In the past, he said, his sister’s house in the village had had ‘fascist’ and ‘criminal’ daubed on the door. Pradas himself had been called a fascist by Sánchez Gordillo in council meetings; he’d had his car vandalised ‘for political reasons’. The accusations kept coming. During one episode of Línea Directa, his Saturday TV programme, the mayor said that anyone who wanted to celebrate semana santa with a procession was a fascist. ‘He thinks religious people must be fascists – you can’t be on the left and religious, apparently. He talks about freedom a lot, but where is the religious freedom? Personally, I don’t believe in much either, but I respect the tradition of semana santa.’
As with so many of the allegations and counter-allegations, unpicking the gossip from the facts is almost impossible. There are a few verified incidents: in November 1986, a group of fifty marinaleños broke the windows and scratched the bodywork of the regional PSOE leadership’s cars when they came to open a party headquarters in the village.
After the interview we climbed up on a rickety ladder to stand on Pradas’s roof and look out to the horizons. As we chatted and looked in vain for discernible landmarks amid the rolling hills, I noticed his consonants were being swallowed up in his round, slightly forlorn face: a word like después sinking into his cheeks and becoming ‘depweh’. He was a funny character, near but not quite at the end of his tether as the figurehead of ‘la oposición’. He alternated between slight exhaustion and faint amusement when recounting his arguments with the Gordillistas – essentially the same arguments they’d been having for decades. As was true in the time of the caciques, much of it came down to personal tensions between him and his opponent. I asked what he thought would have happened if Sánchez Gordillo had never got involved in politics: would someone else have picked up the same mantle? Will this project continue when he is no longer mayor?
‘Definitely not. Gordillismo without Gordillo is impossible,’ he said, without a moment’s reflection. ‘For me his politics aren’t even communism, it’s a politics very personal to him. After Sánchez Gordillo, business will flourish again. We can all move on.’
Over several decades of struggle, Sánchez Gordillo has established a firm narrative for the Marinaleda story, and you can read this narrative repeated online in countless articles, in many different languages, in near-identical form. They’ve been engaged in struggle long enough to attract journalists, activists, filmmakers and photographers from almost every country in Europe, and numerous places beyond. It’s only after staying for more than a short while, and probing around the edges of the locals’ superficial memories, that you start to realise how tightly bound and narrowly focused Sánchez Gordillo’s narrative is.
It’s not even that there’s any malevolent intent to this. Sánchez Gordillo is comparable to a veteran rock star, at the top of his field for decades, who has been compelled to do the same interview over and over again. It’s become a bit of a chore, but he can’t skip it, because that would be self-defeating, so he reels off the same lines again by rote, the same key points in the narrative: they formed a party and a trade union, went on hunger strike, occupied the fields, won the fields, and built a communist utopia free of crime, police or religion, that provides work, housing and leisure for all. With the best will in the world, it is inevitable that this simple, official narrative is economical with the truth. It’s also inevitable that Sánchez Gordillo’s critics have been quick to find the holes in it and shout about them.
The Spanish right are fond of describing Marinaleda as a ‘communist theme park’, a miniature Cuba or North Korea; a failed micro-state, with Che’s face painted over the cracks in its democracy. The land occupations have been described as ‘Mugabe-esque’, and the leader as an absolutist who does what all communists do: erase individual potential and talent, mowing down the tall poppies with the sickle and bashing the rest of them with the hammer. Apart from anything else, to attack Marinaleda for being a miniature Soviet satellite is to completely ignore the history of the region, and the kind of politics its people have been drawn towards: individual freedom has always been paramount, and so it remains today in the village. It’s worth reiterating that Marinaleda follows Spanish electoral law to the letter, yet breaks national laws by having no police force. In a number of the village bars, Spain’s smoking ban is simply ignored, and ashtrays sit on the tables. For better or worse, this is anything but a controlling or authoritarian state.
The murals, in their varied litany of global causes, certainly have a Cuban feel to them. They are an expression of a political identity, or range of identities, to locals and visitors alike. They are also, as one critic argued, a secular catechism – a litany of faith to the believers, and a consciously provocative statement to outsiders and infidels. In that five-minute walk down Avenida de la Libertad, you are given a visual summary of the Sánchez Gordillo doctrine: only agrarian reform will end rural poverty; capitalist TV is propaganda; peace cannot come from militarism; Marinaleda remains true to the Spanish Second Republic, opposes fascism everywhere, and struggles in solidarity with the people of the Basque Country, Catalunya, various parts of South and Central America, Western Sahara, and Palestine.
Some critics of nineteenth-century Andalusian anarchism identified in it a millenarian streak, a replacement of their historical Christian faith with an all-consuming belief that only an inevitable workers’ revolution would bring about the new world previously promised to them by the Catholic Church. Arguably a part of that tendency still lingers. You can choose to see this symbolism in the imagery on the village crest and in some of the murals, which depict Marinaleda as a utopian idyll of green fields and clean white houses under a golden sun, a world born anew from the revivifying acts of workers’ struggle. But is this imagery really evidence of a messianic, millenarian communism? The fields are mostly green, the houses are mostly white and the sun is relentless, and undeniably yellow.
In an interview with the Diario de Sevilla newspaper in November 2011, Sánchez Gordillo said: ‘I am a spiritual leader, if you want to call it that.’ Certainly, as he said on that occasion, his ‘flock’ trusts him. The flock has a powerful devotion to the leader, and, when the situation calls for it, a willingness to take physical risks (fighting the Spanish police, for example) to defend the creed he espouses. But this is to stretch a point: Gordillismo is not a cult, much less a millenarian one. Even the criticism of the wall of murals as sinisterly ‘Cuban’ needs unpacking: they are contributions from all over the world, and not commissioned by the town hall. If this is a catechism, it is an open-source catechism, rather than one dictated from the top.
The Cuban-ness of the mayor’s office is perhaps more robustly expressed in that facility that surely every small village needs: its own radio and TV station. They were established in the 1980s and 1990s respectively to provide an alternative to what Sánchez Gordillo calls ‘the voice of the master’, filtering in from the capitalist media outside.
The Marinaleda media hub is housed between the wall of murals and the Ayuntamiento in the impressive Casa de Cultura, and consists of a few rooms of production desks and edit suites, as well as two dedicated studios. Enlivened with footage of local activities and festivities, demonstrations and rallies, Sánchez Gordillo’s topical phone-in show airs every week for an hour and a half. Looming above the banks of dials in the edit suite on my first visit there, the TV screens were all displaying freeze-frame close-ups of the mayor, disrupted in full flow. It was a slightly eye-watering image, the lurid reds and greens in the studio backdrop clashing noisily with Gordillo’s bold orange jacket.