Get rid of that Francoist garbage

– They want to take Franco’s shit off the street before everyone else! It is unfair! What cruelty, damn, what cruelty!

As a citizen of Santa Cruz de Tenerife I love that order of priorities that the autonomous government has wickedly sponsored. Even more: I find it shameful, suffocatingly shameful, that this city and its council have not dismantled that ignominy decades ago without the bloody need for a Historical Memory law, let alone a catalog of Francoist vestiges. That those who live in the García Escámez neighborhood want the majority of their neighborhood to continue to be called García Escámez has a pass. It is not that they adore the general, but that they suspect the postal inconvenience that a name change could mean, not to mention the nominal identification of a territory that is a neighborhood, a network of relationships in time and a shared memory. None of that happens with that monument in lousy taste installed at the end of Las Ramblas that the day before yesterday was also called General Franco’s, of course. Frank, Frank, Frank. Even among the Spanish coup leaders there are classes. Franco – his name, his figure, his iconography – was omnipresent in Tenerife and in Spain for almost forty years. On the other hand, the relatively chicharrero Leopoldo O’Donnell, one of the swordsmen of nineteenth-century Spain, has nothing to remember him in the city where he was born, except for a bust that not even the most shitty pigeons in García Park notice. Sanabria. The spawn of Juan de Ávalos is a full-fledged exaltation of the figure of the dictator making use of a Francoist angelology that he had previously used. It was lifted by popular subscription: both civil servants and private sector workers had part of their salaries withdrawn to hire the sculptor and carry out the work. ABC, regarding its inauguration in March 1966, reported that the event had been attended by “more than 100,000 people.” The city then had about 142,000 inhabitants. The only thing really striking is a sculptural commemoration of this nature at such a late date, well into the 1960s. The history of this propaganda nonsense has yet to be written. Professor Alejandro Cioranescu does not even mention it in his History of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which occupies four dense volumes.

Some councilor with very little relationship with books and libraries has protested in this mandate because he considers the demand that the monument that pays tribute to Franco and his carnage deed be removed as an expression of resentment. The man recommended not looking back, and not forward, to learn to live in freedom. Franco would have made him a statue. A little angel in a lacoste polo shirt sucking on a lollipop. What must not be forgotten is the immense damage that this devious, cruel and mediocre beast caused to the city, Tenerife and the entire Canary Islands. Not only murder, torture and rape, but hunger, seizures, pellagra, misery, broken liberties and close to a quarter of a century of economic exceptionality that caused us to lose decades of development. And there he is, looking out over the bay where dozens of his victims drowned and rotted. Enough of the idiotic subterfuges and ridiculous chanting: remove that Francoist rubbish from the public space of our city.