Miguel García García

Miguel García García (1908–1981) was a Spanish anarchist and writer. A veteran of the resistance to Francoism he was 20 years a prisoner in Spain. In the 1970s, he lived in exile in London where, through the ''Centro Iberico'' and the monthly ''Black Flag,'' he helped raise funds for his imprisoned comrades and to sustain an anarchist critique both of the Spanish dictatorship and of the Marxist left.

Resistance fighter and prisoner in Spain

In his memoirs, Garcia describes a youth in Barcelona, where, with his father, he and his sisters were supporters of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist trades union. When he was 11, his father weakened a result police detention and torture, succumbed to the post-war global influenza epidemic (known as the Spanish Flu). He worked as a newsboy; briefly had to take refuge over the border in France after injuring a Guardia Civil officer in rally for better pay; was engaged as a typesetter at the age of 13; and at age 14 entered the ranks of the CNT which, under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, was banned.

During the Spanish Civil War, with the Anarchist militia he helped hold Madrid, after the Republican government had fled, during its two and a half year siege. After the defeat of the Republic, and the triumph of the Francoist forces, he spent two and a half years in Unamuno concentration camp in Madrid where he befriended Josep Lluís i Facerias and El Quico. Upon their release in 1941, they together joined the Spanish Resistance. They helped reorganise the CNT, smuggled guns and people, including many Jews, across borders, raised funds through bank robberies and, with their bases in the Pyrenees, mounted sabotage missions against both the Franco's regime on the Spanish side and the Axis occupiers on the French.

Their resistance continued after the Axis defeat. Led by Marcelino Massana, Garcia's group operating in Catalonia, was known to the police and the press as "the Tallion Gang". Funding its operations through bank robberies, it procured arms and documents for their anarchist comrades across both Spain and Portugal.

García was captured in 1949 and sentenced to death but international pressure led his sentence to be reduced to 20 years in prison. After his release in 1969 García was to write about his incarceration in ''Franco's Prisoner'' (1972).

Exile in London

In Madrid’s Carabanchel Prison, Garcia had met Stuart Christie a Scottish anarchist who was serving time for his part in a plot to assassinate Franco. In 1967, following a personal pardon from Franco, Christie returned to London and to the work of the Anarchist Black Cross'','' an anarchist prisoners’ aid organisation which took up the case of Garcia. Garcia joined Melzer in the organisation when, in the parish hall of Holy Trinity, Kingsway, in 1971 he started the Centro Ibérico as a meeting place for anarchist exiles and their sympathisers. In June 1973, the Centro Ibérico moved to a large basement, at 83a Haverstock Hill, near Chalk Farm, Camden. Here he was able to accommodate the printing press on which the newsheet '' Black Flag'' newspaper and other anarchist material was produced.

Among those prisoners for whom Garcia, the Black Cross and ''Black Flag'' campaigned was a young Catalan anarcho-syndicalist, Salvador Puig Antich. He had been in the circle of activists around Miguel Garcia in Centro's the early days, but had returned to Spain in September 1973. There, after a series of robberies to fund the Iberian Liberation Movement (''Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación'', or MIL), he was charged with killing a policeman in a shootout. Despite the international outcry, Puig Antich was executed in March 1974.

Garcia's visitors to the Centro Iberico included the ETA leader Pedro Iñaki Pérez Beotegui (alias Wilson), who was involved in planning the December 1973 assassination of Franco’s prime minister Admiral-General Luis Carrero Blanco. On weekends, there was a regular cabaret nights, compeered by anarchist artist and performer John Olday.

Last years

At the end of the 1970s, following the death of Franco, and restoration parliamentary democracy in Spain, Garcia returned to his native Barcelona where he opened his own bar, La Fragua, a former forge in Barcelona’s Raval District. Like the Centro Ibérico, it was a meeting place for anarchists and libertarians from both Spain and abroad.

García died of tuberculosis in 1981.

References

Selected works

* ''Franco's Prisoner''
** ''Prisionero de Franco. Los anarquistas en la lucha contra la dictadura. Traducción y notas José Ignacio Alvarez Fernández''
* ''Looking Back After Twenty Years of Jail: Questions and Answers on the Spanish Anarchist Resistance''
* ''Unknown heroes: biographies of Anarchist resistance fighters''

Further reading

* Christie, Stuart ''Granny Made Me An Anarchist''
*

External links

Miguel Garcia articles
at the Kate Sharpley Library

{{DEFAULTSORT:Garcia Garcia, Miguel
1908 births
1981 deaths
Writers from Barcelona
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo members
20th-century deaths from tuberculosis
Tuberculosis deaths in England
Exiles of the Spanish Civil War in the United Kingdom
Spanish expatriates in England
20th-century Spanish male writers