More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The diada ‘celebrates’ defeat – a fact that is not lost on many both inside and outside Catalonia, seen as somehow symbolic of the Catalan mindset – and reinforces the idea of Madrid as the natural enemy.
When Barcelona face Madrid it is, according to many culés, the nation against the state, freedom fighters against General Franco’s fascists, the Spanish Civil War’s vanquished against its victors – a confrontation represented by the assassination of Barcelona’s president at the start of the war. Bobby Robson once claimed: ‘Catalonia is a country and Barcelona is its army.’
The sports newspapers claim varying degrees of objectivity when none should claim any at all. El Mundo Deportivo and Sport are openly pro-Barcelona; Marca and AS are pro-Madrid.
The newspaper also placed a chalkboard outside its offices by the Canaletes fountain on the Ramblas on which they kept supporters informed of the score when Barcelona played away. To this day, the fountain remains the meeting point for fans celebrating Barça’s triumphs. A plaque on the pavement, trodden by millions, noticed by few, marks the spot.
A memorial stone was eventually placed, but Sunyol’s son insisted that the name be spelled with a Spanish ‘ñ’ rather than a Catalan ‘ny’.
Meanwhile, in a bizarre historical footnote, Iborra befriended a fellow Catalan exile, Ramón Mercader. One day during lunch together, Mercader abruptly announced that he had to dash off to do something. When the police turned up the next afternoon and took Iborra to see a bloody body, the penny dropped: Mercader had killed Leon Trotsky with an ice pick.
Franco’s troops, ‘the army of liberation’, marched along the Avenida Diagonal – later renamed the Avenida of the Generalísimo – and took the city. Among their ranks was a forty-three-year-old volunteer corporal by the name of Santiago Bernabéu.
Asked which of the four columns advancing on Madrid was going to take the capital in the early months of the war, Mola replied: ‘none of them; it will be the fifth column that is inside it.’
In fact, after the war the new regime contemplated moving the Spanish capital to a more ‘deserving’ city like Valladolid, Burgos or Salamanca, cities where the Nationalists had always been welcomed and where they had not even had to fight. Ramón Serrano Súñer, Franco’s brother-in-law, a Nazi sympathiser and simultaneously foreign and interior minister, insisted on the need to construct a ‘new Madrid, more fitting for an historic Spain’.
Even as late as 1966, the Catalan singer Joan Manuel Serrat pulled out of the Eurovision Song Contest after he was banned from singing part of the song ‘La, la, la’ in Catalan. His replacement, Massiel, sang the same song in Castilian Spanish and won the competition, beating Cliff Richard’s ‘Congratulations’ into second place. Franco had bought off the judges. By the time the dictator died in 1975, less than 5 per cent of books were published in Catalan; forty years earlier, almost a quarter had been.
One newspaper suggested that Barcelona should be renamed España and, although that did not happen, in January 1940 they were obliged to Castilianise their name, from Football Club Barcelona to Barcelona Club de Fútbol, while the four bars of the Catalan flag on their badge were reduced to two.
Whose fault was it, then? The author of that La Prensa article was a certain Juan Antonio Samaranch – later the head of the IOC. A Catalan, yes, but an Español fan and a career fascist, a card-carrying member of the Francoist state party. It was to be the last article he wrote for almost a decade. Samaranch wrote about the ‘exaggerated’ press campaign that followed the first leg, Madrid’s failure to act with the ‘gentlemanliness’ of which they always boasted and the behaviour of the Chamartín crowd. He also questioned a referee who ‘saw which way the wind blew’. ‘There could have been many
...more
Montserrat basilica, spiritual home of Catalonia with its black Madonna,
‘The only thing their sweeper didn’t do was grab a chair and play the violin in the middle of the pitch,’
This was a regime that had painted vests on to boxers’ naked
torsos and dubbed Hollywood lovers into brothers and sisters. Sonia Weinberg recalls arriving in Madrid in 1954, a city of ‘great poverty’, with her husband – the Real Madrid player Héctor Rial – and being stopped on Gran Vía by a Civil Guard officer who took offence at her low-cut top. That was just one challenge; by the late 1960s there were thousands of them and by the 1970s it was irresistible. The Bishop of the Canary Islands declared the bikini a ‘symbol of the delinquency and degeneration of today’s women’ and much has been made of the image of Civil Guards patrolling beaches, ordering
...more
In 1966 the dictatorship wrapped itself in a pseudo-democratic cloak. Juan Carlos was named as the king-in-waiting, groomed for the task of following the Generalísimo,
Before the 1960 European Cup final, the Spanish consul in Frankfurt sent a report to the Bernabéu on the Eintracht Frankfurt team and foreign office files show that colleagues in other cities provided similar reports.
to the assassination of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco in December 1973, less than two months before the 5-0. The man Franco had entrusted with continuing the dictatorship after his death was killed by a bomb so powerful that it sent his car sailing over a five-storey building in central Madrid and on to the courtyard on the other side. The veneer of invincibility held by the regime had been literally blown away.
It is an exaggeration but it is tempting to suggest that if Madrid and Barcelona sought to explain what they were in two books, one would be huge, page after page of story and anecdote and meaning, layer upon layer explaining what Barcelona are. The other, Madrid’s book, would contain a single page. There would be no words: just a photo of the European Cup.
Throughout the later years of the dictatorship, virtually the whole of Spain was on a kind of active stand-by, waiting for Franco to die.
the Basque derby in December 1976 was marked by the captains of Real Sociedad and Athletic Bilbao, José Luis Iríbar and Ignacio Kortabarría respectively, holding aloft the still-banned
When Josep Taradellas returned in October 1978, it was a huge event not only in Catalonia but across Spain. The former head of the Catalan government, in exile since 1939, Taradellas had refused to return until the Generalitat was re-established; now Adolfo Suárez, the president of the Spanish government overseeing the transition, contacted him and when he flew back he did so as the head of the provisional Generalitat, the embodiment of Catalonia’s ‘national’ survival and revival.
Repression was followed almost inevitably by excess and nowhere more so than in Madrid. Solo se vive una vez ran its unofficial motto – a slogan that eventually became song, one whose chorus is still belted out at discos with a collective defiance that’s almost evangelical. You only live once. Spain’s equivalent of the Swinging Sixties, an outpouring of creativity and imagination, arrived in Madrid in the 1980s. It was an explosion in music, in literature, in film, in art.
The Games symbolised a new era and, although only 18 per cent of the funding had come from the Generalitat, the rest of the public money provided by central government, polls showed that by July 50 per cent of people saw them as a Catalan success while only 14 per cent credited the Spanish state.
Pérez had been trying to raise the money to twist Moratti’s arm when Gaspart made a €15 million bid for Madrid’s unwanted striker Fernando Morientes, providing much-needed funds. Barcelona were helping Madrid buy a Camp Nou icon? It seemed too good to be true. It was. At 10 p.m. on deadline day, Gaspart reneged, accidentally leaving Madrid cashless and, therefore, Ronaldo-less. That was the plan, anyway.
