Nationalism is not the answer to Spain’s problems, say an older generation who fought against General Franco

In the war of words in the run-up to Catalan referendum, the language has grown increasingly intemperate, amid talk of dictatorship and “occupation” forces. The Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, has even compared Spain to Turkey.

But for some Catalans who lived through the dictatorship and were beaten and jailed for demanding basic rights, such talk seems overblown.

“For young people it’s easy to believe that independence is going to usher in this wonderful Arcadia,” says Laura Jiménez, a veteran of the Catalan labour movement. “They can march in the streets and the police don’t bother them, they wreck a Guardia Civil car and nothing happens and then they call this Francoism. For heaven’s sake!”

Jiménez, 61, comes from Cornellà, one of a string of satellite towns thrown up around Barcelona to accommodate the mass migration from the south and west of Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. The towns are known as the cinturón rojo, the red belt, because of their history of radical politics.

As the Baix Llobregat area south of Barcelona began to industrialise, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards abandoned the countryside in search of a better life up north. The factories and housing estates became a crucible of leftwing politics and to this day the cinturón rojo has never voted for nationalist candidates.

“El Baix Llobregat was the laboratory where we learned all about communism,” says Pepe Martínez, 64, who led the first general strike in the area in 1974. “For example, while we were still deciding whether to strike, one guy grabbed the microphone and shouted: ‘Workers of the Baix Llobregat, don’t fall for the siren voices of these revisionists. Now’s the time to establish a government of the workers and peasants’. There were people like that here,” he says, laughing at the memory.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Laura Jiménez, Paco Arias, Pepe Martínez and Miguel Salas. Photograph: Stephen Burgen/The Observer

“When we were young, there was a dictatorship,” says Miguel Salas, 66, who from the age of 13 worked 12-hour days in a Madrid dairy before moving to the Baix Llobregat. “There was no question who was the enemy. There weren’t any Catalan nationalists.”

Salas got involved in politics and was jailed for 12 days when the police raided a secret union meeting. “They beat me up a bit but not too much,” he says. “That was my initiation.”

Another veteran of the struggle, Paco Arias, 81, recalls a confrontation between strikers and the Guardia Civil in Cornellà. “The cop was holding a pistol to my chest when another guy hit him from behind. The pistol fell to the ground and there was a moment when no one knew what would happen next. Then another cop picked it up and we ran off,” he says.

All four dismiss the independence movement as a distraction from more pressing social issues, claiming it has proved a useful smokescreen for the Catalan government’s spending cuts.

“What’s happening now is that everyone has been told that Spain is the origin of our problems,” says Salas. “They are being fed a version of Catalan history that has nothing to do with reality and this has radicalised young people around independence.”

“There’s been a sort of mantra, that Spain is robbing us, and there’s a lot of confusion, as though the Spanish government and the Spanish people were one and the same,” Jiménez says. “With a prime minister like Mariano Rajoy it’s very easy for everyone to oppose the government.”

The Baix Llobregat has its own history and none of the four feels included when politicians talk about “the Catalan people”, they say.

“All of us here are immigrants but we’re all Catalans, too,” says Martínez, who is dismissive of the case for Catalan independence. “It’s about class. I don’t have a problem with the person standing next to me, it’s the one above me who’s the problem.”