Felipe
The son of a gentrified context, with a deep intellectual training, he detaches himself from the priority of ideology to concentrate on the actions. Felipe’ story is nourished by his detachment from comfort, security, and status to reformulate what is established from the parameters of the fight and the questioning.
When all falls apart, the word, the poetry, and the three-rooted tree of his identity are left. There is also the beauty of the written word and what the wind leaves behind.
Felipe believes deeply in the continuity and transmission; in the schooling of compromise and in never ending the search for new shapes for the contents without changing their essence.
I am an activist, for reasons that I don’t want, I am one of the few intellectuals who are attached to the movement’s base. Poetry for me is like a way to escape.
The awareness we do in the Iaioflautas is aimed at everyone, but we get a better response from the young people. Many people want to know how to collaborate, they tell us that when they grow up they want to be a Iaioflauta. It is good to feel useful and alive.
Rosario
Born in France from the encounter between a Spanish Republican man, arrested and taken to a French concentration camp after losing the war, and a young antifascist woman of Asturian origin. Heir to the paternal militancy in the Communist Party and related to the mining struggles, Rosario follows the red thread of the claims for equality, dignity and real freedom from France to Spain, where she continues her clandestine work initiated in her Gallic homeland.
Always a Republican, she is persistent in her repudiation for the monarchy, her vision of a future without inequalities and her commitment to the fight within the coordinates of the old known and the novelty of a transformative and cybernetic format.
We all have to jump into the equality role and decide on joint proposals. If for example 50,000 take to the streets, nothing happens. We have to go out by the millions, and I’m not talking about switching one politician for another, rather about changing the ideas.
Celes
As a child, Celes began to take part in organized money collections that took place in the street to raise funds for the political prisoners. He learned then to work as part of a team, to scurry from the police and to look for spaces of freedom like those, in which he activated his childhood’s will, within a climate of repression marked by his father’s arrests.
Celes has not lost sight of his childhood’s landscape and recognizes its forms in some of the deficiencies that populate his present, and his daughter’s future. That is why he marks the continuation centered on a reality principle that does not give up the possible good.
For us, every small victory makes the next victory easier. And there comes a time when you have so many small victories that when you least expect it you get a big one. The use of new technologies for the change is very important for us.
I consider myself a revolutionary, but I know that I won’t see the end of the revolution, nor will my daughter.
Alfonso
From a difficult childhood, marked by deprivation, limited access to schooling, and the neighborhood experience of his class consciousness, Alfonso lands in a notion of struggle based on participation in the social fabric.
His almost casual work in banking, although marked by abandonments and changes of itinerary, is crossed by strikes, protests, imprisonment and many abuses and humiliations that he will never forget. As a man who points out 'intervention' as a means of life, he maintains that no struggle experience is transplantable, and that all social conscience starts from an individual awareness. This is articulated through his personal experience in search of mentoring and the capacity to mentor.
I consider myself a revolutionary, but recognize that not I nor my daughter will see the end of the revolution - what is a revolution after all? It is the step by step consequence of a more just society’s change, and that is a daily fight… Just when we believe we have achieved the revolution, we screw it up.
What kind of future was there for my parents and grandparents? I don’t know what was waiting for them or what waits for me. I will try to leave as good of a possible future for you. I thought I was trying to solve mine and look where it took me. For now, we just have to live the present.
Toñi
Toñi spent her childhood between prison and loneliness. Her mother was serving a sentence while her father was an inmate in another prison and received severe beatings. Her youth passed between changes, losses, classism and repression. She learned to wait for the moment to be able to speak, to declare herself in opposition. She learned to live in fear of the spoken word.
Now she makes use of her deserved freedom and triggers it. She chose civil disobedience and the defense of the earned rights. She knows the past and recognizes the mechanisms that mortgage a future: she does not abide by them. She is an activist.
The fight helps me to not get depressed, to be comfortable with myself, to be happy. We are trying to set the stage for a more just future.
Adrià
The son of a shepherd, an artisan, sunk in silence, is not until he is eleven that Adrià puts on his first pair of shoes while he withstands days of child labor for the town’s privileged señorito. At the end of what are devastating days, he learns "the four rules" and to write in secrecy thanks to the grace and efforts of a former Republican mayor. He also learns what exploitation is.
In his teen years, Adrià forfeits a destiny of abuses, and is soon engaged in the fight for workers improvements, and endless strikes and persecutions. Thorough the broadcasts of La Pirenaica he gets nourished with communism, and with his move to Barcelona, he echoes what he believes to be just. His slogan to this day stands as, In fear against fear, although he no longer feels it.
I am a revolutionary, I think about the revolution. We, the Iaioflautas, are revolutionaries. This fight is very similar to the one we had in the past. We do not care to have power, but we want to control it, we want to let the people be the ones who control it.
Now we have the freedom to take to the streets. I feel free to express what I feel.
Maria
Maria's social conscience is rooted in her father's revolutionary journey and in the vision of inequality between men and women that she has perceived since her childhood. With a strong class consciousness, Maria does not take long to get active in organizations that connect her with the fight for a society that is aware of her rights and stands against their violation.
Experimenting the unevenness of gender roles within her own life journey motivates her to steer her work against the causes and effects of sexist violence. From these parameters, she joins the Iaioflautas, with the vision of what social change means, including the need to assume all inequalities as correlated - gender, class, origin - and demands an integrated action that does not prioritize any of them.
My greatest satisfaction is the fight against gender violence and, to the day I die I will belong to the working class. I feel so proud: it has given me a familiar comfort, affection, happiness, solidarity. All. The end of Capitalism has to come but I will not see it.
Maria and Juan
At sixteen, Maria does not like the repressive climate of the Spain she walks on. With nothing but ideas, she moves to Barcelona and begins her path in the civil fight and social action. A life dedicated to the shortcomings, and the fight to solve them does not stop a woman who firmly believes in the power of the actions and in all that is left to be done.
Juan remembers, as if they had just happened yesterday, the arrests and the fleeing races with the grays on his heels. You had to flee then, and you have to face it now. That yesterday enables today’s awareness, and fear has only changed its face. For Juan the executioners of that time are the current shipwreck’s grandparents, who are still alive. And impunity has not moved at all.
We use civil disobedience to create awareness. There are many people who have joined now, before they were in their houses. We must fight for education, health, the elderly.
Be aware that we won’t stop. – Maria
I don’t like this society; this system is very unfair and has no way out. This crisis has not come alone, it has been provoked by the financial powers. We are losing everything that was conquered from ‘45 until today. They are gradually taking everything away from us.
A dictatorship serves the financial powers because it decapitates the workers movement and sows terror. Today there is still fear, it has been fed by the bourgeoisie.- Juan
Adoni
The son of a woman dedicated to espionage for a brief time, and a man converted - of heart - to anarcho-communism, Adoni soon found by himself, and in solidarity with others, the keys from which to protect the life committed to the change in social justice that he wanted to see.
From his secondary years in the film critics club, to his encounter with the communist militants in his first job at Pegaso, Adoni took a leap into what would be a life away from acceptance and comfort. A life no short of beatings, arrests, fines and incarceration proceedings that almost ended his life, but that educated him in the fight and respect for all other individuals.
From his journey, stands out a word and a means to be an active member of the party– solidarity – as well as his encounter with the feminists and the profound transformation that it brings to his understanding of the fight and human relations. The same one that to this day, he applies to his life, in which the possibility of being again arrested is part of the decision to be a channel and a witness for the new generations.
I am a revolutionary due to the working class, not ahead nor behind, just with it. I have been a production manager in a company and I have taken part in strikes with everyone else.
The young generations admire us very much from the sentimental side, but not so much from an objective side; no, I don’t think they understand. Our mission is to leave a witness for them. We are the little ember that can reignite the fire.
But they are the flame. They have to build their society and we should not impose on them our reality because theirs will be a different one. For now, I am happy to help make sure that the path that others started and I followed, can continue.
Luis
Like many others, as the poet Marcos Ana, Luis starts writing in prison and discovers reading. The deprivation of freedom after his militancy never results in a resignation, but in an appropriation of options, although the exit does not grant the option to remain: like many others, he must go into exile from the south to Catalonia in search of a space where his ideas weigh less.
Heir of his father’s tenacity, he assumes trade unionism and his hands as the tools to build himself and build a better, more just world. The lines of those hands have branched like an olive tree. They also cling like exact roots to a new territory for a struggle that does not change and have been recognized as a symbol of democracy for an entire working generation.
Experience has never been at odds with the renovation.
We fought a lot. We achieved, not great things, but important social points: the development of education, healthcare, good contracts, salaries ... For 40 years we were below the levels of Europe, both socially and politically. Afterwards, there was a time of fat cows, perhaps the elders are guilty of not having inculcated the youth who have to lead the way.