Miguel García García (original) (raw)

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Spanish anarchist

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is García and the second or maternal family name is García.

Miguel García García (1908–1981) was a Spanish anarchist and writer. A veteran of the resistance to Francoism he was 20 years a prisoner in Spain. He died in exile in London, where through the Centro Iberico and the monthly Black Flag he helped raise funds for his imprisoned comrades and to sustain an anarchist critique both of the Spanish dictatorship and of the Marxist left.

In his youth, García became affiliated with anarchism and his family were members of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist trades union. As a young newsboy, after being injured at a rally for better pay, he left Barcelona for France, where he learned the French language. During the Spanish Civil War, he delivered arms across the French border into Republican Spain. While his fellow Barcelonans confronted a government building, García led a cohort to raid gun shops in the wealthier part of the city. During the war, he fought on the Saragossa and Madrid fronts and, after the defeat of the Republic, spent two and a half years in a concentration camp where he befriended Josep Lluís i Facerias and El Quico. Upon their release, they together joined the Spanish Resistance in which they re-organized the CNT, smuggled guns and people across borders and sabotaged Franco and the Axis powers. García was among the few who survived.[1]

García was captured in 1949 and sentenced to death but international pressure led his sentence to be reduced to 20 years in prison.[2] He met Stuart Christie in the Carabanchel Prison.[3] After his release and exile in 1969 García wrote about his incarceration in Franco's Prisoner (1971). García's book was translated into German. García became fluent in Italian and learned rudimentary English in prison so as to read the English-language press. He decided to travel across Western Europe to speak against Francoist Spain and organize wider resistance.

In London, in the mid-1970s Garcia was running the Centro Iberico at Chalk Farm (later in Holborn and, after his death, on the Harrow Road, Notting Hill), a meeting place for anarchist exiles and their sympathisers. Through the Anarchist Black Cross, which published the news sheet Black Flag, Miguel helped raise funds for Spanish prisoners and their families. He worked with Albert Meltzer who wrote of García's influence on The Angry Brigade, the First of May Group, and the Iberian Liberation Movement, among other groups internationally. García died of tuberculosis.[2]

  1. ^ García, Miguel (1972). Franco's Prisoner. Hart-Davis. ISBN 978-0-246-64070-3.
  2. ^ a b Meltzer, Albert (1982). Introduction. Miguel Garcia's Story. By García, Miguel. Meltzer, Albert (ed.). Sanday, Inner Hebrides: Cienfuegos Press. pp. 5–6. OCLC 937134016.
  3. ^ Carr, Gordon (2010). The Angry Brigade: A History of Britain's First Urban Guerilla Group. PM Press. p. 45. ISBN 978-1-60486-365-9.