September 29, 2023 Hello , It was one moment of glory before the storm. The summer of 1936 when Spanish Republican forces initially crushed Fransisco Franco's military coup in Barcelona, somebody handed Marina Ginestà a rifle and told her to report for a photo op. The card-carrying socialist youth dressed in a militia uniform climbed to the terrace of the Hotel Colón, headquarters of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. Over-looking the sun-drenched capital city, the wind in her hair, Marina smiled. The click of the shutter and the 17-year-old girl became the face of a revolution.
Hotel Colón on Plaça de Catalunya, Barcelona, July 21, 1936. Photo by Juan Guzman, Efe. "I believed that if we resisted, we won," Marina said later. "We had the feeling that reason was with us... that we would end up winning the war... that in Spain the Republic would return and that Franco would be shot."
A Face of Hope in the Rising Fascist Storm
Marina's parents, opponents of Spain's King Alfonso XIII and his military dictatorship escaped to France in 1910. She was born in Toulouse in 1919 and after the proclamation of the Spanish Republic in 1931, the family returned home. As a teenager, Marina joined the Unified Socialist Party, a communist political party defending the middle classes against land seizures. It was an exciting time for idealistic young people. "We lived in something of a double culture. On the
one hand, we were fascinated by the Soviet Union, which after all had had a real revolution. We believed in the possibilities of a new society, a new man, a new relationship between the rich and poor, more social justice. "We were
against the power of the church, which in Spain was extremely conservative and powerful, and against the big landowners who’d kept a large part of Spain stuck in the Middle Ages. "But on the other hand, we were young and lived in
Barcelona, then a relatively modern city. We were obsessed with Hollywood and the new world of cinema. We loved Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow. Personally, I was completely smitten with Gary Cooper." According to her son, Manuel Periáñez Marina was also quite smitten with Ramón Mercado, the man sent by Josef Stalin's regime in 1940 to assassinate Leon Trotsky. (Trotsky, the intellectual architect of the Russian Revolution had been exiled from the Soviet Union and given asylum in Mexico.)
Marina with friends in 1935. Ramón Mercader is the second from the left. Courtesy of Manuel Periáñez.
The Spanish Civil War began on July 17, 1936, when Francisco Franco launched an uprising aimed at overthrowing the country's democratically elected republic. The anti-fascist resistance put down the coup d'état and it was several days after this first victory of the people in arms that Marina
Ginestà posed with the rifle on the roof of the Hotel Colón. The girl and comrades had no notion of the bloody war to come. There's debate about whether she actually participated in combat. She claims to have returned the weapon after the picture was taken. "At 17, I was not in a condition to fight
in the war." Marina said identifying the dead at a Barcelona hospital became a terrible and indelible memory. "For the first time I had an idea of death. I saw a dead woman with her child in her arms." As the fighting continued, Marina worked as a journalist and interpreter. She spoke Spanish, Catalan and French and served as translator for Soviet Pravda reporter
Mikhail Koltsov. Koltsov was known to be close to Stalin, until the dictator had him liquidated.
Marina at the front in Bujalaroz with Koltsov, 1936. It's unknown how Marina spent the following three years of brutal civil war, but in 1939, when Franco demanded the unconditional surrender of Republican forces, she was one of the 50 thousand refugees who fled to the harbors of Valencia, Alicante, Cartagena hoping to escape by ship. At a quay in Alicante, crowds watched Benito Mussolini’s Italian troops take over the city. Marina and a boyfriend managed to escape and attempt a dangerous crossing of the Pyrenees mountains. Marina suffered a fall and broken arm on the journey to France.
Her boyfriend and many othered did not survive. Back in Spain Franco's forces arrested nearly 500,000 Republicans and interned them in concentration camps. In the first years after the war, some 50,000 Republican
prisoners were executed. After several months in France, Marina reunited with her parents and brother who had also escaped. As fascist powers arose in Europe, the Ginestà family took passage on a ship bound for Latin
America hoping to find a safe haven. After time in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, Marina returned to Europe in the 1950s eventually making her home in Paris. One's of Europe's longest-ruling dictators, Franco
remained in power in Spain until his death in 1975. With more freedom and the rise of the internet, grandchildren of Spanish Republicans began to search for their legacy. The 1936 photo of Marina was discovered. It had
published at the time in Barcelona and retired to news agency files. Marina didn't know of it and saw it for the first time in 1995.
Marina Ginestà, Paris, France, 2008. Photo courtesy Rare Historical Photos.
The photograph had been taken by Hans Gutmann, a German-born, Jewish photographer. He fled the Nazis and worked in Spain, publishing under the pseudonym Juan Guzmán. When the Spanish Civil War ended, her made it to Mexico where he became famous, in part, for his photographs of Frida
Kahlo. In a 2008 interview with Agencia Efe, Marina said, "It’s a good photo. It reflects the feeling we had at that moment. Socialism had arrived, the hotel guests had left. There was euphoria. We ate well, as if bourgeois life belonged to us..." Marina Ginestà, the iconic face of the Spanish Civil War, died January
6, 2014 in Paris, at 94.
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