Portrait of the day: Dolores Ibárruri

Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, known as la Pasionaria (the Passionflower), was a Spanish Republican fighter of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and she was a communist politician known for her famous slogan No Pasarán!.
She joined the Spanish Communist Party when it was founded in 1920. She became a writer for the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) publication Mundo Obrero in the 1930s. With the advent of the Second Republic in 1931, she moved to Madrid. She was arrested for the first time in September 1931. She was jailed with common offenders and she persuaded them to begin a hunger strike to obtain freedom for political detainees. When she was arrested in March 1932 for the second time, she led other inmates in singing "The Internationale" in the visiting room. She encouraged them to turn down poorly paid menial labor in the prison yard.
She founded Mujeres Antifascistas, a women's organization opposed to Fascism and war in 1933. On April 18, Soviet astronomer Grigory Neujmin discovered asteroid 1933 HA and named it "Dolores" after her. In 1934 she attended the First Worldwide Meeting of Women against War and Fascism in Paris. In 1936, she was jailed for the fourth time after enduring gross abuse from the arresting officers in Madrid. Upon her release, she hurried to Asturias to campaign for the PCE in the general elections of February 16 and she was elected as a Member of Parliament. She went into exile from Spain towards the end of the Civil War in 1939, she became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain, a position she held from 1942 to 1960. Upon her return to Spain in 1977 she was re-elected as a deputy to the Cortes for the same region, she had represented from 1936 to 1939 under the Spanish Second Republic.
She was hospitalized, gravely ill with pneumonia on September 13, 1989. She recovered and left the hospital on October 15, but she experienced a relapse on November 7 and died on November 12 at age 93.