It is convenient not to exhaust some matters to avoid that such matters do not exhaust one completely. This is what happens with the disgusting monument that glorifies (angelizes) Francisco Franco at the end of the Ramblas in Santa Cruz de Tenerife since the sixties. More than twenty years of writing about (against) that sloppiness and the feeling continues to be of a stupid and banal failure. A new chapter in this endless nonsense has arrived with a sentence from the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands that has cautiously suspended the catalog of Francoist vestiges. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, who knows why, had not published the catalog – which obviously includes Juan de Ávalos’ mamarrachada – in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands, limiting itself to posting it on its website. Mayor José Bermúdez immediately came out insisting that the municipal government had already expressed that in his opinion “things were not being done well.” That things have not been going well is quite evident. Nearly forty-seven years after the death of the dictator, a monument that exalts the butcher still remains intact in a city where supporters and henchmen of the rebellious general murdered hundreds of people, arrested in Tenerife or from other islands during the war civil.
Bermúdez has always acted as if a coup d’état, a civil war and a fierce, tireless and merciless repression had not taken place here. As if Santa Cruz de Tenerife had no contact with history and lived like a Shangri-La of comparsas and rondallas. As if the only historical reference of the chicharreros were the successive costumes of the queens of the Carnival. As if the economic elite of Santa Cruz and the entire island had not encouraged and celebrated the military coup. This same newspaper, in which you are reading me, was called La Prensa until the summer of 1936, and it was seized from its owner, Don Leoncio Rodríguez, a Republican and Liberal, who was also fined thousands of pesetas from the time that ended his fortune and, after all, his health. This scoundrel who betrayed his uniform and his oath in this city and from here went to lead a massacre, and who crushed the best of Santa Cruz, trampling it miserably, continues to be honored in the street, but for Bermúdez, it is one, Franco is one of his own who passed by here, and some have a grudge against him and others have good memories, you know how people are, eh, go and understand people and their likes and phobias, but the catalog is very bad, very bad Fortunately, the Superior Court of Justice has put things in their place.
Sooner rather than later, Juan Márquez, the Vice Minister of Culture, would have to be right about something, and it happened yesterday, when he rightly pointed out that the TSJC has not questioned a comma in the catalog: it has only recalled that its full normative nature depends on it being published in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands. And that will happen before next weekend with absolute certainty. And then? Will another hitherto unknown association that you embroidered in red yesterday arrive by imperial routes, walking towards God, to continue delaying the application of the Historical Memory law in this capital? And will the mayor and his first deputy mayor, his first deputy mayor and his mayor, applaud quietly (perhaps quietly) again? Why the hell do we have to suffer this nauseating embarrassment? Do they really believe that this does not move a vote and that it will not have any legal consequences for them and their parties? Maybe they are right. But maybe they are wrong. Cities take many years, sometimes decades, even centuries, to get their revenge. But they never forget. Not even a city as radically forgetful as Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
