Nobody is a prophet in their own land, much less a cartoonist in a dictatorship. Either you have chosen the wrong profession or you have chosen the wrong country. That was the case of Andrés Vázquez de Sola, who was a coherent comedian; of a single piece and a single line, yet masterful and resounding and of great security in the line. A jovial man, with an easy laugh and an overwhelming laugh that he used casually throughout his life, he was above all an iconoclast with an open grave of convictions and immovable loyalties, sweetened all of this by his perennial loyalties to his friends and coreligionists throughout his life. .
Although he was the son of a prestigious judge who became president of the Supreme Court, our man went into exile to France in 1959, to avoid arrest in Spain for his membership in the communist party, and there he became famous as political cartoonist The Chained Duck with the publication of a satire of Franco entitled The sad life of a sad man, which had immediate success and made a place for him among famous established comedians. It was a very critical and caricatured vision of Franco’s Spain, the power of the Church and the political and sexual repression of the people, through the story of the author’s own life in a humorous key, whose Spanish version was published in Spain in 1977 with the title of The Great National Bullfight.
His first exhibition in our country after Franco’s death, titled Caricatures of Spanish Culturewas inaugurated in Madrid in June 1976 by Professor Enrique Tierno Galván, and presented by Francisco Umbral, who said about it in the pages of this newspaper in his column The Diary of a Snob: “exiled in Paris, prisoner in Africa, exhibitor today in Madrid, who has made comics and cartoons of the Regime into books that tell the sad life of sad Spaniards.”
Vázquez de Sola was always a direct and frank man in the literal sense of the word, who neither mince words nor restrained his pen, but not all the countryside was oregano and the Spain of 1977 was not the France of ’68, and what could be said frankly in France could not be expressed clearly in Spain because democracy was in its infancy, there was still no Constitution and there were institutions and issues that were untouchable. The same thing happened to Gila when she returned to Spain: she didn’t understand anything. They told him he had to read between the lines and he saw everything white. I dare say that Vázquez de Sola, acclimatized in Paris, starting in French May, upon his return from Spain, saw everything black. It should not surprise us, because he was a founding member and president of the Granada por la República association.
When he returned from exile, although there was still no Constitution, there was already freedom of expression as far as possible, but we were treading on uncharted ground, as the directors and editors of the newspapers who were trying to find clothes knew well. They knew what he meant, but they didn’t know how far they could go. Vázquez de Sola, in addition to going against the current, “got into politics” when, in the elections of June 15, 1977, Rafael Alberti and himself respectively led the PCE candidates for Congress and the Senate for the province of Cádiz. Circumstance that, surely, closed many doors for him.
What broke the camel’s back was the issue of the referendum on Spain’s entry into NATO, which was much more than he could bear and, therefore, he published in The Marbella Tribune a series of drawings considered profane and insulting by the Civil Government of Malaga, the complaint of which led, in January 1987, to an investigating court in Estepona to issue an indictment against him for an alleged crime of contempt and for the Prosecutor’s Office to request He six years and one day in prison. It had been a year since Spain had been a full member of the European Union. The social, cultural and media uproar that caused such nonsense, and the mobilization of journalists and jurists, managed to activate a parliamentary initiative to “end the imbalances of Spanish criminal legislation in relation to that of the rest of the European countries in terms of freedom.” of expression and opinion.”
When he returned from exile to San Roque, his hometown, he dedicated himself to his passion, which was painting; but he always felt proud to have published his drawings in The Chained Duck, The World, The Diplomatic World, L´Humanité y Workers World. Those of us who knew his mastery of caricature and enjoyed his joviality and joy of life thought he was immortal, but Andrés Vázquez de Sola died on September 25 at the age of 97 in his home in Monachil, located in the foothills of the Sierra. Snowfall.
José María Pérez González, Peridis, He is a comedian, architect and writer.