The Cultural Impact of the Civil War

The international character of the Spanish conflict also found expression in the Brazilian cultural world. The adhesion of many artists and intellectuals to the defense of legality in Spain is explained by the automatic association between the defense of culture and the maintenance of the Spanish Republic. 

In Brazil, Carlos Drummond de Andrade immortalized his support for Spanish antifascists using words as a political weapon. The poem News from Spain was not published until 1948 but was probably written during the conflict. It expressed the poet’s indignation at the lack of information about the war as a consequence of the Brazilian censorship of news favorable to the Spanish republicans. It opens: 

       Of the ships that return 

       Marked by black voyage, 

       Of the men who return there 

       With scars on the body 

       Or with mutilated body 

       I ask for news from Spain. 

And it concludes: 

       There is no news from Spain! 

       Oh, if I had a ship! 

       Oh, if I knew how to fly! 

       But I barely have a verse, 

       And what is it worth? The poet, 

       Immobile within the verse, 

       Tired of vain inquiry, 

       Fed up with contemplation 

       He would want to make of the poem 

       Not a flower; a bomb 

       And break with that bomb 

       The wall that surrounds Spain. 

Other of Drummond’s works are full of references to the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, whose tragic murder by the rebels in August 1936 moved the world. 

In the decade of 1940, the fight for the restoration of democracy in Spain, mobilized many Brazilian artists, intellectuals, and politicians. Manuel Bandeira, Murilo Mendes, Jorge Amado and Erico Veríssimo, to cite only some writers, used their work to voice critiques of Francoism. Among the novels that are set against the Spanish Civil War are Saga by Erico Veríssimo (2006) and The Agony of the Night by Jorge Amado (1986). Saga, based on the diary of the the International Brigades volunteer Homero de Castro Jobim, was not well received by critics despite its historical value. The Agony of the Night, the second volume of Amado’s Bowels of Liberty trilogy, recalls the stevedores and sailors of the port of Santos who refused to load coffee bound for Francoist Spain.