Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel

Spanish author, journalist, essayist and poet. Vázquez Montalbán was born in Barcelona the same year as General Franco came out of the civil war victorious. He belonged to that generation of Spaniards who did not get to know what it means to live in a democracy until their middle ages. Until his death in 1975, Franco ran a hard dictatorship with censorship and with capital punishment or imprisonment for political opponents. In 1962, Vázquez Montalbán was sentenced to three years of imprisonment as a Communist. He was one of the genuine representatives of a left-wing perspective in Spain.