The last thinker of the exile — José Ricardo Morales

On February 17th, 2016, playwright and essayist José Ricardo Morales died in Santiago de Chile. He was perhaps the last of the intellectuals to have lived through the Republican exile and had celebrated his 100th birthday on November 3rd, 2016. He was the perfect example of a species soon to be extinct: intellectual humanists.
Morales had started his studies at the University of Valencia. The theatre group El Búho, directed for a time by Max Aub, premiered his first play in 1938: Burilla de Don Berrendo, Doña Caracolines y su amante.
During the civil war, Morales was head of the Department of Culture of the FUE (Federacion Universitaria Escolar) in Valencia, as well as a member of the UFEH (Unión Federal de Estudiantes Hispanos) and editor in chief of the Frente Universitario magazine – “heart of the FUE in the rearguard”. In October 1936, he voluntarily joined the antifascist milicias and became commissary of the People’s Army. On November 3rd, 1938, he was asked to give a farwell speech to the students of the International Brigades in the auditorium of the University of Valencia.
Here’s the faultless biography of an antifascist student who, on July 18th 1936, was in Barcelona to take part in the People’s Olympiads as a swimmer and who, in 1939, crossed the border with France in La Jonquera and was admitted into the camp of Saint Cyprien.
Morales was a passenger aboard the Winnipeg, the ship chartered by Pablo Neruda, and he arrived in Valparaiso, Chile on September 4th, 1939. He was able to work as an art history professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Chile. He never ceased to feel indebted to Chile and did his best to contribute to it cultural development by taking part in some important projects: he helped create the Experimental Theatre of Chile alongside Pedro de la Barra, as well as the National Theatre of Chile; he directed within the Cruz Del Sur publishing house, “in which he published in 1943 a valuable anthology of poets in exile”; he carried on his academic work; he became a member of the Chilean Academy of Languages (thus becomig the first exiled Spanish Republican to be accepted into an American academy); he wrote 42 plays and numerous essays.
Morales embodies the tragedy of being uprooted, which is deeply characteristic of our republican exile, and he’s victim of one injustice that often goes along with it: silence and oblivion, both in Chile and in Spain. However, the publication in two volumes of his complete works by the Institución Alfon el Magnanim de Valencia tries to correct this wrong and allows whoever might be interested to read the works of a brilliant humanist, whose musings warn us against the dangers of technolatry, especially in our current society where the wildest capitalist neoliberalism reigns and where financial capitals and markets are the new gods.

Manuel Aznar Soler, 24.02.2016 | http://www.levante-emv.com/cultura/2016/02/24/ultimo-intelectual-exilio/1383268.html