Curriculum

He started to work as a carpenter. When he was fifteen, he entered the organisation 'Xuventudes Libertarias', becoming secretary of the organisation when he was sixteen and president of the carpenter syndicate when he was eighteen. At the beginning of the Civil War, he was living in A Coruña. He tried to run away but he was taken to prison and sentenced to death, although it was commuted to life imprisionment. He was in prison for seven years. In 1943, he was on probation and ran away to live in secrecy. He was elected political secretary of the Libertarian Movement and secretary of the National Council of Political Forces, consisting of all the political parties oposed to the Government. He continued to fight against Franco's dictatorship and he was arrested again in Madrid on 9th April 1946. He was sentenced to death again, being commuted to a thirty-year penalty. In 1948, he managed to escape from prison and ran away to Bilbao and later to France. In 1950, he arrived in Paris and then moved to Australia, USA and Uruguay, where he became a librarian when he was fifty. He taught French and English in Montevideo and then moved to Texas and Houston to work as a librarian and direct the purchase section. In 1964, after publishing his minor thesis Bibliography of the Spanish War 1936-39, he began to work at the National Library in Washington as a consultant of the Library of the Congress, one of the best libraries in the world. In 1975, when he was sixty, he defended his doctoral thesis Guerre civile espagnole 1936-39. Interventions estrangeres. He gave lectures in many American, Spanish, French and South American Universities.