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

Our contacts with the socialist youth movement in Europe were
very satisfactory and we learned a great deal from them, establishing
relationships that would later become very important. Conversely,
our contacts with the PSOE leadership-in-exile were quite
disastrous and highly frustrating. We were received with a great
deal of suspicion and mistrust. Who were these students? Were we
crazy or just reckless troublemakers? Or even worse, were we
agents from Franco’s police? As far as the leadership-in-exile was
concerned, we could have been anyone! They were also scandalised
by our intention to cooperate with other anti-Franco activists
in fighting against the dictatorship – with communists and
Christians, whom they saw as our greatest enemies!
We met a number of exiles who had been living cut-off from the reality
of a changing Spain in a bubble for more than twenty years; a
bubble in which time moved rather slowly. They were living in some
sort of microcosm, negotiating and battling with other exiled organisations.
That is not to downplay the role these leaders had been
playing in keeping ideas alive and above all, keeping the symbols
alive. They had been maintaining an important presence in the
structures of international and particularly European socialism. In
addition to their stagnation, however, they had rather taken possession
of these symbols, ideas and relationships and were extremely
resistant to sharing them, least of all with apparently
untrustworthy young upstarts. It was only at a much later stage that
I began to understand that there were many very good people
among those leaders whose loyalty to the ideas and to the organisation
was extraordinary. Maybe we were also too young and inexperienced
to approach them with sufficient tact, intelligence and
humility to gain their trust. It took us time to recognise their great
merit.
But at that time, those relationships were frankly disappointing from
a personal point of view and unsatisfactory from an organisational
point of view. Fortunately our disappointment turned to joy -in the
period that I call my second exile- when we met a group of young
people, almost all children of PSOE leaders in exile, who were in
turn the leaders of the Socialist Youth in Exile. Many of them had arrived
with their parents as very small children in France, Belgium
and Mexico; others had even been born in exile. Although some
spoke Spanish with a foreign accent, they showed an extraordinary
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