of Francesc Macià in the Constituent Assembly of the Catalan independence movement, the estelada was again seen, and the Catalan separatists made it their flag. During this period a new practice began, and continues to the present day; whenever a prominent Catalan nationalist dies, as a sign of mourning, his comrades will cover the red bars of the estelada with a black cloth, leaving the star visible to signify that they will continue pursuing the same ideals. Later, during the period from 1931 to 1936, the estelada still appears numerous times. Some of these flags only have two colours due to the shortage of money, but the traditional estelada with the blue triangle and white star was kept. After the Francoist dictatorship came to power, the Front Nacional de Catalunya (National Front of Catalonia), or FNC, which used the Catalan flag and the estelada, was formed in response to the new Spanish nationalist regime. During the sixties, in the university section of the FNC, there was a faction called the Partit Socialista d’Alliberament Nacional dels Països Catalans, (Socialist Party for the National Liberation of the Catalan Countries), or PSAN. Because this party wanted to make its own socialist and Marxist ideas clear, it decided to change the colour of the star to red; in 1969, this new version of the estelada started to appear at PSAN meetings. In the mid-seventies, the PSAN had, in turn, its own splits. They led to the creation of a new movement, the Moviment d’Unificació Marxista (Movement of Marxist Unification), which started to use the red star inside a white triangle, while the PSAN kept the red star inside a yellow triangle. The unification of the two versions of the flag could only take place when the Movement of Marxist Unification and the Bloc d’Esquerra d’Alliberament Nacional (Left National Liberation Bloc), or BEAN, both disbanded. At that time the flag with the red star and the yellow triangle were a symbol of both socialist and communist separatists. Current use As of 2005 both kinds of Estelada flag (the classic and the red) are used at the same time. After the Fall of Communism in Europe the red star of the Estelada groga (yellow estelada) has steadily lost some of its original leftist meaning, but not totally. It is sometimes currently flown just as a simpler and less cluttered version of the Estelada in the traditional