The ¡Cu-Cut! incident, also known as La Cuartelada, was an assault conducted by Spanish officers on the Catalansatirical magazine¡Cu-Cut!'s offices in Barcelona on November 25, 1905, in response to the publication of a satirical cartoon mocking the Spanish Military.
Antecedents
Spanish Military personnel had been a common target of ¡Cu-Cut!'s editors, due to the Spanish Army having become an outdated and defective institution. Moreover, a sentiment prevailed in Barcelona that viewed the Spanish Army as the arm of a centralist and repressive government. General Weyler and the role of the Spanish Army in the painful defeat in Cuba were recurrent topics of the magazine. The November 12, 1905 municipal elections in Barcelona were a success for the Lliga Regionalista, a Catalanist political party to which ¡Cu-Cut! was affiliated. Six days later, the Lliga organized a celebratory dinner at the Frontón Condal building. This was not liked by rival Lerrouxist Republicans. At the conclusion of the dinner, a fight ensued between two groups of people of the opposing political parties, resulting in a few injured. On November 23, 1905, ¡Cu-Cut! published its issue No. 204, which depicted a satirical cartoon captioned with a joke that referenced the confrontation between Catalanists and Lerrouxists. It also ridiculed the recent military defeats of the Spanish Army. The cartoon, titled "At the Frontón Condal", depicted two men conversing. One man says What is being celebrated here, with so many people?, to which the other replies: The Banquet of Victory.The manasking the question then says Of victory? Oh well, they must be peasants. According to La Vanguardia, at 9:30 pm on November 25, around 300 officers of the Barcelona garrison gathered in Plaza Real and headed towards ¡Cu-Cut!s offices, destroying and setting them on fire, the offices located at the Bagunyà press and library at Avinyó street, where the children's magazine En Patufet and the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya were also edited.
Reactions to the attack
Following the assault, the Government suspended the magazine's publication. The next issue, No. 205, was not published until April 28, 1906. During this time, ¡Cu-Cut!'s editor, Josep Baguñà, attempted to continue the publication of the magazine under a different name. Baguñà used Garba, an art and literature magazine edited by Joan Maragall, Víctor Català and Josep Pijoan among others to further ¡Cu-Cut!s material. Garba's issue No. 11 had a different format, and included some sections with content nearly identical to¡Cu-Cut!. This did not go unnoticed by Barcelona's governor, who immediately suspended the magazine. Although the assault led to the creation of Solidaritat Catalana, a political coalition in Catalonia, it ignited a feeling of solidarity with the attackers in the rest of Spain. However, President Montero Ríos's government decided to punish the attackers in the face of the crisis. King Alfonso XIII's opposition to this measure led to Ríos's resignation. He was succeeded by Segismundo Moret, who suspended the Constitutional guarantees in Barcelona and, along with minister Álvaro de Figueroa y Torres, implemented the Law of Jurisdictions, which favored the military.
The relations between the Spanish Military and Catalanism were profoundly negative. In May 1905, the pro-Catalan independence journal La Tralla published a special issue commemorating Cuba's independence, for which the journal's director, Josep Maria Folch i Torres, along with three editors, were prosecuted. Authors have claimed that the ¡Cu-Cut! incident marked the return of militarism in Spanish politics after a period of civilian rule. The assault on ¡Cu-Cut! certified the return of the military as a lobby group in the political sphere, in this case acting against what it considered to be a separatist threat that was being excessively tolerated by the Government, according to many officers at the time.
