Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (2 page)

Luís Companys, president of the Generalitat (autonomous government) of Catalonia

Francisco Largo Caballero, Socialist leader, prime minister of the Spanish Republic, September 1936–May 1937

Enrique Líster, Soviet-trained commander of the 11th Division of the Popular Army, later of the 5th Army Corps

José Miaja, Loyalist general and chief of the Defense Junta of Madrid

Colonel Juan Modesto, Communist commander of the Fifth Army Corps, later of the Army of the Ebro

Constancia de la Mora y Maura, aristocrat, Communist, deputy (from May 1937) and then propaganda chief of the Spanish Republic, October 1937–February 1939

Dr. Juan Negrín, Socialist leader, finance minister, and later prime minister of Spain, May 1937–March 1939

Andrés Nin, anti-Stalinist Catalan communist, founder of the POUM

Indalecio Prieto, socialist leader, rival of Largo Caballero, Spanish minister of defense, May 1937–March 1938

José Robles Pazos, Spanish translator of John Dos Passos

Luis Rubio Hidalgo, propaganda minister of the Spanish Republic, September 1936–October 1937

José (Pepe) Quintanilla, chief of Madrid’s secret police, brother of the artist Luis Quintanilla

For the rebels (also known as the Nationalists)

Luis Bolín, right-wing conspirator, later Nationalist propaganda chief

Francisco Franco Bahamonde, youngest general in the Spanish Army, later leader of the Nationalist rebellion

THE AMERICANS

Virginia (Ginny) Cowles, Hearst newspaper syndicate correspondent

John Dos Passos, novelist and journalist

Sidney Franklin, American matador, friend and factotum to Ernest Hemingway

Martha Gellhorn, novelist and journalist

Ernest Hemingway, novelist and journalist

Josephine (Josie) Herbst, American novelist and leftist journalist, friend of Hemingway and Dos Passos

James Lardner, American journalist, correspondent for the Paris bureau of the
Herald-Tribune
, son of the American novelist Ring Lardner

Archibald MacLeish, American poet and magazine editor, friend of Hemingway and Dos Passos

Herbert L. Matthews, Madrid correspondent for
The New York Times

Robert Hale Merriman, American professor of economics, commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, later chief of staff of the Fifteenth International Brigade

Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway’s editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons

Liston Oak, American Communist working for the Spanish Republican Propaganda Ministry; secretary of the League of American Writers

Franklin Roosevelt, president of the United States of America, 1933–1945

Eleanor Roosevelt, his wife, journalist and activist

Vincent (Jimmy) Sheean, foreign correspondent of the
Herald-Tribune

THE BRITISH

Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, English investigative journalist and POUM militiaman

Claud Cockburn, Spanish correspondent for
The Daily Worker
, editor and correspondent for
The Week

Sefton (Tom) Delmer, Madrid correspondent for
The Daily Express

Diana (Dinah) Forbes-Robertson, a writer, married to Vincent Sheean

THE RUSSIANS

Vladimir Gorev, special military attaché of the Soviet Union and Madrid station chief of the GRU (Soviet military intelligence)

General Emilio Kléber, a.k.a. Manfred (or Lazar) Stern, commander of the Eleventh International Brigade, November 1936

Mikhail Koltsov, Russian journalist, Spanish correspondent for
Pravda

Alexander Orlov, NKVD station chief in Madrid (later Valencia), 1936–1938

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party, 1922–1952

Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, people’s commissar for defense, USSR

THE OTHERS

Ted Allan, leftist Canadian journalist

André (Endre) Friedmann, a.k.a. Robert Capa, Hungarian photographer

Carlos Contreras, a.k.a. Vittorio Vidali, Trieste-born NKVD agent and founder of the Loyalist Fifth Regiment

Louis Delaprée, Madrid correspondent for
Paris-Soir

John Ferno, a.k.a. Fernhout, Dutch Communist cinematographer

Joris Ivens, Dutch Communist film director

Colonel Hans Kahle, exiled Prussian Communist, after 1936 commander of the Eleventh International Brigade, later divisional commander in the Republican Popular Army

Alfred Kantorowicz, Polish émigré journalist, information officer of the Chapaiev Battalion of the Thirteenth International Brigade

Geza Korvin Karpathi, Hungarian photographer and filmmaker, boyhood friend of Endre Friedmann (Robert Capa)

Otto Katz, a.k.a. André Simone, refugee German Communist, propagandist, founder of the Agence Espagne

Ilse (later Ilsa) Kulcsar, née Pollak, Austrian journalist, socialist activist, and translator

Leopold (Poldi) Kulcsar, Austrian journalist and clandestine political operative

General Pavol Lukács, a.k.a. Maté Zalka, Hungarian-born, Moscow-trained commander of the Twelfth International Brigade

André Malraux, French novelist, art theorist, founder of the Escuadrilla España

Randalfo Pacciardi, Italian antifascist, commander of the Garibaldi Battalion of the Twelfth International Brigade

Gustav Regler, German Communist refugee, political commissar of the Twelfth International Brigade

Kajsa Rothman, Swedish guide and interpreter employed by the Loyalist propaganda department

Karol Swierczewski, a.k.a. Colonel [sometimes General] Walter, Polish-born, Soviet-trained commander of the Fourteenth International Brigade

Gerta Pohorylle, a.k.a. Gerda Taro, Polish-born German photographer

A NOTE ON SPELLING

Although current usage calls for Catalan or Basque spelling for proper and place names in those regions, I have followed contemporary (1930s) practice in rendering them in Castilian Spanish—or, in a few cases where contemporary sources did likewise, in anglicized orthography. Thus today’s Lleida becomes Lérida; Gernika becomes Guernica; Andreu Nin becomes Andrés Nin; but the Catalan Catalunya becomes the anglicized Catalonia (not the Castilian Cataluña), and the Castilian Zaragoza becomes Saragossa. However, the state government of Catalonia is referred to as the Generalitat (not Generalidad), since that is the how both Arturo Barea and John Dos Passos refer to it. Also, when writing of Robert Capa’s assignment in China, I’ve given his location as Hankow (as it was spelled at the time).

AUTHOR’S NOTE

“It is very dangerous to write the truth in war,” said Ernest Hemingway, “and the truth is very dangerous to come by.”
Hotel Florida
is about that danger, and how it is faced by three couples—Hemingway and his fellow writer Martha Gellhorn, the photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, and the press officers Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar—whose paths cross in Madrid while they are covering the Spanish Civil War; it is also about whether, for each of them, living the truth becomes just as important as telling it, to the world, to each other, and to themselves.

From its beginning in 1936, when right-wing, conservative rebels staged a military mutiny against the elected left-wing government, the Spanish Civil War became a kind of historical flash point: as one of its most passionate propagandists, the British journalist Claud Cockburn, wrote in his autobiography, almost no one can “agree with any generalization anyone makes about Spain. I personally disagree with about half the generalizations I made about it at the time.” A war that seemed to start as a struggle between the haves and the have-nots, it reflected—and quickly became subsumed in—the worldwide clash of ideologies that would culminate, only months after hostilities ceased in Spain, in World War II. In such an atmosphere, the shadow line between truth and falsehood sometimes became faint indeed: your friend could be your enemy, and honesty could get you (or someone else) killed.

Negotiating that landscape was particularly hazardous for journalists, who were able to cover this war more closely and thoroughly than they had any previous conflict, certainly more than the Great War of 1914–1918, in which (as Philip Knightley discusses in
The First Casualty
, his critical history of war journalism) correspondents and photographers were banned from the front. With millions of readers, viewers, and listeners getting their news from the new media of radio, documentary film, newsreels, and illustrated magazines, Spain became a place where reputations, and even fortunes, could be made. But those doing the making tended to be foreign nationals, outsiders; and when the war was over, if they lived, they could go home, to enjoy the reputations or the fortunes. If they bent the truth one way or the other, they faced few real consequences. The Spaniards, at least those on the losing side, weren’t so lucky.

Hotel Florida
is not a history of the Spanish Civil War; there have been many such, on all ideological sides of the issue, and I would have nothing to add to their number. It is a narrative examination of the Civil War experiences of my six subjects, and some of their close confederates, which attempts to offer contrasting and close-up views of their tangled wartime destinies. But although
Hotel Florida
is a narrative, not an academic analysis, it is not fiction, or even fictional. It is a reconstruction, based on published and unpublished letters, diaries, and personal accounts, official documents, recovered reels of film, authoritative biographies, histories, and contemporary news media, all cited in detail in the source notes. These sources, some of which have only recently become available, have enabled me to offer new versions of events covered differently elsewhere; but to preserve the narrative texture of the book, discussion of the differences, for those curious about them, has been largely confined to the notes.

In his poem “Remembering the Thirties” Donald Davie wrote of how his own post–World War II generation dismissed the passionate commitments of their elders as the stuff of “high-brow thrillers,” preferring instead “a neutral tone” in action and in writing. And yet, he asked, mightn’t it be better “To praise a stance impressive and absurd / Than not to see the hero for the dust”? I hope that in these pages some of the dust is blown away and the heroes—whoever they are—are visible.

PROLOGUE

On July 18, 1936, at Gando in the Canary Islands, a short, balding, barrel-chested man in a gray suit, carrying a Spanish diplomatic passport in the name of José Antonio de Sagroniz, boarded a private seven-seater de Havilland Dragon Rapide aircraft that had arrived at Gando three days previously and had been waiting on the tarmac for him ever since. The plane had been chartered for the substantial sum of £2,000 ($156,000 today), anonymously deposited into a special account in Kleinwort’s Bank in London, and it had been flown to the Canaries under conditions of greatest secrecy from Croydon Aerodrome in England. Before taking off from Gando, its pilot, Cecil Bebb, a sometime British military intelligence officer, had been instructed to make sure of the identity of his passenger by giving him the bottom half of a playing card and asking the passenger to supply the top half—which would have been peculiar orders if the passenger were an ordinary diplomat, and this were a routine charter flight.

In reality, however, Bebb’s passenger was Francisco Franco Bahamonde, at forty-four the youngest general in the Spanish Army and former commander of the Foreign Legion during the ill-fated Rif rebellion against Spanish and French rule in Morocco. A vocal critic of his country’s five-month-old Socialist government, he had been sequestered in the Canary Islands as military commandant after being dismissed from his post as military chief of staff. And now he was on his way from exile in the Canaries, almost a thousand miles by sea from Spain, to rejoin his old troops in Spanish Morocco and lead them to the mainland as part of a carefully plotted military coup against Spain’s democratically elected regime.

The republic whose government Franco and his coconspirators wanted to overthrow had been established only in 1931, when the first free elections in nearly sixty years led to the abdication of King Alfonso XIII. Spain had spent centuries under the control of the landed aristocracy, the Catholic Church, and, more recently, the new industrial oligarchy; in an effort to break that control, the new republic’s constitution, passed in December 1931, granted women the vote, legalized divorce, discontinued state funding of religious orders, made free primary education compulsory, and supported the concept of autonomy for the nation’s linguistically disparate and historically independent regions. “This young and eager Spain has at last arrived at its majority,” the republicans claimed; but its government was so unschooled in practical politics, and included so many conflicting elements—from the reform-minded Socialists to the conservative anti-monarchists to the radical anarchists and in between—that a unified, consistent approach to Spain’s chronic problems of worker disenfranchisement, illiteracy, poverty, and industrial underdevelopment proved impossible to achieve. And the country’s vested interests—the army, the holders of the vast estates called
latifundias
, the mine- and factory owners, and the Church—viewed most steps toward reform as the beginnings of Communist revolution, a not-uncommon reaction in the Europe of the 1930s. Many among them saw an alternative in the vision of the ascendant fascist leaders Benito Mussolini and, increasingly, Adolf Hitler.

These established forces started pushing back against the government’s policies almost at once. There were reports of
latifundistas
in the south starving out their tenant farmers by simply refusing to put acreage under cultivation, or hiring cheaper labor from elsewhere, and of workers who dared to unionize and strike being attacked by the Civil Guard. The conservative press began referring to the government as a cabal of Jews, Masons, and Bolsheviks; and within the army, which was conservative and monarchist to begin with and resistant to the new government’s efforts to trim its inflated officer ranks, a small cabal started to plot against the Republic.