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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

HOMAGE TO MY FATHER, WHO PASSED AWAY FROM CORONAVIRUS

MY FATHER BELONGED TO THE GENERATION WHO BROUGHT DEMOCRACY BACK TO SPAIN.
MISPLACING HIS FAITH IN THOSE ADVOCATING THE VIRUS WAS MERELY ANOTHER STRAIN OF
FLU, HE FELL FOUL TO ITS DEADLY CHARMS, AND PASSED AWAY AFTER ONLY A FEW DAYS OF
ILLNESS. WHILE THE MOST SEVERE HUMANITARIAN AND ECONOMIC CRISIS IN DECADES
HOUNDS CATALONIA, THIS IS HIS STORY.

Adam Casals

11 min read
·
Apr 23, 2020

Listen

Trobareu aquí la versió en català d’aquest article.

VIENNA, April 23rd, 2020, World Book Day / By Adam Casals / Edited by Jennifer
Draper.

> « A previous article depicts the seduction of the public by politicians and
> mainstream opinion, indicating that there was no need for extra precautions to
> be taken, assuring us that we were under no particular risk. Now, more than
> 9.000 covid-19 deaths later within a matter of weeks, it is time to start
> telling their stories »

During 1942, the year of my father’s birth, Nazi Germany was at the height of
its military expansion, reaching from Libya to Norway, from France to Russia.
Despite the fact that Spain was deemed to hold neutral status, Franco had sent a
full Infantry Division to fight alongside the Nazis in Leningrad (St.
Petersburg), Volkhov and Krasny Bor, in Russia. Back then, it was not unusual to
see nazi flags ostensibly displayed on the facades of public buildings in
Barcelona. The very same Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, visited
Montserrat Abbey, located at the heart of the sacred mountain of the Catalans,
convinced that the Benedictine monks were hiding the Holy Grail. The irony is,
without his powerful allies Hitler and Mussolini, Generalísimo Franco would have
never won the Spanish Civil War. In 1937, Pablo Picasso painted Guernica as a
graphic illustration of an episode of their joint atrocities. Paul Preston, the
“eminent and prolific British historian of modern Spain”, according to The New
York Times, called it “The Spanish Holocaust” in his book about “inquisition and
extermination in twentieth-century Spain”. During the Civil War, my father’s
family had suffered a lot under the chaos of the Red Spanish Republic, because
the anarchists disapproved of Christians like them. Under Franco, they suffered
once again, firstly for being Catalan, but also because Spain was exhausted
after a war that served as a privileged rehearsal for World War II.

> « My father belonged to the generation that brought democracy back to Spain »

My father belonged to the generation that brought democracy back to Spain. The
dictator had ruled for decades; in his final years, he was senile, yet his
influence lingered on until long after he died in 1975. As the Cold War started,
Franco had both the intuition and the survival instinct to become friends with
Eisenhower, thus bringing new allies to the isolated regime, some prosperity and
many tourists to the country. Yet Spain was still far from becoming a democracy.

In the 70s, my mother was a young teacher in her twenties, when the secret
police went to the school to interrogate her. This ‘privileged’ visit was the
result of a neighbour reporting her for organising a local art exhibition
featuring Picasso. Ultimately, they rattled her with questions and left, but it
was a terrible shock for her. That peculiar situation brought my parents closer
together in their love for culture and the Arts. They knew, in their struggle
for freedom and democracy, their goals were but one. Their later home reflected
this devotion in the thousands of books and several paintings and works of art
that my father liked to collect and display. As the Catalan culture began slowly
dragging itself up, out from under the dark cloud of prohibition and ostracism,
Dr Agustí Casals made contributions to the first Catalan Encyclopaedia, the
first Catalan daily newspaper since the Republic, the first children comics in
Catalan. In his spare time, he became a volunteer teacher of the Catalan
language, grammar and literature. He would teach strangers and Catalans alike,
because he was convinced about the efforts to bring the language back to life
through common and universal, daily use. Most of the Catalans of that time, like
my mother, a teacher herself, hadn’t had the opportunity of learning how to
write their own mother tongue at school, simply because it was not a part of the
curriculum until after the arrival of democracy.

On a business trip many years later, I would be introduced to the brilliant
initiative Cymraeg 2050, launched by the Welsh government in 2017 aiming to
reach a million Welsh speakers over the following decades. The Guardian wrote
how speaking Welsh became cool. «Cymru am byth!» Even The Crown series dedicated
one episode, Tywysog Cymru, to that. In Wales, I met people truly devoted to
their language, culture and heritage, just as my father had done in Catalonia
during his whole life. As we stand today, Catalan is spoken by more than 9
milion citizens in Spain, Andorra, Southern France and the island of Sardinia,
in Italy.

There were many facets to my father, Agustí Casals. He was a prominent engineer,
who contributed to civil society through his engagement in various Institutions.
He was a proud member of the Chamber of Engineers and the Engineers Savings
Bank. He contributed to the National Science and Technology Museum project, that
culminated in it opening its doors in Terrassa in 1984, and to the restoration
of old industrial heritage across the country, dating back to the First
Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century.

During the Transition period, the ancient Institution of the Government of
Catalonia was the first to be reinstated in Spain, even before the democratic
Constitution of 1978. His brother Dr Josep Maria Casals became a Member of the
reinstated Catalan Parliament in 1980. Their dream was that of helping to
establish subsidiary policies, and the rebuilding of Catalan self-government
Institutions; to the consolidation of democracy, to achieving full integration
in Europe as a means to grant stability and rule of law. In fact, Spain would
join NATO in 1984 and the present-day European Union in 1986. It wasn’t long
before my father decided to devote his career to public service, to several
Ministries of the Catalan Autonomous Government. My parents knew all too well
what it meant to live under a dictatorship. They had always been staunch
supporters of the causes of liberty and human rights. Agustí’s cousin, the
Claretian Rev Manel Casanovas, was one of the founding members of Amnesty
International in Spain. In 1988, Amnesty’s “Human Rights Now!” Tour arrived at
the FC Barcelona Nou Camp stadium. The RollingStone magazine wrote an “inside
story” on “how Amnesty rocked the world”, with stars like Bruce Springsteen and
the E Street Band, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Tracey Chapman, Youssou N’Dour and the
legendary Catalan group El Último de la Fila. My father was a small cog in that
tremendous wheel.

Photo by Andrey Grinkevich on Unsplash

From engineer, to public servant, musician was yet another string to his bow.
Indeed, music was integral to his quality of life. A tenor, he adored singing
and performed in multiple choirs. He dedicated many years to the
semi-professional choir of the Orfeó Català, the Institution that owns the
famous Art Nouveau Concert Hall of the Palau de la Música in Barcelona. During
the 90s, I remember attending one of his concerts abroad, this time at the
Berliner Philarmoniker, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Potsdamer
Platz was then still in no man’s land; all that existed was a basic, tiny
visitors centre, with pictures of how the new unified Berlin would look like in
a few years, as magnificent as it is now. Those were times of hope and optimism.
The Spanish economy was swelling; the country was able to organise the Olympic
Games in Barcelona and a World Expo in Seville, both in the same year. As proud
Barcelonians, my parents mobilised to support both venues. In our family, we all
volunteered to contribute to the success of the endeavour in that magic summer
of 1992. Again, my father played his part, singing. This time, with the choir
during the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, alongside José Carreras, Sarah
Brightman and Montserrat Caballé. During those years, he would perform several
times at Madrid’s Teatro Real or at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu. I
remember visiting him during a rehearsal of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. After they
finished, we would wander backstage and my father, wearing his engineer hat,
would say: «This is rather chaotic here, this old wood, ropes and stuff. If they
don’t watch out, this could all burn down!» Literally and to my astonishment, it
actually happened just a few months later, in 1994. Luckily for all Opera fans,
like with Venice’s La Fenice, the theatre was rebuilt at the very same location
and opened its doors once more in 1999.

Photo by Duncan Kidd on Unsplash

A major defining contributor to the man who was Dr Agustí Casals, was his faith.
My father was a devout Christian. For forty years he led the choir at the
Sunday’s Holy Mass at the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s iconic Basilica in Barcelona.
I hold a faded memory of a couple of young Japanese tourists asking my mum if
she would take some pictures of them with me in front of the old towers. We were
very little kids as Pope John Paul II visited the Art Nouveau façade in 1982. We
watched in awe from the terrace with a magnificent view of the Temple, that
other times has been for the use of international news channels. The Polish Pope
was devoted to bringing democracy to Eastern Europe. Spanish democracy, fresh
and in its infancy, managed to prevail after a frustrated military coup, barely
one year before. UNESCO declared the Sagrada Familia as World Heritage Site in
1984, for its “outstanding universal value”. Another Pope, the beloved Benedict
XVI, performed the opening ceremony for the magnificent nave of the cathedral in
2010. True to form, there he was, Agustí, singing with the choir.

During the last decade, after having retired from public service, he felt
motivated by yet another cause. The pipedream of an independent Catalonia had
inspired many people of his generation as if they were young again. The
spectacular rallies on Catalonia’s National Day were compelling and
breathtaking. Typically, my father would volunteer to escort people with
disabilities who wished to attend. For example, during 2013’s Via Catalana, as
1,6 million citizens formed a 400 km long human chain across Catalonia to
emulate the Baltic Way and ask for an independence referendum, similar to that
which would be held in Scotland in 2014. Back in 1989, several million people
had joined hands forming a 600 km long human chain through the Baltic countries,
prior to the collapse of the USSR. But the situation in Catalonia was very
different, and the Catalan leadership made many mistakes that ended up with the
2017 fiasco. The whole thing saddened my father, and affected him to such an
extent that he progressively turned his back on politics and unskilled
politicians, in order to dedicate more time to social issues. Agustí always
believed in an inclusive meritocracy as the utopia of democracy. No matter where
you came from to become a Catalan, the important thing was that you lived and
worked in Catalonia and you desired to be a good fellow Catalan. All these
years, he had been volunteering to teach maths to socially disadvantaged
children in Barcelona’s banlieues. He did so until the end.

On March 8th, 2020, my father attended his last service at the Church. That day,
he had lunch with friends at the Palau de la Música, as a former singer
colleague of the ensemble was celebrating his jubilee. Both the Spanish and the
Catalan Government had ignored, de facto, the warnings of the European
Commission and the World Health Organisation. It was Women’s Day, and hundreds
of thousands rallied through Spain’s main cities, supremely unaware of the
gravity of the threat. The Catalan Health Minister, Alba Vergés, attended the
demonstrations. On March 10th, she would continue to maintain that Catalonia was
not “at risk” concerning covid-19. The main concern during her radio interview
at the Catalan National Broadcast seemed to be if FC Barcelona would be able to
play the next match. The Regional Minister didn’t have a clear position on that
either.

A few days later, my father developed what he thought was a common cold. Yet he
felt listless, lacking in energy. Two doctors visited him during the following
week. He was x-rayed, but never tested. At the grand old age of 78, he had
literally never visited a hospital during the last 40 years. He was as fit as a
fiddle, both mentally and physically, no previous illnesses. Okay, so he was
only a male over 70, yet both his parents and their brothers and sisters had
made it up to their 90s. The night before he was admitted to the hospital, where
he would be finally diagnosed with covid-19 and die three days later, he still
managed to set up a Netflix account. It had taken me some time to convince my
parents that during the confinement, it might be a good idea to enjoy some
entertainment. From Vienna, I had helped my mother with the remote setup of the
smart tv. They did never tell me that my father was in such a severe condition
until he was dying in the intensive care unit. I still think they could not take
in the frightening reality of what was really happening. The overall, main
stream, insane perception in Catalonia was still that they were not really “at
risk”.

We haven’t been able to say goodbye yet. We can’t bury my father in his
hometown, the beautiful medieval city of Vic, nor celebrate any kind of funeral.
Because of the pandemic, he had to be incinerated, going against his very
wishes. The weekend after his death, good friends managed to dedicate a Holy
Mass to him in Seville, another one in Jerusalem. I know he would have liked it.

> « All of the thousands of casualties, like Agustí, had names and surnames, and
> every last one of them has a story to tell »

My father’s story is just one among the more than 9.000 deadly casualties of
coronavirus in Catalonia, more than 22.000 in Spain. All of them, like Dr Agustí
Casals, had names and surnames, and every last one has a story to tell. The
horrifying numbers are expected to rise within the coming days and weeks. Yet we
should not forget that, along the huge lists of casualties, we are talking about
individuals; loved ones, family members, friends, colleagues, neighbours, even
strangers; all of them fellow citizens with the Constitutional rights and duties
of having lived in a Western liberal democracy within the European Union.

The first and last movie that Agustí would ever watch on Netflix was The Two
Popes. My mother says that he really enjoyed it.

Agustí has left us, yet his family members and friends will not forget him.
Telling his story is one way in which I can pay respect to his memory. May he
receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord. May his soul,
through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Visit the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center for more information about the official figures of covid-19 deadly casualties in Spain. Diari ARA keeps an own counter for Spain and Catalonia.

© Copyright Adam Casals, 2020. All rights reserved. Our contents disclaimer
policy applies. We are adhered to the Code of Ethics of the Society of
Professional Journalism. | Twitter | LinkedIn | Reddit | Scoop.it!

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Spain
Catalonia
Coronavirus
Covid-19
Democracy

WRITTEN BY ADAM CASALS

56 Followers

CEO, Senior Global Affairs Advisor, Author | Fmr Envoy of the Catalan Gov to
Austria & Central Europe | Vienna · Geneva · Madrid · Barcelona | adamcasals.com

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