Martínez Vendrell and Carrasco and Formiguera
Not even with their hands on their heads. Not even with a penny in their pockets. Not even with the tragedy stuck in their skin. In 1940, they still didn't know if they would be able to return to Catalonia...
"To be able to enter, someone had to back us up. Dad's older brother, Uncle Luis, backed us up. We spent one night detained, and the next day we took the train to the house, without a single house in front of it, without a single house in front of it, without a single house in front of it, without a single house, without a single house, without a single house, without a single house. There were eight of us brothers, and it had been looted by reds and whites. And it went up for auction for political responsibilities," Raimon Carrasco, one of the eight children of Manuel Carrasco y Formiguera, explained to me. The Christian Democrat politician was verbally murdered by red fascism in 1936 and shot in 1938 by black fascism. But Carrasco didn't die.
In 1940, a friend of his, Miquel Coll y Alentorn, stirred the embers and the Creus de Sang were lit. A clandestine organization. It emerged from militants of the Democratic Union of Catalonia, born during the Republic. In the shadows and through the shadows, they produced the newsletter. Order Sheet. The order is important: The first issue is dedicated to commemorating the second anniversary of Carrasco's execution. The second calls for the need to proselytize among children and young people so that the country must be reborn. The embers...
"From the day after the war ended, the Catalanist people haven't given up. If they didn't give up after September 11, 1714, then neither did they the day after January 26, 1939. Then they meet and talk, testing each other out, to see what they could do next in the cultural sphere; poetry is the least suspicious, the reissues of Verdaguer. And something they also take advantage of is the Institute of Catalan Studies, with its history dissemination courses." Coll and Alentorn's son, Miquel Coll Alemany, explained this to me. This was happening within. And outside, to whose Paris did the Carrasco family return?
On May 4, 1940, a dinner party was held in the French capital, surrounded by broken ideological crockery. Amidst a shredded Catalonia. Amidst the diners of a dismembered independence movement. On one side, Nosaltres Sols! (We Are Sols!): Joan Masot, Daniel Cardona Civit, and Jaume Martínez Vendrell. On the other, Estat Català (Catalan State): Antoni Andreu Abelló, Marcel·lí Perelló Domingo, and Joan Cornudella Barberà. Win. Knives. Mosadas. Traditional cuisine: brittle Catalan. But they decided to put it all together. On the tablecloth, they signed: "A pact of non-aggression against Catalonia among us," "to work for the full achievement of our aspirations inside or outside of Catalonia." At that table, "the organization" was born: "The National Front of Catalonia," the first political movement of struggle, combat, resistance, restructured, reborn, resurrected, since 1939. People were in the houses and at the tables. When there's war outside, peace is needed within.
Now that Tigre de Papel and Exitosa have reissued the memoirs of one of those diners: Jaume Martínez Vendrell. A life for CataloniaIt's necessary to reread them or read them. And Carrasco. And despite everyone. We must sit down at the tables and in our homes again. Face to face. Perhaps only to remember that we always bring the dead (Carrasco) and our legs are always broken (Martínez Vendrell). All for the same reason: for being Catalan. And for the same reasons: red and black. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
