“I could not find out who censored The issueprobably a senior official at MIT [Ministerio de Información y Turismo]because due to the low level of “readers” [como se conocían entre ellos los censores] “Someone gave it their approval, although we don’t know who it is either.”
The one who speaks about the ban on broadcasting and singing the legendary song of Lluis Llach, which ended up being one of the anthems of the anti-Franco struggle, is the historian and musicologist Maria Salicrú-Maltas, who has just publish in Catalan Aquesta cançó, no! (Comanegra, 2024), a fascinating book which recounts the research process which surrounded his doctoral thesis on Franco’s censorship of New Catalan Song.
Nova Cançó This is what was called the group of Catalan-speaking singer-songwriters who, at the beginning of the sixties of the last century, began to compose, guitar in hand, songs in a language that until until a few years ago, was banned in the Spanish state. From this movement came artists as popular as Serrat, Lluis Llach, Raimon, Guillermina Mota or Maria del Mar Bonet, among others.
“Due to his oppositional and Catalan lyrics and his particular impact throughout the country, not only in Catalonia but also in Madrid and other cities, the Nova Canco This made the regime very nervous, which tried to censor and repress it much more than other similar musical movements in Galicia or Euskadi”, explains Salicrú, who assures that after completing her thesis, she was so upset by the dimension of the repressive structure of Catalan culture, that she decided to tell it in a literary work.
The result is a very well-articulated novel with a narrative structure that engages from the first moment, both on the progress of the investigation and on the author’s life situation, which takes shape with magnetism and efficiency. Not to be outdone, the result revealed by Salicrú’s investigation is frightening.
A very well articulated machine
This song, no! proof that censorship in Spain was not, as Serrat describes in a song, the work of brutal men with black teeth, but rather that “the regime’s censorship structure was perfectly set up and articulated and operated with great efficiency,” according to the researcher. Salicrú argues that it was a meticulously woven network that controlled all forms of media dissemination of culture and thought, both in Catalan and in any other language of the state.
The work explains that in the various provincial delegations of the MIT there was what was called the “corner room”, an isolated office where civil servants and entrepreneurs – often supporters of the Regime, but at other times, especially in the last year of Franco’s reign, simply professionals who needed the job – listening to records non-stop and reading books and songbooks endlessly to figure out which verses could be played and which couldn’t, or which songs could or could not be sung live.
Additionally – in the case of Barcelona, in a small cubicle in the stairwell – other officials called “network listeners” spent their working day listening to the radio to pick up and report if what was determined by the censorship was not respected. When an “auditor” finished his day, another would replace him without delay.
Franco’s censorship prevented the broadcast or singing of more than 600 songs in Catalan
In Salicrú’s descriptions of this type of spy, the reader cannot help but think of the film’s protagonist. The lives of othersby Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who describes the espionage system in the GDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And it is not in vain that the author evokes this film at the end of the work to denounce the extent to which the Franco regime has become obsessive in its desire for censorship.
Face to face with the censors
Franco’s censorship prevented the broadcast or singing of more than 600 songs in Catalan, resulting in frustration and anger not only of the authors and the public, but also of all kinds of professionals who worked on the organization of the concerts, which may have been suspended. at any time before or during your celebration.
“To the point that often artists traveled alone and only with the guitar to the concert venue, because that way, if they were suspended, only they were affected,” explains the musicologist. Also because some concerts took place clandestinely in the dining room of the organizers’ home, as reported in the book.
What is most surprising in the tireless censorship activity of the “readers” is that these officials who banned with arguments as reactionary as they were childish were cultured, sensitive and educated people.
But what is most surprising about the tireless censorship activity of the “readers” is not their obsession with separatism, which they saw in every nuance and detail – going so far as to ban the tales for children because they mentioned the sardana – but that these officials, who banned with arguments as reactionary as they were childish, were cultured, sensitive and educated people, often occupying alternative jobs as university or high school teachers and with a good knowledge of the Catalan language.
Salicrú recounts the adventure that led him to contact many of them. She did not find people who were strict and reluctant to interview, but rather kind old men and women who made her task easier and filled her with attention. Several of them, like the Valencian “reader” of the Madrid headquarters José Mampel Llop, one of the great censors of the letters of the Nova Canco whom Salicrú calls “the wolf”, they even gave him books and poems that they had written.
During the day I censor and at night I sing the censored songs.
The historian focuses above all on the relationship she develops with Mampel Llop, “the wolf”, a former official from Castellón with whom she speaks in Catalan, at her express request, and he responds to her in Spanish because he barely remembers his mother tongue. But “the wolf”, a voracious censor of the sixties and seventies, hesitates at first to confess his role, even if he ends up admitting it but emphasizing, being very religious, that God knows his sins and has forgiven them .
Another notable censor from the Madrid headquarters, Gregorio Solera Casero, also elderly, takes her to the Ministry of Defense building, the former headquarters of MIT where he was a mid-ranking censorship officer, and manages to get her into the offices passing by as his niece in order to show him on the spot how the central censorship office in Spain was organized.
But perhaps the most shocking case is that of the leaders of the provincial delegations of Lleida and Girona in the seventies, young hires who were ideologically very far from the Franco regime, but who censored mercilessly according to the instructions that were given to them by their superiors.
After determining which songs could not be sung at the concert that would take place a few hours later, they attended the event as simple fans and shouted for the songs they had censored.
They do, however, acknowledge to the writer that after determining which songs could not be sung at the concert that would take place a few hours later, they attended the event as simple fans and shouted for the songs they had censored them, going so far as to sing them if the artist agreed to sing them.
In this environment things move This song, no!a novel which navigates between an academic research thriller, sometimes with Kafkaesque overtones, and the description of an era and a country fortunately distant today. But it’s worth knowing because, as the Spanish-American thinker George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
