Teodulfo Lagunero dies, the communist patron who introduced Carrillo incognito in Spain

Teodulfo Lagunero has died at the age of 95 in Malaga. With his death Spain loses an important figure of the Spanish Transition. Staunch defender of the Republic, lawyer, businessman, patron, millionaire and historical communist, one of the acts for which he is most remembered is for having been the driver who brought Santiago Carrillo to Spain, disguised with a wig from the workshop by Pablo Picasso.

Born in Valladolid in 1927, Lagunero was a patron of the Foro Comunicación y Escuela, first in Ibias and then in Castropol. He narrated his autobiography in the play ‘Memorias. The extraordinary life of an extraordinary man’, whose prologue signed the acclaimed Almudena Grandes. For the writer, Lagunero’s was a work full of “surprises and emotions, from its first pages to the last.”

Lagunero told this newspaper that he grew up “in a normal middle-class family”, but the war would soon come and, with it, his “first lesson in life”. The businessman and patron explained how that event was that marked his life. «He was eight or nine years old and in the first days of the war my brother and I saw how the Republicans shot a Civil Guard captain in Guadarrama. It was the first days of the war and there in Guadarrama, the patients went to cure their tuberculosis by breathing fresh air. They set up some rooms for the hospital and another for the children, and we stayed there for fifteen or twenty days. We went out to run around and we witnessed, in addition to the execution, the scenes of the militiamen arriving in trucks, with rifles, singing the Internationale. That was my first lesson in life », he pointed out. “After that, my father locked us in the basement so that we wouldn’t go out, because he was very angry when he found out that we had seen that,” he recalled.

A traumatic experience that marked Lagunero, although it would not be the only one since, as he recalls, until the age of 39 he had to live in a political and social regime “first of terror and then repressive in all aspects.” His father was a professor at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and he was imprisoned on several occasions, stripped of his academic merits, and his assets were seized for “political responsibilities.” His brother was also arrested and tried by a court martial, as was Teodulfo Lagunero himself.

He went hungry and saw his mother and family suffer, and had to do all kinds of jobs, starting as a boatman on the Pisuerga, until he became a pro businessman in the construction sector.

He lived in Republican Madrid, “with its chaos, with its heroism, with its crimes.” He learned “new words for a child like ‘fifth column’ or ‘los pacos’, which were the fascists who climbed onto the roofs and fired shots.” In Valencia he witnessed the “terrible and enormous” bombardments that besieged the city. He even saw how one of those raids destroyed half of his house, after which they had to settle “with some beds and some blankets in the institute where my father taught.”

He also experienced «the Francoist repression and terror, the murders, and the walks. Because Franco did dirty tricks, one of which was to divide Spain in two, winners and losers, “says Lagunero. «I belonged to the second group and the families of the vanquished were trampled for forty years with the boots».

Despite everything, Lagunero’s desire to improve led him to study Law and Philosophy and Letters, set up an academy in Valladolid and entered the business world. In the early 1960s he founded a company to market a residential-tourist project called El Encinar del Alberche, for which he invented a successful marketing system. His motto: ‘Five minutes to buy and a hundred months to pay’. There he began his success in business, with the already popular invention of ‘the parcel’.

On May 1, 1968, during a stay in Paris, the author had the opportunity to participate in a demonstration in the Place de la Bastille, an event that would mark his entire life. There he met the poet Marcos Ana, who was a member of the central committee of the PCE and who was part of an organization dedicated to helping all those who came to France fleeing Francoism, which Lagunero also wanted to join.