Speech made in 1940 to his companions in the Ocaña prison
«You know, companions in penalties, fatigue and yearnings, that the word tribute smells like a public square and bourgeois vanity. I do not believe that anyone among us has tried to honor anyone of us today, when gathering, in the tasty satisfaction of eating as a family. This is something else. And I want this food to give no reason to pronounce words of strange significance of our revolutionary. This meal is just prize for the many deserves made in his spectrum life by one of us, during the twenty -five days he has entailed with himself, with the patience of an effective dead, there, in the overturies of this prison. The hunger that I have brought from that ghostly transfer to this other real life of prisoner: the hunger that I have brought, and that does not leave my nature, well deserves the reception of the size of a cow: yes; As a poet, I have warned the absence of the laurel ... in the condiments.
For the rest, the laurel detail does not matter, since for my temples I will always prefer some noble grayans. We are, therefore, that today it has corresponded to me to be a pretext to affirm, on a solid food base, our need for fraternal collaboration in all aspects and from all the plans and aride of our life. Today that the people pass, who can pass, through the most delicate and difficult trance of its existence, although also the most sobering and probative of their temper, I want to provide with you. We will provide for the happiness of this town: for what is closest to collective happiness.
You know. We need to provide. And we have neither wine nor glass. But, now, at the same time, we can lift our fists, clandestinely, and sorry. There is no glass that can contain without breaking the single drink that fits in a fist: hate. The overflowing hatred that we feel before these walls representatives of such injustice: the hatred that spills from our fists on these walls: that will spill. The hatred that illuminates with its energetic vital force the forehead and look and horizons of the worker. But, severely, we will take care of us that this hatred is not that of instinct and the unferentized passion. That original hatred only leads to the jungle. And our hatred is not the tiger that devastates: it is the hammer that builds. Let's go, then, to provide ». Miguel Hernández
(Death: March 28, 1942, Alicante, Spain)