In the week in which the Government has recognized him as a victim of the Civil War and Francoism and made the annulment of his sentence official, the poet Miguel Hernández has gone viral for another reason. Numerous comments on social networks and articles in some media accuse the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, of having spread “a hoax” for claiming that “he was murdered for transmitting his ideas.” He did so through a message in
It’s not the first time it happens. Urtasun himself was already criticized weeks ago for stating the same thing and it is a recurring controversy for a long time in which there are voices that always insist that the poet died ill without referring to why and under what conditions. But what happened to Miguel Hernández?
The author of The Lightning that never ceases or the famous Onion lullabieswhich he wrote for his son from prison, would die in the early hours of March 28, 1942 of tuberculosis in the Adult Reformatory, a penitentiary center in Alicante. But its end cannot be separated from the Francoist repression to which he was subjected due to his political position against the regime. In fact, his health condition worsened over time due to the harsh conditions of hunger, cold, lack of hygiene and overcrowding that he experienced in prison.
However, no one helped him or provided him with health care. The few and precarious medicines he was able to access were those sent by his wife, Josefina Manresa, while he was locked up. “Josefina, the fever is going away little by little and I’m better. Send another box of BISEPTISEN injections today […] Give kisses to Manolillo. Miguel,” he wrote for the last time on a piece of toilet paper. His literary production from prison was intense and is well known, but at the end of his life, in his last letters to Josefina, almost everything is reduced to illness and the need for food and medicine.
His voice gradually fades as he waits for treatment that never comes. His family and those around him have always defended that they let him die. Joan Pamiés, who was spokesperson for the family until 1997 at the request of Josefina Manresa, explained it this way to this medium recently: “It was a murder by omission and the reason why they let him die is his anti-fascism,” he said, recalling “the coherence” with which Hernández faced it: “They offered him several times to repent and express himself in favor of Franco, but he never did.”
The man known as the people’s poet, who even stated in the interrogations to which he was subjected that he believed that the National Movement “cannot make Spain happy”, lived a harsh repressive journey since he was arrested on April 30, 1939 in the Portuguese town of Moura trying to flee. During the Civil War, Hernández was a member of the Communist Party, enlisted in the 5th Regiment of the Republican Army, participated in propaganda activities on the fronts and collaborated in publications committed to the republican cause.
Subjected to mistreatment and torture, the poet went through a dozen prisons and was the subject of two summary trials: number 21001 and 4407, which have now been annulled under the Democratic Memory Law. It was the first that ended in a sentence condemning the death penalty for “adherence to the rebellion”: thus, on January 18, 1940, the Permanent War Council No. 5 considered it proven that the writer was “of leftist background” and dedicated himself to the publication of “numerous poems, chronicles and pamphlets, of revolutionary propaganda and excitement against the people of order and against the National Movement, posing as ‘the poet of the revolution’.”
According to the conclusion of the professor at the University of Alicante Juan A. Ríos Carratalá, who has studied the summaries in depth, the decision could have been influenced by pressure from friends of Hernández who were followers of the regime such as the Falangist poet Dionisio Ridruejo, but for him expert, what had the most weight was the fact that the dictatorship could not afford an international repercussion similar to that of the execution of Federico García Lorca. The Franco regime cared about its external image and at the same time the condemnation of the poet “had to be exemplary.” Finally, he would be sentenced to 30 years in prison, but he would not serve even two.
“In reality, they did nothing to prevent his death and left him to die. The disease gave them the opportunity to achieve the same result without reputational cost and thinking that this way they would not become a martyr,” says Ríos Carratalá.
However, it is not uncommon for some sectors to try to separate his ideas from his life and death. It happened a couple of months ago in the Valencian Community, where several city councils processed motions to request the annulment of their sentences – with the PP voting differently based on their alliances with Vox – and the Generalitat of Carlos Mazón promoting an institutional declaration that did not name neither the Coup d’état of 1936 nor the dictatorship.
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