The lifelong CNT militant was part of the Cuban revolution and participated in physical resistance to Franco

~ Joselito ~

Octavio Alberola Suriñach, who died last week in southern France, was the son of rationalist teachers and libertarian militants. His father, José Alberola Navarro, served as Education Councillor of the Council of Aragon during the Spanish Revolution of 1936–1937, and his mother, Carmen Suriñach, was a teacher from Olot.

In 1939, the family went into exile in Mexico. There, Alberola studied civil engineering in Mexico City and became a prominent figure in the Libertarian Youth. Arrested in 1946, he helped found the Mexican Libertarian Youth, its media arm Alba Roja, and the Spanish Anti-Franco Youth.

By 1957, he was organizing rallies in Mexico and establishing European contacts. He became involved in the “Spanish Movement 59” (ME/59), preparing guerrilla actions alongside Juan García Oliver. He also supported Cuba’s “July 26 Movement,” aiding the Castro brothers’ guerrilla struggle against the Batista regime with help from the anarchist diaspora in Mexico. Disillusionment followed when the new Cuban regime aligned with Soviet interests, abandoning promises to support Iberian liberation.

In 1960, he became Secretary of Defense for the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) in the Americas and represented the Mexican CNT at the 1961 Congress of Limoges, where the clandestine Defensa Interior (DI) was formed to combat the Franco regime. DI’s militant section attempted several unsuccessful assassinations of Franco. From 1962 to 1965, Alberola operated clandestinely in France alongside García Oliver and Cipriano Mera.

From 1965 onward, Alberola was linked to numerous anti-Franco actions. He favored direct propaganda actions without casualties, publicly clashing with Gaston Leval on this point. In 1966, he opposed the five-point movement that weakened the CNT and encouraged the rise of autonomous anarchist groups, especially in Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, and Madrid.

That year, he joined the Libertarian Youth Federation (FIJL) and the magazine Presencia, and was a member of the action group Primero de Mayo, responsible for high-profile actions like the kidnapping of Franco’s ambassador to the Vatican in Rome (April 1966) and the attempted kidnapping of Spain’s EEC ambassador in Belgium (1968). Arrested in Belgium in 1968, he spent five months in prison.

In the mid-1970s, Alberola worked as an educator in Liège and returned to France in 1974. Arrested in Avignon for his role in the kidnapping of Spanish banker Baltasar Suárez and for membership in the GARI (Internationalist Revolutionary Action Groups), he was imprisoned for nine months.

From 1975 until retirement in 1994, he worked as a newspaper layout artist and lived in Perpignan, lecturing across Spain and continuing to write. He contributed to both CGT and CNT publications without sectarianism. He also participated in COJRA (Committee for Anti-Authoritarian Reflection Days) and hosted Tribuna Latinoamericana on Radio Libertaire (1980–2000).

In the 2000s, he co-founded efforts to reopen the trial of anarchists Joaquín Delgado and Francisco Granado, executed in 1963, and in 2003 helped launch GALSIC (Support Groups for Libertarians and Independent Trade Unionists in Cuba).

He contributed to numerous publications including Cenit, El Viejo Topo, Tierra y Libertad, El Topo Avizor, and others. His books include The Problems of Science: Determinism and Freedom (1951), Spanish Anarchism and Revolutionary Action (1961–1974), and The Libertarian Opposition to the Franco Regime (1993).

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The excerpts below are from an interview by Anarchist News Agency in 2018

ANA: How did anarchism enter your life?

My father was the son of Aragonese peasants who emigrated to Barcelona around 1899-90. As a young man, he attended the Francisco Ferrer y Guardia Modern School. He met my mother in Olot, Girona province, after a strike that won a 48-hour work week for the first time. He was deported and in 1928 was a rationalist teacher at the secular school in Alayor, Menorca, Balearic Islands, when I was born. In 1936, during the military uprising, he was in Fraga, Aragon, teaching at the CNT rationalist school. When the Council of Aragon was created after July 18, my father was appointed Minister of Culture. At the end of the war, we went to France and then into exile in Mexico. There, he was the director of the Cervantes School in the city of Jalapa, Veracruz State. My mother always helped him with his rationalist teaching.

Was it in Mexico that you first came into contact with members of the Cuban Libertarian Association? 

In 1956, I was contacted by Cuban exiles in Mexico, particularly those of the July M26 and the Student Revolutionary Directorate. I collaborated with them until the fall of General Batista’s dictatorship. It was, indeed, a very turbulent period that raised many hopes for the possibility of experiencing socialism with freedom; but with the institutionalization of the Cuban revolution under state capitalism and dictatorship, I stopped interacting with the Castroites. In 1961, I met several Cuban libertarians who had fought in the Sierra Maestra, but it wasn’t until many years later that I began to correspond with my MLC comrades by letter. These contacts materialized with Frank Fernández’s trip to Paris in 2000. Shortly before, he had contributed to the creation of the Support Group for Libertarians and Independent Trade Unionists in Cuba (GALSIC). But from the early 1990s, I was deeply involved with the Cuban leftist dissidents who arrived in France, and in the late 1990s, I travelled to Cuba to bring aid to the so-called unions and independent bookstores that wanted to organize a demonstration by prisoners’ wives (the predecessors of the Ladies in White) on the occasion of the Ibero-American meeting of Heads of State in Havana. I enlisted the help of the SAC (Sweden) to make the documentary on Trade Unionism in Cuba.

Is there any episode from those years that has left the strongest mark on you?

An episode I’ve never forgotten, and one that was already very significant for the future… was the confrontation I had, at an event organized in 1958 at the Spanish Athenaeum in Mexico, with members of the 26th of July Movement. They tried to prevent a young Black man from the Student Revolutionary Directorate, who had just clandestinely left the island, from continuing his speech after denouncing the danger of caudillismo in the fight against the Batista dictatorship. Since I was presiding over the event, I managed to ensure that the young Black man could remain at the microphone and finish his talk. It was a confrontation that foreshadowed what the struggle for power would be like after Batista’s fall.

What was the most difficult moment during this period?

The most difficult moment was when the Mexican authorities put me under surveillance (several agents were following me in a car…) under the pretext that I could be the target of an attack (by the Trujillo supporters) after the attack on the Venezuelan Betancourt. Of course, that confirmed to me that I had been under surveillance for some time… Later, once in Europe, the most difficult moments were during my three arrests (first by the Belgian authorities and then by the French on two occasions).

What were the reasons for these arrests in Belgium and France? Have you spent a lot of time in prison?

In Belgium, my companion Ariane and I were arrested in February 1968, following a complaint filed by the Francoist police. The charge was of having two pistols and false documents… since they didn’t uphold the initial accusation of plotting the kidnapping of a Spanish diplomat to the EU. I was imprisoned for five months and my companion for two. In France, we were arrested in May 1974, after the release of the director of the Bilbao Bank in Paris, who had been kidnapped for denouncing the execution in Spain of the young Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich and preventing two other MIL (Iberian Liberation Movement) militants from also being executed. They arrested ten of our companions (both Spanish and French) and accused me of having organized the kidnapping (they were never able to discover or arrest the companions who carried it out). I was the one who was detained the longest: nine months. Then the ten of us were released provisionally and assigned to reside in Paris. In 1981, after Franco’s death, we were given a criminal trial that lasted a week, and we were acquitted, as the French police were unable to prove their accusations.

And you entered Cuba without any problems? You weren’t afraid of going to prison, since you were probably targeted by the Cuban intelligence service for your criticism of Fidel and the regime…

I didn’t visit Cuba again until the early 1980s… But I was on my way to Peru and Bolivia for activities to recover and safeguard popular memory in Latin America sponsored by the Amsterdam History Institute, the Feltrineli Library in Milan, the Library of International Contemporary Documentation in Nanterre (Paris), and CIDA in Spain. Then, in 1989 and 1992, I prepared an iconographic exhibition on the influence of the French Revolution in Latin America and another on the 500 years of struggles for human rights in Latin America, on the occasion of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution and the fifth centenary of the discovery of America. On these trips, I was supported by European university institutions. The last time was in the late 1990s, on the occasion of the Summit of Ibero-American Heads of State held in Havana. I went to organize contacts with dissident groups so that a MEP could be present at a demonstration of prisoners’ wives… We had no problems getting in or making contacts, because the regime didn’t want to cause any scandal at the time… But the women and several dissidents had been provisionally detained the night before, so the demonstration couldn’t take place, and the MEP limited himself to holding a press conference with the European journalists present on the island. At the airport, I was detained for a few hours by State Security, who informed me that I had been under surveillance throughout my three-day stay on the island… They told me they knew about my past, when we fought together against Batista… and in the end, they let me take the plane back to Paris. It was clear that they didn’t want to cause a scandal while the Ibero-American heads of state were still on the island.

Is there currently a space for libertarian debate and action in Cuba? How do you see the libertarian landscape in that country?

There are “spaces” to the extent that Cubans are losing their fear of speaking out and the regime (as happened during the end of the Franco dictatorship) can no longer repress as openly as before. This is what is also happening with the “Damas en Blanco” and other opposition groups… I view the libertarian perspective with a fair amount of optimism, because the comrades with whom we are in contact (members of the Critical Observatory) seem very capable and aware of the opportunity, for anarchists, to expose false Castroist socialism and demonstrate the revolutionary potential of libertarian socialism.

Is it true that you organized two assassination attempts on General Franco’s life in the 1960s? What happened?

It’s a very long story, but I’ll try to make it as short as possible. In 1961, at the CNT Congress held in Limoges, France, the Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE), which had been split into two sectors since 1945, was united. At this Congress, in a closed session, it was agreed to create a conspiratorial organization for the fight against the Franco dictatorship. This organization was called Defensa Interior (DI), and was to be made up of seven militants from the CNT, the FAI, and the FIJL. At the beginning of 1962, the MLE Defence Commission appointed the seven members of the DI, and I was appointed to represent the FIJL (Libertarian Youth). That was the reason I left Mexico and joined the DI clandestinely in France and Spain. The DI decided to initiate harassment actions against the Franco dictatorship to denounce the brutal Francoist repression and provide solidarity to the prisoners incarcerated in Spain. It was also decided to kill the dictator, and to this end, a first action against Franco was prepared. This action took place in the summer of 1962 in San Sebastián, but was unsuccessful due to technical problems (battery life on the receiver) and information problems (Franco delayed his arrival). The action caused great commotion, and the press described it as a failed attempt on Franco’s life. Franco’s police made many arrests in the Basque pro-independence circles but had to release them because they were unable to identify the DI libertarians behind the attack. In the summer of 1963, another action was planned against Franco in Madrid, on his way from the Pardo Palace to the Oriente Palace to receive the credentials of the new ambassadors arriving in Madrid. However, circumstances not fully explained to this day led to the arrest of two comrades from the group preparing the attack against Franco and the loss of all the material destined for said operation. The Franco regime reacted brutally and within 17 days tried and executed these two comrades, Francisco Granado and Joaquín Delgado, in addition to proceeding indiscriminately with numerous arrests of libertarians in Spain and even in France, where the French authorities, following the instructions of the Franco regime, arrested almost a hundred young libertarians and some old militants in different cities. This repression led to the paralysis of the DI, and from then on, only the FIIJL continued the actions against the Franco dictatorship. For more information, see the book “El anarquismo español y la acción revolucionaria (1961-1974)” and documentaries on TVE and the European channel ARTE about the attacks on Franco.

Changing the subject. How do you assess the fact that the financial crisis of recent years hasn’t sparked major protests in Europe?

The latest financial “crisis” hasn’t sparked major protests in Europe, despite having significant consequences for employment, for the simple reason that most European workers had reached a high level of purchasing power, and the economic system hasn’t drastically reduced that purchasing power and, consequently, their ability to consume. I don’t think this situation will change in the near future, and that’s why I think the balance of power favouring capitalism will continue… until the other crisis, the ecological one, worsens and makes the majority of workers aware of the danger that the continuation of the capitalist system poses to their survival. This awareness could foster the emergence of a self-managed planetary movement to save the planet and the human species from all the threats posed by the capitalist and authoritarian management of human societies.

Is there any place where you see more anarchist hope, a more vibrant and inspiring anarchism? Is it being influenced by what’s been happening in Greece recently?

What I find most hopeful right now is the consensus among many libertarians and Marxists in their critique of authoritarianism and their appreciation for autonomy and self-management. This is a spontaneous and global phenomenon, interconnected thanks to the internet and through networks of solidarity, dialogue, and reflection. It’s a resolutely non-dogmatic anarchism that has found its greatest exponent outside of strictly anarchist circles in the French philosopher Michel Onfray (whose books have been translated into more than 15 languages and whose print runs number hundreds of thousands). What’s happening in Greece doesn’t strike me as a very consistent manifestation of anarchist ideology, as it seems to overemphasize confrontation for the sake of confrontation with the forces of law and order without developing a true questioning of the authoritarian order. Although this impression may be due to the fact that it’s not easy for us to access his texts…

To close the interview, considering your activism to date, what were your greatest anarchist joys?

My greatest joy was seeing that all the efforts and sacrifices made between 1962 and 1967 by the young libertarians (Spanish, French, Italians, English who were subjected to repression in Spain and also in France, Italy and England) to relaunch anarchist revolutionary activism were not in vain… And this because they decisively contributed to the events of May 1968, in France and other countries, bearing the anarchist imprint of questioning all forms of power and dogmatism. A questioning that seems to me to be a fundamental contribution to that stubborn walk of the egalitarian and libertarian utopia that humanity has not stopped having as its horizon since the opposition between commanding and obeying began to be the driving force of human history.

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Abridged machine translation