Cold war controversies in the pro-amnesty campaigns of the Spanish political prisoners (1961) and the erosion of Spanish exiles’ leadership in the anti-Francoist policies1

ABSTRACT

Coinciding with a growing activity of the new opposition groups, produced in the end of the decade of the 1950s and whose main result was the meeting in 1962 in Munich, an important campaign was held in 1961 for the amnesty of the Spanish political prisoners. Behind the great history of this international protest were found, not easy to unravel or perceive at the time, rivalries and struggles for the leadership among the anti-Franco forces, as well as internal discussions about the strategic aspects of such actions. The article documents that the strategy of countering communist campaigns and propaganda activities from the radical anti-communist approach found growing rejection in progressive circles of liberal exile, generating an important controversy following a protest letter published by Republican Spanish intellectuals in The New York Times regarding pro-amnesty activities of the communists. Those internal quarrels among the liberal sectors of the opposition revealed the growing sterility of the political projects of the anticommunist exile leaders connected to the American covert cold war organisations, and gave reason to the supporters of an action of influence and political mobilization led from inside Spain and among its new opposition groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Pro-amnesty campaigns
• Francoism
• Cold War
• Julián Gorkin
• Congress for Cultural Freedom
• Spanis Communist Party

Introduction

The battle over universal values and elemental human and social rights carried out by different anti-Franco opposition groups was an important aspect of their ideological and political struggles. The work of Santos Juliá (2014), constitutes a novel source for deepening our understanding of how the establishment of political and ideological consensus was carried out through public protest campaigns. Open letters of protest signed by intellectuals from different generations of oppositionists, whether from the interior or from exile, were a key piece in forging Spanish future democratic culture and consensus-based politics often taking advantage of supranational political and cultural platforms, such as international organizations, publishing houses and journals. At the same time they demonstrate the progressive reconstitution in Franco’s Spain of the figure of the intellectual, since, as Julià notes elsewhere, “there is nothing since the appearance of the noun that defines an intellectual more than signing a letter or a manifesto” (2004, 458).

In Spain, a turning point came with the student revolts of 1956, which were followed by the repression of their leaders, most of whom were from the new political formation Agrupación Socialista Universitaria (ASU). Their manifesto, “Testimonio de las generaciones ajenas a la Guerra Civil” (“Testimony of the generations not involved in the Civil War”), appeared in the organ of the Spanish Socialist Party in exile, El Socialista (Toulouse) on 22 August 1957. As Santos Juliá pointed out, for those new generations of anti-Franco oppositionists, the oblivion of the Civil War had become an indispensable ingredient for the establishment of a new political reality because the confrontations of the past could no longer matter for the sake of re-founding democratic coexistence and forging new agreements based on human rights and individual freedoms – the establishment of a minimum acceptable to all that could serve for the foundation of the future democratic Spain (2004, 457). In this long process, the initiatives and mobilisations for the amnesty of political prisoners were of great importance.

During the 1950s, from various political collectives, the discourse in favour of amnesty “ran parallel to that of reconciliation, the first demanded the other” and, although dominant only from the late 1950s – the “Manifesto for National Reconciliation” of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) dates back to June 1956 – we can also go back to Indalecio Prieto’s first pacts with José María Gil Robles in September 1948, which included a postulate of an amnesty for the crimes committed during the conflict (Juliá 2004, 448). Following the birth of the new opposition groups, with the imprisonment of the young generation of oppositionists, three collective letters of Spanish intellectuals were sent to the Francoist organs. The first of these, the “Declaration of Spanish Intellectuals in Exile”, of 22 April 1959, which appeared in the June issue of Boletín de Información de la Unión de Intelectuales Españoles (Juliá 2014, 416–417), edited in Mexico by a group of exiled intellectuals, alluded to “the most elementary human rights” and demanded, twenty years after the end of the Civil War, an end to political repression. In the July-October issue of the same Boletín, “Letter of Plastic Artists to the Minister of Justice”, also signed in April 1959, insisted on the argument of the “anachronistic character” of the repression. But the most important letter was the one written in Spain, headed by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, in June 1959. That “amnesty petition addressed to the Minister of Justice” established that the reconciliation of the Spaniards was indivisible from “the general amnesty for all political prisoners and exiles” and the signatures gathered were representative of a great political plurality (appeared, among others, those of Gregorio Marañón, Pedro Laín Entralgo, José Luis Aranguren, Camilo José Cela and Dionisio Ridruejo, but also those of Enrique Tierno Galván, Alfonso Sastre, Josep María Castellet, Luis Goytisolo and Juan Antonio Bardem) (Juliá 2014, 419–420). It was reproduced in the same issue of Boletín de México and also by New York’s Ibérica, on 15 June 1959, which indicates that, even at this stage, the demand for fundamental freedoms was not only impervious to political divisions, but also reconciled different Spanish generations and crossed borders to converge in the same community of values between the interior and the exile.

In the mobilizations, the pioneer force in demanding the amnesty for the Spanish political prisoners was the Spanish Communist Party. In 1960, the VI Congress of the PCE reiterated, as one of the bases of the anti-Franco pact, a “general amnesty (…) extending to all responsibilities derived from the civil war, in both contending sides” (Juliá 2004, 680). At the congress, the new General Secretary, Santiago Carrillo, called on “all the anti-Francoists in Spain and throughout the world” to “strengthen their work for amnesty in order to open the doors of prisons for so many Spaniards who still suffer in them” (Mije 1961, 55). As a part of a broad international communist campaign, two big conferences were organised in Latin America: first in Sao Paulo in January 1960, and then in Montevideo in January 1961, under the title: “Conferencia Latinoamericana pro-Amnistía para los presos y exiliados políticos de España y Portugal” (Aznar Soler, 2008). In our continent, “Western European Conference in favour of amnesty for Spanish political prisoners and exiles” (“Conferencia de Europa Occidental a favor de la amnistía a los presos y exiliados políticos españoles”) taking place in Paris on 25th and 26th of March 1961, was celebrated in the Hotel Continental of Paris. Under the presidency of the French writer René Jouglet, it united representatives of all the Western European countries and was attended by more than 500 foreign delegates in representation of local Parliaments, political parties, trade unions, social and cultural organisations and cultural and academic elites.

The aim of this article is to document a controversy, produced within an important group of anti-communist intellectuals in exile, about the form and substance in which anti-Francoist campaigns in response to communist initiatives should be carried out. This controversy was already studied by Aznar Soler (2008), yet here we will provide new facts and different conclusions. As the article will aim to show, these controversies will point to the main causes by which the main axis of anti-Franco activity would soon move from exile to the interior. The existence of the ideological Cold War as the political context of the history of anti-Francoism, which is relevant to the processes developed within the opposition groups, will be applied as a fruitful framework for historical analysis and interpretations.

Julián Gorkin, new opposition groups and pro-amnesty campaigns

The history of the Spanish liberal and anti-communist exile cannot be told without focusing on its links with the great intellectual and political organizations of the American and Western Cold War. One of the main ones was undoubtedly the Congress for the Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organization of maximum influence in the intellectual and political world during the post-war period, covertly financed by the Central Intelligence Agency (1950–1967) and with which several Spanish intellectuals in exile maintained strong ties. The most important Spaniard in the CCF was Julián Gorkin, director for several years of its Spanish language organ – the magazine Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura (1953–1965) – and head of the Latin American secretariat of the CCF. Gorkin, who in his youth was a founding member of the Spanish Communist Party and after his move to anti-Stalinism, one of the main founders of the Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista (POUM) – the small party close to Trotskyism that had been repressed by the Spanish Communist Party during the Civil War – ; in the post-war period would become one of the main leaders of the anti-Communist and anti-Francoist struggle from exile. In this task he had the support of Salvador de Madariaga, an eminent intellectual who had maintained a neutral position during the Civil War, and who in the post-war period would become one of the most active public figures in the anti-Francoist struggle, using for that purpose international bodies such as the CCF – of which he was the only Honorary President proceeding from the Hispanic world – the European Movement, the Liberal International, among others.

Concerned about the growing political strength of the Spanish Communist Party, Gorkin was the author of several reports – presented to the heads of the CCF in Europe – warning about the danger of the establishment of a Communist dictatorship in post-Franco Spain. In addition to turning the editorial policy of Cuadernos towards Spanish issues in the second half of the 1950s, he also tried to introduce policies whose aim was to help the new generations of Spanish oppositionists and their leaders as much as possible. Gorkin’s help would be fundamental for Vicente Girbau and Miguel Sánchez Mazas,¹ two of the repressed members of the Asociación Socialista Universitaria (ASU), who had been imprisoned in Spain and soon went into exile, where they constituted the Foreign Delegation of the aforementioned organisation. Gorkin also founded, in September 1959, in Paris, the Centre for Documentation and Studies (Centro de Documentación y Estudios), under the presidency of Salvador de Madariaga and with Francisco Bustelo and José Calviño as members of the Board of Directors, and Vicente Girbau and Sánchez Mazas contributing as collaborators from London and Rome respectively.²

Specifically in relation to policies aimed at countering the growing success of the communist pro-amnesty campaigns, it should be noted that Gorkin was very active, at least since September 1957, in winning international support for campaigns in defense of prisoners in Spain when he addressed the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, the Committee of Science and Freedom, a “scientific” branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as well as the Congress itself from which he hoped to obtain substantial financial means to carry out “serious” work on this subject.³ He also had the idea of sending journalists and international agencies to Spain and organizing an action that could serve as an “international process of the regime”.⁴ The above mentioned Mazas and Girbau would become, through intense documentary and organizational work, in which they always received the help of Julián Gorkin, key actors in winning international support for amnesty campaigns. And as Mateos observes, the first documents published by the ASU insist on the vindication of human rights and reconciliation, in accordance with the new ideological moment lived by the newly born opposition (1993, 28).

The “Western European Conference in favour of amnesty for Spanish political prisoners and exiles”, that took place in Paris on 25th and 26th of March 1961, was attended by over 500 delegates and observers from 15 countries. Liberal leaders from all Western countries, as well as representatives of numerous European parliamentary parties and trade unions, and various European and international social, cultural and student bodies, gathered in Paris to express their support for the conference. Among the 150 renowned international intellectuals who signed the appeal for amnesty are, from Great Britain, several members of Parliament (also from the Conservative Party), as well as the writers Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch, the historian Max Beloff, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the politician Philip John Noel-Baker and the sculptor Henry Moore (Amensty 1961). Several individuals based in France were among the signatories, including the former President of the Republic, Vincent Auriol, and painters such as Pablo Picasso or Marc Chagall; writers Jean Cocteau, Jean Cassou, Louis Aragon, Jean Paul Sartre, André Maurois, Simone de Beauvoir and François Mauriac; professors Charles V. Aubrun and Jean-Marie Domenach (director of Esprit), and the General Secretary of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers Joe Nordmann; in Italy, some of the most illustrious names were the politician Pietro Nenni and writers such as Ignazio Silone, Italo Calvino and Alberto Moravia; the painter Renato Guttuso, the president of the Community of European Writers Giovanni Battista Angioletti and the film directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Roberto Rossellini; in Belgium, the former Prime Minister Camille Huysmans, and, in addition, many other relevant names from Norway, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Greece, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Important communist leaders and analysts such as Antonio Mije emphasized that political plurality – expressed in the signatures of communists, socialists, monarchists, conservatives, Catholics and liberals – was the conference’s greatest achievement (1961, 56).

In view of the success of the Paris Conference, the reactions of the anti-communist Spanish exile were not long in coming. The PSOE and the UGT in exile strongly opposed to the act. Its executive commissions issued a political statement in which they disassociated themselves from the initiative and questioned the very idea of amnesty by criticizing it as a concession to the Spanish dictatorial government, while pointing to the conference as a “communist operation”. In the statement, published in El Socialista, it could be read: “We, political refugees whose title we honour, do not authorize anyone to ask for our amnesty to those who oppress the Spanish people” (Aznar Soler, 814). This positioning of Llopis and his Executive would, however, despite its rotundity, meet opposition. In the same month of March 1961, 200 prisoners from Franco’s prisons, annoyed by the negative attitude of the PSOE adopted before the conference, sent a letter of protest to the Executive Commission in Toulouse.⁵ Regarding the Republican Government in exile, although the then President of the Republic, Diego Martínez Barrio, sent a letter to the Paris conference in which he thanked, on behalf of millions of Republicans, the international pressure exerted, he also stressed that the Republican Executive did not recognize the legitimacy or authority of Franco’s government to grant any type of amnesty (Aznar Soler, 816). And similar was the resolution adopted by the Republican Government itself, on 24 March 1961, despite the initial division among its members on what attitude to take.

For his part, Gorkin had an idea, inscribed in the Cold War dialectic, that in addition to promoting the boycott of the European conference organized by the communists, a rival conference should be organized on behalf of the political prisoners. His hope was that Madariaga would chair the conference, which would take place in Switzerland, with a committee of important personalities from Spain and Latin America and enjoy the support of new political winds coming from the United States, particularly the Kennedy presidency. A month before the conference planned in Paris, Julian Gorkin and Salvador de Madariaga promoted a counter-campaign among the transatlantic circles of liberal exile to “destroy the communist manoeuvre”.⁶

The letter in The New York Times

With this idea in mind, Gorkin wrote to a group of exiled professors in New York, as well as to his former POUM co-religionists living in the same city,⁷ denouncing the objectives of the communist campaign and arguing that it was detrimental to the interests of political prisoners because it marked them as communists themselves. As was customary in his writings, he warned of the danger of totalitarian communism. He asked for the support of the recipients of his letter for a campaign of denunciation of the Paris conference as a communist manoeuvre, to the constitution of a committee to develop a counter-campaign in favour of the imprisoned and liberties, and to organise a counter-conference in a city of Western Europe. In their reply, Joaquín Maurín, Eugenio Granell, Ángel del Río, Francisco García Lorca, Francisco Ayala and Vicente Llorens responded by endorsing the “expressed plan”, but pointed out the following:

Nevertheless, we have agreed, in the course of our exchange of views, that it is a mistake to act habitually, and in this particular case, in reaction to communist initiatives. Any campaign in favour of the prisoners is unobjectionable; and the reason why the communists launch it lies precisely in the fact that it does not commit politically, being for them an act of mere propaganda. We therefore consider it advisable to take and encourage our own initiatives in relation to the situation of the world in general and that of Spain in particular, seeking to address the truly fundamental and principled issues.⁸

The point was important because it advised Gorkin, as a Cold Warrior, not only not to follow his binary dialectic in responding to communist initiatives, but rather to promote those aimed at fundamental problems. However, the spirit of the ideas pointed out by the exiled professors was totally ignored in the protest note that appeared in The New York Times on 23 March 1961, born from Madariaga’s pen, under the title “Meeting on Spain opposed”. The same letter was also published by Le Monde and The Times, and in Spanish, in El Socialista and Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura, and stated, regarding the Paris conference, the following:

We have fought for several years and we will continue to fight so that our compatriots, imprisoned for political reasons, are returned to freedom, insofar as it exists, under the current regime, for the other Spaniards. But we reject the idea of amnesty, because neither political prisoners nor exiles have committed crimes that demand forgiveness. We also protest against any action in favour of Spanish political prisoners in collaboration with Communist leaders such as Maurice Thorez, Luigi Longo, Louis Aragon and others, who have covered the massacres in Budapest with their names, as well as the imprisonment of millions and exile of hundreds of thousands of Europeans. And we allow ourselves to draw the attention of the non-Communist signatories of this appeal to the fact that the assembly, gathered under the aegis of the Communist regime, will be very useful to a dictatorship that has given a Communist label to all actions in favor of freedom.

We deeply regret that a good number of people, whose fidelity to freedom and democracy is beyond doubt, have allowed themselves to be persuaded, with the best of good faith, to the point of covering this manoeuvre with their name, and we express the hope that it will be possible for us to have a support in the effort that we intend to make without ulterior motives, in order to achieve the objective that these people of good faith set themselves by giving their honest and sincere support to this Communist-inspired management.⁹

Salvador de Madariaga, Francisco García Lorca, Federico de Onís, Ángel del Río, José Ferrater Mora, Francisco Ayala, Vicente Llorens, Joaquín Maurín, Eugenio Granell.

The main effect in political terms of this open letter was that the Franco regime exploited it immediately after its publication and tried to use it to delegitimize international pro-amnesty mobilizations led by the communists by virtue of its pro-communism. The Spanish newspapers inserted on 25 March 1961, a note from the Efe agency denouncing that the spirit and engine of the protest campaign were the communists, citing Madariaga’s words, as well as the official position on the matter taken by the socialists and anarchists in exile who had distanced themselves from the conference (Aznar Soler 2008, 817).

The use by the Franco regime of the letter signed by the political exiles caused a great uproar and unleashed a notable controversy among the signatories of the open letter. On 25 April 1961, the liberal professors protested to Gorkin because nobody had given them the letter to read before sending it to the press, and the one that finally saw the light not only did not collect the reservations they had expressed, but contradicted them. They demanded that Gorkin publish, in Cuadernos – the magazine in Spanish of the CCF – an official declaration of rectification (Aznar Soler 2008, 823). The archives contain, on this matter, several letters sent to Gorkin as a sign of protest by involuntary signatories, such as those of Joaquín Maurín, who although personally did not express any personal objection to his signature appearing on the letter, fully argued that other signatories had reasons for concern and anger.¹⁰ Another of Gorkin’s co-religionists from the time of the POUM, Eugenio Granell, in his letter of 31 March, reproached him for the impossibility of previously reading the letter published in The New York Times and said in the following terms: “It is clear that no one likes to appear signing documents he does not know” (Granell et al. 2009, 322). Likewise, the philosopher in exile Ferrater Mora, on 28th of March 1961, addressed Madariaga and Gorkin to express his surprise at seeing his name at the bottom of the letter, a letter he had not been able to examine previously, and indicating that there were better ways of fighting communism than through open letters written from an anti-communist approach. He articulated the weakness of such a strategy of political blocs and advocated a more subtle and intelligent way of fighting communism:

I don’t need to tell you that communist enterprises deserve my condemnation. Their political aims and the immorality of their methods are absolutely strange to me. I therefore fully agree that everything possible must be done to oppose them. But they must be skillfully opposed, as long as it is not in conflict with political decorum. Communists often ask for things that in themselves are unobjectionable: “avoid war”, “free political prisoners”, etc. etc. etc. We already know, of course, that’s not what really matters to them. But a purely negative attitude reveals a certain weakness in the anticommunists.¹¹

Ferrater Mora pointed out as another mistake to disdain intellectuals who had adhered to the conference of the stature of Mauriac, Malraux or Maurois, to limit themselves only to the “M”, as he said with irony, to those whom the spirit of the letter practically equated with stupid and unconscious because they had allowed themselves to be used in an incautious manner by the communists. And yet about the strategy of the response that should have been given, and that was not given, to the communist initiative, he argued against the “suspicious” aspect of the blocks, of whatever political colour they were, and argued that democracy lay precisely in the nuances: “Blocks are always suspicious – and that’s why communists are so fond of them. Communists don’t like, or don’t want, to nuance. But we have to do it, because freedom is largely freedom to nuance”.¹² But the true reprimand came to Gorkin in the form of the joint letter from Ángel del Río, Francisco Ayala, Francisco García Lorca and Vicente Llorens, dated 30th of March 1961, where they expressed their deep unease on the fact that the letter sent to the press not only did not contain their initial reservations, but in a way contradicted them. They insisted on the idea of Cuadernos publishing a rectification (Aznar Soler 2008, 825).

After Gorkin’s intense efforts in several letters to dissuade liberal professors from publishing the rectification, Cuadernos would eventually include it, and Ángel del Río, Francisco Ayala, Francisco García Lorca and Vicente Llorens used this medium to remind readers of their initial objection to merely copying, from the anti-communist approach, the communist initiatives, and distanced themselves from the open letter published in The New York Times while expressing concern that Francoist propaganda had used their names – precisely those of political exiles of the Franco regime – to discredit the pro-amnesty campaign carried out in the name of the victims of the dictatorship. Moreover, they also stated that “we do not oppose – nor could we oppose – any initiative in favour of the persecuted”.¹³ Other reactions, such as the open letter published in the magazine Acción (Montevideo) on 3 May 1961 by Eduardo Ortega y Gasset to Madariaga, demonstrated a deep malaise in other sectors of the exile with the counter-propaganda efforts of Gorkin and Madariaga that were ultimately so beneficial to the Franco regime.

Change of the political paradigm: from exile to the interior

The anti-Franco policies inserted in the polarization of the Cold War, as well as the radically anti-communist tone that characterized Madariaga’s letter, became increasingly sterile for the anti- Franco struggle and boycotted efforts to draw the attention of the world intelligentsia and international organizations to the situation of the victims of Francoism. The progressive erosion of Madariaga and Gorkin’s leadership was a fact, even among the liberal sectors that had always been closest to them. The main criticisms were raised two years later by Francisco Ayala, a particularly precise interpreter of the political transformations in Spain, in increasing contact with the dissident intellectuals of the Peninsula. When Gorkin and Madariaga, after the Congress in Munich held by the Spanish opposition in 1962, requested his adhesion to a council that should watch over the development of the political negotiations, Ayala refused to give his name, a decision in which he coincided with Ferrater Mora, positions that they expressed in letters to Gorkin, respectively on 13 and 14 of October 1963, in very similar terms. Their arguments reflect very well the reasons, increasingly dominant among the anti-Franco opposition, that would soon determine the shift of the anti-Franco policies from exile to interior and, as a result, a political erosion of exile.

In his letter to Gorkin and his closest collaborator from the interior Dionisio Ridruejo of 13 October 1963, Ayala considered that anti-Franco initiatives should “arise within Spain and on the part of those who live and act there”, and not on the part of the exiles. And on the idea of naming a new political centre, re-established after the Munich Congress by Gorkin under Madariaga’s presidency, Ayala added, with evident nods to the past controversy over the pro-amnesty campaign, that he considered “somewhat anomalous that one has to sign something on behalf of others whose identity one ignores” and that it was hardly possible to convince himself that “those ‘true initiators’ have to hide in the catacombs to form the committee as the suggested one”, citing the example of the recent document signed by Spanish intellectuals asking for clarification on the repression of strikes in Asturias. And then he added an argument, soon decisive for the definitive change of the main scenario of the anti-Franco struggle: “I insist, then, in my view: if something is to be done with expectations of effectiveness, that something, whatever it may be, must part from personalities ‘residing inside’, and certainly avoiding a conspiratorial air that is inadequate when one does not think of carrying out the type of activities that require secrecy but, on the contrary, acting on public opinion”.¹⁴

For his part, Ferrater Mora told Gorkin on 14 October 1963 that the Council’s initiative could not be “effective or even prudent” nor “useful or reasonable”, and repeated the argument that “initiatives of this type must at the present time part from Spain and not from those who are out of the country, in numerous cases for many years now”.¹⁵ In another letter, dated 31 October 1963,¹⁶ Ferrater Mora, in harsher terms than the employed in the previous one, recalled that the incident of the open letter two years earlier did not exactly encourage him to give his name in blank so that no one would act on his behalf, while declaring himself as alien to politics. He added forcefully: “One thing is, for example, to be part of a Commission or a Council with regular and effective activity, and where each member in praesentia, proposes, discusses, accepts, rejects, votes, abstains, etc. etc. etc. [sic] – Commission or Council, moreover, in which I do not see why I should appear if I do not do politics, nor do I live from it – and something else, very different, is to have one’s name out there, when, moreover, there is no need for the damn thing”.¹⁷

Ayala found Ferrater Mora’s hard letter “wonderful”, and he told him he wanted to savour his words a little more before returning the letter to its author: “Well, they didn’t just look like pearls to me, they looked like very fine pearls from the purest East”. Ayala mentioned his planned response to the “fine and skilful” letter of Dionisio Ridruejo (dated 29 October 1963), in which he defended the idea of the Council, “indispensable” due to the impossibility of operating as an association within Franco’s Spain, as well as the need, precisely abroad, to show the image of an opposition bloc independent of communist platforms and thus be able to capitalize international support. Ayala anticipated to Ferrater, with strong ironic tone, his impression on Ridruejo’s letter:

He says that the formal agreement of the democratic parties “has only crystallized as a moral possibility” (do you understand that, you who are a philosopher?) and that the idea of replacing it with the proposed Committee came from Gorkin (“I do not hide from you that the initiative comes from an ancient occurrence of Gorkin”). He says they’ve talked to [sic] party leaders like Gil Robles and Llopis who consider it useful and “complementary” (complementary to what?). And that you have written to them coinciding with my points of view, and Bosch, V. Kent, Alcalá Zamora and Justino Azcárate, “all agree with the project”, I suppose they will also consider it useful and complementary. Well, I’m going to think slowly on my answer and, as I say, I’ll send it to you along with the other documents, so that you can incorporate them into the archive of dissolved issues.¹⁸

After meditating on his response, Ayala finally sent the letter to Ridruejo on 5 November 1963,¹⁹ with new and pronounced notes of irony so characteristic of him:

Your letter, as fine and subtly written as from whom it comes, fully confirms the composition of place that I had formed and on which my reaction to your proposal was based. I appreciate the explanations you’re giving me. All these explanations involve (and I use this verb with a clear semantic conscience) an approach that I would have greatly appreciated if it had been done to me in a timely and frank manner, instead of that invitation to support in blank the initiative to create the Council in question. I would have considered it, I say, as proof – and elemental proof – of the confidence that Gorkin claims so much and which, in my opinion, should not be blind, but based on mutual consideration and respect. If this had been the case with me, I would have been given the opportunity to tell you what I thought of the committee you had devised. I would have expressed the opinion that, in the absence of the formal agreement of the democratic parties – which, as you say with a funny euphemism, “has only crystallized as a moral possibility” – the projected organism did not seem viable to me nor, in the event that it was constituted, would it serve as “a platform for manifestation and super partisan and mainly intellectual management”; (…) What that Council would be, if it were indeed constituted, is – wish it or not – a new political grouping, that not even with an overflowing optimism could take place in substitution of the formal agreement of the democratic parties; another political grouping, born already under a leader, Don Salvador de Madariaga, whose personality deserves to me all respect, but whose political leadership I am not willing to accept, among other reasons, because I do not wish to take part in any partisan militant activities.

Ayala finally refused to form part of the Committee which, for him, was, at best, “impracticable” and, from his particular point of view, “undesirable”. The erosion of Gorkin’s and Madariaga’s leadership was, therefore, already an obvious fact at that time, as another letter from Ayala to Gorkin, dated 5 November confirmed: “(…) I cannot understand how Madariaga’s duty as a Spaniard, at the age of 76, consists of ‘going where he is told’ and acting ‘relentlessly in that sense’. If he considers that his duty is that, I have no objection to it; but I, for my part, understand mine very differently”.²⁰

It was clear that radical anticommunism was not appropriate for the tasks of anti-Franco militancy, as Ayala and these liberal anticommunist intellectuals understood it, and even detrimental, since the Cold War binary policy of anticommunism against communism was overtaken by the demands of carrying out more plural and complex policies.

In this line, the plural composition of the acts around the homage to Antonio Machado of 1959, as well as the fruitful exchanges and confluences sustained between Christians and Marxists in platforms such as the soon funded magazine Cuadernos para el Diálogo (1963–1976), and the opening of the socialists towards the communist circles, represented examples of the progressive cohesion and the communication between the different forces of opposition, already without exclusion of Marxists and militant communists. At the height of the 1960s, it was simply unproductive in political terms to ignore the Communist Party as a fundamental reference point for the opposition in Spain, whose actions against the dictatorship won the support of numerous non- Communists, not a few Catholics and liberals, and especially of young socialists, bound by friendships forged in a shared anti-Franco militancy and in their common condition as victims of the same repressive machinery. As a consequence, the most important policies of anti-Francoism, those that would be relevant for the subsequent transition, were carried out without the politicians in exile. Initiatives such as that of the Spanish Committee of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1959–1977) – organized under the supervision of international intellectuals such as Pierre Emmanuel, Roselyne Chenu and Konstanty Jelenski, expressly on the margin of Gorkin and Madariaga – already belonged to this new era. On the other hand, neither Gorkin’s leadership nor the political agreements following the Munich Congress had an important impact on the new political militancy, as established years ago by Santos Juliá and confirmed by such an important opposition actor as Amadeu Cuito, one of the fundamental promoters of the Alianza Sindical Obrera (ASO) (personal communication, 16 September 2019). In this sense, although Girbau, Mazas and Bustelo had been affiliated to the PSOE since 1958, the ASU policy meant “a real break with that of the leadership of socialist organizations in exile” (Mateos 1993, 29). And in general, the division between the Socialists from Spain and the Executive of Toulouse was increasing at least since June 1958.²¹ Finally, it would conclude in Llopis’ displacement from the PSOE leadership thanks to the means and international support provided by the German trade unions, first to the ASO, “a broad and unique trade union confederation throughout Spain, independent of doctrines and political parties” (Gillespie 1991, 256), and later to the re-founding of the PSOE based on the young generations of activists from the interior of the country.

Conclusions

It is by no means an exaggeration to affirm that the work of Gorkin and Madariaga, over the years, was fundamental to the cause of Spanish democracy, not only because it helped to create the conditions that ended up allowing a great dialogue between major part of dissident forces, but also because it enabled Spanish opposition leaders to get in touch with their counterparts in the Western world, particularly through international bodies such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the European Movement or the American and Western trade unions. The IVth Congress of the European Movement, held in Munich between 5 and 8 June 1962, in the midst of a wave of mining strikes in Asturias, was in that sense their most important political achievement, but at the same time marked the beginning of the decline of Gorkin’s and Madariaga’s political relevance.

The arguments with which Ayala and Ferrater Mora opposed to Gorkin and Madariaga’s policies revealed the growing sterility of the political and cultural projects of the Spanish exiles connected to the Cultural Cold War machinery, and would ultimately give rise to the supporters of a wider action of influence and political mobilization inside Spain and among its new opposition groups. The controversy about the appropriate way to carry out the political denunciation of

Francoism analyzed in this study points to the idea that giving a decisive role to the interior, at the cost of exile, and of carrying out policies that escaped the binary rhetoric of the blocs, “always suspicious” and contrary to democracy, to recall the words of Ferrater Mora, became dominant even among the sectors of the anti-communist liberal exile. The erosion of radically anti- communist policies, in their forms and rhetoric, which at the height of the sixties promoted leaders such as Gorkin and Madariaga, was evident, because what was required was plurality, the overcoming of divisions of yesteryear and the present among the opposition, and the building of consensus necessary to build the future. The success of anti-Franco policies would no longer depend on the communist/anti-communist dichotomy, but on initiatives of a multipolar and plural character, based on the personal ties woven between the different opposition collectives, which in time would end up converging in the horizontal consensuses embodied in the Transition.

Abdón Mateos states that “the solidarity campaigns organized before the European

internationals and democratic parties and trade unions, together with the pro-amnesty activities prepared by the PCE abroad during the years 1959–1962, had the effect of a certain softening of repressive activities” (1993: 150–152). On the other hand, human rights became a key demand of the opposition in the 1960s, while the liquidation of the great narratives inherited from the fratricidal struggles of the republican period and the Civil War also took place (Juliá 2004, 538). The human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations Assembly in 1948, were, in this context, a weapon in the fight against the Spanish dictatorship, since they allowed the postulates of democratization to be based on an apolitical terrain, regardless of who promoted it, an issue that was irrelevant to almost everyone. This is what De Haro calls the change in the “interpretative framework that gave meaning to collective action within the anti-Franco movement” (2019, 85). Human rights, as expressed in the mobilizations for amnesty, regardless of whether they were promoted by communists, anti-communists, liberals, socialists, Catholics or fellow travelers, became a powerful new tool for fighting the Franco regime on the common basis of fundamental democratic principles. It is important to note that, exactly as the exiled New York professors observed, human rights provided an unquestionable basis for mobilization precisely because they constituted a pillar of apolitical demand, directed at universal rights and therefore impervious to the divisions of the Cold War. In Franco’s Spain, very soon, fundamental human and social rights became the ideological basis for popular mobilizations and it was on this basis that dialogue and political negotiation could be extended among the broadest political sectors – no longer excluding neither the communists nor the sectors of the Regime – and the process that ended up making the current democratic regime a reality could be completed.

Archives

Archive of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the International Association for Cultural Freedom. Special Collections section of the Regenstein Library. University of Chicago (USA).

Luis Araquistáin Personal Papers. The Spanish National Historical Archive. Madrid. Francisco Ayala Digital Archive. Francisco Ayala Foundation. doi: http://www.ffayala.es/

Josep Ferrater Mora Personal Papers. University of Girona. doi: https://dugifonsespecials.udg.edu/.

Salvador de Madariaga Personal Papers. The José Cornide Institute. A Coruña.

Joaquín Maurín Personal Papers. The Hoover Institution Archives. Stanford University

(USA).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Research under the Ramón y Cajal program (Ref. RYC-2017-22516).

Notes

1. Letter from Miguel Sanchez Mazas to Gorkin, thanking him for the many friendly and kind gestures, favors and help, both political and human, with the members of the ASU. Archive of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the International Association for Cultural Freedom, held in the Special Collections section of the Regenstein Library [IACF]. University of Chicago (USA); Series II; box 57, folder 2.

2. Letter from Gorkin to Madariaga, 30 September 1959. Personal Archive of Salvador de Madariaga deposited at the José Cornide Institute in A Coruña [APSM]; C162/1; C1.

3. Letter from Gorkin to Araquistain, 25 November 1958. Personal Archive of Luis Araquistáin [ALA] preserved in the Spanish National Historical Archive. Madrid. ALA-99-1.

4. Letter from Gokin to Llopis, 9 September 1957. ALA-97-24.

5. Section “Represión franquista”, Series “Cartas y peticiones”. Spanish Communist Party Archive. Madrid.

6. Letter from Gorkin to Madariaga, 22 February 1961. APSM; C165; C17.

7. Letter from Gorkin to Joaquín Maurín, Eugenio Granell, Ángel del Río, Francisco García Lorca, Francisco Ayala and Vicente Llorens, 23 February 1961. IACF; Series II; box 62, folder 1.

8. Personal Archive of Joaquín Maurín [APJM]; box 6, folder “Correspondence with Gorkin”, Hoover Institution Archive. Stanford University (USA). [“Ello no obstante, hemos coincidido, en el curso de nuestro cambio de impresiones, en considerar que es un error actuar habitualmente, y en este caso particular, en forma de reacción frente a las iniciativas comunistas. Toda la campaña en favor de los presos es inobjetable; y la razón de que la lancen los comunistas reside precisamente en que no compromete políticamente, siendo para ellos un acto de mera propaganda. Consideramos, pues, aconsejable tomar y fomentar iniciativas propias en relación con la situación del mundo en general y con la de España en particular, procurando abordar las cuestiones verdaderamente fundamentales y de principio”].

9. [“Hemos luchado durante varios años y seguiremos luchando para que nuestros compatriotas, encarcelados por motivos políticos, sean devueltos a la libertad, en la medida en que existe ésta, bajo el régimen actual, para los otros españoles. Pero rechazamos la idea de la amnistía, ya que ni los presos políticos ni los exiliados han cometido crímenes que demanden perdón. Protestamos, además, contra toda gestión a favor de los presos políticos españoles en colaboración con los jefes comunistas como Maurice Thorez, Luigi Longo, Louis Aragon y otros, que han cubierto con sus nombres las matanzas de Budapest, así como el encarcelamiento de millones el exilio de centenares de miles de europeos. Y nos permitimos llamar la atención de los firmantes no comunistas de ese llamamiento, por el hecho de que la asamblea, reunida bajo la égida comunista, le será harto útil a un régimen que les ha puesto un rótulo comunista a todas las acciones a favor de la libertad. Lamentamos profundamente que un buen número de personas, cuya fidelidad a la libertad y a la democracia no admite duda alguna, se hayan dejado persuadir, con la mejor buena fe, al punto de cubrir con su nombre esta maniobra, y expresamos la esperanza de que nos será posible contar con un concurso en el esfuerzo que nos proponemos hacer sin segundas intenciones, con el fin de alcanzar el objetivo que esas personas de buena fe se proponían al dar su honrada y sincera adhesión a esta gestión de inspiración comunista”.]

10. Letter from Maurin to Gorkin, 3 April 1961: “They had adhered to the idea that motivated the letter, with certain reservations that were communicated to you. It is therefore natural that they would not accept that their signature should have been affixed to the foot of a document which had not previously been given to them to read”. APJM; box 6, folder “Correspondence with Gorkin”.

11. [“No necesito decirles que las empresas comunistas merecen mi repulsa. Sus fines políticos y la inmoralidad de sus métodos me son absolutamente extraños. Por lo tanto, estoy completamente de acuerdo en que hay que hacer todo lo posible para oponerse a ellos. Pero hay que oponerse a ellos con habilidad, siempre que ésta no se halle en conflicto con el decoro político. Los comunistas suelen pedir cosas que en sí mismas son inobjetables: “evitar la guerra‘,’liberar a los presos políticos”, etc. etc. Ya sabemos, por supuesto, que eso no es lo que realmente les importa. Pero una actitud puramente negativa revela en los anticomunistas una cierta debilidad”].

12. Letter from Ferrater Mora to Salvador de Madariaga and Julián Gorkin, 28 March 1961; Ferrater Mora Archive held at the University of Girona: https://dugifonsespecials.udg.edu/handle/10256.2/1358 [“Los bloques son siempre sospechosos – y es por ello que los comunistas son tan aficionados a ellos. A los comunistas no les gusta, o no les conviene, matizar. Pero nosotros tenemos que hacerlo, pues la libertad es en gran parte libertad para matizar”].

13. Declaration quoted in “Correspondencia”, Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura, 51 (August 1961), pp. 98-99.

14. “Insisto, pues, en mi punto de vista: si algo ha de hacerse con expectativas de eficacia, ese algo, sea lo que fuera, debe partir de personalidades “residentes en el interior”, y evitando por cierto un aire conspirativo que resulta inadecuado cuando no se piensa en llevar a cabo el tipo de actividades que requieren secreto sino, al contrario, actuar sobre la opinión pública”.

15. APSM; C162; C6.

16. APSM; C162; C6.

17. “Una cosa es, por ejemplo, formar parte de una Comisión o un Consejo con actividad regular y efectiva, y en donde cada miembro in praesentia, propone, discute, acepta, rechaza, vota, se abstiene, etc. etc. [sic] – Comisión o Consejo, por lo demás, en la cual no veo por qué debería figurar yo, que no hago política, ni vivo de ella – y otra cosa, muy distinta, es tener por ahí su nombre, que, además, maldita la falta que hace”.

18. “Dice que el acuerdo formal de los partidos democráticos ‘sólo ha cristalizado como posibilidad moral’ (¿entiendes eso, tú que eres filósofo?) y que la idea de sustituirlo por el Comité propuesto se le ocurrió a Gorkin (“no te oculto que la iniciativa procede de una antigua ocurrencia de Gorkin”). Dice que han hablado con [sic] jefes de partido como Gil Robles y Llopis que lo consideran útil y “complementario”. (¿Complementario de qué?). Y que tú les has escrito coincidiendo con mis puntos de vista, y Bosch, V. Kent, Alcalá Zamora y Justino Azcárate, “conformes todos estos con el proyecto”, supongo que también lo considerarán útil y complementario. Bueno, voy a pensar despacio mi respuesta y, como te digo, te la mandaré junta con los demás documentos, para que los incorpores al archivo de cuestiones dis-putadas [sic]”. Letter from Francisco Ayala to Ferrater Mora, of 3 November 1963, reproduced in the Francisco Ayala Digital Archive, Francisco Ayala Foundation: http://www.ffayala.es/epistolario/carta/115/

19. APSM; C139; C4.

20. Gorkin’s reply to Ayala, 5 November 1963. APSM; C139; C6.

21. During the VII Congress of the PSOE in exile, in June 1958, members of the interior had asked for greater participation in the decision-making process, since “in their view, the political action against Franco should be located within Spain”. On August 11 and 12, 1958, Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Interior proposed to the PSOE Steering Committee the following, as detailed by Pilar Ortuño: “1) collaboration in practice with the communists, 2) autonomy for the interior, and 3) a pact with other opposition groups and the organization of peaceful protests. All of them were reached by the Executive Commission in exile (2005, 98-99).