Fifteen Eighty Four

In a 1954 poem called ‘Spain in America’ (España en América), the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara likened Castillo Armas’s coup in Guatemala to General Franco’s onslaught against the Spanish Republic two decades earlier. “Do you remember, Guatemala, those July days in the year of 1936? Of course you do.” Spain and Guatemala had both been democracies, Guevara noted, urging Guatemalans to stand up against the aggressor.

The poem, written by a young doctor who would later become the most celebrated foreign fighter of the twentieth century, suggests a connection between the Spanish Civil War and the military interventions in Latin America and other parts of the Global South during the global Cold War. But what lessons could left-wing transnational war volunteers from the 1940s to 1970s possibly draw from Spain? According to the lesser-known foreign fighters portrayed in our new book, the main teachings were both military and political.

Spain offered military lessons, which were soon transmitted to other conflicts. Ilio Barontini, an Italian anti-Fascist and Spanish Civil War commander, brought insights on how to combine regular and irregular warfare with him to Ethiopia, France, and finally Italy, where he became a regional resistance leader during World War II.

Scandinavians too drew upon their military experience in Spain when they organized their resistance against the German occupiers. Even as late as 1960, the Algerian National Liberation Front planned to form an International Brigade modelled on the Spanish experience and even asked a former Danish member of the International Brigades, Leo Kari, to help organize it.

As it turned out, this kind of transnational war volunteering could not easily be transferred to an anti-colonial context. In the end, Algeria decided that its fight for national liberation was not to be shared with armed internationalists of the European left. Likewise, Ho Chi Minh could in the late 1940s find good use for European volunteers in his fight for the national liberation of Vietnam—especially their knowledge of irregular warfare was appreciated—but in the end, their paths had to diverge.

More than military and practical insights, Spain continued to offer ideological and political guidance in the postwar period, as evinced by the special status accorded to the memory of the Spanish Civil War (and to some extent Spanish Civil War veterans) in Central American revolutionary activity of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as its lingering inspirational force across Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Intriguing are the histories of Cuban revolutionaries who had fought in Spain. Some ended up in Fidel Castro’s political and military entourage; others became his sworn enemies, as was the case with Rolando Masferrer. He used his background in the Spanish Civil War as proof of his moral compass; he might even have believed it himself, but his subversive projects acquired absurd dimensions at times, as shown by his idea of a televised coup in Haiti.

A study that analyses such historical cases of transnational war volunteering on the micro-historical level and theorizes about their meaning on the macro-historical level has been sorely missing. When the great historian George Mosse in 1990 lamented that the “history of volunteers in war has not yet been written,” he was not wrong. But hopefully his claim will become less true. This book, the first study of its kind, analyses left-wing war volunteering in the twentieth century and especially the legacies of the Spanish Civil War on a global scale.