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It is said that people born under the zodiac sign of Aquarius are of a sweet and kind disposition, intellectual, rebellious, sincere and great friends of their friends. Jose Manuel Castañón was a truly representative of the characteristics of his zodiac sign. These characteristics added to the classical heroes virtues- braveness, loyalty and honesty -, which he also had, furnished his intellect with all necessary qualities that made him an extraordinary man.
Jose Manuel Castanon devoted himself exclusively to his vocation of writer. In Olympic gesture, he resigned to all the advantages and benefices obtained by his rank of Victorious Officer and Member of the Corps of the Spanish Civil War Disable Veterans. The triumpf of the General Francisco Franco national forces in the bloody Spanish Civil War of 1936 brought the implantation of an iron facist dictatorship in his country to which Jose Manuel Castanon was fiercely opposed. His sensitivity and his congenital love towards his fellowmen prevented him to remain impassible to the social injustice and the atrocities that were committed in pro-Franco Spain, and he assumed a contentious attitude for which he was private of his freedom by several months accused of beign a subverter. In 1958 he leaves Spain into voluntary exile. In Pola de Lena, the beautiful Asturian town, where he was born February 10, 1920, he had witnessed atrocious acts committed by leftist extremists during the Asturian Mining Revolution of 1934. At scarce kilometres from his birthplace, in Turon, 11 monks of the order of La Salle were shot dead by the insurgents. The uncontrolled insurgents killed priests, monks, and Theological Seminary students, - one of these theological students was native of Pola de Lena...-, and they destroyed monuments (the Cathedral of Oviedo, the University, the Archiepiscopal Palace). All that was sealed in the mind of Jose Manuel, 14 years of age at that time. His father, the lawyer Guillermo Castanon Diaz-Faes, man of great culture, of liberal political convictions and supporter of the social, educative and religious reforms of the Spanish Republic, felt that a civil war was inevitable. The women of the family: his mother, Bertha de la Pena Acebal, two aunts of his father, who lived with their nephew, and his sisters the twins Germana and Guillermina two years older than him, were all women of religious beliefs. His ants were regarded as extremely religious because of their daily attendance to Mass. The stories of bloody acts committed by the republicans - "the reds" -, and the moans that he heard in his home and in the home of his friends, affected him and, in his naivete he thought that " the blues" (the Franco forces) would bring peace in Spain for which their pious aunts daily prayed. |