The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [71]
It can be argued that it was the times, that between the end of the Fueros and 1898, Basque nationalism would have arrived even without this unpleasant zealot. What is certain, though, is that when Sabino was born, the Basques had a culture and an identity. Thirty-eight years later, when he died, they had the beginnings of a nation. A country was the great unfinished work.
* * *
9: Gernika
GERNIKA!
GUERNICA!
Xoratzen iluntzen daut
This name inflames
hitz horrek bihotza.
and saddens my heart
Mendek jakinen dute
Centuries will know its misfortune . . .
haren zorigaitza . . .
We can no longer say
Numanze ta Kartagoz
the names Numancia and Carthage
ez gaitezke mintza.
Without saying in a loud voice
Goraki erran gabe
In Euskadi,
Euskadin, han, datza:
lying in its ruins:
GERNIKA!
GUERNICA!
—Jean Diharce, a.k.a. Iratzeder, 1938
* * *
EVEN THOUGH IT BEGAN in 1931 as, at last, Spain’s first democracy, only the most optimistic of dreamers could have believed the new Spanish republic would end up well. It was called the Second Republic because there had been a first, but that had only lasted a wink of an eye between dictatorship and monarchy in the nineteenth century.
Today the cause of the Second Republic and that of the Basques are so closely linked that to say someone was a Basque Republican seems redundant. But in 1931, at its birth, the Second Republic had few Basque supporters. Steeped in a traditional leftist ideology, the Republic was too socialist and too anti-Church for most Basques. Across Navarra, including Pamplona, the majority voted against the Republic. The only strong support for the Republic in Basqueland was among the urban population of San Sebastián, Bilbao, and Vitoria.
Carlists were never likely to be Republicans. Their doctrines had far more in common with those of that other twentieth-century Spanish movement, the Falange, or Fascists. Many Carlists were close to another far-right group, the monarchists. However, Basque Carlists had one fundamental disagreement with both Fascists and monarchists: They wanted Basque self-determination.
La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibarruri during the Spanish Civil War by David Seymour. (Magnum Photos, Inc.)
On the eternal other side were the Liberals. But they were linked to the industrialists, whose main concern, in addition to resisting the leftist labor movement, was protectionist tariffs for their industries. By the time of the Second Republic, Basque iron fields were already showing signs of decline, but Vizcaya was still producing half of the iron and three-fourths of the steel in Spain. Basque banks controlled one-third of all investment in Spain. Basque industrialists worked closely with Catalan industrialists, not because they shared the issue of local autonomy, but because Catalonia was the only other important industrial center in Spain and the Catalans too wanted to stop the wage-and-working-condition demands of organized labor.
The ruthless capitalism of Vizcayan and Guipúzcoan industrialists produced strong labor movements and Communist and Socialist parties in those two provinces. Such leftist figures as Vizcaya-born Dolores Ibarruri made up a third group of Basques who passionately supported the Republic. Ibarruri, always dressed in black, with her sculpted Basque face—the strong nose, deep-set eyes—had been a young sardinera, a woman who sold sardines from town to town in Vizcaya from a tray carried on her head. Until the twentieth century these women, covering as much as twenty miles in a day, selling on foot, were the primary distributors of fish in Basqueland. Ibarruri had married an Asturian miner and was elected to the Republican legislature as a Communist representing Asturias. During the Spanish Civil War she would become a symbol of the entire Republican cause. Known as La Pasionaria for a speaking style that brought tears to the eyes of thousands of listeners, she turned the World War I battle