The Weight of the Stars: The Life of Anarchist Octavio Alberola

By Agustín Comotto

• A fascinating life and a fascinating approach to sharing it. Comotto has written a very unique political biography. It is similar in certain ways to the book Tuesdays with Morrie, in which a younger acolyte makes numerous visits to a respected older thinker and records what happens. In this case, there is a goal of telling the full story of Octavio Alberola’s life, but it is presented in the context of those conversations, with Alberola sharing his thoughts about a wide variety of subjects, from physics to art to love. It is a form of biographical storytelling, with Alberola narrating passages, Comotto filling in blank spots himself or with other primary sources, and all of it interspersed with their present-day exchanges. A truly enjoyable read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AK Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781849354097

Agustín Comotto

Agustín Comotto is an author and illustrator who was born in Argentina but moves around the world. He has drawn and/or written books in the U.S., France, Mexico, Argentina, and Spain. Winner of the A la Orilla del Viento award in Mexico, his most recent book in English is Prisoner 155: Simón Radowitzky.

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Preface: History’s Accidents

by Octavio Alberola

in one of life’s strange coincidences, I was born the very same year as Che Guevara and Noam Chomsky, albeit several thousand kilometers away from them. I was born in Minorca, Spain, on March 4, 1928, Che shortly after that, on May 14 or June 14 (depending on which source one goes by) in Rosario, Argentina, and Noam Chomsky on December 7 in Philadelphia. There was nothing to predict how we would turn out, much less, the meetings of minds and disagreements that we would have.

A lot of years went by and a lot happened around the world before my path crossed with Che’s in Mexico in 1956. That was shortly before he set sail on the Granma with Fidel Castro to embark upon a guerrilla war in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra against General Batista’s dictatorship. Later, quite some time after that feat of liberation and its institutionalization as a revolution, after Che’s epic demise, and after he had been turned into a revolutionary icon, I met his grandson Canek Sánchez Guevara … At the beginning of the second millennium, Canek came to Paris intent on helping us with the publication of the Cuba libertaria bulletin. When, towards the end of 2015, Canek unexpectedly died in Mexico, it fell to me to write his obituary notice.

As for Noam Chomsky, our paths crossed in Paris in the mid-1970s during one of his lectures at the University of Vincennes, the free university that had arisen out of the May 1968 student unrest (even then it was on its last legs as a libertarian forum). Many years would pass before I took issue with him for having, in 2013 in Caracas, endorsed the socialist rabble-rousing of Colonel Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution.

I mention those two instances of synchronicity linked to my birth date because, ever since I was very young, I’ve had the impression that each historical moment shapes the way that each generation sorts out its contradictions and leaves its mark on history. And also because, not only is there a close connection between the individual and his surroundings, but on certain occasions the simultaneity of seemingly unconnected events is not chance but the effect of the causal impact of each age’s episteme. In other words, such exceptional events—generally chalked up as coincidence, luck, and even magic—are the outworking of the historical determinism that governs our lives and triggers the events that amount to human history.

It strikes me, therefore, that in my own case such synchronicities are telling in that they are suggestive, right from the very opening of my autobiography, of the direction that my life was to go through, the upheavals in the history of these past ninety years: both the ones that it fell to me to live through as a more or less consciously implicated witness and the ones I witnessed at some distance and, occasionally, sheltered from their disastrous consequences.

Of course, what such upheavals meant to me during my childhood days and the awareness I acquired of them later, I can only recount on the basis of what I learned from subsequent study or from what I was told by my parents and friends. Broadly speaking, we all have great difficulty remembering the events of our childhood days; this is a phenomenon explained by the unrelenting creation of new neurons, neurogenesis, which enables children to learn more and more things but that wipes away their memories—even their most personal ones. This is all the more true of the memories that might be left behind by the upheavals generated by the class struggle and the survival instinct in childish minds before the onset of adolescence.

Being cognizant of that difficulty, how can I sum up the most important events from my childhood years—after my parents, a father from Aragon and a mother from Catalonia, conceived me on the island of Minorca, where they had set up a year or two before my birth, driven by my father’s passion for rationalist education and a sort of an instinctive calling to a social apostolate that my mother shared with him? How am I to explain, from memory, how that apostolate was marked throughout by an advocacy of freedom and equality for all?

Later, as an adolescent, as my own conscious life was starting to assert its autonomy, I began to understand that influence on my developing mind, how my thinking and self-awareness and the feelings were shaped by them. Nevertheless, the likeliest thing is that those events and their meaning took shape as recollections in my mind after what I learned later or heard said about my parents, and it was on the basis of such neuronal synthesis that I have been able to remember them.

There is—no question about it—a passing-on such as occurs between one generation and the next, which also requires a written and oral record before it can constitute a remembrance. Consequently, being certain that anything I might recount from those times would be a construct rather than an authentic memory, it strikes me as more logical to leave the responsibility there up to Agustín … Not just out of honesty, but also for consideration of coherence, the aim being the sort of transparency that should govern the drafting of an autobiography.

My autobiographical narrative opens, therefore, in my adolescent years, when I was a student at secondary level and at preparatory school in Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz state in the Mexican Republic.

Introduction: Stowaway in a Long Train

by Agustín Comotto

this all started back in the summer of 2014, when I was looking through the Biblioteca Arús in Barcelona for information for the graphic novel I was working on, on the life of Simón Radowitzky. Tracking something down in an old library is no easy matter. I was trying to fathom the modus operandi of the paper files essential for locating the materials one is looking for, when, just as I was floundering among the nineteenth-century arrangements, I received assistance from a stranger. This was Agustín Guillamón. He suggested a search methodology that proved of great assistance. We chatted and swapped email addresses. Agustín is a historian with a prodigious memory when it comes to dredging up seemingly irrelevant facts, dates, and data. That casual encounter brought me a lot of subsequent gratification, which was wholly unexpected. A year later, I received an email from Guillamón in which, in the usual terse manner he always employs in his messages, he stated: Octavio Alberola was present at Radowitzky’s funeral in Mexico in 1956. Here is his email address. He lives in Perpignan.

This is how I came to write to Octavio. A dab hand in the digital world, he didn’t take long to respond to my email. This was an extraordinary opportunity as he was a primary source and I was keen to interview and make the acquaintance of (insofar as I was aware) the only person alive who had been acquainted with Simón. The itch I had to learn more about the personality—which had, for years, been costing me so many sleepless nights—was now satisfied. Octavio gave me pointers as to the ending of the book and it was thanks to him that I found a way of bringing the writing to fruition. At the time I interviewed him, Octavio had no recollection of the Radowitzky funeral, but did confirm for me that he had known the man. Both my partner, Anna, and I were impressed by his lucidity, serenity, and tremendous humanity. When I met Octavio and his partner, Ariane, I also met a number of exiles who, for a variety of reasons, never went back to Spain after the end of the dictatorship.

Octavio is in all likelihood right when he talks about there being a degree of logic underlying chance. Look and ye shall find and, if the lookers are seeking much the same thing, the likelihood is that their paths will cross. Which doesn’t, however, make it any less fascinating how a certain gravitational force attracts persons with shared purposes.

Two years on from that meeting in Perpignan, I had the graphic novel about Radowitzky done and dusted and was about to launch it. It had been a protracted and complex process and, given the important part that Octavio had played in it, I wanted him at the launch event. This was asking a lot, because Octavio was up in years and could have told me no. But he said yes. And, after many years of hard work and striving, the circle came to a natural close.

I can still remember the utter silence that descended upon the launch when Octavio took the microphone and starting speaking about Simón, about the short time when their paths had crossed in Mexico City in 1955. Octavio spoke for around fifteen minutes. When he speaks, Octavio casts a curious spell, a blend of ethical awareness and appreciation of well-being in which the listener is engulfed and carried away. He seems to make everything comprehensible. The unforced silence of the listener on a journey through time and ideas. There we all were, that November day, on a journey back into the past, witnessing the ailing, weary Simón Radowitzky and the youthful Octavio full of energy and chatting with him. By means of the agelessness of the spoken word, a concrete recollection was being conveyed to us. Because when Octavio speaks, I can just imagine the ritual acted out thousands of years ago in some cave, in front of a warming fire, as the tribal elder recounted his tales of the hunt, the gods, or calamities.

Knowing that his own life story deserved to be placed on record, I asked Octavio on several occasions why he hadn’t written his autobiography, and his answer to me, every time, was that it had occurred to him but that circumstances had not spurred him into doing it. A month after that, I got a message from him in which he bluntly said that I should help him write his autobiography. According to Octavio, his story was worthy of comment in the sense of a stroll through the events that shaped his life and the chances of a dialogue about them. Initially, I had the odd misgiving. What right did I have to inject myself into his life? I couldn’t come up with an answer that might justify it. I deferred to intuition and to Octavio’s tremendous wisdom. If that’s what he wants, he must have his reasons.

Octavio is an anarchist. Meaning what? That I am not quite clear on, as I have known lots of anarchists and each of them possesses a highly personal notion of what anarchy as a modus vivendi and way of thinking ought to be. Octavio is an antiauthoritarian possessed of an ability to communicate, which I have rarely encountered in anyone and, above all else, he is possessed of boundless curiosity. Octavio wonders about life, nature, the cosmos and its laws or the disorderliness of human existence. In that sense, his interest in how life is played out in society has prompted him to construct a life rich in experiences, and through his personal approach and activism, he’s tried to influence others in their own pursuit of fairness, harmony, and mutual respect.

I waited for Octavio at the train station in Sants, Barcelona. He was traveling up from Valencia to attend a libertarian festival. I kept my eyes peeled for him as Octavio had no cell phone; if I didn’t see him, we would miss each other. In the end, he was the one who spotted me.

The story begins with my parents. Check them out if you can.

Of course, Octavio. You want me to start off the book with them?

Yes. Strikes me as a good idea; what their beliefs were and what they fought for. My father was an anarchist and I imagine that that had an influence on me. What I like about the project, he remarked, is that your generation will get a mention in the book too.

We chatted through the two hours we had available to us, and in the end, I saw Octavio to his train. He almost missed it, as we had lost track of time and neither of us was wearing a watch.

Misty Memories

From Apprentice to Teacher

stunted holm-oak trees, soil of greyish hues, blanketed in the dried yellows of winter grass and, here and there, the dusty villages blending in with Aragon’s rural landscape. Nothing in the countryside showed any sign of having been changed here, where José Alberola, Octavio’s father, was born.

José was born in Ontiñena near Fraga, where Aragon abuts Catalonia and where the different languages play havoc with the traveler who has lost his way. Ontiñena, on the river Alcanadre, is just one of a long list of familiar names, dots on the map: Fraga, Bujaraloz, Mequinenza … Places that conjure up the utopian dreams that efforts were made to realize during the civil war years. In 1895, the year of José’s birth, however, life in Ontiñena was not easy, and for that reason his mother, together with José and his two sisters left the village for Barcelona. Apart from looking for more promising prospects, there was another reason for their departure: José’s father had died and left behind a young widow, a mother of three who she would be required to dress in mourning all her life in the backward-looking Bajo Cinca region with its strong religious traditions.

They arrived in Barcelona at the beginning of the 1900s. With its economic growth then at its height, the city boasted two industrial arteries, the rivers Besós and Llobregat, filled with manufacturing activity and smoke, attracting increasing numbers of migrants from different parts of the Peninsula, looking for work and opportunities. By the start of the 1900s and in less than five years, more than 250,000 people arrived in the city.

How did these Aragonese country folk arrive in the city? By cart? By train? What assets might a widowed mother of three have brought with her back then? Naturally, the experience was a rough one for a boy of just five years of age, holding on tight to his older sister’s hand as if it was his only salvation.

José would go to school, and his sisters, as was the norm for poor women back then, worked, cleaning bourgeois homes. They were outsiders, poor folk from Aragon.

It was about this time, that Barcelona started to register a few ventures designed to introduce progressive changes to the social order. One of those revolved around schooling. Alfonso XIII’s Spain saw an upsurge in conservatism and, in the field of education—under the sway of the Church—those progressive changes had not gone unnoticed.

José started his education under the Salesians in Sarrià, at a religious school in the upper part of the city. Later he attended Francesco Ferrer i Guàrdia’s recently founded Modern School, which found itself in the sights of Church and State, in light of the educational innovations introduced by Ferrer i Guàrdia. In the religious and state schools back then, the separation of boys and girls, physical punishment, learning by rote as a teaching method and the instillation of fear and obedience through dogma were common practices. But José had embarked upon a brand-new form of education in accordance with the ideas of Ferrer i Guàrdia, whereby the learning methods were the very opposite of what was practiced by the priests: which is to say, José was learning how to learn.

How could a boy from such poor circumstances possibly have attended the school founded by Ferrer i Guàrdia, a school targeted at the middle class? We don’t know that, but clearly Ferrer i Guàrdia’s Modern School was one of the keys to understanding why José and then Octavio became anarchists.

We have no hard and fast information about José Alberola back then. Nothing with which we can flesh out his story; just conjectures about a boy whose future path we know. However, it is interesting to note that the fears of the detractors of the Modern School’s teaching methods were well founded. Because, at that school, José Alberola learned how to think rather than merely to be obedient. This wrought such a change to his intellect that, added to the flurry of social happenings in the city, by the time he reached his adolescent years he was directing his energies into taking over the baton from Ferrer i Guàrdia (shot by the regime in 1909) and devoting himself to teaching. And so, in the Rosa de Foc (or Fiery Rose), a port city of bourgeois comportment that was packed with proletarians who were forever erupting into social upheaval, José Alberola trained as a rationalist teacher and anarchist.

At the time, combining studies with real life was not such an easy undertaking. Rarely was this humble fourteen-year-old not caught up in the events happening all around him. For instance, there was the order issued by the Antonio Maura government on July 10, 1909 that reserve troops (youngsters aged between seventeen and eighteen) were to be sent off to the war in Morocco. Tensions erupted into what the history books today refer to as the Tragic Week. Yet again, the Rosa de Foc (i.e., Barcelona) went up in flames. On that occasion, José was part of the fire in the city that slowly but inexorably was on the march to anarchosyndicalist revolution. But, as Octavio remembers it, his father was not a young direct actionist but rather enthralled by the anarchist ideas of Elisée Reclus, Piotr Kropotkin, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. José must have been sixteen or seventeen when he began teaching. He was deeply influenced by his own experiences as a student of Ferrer i Guàrdia and by what he had read of the most humanistic strand of anarchism. The likelihood is that statements such as the following struck him to the core:

Under the present system of social economics, machines, and likewise

the division of labor, are at once the source of wealth and

the ongoing, fatal cause of poverty.

—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The stream that I watched emerge into the daylight, flowing so clear

and carefree, is now no more than a sewer into which the entire

city dumps its trash.

—Elisée Reclus

In the midst of this sea of anxiety, the tide of which is constantly rising all around, in the midst of these folk perishing of hunger, these bodies stacked up in the mines and these mangled corpses sprawled in heaps on the barricades … You cannot remain neutral: you will come to side with the oppressed because you know that what is fine and what is sublime—as you yourself are—is on the side of those who fight for light, for humanity, for justice.

—Piotr Kropotkin

All of this was happening in a city that had a penchant for setting churches on fire or overturning streetcars and mounting strikes in answer to oppression. Octavio recounts how his father had made the trip to Paris in 1918. There he made the acquaintance of Paul Reclus—nephew of the anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus—and of Renée Lamberet, the like-minded historian and intellectual.

In Octavio’s opinion, our parents’ experiences of that sort eventually leave their mark on us. And he is right, because this blend of great thinkers and the direct action of Barcelona meet in Octavio.

In Barcelona in 1919, the dynamics of society sped up, just as the machinery in the factories had, and by then, the workers boasted mighty trade unions. With a mere nine years in existence was a trade union confederation, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo/National Confederation of Labor (CNT) that was planning to do away with the state and install libertarian communism. What is more, it had a large membership, felt a degree of affinity with the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores/Workers’ General Union and was counting upon building the future on the basis of Spanish trade unionism. So its main spokesmen decided to foster direct action as a strategy and to shun all compromise with the bourgeoisie and manufacturers. For their part, the bosses, backed by the government, hired gunmen (pistoleros) to eliminate the most significant trade union leaders. Unable to bring the situation under control, in 1923 Alfonso XIII backed the coup d’état by Primo de Rivera and withdrew from active politics.

By then, twenty-four-year-old José was a rationalist schoolteacher with some experience under his belt; he was writing for anarchist publications of the day, such as La Revista Blanca and Solidaridad Obrera. Teaching brought him to a variety of sites such as the CNT-sponsored La Farigola i Natura (Thyme and Nature) rationalist school in El Clot. Eventually, José traveled to the town of Olot, where his sister Florentina lived, to work as a teacher.

Back then, Olot was a small town with industrialization already under way. José taught children’s classes by day and adults in the afternoons and nights, which was unremarkable, given the large number of illiterates among the workers. The bosses very soon began to look askance at the anarchist teachers who were infecting the workforce with their beliefs.

1919 was the year of the big Barcelona general strike, which was triggered by lay-offs at the Riegos y Fuerza del Ebro S.A. power company, known popularly as La Canadiense. The strike created ripples elsewhere in the region and affected the textile plants in Gerona and Olot. As a member and active member of the CNT, José was familiar with what was going on in Barcelona and was therefore one of the activists behind the strikes in Olot. José used to draft the manifestos and all the propaganda in support of the protest.

Also living in Olot, was the Surinach family, a family of peasant extraction that had come up, and now belonged to the town’s well-to-do bourgeoisie. They owned a number of properties and, on one of them, the young Clara Surinach held an informal conversation with the industrial employers, leading businessmen, and members of the clergy. At that meeting there was talk of the strike, anxieties regarding the rebelliousness of the workers, and the overall climate of unease in Olot. It was not long before the guilty parties were being named as those anarchists from the CNT and, in Olot itself, that José Alberola, sowing the seed of defiance with his school.

Clara Surinach had a great vocation as a Samaritan. An austere, practicing Catholic involved in charitable efforts, she felt at home with talk about help for the poor. She took Christ’s message deeply to heart. Her religiosity was simple, based on simple values and bereft of clerical artifice. For these reasons she was greatly concerned when her uncle, who was a priest and who had attended her gathering, raised with the other employers the possibility of getting rid of the rationalist teacher. Somebody brought up the name of an alcoholic thug nick-named Barretinas: he could dump José in the river, exploiting the fact that it was Jose’s habit to read while strolling through a grove near the riverbank.

The very next day, Clara went to see Florentina, José’s sister, to warn her about the plan to take action against him. José and Clara first met that day.

The strike carried on and the bosses in the textile sector threatened to enforce a lockout, or employer boycott, a threat behind which other local branches of industry threw their weight. The workers’ response was to lock themselves inside the factories, ignoring the ultimatum.

Following Clara and José’s meeting, and against every expectation of the Surinach family, Clara brought food to the workers entrenched in their workplaces.

Some days after that the strike ended; a lockout was enforced and the authorities in Olot adopted a tougher line towards the workers and those sympathetic to the strike and ordered that the teacher be banished, or be arrested.

José left town at the start of 1920, bound for Barcelona. He passed through a number of schools, stepped up his activism within the CNT, and carried on contributing to anarchist publications. In the midst of all this activity, José and Clara wrote letters to each other, until she joined him in Barcelona and they set up a home together.

Clara’s decision was unusual for those times and for the social class to which she belonged. It was a leap in the dark in the direction of anarchist principles and something that her family found very hard to swallow. Octavio remembers hearing talk of Clara’s family being outraged because she had to clean house for some Russian emigrés from Odessa living in Barcelona. Furthermore, Clara had four brothers and one of them traveled to Barcelona to talk her into coming back to Olot. He cautioned her about the perils of social struggle and the anarchists, and tried to persuade her that there was a better future waiting for her in Olot, where she could live a different lifestyle alongside her own kind.

I think it is essential that we talk about the importance of your mother, I told Octavio. Lots of people talk about your father, José, because in the historical context his name stands out, but it strikes me that your mother made a monumental sacrifice. She was very brave.

"Sure, sure. Tremendously brave. As you will appreciate, back in those days my father was the visible head of the struggle and she was just the ‘compañera,’ a partner and no more. Which is why I think it is important that we now rescue my mother’s standing."

"As far as I am concerned, the sacrifice made by Clara is crucial. Waking away from one’s family, one’s religion, everything one had previously believed in is an act of love, an act of an agile mind, and it rarely gets a mention. The compañeras are always overlooked, their personalities eclipsed by those of the fighters. What was your mother like, Octavio?"

She saw religion as a matter of love, love for the human being. She saw that too in my father’s trade union struggle. She embraced free love and bearing children outside of wedlock and until her dying day she clung to her break with the Church. But she stuck by the Christian faith’s discourse on love too. Octavio paused for thought here, transported back many years into the past. Oh, and she also clung to a kind of a life-long puritanism. For example, when I was eighteen and living in Mexico, I was very friendly with one girl… (Octavio is forever referring to girlfriends.) My mother called me to one side and remarked that this was a very serious matter. She said that she had not brought children into the world just to ‘bring people into this valley of tears,’ but because my father ‘had wanted that.’ And she added, ‘The physical act never held any charms for me.’

Meaning that the urge to procreate had come, not from her but from your father. For all her Christian background, there is a paradox in her ‘breaking’ with her duty to procreate…

Yes. It was my father that wanted children. She never had any interest in the material, carnal side of things. That was something she had rejected, way back, in her youth, back in the days of her charitable works.

Maybe she thought of becoming a nun once upon a time, I ventured to suggest.

Possibly. At the very least, the folks at home thought she would become a nun. To her, charity was everything, up until she met my father.

There is not much question about the menace to the physical integrity of anarchist activists in the 1920s, given the tremendous violence unleashed by gunmen in the hire of the employers, violence that left many dead on the streets. So, the realization that one was a target for the bosses’ hired guns, since one’s charisma or contributions to newspapers simply added to the personal risks, flew in the face of the rational decision to have children. However, we have to keep in mind that the decision to bring children into this world is a consistent feature of individuals involved in revolutionary processes.

In 1923, one of the bosses’ hired guns murdered the anarchist leader Salvador Seguí aka El Noi de Sucre in Barcelona’s El Raval quarter. Seguí was ­thirty-seven and his partner was expecting their baby. José knew El Noi de Sucre, and Octavio has confirmed that he had often chatted with him in his home. Seguí’s impact upon José’s thinking was palpable. In one of his many talks, Seguí said:

Granted that anarchy is not an ideal that can be implemented in the short term … granted that anarchism, through time, might be achievable, have no doubt but that it will first provide scope for the devising of other ideas and other schools of thought springing naturally from the crude version of the idea.…

There is no denying that our organization, that syndicalism, is the spiritual progeny of anarchism … plainly, syndicalism is not anarchism, but it is a measure of anarchism. The distancing of the anarchists from the trades associations is suicide. Everything should and can be done inside the unions.

José went on later to join the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) and his thinking remained Proudhonist. Such anarchist contradictions could be found in José Alberola and in Salvador Seguí alike. Contradictions between direct action, revolutionary violence, and classical anarchism’s nonviolent approach.

But the possibilism of the times was vital if one was not to lapse into simplistic thought patterns. Those were not the days of harmonious living, breakdown of the ego, the society of the future, or naturism. No, the keynotes of the day related to the unions, guns, and general mobilizations.

That said, José’s romantic anarchist ideal was not entirely discarded, as we can read in an extract from his report to a CNT congress in Madrid in 1931:

Those lobbying on behalf of Federations of Industry have lost their faith in the value of man and defer to that of gear mechanisms … We are not in favor of the retention of capitalism without capitalism … It is the ideal that sustains our belief. We cannot countenance anything bordering on statism.

In the same year that witnessed the murder of Salvador Seguí, José and Clara’s daughter Helie was born. And in the wake of a thwarted experiment with a modern school in Alicante in 1926 (which was shut down due to pressures brought to bear by the catechist nuns who alleged that it was offering tendentious lessons), José and his family moved away to Alaior in Minorca.

It was in that little village, basking in the Mediterranean light that can only be appreciated by visitors to the Balearics, that Octavio Alberola was born on May 4, 1928.

Backwater in Cinca

the alberolas arrived on the island of Minorca in 1926 and lived in Alaior in a rented home of Indian construction.

Since the Primo de Rivera coup d’état in 1923, the CNT was outlawed, publications with anarchist leanings were banned, and any dissent from the regime was persecuted. The class war (to borrow historian Josep Termes’s characterization) between the industrial bourgeoisie and the working class culminated in a dictatorship that formalized the repression hitherto enforced by parapolice gunmen. Whereupon things such as thought crime, so-called, provided the pretext for taking activists and intellectuals alike into preventive custody.

José was vulnerable to this new policy of repression because at no point did he cease his activities as either a teacher or as a CNT militant.

The newspaper Solidaridad Obrera resumed publication surreptitiously around 1930. Lots of prestigious writers contributed articles and lots of anarchists passed through Barcelona’s Modelo Prison at that time.

September 14, 1930 saw a protest rally held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Barcelona. It became a rallying point for a wide range of political persuasions. The protest was against the expulsion from Catalonia of Francesc Macià. There was also a demand that political prisoners be set free. The rally was addressed by figures such as Lluís Companys, Antoni Rovira, Ángel Samblancat and, representing the CNT’s Regional Committee, José Alberola.

After the rally, on his way home to Minorca, José was intercepted by the police as he came ashore in Ciutadella. He was placed under arrest and told that he had to leave the island at the earliest opportunity, having been banished for his militant activity. And so, barely two years after he was born, Octavio and his family made their way back to Barcelona.

The increasingly eccentric and obtuse Primo de Rivera’s last year as dictator was 1930. One example of his eccentricity was his choice of Severiano Martínez Anido as military and civilian governor of Barcelona and subsequently as minister of the Interior. Martínez Anido brazenly proclaimed his contempt for intellectuals and for the working class. The Galicia-born Martínez Anido had a resumé filled with cruelty and atrocities carried out in Cuba, the Philippines, and Morocco. Primo de Rivera saw him as ideally qualified to contain the anarchists in the capital of Catalonia.

But the dictator’s days were numbered and, with CNT support this time, the political parties from a range of ideological positions clamored for the return of a Republic. That very year the CNT called a general strike in December. In retaliation, nearly all of the leadership of the Regional Committee in Barcelona (José for one) were arrested: José served a short term in the Modelo. His recollections from that time were passed on to Octavio; memories of the university he had attended in the company of the other anarchists held there.

In the end, afflicted with diabetes and rejected by much of the army, General Primo de Rivera stepped down from power on January 28, 1930. After a softer period of authoritarian rule, the Second Spanish Republic was introduced in April 1931, bringing an amnesty in its wake.

A free man once more, José Alberola spent some time working in a range of the CNT’s rationalist schools in Barcelona and Manresa. The Alberolas’ travels ended in 1933 in Fraga, a few kilometers from where José had been born. It is at this point that Octavio’s memories begin.

The town of Fraga, in the 1930s, had approximately 7,500 inhabitants. Small, rural, dating back to times immemorial, with traces of Iberian, Roman, or Arab influences, Fraga was claimed by both Aragonese and Catalans. Shortly after the Alberolas arrived, the town would undergo one of the most novel social changes the history of the twentieth century had to show. In 1936, for a brief period that lasted less than a year, the entire Bajo Cinca area was under the remit of the Regional Council of Aragon, meaning that the area’s inhabitants lived under libertarian communism, with the land collectivized, and private ownership and the use of money eliminated.

The school at which José started teaching was known as La Cultural and was part of the Sociedad Cultural Aurora libertarian ateneo set up by the Fraga and district CNT member.

One ex-pupil of José’s stated in an interview that attendance at La Cultural was not contingent upon one’s being an anarchist or from the proletarian class. However, pupils were primarily drawn from peasant families which were anarchist or proletarian.

As for the ateneo we have the testimony of one resident, Agustín Orús, who was a pupil of José’s: "The ateneo was a real powerhouse; we had an arts group and staged plays, mounting libertarian tours of the villages in the comarca and we had access to a splendid library that made books available to the members."

Amateur dramatics, literacy classes, health education, and many other subjects were taught there to anyone willing to learn. In next to no time, José and Clara settled in the town, earning the sympathy of Fraga’s workers and the enmity, once more, of the well-to-do classes.

Valerio Chiné Bague, another ex-pupil, said of Alberola the teacher: I barely knew him but he was the only teacher who taught classes at times when it best suited his student … I arranged with him that I would attend his classes at nine o’clock at night. Even though I was fifteen years old, I could barely read or write since I had been working since I was eleven […] Imagine my surprise when my boss discovered that the teacher due to deliver lessons to me was Alberola; he told me bluntly that I needed to find myself another job […] The fact is that Alberola was held in very high regard by ordinary folk and by the workers, though not by the bosses or the monied classes.

Octavio was able to live a normal life up until the outbreak of the Civil War changed everything in 1936. He would go to school, play in the street with other children, and from time to time, Clara’s family would travel out from Olot to visit them. Virtually nothing from that time has stuck in his memory, but judging by how he speaks of it, it must not have been an unpleasant time.

Sometime in the Future

in 1936, the fascist wing of the Republic’s army mutinied against the Republic. Simultaneously, social revolution erupted in Barcelona, which initially put a stop to the fascist uprising there. The fact that the mobilized populace was able to stop a regular army—as happened in Madrid and Barcelona—can only be explained in terms of the existence of good internal organization on the part of the CNT and its regional committees, as they had spent years making preparations for a potential army revolt. The euphoria felt by Barcelona anarchists at their defeat of General Manuel Goded (who had sided with the would-be coup-maker General Francisco Franco while in the Balearics before flying on to the capital of Catalonia) was cut short by the high cost of their victory: many of their comrades lost their lives on the pavement of the Avenida del Paralelo, fighting the rebels.

The reaction to developments outside of Barcelona varied. In Fraga, José’s comrades reacted speedily and brought the situation under control. In Aragon, even though the fascists seized power in Zaragoza, the situation was dominated by the CNT and the republican parties, especially in Huesca. José was put in charge of Education on the Aragon Defense Council.

Within days of crushing the fascist rebellion in Barcelona, the first libertarian columns were setting off from that city, bound for Aragon. The aim was to liberate Zaragoza, opening up access to the Basque Country which was particularly important to the Republic as far as industry was concerned. That entire part of Aragon fell under the control of the Aragon Defense Council and, once established as an entity, the latter set about fostering the process of land collectivization and the abolition of money from exchanges of goods.

Getting a handle on such happenings today, in a world so