The Canary Islands In 1933 The Civil War

HE RETURNED TO THE CANARY ISLANDS IN 1933. THE CIVIL WAR Tejera's return to the Canary Islands took place in 1933. Like so many other Spanish émigrés, "The reality found in Cuba clashed with the dreams of all the young people who saw America as the land of the pack, where work would be much lighter than that left behind and where fortune would soon smile on them."11 The situation in Cuba was becoming more critical every day and the economic and political crisis was becoming more acute. He arrived in Tenerife with his family and returned to the work of journalism linked to Hoy (Diario Republicano de Tenerife), La Prensa, La Tarde, where he published news of Cuban events. In this sense, the article that appeared in Hoy, dated August 1933, reflected with deep feeling: When we write these lines, the information received from Cuba tells us that that country has once again entered through the channels of normality, which has produced an intimate satisfaction. for the misfortunes of the Cuban people exert deep sadness in us, just as I rejoice in their fortunes. In the uncertain hours that have elapsed in recent days, our vows have been of supplication – of passionate supplication – for that society to emerge from the great political crisis it was suffering.12 In the same way he expressed: We do not know what will ultimately come out of what is happening in the sister Republic. Warships anchor, menacingly, in the bay of Havana. What they did not do in moments of anguish, when the weight of a dictatorship with all the aggravating factors of murder and crime, crushed the Cuban people, they do now, when tyranny was (sic) discarded by the triumphant revolution. We fervently hope that fate will be favorable to that beautiful country. We desire it as if it were our own land.13 This is how Tejera loved Cuba, and especially Cienfuegos, which welcomed him like a son and where he had left friends, comrades, and close relatives of his Cuban family. He became involved in the artistic and literary circles of Tenerife, met the Tenerife intelligentsia of the time, became intimate with Luis Álvarez Cruz and with the poet Pedro García Cabrera, a left-wing militant of the PSOE. The difficult times that his homeland was going through as a result of the global economic crisis, forced Saturnino to travel to the mainland of Spain in search of better job horizons; and when he had already obtained some improvement in his intentions, the Francoist uprising of 1936 against the Republic took place. The references found refer to his stay in Madrid. He was a member of the PSOE and a political leader. In Madrid he was surprised by the war and because he was a republican and his left-wing militancy, he suffered imprisonment and concentration camps. He was also prosecuted in the Supreme Court of Repression of Freemasonry in Madrid for defending the ideals and postulates of the same. The reality lived by Nivaria, his young daughter who suffered and felt the war and the difficult days that her imprisoned father went through, later found artistic reflection in the pages of her novel El Barranco, dedicated in the first Cuban edition to her father "Until my father in his death, in his name to all Spaniards, 14 And before him are some words of his: Alas, the land of my heart where you are forever subterranean forever motionless in peace now. We quote an excerpt from El Barranco: From the ground I heard that they were brought from Los Rodeos. I got up to catch up with a truck again. (Dad was supposed to be there.) I was able to hang from a rack. They were tied up, yes, hidden under huge packages, wrapped in sacks like cattle. Blood rolled around. Some sacks were completely dyed red. It was impossible to recognize them like that. I looked at everyone impatiently. It seemed to me that suddenly his head was going to pop out. "Are you there?" I yelled. (Maybe they resisted getting into the truck that way and beat them to death.) A dark-haired man pinned the tip of his rifle to my dress. "Come on, come on, scare away, you, you slut, you shoveler" and kicked me until I fell again. But now I didn't want to get up and from there I watched them walk away. (Beasts, beasts.) "Beasts," I cried, "15 In 1945, when Tejera decided to abandon his homeland forever as a political exile, he brought congratulations and greetings for Francisco Cañellas, a Cienfuegos native who had been Cuban consul in Tenerife during 1921 and 1922, from those old comrades in the circles and gatherings of the Athenaeum, Saturnino says: "Many years have passed. However, as I left Tenerife for Cuba again, dear friends: Leoncio Rodríguez, founder and director of the main newspaper of the Canary Islands, "Carlos Cruz", José Manuel Guimerá, writers; Bonnin, a painter, and many other intellectuals, spoke to me in the same or similar terms: "If you see Cañellas, give him a hug from me (...)". 16 From the moment of his arrival, his homeland would be Cienfuegos, the Cuban city that welcomed him into its bosom as an émigré, the city of his family, and to it he gave himself body and soul for the rest of his life.