Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

it was necessary to formulate socialist alternatives. Perhaps the
most important thing for us was the importance of emerging from
secret underground activity, opening up to some extent and making
ourselves known at least within university circles, proselytising
and aspiring to grow. Even at that stage, when there were no more
than twenty five of us, we were aiming to be an organisation of the
masses.
We were aware of risking a great deal. The punishment for belonging
to an organisation was much harsher than for simply
protesting and even harsher for acknowledged socialists. Emerging
from underground was going to have serious and immediate
consequences. Some people branded us naïve, reckless or even
worse, but the very fact of beginning to operate a little more openly
was something new and original and something which, for a few
months anyway, disconcerted the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship.
Of course the inevitable happened and our actions led to arrests,
torture, conviction and imprisonment. Nevertheless, it is undeniable
that our emergence from underground and our subsequent treatment
generated interest in the activities of young socialists and inspired
others who came after us. The thread that the dictatorship
had broken a few years before had been restored, and in the best
possible way; opening the way for a new generation of resistance,
people who had been born around the time that the war in Spain
ended. That was when we began to win the battle that would take
another twenty years to come to an end.
This was the background to my experience in exile or more precisely
to the three different exiles I experienced.
The first stage of my journey took place not long after we had
started to make our initial plans for organising a socialist student resistance.
Almost automatically we sought to establish two types of
contact: the main socialist youth organisations in the various countries
of Europe on the one hand and on the other, the leaders of
PSOE. We had been unable to link up with PSOE leaders through
their underground structures within Spain so we went to look them
up in the cities where they were living in exile – Paris, Brussels,
Geneva and most particularly, Toulouse.
209 Miguel Angel Martinez