Early Life in Spain
Born in A Coruña in the autonomous community of Galicia, Eugenio Fernández Granell started out as a political radical and a musician. In 1927 he set up the magazine SIR (Sociedad Infantil Revolucionaria) with his brother Mario, and in 1928 enrolled at the Escuela Superior de Música del Real Conservatorio in Madrid. Among his friends were Maruja Mallo, Joaquín Torres García, Alberto Sánchez and Ricardo Baroja. A member of the POUM (Workers’ Party for Marxist Unification) during the Civil War, he contributed actively to newspapers such as La Nueva Era, La Batalla and El Combatiente Rojo.
In 1939, he went into exile. After arriving in France, he was held in internment camps for several months, but was eventually able to escape to Paris. While in the French capital, he struck up friendships with Benjamin Péret and Wifredo Lam. His affiliation with Trotsky made him the enemy of fascists and Stalinists and steered him towards a life marked by changes of residence. As María Zambrano said, during the first half of the twentieth century, Spain was a “master of dispersal and wastefulness” as it forced many of its most outstanding artists and intellectuals into a painful flight to other countries. Granell was one of those exiles, residing in France, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Guatemala and New York. In the Dominican Republic, he was in the company of other Spanish exiles, including artists José Vela Zanetti and Josep Gausachs.
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