Juan Regulo Perez

In my previous topic articles, I described briefly the rise and fall of the leaders of the Esperanto movement in the USSR. First the moderates and finally even the Stalinist hard-liners were purged during the Great Terror. However, it was not only in Communist countries that Esperantists were subjected to oppression and in the next two topic articles I want to tell the story of a man who showed great courage and determination during a long period of victimization and persecution. His name is Juan Regulo Perez and I have for a long time felt that I owed him a debt of gratitude. Telling his story to the readers of this topic is a part-payment of that debt. http://www.forst.uni-muenchen.de/OTHERS/...

Much of the information about the history and development of Esperanto which I have shared with my readers since last year has been gleaned from my own collection of Esperanto literature. I am pleased with my Esperanto library and, although I wish it were five times as large, I know that had it not been for people like Regulo, as he was known to his friends, I would not have any Esperanto books at all. To see the light of day, a book really needs three things to be in place. First, and most important, there must be a writer, someone with something to say and a burning desire to share it. Second, there must be the people to for the writer to share his ideas with. And third, there must be someone with the motivation to publish and distribute those ideas. The great contribution which Regulo made to the Esperanto movement was that he published a remarkable number of high quality books and, in doing so, enabled the literary development of most of the outstanding literary figures of the Esperanto world.

As we will see, this achievement, very praiseworthy under any circumstances, was accomplished despite very difficult personal circumstances.

Juan Regulo Perez was born in 1914 and died just six years ago on the 27th of January 1993. His parent was both illiterate and lived in a tiny village in La Palma, one of the Canary Islands. http://www.canary-guide.com/visual/html/...

When Regulo was ten years old, his parents moved to a larger town and he had the opportunity to go to school and begin the pursuit of knowledge, which would continue for his whole life. He became a teacher when he was only 19 and, as he had learned Esperanto, he taught that as well as conventional subjects. Unfortunately, his teaching career did not last for very long. General Franco's military coup of 1936 was met by fierce resistance from the Spanish trades union movement and a social revolution and civil war raged in Spain for several years.

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