Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

by Vaill, Amanda

  Negotiating that landscape was particularly hazardous for journalists, who were able to cover this war more closely and thoroughly than they had any previous conflict, certainly more than the Great War of 1914–1918, in which (as Philip Knightley discusses in The First Casualty, his critical history of war journalism) correspondents and photographers were banned from the front. With millions of readers, viewers, and listeners getting their news from the new media of radio, documentary film, newsreels, and illustrated magazines, Spain became a place where reputations, and even fortunes, could be made. But those doing the making tended to be foreign nationals, outsiders; and when the war was over, if they lived, they could go home, to enjoy the reputations or the fortunes. If they bent the truth one way or the other, they faced few real consequences. The Spaniards, at least those on the losing side, weren’t so lucky.

  Hotel Florida is not a history of the Spanish Civil War; there have been many such, on all ideological sides of the issue, and I would have nothing to add to their number. It is a narrative examination of the Civil War experiences of my six subjects, and some of their close confederates, which attempts to offer contrasting and close-up views of their tangled wartime destinies. But although Hotel Florida is a narrative, not an academic analysis, it is not fiction, or even fictional. It is a reconstruction, based on published and unpublished letters, diaries, and personal accounts, official documents, recovered reels of film, authoritative biographies, histories, and contemporary news media, all cited in detail in the source notes. These sources, some of which have only recently become available, have enabled me to offer new versions of events covered differently elsewhere; but to preserve the narrative texture of the book, discussion of the differences, for those curious about them, has been largely confined to the notes.

  In his poem “Remembering the Thirties” Donald Davie wrote of how his own post–World War II generation dismissed the passionate commitments of their elders as the stuff of “high-brow thrillers,” preferring instead “a neutral tone” in action and in writing. And yet, he asked, mightn’t it be better “To praise a stance impressive and absurd / Than not to see the hero for the dust”? I hope that in these pages some of the dust is blown away and the heroes—whoever they are—are visible.

  PROLOGUE

  On July 18, 1936, at Gando in the Canary Islands, a short, balding, barrel-chested man in a gray suit, carrying a Spanish diplomatic passport in the name of José Antonio de Sagroniz, boarded a private seven-seater de Havilland Dragon Rapide aircraft that had arrived at Gando three days previously and had been waiting on the tarmac for him ever since. The plane had been chartered for the substantial sum of £2,000 ($156,000 today), anonymously deposited into a special account in Kleinwort’s Bank in London, and it had been flown to the Canaries under conditions of greatest secrecy from Croydon Aerodrome in England. Before taking off from Gando, its pilot, Cecil Bebb, a sometime British military intelligence officer, had been instructed to make sure of the identity of his passenger by giving him the bottom half of a playing card and asking the passenger to supply the top half—which would have been peculiar orders if the passenger were an ordinary diplomat, and this were a routine charter flight.

  In reality, however, Bebb’s passenger was Francisco Franco Bahamonde, at forty-four the youngest general in the Spanish Army and former commander of the Foreign Legion during the ill-fated Rif rebellion against Spanish and French rule in Morocco. A vocal critic of his country’s five-month-old Socialist government, he had been sequestered in the Canary Islands as military commandant after being dismissed from his post as military chief of staff. And now he was on his way from exile in the Canaries, almost a thousand miles by sea from Spain, to rejoin his old troops in Spanish Morocco and lead them to the mainland as part of a carefully plotted military coup against Spain’s democratically elected regime.

  The republic whose government Franco and his coconspirators wanted to overthrow had been established only in 1931, when the first free elections in nearly sixty years led to the abdication of King Alfonso XIII. Spain had spent centuries under the control of the landed aristocracy, the Catholic Church, and, more recently, the new industrial oligarchy; in an effort to break that control, the new republic’s constitution, passed in December 1931, granted women the vote, legalized divorce, discontinued state funding of religious orders, made free primary education compulsory, and supported the concept of autonomy for the nation’s linguistically disparate and historically independent regions. “This young and eager Spain has at last arrived at its majority,” the republicans claimed; but its government was so unschooled in practical politics, and included so many conflicting elements—from the reform-minded Socialists to the conservative anti-monarchists to the radical anarchists and in between—that a unified, consistent approach to Spain’s chronic problems of worker disenfranchisement, illiteracy, poverty, and industrial underdevelopment proved impossible to achieve. And the country’s vested interests—the army, the holders of the vast estates called latifundias, the mine- and factory owners, and the Church—viewed most steps toward reform as the beginnings of Communist revolution, a not-uncommon reaction in the Europe of the 1930s. Many among them saw an alternative in the vision of the ascendant fascist leaders Benito Mussolini and, increasingly, Adolf Hitler.

  These established forces started pushing back against the government’s policies almost at once. There were reports of latifundistas in the south starving out their tenant farmers by simply refusing to put acreage under cultivation, or hiring cheaper labor from elsewhere, and of workers who dared to unionize and strike being attacked by the Civil Guard. The conservative press began referring to the government as a cabal of Jews, Masons, and Bolsheviks; and within the army, which was conservative and monarchist to begin with and resistant to the new government’s efforts to trim its inflated officer ranks, a small cabal started to plot against the Republic.

  The anti-Republicans were helped by the old paradox of reform: when enough pressure for change builds up, lifting the lid off the kettle just a little doesn’t reduce the pressure—it makes the contents explode. In the first year of the Republic there were agrarian revolts, church burnings, and an anarchist uprising, all of which created a climate of fear and turmoil and stimulated the right to action. Although the government managed to squash a mutiny by General José Sanjurjo late in the summer of 1932, in the 1933 parliamentary elections the right-wingers of the Catholic CEDA party (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas) won nearly twice the number of seats in the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, as the Socialists; and the Radical Republicans, who had become estranged from the left, definitively broke with them and joined the other anti-Republicans in a coalition of the right. With the Socialists out of power, the socialist trade union, the UGT, fearful that the new government would dismantle recent reforms, called a general strike; and the president of the Catalan regional assembly declared wealthy, industrialized Catalonia an autonomous state within the Republic. Then, in October 1934, an armed labor rebellion broke out in Asturias, where thirty thousand workers took over mines and factories, destroyed property, and killed factory owners and priests.

  The man the government summoned to put down this uprising was Francisco Franco, newly promoted to army chief of staff; and his principal weapon was the fighting force with which he’d battled the Rif rebels in Morocco: the mercenaries of the Army of Africa, soldiers for whom slaughter was a job, who didn’t need to think twice about what it meant to kill fellow citizens, because the miners of Asturias weren’t their fellow citizens. “The war in Morocco,” Franco remarked to a journalist covering his Asturian action, “had a certain romantic air, an air of reconquest. But this war is a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism, and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism.” By the time reconquest was achieved, between one and two thousand people had been killed, of whom about 320 were military or government personnel.

  In the aftermath of the events of October
1934, many left-wing politicians were imprisoned—one of them, Francisco Largo Caballero, spent the time reading the works of Marx and Lenin for the first time—and the president of the Catalan assembly, Luís Companys, was sentenced to death. All were ultimately freed in a vain attempt to restore some kind of equilibrium to the Republic; but by now the only equilibrium seemed to be the balance of suspicion and hatred between left and right.

  In February 1936, a left-wing coalition called the Popular Front, led by the former prime minister Manuel Azaña, a left-Republican litterateur, and including both Socialists and Communists, faced down the right-wing Antirevolutionary Coalition (sometimes referred to as the National Front), a loose confederation of the CEDA and the monarchists, in a close and bitterly fought election. Feelings ran high: during the campaign bishops told Catholics to vote for the Antirevolutionaries or risk purgatory, while Largo Caballero threatened civil war if the right won. He had been making similar statements since 1932, but his comments did nothing to defuse tension. When the Popular Front prevailed (by a popular margin of only 1.1 percent, although they won 263 of the 473 seats in the Cortes), the narrowness of the victory undercut the new coalition’s mandate; and the withdrawal of substantial amounts of capital from the country by edgy investors shook the economy, already weakened by the effects of worldwide depression, to its core. The Cortes became a hive of angry rhetoric, while outbreaks of violence by the armed militias of a triumphalist left and a resentful and provocative right took that anger into the streets.

  It was against this background that the government tried to push through a program that included military and agrarian reforms and Catalan autonomy, as well as freedom for the political prisoners taken during the past several years—at which point leading figures on the right began to talk seriously, and secretly, with a cadre of disaffected army generals about seizing power. And Spain’s fate became a matter of increasing interest outside its borders: to men and women in Europe and the United States who eyed the power of Soviet Russia and its Communist revolution with apprehension, or who watched in horror as Hitler and Mussolini led their followers to ever more aggressive actions against their compatriots and their neighbors; as well as to the leaders of Germany, Italy, and Russia, who saw in Spain a template for their own futures.

  In June, Francisco Franco had written from his post in the Canary Islands to the prime minister, Santiago Casares Quiroga—a detached, ascetic-looking man who had taken over the office when Azaña became president—protesting the recent removal of some of his fellow right-wing officers from their posts in the government’s military house-cleaning. He warned his superior that he was risking “the discipline of the army” by the government’s actions; however, he suggested, if he himself were put in supreme charge of the military, he might be able to assure its loyalty. Casares Quiroga never answered the letter.

  The stage was now set for a carefully orchestrated military uprising, first in the colonial outposts of Melilla, Ceuta, and Tetuán in Spanish Morocco, then in garrisons around the Spanish mainland. The plotters apparently envisioned a quick military takeover: not a prolonged civil war that would last nearly three years; cost nearly four hundred thousand lives; destroy villages, towns, and substantial parts of cities; put thousands of citizens in political prisons for decades; lay waste to the country’s economy; and leave scars in the national psyche that still hurt seventy-five years later. But they did intend—unilaterally, by force—to overthrow their country’s legally elected government and replace it with one of their devising.

  So when the hired Dragon Rapide crossed into Spanish colonial airspace, Francisco Franco opened his suitcase and changed from his gray business suit into a khaki uniform, winding around his waist the red-and-gold tasseled sash of a general in the Spanish Army. Shortly thereafter, the plane touched down on the tarmac at Tetuán, where rebel troops had already stormed and secured the airfield, and Franco proceeded by motorcade between lines of saluting Moorish soldiers to the office of the high commissioner. Soon all the world would hear his proclamation:

  Once more the Army, reunited with the other forces of the nation, has found itself obliged to respond to the wishes of the great majority of Spaniards who, with infinite bitterness, have seen disappear that which unites us in a common ideal: SPAIN. At stake is the need to restore the empire of ORDER within the REPUBLIC … [and] the principle of AUTHORITY, forgotten in these past years …

  To execute these tasks rapidly

  I order and command:

  Article 1. Martial law is declared in the whole territory and all armed forces in consequence are militarized …

  Ten days later, an American newspaperman, Jay Allen, who had happened to be in Gibraltar when the uprising began, managed to get to Tetuán and interview Franco in the high commissioner’s mansion. “There can be no compromise, no truce,” the general told Allen then. “I shall advance. I shall take the capital. I will save Spain from marxism at whatever cost.”

  “That means,” Allen asked, for clarification, “that you will have to shoot half Spain?”

  Franco smiled. “I said whatever the cost.”

  The Spanish Civil War had begun.

  PART I

  “THEY ARE HERE FOR THEIR LIVES”

  July 1936: Madrid

  Arturo Barea lay on the brown, pine-needled floor of a forest in the Sierra de Guadarrama, northwest of Madrid, with his head in his mistress’s lap. It was midafternoon on Sunday, July 19, and the resinous air was loud with the sound of cicadas. Tall, thin, with slicked-back dark hair, the eyes of an El Greco saint, and the mouth of a sensualist, Barea was drowsy with the heat, the wine he and Maria had had with their picnic lunch, and the lovemaking afterward; he longed to close his eyes and give himself over to sleep. But Maria had other ideas. She wanted to talk. Not, this time, about how much she wanted him to leave his wife and children and make an honest woman of her after six years as his secretary and occasional bedmate, a subject that usually ended in stalemate and tears. Today she wanted to know where Barea had been last night, all night: what he had been doing that had kept him both away from home and away from her bed. But the events and sensations of the last twelve hours were too raw, too immediate to discuss; he sensed that the equipoise of his life was about to spin irrevocably out of control, and he was too exhausted to deal with the consequences.

  At thirty-eight, Barea had constructed a life that was a delicate balancing act. He’d grown up poor: his father, an army recruiter, dead at forty, had left his family penniless; his mother had had to wash soldiers’ dirty laundry in the Manzanares—breaking the ice with her wooden beater on cold winter mornings—and work as a servant for her well-to-do brother in order to keep the children out of the orphanage. The brother had taken an interest in little Arturo—sent him to school at the Escuela Pía, treated him to the circus, and the cinema and the bookstalls in the Plaza de Callao, and encouraged his dreams of studying engineering (he was less enthusiastic about the literary ambitions that fueled Arturo’s many contributions to the school’s magazine, Madrileñitos). But then he, too, had died and his wife wanted no more to do with her sister-in-law and her children. So Arturo, still a scrawny teenager, had to go to work, first as a jeweler’s apprentice; then, after studying for and passing accountancy exams, as a clerk at the Madrid branch of the Crédit Lyonnais.

  A quick learner, he soon began to see raises in his modest paycheck; if he’d wanted to play the toady he could have climbed the bank’s career ladder in a hurry. But he was proud and thin-skinned—a dangerous combination—and he chafed under the cavalier treatment of his bosses while also feeling shame at the humble origins he knew they disdained. He flirted with an alternative ambition—writing—but submitting prose pieces to the Madrid weeklies and hanging around the tertulias, the freewheeling discussions in various literary cafés, seemed to lead nowhere. He joined the Socialist general trade union, the UGT, when he was twenty; and despite feeling out of place when he appeared at union meetings in his señorito’
s suit and tie, he felt more solidarity with the workers in their blouses and rope-soled shoes than he did with the frock-coated bank directors who glared over their pince-nez at him. It was as much their patronizing attitude as his disgust at what he considered unjust profiteering that led him to storm out of the bank—calling it “a pig sty”—the day the Great War was declared in 1914; and although he would manage, against all odds, to become a boss himself, with a patent agent’s office high above the most fashionable part of the Calle de Alcalá, he still sided with the workers over the fat cats. “I’m no use as a capitalist,” he would say.

  Not that he wasn’t happy to have the capitalist’s salary, and the gold cédula personal, the identity card showing him to be in one of the top income brackets, that went with it. But he’d insisted on installing his family in a large flat on one of the narrow, crooked streets in Lavapiés, the working-class barrio where he’d grown up, rather than in one of the bourgeois districts his wife, Aurelia, hankered after. He liked the idea of living in both worlds while belonging to neither, which he’d managed to do, in part, by staying out of the political struggles of the past decade. True, he’d joined the Socialists in 1931, when the new republic was declared, and that year he’d helped a friend organize a new clerical workers’ union; but otherwise he’d confined himself to the sidelines, even during the bienio negro, the two dark years following the right’s electoral victory in 1934. Although he decried the corruption and exploitation he frequently saw in his position as a patent agent, he told himself he was too insignificant a cog in the economic machinery to do anything about it.