“I have not been able to find out who censored The stakeprobably a senior official at MIT [Ministerio de Información y Turismo]because due to the low level of the ‘readers’ [como se conocían entre ellos los censores] “Someone gave him the approval, although we don’t know who it was either.”
The person who speaks about the prohibition of broadcasting and singing the legendary song by Lluis Llach, which ended up being one of the anthems of the anti-Franco struggle, is the historian and musicologist Maria Salicrú-Maltas, who has just published in Catalan Aquesta cançó, no! (Comanegra, 2024), an exciting book that narrates the research process that surrounded his doctoral thesis on Franco’s censorship of Nova Çançó Catalana.
Nova Cançó It is what was called the group of singer-songwriters in the Catalan language who, at the beginning of the sixties of the last century, began to compose, guitar in hand, songs in a language that until a few years ago was prohibited in the Spanish State. From this movement came such popular artists as Serrat, Lluis Llach, Raimon, Guillermina Mota or Maria del Mar Bonet among many others.
“Due to its oppositional and Catalan lyrics and its special impact throughout the country, not only in Catalonia but also in Madrid and other cities, the Nova Canco It made the regime very nervous, which tried hard to censor and repress it much more than other similar musical movements in Galicia or Euskadi,” explains Salicrú, who assures that after finishing her thesis she was so overwhelmed by the dimension of the repressive structure of culture. Catalan, who decided to tell it in a literary work.
The result is a very well-articulated novel with a narrative structure that engages from the first moment, both to the course of the investigation and to the life situation of the author, who draws herself with magnetism and effectiveness. Not to be outdone, the result revealed by Salicrú’s investigation is chilling.
A very well articulated gear
That song, no! evidence that censorship in Spain was not, as Serrat described in a song, a thing of brutal men with black teeth, but rather that “the censorship structure of the Regime was perfectly set up and articulated and worked with great efficiency,” according to the researcher. Salicrú maintains that it was a meticulously woven network that controlled any form of media dissemination of culture and thought, both in Catalan and in any other language of the State.
The work explains that in the different provincial delegations of the MIT there was what was called the “corner room”, a secluded office where officials and contractors – often followers of the Regime, but other times, especially in the final year of Franco’s rule, simply professionals who needed the job – listened to records non-stop and incessantly read books and songbooks to determine which verses could be broadcast and which could not, or which songs could or could not be sung live.
Additionally – in the case of Barcelona in a small cubicle in the stairwell – other officials called “network listeners” spent their workday listening to the radio to capture and report if what was determined by the censorship was not complied with. When a “listener” finished his day, another one replaced him without delay.
Franco’s censorship prevented more than 600 songs in Catalan from being broadcast or sung
In Salicrú’s descriptions of this type of spy, the reader cannot help but think about the protagonist of the film. The lives of othersby Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which describes the spy system in the GDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And it is not in vain that the author mentions this film at the end of the work to expose how obsessive the Franco regime became in its desire for censorship.
Face to face with the censors
Franco’s censorship prevented more than 600 songs from being broadcast or sung in Catalan, with the consequent frustration and anger not only of authors and the public, but also of all kinds of professionals who worked in the organization of the concerts, which could be suspended. at any time before or during your celebration.
“It got to the point that many times the artists traveled unaccompanied and only with the guitar to the location of the concert, because this way, if they were suspended, only they were affected,” explains the musicologist. Also because some concerts were held clandestinely in the dining room of the organizers’ home, as reported in the book.
What is most surprising about the tireless censorious activity of the “readers” is that these officials who prohibited with arguments as reactionary as they were childish were cultured, sensitive and educated people.
But what is most surprising about the tireless censoring activity of the “readers” is not their obsession with separatism, which they saw in any nuance or detail – going so far as to ban children’s stories because they mentioned the sardana – but that these officials, who banned with arguments as reactionary as they were childish, were cultured, sensitive and educated people, often with alternative jobs as university or high school teachers and with a good knowledge of the Catalan language.
Salicrú tells of the adventure that led him to contact many of them. She did not find people who were stern and reluctant to the interview, but rather kind old men and women who made the task easier and filled her with attention. Several of them, such as the Valencian “reader” from the Madrid headquarters José Mampel Llop, one of the great censors of the letters of the Nova Canco whom Salicrú calls “the wolf,” they even gave him books and poems they had written.
By day censoring and by night singing the censored songs
The historian focuses especially on the relationship she develops with Mampel Llop, “the wolf”, a former Castellón official to whom she speaks in Catalan, at his express request, and he answers her in Spanish because he barely remembers his mother tongue. But “the wolf”, a voracious censor in the sixties and seventies, is reluctant at first to confess his role, although in the end he admits it but points out, being very religious, that God knows his sins and has forgiven them.
Another notable censor at the Madrid headquarters, Gregorio Solera Casero, also elderly, takes her to the Ministry of Defense building, the former headquarters of MIT where he had been a mid-ranking censorship official, and manages to get her into the offices by passing her off as his niece in order to show him on the spot how the central censorship office in Spain was organized.
But perhaps the most shocking case is that of the officials of the provincial delegations of Lleida and Girona in the seventies, young people hired who were ideologically very far from Franco’s regime, but who mercilessly censured according to the instructions given to them by their superiors.
After determining which songs could not be sung at the concert that would be held a few hours later, they attended the event as just another fan and shouted for the songs they had censored.
However, they acknowledge to the writer that, after determining which songs could not be sung at the concert that would be held a few hours later, they attended the event as just another fan and shouted out for the songs they had censored, going as far as chanting them. if the artist agreed to sing them.
In this environment it moves That song, no!a novel that navigates between an academic research thriller, with sometimes Kafkaesque overtones, and the description of a time and a country that fortunately are far away today. But it is worth knowing because, as the American thinker of Spanish origin George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
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