Manuel Buenacasa Tomeo

Manuel Buenacasa Tomeo (1886, Caspe – 1964, Bourg-lès-Valence) was a Spanish trade unionist and anarchist and a militant of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo.

He was a carpenter and a journalist by profession. Between 1900 and 1905 joined a Franciscan convent from Andalusia. Subsequently, he participated in the Federation of Trade Unions in Zaragoza in 1911 and was exiled to France from where he traveled to London, where he met Vladimir Lenin and Enrico Malatesta. In 1914, he returned to Barcelona, where he established contact with the anarcho syndicalist leaders Anselmo Lorenzo, Ángel Pestaña and Salvador Seguí. In 1915 was exiled back to Paris, where he was a member of the Comité de Relaciones Anarquistas Internacionales (Committee on International Anarchist Relations) and met Mahatma Gandhi. In 1916, he traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland where he again conferred with Lenin. Back in Spain, he was made a prisoner and after being jailed in the prisons of San Sebastián, Gijón, Zaragoza, Madrid and Barcelona, regained freedom in 1918 and was elected General Secretary of the CNT. In January 1919, in the run-up to the La Canadiense strike of 1919^[1] was arrested and imprisoned in the ship Pelayo, together with other trade unionists. As part of the National Committee of the CNT, he attended the Confederal Congress, held in Madrid in December of that year, in which he served as president of the conference in the second session and was one of the twenty-four signatories of opinion on the declaration of the union's ideology, which stated: "The purpose of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo of Spain is Libertarian Communism".

In 1920, he helped to organize, a general strike in Zaragoza to protest the assassination of Francesc Layret. He served as regional secretary of Aragon of the CNT and as such attended the Extraordinary Conference which was held in the Aragonese capital between 11 and 14 June 1922. In 1923, he helped to organize an anarchist congress in Madrid, which agreed to the formation of a Federación Nacional de Grupos Anarquistas ("National Federation of Anarchist Groups"). In 1929, he was exiled in Toulouse, where he established a carpentry shop where he worked until 1930 when he was expelled from France and returned to Barcelona. After the Spanish Civil War, (1936–1939) he returned to France and supported the split in the CNT in 1945. In 1961 participated in the congress of the CNT in exile. He contributed to the publications, Tierra y Libertad and Solidaridad Obrera, in Barcelona, with the pseudonym of Manuel S. Ordo. He edited the magazine Cultura y Acción (in 1910 and 1921), the organ of the Aragonese regional body of the Anarcho-Syndicalists. He also edited the Gijón Solidaridad Obrera (1922) and El Productor, a publication based in Blanes, Gerona in 1925. He published several books, among which are: El movimiento obrero español. 1886-1926 and Historia y Crítica, La CNT, los Treinta y la FAI, y Perspectivas del movimiento obrero español^[2] His writings form a major internal source of data on the CNT and FAI.^[3]

Though he remained a militant anarchist throughout his life, he opposed the terroristic tactics of some Anarchist groups.^[3]

References

1. 1919: La Canadiense and Barcelona general strike
2. Diccionari de Sindicats, Sindicalistes (Spanish)
3. (1998) Bookchin, Murray. The Spanish Anarchists