Freedom City

The novel "Ciudad Libertad" by journalist Salvador Gómez Valdés, whose professional life has been linked to RTVE for forty-three years, the last fifteen as director of the educational program of La 2 "La aventura del saber", has just been published by Renacimiento publishing house.

It deals with his time at university (1974-1979) in Madrid at the end of the Franco regime and the beginning of the Transition and the Movida. The Colegio Mayor San Juan Evangelista, the Faculty of Information Sciences of the Complutense University, several student apartments and the Institution of the Divine Master are successive scenarios in which we witness the learning and implementation of the newly released freedom of expression, conscience and assembly that brought with it the 1978 Constitution.

We have known in some detail the Spanish transition to democracy from a sociological and political point of view, but what did it feel like then, when nobody knew how it would end? The reader finds in "Ciudad Libertad" a forgotten part of Spain's recent past from the perspective of Angel, a young student with the best intentions and little experience from a village in the province of Malaga.

New acquaintances and classmates, new situations in the big city, old high school friends, the struggle to improve and the search for love, in a context of great uncertainty, result in a story full of smiles and complicity with the reader. "Freedom City" also offers a friendly vision of a reality whose knowledge can also help to develop with greater guarantees of success in our present, almost fifty years later. Throughout "Freedom City" we discover the common traits of this and that era and of the youth of then and now. Because there are aspects of human life that change very little.

For young people of any generation it has always been difficult to face life outside the protective family environment, for example. We had to struggle in Spain to make a nascent welfare state a reality. Well, now we need to shore it up in the face of the climate emergency. Finally, during the second half of the 1970s, in the midst of the Cold War, the international situation was very dangerous. And we are now experiencing the birth of a new cold war under the threat of the use of nuclear weapons.

"Ciudad Libertad" shows the challenges, illusions and contradictions of a youth called to lead the greatest social transformation in the history of our country, in the light of a present in which we again need to agree on the fundamentals.

Other reading recommendations:

- Book: “Neurocomunicación y Neuromarketing Nuevos escenarios y tendencias” by Ubaldo Cuesta, Almudena Barrientos-Báez and Victoria Cuesta Díaz.

- Book: “Diálogos Posdigitales” by Carmen Marta-Lazo and José Antonio Gabelas-Barroso.

- Book: “Giddens. Más allá de la Comunicación” by Almudena Barrientos-Báez and David Caldevilla-Domínguez.