From the journalist and writer Montserrat Roig (Barcelona, 1946 - 1991) to Triumph (March 20, 1976). My own translation. This week marks the sixtieth anniversary of the assembly held at the Capuchin monastery in Sarrià (Barcelona) to found the Democratic Union of Students of the University of Barcelona (SDEUB). This initiative, repressed by the dictatorship, contributed to the rise of the opposition to the Franco regime.
In the jargon of those of us students who lived through the irresistible rise of the Democratic Union of Students of the University of Barcelona (SDEUB), one name stuck: La Caputxinada. For three days in March [between March 9 and 11, 1966], we stayed in the Capuchin monastery in Sarrià. We were five hundred young students, both men and women, and more than thirty intellectuals, most of whom identified with the Catalan cultural resistance that had been going on since 1939. There were also a good number of university professors, the best teachers of the time, subjected to meager salaries and driven by an exemplary vocation for research and scholarship. […] Those three days in March were an island of happiness, freedom, and democracy. A peaceful and orderly island. An atmosphere I felt again in the two recent Catalan demonstrations, the demonstrations of the two days in February 1976, ten years later. […] The Capuchin uprising was the first citizen demonstration of a wounded society that was beginning to lose its fear. Most of us were twenty years old and desperately wanted to "have," to have something of our own, our own room in a country whose ownership we didn't even know. We lived with the Capuchin friars of Sarrià, discovering their generosity, their joy, their simplicity, and their austerity. […] I remember the Capuchin garden, the walks we took in our free time, when there were no assemblies or meetings to discuss our actions, talking about poetry, improvising board games, or conversing with an elderly friar with a white beard and profoundly innocent eyes who told us about his flowers. The old man didn't know who we were, nor what that disruption to the convent's peace meant, but it didn't matter: he had always been able to translate the teachings of that Renaissance revolutionary, Francis of Assisi. […] I could remember many things, things that the harassing police officers on the other side of the convent walls and at the gate of the compound couldn't understand because they spoke a different language, the language of force, while we, with our meager resources, wanted to establish the language of dialogue and reason. […] On the last day, a few hours before the police stormed into the convent, we had almost nothing left to eat. The friars gave us a lovely fried potato, which we seasoned with whatever we could find: salt, pepper, and a little mustard. They took us out of the convent on the third day, around four in the afternoon, after we had eaten the historic fried potato. A good beef steak was waiting for me at home. As I ate it, I thought that now we would truly change history. We didn't change history, it's true, but we became somewhat better.
Montserrat Roig 1976
