In the summer of 1936, a young militiawoman, happy and confident, displayed a red and black flag of the CNT-FAI on a barricade erected on Calle Hospital next to the Rambla, with the Casa dels Paraigües in the background. That image, a symbol of the revolutionary soul and the hopes of the people in arms, became one of the most widespread icons of the Spanish Civil War throughout the world, reproduced on postcards, magazines and even t-shirts for dogs or motorcycle helmets, although it was not known who its author, Antoni Campañà, was until one of his grandchildren found it in 2018 in the garage of his house inside a red box that the photographer had hidden for fear of repression by the Francoist authorities. First mystery solved. But who was this smiling and confident libertarian?
When two years ago the French couple formed by François and Liliane Gomez saw the image displayed on the MNAC façade announcing the Infinite War exhibition. Antoni Campaña. The tension of the gaze. 1906-1989, they did not doubt it for a second. "But it's great-aunt Anita!" Anita was the family name of Ana Garbín Alonso, a free and libertarian woman who had worked as a clerk at Can Jorba and who, at the time of the photo, was 21 years old, divorced from her first husband, had a daughter, Liberty, three years old, and was in a passionate relationship with a republican army officer who had a second family in France. They lived near Passeig de Gràcia.
Born in Almería in 1915, she had arrived in Barcelona at the age of five and was the eldest of the six children (four girls and one boy) of Manuel Garbín Ibáñez, a militant anarchist who had joined the CNT in 1921 and worked on the railways, and Gabriela Alonso Martínez, who ran a greengrocers and poultry shop at the address where they lived in the Plaza de Sant Agustí Vell, in the Ribera neighborhood.
“His commitment is totally linked to that of his parents. She grew up in an environment of anarchist militancy and she maintained her ideals until the end”, remember her young son, Joseph Lumbreras, Pepito, and her nephew Alain Solans, who in their French exile remember her cooking paellas and listening to records by Antonio Molina, Juanito Valderrama, Joselito, Luis Mariano, Lola Flores, El Niño de Murcia or Manolo Escobar. She never wanted to return to Barcelona. “His political commitment to her overturned any desire to return to a country ruled by fascists,” she notes. She died in 1977 in Béziers and, as a good believer, her tomb is presided over by a cross.
In 1937, a year after Campañà portrayed her, Anita, who had already seen her second daughter, Harmonia, die, gave birth to Floréal Pérez. "I couldn't breastfeed her and her mother, Gabriela, who had just had Amapola, took care of it," recall her son and nephew, who say that Anita was involved in politics since she was 18 years old and that they participated in the defense of Barcelona also his sisters Carmen and Josefa, aged 11 and 8, "hiding weapons in double-bottomed chairs and in laundry baskets that they took to Figueres."
Floréal is the daughter of a Republican commander with whom she crossed the French border on February 10, 1939, fleeing from the bombs. They threw their weapons into the sea in Cervera de la Marenda and were separated in different refugee camps until the French soldier's wife rescued them. "Anita then went alone with her children to Bédarieux, worked as a seamstress in a military uniform factory, organized union meetings with the Spanish exiles and then settled in Béziers", where she met the love of her life, José Lumbreras. , communist and father of Pepito. "They often argued passionately and the conversations escalated, but they did not try to convince each other, each convinced of his good cause and his good faith." Of course, when she pronounced the word religion, he responded: "Inquisition."
The identity of the protagonist of the iconic photograph has been revealed on the occasion of the presentation of Antoni Campañà. Icônes Cachées, which opens this Friday at the Pavillon Populaire de Montpelier and is curated by Arnau González i Vilalta, Plàcid García-Planas and the photographer's grandson, Toni Monné, the same ones who first opened to the public at the MNAC on content of those red boxes about life in the rear. "The great paradox of this story is that the iconic photograph of Spanish Iberian anarchism was taken by a Catholic photographer and the model was a believer," says García-Planas, who together with the other two commissioners is preparing a documentary about the militiawoman.
