Vicenç Riera Llorca and the Catalan exile in the Dominican Republic

The victory of Spanish fascism in the civil war, the consequent Francoist dictatorship, and the continuity that, on identity and linguistic-cultural issues, has been given from so-called democratic institutions to Spanish nationalism with Francoist echoes, make it so that when we read the books and review the figure and life trajectory of Avel·lí Artís Gener “Tísner” or Vicenç Riera Llorca (Barcelona, 1903–Pineda de Mar, 1991) they seem to us of heroic and purest radicalism and coherence. Is it because we have put them on a pedestal or because we have objectively let ourselves be lowered?A staunch Catalanist and socialist of popular extraction and republican convictions, Riera Llorca, who declared himself a Catalan nationalist and therefore (not despite it: therefore) also an internationalist, made his name as a writer in the rich breeding ground of Catalan journalism during the years of the Republic. A polyglot and voracious reader, he dedicated himself to trade unionism and went to fight voluntarily at the front. After the republican defeat and the military occupation of Catalonia, Riera Llorca fled to France, where he was interned twice in concentration camps, from which he escaped both times. From there, he managed to flee to the Dominican Republic, and then to Mexico, where he co-founded and directed the most mythical and fertile exile magazine, Pont blau. He returned to Catalonia in 1969. The country had been deformed, Riera Llorca had not, and he continued to defend the same ideas he had before he had to leave. I have extracted this information from the very interesting study Vicenç Riera Llorca. Exile, memory and the working class, by Albert Ventura (Publicacions Universitat Rovira i Virgili).A chaotic, indolent and precarious world

The best-known title by Riera Llorca, Tots tres surten per l’Ozama, published in Mexico in 1946, now reissued by Club Editor, is a testimonial novel, between historical chronicle, journalistic reportage and expressively frontal and refined narration, about the experience of Catalan exile in the Dominican Republic of dictator Trujillo. Applying tones, perspectives, and technical lessons learned from reading the Americans Hemingway and Dos Passos, then very popular, Riera Llorca offers an exhaustive panorama, full of ellipses and not at all prolix but socio-anthropologically incisive, colorful and insightful, of a world marked by material misery, political corruption, racial prejudice, and passionate sensuality. It is a chaotic, static, indolent and precarious world that suddenly has to manage the arrival of many thousands of immigrants (Catalans, Spaniards, Jews, Italians...) from a Europe at war, and in which the three Catalan protagonists – Ramon, intellectual but worldly; Miquel, steadfast idealist; Lluís, conceited, boastful, soft – barely make a living doing jobs and little jobs, cohabiting with natives and other exiles, and thinking little or not at all about the past and all that they have left behind.Riera Llorca's literary operation, consisting in documenting from fiction – therefore, recreating not from literalness but from imagination – a concrete human experience in a specific historical period and territorial framework, still proves modern and lucid today. This is so because formally the novel has not become outdated and because the gallery of human types that parades through it is vivid and convincing, even in the cases of secondary and schematic characters.With a style that combines naturalist narration and reportage – vividness, drama, and symbolic power, but also detachment, clarity of style, and a desire for objectivity, as if everything were seen through the lens of a camera, although from time to time the narrator lets slip a judgmental adjective–, Tots tres surten per l’Ozama is a valuable work for literary, politico-historical, and human reasons. An important book.