Heriberto Quiñones, the uncomfortable Soviet partner of Aurora Picornell

PalmaDuring the Second Republic, the Communist International, known as the Comintern in Russian, sent a mysterious figure to Spain who played a prominent role in the Balearic Islands. His trajectory can be traced in the book by historian David Ginard titled Heriberto Quiñones y el movimiento comunista en España(1931-1942), published in 2000 by Documenta Balear. “Of him –he asserts–, Dolores Ibárruri, the leader of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), said that ‘everything, even the name, was false’”.

Stalin’s agent could have been born in Bessarabia (Moldova) at the beginning of the 20th century. In the twenties, he worked in Latin America under the orders of the general secretary of the Argentine Communist Party. Around 1931, he was expelled from France and crossed the Pyrenean border with a Polish passport that corresponded to the identity of Yefin Granowdisky. In Spain, to go unnoticed, he would use others. In 1931, he appeared in Mallorca as Heriberto Quiñones González. The name was provided to him by an official from the Gijón City Council. He took it from a deceased person with a birth date in January 1907 in the same Asturian city.

“Quiñones –points out Ginard– was a character with an eccentric appearance. He arrived in Mallorca speaking a strange Spanish with a marked Argentine accent. Later he learned the Catalan of the island. He found a quite residual PCE”. The Soviet emissary settled in the Molinar neighborhood of Palma, at the house of the communist leader Pere Canals. It was the neighborhood where Aurora Picornell's family lived. Since 1930, at 18 years old, the young woman from Palma, who had worked as a seamstress since she was 14, was a member of the Secular League of Mallorca, founded by the communist freethinker Ateu Martí. The proclamation of the Second Republic on April 14, 1931, led her to join the PCE and to take up the feminist struggle of the working woman.

Accused of being sectarian

In 1932 Picornell began courting Quiñones. “Gabriel, her father –the historian states–, was also a communist militant and clashed with him due to his more authoritarian nature”. In June of that same year, the enigmatic foreigner was arrested and expelled from Spain –due to his status as a stateless person without a name, he would be arrested on more occasions. Shortly after, he crossed the border again and moved to Valencia in the company of Picornell –no document confirms that they married. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1933 the couple settled back in El Molinar, where their first and only daughter was born in August. They named her Octubrina Roja in memory of a heroine of the Communist Youth of the USSR, protagonist of a 1924 film.

In September 1933, one month after becoming a father, Quiñones entered the Palma prison again. He was released after two months. From 1934 onwards, he would become the strongman of the PCE in the Balearic Islands. He published numerous articles in Nuestra Palabra, the party's newspaper. “In those years –states the historian– his comrades accused him of being sectarian due to his belligerence against the left-wing forces of the Balearic Islands”. Following the October Events of 1934 (the rebellion against Lerroux's center-right government), Stalin's man was transferred to Oviedo (Asturias), where he was imprisoned until November 1935. Upon returning to Mallorca, he resumed his political activity, but tuberculosis contracted behind bars prevented him from doing so. In May 1936, he was already admitted to the Humera sanatorium in Madrid. It was here that the military insurrection of July 18 caught him by surprise.

Mallorca was immediately controlled by coup plotters. Aurora Picornell, 24 years old, was one of the first people arrested. In November, she would be transferred to the Can Sales women's prison in Palma. The gravity of the situation caused Quiñones to leave the Madrid sanatorium and travel to Barcelona, where, in August, he participated in organizing Captain Bayo's landing in Portocristo to liberate the island from the fascist yoke –he did not end up enlisting. Once that operation failed, in September he settled in Menorca, the only one of the Balearic Islands that remained loyal to the Republic. He placed himself at the head of a PCE as weak as the one in Mallorca.

Armed and with an escort in Menorca

In Menorca, on the 18th and 19th of November 1936, the largest massacre perpetrated by the Republican militiamen under the orders of commander Pere Marquès took place. 75 prisoners locked in the steamship Atlante, among them 37 priests, were executed at Cala Figuera and at the Castle cemetery. The executioners acted moved by a desire for revenge after an attack by the Italian aviation coming from Mallorca left seven dead at the naval base of Maó. That state of terror ended with the dismissal in September of Marquès, who was replaced by José Brandaris, who had arrived from Cartagena.

In his chronicles, the journalist and socialist leader Deseado Mercadal (1911-2000) denounced that Quiñones always went armed and with an escort and aspired to “destroy and nullify all the enemies of the Republic who were conspiring against it in the rearguard”. On November 4, 1936, the Soviet agent insisted that it was necessary to “completely cleanse all of Menorca of factionalists who still enjoy all their liberties, free and without punishment”. “Also –says Ginard– there are relatives of victims who mention him. His spirit of vengeance responded to the repression that the fascists had exercised in Mallorca and which had led his partner to prison”.

Meanwhile, from Menorca, the Moldovan internationalist made efforts to get Aurora Picornell out of prison. It was in vain. On January 5, 1937, the night of the Three Kings, the ‘Passionaria of Mallorca’ was executed by firing squad at the Manacor cemetery together with the ‘Red Women of El Molinar’ (Catalina Flaquer Pascual and her daughters Antònia and Maria) and a young woman from Palencia named Belarmina González Rodríguez. The fascists would also murder the communist leader's father, Gabriel, and her brothers Gabriel and Ignasi. In June, six months later, Quiñones was forced to move to Valencia due to the tensions he maintained with the UGT and the CNT.

At the end of the war, Quiñones refused to leave Spain. He was then confined in the Albatera concentration camp (Alicante). He escaped from it after a few days. In the summer of 1939 he was arrested and tortured again, on this occasion by Nazi Gestapo officers –in August, a week before the start of the Second World War, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union would sign a non-aggression pact. Unconscious due to the electric shocks they applied to him, they took him to the Valencia prison. By October 1940 he was fully recovered to escape from it after having bribed a priest.

‘Heroic fighter for freedom’

In the spring of 1941, the indefatigable Soviet agent arrived in Madrid to take the reins of the Central Reorganizing Commission of the PCE. On December 30, he was captured again with his organization secretary Ángel Cardín. “He was –says Ginard– brutally tortured. When he entered the Madrid prison of Porlier, he had a broken spine. Then the party organization informed him that he and Sendín had been expelled as ‘traitors’ for having revealed the names of comrades. In his cell, he received some letters from his eight-year-old daughter Octubrina, who, in Mallorca, was under the guardianship of one of Aurora’s sisters”.

On September 26, 1942, the court-martial against 22 suspects of being leftists arrived. Quiñones, Sendín and a third man, Ángel Fermín, were sentenced to death; another was sentenced to 30 years in prison and the rest of the 18 defendants, to sentences between 12 and 6 years in prison. At dawn on October 2, the execution order was carried out in front of the walls of the East Cemetery of Madrid, popularly known as Almudena. “Quiñones –the historian points out– had to be tied to a chair, as he could not stand upright. They say that at the last moment he shouted ‘Long live the Communist International’”. The three would be buried in a mass grave in the same cemetery.

In 2020, the Madrid journalist Carmen Ordónez accessed the judicial case against the former communist leader in the Balearic Islands, supposedly 35 years old, according to the documents. It impressed her so much that she decided to novelize his life in the book Heriberto Quiñones y veintiuno más (La literna, 2023). “His difficult character –she says– meant that he made many enemies. He is a character out of a movie. He was more of an intellectual than a guerrilla. He fit the classic profile of the people of the Comintern of the early period. He had, therefore, nothing to do with the officers of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, whom Stalin sent to Spain in 1937 to torture and murder the Tarragona native Andreu Nin, the leader of the POUM [he was a close collaborator of Leon Trotsky, the most hated man by the ‘red tsar’]”.

After his death, Quiñones was criticized by his comrades, including Santiago Carrillo, who in 1960 became the general secretary of the PCE, replacing Dolores Ibárruri. Among other things, they unfairly accused him of being an informant and a British agent. It was not until April 1986 that the party officially rehabilitated the uncomfortable partner of Aurora Picornell as one of the 'heroic fighters for freedom'.