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Title: Remembering Miguel Garcia Author: Stuart Christie Date: 2010 Language: en Topics: biography Source: Retrieved on 16th May 2021 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/vt4cq2 Notes: This is the introduction to a planned Spanish edition of “Franco’s prisoner”. [See Prisionero de Franco : los anarquistas en la lucha contra la dictadura, Anthropos, 2010. ISBN 9788476589793.]
My first meeting with Miguel García García took place in the mid-1960s
in la primera galleria of Madrid’s Carabanchel Prison. He was in transit
to another penitentiary and was in what was known as ‘periodo’ – a
fortnight of sanitary isolation, ostensibly to prevent or limit the
spread of disease. I was the practice nurse (practicante) for the 7^(th)
Gallery, a position that gave me the run of most of the prison and
allowed me to liaise with comrades in different wings, especially with
isolated transit prisoners or prisoners in solitary confinement. Miguel
passed through Carabanchel on a number of occasions over the years,
going backwards and forwards between penitentiaries and Yeserias,
Spain’s main prison hospital in Madrid.
Miguel and I struck up a close relationship, one that was to endure for
a decade and a half until his death in 1981. What particularly impressed
me about him on our first meeting was his undoubted strength of
character – forged by his experiences in the Resistance as an urban
guerrilla and ‘falsificador‘ [forger], and in Franco’s prisons – and the
extraordinary quality of his spoken English, a language he had acquired
entirely from English-speaking prisoners. No other political prisoners I
came across during my three years imprisonment in Franco’s jails had
Miguel’s mastery of language, or his skills as a communicator. Our
conversations centred on how to expose the repressive nature of the
Francoist regime and raise the profile of Franco’s political prisoners
in the international media, something I was in a position to do given my
relatively privileged position as a foreign political prisoner and the
access I had to the outside world through my by then extensive network
of friendly functionaries in Carabanchel itself.
In 1967, following receipt of a personal pardon from Franco, I was
released from prison and, on my return to Great Britain, I became
involved with the resuscitated Anarchist Black Cross, an anarchist
prisoners’ aid organisation. The focus of our activities was
international, but Franco’s prisoners were, naturally, because of my
history and the continuing and intensifying repression in Spain, top of
our agenda. The case of Miguel García García, one of the Anarchist Black
Cross’s most prominent correspondents, was one that we regularly pursued
with the international press and through diplomatic channels.
Released in 1969, after serving twenty years of a thirty-year sentence
(commuted from death), Miguel came to live with me in London. It took
him a little time to acclimatise to the profound social and
technological changes that had taken place in the world since his arrest
as a young man in the Barcelona of 1949, changes that were even more
profound in the ‘tolerant’ and ‘permissive’ London society of 1969. In
fact, so great was the trauma that he literally was unable to speak for
some months. The shock of his release had triggered a paralysis in some
of the muscles in his throat, and, through Octavio Alberola then living
under effective house arrest in Liege, we arranged for him to see a
consultant in Belgium about his condition. The time with Octavio was
well-spent and brought him up-to-date with what was happening within the
European movement and the role of the International Revolutionary
Solidarity Movement, which operated under the banner of the Grupo
Primero de Mayo, a continuation of the clandestine anarchist Defensa
Interior (DI), which had been tasked with the assassination of Franco.
The First of May Group had recently emerged from the sabotaged (by
Germinal Esgleas and Vicente Llansola) ruins of Defensa Interior (DI) as
an international, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist revolutionary
organisation, structured to carry out spectacular direct actions. It
took its name from the first operation carried out on 1 May 1966 when
members of the group kidnapped the ecclesiastic adviser to the Spanish
Embassy to the Vatican, Monsignor Marcos Ussia. Soon the group began
taking in a much broader area of attack targeting, in particular, the US
and European governments for their complicity in the imperialist war in
Vietnam.
BACK IN London, mainly with the moral and financial support of comrade
Albert Meltzer, my co-editor of Black Flag and the driving force behind
the revived Anarchist Black Cross (ABC), Miguel entered into a dynamic
new phase of his life as the International Secretary of the ABC and a
pivotal figure in the libertarian resistance to the Franco regime. With
Albert he embarked on lengthy speaking tours of England, Scotland,
Wales, Northern Ireland, West and East Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark
and Italy, talking to a new generation of radicalised young Europeans
about anarchism, international solidarity and, of course, the need to
confront tyranny with practical cooperation and direct action.
It could be said that the result of one of Miguel’s early talks – in a
crowded meeting room at the offices of Freedom Press in London’s
Whitechapel High Street in February 1970, shortly after his arrival in
Britain – was to give rise to the so-called Angry Brigade, Britain’s
first urban guerrilla group. Miguel’s voice was still weak so I had to
do much of the talking for him, but as the evening wore on and the story
of his adventures and deprivations at the hands of the Francoist
authorities unfolded, that and the fact that his revolutionary spirit
and determination remained clearly undiminished, it was clear he had
made a deep emotional impression on the fifty or so young people in the
audience. Here, in front of them, in person, was someone who had been in
direct confrontation with a fascist state, who had been totally involved
in resistance struggles, and who had paid a heavy penalty. Nor was it a
purely historical struggle. Franco remained in power and a new
internationally coordinated anarchist action group, the First of May
Group, was carrying on that struggle.
At Freedom Press that February night in 1970, the significance, the
importance of the First of May Group, and the tradition it – and Miguel
– sprang from, was not lost on the people crammed into the small room to
hear Miguel García’s story. Among those present were some of the core
activists later convicted in the historic ‘Angry Brigade’ trial: John
Barker, Hilary Creek, Jim Greenfield and Anna Mendelson.
Miguel’s flat in Upper Tollington Park, near North London’s Finsbury
Park, soon drew visiting anarchists from all over the world. It also
began to attract police attention once Miguel launched (with Albert’s
help) the Centro Ibérico and International Libertarian Centre in London,
a cosmopolitan venue that became a magnet for anarchists everywhere; it
had been many years since there was such a thing as an international
anarchist club in London, and its success was entirely due to Miguel’s
powerful personality.
In 1971 the Centro Ibérico moved to a large basement in Haverstock Hill
to which came many extraordinary people, including survivors from
innumerable political upheavals. Visitors included the Spanish militant
and historian José Peirats and Emilienne Durruti, partner of
Buenaventura Durruti. Another regular at the Centro Ibérico was ETA
leader Pedro Ignacio Pérez Beotegui, also known as ‘Wilson’, who was
involved in the planning of the December 1973 assassination of Franco’s
protégé and deputy, prime Minister Carrero Blanco.
The new Centro was entirely Miguel’s creation and he spent his whole
time nurturing it, cutting himself off from any paid employment, even
though he was well past what should have been retiring age anyway.
Through Albert, however, he did extract a small pension from the British
government.
Phil Ruff, the Black Flag cartoonist who shared Miguel’s Upper
Tollington Park flat after Albert moved to Lewisham, remembers
accompanying Miguel on endless trips from Finsbury Park to Haverstock
Hill, almost every night throughout the 1970s, to open up the Centro so
that someone would be there if anyone dropped in. Often it was just Phil
and Miguel looking at the paint peel off the walls and having a drink,
but if someone did drop by Miguel would immediately make them welcome,
cook up a paella, and start weaving his magic. He was without doubt a
great communicator and would have made a wonderful hostage negotiator.
Everybody left the Centro feeling they were Miguel’s best friend, and
ready to slay dragons. He had a way of making you think that. He turned
the basement into an internationally known place to go if you needed
help in London; somewhere to find a welcome, food, a bed for the night,
or a place to squat. He also brought people together from all over the
world, becoming the birthplace for many affinity groups that were active
in Central and South America, and Europe.
In 1970–71 Albert was working in Fleet Street as a telephone
reporter/copy-taker for The Daily Sketch, a right-wing British national
tabloid newspaper, and after much discussion and argument – and believe
me Miguel could be extremely argumentative and pugnacious – Albert
finally convinced Miguel to write his memoirs. And so it was that the
typescript of what was to become Franco’s Prisoner was hammered out
between Miguel and Albert and typed up in a disused back room of one of
Britain’s foremost Conservative populist newspapers – and paid for on
the time of Associated Newspapers. The book, Franco’s Prisoner, was
published in 1972 by the Rupert Hart-Davis publishing house, which had
originally commissioned my book The Christie File, but reneged on the
contract at the last moment because of the allegedly contentious nature
of the material.
As well as providing wide-ranging advice from abortion to legal aid to
squatting, Miguel played a key role in many of the international defence
campaigns run by the International Anarchist Black Cross at the time,
including those of Julian Millan Hernandez and Salvador Puig Antich in
Spain, and Noel and Marie Murray, two members of the Dublin Anarchist
Group sentenced to death in Ireland for their alleged part in killing an
off-duty Garda officer during a bank robbery in Dublin, in 1975.
Salvador Puig Antich had been a regular visitor who accompanied Albert
and Miguel on some of their speaking tours around Britain. Returning to
France in August 1973 to take part in a conference of young activists to
set up the anarchist defence group known as the MIL (Movimiento Ibérico
de Liberación), Salvador Puig Antich was involved a series of
spectacular bank expropriations across Catalonia and Southern France. In
September 1973, however, Puig Antich walked into a police ambush in
Barcelona’s Calle Gerona in which he was wounded and a Francoist
policeman was shot dead. Puig Antich, 25, was garrotted in Barcelona’s
Modelo prison on 2 March 1974.
After the military coup in Argentina on 24 March 1976, Miguel persuaded
a lot of people to ‘lose’ their passports so that comrades fleeing to
escape the Junta could adopt a temporary identity change. In June 1976
he installed a printing press in the basement at Upper Tollington Park,
on which he printed a number of anarchist books in Spanish, including
Anarquismo y Lucha de Clases (the Spanish translation of Floodgates of
Anarchy, written by Albert Meltzer and myself) that he distributed in
Spain. As well as printing identity documents, he also got together a
group of young Spanish comrades in London to produce their own anarchist
paper Colectivo Anarquista.
In the late 1970s Miguel returned to his native Barcelona where, funded
by the Spanish writer and former diplomat Jose Martin-Artajo, anarchist
son of Franco’s foreign minister Alberto Martin-Artajo, he fulfilled one
of his life’s ambitions – to open his own bar. La Fragua, a former forge
at No 15 Carrer de la Cadena in Barcelona’s Raval District – not far
from where pistoleros working for the Catalan employers’ organisation
gunned down the noted CNT leader Salvador Segui and his friend Frances
Comes in 1923 – opened for business in 1979. As with the Centro Ibérico,
La Fragua became a Mecca for anarchists and libertarians from all over
the world, and an important meeting place for the anarchist activist
groups of the so-called ‘Apache sector’ centred around Luis Andres Edo
in Barcelona.
Miguel’s humanity was the most characteristic thing about him, that and
his tenacity and ability to persevere and survive despite all odds. He
was, without doubt, a pretty significant figure to the generation
radicalised in the late 1960s and 1970s. Miguel had gone to prison
fighting – and that was how he came out. He was untouched by the years
of squabbling and in-fighting that characterised the life of the Spanish
Libertarian Movement in exile. Miguel’s answer for any dire situation
was always the same – ‘we must DO something!’ His work with the Black
Cross – providing practical aid to libertarian prisoners all over the
world and making solidarity an effective springboard to militant action
– influenced a new generation of anarchists not just in Spain but in
many other parts of the world including Britain, France, Belgium, Italy
and West Germany.
I was living on the northern island of Sanday, in Orkney, for much of
the time Miguel was in Barcelona, but we met whenever we could. In 1980,
Brenda, my partner, went to work with him at La Fragua for six months,
at his invitation, to help improve the bar’s menu. Miguel’s culinary
skills, acquired in Franco’s prisons during times of great austerity,
left much to be desired! It was on Sanday, one December evening in 1981,
that I received an unexpected telephone call from Miguel who was back in
London, in a nursing home, being treated for advanced TB. It was nice to
hear from him and we chatted about this and that, but nothing in
particular, and for that reason alone it was strange. Usually, when
Miguel rang it was to arrange to do something or get something done. But
on this occasion it was simply to talk, nothing else. He also spoke with
Brenda, again about nothing in particular, and she promised to write him
one of her long chatty letters the following day, which she did.
Unfortunately, Miguel never received it. He died in the early hours of
the following morning.
Miguel García García’s life is a good pointer to what anarchism is in
practice. Not a theory handed down by ‘men of ideas’, nor an ideological
strategy, but the self-activity of ordinary people taking action in any
way they can, in equality with others, to free up the social
relationships that constitute our lives. Miguel García García may have
lived a hard life, but it was a worthwhile life, and he was an
inspiration to us all.