Rafael Pillado, in memory

OROn February 22, hundreds and hundreds of people from Ben were laid to rest in the cemetery of Catabois (Ferrol), Rafael Pillado, two great names of the working class against the fascism of the Franco era. Namely, the great Raphael dies of cancer caused by asbestos, which poisoned the lungs of two workers from Bazán, or the state and military smelter, and not that Pillado carried out the claims that are already in the history books.

Let’s be rigorous, I expected (better dito, I wished for) a farewell with tens of thousands of people, as it happened in 1925 at the burial of Pablo Iglesias, but we are at a moment when many media are not interested in individual biographies, thank you More cals, otherwise many and many citizens eat hot.

Of all the achievements, the hundreds of men and women who gathered at Catabois Cemetery conveyed, like a never-before-seen Russian film for two years, respect, gratitude and admiration for that life that asbestos ended at the age of 81. His brother Raúl ended the secular sermons with a poem written with strong lines: «In the end, they killed you, Rafael, / they couldn’t kill you with bullets, prison, / but they used asbestos weapons.». It is known that Rafael Pillado’s last civic feat was winning a legal battle for others affected by the dangerous mineral.

In addition to the 22nd, two other events from March 10, 1972, when the Francoist police dispersed those large workers’ demonstrations with shots, in which Amador and Daniel fell and injured more than a hundred demonstrators, among them Julio Aneiros, who in Bazán, the place of Pablo Iglesias and Ginero de los

Rivers. Some very critical spirits wonder if so many years of imprisonment, so many hours of torture and so much time of family neglect have paid off. The answer should be clear: without the sacrifice of Rafael Pillado and many others (Aneiros, Paco Figueiras, Paco Balón, Amor Deus, Rioboo…) we would be worse off. On the other hand, as said in one of Catabois’s interventions, “we are soldiers defeated by an invincible cause.”