The Strains in Spain
ALAN, RAY
The Strains in Spain By Ray Alan Bilbao A pale apprentice in baggy overalls guarded the door. In the gloomy bodega eight or nine men crowded around a hissing radio. "La Pasionaria,"...
...The press made no mention of the crisis, though it had space to cover Princess Sophia's wedding preparations and to report that a Mass had been said in Madrid for the soul of Benito Mussolini...
...By the fall of 1961 the economy was booming...
...30-40 thousand are striking in the Basque provinces of Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa...
...Forty or 50 arrests were made...
...Tentatively, the Socialist and Left-Catholic opposition began to organize strikes—first in the Basque country, then in Catalonia...
...Security measures began to be relaxed...
...The BBC Spanish Service probably gives most space to liberal points of view, but its reporting of the strikes has been hesitant and scrappy...
...another part was the high rate of emigration (to France, Germany, Switzerland and Australia) which, one assumes, siphoned off the most discontented as well as the most ambitious workers...
...Some employers, in Bilbao and Beasain, have since told workers' representatives that they prefer this method of negotiating, and are in no hurry to return to the cumbersome "vertical" system in which every labor dispute is apt to be dramatized and treated as an incipient insurrection...
...Neither the press nor the radio was allowed to report the strikes...
...There is indeed—though not in the sense Arriba intended: Fortyfifty thousand miners are on strike in Asturias...
...Fear, we had agreed, was part of the explanation...
...And the trade-union offices were those of the sindicato organization—to which most of the strikers were implacably opposed...
...La Pasionaria," someone said...
...When Asturian mine owners were recruiting strikebreakers at the end of April in the neighboring province of Leon, they distributed handbills outlining their requirements and the conditions offered: "Pay 61 pesetas [only $1] a day...
...One of the most interesting "clandestine" documents in circulation is signed by 24 influential intellectuals, including José Maria Gil Robles, a Right-wing Christian Democrat leader who helped dig the grave of the Republic but has since made his peace with the more moderate Republicans, and Dionisio Ridruejo, once the Falange's propaganda chief, now a Left-of-Center critic of the regime...
...The French State Radio's Spanish Service reflects General de Gaulle's desire for close relations with General Franco, and tends to flatter the Caudillo...
...provide the Government with an instrument for controlling the workers and students...
...There is a new spirit animating the ranks of labor...
...All this despite the fact that strikes are illegal in Spain and strikers may be charged before a military court with "rebellion against the state...
...A product of Falangist ideology, they are "vertical syndicates" to which both workers and employers must pay dues...
...its coverage of the strikes, however, has been good...
...Ray Alan, a regular New Leader correspondent, often reports on European and North African affairs...
...Good hostel accommodation...
...When the seriousness of the Asturian and Basque strikes of the last six weeks became apparent, the Government at first tried to intimidate the workers by moving in security forces and ordering employers to impose a lockout...
...Despite severe police reprisals, the students have distributed leaflets inscribed: "1962—Last Year of the Dictatorship...
...Even the leading Western embassies in Madrid had little information about them...
...In the Basque provmces and most other areas it has been slight, though Catalonia may be an exception: The underground Communist party is stronger in Barcelona than anywhere else in the country...
...Now, with talk in every workingclass barrio of strikes and lockouts, rumors of bloody clashes and mass arrests, Dolores Ibarruri on the radio, truckloads of riot-police down the road, and barbed-wire barricades in front of the local tradeunion headquarters, Spain seemed to have plunged back into the 1930s...
...Strike procedure came, in fact, to resemble that followed in the decadent democracies...
...Soon even agricultural workers in Cadiz province were plucking up courage to strike for higher pay, and industrial workers at Beasain demanded free trade unions...
...The Government yielded and authorized employers to grant small wage increases...
...The sindicatos are the official and only trade unions of General Francisco Franco's Spain...
...Only a few weeks previously in Madrid a French diplomat had discussed with me what he described as the "astonishing passivity" of the Spanish workers...
...Scores of pamphlets have been issued by the underground presses and duplicators of Madrid and Barcelona...
...A strong though aging voice, straining after emotive effect, obviously only a ghost of what it once had been...
...Its subject was May Day...
...The sindicatos began to discern the first storm signals two years ago when Spain was in the depths of the slump provoked by its 1959 economic stabilization program...
...The political consequences of the strike wave are already being felt...
...The sindicatos have been totally discredited and most Spaniards seem to assume that the Minister responsible for them, José Solls Ruiz, for many years one of General Franco's most faithful collaborators, will shortly be relieved of his post...
...Despite the enthusiasm voiced by the "Free Spain Radio," Communist influence has been significant only in a minority of strikes in Asturias...
...The Communist "Free Spain Radio" is widely listened to, chiefly because most Western broadcasts in Spanish are so mealymouthed...
...A few dozen arrests were made from time to time, a few workers were tortured by the police, but there were no major clashes...
...The economic consequences are bound to be serious...
...Commenting on the fact that May Day is now celebrated in Spain as a religious feast—for "Saint Joseph the Worker"—the paper wrote: "The changed character of the May Day feast is symbolic of the new mental climate in Spain...
...Most of the strikers have secured pay increase promises from their employers ranging between 70-100 per cent...
...The name sent me back to my schooldays: A dozen 11-yearolds fighting the Spanish Civil War with peashooters along a green English river bank...
...This is the great victory of the regime...
...The game soon fell through, though, because apart from a couple of Irish boys nobody wanted to fight for Franco...
...Then an announcer began reading a resolution of the Spanish Communist party urging Catholics and Communists, Liberals and Socialists, Republicans and Monarchists . . to join forces, presumably...
...The principal beneficiary has been the Union of Democratic Forces, an underground alliance of Socialists, Left-wing Christian Democrats, Liberals, and moderate Catalan and Basque Leftists and regionalists...
...Their principal purpose is to...
...When a girl was available she played La Pasionaria...
...While it saved the Franco dictatorship from economic collapse and, aided by an unprecedented tourist boom, made possible an impressive expansion of Spanish industry in 1961, it involved devaluation, price hikes and a wage freeze, which inflicted severe hardship on the workers...
...Applicants must have identity card, birth certificate, seven identity photos and a sindicato recommendation...
...The Government, conscious of the importance of the tourist trade and contemplating an approach to the European Common Market, was anxious not to give ammunition to its critics in the democratic countries...
...I never knew for sure...
...thousands more are on strike in Catalonia, León, Córdoba, Cadiz and Jaén...
...Students have demonstrated boldly in the center of Madrid and Barcelona in support of the strikers and against the "plutocratic and obscurantist" Opus Dei wing of the Administration, which now controls more posts in General Franco's Cabinet than the Falange...
...The program was drawn up on the advice of experts supplied by the United States government and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), and backed by substantial loans from the U.S., the OEEC and the International Monetary Fund...
...This gives a fair idea of the sindicatos' devotion to the workers interests...
...Someone gave me a recent issue of Arriba, the leading Falangist daily, tapping the editorial contemptuously...
...Industrial relations which used to be chaotic are now organized...
...He was switched off...
...La Pasionaria belonged to Basque and Asturian folklore, but relaying Communist party resolutions in public was tempting fate a little too far...
...The document calls for the establishment of a situation "as near as possible to liberty, justice and concord," and urges all Spaniards to address petitions to General Franco asking him for freedom of expression and "normal non-totalitarian" trade unionism...
...Sindicato officials were either by-passed or obliged to forget their "vertical" pretensions and negotiate on the workers' behalf...
...Women of Asturias, women of the Basque country, women of Catalonia: stand by your husbands, your brothers, your sons in this exalting struggle for bread, for freedom, for dignity...
...Sindicato officials reported an increase in clandestine Socialist and Left-wing Catholic Action agitation in every industrial area, and severe security precautions were imposed...
...But where, strikers stood firm, they and their employers were soon informed— generally within a week—that they were at liberty to negotiate a settlement, and assured that the Government would maintain a neutral attitude...
...The morale of the Left has naturally been boosted by its rediscovery of working-class solidarity...
...A grey-haired man wiped his eyes...
...Once a feast of hatred, May Day is now a feast of collaboration...
...There were a few differences, however...
...La Pasionaria's message had been broadcast by the "Free Spain Radio," supposedly operating in the Pyrenees, but actually domiciled in Prague...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 11
