On July 21, 1936, three days after the coup d'état, the Catalan Marina Ginestà Coloma, a 17-year-old communist girl, accidentally became the great icon of the anti-fascist militia woman. She was working as a translator at the Hotel Colón in Barcelona, which had been converted into the headquarters of the PSUC, the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. Her determined pose did not go unnoticed by Juan Guzmán, a Mexican photojournalist of German origin who was in the city to cover the People's Olympiad for the Efe agency, the alternative to the Olympic Games in Hitler's Berlin that, due to the military insurrection, did not take place. Guzmán asked the young woman if he could take a special photo session of her. He had her go up to the building's roof and lent her a rifle. The proposal caught her attention, as she had never touched one before. Due to the circumstances of the moment, however, she agreed to act as a model dressed in a militia uniform. In front of the camera, she exhibited a defiant attitude with the weapon hanging on her back.

He was short, but energetic. And, above all, he was loyal to the constitutional legality. The Majorcan military man Valerià Weyler did not like it at all that his colleague Miguel Primo de Rivera staged a coup d'état and became a dictator, with the approval of the monarch of the time, Alfonso XIII. He disliked it so much that, a century ago, in June 1926, at the age of 87, he led an attempt to overthrow Primo de Rivera and return to normality: the 'Santjoanada', so named because it was to take place on the 24th, Saint John's Day.