Round numbers make us all dance like goats and like them we run after the 50th, the 100th, the 75th or even the 25th anniversary of this or that. We also did it this year, with all reason and without exaggerating a little, to celebrate with joy the half century that has passed since the death due to the systemic and multi-organ collapse of the general, as Juan Carlos I likes to call him, removing him from other functions that he also exercised in life with courage, determination and a firm hand, as befits a general of his lineage. It makes everyone proud to know that the emeritus retains this reserve of respect and consideration for him so many years later: a man of principles.
With the vision of cultural mutations, something a little strange happened: I have the impression that the round and brutal figure of the half-century imperceptibly penetrated the feeling that there was a before and after of a certain importance after the death of Franco in the cultural ecosystem of the last long decade of the dictatorship and its continuity between fear and enthusiasm since November 20. for several years before 1975 and because they were going to be even more active thereafter, without us knowing exactly in which direction. We have even tended to remain silent in the face of the democratic fullness that much of the most powerful and respectable Spanish culture that we respect today, grew and took shape with Franco alive and well and as murderous as ever, although increasingly trembling. If we consider the biggest names in painting of the last half century – from Tàpies to Guinovart, via Manuel Viola, Manolo Millares or Antonio Saura –, or some of the names of architects with exemplary work in Spain, such as Josep Lluís Sert and the Fundació Miró, or sculptors like Eduardo Chillida, we can assume that a good part of the most important group of creators that democracy consecrated after the death of Franco was active. with, against and under the Franco regime. And then? Then more prestigious names, from the urban explosion of Oriol Bohigas, the current lesson of Juan Antonio Coderch or the long shadow of Enric Miralles to the continued explosion of Miquel Barceló, Juan Muñoz or Cristina Iglesias.
Much of the best Spanish culture of the last fifteen years of Francoism provided the moral goods, the intimate baggage of a democracy in progress and without name, parties, institutions, or authorization to exist.
And if we had to talk about literary creation itself, we would once again find ourselves on our ass, because there is no name of writer who has reached with authority and readers, say, in the year 2000, who has not made his career in the same conditions of submission to the dictatorship, and this goes for indisputable novelists like Juan Marsé, Juan and Luis Goytisolo, Carmen Martín Gaite or Ana María Matute, in fashion shortlist, and all of them immediately began to coexist with really new, younger names who were already publishing things literally conceived outside of Franco’s shadow because he didn’t exist. The Marías, the Muñoz Molina, the Millás, the Mendozas or the Pombos would set the truly new tone of a literature in democracy which, however, had not rejected, forgotten or interrupted many of those who wrote before them, without even remotely seeing the end of the Franco regime.
But it is true that there was a wild transit zone and a very politicized youth population who led an intense, furious and very brief mobilization. They were a bit like emeritus, and just as he knew that Franco was a general, part of the political-intellectual teams forged since the mid-sixties were soldiers of the revolution eager to put an end not only to Franco and Francoism but also to global capitalism, the exploitation of the worker and the predatory colonialism of the poor of the planet.
There were more objectives, it’s true, but I summarize it like this to focus the plan on the essential objectives in the foreground… Maybe later we would see if the homosexual could find a certain form or if the box that a few women gave carried precious metal among so many cecerrada. But these were not priorities because the priority was revolutionary, as so many pamphlets of the moment filled the heads of left groups with a rupture that left nothing standing. The young radicals of Italy or Germany were in the same situation, so there was no exoticism in demanding an armed revolution as a path to the dictatorship of the proletariat, at least at the beginning, and many more people than we remember, perhaps today ashamed of the infantilism of the analysis, perhaps overwhelmed by the legitimization of weapons, perhaps knowing that they were closer to ETA at the time, or of Bander-Meinhoff or the Red Brigades, than they thought. Today it is convenient or you want to remember it. What happened to them, as to the vast majority of the population in November 1975, was that they lacked the slightest democratic culture, and this is what they had to learn quickly after Franco’s death. The other side of the coin is less obvious: a good part of the best Spanish culture of the last decade and a half of Francoism provided the moral goods, the intimate baggage of a democracy in progress and without name, parties, institutions, or authorization to exist. But it existed and we did very well with it.
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