Diada 2014

It started early in the morning, getting three T-shirts ready: one to wear, one last’s year yellow and this year new red, and packing a couple of sandwiches and a bottle of water in a small backpack. And then fetching a flag. This year a double one: the “estelada” plus the Tarragona banner, yellow with four wavy red stripes, as Tarragona is “Catalonia on the sea”.

Sometime after 9am, I joined a bunch of citizens in a gathering at one of Tarragona plazas. By 10am some 200plus started to march towards the city hall at the sound of a band of Catalan bagpipes (called “sacs de gemecs”, bags of laments, for their peculiar wailing sound) and a “batucada”, a quite noisy drums and cymbals band, brazilian style, nowadays very popular amongst youngsters in Catalonia.

At the city hall we gathered some 2800 people with “estelada” flags, and 58 representatives of different associations and organizations presented the mayor a signed document of their compromise with Catalonia’s “Right to Decide”, right to vote.  That’s been done in all of the 960 municipalities  of Catalonia.

After some speeches and chants and the final singing of the Catalan national anthem, the gathering peacefully dissolved itself, many people moving to another plaza, where the “castells”, those peculiar Catalan human castles, staged a show.

(Foto: The Tarragona flag flying over the mayor’s head was mine)

Around noon I took a train to Barcelona. I was to meet there my brothers, who had left earlier by car.

When I reached Barcelona-Passeig de Gracia station, around lunch time, the streets were taken by hundreds of people dressed in yellow or red T-shirts.

 (Foto: Aragon-PdeGracia crossing 13.30h. People sitting on the grass in the shadow)

We went to a restaurant for lunch, absolutely packed full with a very noisy crowd of demonstrators.

I treated myself to fried vegetables (like vegetable chips) and “cap-i-pota”, a popular Barcelona delicacy of pork head and feet, stewed over a long time with a very saucy gravy. (No matter what the recipe may suggest, it is a very low cholesterol meal, as the vegetables are fried in olive oil and the cap-i-pota has hardly any fat).

After coffee, we walked to Gran Via, one of the two sides of the “V” to be staged in Barcelona. It took us close to one hour to walk from the GranVia-Passeig de Gracia crossing to Entença street, some 13 blocks away (1.2 miles), one whole hour before the set time for the demonstration, 17.14h (to remember the year 1714, of the fall of Barcelona, 300 years ago to the day).

I just saw what I saw, but I’d bet there were way more than one million people in Barcelona avenues. They shouted, chanted, sing and had fun. Right after the set hour, the “castellers” raised the pillars of honour.

(Foto: 6 tier pillars by the “Colla Jove”, lavander shirt, and “Xiquets”, striped shirt)

Not one single incident recorded. This is a very resolute, determined, and peaceful people. Make no mistake: they want to be independent from Spain.

Hear, hear, oh! World

XA



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Crowd control

That’s a tricky business. We’ve seen it all over the world. Very often ending in massacres as mounted soldiers charged or let go a fusillade bloodying the streets in SaintPetersburgh, Soweto, Tian-an-Men or Madrid (see hereby Ramon Casas masterpiece "La carga").

How easily a demonstration becomes a riot.

And city authorities mismanaging the affairs in Chicago, Watts, Washington DC since way back in 1968. And Paris in May that same year.

I landed in Washington DC on June 26, 1968 as a rookie doctor on a Fulbright scholarship to get training in the US. That very evening we went downtown to see the riots. The National Guard was deployed and kept us from driving to the east of the Capitol hot zone.

Burn, baby, burn!

Almost five decades later the Sants quarter of Barcelona burst in flames, alas! only some trash containers and a couple of vehicles, in the riots that followed the eviction of CanVies, an “okupa” building. This squatter’s stronghold belonging to the city Public Transportation Authority had been occupied for some 17 years. It has been harbouring multiple activities, workshops, “alternative” conferences and courses, and hundreds of youths and not so young have been going through them. It was part of the landscape of the working class “barrio” of Sants. But the city wanted them out and after several legal battles, some 7 months ago got the eviction approved by the courts.

The city decided to execute the eviction just the day after the European Parliament elections. The very same day the Chief of the Catalan Police, long time contested for his handling of several street protests over the past months, resigned “for personal reasons”. The botched eviction took place under a spiral of violence. Rioters set fire to the backhoe demolishing the building, a TV truck and dozens of trash containers (those plastic contraptions catch fire very easily and light up the scene very dramatically).

Four days of rioting and no end in sight.

The riot police had utterly failed to control the demonstrators despite coming in in force. Their tactics have been circumvented by the rioters taking advantage of the small side streets and alleys. Pundits and politicians keep saying in the media the protesters are very well organized and put the blame on foreign elements of anarchists groups, mainly Italian. Antisystem, they are called.

But they do not want to see or hear the tin pot banging of dozens of neighbours cheering protesters in the street and cursing the police. Raging unemployment, rising commodities prices, cuts in health and social services have brought quite a lot of despair, frustration and anger to the Spanish people on the whole and Catalans in particular.

Banners say: ”If you sow misery, will harvest anger”. Does anyone thing this is a matter of crowd control?