A Night of Anarchism in Barcelona

Verreina Palace

La Rambla, always a river of smartly dressed and gregarious Catalonians, was on New Year’s Eve 2004 overflowing and I branched off with other revelers into La Raval, a port-side neighborhood of seedy bars, immigrant tenements and unlit streets too narrow for cars. If you were looking for trouble in Barcelona, this is where you could find it. Mostly people just got their pockets picked by expert grifters whose skills had been honed over centuries of work on sailors rolling in from the port and wealthy fish flopping over the banks of the elegant Rambla. Spanish pickpockets are notorious for their finesse. A friend of mine had his wallet lifted in the Madrid train station…never felt a thing, but after being jostled and then engaged in a disconcerting apology had the presence of mind to check his suddenly empty pocket, and then to grab the one who had diverted him and start yelling, “Thief!” A crowd quickly gathered and began chanting, “Put it back, put it back…” Suddenly, the man he was holding ceased struggling, turned into him and said “Enough, you have it back.” And as he released him with one hand and reached back to his once empty pocket, it was full again, with his wallet, and just as before he had never felt a thing. He let the man go and, satisfied, the ring of spontaneous vigilantes turned back into an anonymous crowd.

But I hadn’t wandered into La Raval to get my pocket picked. I was looking for La Marsella, a legendary absinthe bar where Hemingway came to drink that strange elixir. I found it, but it was shuttered. That was unfortunate and what was equally unfortunate was that I was now deep enough into the dark barrio that I was starting to become uncomfortable on this night of over-indulgence, just as the eleventh hour rang. I was only two weeks out of a cast for a broken leg, the result of a fall while motorcycling in the deserts of Nevada, and the realization that I could neither fight nor flee with any efficacy was for me such a novel state of vulnerability that for the first time in years of travel I became afraid. In the middle of La Raval there’s a substation of the Guardia Urbana established some years back to deter the petty crime that keeps tourists and investors out, but other than along the five-block stretch of shops and bodegas that links it to the Rambla, it hasn’t worked. As I headed in that direction I realized why…they don’t send out any beat cops. It had been week since I arrived in Barcelona and I’d not seen cops anywhere but on that connecting street or along the toniest avenues. Soon I was turning back onto La Rambla in front of the district garage of the Guardia Urbana, a sheer wall of concrete wedged between 19^th Century balconied flats. The upper floors’ illumination shone through the narrow slots that passed for windows and at the street level at precisely 11:30 pm a massive slab began sliding across the sally port as a lone guard stepped back into a hall full of prowl cars and motorcycles. And then it was shut and that was the last cop I saw in Barcelona that night.

La Rambla was very crowded now and North Africans were peddling bottles of cheap champagne and six packs of beer, trolling with their arms out against the stream of well-dressed Spaniards. It was difficult for me to maneuver and so I crossed over and limped into the Barrio Gothic, a somewhat gentrified and mostly pedestrian but still bohemian district where Picasso came of age. There’s a large square there with a fountain in the center. Cafes on the ground floors of four-story apartment buildings surround it and during the day it has a peaceful, old world gentility. That, I decided, was where I would make my stand and witness the turning of the midnight hour.

It was packed, wall-to-wall, and it was not a quiet crowd. I bought a beer and tucked into a corner of a slightly raised gallery at one of the un-illuminated cafes and looked out over a moonlit sea of twisting shapes. Around the edges, strings of firecrackers were going off and in the center, a pile of silhouettes were climbing all over the fountain as if clinging to a storm-tossed raft, water splashing into the chill night air. All around them thousands of people were yelling and waving their arms, spraying champagne and beer all over each other, and then smashing the bottles onto the flagstones. It looked like the Red Sox locker room after the ’04 World Series, if somebody had turned the lights out.

When I awoke, early on New Year’s Day, I walked out into a deserted city. Even the Rambla was empty. I crossed through La Raval and turned up Diagonal to Plaza Espana and on to Plaza Catalunya and it was the same everywhere I went: a carpet of confetti, fireworks casings, broken glass and trash. I went by all the places where I normally got the news, curious to read about the body count, but all the racks were empty. I never did get a paper that day. Where else does the press take New Year’s Day off? Back at my hotel I caught the evening news on TV and was surprised to hear that there had been no serious injuries or crimes reported last night. A check of the next day’s newspapers confirmed it: there were some minor lacerations from broken bottles and some pockets were picked, but in all those teeming and un-policed crowds, in all that anarchy there were no murders, no rapes, no vandalism, no looting, no mob violence, no wilding. The exuberant people of Barcelona had gone completely nuts and trashed and pissed all over their beautiful city, but by nightfall of the following day it was all cleaned up. They had pulled out all the stops and blown their tops and driven the cops into hiding, but the social fabric had held, and held well. That seemed clear, but I was confused as to the why and the how of it.

A visit to an exhibit of Spanish Civil War posters at Verriena Palace enlightened me. In Spain, in 1936, Anarchists, along with Communists and Revolutionary Socialists were the first line of defense against a tyrannical military coup. They were patriots; a desperate and idealistic political front that organized to fight an overwhelming bloc of nationalists, Nazis and fascists. In Catalonia, that province of Spain that runs from France along the Mediterranean coast, past Barcelona and Valencia towards Gibraltar, the Anarchists were charged with a special fervor. Catalonians in general, and Barcelonans in particular, had long nursed a grudge against all authority that attempted to dismiss their unique cultural identity and language, a dialect more akin to Latin than Spanish. As the civil war intensified, the city became a hotbed of resistance and the center for production of an astounding series of ideological posters. They reveal a passionate sense of social consciousness that went far beyond civil war against the Nationalists, encompassing human rights, emancipation of women, literacy, agrarian and industrial reform, and social responsibility. With their bright colors, startling imagery and bold rhetoric, plastered on every wall and in every square during the civil war, they must have been a stirring call to arms against the combined threat of the right-wing military, industry and church.

The Anarchists collectivized their factories, turned palaces into print shops, and burned out every church in Barcelona except for Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, but despite their lofty ideals, they were undisciplined and unpredictable on the battlefield. Barcelona fell in 1939 and the country was drawn down into forty years of authoritarian rule by the dictator, Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

Anarchism in Spain today is neither chaos nor a practical political agenda; it’s a mindset burned into the character of a people who have fought fascism for decades. Anarchism is a walking philosophy, like Existentialism, that speaks to an individual’s sense of personal and social responsibility. The events of the previous night had concerned me because I was disabled and didn’t fully understand what I was seeing. Certainly, a riotous night like that in Barcelona is no place for the frail, but then, if you don’t want to get trampled by bulls you should stay off the streets of Pamplona on certain well-advertised days in early July, and likewise if you don’t want to get bombarded with tomatoes in Valencia on the last Wednesday in August. But if you were looking for a strong and committed populace that demands accountability and real freedom from its government, Spain would be a good place to find it. Not America, where in even the most benign suburbs prowl cars now roll with assault rifles clipped to the dash, where surveillance cameras are proliferating, and where tanks have begun appearing at antiwar demonstrations, such as in Los Angeles and Miami. Not America, where the people are as domesticated as sheep and seem to have lost the capacity for outrage. Not America, where an entire generation has been brought up on groupthink in the highly structured world of soccer moms where everyone’s a hero and can’t-fail schools where mediocrity is rewarded. How else to explain the deafening silence in the universities despite the most glaring calls for protest since Nixon and The Vietnam War? In America, a majority believes the hypocritical rhetoric about the conservative agenda favoring less government when in fact it is insidiously and relentlessly digging deeper into our privacy in the name of national security. In America, a majority believes GOP doubletalk that deludes working people into thinking republicans are taking the weight off them when in fact they’re stacking the deck with deregulation of fraud-prone industries and tax breaks for the rich. In America, a majority still trusts a rubber-stamping legislature without one family member in the armed forces that allowed an administration of lying extremists to send the nation’s underprivileged youth to fight and die in an illegal and unnecessary war. The Founding Fathers warned us… those who won’t fight for their own freedoms deserve to lose them.