Every day when he gets up, the old man looks at the sea from the porch of his house. It is the sea he jumped into when he was still a scared child, the sea that will always remind him of who he is and where he comes from. The old man's name is Anastasio Barreto. He was born in Lanzarote in 1936, shortly after the start of the Spanish Civil War. His mother was a housewife, his father had a camel, his means of transport for everything and the only source of income to raise two small children. “We lived inconsolably, everything was misery. We weren't hungry, but we didn't have a choice of food,” recalls the man in the coastal town of Punta Mujeres on the island where he was born. His story of the journey that took him to America as a boy is not so far removed from the journey told today, in the 21st century, by migrants coming to the Canary Islands from the African continent.
Like hundreds of thousands of Canary Islanders who depended on a dry field, Anastasio's father also emigrated. He had gone away on other occasions to help with the corn harvest and returned a few months later, but that wasn't the case this time. In Argentina he broke his back to send some coins to the island. He felt alone and tired and in every letter he sent to his wife he asked about the boy, who was 13 at the time. “And Anastasio what? Did it grow or not?” This question was not easy for an illiterate woman to answer, so the woman took out a piece of thread, called her son and measured him from head to toe. “He put the thread in an envelope and sent it to Argentina,” Anastasio says as he sips coffee. “Good, good, good, then it’s good to work. Send it to me,” replied the father in the next letter.
Poster with the tariffs of the ships on which Canarian emigrants traveled.
On December 13, 1951, two years after seeing his father abandon him, Anastasio set off for the port of Las Palmas for a 14-day voyage. He carried a briefcase in each hand. I was 15 years old. “I would like to save a photo of this moment,” he sighs. His ticket cost 860 pesetas, “a fortune,” which at the time was equivalent to three months of farming from dawn to dusk. “People escaped in one way or another, but not everyone could make it, right? Not everyone had the money or family to help.”
This boy was crammed together with 300 other people in the hold of a warship that had been converted into an emigrant ship. A single bathroom for everyone, salt water for showers, a Christmas alone on the high seas, squeezed into the space reserved for the canaries. He spent two weeks searching his bag to make sure his only five pesetas were still there. “We are experiencing disasters. We were afraid. What a shame! At just 15 years old… what experiences did he have? He had never left Lanzarote, he didn't even know how to eat with a knife and fork. “I was a piece of meat with eyes,” he remembers.
Anastasio disembarked at a port where a father he barely knew was waiting for him. He took him to breakfast and then to work. He dwells on the details when he talks about the bed he had to build that same night: a few rows of bricks as legs, a sheet of zinc as a bed base and three sacks of straw as a mattress. “Poverty breeds intelligence,” he jokes.
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Father and son worked for years in a brick factory in Buenos Aires, although Anastasio claims that life for his mother and little sister has hardly improved: they were able to send very little money. They were immigrants and poor, sharing a small room without electricity. And he missed his city, watching movies, girls… At 20, he woke up, founded a cooperative with other foreigners and started raising chickens and rabbits to earn some extra money. He met Maruja, with whom he had two daughters and a son, and lost his father, who was murdered in a robbery. And 17 years after he left Lanzarote, coinciding with man's arrival on the moon, he embarked again to reunite with his mother. “I no longer knew her, I had even forgotten her voice. We had changed. But it was one of the most beautiful trips I have ever taken, without despising any of it,” he says.
Anastasio left Argentina permanently in 1990 and became a taxi driver. “There was a pretty big economic problem, money was worth less and less and anyone who didn't have a bit of knowledge was left with nothing.” There he left his children Maruja – now his ex-wife – behind and became an immigrant again, almost 60 years old, back in Spain.
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There are no records of the exact number of Canarians who left the islands in search of a more prosperous future in Latin America since the 15th century, particularly in Venezuela, Cuba and Uruguay, where Canarians became synonymous with farmers. In a very conservative estimate, Manuel Hernández, a professor of American history at the University of La Laguna, puts the number of islanders who emigrated in the 20th century at at least half a million, about 30% of the population at the time. Gallegos, Canarians and Asturians became the largest Spanish diaspora across the seas. “In the Canary Islands it is impossible to find a family that does not have relatives in Cuba and Venezuela,” he says. They emigrated mainly because of poverty, but also because of the Franco dictatorship, which brought not only oppression but also a period of autarky and the resulting economic debacle in an archipelago dependent on trade with foreign countries.
Unlike other Spanish migrations and although the ships were loaded with men, the Canary Islands exodus was familiar: many women and children dared to escape. The majority, between 60 and 70%, ultimately returned home, says the historian. They embarked legally, with an original employment contract or because a family member claimed them, just like Anastasio, but they also did so on sailing ships that were at the mercy of the trade winds for up to 80 days at sea.
Hernández estimates that between 1948 and 1952 at least 12,000 Canarians traveled to Venezuela in boats with sails. “At first they were well received. But in November 1948 there was a military coup in Venezuela and the country began to consider all Spanish émigrés as communists, even though the majority were economic émigrés,” he explains. When they arrived, they were housed in a kind of concentration camp on the prison island of Guasina, in the middle of the jungle, at the mouth of the Orinoco. “It was a real hell,” Hernández writes in his publications. However, the canaries continued to arrive. In the end, Venezuela came to an agreement with Franco because “the regime didn't want communists, but it needed workers,” the professor emphasizes.
A ship at the mercy of trade winds, weapons and cannibalism
There are not many people left who can give first-hand accounts of these secret journeys. Most of its protagonists died, although their grandchildren and nephews continue to feed the legends of their travels. Some of them did so last week at the Lanzarote Film Festival, which dedicated this year's edition, marked by the record arrival of Cayucos from Africa, to emigration.
Domingo Corujo, who emigrated to Venezuela, poses with his large guitar in Arrecife.Adriel Perdomo
78-year-old Domingo Corujo, one of the Canarian emigrants famous for his invention of the grand piano, tells of his uncle Pedro Corujo's secret journey in the 1950s: “People went on boats that they had built here and bought together . My uncle’s were for a 14 and they fit 42″.
The emigrants, especially Galicians and Canarians, bought dilapidated fishing boats and put captains with dubious expertise at the helm. Many passengers had no way to pay their share and ended up having to forego their homes or properties to leave. Those who didn't even have it stowed away on the ocean liners that docked at the islands. When the Civil Guard was distracted, the sailboat was waiting for them on the sea to the south of the island and they had to row in small boats until they reached it. An armed man sneaked onto Corujo's boat and pulled out his revolver to gain entry. “Here is my safe passage,” he told them, pointing the gun. They are stories very similar to those of the Senegalese who have arrived in the Canary Islands in recent months.
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The trade winds, which can drive a boat without an engine all the way to the Caribbean, are also treacherous: if they stop, there is no further progress. Corujo and the others were surprised by the complete calm and got stuck there, in the middle of the Atlantic. “With the stupid candles it didn’t move. They ran out of food and water. The situation reached an almost unspeakable point.” His nephew says the crew decided to draw lots to see who they should kill for food.
It's not the only evidence of cannibalism in the canaries' travels. According to Professor Hernández, there are documented cases from trips to Uruguay in the 19th century. An English ship was able to prevent the tragic outcome on this ship. The man with the revolver, the only one who spoke English, asked about food and wanted to know how far from Venezuela they were. “Imagine what the English would think if they were asked in the middle of the ocean whether Venezuela was nearby or not,” scoffs Domingo Corujo. This was the case, although it took another three days for it to arrive.
Canarian emigrants on a sailboat on the way to Venezuela, in an undated photo. Luis Suárez Galvá Collection. (Archive of Historical Photography of the Canary Islands)
Domingo Corujo himself also emigrated to Venezuela. He traveled there at the age of 17, on a normal boat and with his whole family. They were not poor, they wanted to “open up new horizons”. This guitarist, who has been away from his island for 22 years, regrets the views on immigration currently expressed by “some politicians”. “You don’t know or can imagine what it’s like to have an empty stomach. You are able to bite off anything with your remaining teeth in order to put something in your mouth. “Don’t think so freely,” he tells them. Despite the similarities, he sees differences between the emigration of his time and today. Especially because those who left ended up doing well. He assures that they were welcomed with open arms not only in the countryside, but also in the cultural sector and at universities. What he sees now is something different: “Europe is not as generous as South America,” he says.
Anastasio Barreto remains silent and leans on the oilcloth covered in food crumbs. Watch the sea meet the black rocks on the shore. He will always remain an immigrant, even if it is difficult for him to identify with those who land on the island today, sometimes just a few meters from his homeland.
“It’s different, we did everything legally, with a contract,” he says.
“But you yourself know many cases of people who left on illegal sailing boats… When you see these children, don't you identify with them?
– Yes, that’s the same thing. When we were here everything was misery and we fled. We were fighters and got to work. People do not attach any value to this past.
The secret escape of Ramón Robayna from the Franco regime
MM
Ramón Robayna's family learned that he had emigrated to Venezuela on a ghost sailboat when his wife, with all his belongings at the front door, alerted his children that he had lost his home. It was 1949 and Robayna, a staunch opponent of the dictatorship, had decided to flee because he was spending more time in prison than on the streets. In his desire for freedom, the man decided to sell the family home to buy passage on a sailboat that would secretly take him to Venezuela.
Robayna's adventure is recorded in “History of the Secret Emigration to Venezuela” by José Ferrera and in the memory of his granddaughter Pacuca, who spends her afternoons sitting on a bench in the center of Arrecife. The matter bothers him because he doesn't like talking about politics and has suppressed this family episode over the years. “My grandfather was very red,” he summarizes. Robayna's dream was quickly dashed and he was imprisoned again shortly after arriving in Venezuela. He was released in 1950 thanks to one of his daughters who brought him back. He died 10 years later.
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