Miguel García García
Miguel García García was a Spanish anarchist and writer. He was a political prisoner during the Franco era.
In his youth, García became affiliated with libertarianism and his family belonged to the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo. As a young newsboy, after being hurt at a rally for greater pay, he left Barcelona for France, where he learned the language. During the Spanish Civil War, he drove arms across the French border into Republican Spain. While his fellow Barcelonans confronted a government building, García led a cohort to raid gunshops in the wealthier part of the city. During the war, he fought on the Saragossa and Madrid fronts, and after the anarchists' defeat, spent two and a half years in a concentration camp where he befriended Josep Lluís i Facerias and El Quico. Upon their release, they together joined the Spanish Resistance, in which they reorganized the CNT, smuggled guns and people across borders, and sabotaged Franco and the Axis. García was among the few who survived.
García was captured and sentenced to death, but international pressure led his sentence to be reduced to 20 years in prison. He met Stuart Christie in the Carabanchel Prison. García later wrote about his incarceration in Franco's Prisoner. Reviews compared his autobiography to In Hiding, written by a socialist mayor who opposed anarchists. García's book was translated into German. García became fluent in Italian and learned rudimentary English in prison so as to read the English-language press. He decided to travel across Western Europe to speak against Francoist Spain and organize wider resistance. In London, he worked with Albert Meltzer on the Anarchist Black Cross. Meltzer wrote of García's influence on The Angry Brigade, the First of May Group, and the Iberian Liberation Movement, among other groups internationally. García died of tuberculosis.Selected works
