Sometimes you have to be 88 years old, with a lot of baggage behind you, having done almost everything while remaining absolutely lucid, in order to tell the great truths and say exactly where we've come from and the difficulties we have had - and still have, in many respects - in maintaining the identity of Catalonia. One might also have to expose the falsity of the occasional legend that gets passed down and resists the passage of time, such as that fake story that referred to a Catalan princess when in reality she was, in the best of cases, just a princess who lived in Catalonia. If the times of the Empordà writer Josep Pla had overlapped with those of Joan Granados, the latter could perfectly well have been one of those homenots - outstanding fellows - that Pla described so vividly in his prose. Because Granados has this profile perfectly: general secretary of Barça under president Agustí Montal, under whom the broadcast of matches in Catalan was initiated; together with Armand Carabén, one of the architects of Johan Cruyff's arrival at the football club; general director of the CCMA, the Catalan broadcasting corporation, for the 11 years from 1984 to 1995, a decisive period in which TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio were launched; a founder of the CDC party, a deputy in the Catalan Parliament and a long etcetera.
Very often, we Catalans lose our bearings when analyzing a problem. The passing of the years has deepened this deficit, which is the result of not having the tools or the political training to get past the obstacles, of the lack of a strategy to overcome the adversary and of the fact that leaders have become increasingly emaciated over time. The battle with Spain has been approached from an ignorance of how the state functions and with an arrogance that did not help in knowing either our own strengths and weaknesses or those of others. All of these truths came rushing back on Thursday as Joan Granados explained, on Helena Garcia Melero's TV3 programme, his stories of how they launched the channel, which will be 40 years old in September. No doubt they were just a taste of all that he has experienced.
There are two moments in his relationship with the Spanish crown that bring us closer to understanding its enormous distance from Catalonia than any speech we might hear. Granados explains that when he had been at the CCMA for about eight years, that is, about the time of the Barcelona Olympics of '92, he decided to invite princess Cristina, the youngest daughter of Juan Carlos I, who at that time lived in Barcelona and whom, to distinguish her from her sister, the Spanish media called "the Catalan princess", because, among other reasons, her then-husband, Iñaki Urdangarin, played handball for Barça. He sent her a letter, she accepted and the visit took place. Granados was waiting for her at the door with a bouquet of flowers, he opened it politely and said how pleased they were to receive their guest: "Estem tan satisfets que estigui aquí..." and, without letting him finish, she blurted out, in a shrill tone: ¡En español, por favor! - "In Spanish, please!" As best he could, Granados took her to a room and in private, to calm the situation, he added: "Senyora, here people speak Catalan, you have to understand" and she, raising her voice, insisted: "I told you: in Spanish, please!"
The second was with Cristina's father in the Zarzuela royal palace after Jordi Pujol had asked him, a few years earlier, to go and explain to the king what TV3 was and how it was going to work. Juan Carlos I asked his visitor what this Catalan television channel would be like and he replied: "In Catalan, your majesty." "All in Catalan?" the monarch queried. "Yes, all of it," Granados confirmed. The king began to walk around in his office, and persisted: "Will they understand it, Joan?" These are not two minor anecdotes, since, deep down, they show, more than the lack of knowledge that there is of Catalonia, the enormous desire that exists to go against it. His son, today the king, Felipe VI, and now his granddaughter, Leonor, have both learned Catalan to speak it in public. But you can speak a language perfectly and ignore or despise the country that speaks it. And, many times, for the crown, a folkloric treatment has been enough when in Catalonia. And in this way, the institution has gradually fallen into irrelevance.