Florentín CEBRIAN’S father had resisted joining the collective. A right-winger, he owned only half a hectare of land, which was insufficient to support a family of five children. Florentín, at the age of twenty-one, went out to work as a labourer; when his father at last joined the collective ‘from force of circumstances or fear, I’ve never known’, he too had to join. He did not mind the work, but he resented receiving no pay. ‘Everybody at work likes to know why they’re working and for whom.’ When he went out to work it was to earn a day’s wage. Now he got his food instead.
—But there was a war on, you had to bear that in mind. I used to say to myself, ‘This isn’t going to last for ever. Nothing is eternal.’ I had heard people talk about the war in Cuba. That had come to an end, and I imagined one day this war would end too …
The collective attempted to reconcile the peasantry to the new system by allowing each collectivist a small, irrigated plot to grow vegetables for his own home. The men worked there on Sundays. Similarly, everyone was allowed to keep chickens and to rear rabbits at home. The two or three village motorbikes which had belonged to small businessmen were expropriated and given to the shepherds of the large herds formed from the previous privately owned head of stock. ‘It was time to improve the shepherds’ lot, we thought; they had always had the hardest, most oppressed lives, and so now we spared them having to walk long distances,’ Sevilla PASTOR, of the libertarian youth, remembered.
In almost every collective there was one general wish which, when fulfilled, brought immense satisfaction: the introduction of agricultural machinery where there had been none. In many collectives, as in Mas de las Matas, this was a threshing machine which ended the laborious task of threshing by mule and winnowing by hand. The collective procured a Czech machine powered by an electric motor in time for the 1937 harvest. It was ‘paid for’ by the collective’s produce of beans, fruit, and cattle stock with which the collective had run up a credit with the Council of Aragon. The latter had found the foreign currency.
As the chief village in a rural district comprising eighteen other villages, Mas de las Matas was responsible for the district’s exchange of produce. An account – expressed in pesetas and at pre-war prices – was kept for each village in the district warehouse, and exchanges carried out through the Council of Aragon.
—There was no inflation, prices were fixed. Without realizing it we had created an economic dictatorship! It went against our principles, we would have had to change it with time, explained MARGELI. But I came to the conclusion that someone has to be responsible for giving orders; things couldn’t work simply with people doing as they wanted …
He began to see that assemblies, in which many anarchists put all their trust, were not always the best vehicles for selecting the people to be in charge because those attending the meeting often did not take sufficient account of a person’s psychological suitability for the post. And choice of the correct person was what mattered most.
—We held village assemblies only to discuss special matters, like fixing the bread ration, or schools. The women attended, of course. They, for example, wanted to continue to bake their own bread. The collective provided freshly baked bread daily whereas the women, traditionally, baked only once every ten days or so, and the bread went stale. But the women liked their old ways, didn’t want to change. The assembly decided against them. There was a lot of talk at these assemblies – too much. We should have talked less and worked more! …
A characteristic concern with education occupied the collectivists. From the start of the war the village schools were re-opened to keep the children off the streets, and students called in to replace teachers absent on holiday, MARGELI made a special trip to Barcelona to fill a lorry with rationalist school books. He also managed to procure a duplicator, a ciné projector and some children’s films. A new school was built in a farmhouse for children from outlying areas who had never been able to attend school; education was made co-educational, a school magazine started, a theatre group set up. Once a week the collective’s committee met to discuss matters with the teachers, insisting that the schools must want for nothing.
—A young woman teacher said she had never known anything like it. Previously it had been impossible to get funds for education. We were always prepared to adapt our ideas in every area of collective life if things didn’t work. That was the advantage of our collectives over state-created ones like those in Russia. We were free. Each village could do as it pleased. There was local stimulus, local initiative. True, the problem of inequality of resources existed; there were rich and poor collectives, and this was something that had to be tackled, as it was at the 1938 special CNT economic conference in Valencia which proposed the creation of an Iberian syndical bank. Meanwhile, we suggested that villagers from the poorer villages, where there was a surplus of labour, should go to work in more prosperous collectives. But the people were stubborn, they didn’t like the idea of moving …
*
The Mas de las Matas collective was undoubtedly among the more successful. In Macario ROYO’S view this was because of the existence of a relatively prosperous, independent peasantry. ‘As a result, many of the young people had a good education, a good grounding in libertarian thought. It wasn’t a poor day-labourers’ village –’ A socialist from a neighbouring village in the province of Castellón, Emilio SEGOVIA, who travelled extensively through Aragon on business and was opposed to the total collectivization that was being carried out, admired the Mas de las Matas collective. He remembered going to see one of the richest men in the village who had joined.
—‘How come you’re a communist now?’ I said. He had more than enough land, wine, olive oil to live comfortably. ‘Why? Because this is the most human system there is.’ In Mas de las Matas it worked really well. I remember them sending a man who suffered from an ulcer to Barcelona to be cured. It cost them 7,000 pesetas, a considerable amount of money at the time. More than the man would have been able to raise for himself … 43
ALLOZA (Teruel)
Some 30 km from Mas de las Matas, on a small prominence in the centre of a large bowl of arable land, stands the village of Alloza. In the 1930s, Alloza was both smaller (population 1,800) and less prosperous than Mas de las Matas. Its economy was based on the traditional wheat, olives and wine; a year without rain meant no wheat harvest. Though a few villagers had joined the CNT in Barcelona, there was no union in the village. Politics functioned in a manner common enough in rural Spain: the monarchy’s liberals and conservatives became the republic’s left republicans and CEDA members. Power remained in the same hands; the change of regime at the national level meant only a change of shirt at the local. In the Justice of the Peace’s words, the village was like a vat of olive oil – ‘so calm that it seemed the republic had not been proclaimed here’.
At the outbreak of war, with rumours that the insurgents were advancing from Saragossa some 100 km to the north-west, and anarcho-syndicalist columns setting out from Barcelona to the east, the villagers chose an ingenious course: they set up a committee composed of left- and right-wingers to protect each other whatever side arrived first. ‘A form of mutual aid to prevent a blood-bath; it was fear of what might happen which made it possible, of course,’ explained Mariano FRANCO, CNT member and smallholder’s son, who was responsible for the initiative.
Within a few days an armed group claiming to belong to the CNT reached the village, sacked the church and set fire to religious images, including some locally famous copper reliefs from the Calvary above the village. Mariano FRANCO finally managed to get them to leave.
—It was an unequal struggle; they were armed and I wasn’t. But I had joined the CNT at the age of sixteen, had been fighting for my ideals-which evidently they didn’t share – for nearly half my life. With the moral strength that gave me, I was able to confront them …
A few days later, the Carod column reached the village and continued on to Muniesa. FRANCO, who had known Carod in the Barc
elona CNT, had already set off to join the column. Alloza was now, and remained for the next eighteen months, only a few kilometres behind the front line. Barely a week later, militiamen from two neighbouring villages came to make four arrests in the village; the prisoners, who included a priest and a civil guard lieutenant, were taken to Carod’s headquarters where a militia committee condemned them to death. Mariano ALQUEZAR, a large-holding peasant and right-wing deputy mayor of the village, was one of the four. He was accused of being the village’s leading fascist. ‘In fact, I wasn’t a falangist – although I would have been if I could. My family was traditionally right-wing, my father had been the local leader of the Conservatives, and we were called caciques in the village.’ Convinced from the moment of his arrest that he was going to die, he did not deny the charge. He remained calmly waiting in the cell for his hour to come.
—Suddenly Mariano Franco appeared. I could see he was deeply upset. He was an idealist, completely opposed to people being shot. This wasn’t what he was fighting for. He didn’t mention the priest and the civil guard lieutenant, who were both from Alloza originally and had returned there to hide. Franco couldn’t save them, but he got me and the other man released. I returned to the village with my companion who almost immediately fell ill and soon afterwards died …
Angel NAVARRO, a smallholder, had seen the men being driven away. ‘Now it’s going to start,’ he thought and began to shiver. A former CNT member in Barcelona where he had gone as a building labourer because his father’s land was too poor to support the family, he was shortly appointed president of the village committee on Carod’s and Franco’s recommendation. His sole concern became to avoid bloodshed in Alloza where, as he knew, opinion generally favoured the insurgent rather than the Popular Front cause.
One day a car drew up and half a dozen militiamen got out with a list of people they had come to arrest.
—‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Have you eaten supper, companions? No. Well, let’s go and eat and we’ll talk about it then.’ We went to the inn which was run by a relative. I sent out the town crier to find the man who held the keys of the collective store to fetch a good ham, a carafe of wine. When the militiamen had eaten one of them said: ‘Come on, we’re in a hurry.’ I feared the worst. Instead, one of them put his arm round my shoulder. ‘Comrade, everyone should be like you, act as you have.’ They left. That night in Alcorisa they shot a lot of people …
There had been other incidents of this sort earlier. It was in this climate that, in the autumn of 1936, collectivization took place. Until the CNT representatives of the district committee came to tell them to collectivize, nothing had changed on the land.
—We agreed to collectivize – simply to ensure that lives were spared. If we did what we were told there would be no cause for reprisals. Otherwise I feared for what might happen – and to us on the committee in particular …
A village assembly was called. NAVARRO explained that the initiative came from outside. ‘They’ve come and told us other villages have collectivized and they want everyone to be equal.’ The CNT representatives had stressed that no one was to be maltreated, had suggested how to organize the collective. NAVARRO proposed to the assembly that work groups be made up of family and friends and that each group work its former lands, although all produce would have to go on ‘the pile’, i.e. to a collective warehouse.
—The collective wouldn’t have been formed if it hadn’t been for the terror. In fact, given the choice, I wouldn’t have joined myself. If everyone were good and just – not egotistical and two-faced – a collective would be fine to work and live in because union brings strength. But I knew what we were really like …
Once the decision was taken, it was formally left to the peasants to volunteer to join. Mariano Franco came from the front to hold a meeting, saying that militiamen were threatening to take the livestock of all those who remained outside the collective. As in Mas de las Matas, all privately owned stocks of food had to be turned in.
Juan MARTINEZ, a twenty-eight-year-old medium-holding farmer, who belonged to the left republicans but considered himself a-political, had considerable quantities of olive oil, wine and wheat which, with other stocks in his wife’s small shop, had to be handed over. He was left without anything, ‘cleaned out, in fact’.
—But I realized there was a war on and everyone had to make sacrifices. ‘Look, chico, material interests aren’t the most important thing at the moment. What we’ve got to ensure is that no one is assassinated.’ Everyone felt the same …
Once the work groups were established on a friendly basis and worked their own lands, everyone got on well enough together, he recalled. There was no need for coercion, no need of discipline and punishment. People worked just as hard as before. The owners of the land knew what crops needed sowing in their fields, everyone knew how to work the land. A collective wasn’t a bad idea at all.
—To work in common is by no means stupid. It meant large concentrations of land instead of small, scattered plots, which saved time and effort. We didn’t live worse under collectivization than before – or only to the extent made inevitable by the war. Those who had had less – and there were quite a few of them before – now ate more and better. But no one went short …
He shared, however, the generalized dislike for having to hand over all the produce to ‘the pile’ and to get nothing except his rations in return. Another bad thing was the way the militia columns requisitioned livestock from the collective, issuing vouchers in return. Having been appointed livestock delegate, he went on a couple of occasions to Caspe to try to ‘cash in’ the vouchers unsuccessfully.
As elsewhere, the abolition of money soon led to the ‘coining’ of local money – a task the blacksmith carried out by punching holes in tin disks until paper notes could be printed. The ‘money’ – 1.50 pesetas a day – was distributed, as the local schoolmaster recalled, to collectivists to spend on their ‘vices’ – ‘the latter being anything superfluous to the basic requirements of keeping alive’. With the money he could go to the café – there were only two kept open: one for the collectivists and one for the ‘individualists’ – and have a cup of coffee (no spirits were served; the bottles had been taken away), or his wife could buy a quarter litre of milk or extras like peaches when they were in season.
In the schoolmaster’s view, the reaction of many of the independent local peasantry was not as equanimous as Juan MARTINEZ’S. Along with the doctor, chemist, barber, shoemaker, etc., Alfredo CANCER, the schoolmaster, was collectivized.
—The peasantry disliked having to give up their crops. ‘A thousand dobles of my olives have gone to “the pile”. Virgen del Pilar, when will the fascists come?’ one of them said to me. He wasn’t worried about the Virgin, he was concerned about his olives …
Well over half the small- and medium-holders felt like him, thought CANCER, who now received only food and a tin disk for 1.50 pesetas a day in place of his previous 250 pesetas a month salary. He was living on potatoes, bread, lentils and a bit of rice. He had no pig to rear.
—I went to the committee and they said: ‘Go to Tío Enselmo’ – that’s the way they say the name Anselmo – ‘and he’ll give you half a pig, for he’s got two.’
‘Tío Enselmo,’ I said, ‘I’ve come for half a pig –’
‘And this pig,’ he said, looking at me, ‘who has reared it?’ ‘You.’ ‘And if I have reared it, whose is it?’ ‘Yours.’ ‘And if it’s mine, why have you come for it?’ ‘I’ve been told to by the committee. But if you don’t want to give it to me, I won’t take it. It’s harder for me to have to come to ask than for you to have to give it to me. My sister gets headaches living only on fried potatoes – 1 think she’s anaemic, and a little meat would do her good.’
‘Take it then,’ he said …
He had the same story when he went to get a sack of potatoes on the committee’s instructions. The peasants did not want to give up what they considered was theirs; ‘that was the only r
eason they favoured the fascists.’ On the other hand, he observed, the poor who had lived on little more than bread, potatoes and water were certainly much better off than before, for now they got olive oil, rice, sausages, meat.
—Had I been one of them I might well have thought like them and wanted the new system to continue. It wasn’t that the anarchists’ ideals were bad – they were simply utopian. I was no property owner and had no reason to be hostile to them out of fear of losing my wealth. Nor was I political. It seems fine that I should teach the shoemaker’s son free and the shoemaker should make me a pair of shoes for nothing. But what really happened was a loss of incentive. That is, unless you were a don Quixote or a saint. We Aragonese are independent-minded, freedom-lovers, healthily proud. Without freedom, what is there? …
As far as his school went, the collective obtained everything the children needed free of charge, made parents respect the legal school-leaving age of fourteen – ‘before they took their children out of school at twelve to look after the livestock’ – and generally showed a great concern about education.
Freedom could be subject to many definitions; but there was no doubt that for many peasants it meant continuing in the way they were accustomed to.
—The immense majority in the villages round here didn’t want to be collectivized, admitted Angel NAVARRO, the CNT village committee president. They didn’t believe the collectives could work with everything going on ‘the pile’; they felt they had to ask for what was theirs by right – it was like having to beg …
The opponents of collectivization included CNT members and those close to them. One of the talking points in Alloza was the refusal of Mariano FRANCO’S father to join.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 54