendo por el contenido imprescindible que aporta a todos los interesados en la GCE y su memoria. Es además una manera de homenajear a los voluntarios, para que sus nombres no se borren de la historia.

"War is Beautiful," de James Neugass

Continuando con el tema de los brigadistas internacionales, empezado con el artículo del 29 de agosto sobre Matti Mattson, incluyo abajo un reportaje extenso en inglés acerca de un manuscrito del brigadista James Neugass, publicado originalmente en 1937 y "exhumado" (en palabras de Dan Kaufman) el año pasado. La memoria perdida (y aquí quiero decir "memoria" en el sentido del género literario) de Neugass se llama War is Beautiful, y a pesar de su título desafortunado (como nota el presente reportaje, es una alusión irónica a los esloganes fascistas), el libro es una crónica de la guerra desde la guerra. Según Kaufman, War is Beautiful nace de un diario mantenido por Neugass -- que como Matt Mattson, era conductor de ambulancias -- e incluye descripciones de la vida cotidiana en la guerra tanto como los horrores de la contienda -- las mutilaciones, el hambre, las matanzas. El libro es de unas 500 páginas, y aunque hubiera rumores que existían en algún lugar las memorias de Neugass, no fue hasta el año 2000 que un librero encontró el manuscrito en el estado de Vermont (Neugass falleció de un infarto en 1949).

Para mí, siendo estadounidense, una de las cosas que más me choca del reportaje es lo que dice sobre el tratamiento de los veteranos del Lincoln por parte de su propio gobierno. Como bien apunta Kaufman, "the effort to disparage the vets' motives began even before Barcelona fell to Franco" ("empezaron los esfuerzos por desdeñar los motivos de los veteranos aún antes de la caída de Barcelona," traducción mía). Presagiando la obsesión por perseguir a comunistas en los años 50, J. Edgar Hoover y el FBI empezaron a perseguir a los veteranos del Lincoln, asegurando que eran "anti-American" y tramando una especie de "revolución" en EE.UU. (ver párrafo 14 del artículo). Como bien se sabe, siempre se recurre a tendencias nacionalistas cuando se percibe una amenaza desde fuera, y en años recientes (la era de Bush hijo), hemos oído mucho de la supuesta falta de patriotismo de los estadounidenses que cuestionaban o protestaban las políticas domésticas y extranjeras del Gobierno. La falta de una banderita de USA en el traje podía verse casi como un acto de traición. Pero volviendo al tema de los brigadistas, tenía que haber sido sumamente difícil volver a Estados Unidos sabiendo que la contienda no se había resuelto, y encima, averiguar que su propio país iba a terminar aliándose con Franco. El reportaje de Kaufman es un estudio sobre la memoria de Neugass, pero también una indagación en el contexto en que fue escrita, y en el que apareció por casualidad, tantos años después.


Artículo de la revista The Nation
Publicado en línea: 12.8.09
Versión impresa: 29.8.09
Autor: Dan Kaufman

La Despedida: A Lost Memoir of the Spanish Civil War
By Dan Kaufman

"Who could see you and not remember you?" Federico García Lorca wrote in 1926, describing the brutality of the Guardia Civil, Spain's paramilitary police, toward his beloved Gypsies. Ten years later, at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, that brutality would be visited upon Lorca when fascist soldiers loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco executed the poet and dumped his body in a fosa común, a mass grave, near Granada. For decades, Lorca's insistence on remembrance clashed with Spain's post-Franco pacto del olvido, or pact of forgetting, an agreement between the government and the army that opened the door to democracy in exchange for a sweeping amnesty of the Franco regime. Recently, however, the pact has shown signs of unraveling. In 2007 Spain's Socialist government enacted the Law of Historical Memory, which for the first time officially acknowledges the victims of Franco's dictatorship. The law also allows anyone with evidence of a mass grave to ask the state for help in unearthing and identifying any human remains found in it. Last October, after a decade-long effort by Spanish human rights groups, the crusading judge Baltasar Garzón ordered the exhumation of nineteen Francoist mass graves, including the one believed to hold Lorca's corpse. Yet more than seventy years after Lorca was killed, the resistance to excavating the country's repressed memory remains fierce; a week after Garzón issued his order, Javier Zaragoza, Spain's chief prosecutor, challenged it on the grounds that the judge lacked jurisdiction. Fearful that the country's Supreme Court would agree with Zaragoza, Garzón tactically withdrew his order, referring it instead to Spain's provincial courts in the hope of keeping the investigation alive.

By chance, around the same time last year an unexpected exhumation of literary remains dating to the Spanish Civil War was completed with the publication of War Is Beautiful, a long-lost memoir by James Neugass, a volunteer ambulance driver during the conflict. The book's publication is remarkable for many reasons, not least the survival of the manuscript. In 2000, more than fifty years after Neugass died of a heart attack in a Greenwich Village subway station and nearly as many years after most of his papers were destroyed in a cellar flood, a book dealer discovered a manuscript of Neugass's in a Vermont bookstore that was believed to have come from the collection of Max Eastman, onetime editor of the influential leftist magazine The Masses. It had most likely been sent to Eastman for review, and in the margins someone, perhaps Eastman, wrote, "The title, 'War is Beautiful,' is a Fascist slogan. If this is naïve and misdirected irony it is very dangerous." Five hundred pages long, an incomplete copy of the typewritten manuscript wound its way to Neugass's son Paul, and then to Peter Carroll and Peter Glazer, historians of American involvement in the conflict. The pair edited the original manuscript, now housed in a university library, and shaped it into the book published last year.

Nearly 3,000 Americans volunteered to defend the democratic Spanish Republic from a military revolt led by Franco, who was aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Shortly after the war began, the US government forbade Americans from entering Spain, so most entered the country illegally, usually by crossing the Pyrenees at night or occasionally by stowing away on small ships that embarked from France. The volunteers formed two American battalions and later became known collectively as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. A separate, legal organization for aiding the Republic, called the American Medical Bureau, was founded by a New York surgeon named Edward Barsky. (The bureau owed its legality to a State Department exception for groups providing humanitarian aid.) Barsky established base hospitals in churches and monasteries, and set up a mobile medical unit. At its peak strength, Barsky's staff included more than 100 doctors, nurses and drivers. Neugass, a 32-year-old poet who made his living as a fencing instructor, cook, social worker and janitor, arrived in Spain in November 1937 and was assigned to be Barsky's aide and an ambulance driver.

For Neugass, two facts of the war were inescapable: Hitler and Mussolini were providing overt military support for Franco, and the Non-Intervention Agreement signed by the Western democracies, crucially France and Britain, forbade any involvement in the Spanish Civil War, including the sale of arms to the Republic. Italy and Germany were also signatories to the treaty, but they openly defied it: Italy dispatched more than 75,000 professional soldiers to aid Franco, and Germany mobilized pilots and a fleet of ultramodern bombers. (Responding to Germany and Italy's involvement in the war, the Soviet Union sent military equipment and some 3,000 personnel to aid the Republic.) Neugass's mind drifts to those tactical facts repeatedly, even when his immediate problem is commonplace. "The lack of a tire pump can kill a man as easily as the lack of a helmet. I haven't got one of those either. All of them are up at the lines...or should be," he wrote. "The entire country is organized to strengthen the thin thousand mile dam of dugouts, men and munitions which separate not only the Republic but every democratic nation on earth, from fascism." His metaphor proved prescient; five months after the Republic fell, Hitler invaded Poland.

Neugass's memoir, drawn from a contemporaneous diary, follows the haphazard rhythm of the war, moving jaggedly between boredom, fleeting triumphs and terror. Brief, vivid descriptions of daily life, such as an unpalatable dish of bacalao ("tastes like rawhide soaked in glue then boiled in machine oil"), mingle closely with unsentimental depictions of wounded soldiers. "A sniper got Fred Mowbray of New Orleans in the base of the spine," he writes. "Paralyzed from the waist down, urine accumulating in the kidneys, he begged to be catheterized.... He begged for morphine, which could not be given him. Crying all the more pitifully because he was not delirious, Fred was carried out of the ward and evacuated this morning. I hear that spine cases, sooner or later, all die." Neugass sometimes sounds like a world-weary, Popular Front Raymond Chandler. "The clay complexion of death is international," he writes. "What can you do? Go out and make more dead."

Conversant in Spanish and acquainted with Spain from his travels there before the war, Neugass is periodically able to slip out of his American skin and steal a local perspective of the conflict. During a short respite in Mezquita, a small town near the Aragon front, he is invited to join an impoverished family of twelve for dinner. "I was asked to eat," he writes. "When I looked at the size of the single earthenware jug in the fireplace, I answered that I had already had supper.... The mother lifted the crock from the fireplace and emptied a steaming mass of potatoes." The family insisted that Neugass share their food with them: thirteen people ate off a single plate. When they finished the potatoes, the meal was over.

After dinner, Neugass interviews the father of the family, a landless peasant. Neugass asks the man what political party he belongs to. "Soy revolutionario, como todos," he answers. Pressing the point, Neugass asks again to which party he belongs. "De los matafascistas.... I believe in the fascist-killer party," the man answers. "But which party is that?" Neugass asks. "That is every political party," the man replies. "What is communism?" Neugass asks, switching tactics. The man replies hesitatingly, "I don't know...significa, significa...tractors!... And the other parties also...communism, socialism, anarchism...it all means...machines for the land!"

The desperation of the peasant was typical of many who toiled at the bottom of Spain's semifeudal agricultural system. Much of the Spanish countryside was divided into enormous agricultural estates called latifundios, and the estate owners generally considered their workers to be almost indistinguishable from their other property. Between 1918 and 1921 a series of peasant uprisings erupted in southern Spain. Though the army and the Guardia Civil eventually put down the laborers' revolt, sporadic strikes and reprisals continued throughout agrarian Spain. The landowners, anxious to subjugate the peasantry, enthusiastically supported Franco's military revolt against the Republic, which had been trying, with limited success, to introduce land reform and break up the latifundios. Gen. Emilio Mola, an architect of the rebellion, articulated the fascists' method to regain control over the peasants in a martial law proclamation on the second day of the war: "Re-establishing the principle of authority unavoidably demands that punishments be exemplary both in terms of the severity with which they will be imposed and the speed with which they will be carried out."

Neither the landowners nor the fascist troops needed much encouragement. As the British historian Paul Preston details in a profile of Capt. Gonzalo Aguilera, an estate owner and press officer for Franco, the day before Mola's proclamation Aguilera lined up his workers, randomly selected six and publicly shot them as a warning to the others. (Aguilera's actions are not surprising in light of what he told an AP correspondent about the Spanish masses. "They are slave stock," he said. "They are good for nothing but slaves and only when they are used as slaves are they happy.") Near Córdoba, at the beginning of the war, a landowner shot ten of his workers in retribution for every fighting bull the workers had slaughtered for food during a brief collectivization of his estate. Outside Seville, fascist officers made peasants dig their own graves before shooting them. Just before the peasants were murdered, the officers mocked them. "Didn't you ask for a plot of land?" the officers yelled. "Now you're going to have one, and for ever."

Neugass's memoir is particularly important given the growing revisionist tendency in accounts of the Spanish Civil War published in the past decade. Prominent articles by George Packer in The New Yorker and Sam Tanenhaus in Vanity Fair echo the sentiments of George Orwell--who in Homage to Catalonia described the Soviet-backed purge of the revolutionary militia he'd joined, and cautioned that any postwar Republican government was "bound to be Fascistic." Both Packer and Tanenhaus suggest that Spain would have faced a Stalinist future if the Republic had prevailed, and they praise Orwell as a singular prophet. Packer writes that unlike Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, "Orwell kept his bearings, neither turning the war into a stage for his own psychodrama nor wilting under the pressure of ambiguous reality." Tanenhaus's piece, "Innocents Abroad," asserts that the traditional view of the Spanish Civil War as a noble fight against fascism is the "last great myth of the 20th-century left" and that the conflict "brutalized and corrupted the idealistic young American volunteers." Like Packer, Tanenhaus praises Orwell as an exception to "the literary rule" and points out that Homage to Catalonia sold only 700 copies when it was released in Britain in 1938. In their unqualified admiration for Orwell, however, Packer and Tanenhaus slight the cautionary note in Lionel Trilling's introduction to the first American edition of Homage to Catalonia, published in 1952. Orwell, Trilling wrote, "told the truth, and told it in an exemplary way, quietly, simply, with due warning to the reader that it was only one man's truth."

For Packer and Tanenhaus, Orwell's criticisms are backed by a trove of Soviet-held documents (the "Moscow Archives") unearthed after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Particularly influential in the English-speaking world, and cited in Tanenhaus's piece, is a selection of these documents edited by Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck and Grigory Sevostianov and published in 2001 under the title Spain Betrayed. This collection, consisting mostly of private communiqués between Russian military and diplomatic officials in Spain and various officials in Moscow, provides an intriguing glimpse into the Soviet involvement in Spain. Interspersed with the documents are commentaries written by the book's editors. The book asserts that the newly discovered documents prove the Soviet Union "sought to take over and run the Spanish economy, government and armed forces in order to make Spain a Soviet possession."

Yet the documents teem with contradictions (sometimes within the same document) and resist such oversimplified conclusions. Revealing too are the documents the editors chose to exclude. As Helen Graham, a British scholar of the Spanish Civil War, points out in a thoughtful review of Spain Betrayed, the editors include only one document from 1939, when a military rebellion against the Socialist prime minister revealed how little the Soviets actually controlled the army and government of Spain. (Material from the Moscow Archives relating to this late rebellion was published in 1999 by two Spanish academics, Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrando.) Graham is baffled by the lack of any context in the editors' commentary. "Professor Radosh and his co-editors leave entirely out of account the broader picture of Republican Spain at war," she writes. "It is as if they see it as a blank screen waiting to be written on by Soviet and Comintern players."

In his Vanity Fair article, Tanenhaus writes that several Lincoln deserters, whose names disappear from the Moscow Archives, faced "potential death sentences." But as Peter Carroll, Neugass's editor and the author of a scholarly history of the Lincoln Brigade, notes in a pointed essay called "The Myth of the Moscow Archives," there can be a vast difference between potential and actual. One of the men whom Tanenhaus suspects might have been shot, an African-American soldier named Edward Carter, returned to the United States after fighting in Spain. Carter served in the US Army in World War II and was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Clinton. Carroll, who was one of the first researchers to view the Moscow Archives, stresses the need for skepticism and rigor when drawing on the archives' documents: "Reports sent to the Kremlin by Soviet generals can hardly be taken at face value or treated as statements of policy without considering that reporters serving under Stalin would, to put it mildly, attempt to place themselves in the best light."

The recollections of the surviving Lincoln veterans, who now number only a couple dozen, are the most poignant reminders of the need to heed Trilling's warning. George Sossenko, a 90-year-old vet who fought in the anarchist Sébastien Faure Century and was later adopted by the Lincolns, recently told me, "The Soviet Union, with some assistance from Mexico, was the only country which helped the Spanish Republic. They put a lot of money in it. No need to say that they didn't want to have on their side other ideological groups competing with them." At the same time, Sossenko feels that the divisions in the Republic were overemphasized and varied widely. He mentioned his anarchist militia as an example: "I was on the Aragon front with Durruti's army [Buenaventura Durruti, the Spanish anarchist leader], and very often we received Russian supplies and weapons." Sossenko, like Neugass, believes that the focus on the left's infighting is meant only to obscure the larger betrayal of Republican Spain by the Western democracies.

Jim Benet, a 95-year-old ambulance driver with the Lincolns and a former editor and reporter at The New Republic, was particularly unimpressed with Orwell's account. "In the first place he was terribly arrogant," Benet told me. "He wanted it to be about a different thing than it was." Benet feels that Orwell, who understood little Spanish, was missing a key part of the story. ("When I came to Spain, and for some time afterwards, I was not only uninterested in the political situation but unaware of it. I knew there was a war on, but I had no notion what kind of a war," Orwell admits in Homage to Catalonia.) "I think the people who were connecting it only with the Russians and Stalin were overreaching," Benet said. "It did seem to us at the time that basically this was a Spanish thing, and of course people took sides. The Russians took sides and the Germans took sides, but basically it was a Spanish conflict."

Still, some of the vets were strongly critical of the Soviet presence in Spain. Maynard Goldstein, a 95-year-old Lincoln volunteer and likely the last American survivor of Jarama, the brigade's first battle, worked closely with the Soviets after he was promoted to intelligence officer. "Our problems were the Russian system of government, of military operation," he told me. "I got into fights with the Russians." After the civil war ended, Goldstein planned to spy on the Nazis in Belgium for the Soviets. He returned to New York and awaited contact from Moscow, but after a year with no word he gave up; instead he became involved in the Communist Party in the Bronx before breaking with the party in 1948 over Tito. Despite his criticism of the Soviets, however, Goldstein doesn't blame them for the Republic's loss. "The fascists were the professional soldiers," he said. "Did we have any great battles? No. It was a question of holding the lines, and that wasn't easy."

Other volunteers, like Neugass, embraced a nonideological, though fierce, antifascism. Neugass describes a scene on the Córdoba front where a group of Lincoln soldiers were attacked at night and forced to withdraw to the next hill, leaving behind several wounded men. Before morning, as the Lincolns were approaching the hill, they saw large fires burning. The wounded Americans were being burned alive. "Not only were there no fascist wounded brought in that night," Neugass writes, "but no prisoners were taken."

Despite those brief moments, Neugass wasn't prone to vengeance. "I am a poor hater of people and a great hater of ideas," he writes. Toward the end of his service in Spain, he describes a moment that sheds light on the meaning of the title he gave his manuscript. In a relatively unscathed village near Segura de los Baños, the site of one of the Republic's last-ditch counter-offensives, Neugass manages to buy 250 extremely scarce eggs for the wounded men and the hospital staff. Besides the Republican wounded, the hospital had taken in an injured, delusional fascist prisoner whose hunger complicated the delicate question of distributing the eggs:

A great change came over the fascist this morning. Sana [a nurse] had soft-boiled a quantity of eggs for the patients. As she worked down the ward, carefully feeding liquid gold into the mouths of each man, I wondered what she would do when she got to the fascist. The sheet had come down from his face and he was for once quiet. The eyes of even the half-conscious were on him and on Sana. Would he be fed?... The fascist should be given an egg although the other wounded in the ward look at him as if he were the one who shot them, and perhaps he was.... With the entire ward looking at her, Sana held the fascist head-case in her arms and fed him two soft-boiled eggs. She is not Mary Magdalen and he is not Christ. If this is religion, then I am religious.

Like Guernica, Segura endured a massive, unanswered aerial bombardment, another casualty of the Republic's outmatched forces. Barsky ordered Neugass and other members of the medical team to exhume civilian bodies from the ruins to prevent an outbreak of the plague. While sifting through the rubble, Neugass saw a farmer and his wife kneeling on the floor, staring at their bloodstained infant child. "The child had been suffocated," he writes. "Major B.'s [Barsky] hands can do many things but they cannot repair death. Remembering his first and useless instructions, the mother again and again breathed into the lips of what had been her daughter." Within a month, after a harrowing retreat through fascist territory in which he was nearly killed, the exhausted and emotionally drained Neugass decided to return home to "write what I had seen in Spain."

Two years ago, in the New York Sun, Ronald Radosh disputed that the Lincoln veterans went to Spain to save its democracy. "The kind of republic the volunteers sought was a prototype of what the Soviet Union created at the end of World War II," he wrote. But the effort to disparage the vets' motives began even before Barcelona fell to Franco. In January 1938, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote to FDR's attorney general, Homer Cummings, detailing the warnings of a confidential source regarding the volunteers. According to Hoover, the source told him that the Communist Party was sending men to Spain "to train such individuals in the art of military science so that they can be returned to the United States to lead the vanguard of the revolution in this country." Hoover concluded by urging Cummings to inform Roosevelt of this secret plot.

After the war, the Lincoln veterans were labeled "premature antifascists" by the US military and Hoover's FBI, and countless vets were harassed at work or at home by FBI agents. In the early '40s Edward Barsky started an organization aimed at aiding the hundreds of thousands of Republican refugees who were living in concentration camps in southern France. At the time, the United States was anxious to solidify its bond with the anticommunist Franco. Barsky was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he refused to comply with the subpoena, partly on the grounds that the hearing could expose the names of the refugees. In 1947 Congress held Barsky in contempt; after a series of court battles he was sentenced to six months in prison (he served five) and temporarily stripped of his medical license. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence in an 8-1 decision.

For the Republican refugees, the Supreme Court's ruling was simply a continuation of the West's abandonment of the Spanish Republic. A German officer with the International Brigades described the scene of the refugees' arrival at the French border:

That afternoon the Republican troops came. They were received as though they were tramps.... The Spaniards were asked what was in the haversacks...and demanded that they should be opened. The Spaniards did not understand. Until the last moment they persisted in the tragic error of believing in international solidarity.... The dirty road on which the disarmed men stood was not merely the frontier between two countries, it was an abyss between two worlds. Under the eyes of the Prefect and the generals, the men of the Garde Mobile took away the bags and bundles containing the Spaniards' personal belongings and emptied their contents into a ditch filled with chloride of lime. I have never seen such anger and helplessness as those of the Spaniards. They stood as though turned to stone, and they did not understand.

For the vets it was difficult to leave Spain to the ravages of Franco. Garzón's judicial order accuses Franco and thirty-four accomplices of the disappearance and systematic killing of more than 114,000 people between 1936 and 1952, many of them interred like Lorca in fosas comunes. Franco also sent an estimated 1 million political prisoners to jails, concentration camps or to work on forced labor battalions. Like Neugass, Matti Mattson, a 92-year-old former ambulance driver with the Lincolns, knew it was just the beginning. "We said, Just wait, there's another one coming," Mattson told me recently. Mattson left Spain in November 1938, when all the International Brigades were sent home. "It was very tough because the war was still going on and the prime minister decided if he sends us home maybe the Italians and the Germans will be sent home as well," Mattson said. "We had lost a lot of territory and retreated all the way in the Aragon. Republican Spain had been severed in two parts." On April 1, 1939, Franco announced the end of military hostilities. The same day, the United States, which like the other Western democracies remained neutral during the war, recognized Franco's government.

Last October, around the time of the publication of War Is Beautiful, Mattson returned to Barcelona for the seventieth anniversary of his departure, the day the Republic called La Despedida, the farewell. At his small, tasteful apartment in Brooklyn, he showed me one tangible provision of the Law of Historical Memory, an application for Spanish citizenship offered by the Spanish government to all surviving members of the International Brigades. But Mattson's eyes glowed much brighter when he recalled La Despedida: how the International Brigades marched on the Diagonal through the city and how he heard La Pasionaria's famous speech urging the volunteers to come back "when the olive tree of peace is in flower." He recalled it all with extraordinary vividness, especially the gratitude of the Spanish people for the precious gift of solidarity. "I never saw anything like it," he said. "People lined up on the sidewalks. All the balconies were full and the windows were full and women had flowers--they'd come running out and give you flowers. After a while there were so many flowers that you couldn't take any more--the flowers were all over the street. It was paved with flowers."

About Dan Kaufman
Dan Kaufman, a musician and writer living in Brooklyn, has written about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade for the New York Times and the New York Observer.

Vídeo de Matt Mattson, nuevo ciudadano español

El sábado 29 de agosto colgué aquí un artículo publicado en el New York Times sobre el brigadista del Lincoln, Matti Matson, que, a los 92 años, fue otorgado la ciudadanía española en el consulado español de Nueva York. En el artículo, Mattson relata su experiencia de ser conductor de ambulancias en el frente, e incluso recuerda haber transportado a Ernest Hemingway. Hasta la fecha, Mattson es sólo el tercer brigadista estadounidense para solicitar la nacionalidad española, algo que garantiza la Ley de Memoria Histórica, reconociendo el sacrificio de las Brigadas Internacionales en la GCE:

España reconoce la labor de defensa de la libertad y los principios democráticos que llevaron a cabo los voluntarios integrantes de las Brigadas Internacionales en la Guerra Civil española.

Ese reconocimiento ya se manifestó en 1996, al concederles, por Real Decreto de 19 de enero, el derecho a adquirir la nacionalidad española por carta de naturaleza. Sin embargo, el acceso a la nacionalidad por esta vía está sujeto al requisito de tener que renunciar a la anterior, por lo que un buen número de brigadistas no hizo efectiva la adquisición de la nacionalidad española.

La Ley 52/2007, conocida como Ley de Memoria Histórica, en su artículo 18, reconoce de nuevo y de un modo singularizado la labor de los brigadistas y amplía su derecho a la nacionalidad española eliminando el requisito de tener que renunciar a su anterior nacionalidad.

James D. Fernández es profesor y estudioso en New York University (NYU) y autor de numerosos estudios. Junto con Peter Carroll ha editado recientemente el libro Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War (hacer clic aquí para leer sobre la exposición relacionada y aquí, sobre el libro). Anoche, el profesor compartió conmigo un enlace a un video sobre Matt Mattson que Fernández ha filmado y colgado en YouTube. El video es muy reciente, porque nos enseña el viaje del ex brigadista de su casa en Brooklyn al consulado español para "reclamar" su nacionalidad española. Un agradecimiento especial va al profesor Fernández por compartir este enlace muy emotivo con nosotros y muchas felicidades al sr. Mattson.

Ciudadamía española en Nueva York para un brigadista del Lincoln

Foto de Matti A. Mattson en 1938, de los archivos de The Tamiment Library y Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives

Matti A. Mattson en el consulado español de Nueva York. Foto de Nicole Tung para el New York Times

El artículo de abajo relata la historia de Matti A. Mattson, de 92 años, que sirvió como conductor de ambulancias en la GCE y era brigadista del Lincoln. El miércoles pasado fue otorgado la ciudadanía española en un acto en el consulado español de Nueva York.

De: The New York Times
Spain Gives Citizenship to a Fighter of Franco

By SIMON AKAM
Published: August 26, 2009

Like many young Americans traveling in Europe, Matti A. Mattson had a close encounter with wine — but not in the cafes of the Left Bank or the trattorias of Tuscany.

Instead, seven decades ago, he stowed away on a wine carrier in the French Mediterranean port of Sète, about 100 miles from the Spanish border, to reach Spain, crouching among the cargo on board the small vessel. “We got on at night when no one was looking — we hoped,” he explained.

It was March 1937, and Spain was in the throes of civil war — with the Republican government fighting Fascist Nationalist forces led by Francisco Franco.

Ignoring an international nonintervention agreement, Mussolini and Hitler lent support to the Fascists, while the Republican side was aided for a time by the Soviet Union and Mexico. In addition, about 40,000 foreign volunteers — including 2,800 from the United States — fought on the Republican side. They formed international brigades, and the American contingent came to be known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

One of those young Americans was Mr. Mattson, who is now 92 and who has lived in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, since the 1950s. On Wednesday, Mr. Mattson was awarded Spanish citizenship at the Spanish Consulate General, on East 58th Street in Manhattan.

“I am going to accept this citizenship not only for those guys who are buried in Spain but also those who are buried in the U.S.,” he said, dressed in dapper white shoes and a green blazer.

“We are really honored that people like you, with ideals, wanted to fight for democracy, for liberty,” said Fernando Villalonga, Spain’s consul general. “History has recognized your courage, your will to defend democracy.”

The civil war ended in 1939 with a Nationalist victory, and Franco ruled the country until his death in 1975. Since then, Spain has begun to honor the foreigners who had fought for the doomed Republican cause.

A spokesman for the Spanish Consulate explained that a 2007 Spanish law allowed former members of the International Brigades to apply for full Spanish citizenship without relinquishing their existing passports.

Mr. Mattson said he decided to apply at the prompting of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving the history of American involvement in the conflict.

Mr. Mattson is the third American to apply for the honor — the first two are from Madison, Wis., and Providence, R.I., — said Peter N. Carroll, chairman of the group’s board of governors.

In an interview at his apartment on Tuesday night, Mr. Mattson, whose hometown is Fitchburg, Mass., said he was horrified by the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s.

“There were four people that left Fitchburg to volunteer for Spain: two Finnish, one Swedish, one Greek,” said Mr. Mattson, who is of Finnish descent.

Contacts in Boston helped arrange passages across the Atlantic for Mr. Mattson and a friend, Joseph Hautaniemi. Once in France, they made their way to Spain, where both became ambulance drivers.

“There was an English ambulance with the steering on the right-hand side,” Mr. Mattson recalled. “They said, ‘Do you think you can handle that?’ ” He did.

After one bloody offensive, Mr. Mattson drove for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Mr. Carroll, who has written a book about the brigade, said Mr. Mattson’s occupation was hazardous.

“Matti was a front-line ambulance driver,” he said in a telephone interview. “He had one of the most perilous jobs there, because ambulances were particularly targeted by fascist aircraft.”

Fraser M. Ottanelli, a historian at the University of South Florida who has also written about the war in Spain, said the presence of Americans proved that the war was a global conflict.

“The main contribution is that they sent a clear message to the Spanish people that they were not alone,” Professor Ottanelli said.

On one occasion, Mr. Mattson said, he gave a lift to Ernest Hemingway, who was covering the civil war as a journalist and who later used it as material for his novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

“I knew he was a reporter. I didn’t know it was Hemingway immediately,” he remembered. “I had read his book ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ ”

“We got to the front and he just took off and he said thank you — he gave me a bottle of White Horse Scotch,” Mr. Mattson said.

After returning to the United States in 1938, he found that his service in Spain had made him, like many other Americans, a target of suspicion by anti-Communists.

He said he was abruptly dismissed from pilot training in World War II, refused an officer’s commission and reduced to the ranks. He said he served in the Army in both Europe and the Philippines during the war. After it ended, he worked as a printer in New York.

His son-in-law Jim Williams said that though Mr. Mattson was certainly gratified to be granted Spanish citizenship, he never doubted that what he did was right, despite having been “hounded” by the F.B.I.

“In some ways,” Mr. Williams said of the citizenship award, “it will be a recognition of everything he’s fought for all his life.”