Spanish Civil War Memory Project

Summary

Pérez Lara was born in Madrid on Aug. 12, 1936. His father was a member of the Communist Party and joined the republican forces soon after the outbreak of hostilities. During the Spanish Civil War Pérez lived with his maternal grandmother in the small town of Orusco de Tajuña, outside of Madrid. In 1942 his father was incarcerated. Eventually his father became an exile in France, remaining active in underground work for the Communist Party. Pérez's mother was persecuted in Spain after the war, suffered greatly during the Francoist period, and died young. After the war, essentially an orphan, Pérez was labeled an "hijo de rojo, " and consequently he was unfairly singled out by teachers for special humiliations and punishments. Between the ages of 9 and 14 he worked on a farm, never receiving wages from his employer beyond room and board. As a young man he moved to Madrid, worked in a produce shop, and enjoyed a taste of independence. For his military service he was assigned to Alcalá de Henares. As one of the few literate men in the unit he was put on office duty (by his account 85% of the men were illiterate). He convinced his superior to allow him to organize literacy classes for his fellow soldiers. In the 1950s he reunited with his father in Paris. With his father's help Pérez found a job at a Citroën factory. Already involved with the Communist Party , Perez read widely and became ever more engaged politically. He gives some account of the Spanish exile community in Paris in the 1950s, their hopes and efforts. He also engaged in underground political work in Spain, such as smuggling anti-Franco propaganda across the border. Eventually he returned to Spain permanently to work as an underground militant for the Communist Party. By 1965 he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Spain. Pérez describes how propaganda was printed on small stencil presses, and then distributed in creative ways during the Franco era. In one instance he devised a special balance weighted with a slowly leaking bucket of water in order to delay a large stack of bulletins from dropping from the Torre Madrid skyscraper. In April of 1967 he was detained by Francoist authorities and tortured by the infamous Roberto Conesa. Sentenced to thirteen years and a day, he was sent to Carabanchel prison. He was released after seven years. Pérez describes life at Carabanchel, the organization of communists inside the prison, the extraordinary level and range of courses available there, amounting to a "University of Carabanchel." In prison he created his own daily newspaper which was a handwritten summary of the previous night's radio news. Two days after his release in December 1973 Pérez found himself near the scene of the ETA car bombing that killed Luis Carrero Blanco. He gives a brief account of the transition to democracy in the late 1970s, including the first elections, and his work with the Communist Party. During this period Pérez campaigned for the Party in the province of Zamora, among other places. In the 1980s he traveled internationally for Party business, including to Iraq, North Korea and the Soviet Union. More recently he has been very active with the founding and running of a cultural center in Madrid, the Centro Cultural Blas de Otero