The regional and municipal elections on Sunday in Spain confirmed the Left's worst fears, as the ruling Socialist Party was routed and the conservative Partido Popular achieved its largest electoral victory in its history, predicting a similar victory in next year's general election--although not all the votes that the Socialists lost went to the...
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The exhumation of the body of Chilean President Salvador Allende, at the request of his family, is expected to shed light on the still murky circumstances surrounding his death during the September 1973 coup that inaugurated the bloody regime of General Augusto Pinochet. The New York Times reports:
after nearly 38 years...
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In the slide show we prepared for the Pete Seeger benefit concert last October, we incorporated a photograph of Lincoln vets marching in the 1946 New York May Day Parade. As it turns out, there is also moving footage of this parade. See the clip here; the Lincolns make there appearance around the...
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The students in my undergraduate seminar –“Spain in New York”– and I are in the process of uploading to a word-press blog the results of our research about the history and current presence of Spain and Spanish culture in New York. The recent rally of Spanish ex-pats at the foot of the Washington Square...
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Even for a Spanish news junkie like myself, it is hard to comprehend and convey the significance of the recent massive meetings of citizens in Spain’s symbolic center –the Puerta del Sol in Madrid– and in many other cities in Spain, and now, it seems, around the world. Here’s what I understand of the...
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On Tuesday, May 17th, a group of people gathered at Madrid’s Athenaeum to remember and pay tribute to the heroic men and women who joined the International Brigades 75 years ago.
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Now available for online viewing: the speech that Larry Cox, Executive Director of Amnesty International, USA, gave on Saturday May 14 in New York City on the occasion of the first ALBA/Puffin Human Rights Award for Judge Baltasar Garzón:
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Now available for online viewing: the speech that Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, gave on Saturday May 14 in New York City on the occasion of the first ALBA/Puffin Human Rights Award for Judge Baltasar Garzón:
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In an important victory for transitional justice after 36 years, a court in northern Argentina has sentenced eight ex-army officers to life in jail for killing unarmed activists in the town of Margarita Belén during the military dictatorship, the BBC reports:
Twenty-two people, mostly members of the Montoneros rebel group, were tortured and killed...
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Before Judge Baltasar Garzón received the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism this past Saturday May 14 in New York, he was interviewed by Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School. The whole interview (appr. 1h15m) was filmed by David Schwittek and can now be viewed here:
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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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