On July 17, General Francisco Franco led a military uprising in Spanish Morocco. He began by executing two hundred senior officers of the Spanish Foreign Legion in Africa who remained loyal to the Republican government. Meanwhile, four other generals and leading officers in Spain moved in unison to overthrow the Republican government. The Spanish Civil War had begun. Franco and his fellow insurgents took control of most of the armed forces. Mussolini and Hitler supplied him with planes and weapons. Seville fell to Franco’s Nationalists the day after the uprising. The insurgents advanced quickly toward Córdoba, Granada, and Madrid. The Communist leader Dolores Ibárruri went on the radio to urge citizens to resist the rebellion. Women, she said, must prepare to fight the insurgents with knives and boiling oil. Her closing words became the Left’s rallying cry: “¡No pasarán!” “They will not pass!”
The day after the insurgents took Seville, a rebel general led five thousand soldiers to take Barcelona. They were defeated by a coalition of forces loyal to the Republic, led by the workers’ union. Franco’s plans for a quick coup would not be realized; the fighting would be protracted over three years.
At the start of the war, the Marquis de Heredia Spínola and his family left Madrid to join Franco at his base in Burgos. When they abandoned their mansion, the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture occupied it and made it its base of operations. The alliance was a group founded by Neruda’s friends who were determined to wield their intellect and creativity in support of the Republic. They used writing and theater to raise morale at home and awareness and sympathy abroad. (The group came together after members returned inspired from the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture’s 1935 congress in Paris. The alliance was, in effect, the Spanish chapter of the international association.)
The eccentric “Zabálburu Palace,” as the marquis’ mansion was known, was built from a family fortune that originated in the slave trade with New Spain. Centrally located in Madrid, it served as an ideal home for the alliance. During the war, it opened its doors to serve as an open hotel for members of the International Brigades of writers, artists, and activists who came to help the Republican cause. More than three thousand men and women came from the United States to fight, forming the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Many of these international idealists became directly involved with the alliance’s work.
The palace became even more of a center for hospitality and social activity during the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which took place in 1937. Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and the photographer Robert Capa stayed there, as well as Nicolás Guillén, who was on his way to being considered the national poet of Cuba; Octavio Paz, who became the most significant Mexican poet of the century (he was named a Nobel laureate in 1990); and Louis Aragon, one of the most important French poets of the century, along with his wife, Elsa Triolet, also a prolific writer.
When Langston Hughes arrived in Madrid, with Franco battering the city almost daily, he wondered why the alliance offered him his choice of “the large and beautifully furnished front rooms on the top floor.” Living quarters were very scarce, yet this room was ample and open. He soon learned its availability was due to its vulnerability to Fascist attacks.
At night I could see the flash of enemy fire when shells poured into the city. But once I’d moved in, I stayed. Another American and I were the only tenants on the top floor. The Spanish writers, thinking that all Americans were like Ernest Hemingway, anyhow, believed we loved to live facing guns.
According to Hughes, “Guillén, much wiser, took a servant’s room belowstairs.” He remembered the palace as a “richly furnished house of some fifty rooms.” The living room walls were covered in Goyas and El Grecos. There were real Louis XV chairs. The alliance members worked and slept surrounded by luxury. There was an entire room, as Hughes described, full of armor and suits of mail, such as those Don Quixote wore. There were trunks filled with ruffled Sevillian skirts, and others with spangled bullfighter suits. Superfluous clothing was donated to the Red Cross, though a few aristocratic get-ups were kept to wear for comic relief. The alliance members dressed in plume hats, capes, and long dresses for dinner. Hughes remembers how on some “chilly nights when we had nothing better to do, the men would all dress up in matador jackets and the women in dresses from Seville of old and have, to my jazz records, an impromptu costume ball.”
In August, the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals published its first issue of what started out as a series of leaflets and later developed into a little magazine. It was written primarily for Republican soldiers; many read it while on the front lines. Its title was Mono azul (Blue Overalls), the worker’s uniform that was now the ad hoc uniform of soldiers on the front.* One member of a unit would often read it out loud for those who couldn’t read. The list of contributors was extraordinary. It included almost all the great Spanish writers who weren’t pro-Franco, including Antonio Machado, Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre, María Teresa León, and Rafael Alberti, the last two the main forces behind the publication. Vicente Huidobro contributed, as did André Malraux, the French novelist and art theorist who joined the Spanish Republican Air Force during the civil war. John Dos Passos, the great American author of Manhattan Transfer and the hallmark U.S.A. trilogy, also contributed, though later he would turn away from the Republican cause as his sympathies moved to the right.
At the beginning of August, the prime minister of the Spanish Republic, José Giral, asked for help from the Socialist prime minister of France, the poet Léon Blum. Blum at first had offered aid,
