Marcos Ana

Fernando Macarro Castillo (20 January 1920 in Alconada – 24 November 2016 in Madrid), better known by his pseudonym Marcos Ana, was a Spanish poet and is considered by numerous sources Spain's longest serving political prisoner. Under the dictatorship of Francoist Spain, he was convicted of the murder of three people (a priest, a postman and a farmer) at the age of 19 in 1939, crimes he always denied having committed. He was released in 1961 after 23 years of imprisonment. He spent 23 years in prison, longer than any other republican combatant, being released in 1961 and exiled in Paris. He told his story in the 2007 memoir Tell Me What a Tree Is Like He was born in the hamlet of San Vicente, which belongs to the municipality of Alconada in Salamanca, although he spent his childhood in Ventosa del Río Almar, also in the same province, within a very poor family of day laborers, deeply Catholic. The youngest of four siblings, Fernando Macarro spent his childhood in Ventosa del Río Almar with his parents. His older siblings emigrated to Alcalá de Henares, and in the early 1930s, his older sister Margarita secured a job for his father in the town of Alcalá, prompting Fernando and his parents to move there. His education was limited, and at the age of twelve or thirteen, he left school and began working as a shop assistant to contribute to the family income. At barely sixteen, he joined the Socialist Youth, which shortly before the Civil War became the Unified Socialist Youth (JSU), under the communist umbrella. Alongside this, he gradually abandoned religion. He joined the front at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, in the "Liberty" militia battalion of the JSU, fighting in the Peguerinos area of the...