The Spanish Government has honored, for the first time in Mexican lands, the Republican exiles. The Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, has traveled to the capital of Mexico for two days with a packed agenda whose main course was the recognition of the suffering, bravery and cultural and professional contribution of the more than 20,000 Spaniards who rebuilt their lives on the other side of the Atlantic while they waited for the end of the Franco dictatorship that never came. At the event held in the gardens of the embassy, they were warmly thanked for the welcome given to them at the end of the war by the Government of Lázaro Cárdenas, generously opening the doors of their country to the contingent of the defeated. The general’s son, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, 90 years old, has given a speech of repudiation of all wars and of pain for the exiles. “Too much time passed for the truths to emerge in Spanish soil,” he said.
The state tribute has taken 85 years, which are now commemorated since the arrival of the ship Sinaia, on June 13, 1939, to the Veracruz coast, with some 1,600 Republicans who left behind an ocean and a homeland. Then they would arrive Ipanemahe Mexico or the Nyassa, all packed with Spanish men and women who brought to Mexico the frustrated dreams of freedom, justice and dignity that they deposited in the Republic and that the military coup d’état took away with one blow of an ax. Many of them never made the return trip. “On behalf of the Government of Spain, our solidarity, respect and affection. You are the common thread between republican Spain and today’s democratic Spain; the reference and lighthouse of those who longed for freedom during the dictatorship,” said Minister Torres. “Our gratitude goes to the Mexican people and the Government of Lázaro Cárdenas, who welcomed them with open arms when they were coming out of a nightmare,” he added.
About thirty people have received a kind of diploma that recognizes their status as victims of the war and the persecution and violence they suffered, which declares “the injustice that the exile entailed, the illegality and illegitimacy of the courts to impose sentences or sanctions as well as the annulment of the sentences and resolutions that were issued.” Of advanced age, some collected in person the tribute to their past in a country that began as a stranger and ended up being the homeland, also of their children and grandchildren. The renowned writer Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, 87 years old, daughter of Spanish republicans who passed through France and Cuba before arriving in Mexico, read a poem that in some of its verses describes the estrangement of exiles in a new land: “ What to do if the landscape was not mine? What to do if I was born facing the sea?” Until one day, looking out the window, one realizes that he has finally accepted the landscape. This is what happened to Aída Pérez Floresvaldés, Ester Vilar Llores, Carmen Hernández, Concepción Michavila, Vicente and Alejandro Rodríguez or Víctor Daniel Rivera, among many.
![The writer Angelina Muñiz-Huberman reads a poem this Thursday at the Spanish Embassy.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/2YCGWMLBM5CZ5J3QFKF7ODPOIA.jpg?auth=bb1489a053a73074f8f5831910acefc6a8c03d0151a7f145ba038ff8655206f4&width=414)
The event was attended by Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena, who also said she was of Spanish descent. She said that in Sinaia 1,598 Republicans embarked and 1,599 arrived in Mexico, because in the middle of the journey a girl they called Susana Sinaia Caparrós came into the world. With it, the 456 orphans of the war who had arrived in Mexico months before the end of the civil war were also remembered, the so-called Children of Morelia, to whom General Cárdenas’s wife, Amalia Solórzano, dedicated all her attention. Bárcenas thanked the warm mentions of the generosity of the Mexican people and their exceptional diplomatic efforts after the Spanish conflict. He recalled that Mexico “interrupted its political relations with the murderers of the Republic.” “The mark of the children of the Republic in Mexico has been and will be fruitful,” he added. “We do not receive them as castaways from dictatorial persecution to whom a lifeline is mercifully thrown, but as brave defenders of republican democracy,” Bárcena mentioned quoting the Mexican lawyer and politician Ignacio García Téllez.
Mexico was then filled with professionals of all kinds, farmers, mechanics, miners, but also hundreds of teachers, scientists, philosophers, doctors and soldiers who taught classes in high schools and universities, men and women who “brought a lot of benefit” to the country, recognized Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Some of them were famous writers, poets, politicians or academics who ended their lives in Mexican land. Before going to the embassy, Minister Torres visited the Spanish cemetery, where León Felipe, Max Aub, Matilde de la Torre, José Giral Perera, Manuel Tagüeña (who at the age of 25 commanded 50,000 men in the battle of the Ebro, recalled the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez), Carmen Parga, Ramón Giraut, José Moreno Villa and many others. For all of them there was a red rose and a Spanish flag on their graves, not the republican one, but the reddish one.
![The Spanish ambassador to Mexico, Juan Duarte, recognizes the poet León Felipe, this Thursday during the tribute.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/G5VCUYUHP5G7TGVSUELFUZEG6U.jpg?auth=8b93f3c1551d62b8735f0373d8ecafe541d3637b3a5c6b72acf42fa65718825c&width=414)
At dawn, Torres traveled, without means of communication, to another cemetery, to leave a flower on the grave of another of the greats, the Sevillian poet Luis Cernuda. And then he went to the Luis Vives Institute, founded in 1939, where many of the children of exiles studied. A plaque was discovered there. To the accompaniment of guitars, the children sang The Tarara and If you want to write to mewhich filled the school yard with militia souvenirs that drowned in the Ebro. The Madrid school, another of the institutions founded by Spaniards following the pedagogical schemes of the Free Teaching Institution, also received the minister on Wednesday and his students they intoned Ay Carmela at the embassy with piano chords. The House of Spain, then the College of Mexico, the Ateneo Español, all of them remain today guarding that legacy of the best exile, indelible proof of the brotherhood between Mexico and Spain that was strengthened in those years by the hand of the Spaniards who ” “They imagined a Republic of equals, a homeland of citizens and not of subjects, and they paid for it with blood,” in the words of Chancellor Bárcena, who also wanted to read a poem by Pablo Neruda in which he thanks the Cárdenas Government for the hospitality provided. .
The Spanish ambassador in Mexico, Juan Duarte, paid special attention to the humanist aspect of the Mexican government to receive exiles from other countries, whether Argentinians, Chileans, Russians or the thousands of migrants who cross its territory in search of the United States. . “Mexico has granted 112,000 refugee statuses, it continues to be a country of solidarity,” said the ambassador. The day was ideal for ironing out any diplomatic acrimony between Spain and Mexico, and there have been many in this six-year term. This Thursday, however, the chancellor brought everyone “a greeting from Andrés Manuel López Obrador,” the Mexican president, which was not received with applause either. The Spanish legation expressed the affectionate greetings of President Pedro Sánchez.
The Cárdenas family, led by the general’s son, is still the one that arouses the most applause. Nobody wants to forget the gesture of a Government that opened the doors of its country to thousands of exiles, something that many of those who today are forced to flee their homeland would like to have, instead of walls and waters stabbed with barbed wire.
![An offering on one of the tombs of the Spanish Pantheon.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/BIVUDB5PCRAGFHN5BJ5QKVM2SA.jpg?auth=b30a89e61eb5a6ce7bfbd11588a4867667521369e2938eee10ae0661b4a97a06&width=414)
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