The poet Pedro Garfias says in his poem, turned into an anthem by Víctor Manuel, that Asturias had two chances to risk “his life in a game” and he did it both times. The Asturian historian and economist Germán Ojeda jokes that those two challenges are the 1934 Revolution and the 1962 Revolution. in 1941–, but Ojeda's provocation is useful to understand the importance of that mining protest that put the regime in a bind and that, in the words of the historian Rubén Vega, "is the hinge that divides the two political halves of Francoism", as the 1959 Stabilization plan is in economic terms.
The huelgona – also known as the strike of silence – began in the Pozu Nicolasa de Mieres on April 6, 1962 – the event was held this weekend due to scheduling problems last April – with material demands and in a peaceful manner. Those who stop "there are seven: Francisco, Aníbal, Eugenio, Jovino, Eladio, Abelardo and José", says Paco Cerdà in his original essay on the events of 1962 El peón (Pumpkin Seeds, 2020) and in just a few weeks, some 60,000 workers in Asturias and 300,000 throughout the country – all mining, industry and some other sectors – supported the strike. “Nobody expected it. Even less so the regime, never so cornered since the day of its victory on that distant first of April”, writes Cerdà.
A milestone for labor relations that would mean the end of the vertical union as it had operated until then. The Minister General Secretary of the Movement, José Solís, who was the national union delegate, had to travel to Asturias to negotiate with the miners' commissions. And the regime gave in. Vega explains: “On May 24, 1962, the price of 75 pesetas per ton of coal was published in the Official State Gazette”, a figure that should have been transferred to wages.
But beyond the labor conflict, the striker had deep political and social repercussions. The lawyer and essayist Pedro de Silva Cienfuegos-Jovellanos, who was president of the Principality of Asturias between 1983 and 1991, underlines the categorical nature of those events, whose shock wave will be felt in the labor, political, student, intellectual and even diocesan worlds. .
The strike of silence "has a direct political precipitate that is the Munich conspiracy," explains De Silva, a meeting of intellectuals with Social Democratic and Christian Democratic roots that will have much better historiographic luck than the Asturian strike. The reason, explains Vega, is that the pilots and narrators of the transition will be precisely Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, so they widen their own role. La huelgona, on the other hand, is a story of workers –Cerdà's peons– and communists, and neither one of them took up the pen of history when the Franco regime ended.
But the people on the street, the sudden coverage of the international press, and the acts of solidarity in places as remote as Sidney, Montreal or Montevideo –carried out by exiles and also by veteran brigade members– concerned much more in Pardo than the canapés Cerdà explains, and this centrality of the street action is ratified by De Silva, who recalls that his essay The forces of change (when the king hesitated on 23-F and other essays on the transition) (Editorial Prensa Ibérica), was going to entitled The mass and the bullet because "the mass can occupy the street and the bullet can dislodge it."
As a shameful partner of the Western side in the Cold War, the veil of international silence had fallen over Spain, and that veil was torn by the huelgona. Le Monde or The New York Times echoed it and the entire Italian press began to report harshly against Francoism. To such an extent, says Vega, that the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See did not stop sending cables to Madrid requesting, without success, arguments to defend the regime. But it was 1962, the Second Vatican Council was beginning, and Rome no longer looked favorably on Franco parading under a canopy, as only wooden saints walk. With the assassination of Julián Grimau in 1963, things between Madrid and Rome would get even worse.
Three communists, Juan Antonio Bardem, Alfonso Sastre and Armando López Salinas, drafted a statement that they managed to get signed by twenty intellectuals of all kinds and great tinsel, among others, two future Nobel Prize winners –Cela and Aleixandre– and two presidents of the RAE , Lain Entralgo and Menendez Pidal. Vega says that, being a nonagenarian at the time, Don Ramón said: "What is this, against that bastard Franco?"
Another downstream effect was that the workers decided to set up their workers' commissions, effectively, the germ of Workers' Commissions, sponsored by the PCE and with the successful strategy of entryism in the vertical union, recalls Unai Sordo, current general secretary.
And we end as we began, with a song. A young Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was arrested at the University of Barcelona for singing Asturias, patria querida. No more evidence of the political scope of what was happening in 1962 is needed than the subtle understanding of those policemen.
