4 ideas
Torbado's 1976 Premio Planeta novel imagines the Second Spanish Republic winning the Civil War in 1939, with Franco fleeing into exile, and follows postwar Spain under the victorious Republic. The title inverts the opening words of the Nationalists' final war communiqué of 1 April 1939 ('En el día de hoy, cautivo y desarmado el Ejército Rojo...'), assigning that proclamation of total victory to the other side.
The novel suggests that whichever faction wins a civil war faces the same pressures: consolidating power, settling scores with the defeated, and suppressing rivals inside its own coalition. Swapping the winner does not remove the postwar machinery of purges and exclusion, because that machinery comes from total victory in a fratricidal war, not from any one ideology.
Written just after Franco's death, during the transition, an imagined Republican victory works as a mirror for the real Francoist settlement. By showing the other side's triumph, it makes readers see that the actual outcome was contingent, not inevitable, and invites them to judge both regimes by the same standard.
Borrowing Franco's victory communiqué for a Republican triumph shows that the formulas of official victory, such as the defeated enemy and the war declared over, carry no content of their own. Any regime can fill them in. Language that presents itself as the voice of history is really a template the winner occupies.