At the end of July, I spent a week at a personal-development retreat in the Spanish countryside, one of those programs built around small groups, long days, and exercises designed to get you talking about things you don’t usually say out loud.
When it wrapped, Carlos, the Spanish organizer who’d spent the week holding it together, took our group to a restaurant in Rivas, a town just outside Madrid, to celebrate. The owner didn’t speak English, and it didn’t seem to matter. He waved off our attempts to see a menu and started sending out tapas we never ordered and never got a bill for, plate after plate, until the table couldn’t hold any more.
We barely talked. We were too busy eating, watching Carlos translate each new dish as it arrived, his eyes doing something I can only describe as proud, the warmth of someone introducing you to a place he loves.
Afterward we walked it off through the streets of the town, and that’s when I finally talked to Carlos in person and managed to get some insider perspective I’d been wanting for quite a while already.
We hadn’t gone far before two women crossed the road ahead of us, walking a goat on a leash casually, the way you’d walk a dog on its evening rounds. Even Carlos, who has lived in or around Rivas most of his life, stopped and stared.
Then, a little further on, he picked the thread back up. “The thing is,” he said, “we grew up believing in communism here. Properly believing in it.”
The same word, two different imagined worlds
He said it lightly, the way you’d mention a hobby, and I felt something in me go quiet and alert at the same time. I was born in Gori, in Georgia, the same town Stalin was born in, and I grew up in a country where that word doesn’t arrive clean. It comes pre-loaded with queues for bread, with relatives who disappeared and were not discussed, with a particular silence that settles over dinner tables when the subject gets too close. Hearing a young Spaniard use the word with something close to fondness was disorienting in a way I wasn’t fully prepared for on a quiet street after dinner.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened to me either. My sister’s boyfriend is Portuguese, and I remember him talking about communism once with a wistfulness I found almost impossible to place, back when I first heard it. At the time I filed it away as a strange European quirk I didn’t fully understand. Walking beside Carlos through Rivas, I finally understood what I’d actually been hearing both times.
We were using the same word for two completely different imagined worlds.
Mine came from tanks and food shortages and a grandmother’s generation that learned to whisper certain names. His, and my sister’s boyfriend’s, came from something smaller and much less bloody: an idea about people knowing each other, about a town organizing itself around its own needs instead of around what could be sold to it. Neither of us was arguing for the Soviet Union, or for anything with a flag.
What Carlos was actually describing, once I stopped hearing the word and started listening to the sentences after it, had almost nothing to do with a state at all.
What he actually meant
He meant people knowing their neighbors’ names. He meant a culture where showing up to a communal meal or a local meeting wasn’t an imposition on your time but just what an ordinary evening involved. He meant sharing tools, sharing food, helping someone move a couch without being asked twice, and making decisions about the place you lived as something you did together rather than something a company decided for you and mailed you a notice about afterward.
I thought, half listening, about the restaurant owner an hour earlier, feeding a table of exhausted foreigners for free, expecting nothing back. Carlos’s whole argument, it turned out, I’d already watched happen before he said a single word of it.
Rivas itself, it turns out, was built partly on that instinct. It started small, a few hundred people in the 1980s, self-built housing, land bought and developed cooperatively rather than handed over wholesale to a developer. Carlos told me it’s been governed by the same left-wing coalition since before he was born, which he mentioned with a shrug, like a fact about the weather. What struck me wasn’t the politics of it. It was that an entire town’s daily culture, in his telling, had been shaped for decades around the assumption that residents would participate in the place rather than simply live inside it.
What he’s watching change
Carlos wasn’t romantic about all of it, though. He talked about larger companies moving in, chain shops replacing small, informal businesses that used to double as community meeting points. He talked about newcomers arriving, drawn by cheaper housing than central Madrid, without necessarily inheriting the habits that built the town’s character.
He wasn’t blaming any single group. He was describing something closer to erosion: a place’s social architecture wearing down as it grows, not through any single decision, but through thousands of small ones nobody signed up to make.
What made him compelling, rather than just nostalgic, was that he didn’t pretend any of this was reversible or that some purer version of the town could be restored on demand. He knew the idealized version he’d grown up believing in was never going to exist at full scale, for anyone, anywhere, and said so almost apologetically. And yet when he talked about younger people around him who still organize things collectively, still show up to the unglamorous meetings, still treat their neighborhood as something they’re responsible for, he didn’t sound cynical about it at all. He sounded, oddly, hopeful.
An ideal doesn’t have to be fully achievable to still change how people treat each other while they’re failing to reach it.
Community requires people to keep showing up
This conversation made me think about social capital and everything I’ve learned about an American political scientist, Robert Putnam and his concept of “Bowling Alone” during my master’s. Putnam spent decades documenting the exact opposite pattern in the United States, where he found membership and activity in local clubs and civic and religious organizations falling at an accelerating pace. He called the resource being lost social capital: “connections among individuals, social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.”
What struck me, thinking about that after the walk with Carlos, was how unglamorous the actual mechanism is. Social capital doesn’t require ideology. It requires repetition. People coming back to the same square, the same meeting, the same neighbor’s door, often enough that trust has time to accumulate.
That reframed the whole evening, which I hadn’t expected from a thank-you dinner. The interesting question was never whether communism, in any of its historical forms, was good or bad. I’ll leave that argument to people better positioned for it.
The interesting question is smaller, and I think more useful: what does it actually take to build a place where people feel responsible for each other?
The answer, at least in Rivas, doesn’t sound like heroism or sacrifice. It sounds almost boring. Come back tomorrow. Remember the name of the person who runs the corner shop. Show up to the meeting you could easily skip.
The thing I actually watched happen
A few days later, in a small square, I watched a group of neighbors set up folding tables and start passing dishes of food down the line without anyone organizing it out loud. Nobody made an announcement. Nobody was checking a list. A woman refilled a stranger’s glass without being asked, the way you’d do for someone you’d known for years, and as far as I could tell, she hadn’t.
It wasn’t a political statement. It wasn’t proof of anything Carlos and I had argued about, because we hadn’t really argued at all. It was just people who had decided, individually and repeatedly, over years of ordinary evenings, to keep showing up for each other in a square that belonged to all of them a little and none of them entirely. If loneliness or disconnection has been sitting heavier on you than you’d like lately, this is apparently where it starts loosening: not with a movement, but with one more evening you decide to show up for.
I still don’t know what to call what Carlos believes in, and I’m not sure the word matters as much as I used to think it did. What I keep thinking about instead is a restaurant owner who fed strangers for free, a goat out for its evening walk like nothing was unusual about that at all, and a folding table where someone kept a stranger’s glass full without being asked.
