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

degree of generosity, activism and nostalgia for a country they had
never known.
Their reaction to us was very different from that of their parents.
They opened their arms, their hearts and their organisation to us. It
was not easy for them: the party itself made things very difficult. Yet
these men and women remained firm, and together we even succeeded
in removing from the name of the organisation the words in
exile. This meant that half of the leadership of the Spanish Socialist
Youth would be based in Spain and half would continue to be
based in exile; a tremendously important step which the party was
to follow only a few years later.
This organic link was a determining factor in the growth and consolidation
of the organisation in Spain and beyond, and encouraged
young working people as well as students to join. The initial
group of activists, of whom I was one, was only active for about a
year and a half before Franco’s political police caught up with us.
We never really knew whether it had taken them that long to work
out what was happening or whether that had in fact left us to our
work so that they could arrest us in greater numbers.
In the meantime there was a conference of the party-in-exile, held
in a suburb of Paris, which we attended as delegates from what
was called the internal organisation. It caused a real stir when we
openly stood up at the conference and asked for the floor on behalf
of the comrades operating underground in Spain. Half of the
delegates thought that we were mad and some thought, once
again, that we must have been agents of Franco’s state machinery.
However, almost all of them understood that we were entering a
new phase in the life of the party and of Spain. Many people cried,
and those days provided a tremendous injection of enthusiasm and
confidence in our future for everyone. We had entered the world of
reality, moving on from political fiction.
When we returned to Spain the inevitable happened. In a couple of
weeks we were arrested, ill-treated for several days at the State
Security Office, imprisoned and then tried by special courts and
given harsh sentences. This was the first time in almost two
decades that young PSOE activists had been convicted and it
caused a great surge of protest in Spain and the rest of Europe. Key
figures like Willy Brandt, Olof Palme and Bruno Kreisky spoke out.
211 Miguel Angel Martinez