Exile
Solano spent several months living in Paris and Chartres, and along with other poumistas attempted to reconstitute the Party, with an exile wing and one active inside Spain, and also maintain links with other organizations. In 1941, after Nazi Germany conquered and occupied France, Solano was detained in Montauban and condemned to twenty years of forced labor by a Vichy regime tribunal. He was freed on July 19, 1944 by the Maquis. He joined the French Resistance and, along with POUM and Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and militants founded a Spanish guerrilla unit, the Liberty Battalion. In 1945 he left the Battalion to rededicate himself to organizing the POUM and reestablishing its newspaper, La Batalla ("The Battle").
In 1947, after a clandestine voyage to Madrid and Catalonia, Solano was elected secretary general of the POUM at the party's general conference in Toulouse, attended by representatives of the illegal Spanish organization as well as exile groups from France, North Africa, and Latin America.
During his exile, aside from editing La Batalla, considered one of the best Spanish émigré publications, Solano founded Tribuno Socialista ("Socialist Tribune"), a magazine that secured a notable following in Spain in an epoch when the resistance to the Franco dictatorship (see Spanish State) reached hopeful peaks. Moreover, Solano participated in numerous international activities and, in particular, in the creation of the Movement for the United States of Europe, one of the first postwar Pan-European organizations, and that of the Anti-Imperialist People's Congress, which brought together many of the African and Asian national liberation movements.
Professionally, Solano worked for Agence France Presse between 1953 and 1981. In 1975-76, when the POUM found itself in the midst of a crisis, he stood in opposition to the dissolution of the Party and its entrance into the camp of Social Democracy (the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party). He pushed for Tribuno Socialista to become the POUM's magazine, and expressed his support for the regroupment of revolutionary Marxist organizations.
Read more about this topic: Wilebaldo Solano
Famous quotes containing the word exile:
“Public employment contributes neither to advantage nor happiness. It is but honorable exile from one’s family and affairs.”
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“The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one’s country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.”
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“the bird in the poplar tree
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