Raphael Minder, writing in today's New York Times, talks about Spain's economic crisis with two dinosaurs of Spanish politics: Manuel Fraga, Franco's minister of propaganda in the sixties and later president of Galicia, and Santiago Carrillo, former secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party. For the latter, the crisis provides an opportunity...
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Last week Human Rights Watch issued a critical report on the work of the United Nations' Human Rights Council, founded in 2006 in place of the UN Commission on Human Rights and up for review in 2011. HRW's report takes a comprehensive look at the Council's successes and failures, calling on the...
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Seventy years ago, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the ruthless dictator of the Dominican Republic, welcomed the first group of Spanish Republican refugees, initiating one of the most contradictory and tragic episodes of the postwar Spanish diaspora--an event on whose commemoration in the DR Público reports today. Trujillo's generosity toward the thousands of Spaniards fleeing Franco and...
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In a rare interview, Garzón has told the Spanish radio network Cadena Ser that he is reasonably pessimistic about his career at this point. Speaking from the house of his friend José Saramago--the recently deceased Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize winner--where he participated in the presentation of a biography on the writer, Garzón...
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Amnesty International urges the parliament of Catalonia not to ban the use of full-face covering veils in public:
"Any wide-ranging ban will violate the rights to freedom of expression and religion of those women who choose to wear a full-face veil as an expression of their identity or beliefs," said...
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In a report released yesterday, Human Rights Watch calls out France, Germany, and Britain for using intelligence obtained in other countries through torture:
"Berlin, Paris, and London should be working to eradicate torture, not relying on foreign torture intelligence," said Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch....
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Joseph Waltz writes in the Monthly Review on the conversations that John Gerassi--son of a Spanish Republican general and author of The Premature Antifascists, on the Lincoln Brigade--had in the early 1970s with Jean-Paul Sartre:
“Wow,” Sartre replies, “you really want to put me on the spot today…OK...
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La mula, a new internationally-produced Spanish-language comedy set during the Spanish Civil War--co-written and directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino)--may never see the light of day, Variety reports:
Three of Europe's highest-ranking film executives -- U.K.'s John Woodward, Spain's Ignasi Guardans and Ireland's Simon Perry -- are battling to save...
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The official map of mass graves dating from the Civil War in Andalusia, released after a five years of research, offers an inventory of almost six hundred different unmarked burial sites. The mass grave at the San Rafael cemetery in Málaga is assumed to contain more than four thousand bodies, making it the...
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Geoff Dyer, writing in The Guardian, reflects on recent war accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan (Sebastian Junger, David Finkel) and, more generally, on the strengths of fiction vs. non-fiction when it comes to transmitting the reality of warfare:
If there were ever a time when the human stories contained within...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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