50º Aniversario del Asalto a Moncada

More on what I think it means (that the Cuban revolution has held out so long) in coming notes. Right now I'm still in the People's Republic of Carboneras. I may find clues here to what has happened there. You never know -- everything is connected. So, Congratulations, Cuba -- I think.

Correction: wrong tajo

Back on July 8, writing about Ronda, I said that the "Tajo" or gorge that is the most dramatic feature of the city was cut by "the Tajo, one of Spains's great rivers." Boy, was I off! By hundreds of kilometers. The Tajo (Tagus) river runs through Madrid. The river that has cut the spectacular tajo of Ronda is the Guadalevín. (I don't know who Levín was, but "Guada--" is the first name of many rivers of Spain. I haven't yet found out why, but I suspect it's a castillianized form of the Arabic "wadi".)

Report from the red zone: the struggles continue in Carboneras

And in all of Almería (the province). I just learned the other day that Almería was the last province to surrender to Franco's forces, 31 March 1939 -- two days after Jaén and 3 days after Madrid. It was not until Almería surrendered that the war was over. Except, it wasn't really over, merely interrupted for 36 years.

I'll have much more to say about this after I've had a chance to digest lots of new information and time to write it up in something clearer than my cramped notes. Besides the splendid little library of Carboneras (whose computer I'm using at this moment), there are all the splendid people, and the less splendid but nevertheless very interesting people, that I've been interviewing, in my quest to understand how Andalucía in general, and Carboneras and environs in particular, got so red (anarchists, socialists, communists). And of course there's snorkeling and trying to negotiate our way through the local bureaucracy (we're trying to build a house here). I'm getting deeply suntanned, mostly on my back -- because I spend almost all my water-time face down, watching all the bright-colored fish and seeking out the wonderful octopuses (octopoi? Is that the Greek plural?) in their reef caves. More later on the reds, both home-grown and the many who've come through or settled here from distant places.