1. The Long Night of Francoism
Nobody knows exactly how many people were killed in the bloody three-year Spanish Civil War. Estimates range from 200,000 to 1,000,000. The true figure may be somewhere between these estimates. But the slaughter did not end there. The savage repression that began in the nationalist zones during the Civil War continued unabated after the war itself. The fascists took a terrible revenge on the workers. Hundreds of thousands of republicans, communists and socialists were arrested and interned in concentration camps and countless numbers were murdered or disappeared in Franco’s prisons.
The bodies of these innumerable victims would be buried in unmarked graves all over Spain. In the villages of Castile and other areas fascist gangs were mobilised to wipe out the ‘Reds’. That is to say, any poor peasant, schoolteacher or any other person that had somehow caused annoyance to the local landowner or displayed any hint of rebelliousness or dissent. One word from the priest or landowner and the fate of the victim was settled.
Fascist murder squads from one village would be sent to a neighbouring village where the victims would not be known to them personally. They would be identified by the local priest or landlord and arrested on the spot. These unfortunate people were then led on what was known as the paseo (stroll) down some quiet lane and would never be seen again.
As of 1944, the military courts continued to judge and condemn many of the defendants, both for actions that occurred during the war and for subsequent events. Most of these executions took place shortly after the closure of the prisons in the capital, and once the notorious Carabanchel Prison was opened.
The murder machine continued to work overtime long after 1944. Despite the so-called amnesty of 1945, the courts continued to issue sentences that in many cases led to capital punishment, either by shooting or the garrote vil, a particularly gruesome method of execution where the victim is tied to a stake and strangled with wire from behind.
While the official executions stood at ‘only’ 35,000, some historians (such as Anthony Beevor) estimate that the figure could be closer to 200,000. The real figure will probably never be known, but there was a thorough purging of all dissidence. “It is necessary to spread terror,” one of Franco’s senior generals declared. “We have to create the impression of mastery, eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do.”
In addition to the hundreds who were executed every year by military tribunals, we must add further tens of thousands of civilians and refugees who died of starvation, disease and ill-treatment in Franco’s concentration camps and prisons. Franco himself admitted in the mid-1940s that he had 26,000 political prisoners in his jails, though the real figure was probably ten times greater.
In 1950, according to some estimates, around 200,000 political prisoners were languishing in prisons or labour camps. Communists, socialists, anarchists, republicans and trade unionists were dismissed from their jobs, imprisoned, tortured and murdered. According to Carlos Hernández, 296 prison camps were built in Spain, through which there passed between 700,000 and 1 million prisoners.1
It is hardly possible for us today to get a sense of the terrible plight of the prisoners. In 1940, the year after Franco’s victory in the Civil War, work began on the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen). That monstrous monument was to be dedicated to “those who died for God and the Fatherland”, that is to say, those who died fighting for Franco. This hideous symbol of National Catholicism and fascism was built in large measure by the slave labour of those who had fought on the other side.
Many of the poor devils who had to work in dangerous and unhealthy conditions were, in effect, condemned to death. Those who did not perish in accidents during construction would in later life suffer a slow, lingering death from silicosis, their lungs turned to stone by the murderous dust that they were forced to inhale.
That was not the only example of political prisoners being forced to work on fascist projects. When the construction of the infamous Carabanchel Prison commenced in April 1940, the work was carried out by around a thousand political prisoners subjected to forced labour. In this way, the regime made its victims forge their own chains and build monuments to their masters.
Yet these were only the most visible reminders of the nightmare that was Francoism.
The iron heel
Until his death in November 1975, Francisco Franco Bahamonde ruled Spain. The coins carried his image to remind everyone of that fact. He was Generalissimo of the armed forces, his real base of support. He held the reins of power firmly in his hands, having the power to appoint and dismiss ministers and other decision makers. His declared aim was to maintain the unity of Spain ‘One, Great and Free’ (that is, free to do whatever he wanted) and to keep what he termed the ‘anti-Spain’ at bay. The people of Spain were to be crushed under an iron heel.
Franco’s personal power was like the tip of an iceberg. In reality, he ruled on behalf of a wealthy elite consisting of no more than a hundred families. The economy was dominated by a small group of big and powerful banks. This was the real class basis of the Franco dictatorship. The Spanish financial oligarchy was in a close alliance with the army and the Roman Catholic Church. These were the real rulers of Spain.
The so-called Charter of Rights guaranteed all Spaniards the right to express their opinions freely, but they were not to “attack the fundamental principles of the state”. So, you could say anything you liked, as long as you said nothing. In any case, the government that granted these ‘rights’ could suspend them at any time, without any justification. The Charter was just a fig leaf to disguise the real role of the dictatorship, which was to keep ‘order’ in society, that is to say, to keep the working class in a state of abject submission. Deprived of their traditional mass organisations, the working class was turned into raw material for exploitation.
This essentially lawless and despotic regime was nevertheless based on a number of Fundamental Laws, the first of which was the Labour Charter, promulgated as early as 9 March 1938. In theory, it stressed the mutual obligations of the state and its citizens: all Spaniards had the duty to work, and the state was to assure them the right to work. The decree called for “adequate wages,” paid vacations and a limit to working hours.
However, what constituted an adequate wage was never specified. And since the workers had no right to organise trade unions, to hold free meetings to discuss their problems, to strike or protest, the employers had a free hand to impose anything they liked. The boss ruled supreme in the workplace, just as the priest ruled supreme in the church, the Civil Guard on the streets and Franco in the state. The so-called Labour Law reduced Spanish labour to slavery. It took away the right of the worker to withhold their labour: strikes were classified as treason.
The old political and trade union organisations of the working class were abolished. The workers’ unions – the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT, National Confederation of Labour) and the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT, General Union of Workers) – which were a powerful force were destroyed in 1939. The knot of history was broken for more than a generation. The masses had to relearn all the old lessons starting from scratch. Deprived of genuine representation, the workers of Spain were delivered to the tender mercies of the employers.
Under Franco, all Spanish workers were obliged to join the fascist union, or CNS – Central Nacional Sindicalista (National Trade Union Centre) – the Sindicato Vertical, or the ‘Vertical Union’ as it was referred to by the workers. Modelled on the state-run unions of Mussolini’s Italy, the CNS organised both employers and workers in the same structure.
The stated function of the Vertical Union was to “succeed in harmoniously balancing workers’ and employers’ interests”. Of course, the unity of worker and employer is like the unity of horse and rider. Wages were fixed by employers and officials of the CNS. The workers’ ‘representatives’ were hand-picked by the bureaucrats of the Sindicato in agreement with the bosses. They were known as jurados and enlaces and usually consisted of bosses’ men, spies and informers. Their real purpose was to oversee the policing of the shop floor.
The Constituent Law of the Cortes (1942) presented the outward trappings of a parliament. But this Cortes (parliament) had nothing in common with a democratic parliament and was no more than an advisory body. The Cortes could not initiate legislation or vote against the government. Most of its members were indirectly elected or appointed and many were already part of the administration. As if all that were not enough, Franco had powers to rule by decree without consulting the Cortes. The members of the ruling Council of Ministers were appointed by the Caudillo (General Franco), who also had the right to dismiss them. In short, it was merely a rubber stamp for laws presented by the executive.
Fear and misery under the Franco regime
For the Spanish working class, the 1950s was a desperate time. Life was already hard enough, but Franco’s policy of autarky further increased the hardship for the Spanish people. After the defeat in 1939, the landlords and capitalists took their revenge on the working class. Living standards suffered a total collapse.
Areas bombed during the Civil War were left unrepaired. Two-thirds of the population lived without plumbing or electricity. Tuberculosis rates were the highest in Europe: it was estimated that seventy-five per cent of children in Spain suffered from the disease at some time or other. In 1951 even the Falange (fascist party) recognised that in Jaén around 60,000 families spent most of the year simply aspiring to have enough food to stave off death.
Even the low wages that were paid were continually eaten away by the rapid increase in the cost of living. Food was rationed and supplies barely adequate. Many people were forced to turn to the black market for their essentials, if they could afford it. But since prices on the black market could be up to double the official price, even that avenue was blocked for most people. Starvation was common in rural areas, particularly Andalusia, where twenty-two per cent of total deaths in Spain from deficiency diseases were recorded in 1950.
Wages in the countryside were fixed at half of what they had been during the Republic. They would not reach the 1931 level again until 1956. In the years following Franco’s crushing of the Republic (1940-44) some 200,000 people died of starvation. According to a British diplomat many workers in Andalusia could not perform their jobs as a result of starvation.2
In the rural areas, unemployment was endemic. According to the regime’s own estimates, in 1950, out of 3,700,000 peasants and rural labourers only 500,000 were in regular employment. Forty per cent of the land was owned by the Church, and the remaining sixty per cent was owned by landowners, who made up two per cent of the population. 400,000 people around Madrid were living in caves and mud huts, and 150,000 lived in caves or open fields around Barcelona. Many thousands more were sleeping rough on the streets.
A friend of mine, Miguel G., recalling his childhood in Extremadura, related the following incident:
One day when I was walking along the street, I saw another kid who was well-dressed and obviously well-fed eating an orange. When he had finished, he threw the orange peel on the ground and walked on. I looked at that orange peel and was filled with a sense of shame. But hunger got the better of me. I first looked around to make sure that nobody could see me. Then I quickly bent down, picked up the orange peel and devoured it. It was not much but at least it gave me the sensation that I had eaten something.
As late as the early 1960s many of the poorest people experienced hunger to some degree. Ana Muñoz recalls her experience as a child in a small village in Castile:
Many people could only afford to eat bread and little else. In my father’s village in the province of Ávila the beggars knocked on the door not to ask for money (people didn’t have any) but a crust of dry bread and maybe some water to soften it. I saw this with my own eyes more than once. People really did not have anything else to give and the poor people felt lucky to get that.
For those at the top of the social pile, the wealthy elite who really owned and controlled Spain, there was general satisfaction at the state of affairs. At the bottom, misery, poverty, unemployment and utter hopelessness was the lot of the majority, who watched and waited in silence for the moment when conditions might change. It took a long time to happen, but change it did.
The Church and the Dictatorship
Francisco Franco Bahamonde referred to himself as Caudillo de España por la gracia de Dios, a phrase seen on the coins he minted, which means ‘Leader of Spain by the Grace of God’. He closely allied his government with the Roman Catholic Church so as to divinely legitimise his rule. In Franco’s Spain, not only political but religious freedom was extinguished. Roman Catholicism became the only tolerated religion.
During the years of the Republic and the Civil War that followed, the Church had lost a lot of its authority. People saw it as part of the regime that oppressed them. The Unholy Trinity of the landlord, the Civil Guard and the priest was hated and feared by the village poor. At the first opportunity, they turned against their oppressors – both secular and spiritual.
During the Civil War, the Church openly sided with the fascists, blessing the Franco forces as they moved into battle against the Republic. They presented Franco’s rebellion as a ‘crusade’ and had justified the war to the world as an ‘armed plebiscite’. They hailed it as a Holy War, thus providing Franco with a religious justification for all his actions, both during the war and after it. One can find many photographs of Spanish bishops raising their arms in the fascist salute, or blessing Franco’s troops as they marched into battle.
Since the Roman Catholic Church had enthusiastically supported the fascists against the ‘Reds’ they then reaped their reward. It was the institution that most benefited from Franco’s victory. He abolished the Republican measures that had undermined the Church’s spiritual and social roles, and entrusted it with more power and privilege than it had enjoyed since the eighteenth century.
The Franco regime developed close relations with the Catholic Church, which could always be relied upon to sprinkle holy water on its evil deeds, so that physical oppression was backed up by religious oppression. Cardinal Gomá, Primate of Spain, stated that the only way was to impose “divine totalitarianism” (sic!). The political dictatorship of Franco was to be accompanied by the spiritual dictatorship of the Roman Catholic Church. Franco was only too happy to oblige and the Church was one of the main pillars of his dictatorship.
In return it received very substantial and profitable privileges. Not only did the Church enjoy huge exemptions from taxation, it also had a large say in determining the policies of the regime, particularly in the field of education where it had a virtual stranglehold. These rights were outlined in June 1941 in an agreement between the Vatican and the Franco government, and formalised in a Concordat signed in August 1953. It included the following provisions:
- Recognition of Catholicism as the official religion of the country.
- Compulsory religious instruction at all educational levels in conformity with Catholic dogma.
- Financial support of the Church by the state, which would pay the salary of priests and contribute to the reconstruction of church buildings.
- Guaranteed representation in the public means of communication.
In addition, in order to ensure that the Church hierarchy remained loyal to the regime, Franco was empowered to participate in the selection of bishops. The Concordat remained in force until December 1979, one year following the introduction of the new ‘democratic’ Constitution. But as we shall see, the Church retained a great part of its powers, its wealth and its stranglehold over education and other aspects of social life.
A religious, moral and cultural dictatorship
According to the 1953 Concordat with the Vatican, the appointment of bishops would be subject to the veto of Franco. This close – one might say incestuous – relationship between the Franco regime and the Church bestowed considerable benefits on both parties. They were quite happy to lean on each other. The Church turned a blind eye to all the crimes of the regime. In return, the regime gave its full and enthusiastic support to the Church’s “divine totalitarianism”.
The Church eagerly seized its chance to reassert “Catholic hegemony via the homogenisation of Spanish culture.” Franco was purging the country of political plurality, stamping out all deviations from the official line. On the other hand, the Catholic Church was engaged on its own crusade to stamp out all cultural, and religious ‘heresy’. The revenge exacted by the regime on the defeated acquired its most cruel and inhuman when thousands of children and war orphans were torn from the arms of the families of the ‘reds’ to be deposited in dark and gloomy hospices run by priests and nuns, those black crows of reaction, or delivered to families known for their unconditional loyalty to Franco.
A particularly sinister aspect has emerged in recent years about the activity of the Church during the Franco era and the early years of ‘democracy’. I refer to the existence of a network, which was active until the beginning of the 1980s, for the purpose of stealing babies from their families. In this infamous scheme, the unfortunate mothers and families were informed that their babies had been born dead, or that they had died suddenly within a few hours of birth. In this way, an undetermined number of newborns from working-class families or single mothers (1,500 cases have already been documented) were to be sold to families without children. This was approved by Francoist doctors in collaboration with priests and nuns. A thick veil of secrecy surrounded the private trafficking of babies that continued in the 1980s until two men made their story public in 2011.
The political dictatorship exercised control over the bodies of men and women, while the Church exercised a spiritual dictatorship over their minds and souls. Here we have a very convenient double act. The Franco dictatorship provided a firm buttress for the Church’s authority, granting it a monopoly over religion in Spain. The Church saw the Franco dictatorship as a golden opportunity to reassert the power it had lost in the Civil War. And Franco used the Catholic Church to exercise complete control over the public, even extending it to the most private and intimate corners of their lives and thoughts.
Hard-line Catholics played an important role in Franco’s cabinet, including members of Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic institution. Nationalism marched hand in hand with Catholicism to combat the menace of democracy, socialism, anarchism, and above all, communism. In return for backing Franco, the Church received very substantial material benefits. It enjoyed the exclusive right to proselytise (especially through its control of education) and a generous state subsidy.
The Inquisition had long since ceased to exist, but the spirit of the auto-da-fé was alive and well in Franco’s Spain. True, people were not burned at the stake, only imprisoned, beaten and tortured, but the flames of religious intolerance still fed on a pile of dangerous or subversive books and magazines that were burned in public squares, just as in the good old days.
The dictatorship depended on the services of the Civil Guard, and that of the Church depended on those of the local priesthood, who demanded religious conformity and obedience. Those who neither confirmed nor obeyed could expect no mercy in a country where jobs were frequently dependent on a letter of recommendation from a priest.
The system was based on the unchanging values of the family, in which the man would rule with an iron hand and the wife would be enslaved to the tasks of the kitchen and bedroom, to rearing children and going to mass every Sunday. The Roman Catholic Church ruled their conscience just as the employer ruled absolutely in the workplace.
Sheelagh M. Ellwood, in her Spanish Fascism in the Franco Era, explains that “there was no honourable space either for Spaniards who disbelieved Catholic dogma or were not interested in it, or for Catholics who disliked enforced absorption into a military, centralist, Spanish state.”
For years everything worked like a charm. Spaniards loyally went to mass; little children obediently recited the words of the catechism in classes under the watchful eyes of inquisitorial priests. Young men queued up to join the priesthood. Seminaries and churches were springing up everywhere and pilgrimages to local shrines (romerías) were crowded with the faithful. But eventually that cosy relationship came under strain.
Fascism and culture, or giving Franco a hand
If revolution is the motor force of history, then fascist dictatorship acts as a powerful brake on progress. Fascism marks a terrible regression, a retreat of culture to the primitivism of the distant past. It celebrates its hostility to science and knowledge by burning books. It imposes its own ignorance on all levels of social and cultural life. The religious fanaticism and obscurantism of Spain’s ruling classes insinuated itself into every aspect of education. The Franco regime only differed from that of Hitler, whose religion was modelled on an undigested and garbled version of ancient Teutonic paganism, in that it was firmly wedded to the Roman Catholic Church and its hierarchy.
When we contemplate the fascist regime in Spain, it brings to mind the words used by Jesus Christ to describe the Pharisees:
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. (Matthew 23:27-28.)
The phrase “whited sepulchre” literally signifies a whitewashed tomb, outwardly clean but containing decaying corpses. That is a fitting description of the Franco regime. Outwardly, the dictatorship was impressive, solid and powerful. But inwardly, it was rotten to the core.
Inside the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela one can see a most remarkable sight. From the heights of this imposing building, there hangs an enormous censer called the Botafumeiro. At certain times, such as during the entrance procession or at the end of the Eucharist, it is swung back and forth, wafting clouds of perfumed incense over the heads of the congregation. So heavy is this monster that it requires the exertions of a team of eight professionals (the tiraboleiros) to swing it.
The purpose of this great censer is said to symbolise the true attitude of the believer. In reality, the origins of this ancient ceremony are far more prosaic and practical. For centuries, Santiago de Compostela was the destination of countless numbers of pilgrims, who, having travelled long distances on foot, arrived in a state of extreme spiritual purity, but also extreme physical squalor. Crowded with unclean bodies, the place must have smelled of something other than the odour of sanctity. In the absence of modern deodorants, the enormous Botafumeiro was a necessary means of removing, or at least palliating the obnoxious odours.
The relationship of the Roman Catholic Church to the Franco regime bears a striking resemblance to the role of the Botafumeiro. Francisco Franco was a fascist dictator, responsible for countless murders and other atrocities, but he was still a devout Catholic and a loyal and obedient son of the Church. The latter repaid his loyalty by forgiving his sins – for are we all not sinners in the eyes of the Lord? Nor was there anything superficial or insincere about the Caudillo’s attachment to religion. Religious scholars are all agreed that he was indeed a zealous worshipper.
He appears to have had a particular liking for St. Teresa of Ávila. Considered one of the greatest female mystics of Christianity, she lived in Ávila in the sixteenth century. Franco was greatly attached to her saintly person – so attached indeed that he kept a portion of her mummified mortal remains in his room. Right to the end of his life, he held tightly onto her right hand – or whatever was left of it.
This conduct may seem slightly bizarre to some folk today, but in fact, the practice of worshipping the relics of saints was accepted by the Roman Church, which even took steps to encourage and propagate it. But how did Franco come to acquire this precious relic? Apparently, it had already been stolen from a convent in Ronda, so it could be argued that he had ‘rescued’ it, and having accomplished that meritorious deed, he decided to hang onto it – to prevent it from ever been stolen again. And also, to keep it warm at night…
Ever since February 1937, Franco would not be separated from this relic. He took the mummified hand wherever he went, sleeping with it underneath his pillow. As we have seen, it is said that he was still clutching it the very moment he passed on to a better life in November 1975. One could argue that General Franco went a little too far by storing the relic in his bedroom, but that must purely be a matter of taste. On the other hand, what future could there be for a nation ruled by a man who slept with a mummified hand in his bed?
This little anecdote, of course, has its amusing side. But it is also a manifestation of something deadly serious. The primitive superstitions of the dictator were a throwback to the dark ages of humankind, to the deep psychological fears and obsessions, to a world peopled with spirits and demons, to be placated by human sacrifice or warded off by amulets and sacred relics.
Fascism not only deprived Spain of political freedom, it stamped on every shred of cultural and artistic creativity. A palsied hand fell upon the very soul of the people. A black cloud descended on the cultural life of a great nation and suffocated it.
My old friend and comrade Jesús D. recalls his childhood in the Basque Country:
The paralysing influence of the Church affected all aspects of social life at that time. The church deliberately encouraged an atmosphere of obscurantist fanaticism. They had what was known as the Missions (Misiones), which were public sermons, probably dating back to the early days of the Inquisition, designed to terrify people into submission to the authority of the Church. These were attended by so-called penitents, dressed up in such a way as to put the fear of God into anybody. It reminded one of the films of Luis Buñuel. You could not move or breathe for the suffocating influence of the church.
The paralysing influence described by Jesús had profoundly negative effects on education and particularly the teaching of science. In their book Enseñanza, ciencia e ideología en España, 1890-1950, Manuel Castillo Martos and Juan Luis Rubio Mayoral exposed the retrograde effects of the Franco regime on these fields.
They show that Francoism smothered research and relied upon the Opus Dei to police academic life. On 24 August 2015, the respected Science magazine published an interview with the authors under the title ‘How the Franco Dictatorship Destroyed Spanish Science’. In it we read the following:
We found unpublished data about prohibitions in Spanish universities banning Darwin’s books. The Franco regime defended the literalism of the Bible, which was considered an infallible account, inspired by the word of God. Scientific ideas that contradicted it, such as Darwinist evolution, were considered unacceptable. For example, in the last years of Francoism, religious censors prohibited science broadcaster Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente from using the phrase “the sea, the cradle of life” on public television. (My emphasis, AW.)
Following his victory, Franco dissolved the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios (JAE), an institution that provided scholarships to enable the most outstanding Spanish scientists to broaden the scope of their training in European and North American universities. This had contributed to the cultural and scientific flowering of Spain during the first third of the twentieth century. In its place, on 24 November 1939, Franco created what today is the largest public science body in Spain, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) to place “academic life under the auspices of the Immaculate Conception of Mary”. Under Franco, the CSIC was in the hands of the Opus Dei. Its declared purpose was “to restore the classical and Christian unity of the sciences that was destroyed in the 18th century”. In other words, it was an attempt to eradicate the rationalist and scientific basis of education established by the Enlightenment two-and-a-half centuries ago. But those who were responsible for repression against researchers were the political authorities, not the CSIC as an institution. Just as communists were put in prison and religious heretics were persecuted by the Church, so scientific ‘heretics’ were purged from education. ‘Purging committees’ were created in every Spanish university to identify academics that the government wanted to remove because of their political or religious ideas. Some were removed from their university chairs, others could not return to the university at all, some were jailed. Some academics could not leave the country, but many were forced to go into exile.
In their book, the historians Manuel Castillo and Juan Luis Rubio provide invaluable documentation and testimonies about the demolition of science carried out in the first years of Francoism and the religious obscurantism that permeated the cultural and intellectual life of that time in Spain. Here are some examples.
The Students’ Auditorium, one of the jewels of the JAE in Madrid and the site of important international scientific conferences, was partially demolished and converted into a church. Its architect, Miguel Fisac, a member of the Opus Dei, justified it in this way: “If the earliest Christian churches arose out of the Roman basilicas, why cannot a small church or an oratory arise out of a theatre or cinema, where they tried to besmirch and poison the minds of the Spanish youth with a diseased culture and art, so that the Holy Spirit can be the true guide of the new youth of Spain”?
Out of 580 professors in Spanish universities, twenty were murdered, 150 expelled and 195 exiled. Among the exiled scientists and academics was the physicist Blas Cabrera y Felipe, an expert in magnetism who had been elected a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences. Around 500 doctors and researchers of biomedical sciences went into exile in Mexico. Great figures in the field of natural sciences also fled, including Ignacio Bolívar y Urrutia, who succeeded the Spanish Nobel Prize winner Ramón y Cajal as the head of the JAE in 1934, and Odón de Buen, pioneer of oceanography, whose books were banned by Pope Leo XIII for defending the theories of Darwin.
The mathematician Luis Santaló, one of the fathers of integral geometry, went into exile in Argentina where he continued his research at the University of Buenos Aires. Antonio García Banús, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Barcelona, fled to Colombia where he created the School of Chemistry at the Universidad de los Andes. Enrique Moles Ormella, a world authority in the determination of atomic weights, the author of 262 scientific publications, was prevented from practicing his scientific work after returning from exile several years after the end of the Civil War.
Not only the political and religious life of the nation was throttled, but the educational, scientific and cultural aspects were also censored. A whole generation of talented artists and musicians went into voluntary exile after Franco’s victory. Most never returned to Spain. The great Catalan cellist, Pau Casals, refused to play in Spain as long as Franco was alive. Pablo Picasso remained defiant in exile to the end of his life.
In Franco’s Spain the Church was ever-present, insinuating itself into the most intimate corners of people’s lives: birth, marriage, confirmation, death. It peered between the sheets of your bed to see what you were doing there. It decided by what names your children could, or could not, be called. It made you confess your most petty sins, while the most appalling sexual abuse was being perpetrated on the helpless bodies of little children by priests, monks and bishops, with guarantees of the most absolute impunity. But there was no such impunity for ordinary citizens, whose actions could be denounced by priests, even when communicated to them in the secrecy of the confession. The priesthood under Franco became the eyes and ears of the state just as much as the dreaded secret police.
Juan Eslava Galán reports one such case:
Don Próculo knows how to be charitable to those who have fallen from grace, but he also knows that Christian charity must not stand in the way of justice. Whenever necessary, Don Próculo, like a severe father guiding his flock, also denounces to the relevant authorities cases of subversive elements who have gone into hiding or escaped, to whom his attention has been drawn either by members of his congregation, or in the secrecy of the confession.3
Franco’s Spain was not only a vast prison for political dissent. It was a prison of the mind and soul. There was no escape. Everywhere you turned, there was the sickly scent of clouds of incense by which the church attempted to disguise the overpowering odour of staleness and decay that permeated everything, as when they finally opened the door of a long-disused, disintegrating crypt to reveal the dark interior of the ‘whited sepulchre’.
The Death of a Poet
Miguel Hernández was, alongside Lorca, one of the most outstanding Spanish poets of the twentieth century. During the Civil War he visited the front line, inspiring the Republican fighters with recitals of his verses. He ended his life in the most tragic circumstances in one of Franco’s prisons. Miguel Fernández has long been active in the world of Esperanto in Spain. He has translated the poetry and theatrical writings of Lorca and the poetry of Miguel Hernández and other progressive Spanish writers into Esperanto. He describes how Miguel Fernández met his death in one of Franco’s jails:
Miguel Hernández, known to many by the name of the shepherd-poet, was born in Orihuela, province of Alicante, in 1910. At fourteen years of age, his father, who, although not poor, was an uneducated, crude and austere man, forced him to abandon his studies to devote himself to the herding of his flocks of sheep and goats and to go from house to house selling milk.
At seventeen years of age, Hernández had evolved rapidly as a self-taught writer, transforming himself from a local versifier, writing pious verses for parochial publications into a poetic phenomenon that surprised everyone.
Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet who was consul of Chile in Madrid in the thirties, expressed his admiration for the young Miguel: “In all my years as a poet, I can affirm that life has never allowed me to contemplate such a vocation, such an electric phenomenon and so much verbal wisdom.” In 1935, Hernández participated in the Pedagogical Missions, created by the Republic to take science and history, books, films, recorded music, theatrical performances and poetic recitals to towns and villages… In some towns, the intellectuals of the Missions were received by the priests and caciques as ‘church-destroying atheists’.
The collection of poems El rayo que no cesa, (Unceasing lightning) is unique, not only in the work of Miguel Hernández, but in Spanish poetry of the twentieth century. It consists of twenty-seven masterly sonnets, two poems conceived in another kind of stanza and the famous Elegy to his dead friend Ramón Sijé, written in chained tercets, considered, together with Jorge Manrique’s famous Coplas a la muerte de su padre (Verses on the death of Don Rodrigo Manrique, his Father) and Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, by Federico García Lorca, one of the finest elegiac poems in Castilian lyric poetry.
When the fascist uprising of the oligarchy occurred, Miguel enlisted as a volunteer on the Republican side and acted as a cultural militant. In 1937, the poet contracted a civil marriage with Josefina Manresa, he wrote the book of poems Viento del pueblo and was part of a group of Spanish intellectuals who visited the Soviet Union.
The year 1939, did not bring peace, only the end of war. Miguel tried to save his life by fleeing to neighbouring Portugal, which, at that time, was subject to the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. There the poet was finally arrested by the Portuguese police, who handed him over to the Spanish Civil Guard. Like thousands of Republican losers, Hernández had to drink that bitter cup of the loss of freedom. Transported from one prison to another, he suffered beatings, hunger, damp conditions and endless misery. In prison, Miguel wrote most of the poems that make up his collection Cancionero y romancero de Ausencias (1938-1941), a real gem of Spanish lyric poetry. In it, Miguel Hernández elaborates the most authentic and profound quintessence of his poetic vibrations based on expressive nudity.
While in prison he fell ill with tuberculosis. They did not send him to a hospital, which would have been a sign of elementary justice, a gesture of humanity, or simply of ‘Christian charity’, as preached so often by the most Christian victors. The fascist authorities demanded that he give up writing about his ideals and go over to the Francoist side. Miguel refused. And his health got worse every day. So, without the slightest compassion, they allowed him suffer a terrible agony.
The priest who had been his protector in his early years, writing religious poetry in parochial and provincial publications in Orihuela, Canon Luís Almarcha, was now Franco’s trusted man. One of the most influential people of the Spain of National Catholicism, he had never forgiven Miguel for his betrayal of the fundamentalism implanted by him from his earliest childhood. A simple telephone call from Almarcha could not only have had Miguel Hernández transferred to an anti-tuberculosis hospital; it would have been enough to free him from the last prison where he was being left to rot for the crime of fighting for the Republic. But to Almarcha, Miguel was a sinner who had to ‘regenerate’ by slowly dying of a horrible disease in a filthy prison cell.
With the perverse insistence of a sadistic medieval Inquisitor, the man of God repeatedly demanded that the poet must abjure in writing all the principles for which he had fought; that he should recognise his error and embrace the justice and righteousness of the regime of Franco; and he must sign his name to a collection of religious poems written by authors utterly alien to him.
Miguel Fernández concludes:
This was one of the last, and most painful tortures suffered by Miguel Hernández. It was the most refined spiritual cruelty and blackmail. In that shameful chapter, the cynicism and viciousness of both National Catholicism and the fascist state plumbed new depths of moral turpitude. The poet, who had married Josefina Manresa in a civil ceremony, was informed, practically on his deathbed, that he would have to marry ‘as mandated by the Holy Mother Church’.
On the verge of dying, Miguel had to agree to participate in that macabre carnival not only in a last desperate attempt to be hospitalised, but above all to mitigate, if only a little, the difficult situation in which Josefina would have found herself if he had refused. Sometime after, permission was granted for the poet to be transferred to the Porta-Coeli Hospital in Valencia. Too late. Miguel Hernández died in the infirmary of the Adult Reformatory of Alicante on 28 March 1942. Spain had lost one of its greatest poets.
The death certificate specifies the cause as tuberculosis. But one of his biographers, Eutimio Martín, currently a professor emeritus at the University of Aix-en-Provence, insists that we must not speak of the death of Miguel Hernández but of premeditated murder. The name of his murderer was none other than Canon Luís Almarcha.
Two years later, on 24 September 1944, Pope Pius XII consecrated Luís Almarcha bishop of the Spanish city of León, where he continued his good work in the service of the Holy Mother Church until 1970.
Education: One Law for the Rich, Another for the Poor
The educational system of Franco was shockingly backward. Illiteracy levels were the highest in Europe. Many thousands of children did not even have the opportunity to learn the basic skills of reading and writing. Education in Franco’s Spain was heavily biased in favour of the rich and the middle class. If you wanted a half-decent education you had to pay a lot of money. Naturally, most working-class families were unable to do this. The corruption in education extended to the highest levels.
It was not uncommon for the sons of the rich, who were too stupid, lazy or incompetent to pass an exam, to pay for an able but poor student to sit his exams for him. Nobody ever bothered to investigate this kind of swindle and, consequently, many professional people in Spain, including doctors, had gained a position without having any genuine qualifications for it. This goes a long way to explain the appalling state of Spanish medicine at that time.
Nowadays, of course, the situation is quite different. Spanish medicine, at least until the cuts inflicted by the Popular Party (PP) government, could be favourably compared to the National Health Service in Britain. The quality of Spain’s doctors and nurses is world class. An English friend of mine is only alive today thanks to them. But that was certainly not the case then.
Ana Muñoz remembers the school she attended at the age of seven in Entrevías, a neighbourhood in the working-class district of Vallecas, Madrid:
It was not really a school at all, but a room in a house. There were no facilities whatsoever, not even desks. The children even had to bring their own chairs to sit on. There was no playtime, and discipline was strict. The teachers had no qualifications but were simply picked on the basis of loyalty to the regime and the Church, which controlled absolutely everything. This was not restricted to the field of education. If you were on good terms with the priest you would get a job, otherwise not.
Later, I went to a ‘proper’ school in the same barrio (neighbourhood). Here at least we had desks with inkwells and the teachers had some minimum qualifications. But the discipline there was ferocious. Every morning the children had to line up outside the entrance to the school, raise their arm in the fascist salute to the Spanish flag and sing the Falangist anthem, Cara al sol (Facing the Sun).
You were punished severely for the slightest thing: talking, getting up from your desk without permission, being disobedient to the teacher or not getting good marks. They specialised in humiliating punishments aimed at destroying any spirit of individuality or rebelliousness. They demanded obedience in the classroom just as they demanded obedience in society.
When a pupil had fallen into disgrace, he or she would be led from class to class, made to stand up at the front while the list of supposed crimes was read out. The children in each class were encouraged to ridicule and laugh at the child until the unfortunate pupil was reduced to tears. Foremost in the ranks of the tormentors were the priests and nuns, many of whom took a sadistic delight in humiliating punishments.
The Church exercised a dictatorial control over education at all levels. Their power over little children was boundless and they exercised it with extreme vindictiveness. Nobody dared to criticise them. My elder sister told me that one of the Fathers frequently molested young girls sexually. I personally had no experience of this, but I did experience physical abuse from the same priest who had molested other girls.
It was about 1964 when I was ten years of age. The school had acquired a tape recorder, which the teachers wanted to use to get the brighter pupils to record elementary lessons that could be used to educate younger pupils. I was quite good at my lessons so I was chosen for this task. I was placed in front of the machine and told to recite a rhyme that included the ABC. At one point I made a mistake, which spoilt the recording. The priest flew into a fury and struck me across the face with such force that the mark of his hand was still visible when I went home hours later.
My parents, who in general never questioned the right of teachers to chastise their children, were visibly shocked. But they said nothing. To voice even the slightest criticism of a priest would immediately have laid one open to the accusation of being a ‘Red’. The priests ran everything and nobody could question them about anything. One wonders how many of these priests were paedophiles and how much damage they inflicted on young lives with complete impunity.
Jesús D recalls:
A sombre, grey atmosphere that suffocated all thought and creativity. Primary school education was in the hands of the priests and nuns who were, in the majority of cases, completely unqualified and unable to teach anything except the catechism and a few religious songs. They were not teachers but childminders; and not very good ones at that.
In secondary schools, the influence of the priests and nuns was less pronounced, and some of the younger teachers had a more progressive outlook. It was here that many young people began to acquire a more critical state of mind and even radical left wing and revolutionary ideas, as Ana Muñoz recalls:
I entered high school at the age of sixteen in Valdeacederas in Madrid. I was lucky enough to find myself in a progressive school where the teachers were mainly left-wing inclined. Unlike the priests, who dominated elementary education, they did not demand blind obedience but encouraged young people to think for themselves.
There were many such teachers in Spain at that time, young people who even organised night schools to help adult workers get an education. Many of them were members of underground left-wing organisations and they played a bigger role in winning over the youth of Spain to revolutionary ideas.
These night schools for adults were very similar to what Krupskaya describes in her biography of Lenin:
Workers who belonged to the organisation went to the school to get to know people and single out those who could be drawn into the circles and the organisation. As far as these workers were concerned, the teachers were no longer just a featureless set of women. They were already able to distinguish the extent to which this or that teacher was politically well-grounded. If they recognised a schoolteacher to be ‘one of us’ they let her know it by some phrase or word. For instance, in discussing the handicraft industry a man would say: “A handicraft worker cannot compete with large-scale production,” or else he would ask a poser, something like “What is the difference between a St. Petersburg worker and an Arkhangelsk peasant?” And after that he would have a special look for that teacher and would greet her in a special way, as much as to say, “You’re one of us, we know.”
Life in the Factories
Given the appalling state of education in Spain at that time it is amazing how anyone managed to learn anything. And yet many children from poor working-class homes managed against all the odds to advance and even reach university, particularly from the late 1960s and early 1970s. That was on the basis of colossal sacrifices made by their parents, who were anxious to see their children get out of the trap of poverty they had suffered for so long.
Ana Muñoz recalls:
The majority of working-class kids left school at fourteen with no qualifications and faced a life of low wages and exploitation. Many of those who wished to continue their studies were obliged to work in order to pay for higher education. I myself left school early and got a job in a factory making wigs. That was a real education. There were about 100 women working in this factory in the most intolerable conditions, forced to work long hours on pitifully low wages and subjected to constant harassment, intimidation and humiliation on the part of the factory owner.
The only two men were a mechanic in charge of repairing the sewing machines and the boss, who was a real bastard. Since I had received a secondary education, the boss sent me to work in the office where I was in charge, among other things, of dealing with the payment of wages. I was shocked to discover that many of the women could not even read or write. When they came to collect their pay, they were unable even to sign their names. Instead, they dipped their index finger in ink and made a mark. That was the level of education that existed under Franco – and this was not in a village but in Madrid itself.
At that time, wigs had become fashionable because of cheap artificial hair imported from Japan. Most of the women were engaged in sewing wigs made of artificial hair on sewing machines. Others had to make wigs from human hair by hand – an extremely disagreeable occupation. These women would be bent over for hours while performing these distasteful tasks.
The working day was from eight o’clock until five and the only break was half an hour for lunch. There were no canteen facilities and nowhere to wash, prepare food or even to heat water. The workers had to eat a sandwich on the same bench where they worked. As the benches were always covered with hair, the women first had to clean them before sitting down to eat, and then clean them again in order to restart work. You had to eat quickly to do this and it is no wonder that many women suffered from ulcers and other gastric complaints.
We had no rights whatsoever and our lives were made a misery by the constant harassment that the boss meted out with sadistic enjoyment. He liked to humiliate us by singling out a victim, harshly criticising the quality of her work in front of all the others. He had difficulty with me, however, since I accomplished my work correctly and he therefore could find no fault with it. He got around this little problem in the following fashion.
The wigs were of different colours according to the hair dye used and we had to arrange them in the correct order. One day the boss called me over, pointed to the wigs that I had only just arranged and said menacingly, “What is the meaning of this?” I saw immediately that he had deliberately mixed up the wigs. When I protested that I had done my work correctly, he replied: “But who could have done this?” Since only he and I had access to the room, it was a question that answered itself.
I decided that enough was enough and left the job without saying a word. I felt sorry for the other women that were left behind in the hands of this monster, but there was nothing to be done. This was the lot of millions of workers, and especially women workers, under this vicious and oppressive regime. The experience turned me into a convinced socialist and revolutionary. I decided to go to university where my revolutionary activity began.
The Rural Areas: Andalusia
When Manuel Fraga was Franco’s Minister of Tourism, he coined the phrase: “Spain is different.” This was far truer than most people in the rest of Europe realised. The picture of Spain that was presented by the tourist agencies presented an attractive spectacle of sun, wine, beaches and flamenco dancing. That was the idea of Andalusia that was sold to the tourists. But behind the happy and carefree picture lay a grim reality.
Life in Andalusia was always held cheap – the life of the farm labourer and the building worker, that is. The Andalusian poor are the poorest of the poor. But the rich hidalgo (gentleman) still rides his pure-blood stallion on the vast expanse of his estate. He spends half the year hunting, shooting and fishing while the numberless, nameless men who pass by his door month by month to seek some kind of casual work eke out an existence now picking olives, now harvesting grapes, now digging trenches, and inevitably, ending up as one of the growing army of unemployed.
The people of Andalusia are poor but they are also courageous. Their indomitable spirit of revolt has been spelt out in letters of blood throughout the ages in peasant revolts and armed uprisings, brutally suppressed by the state. There are terrible stories of bloodshed, terror and counter-terror. The class struggle in Andalusia has always been a ferocious, and frequently bloody affair.
The fascist reaction wreaked a terrible vengeance with mass executions, arrests and torture. There is hardly a family which is not marked by the death of one or more member in the tempestuous period of revolution and counter-revolution of the 1930s. An old worker showed me his hand, with two fingers missing. He told me:
When the Nationals (fascists) came here they called up all the young men and forced them to fight with Franco. What did I want to fight for? My friends were on the other side. I was no fascist. So, I took my gun, held it against my hand and pulled the trigger. They let me go after that.
A veteran socialist described how the members of the Young Socialists saved his village in Jaén from the fascists at the time of the uprising in 1936. The local members of the Falange had a prearranged signal for the uprising. A car would rush through the village sounding its horn, and all the fascists would come out with their weapons and take over.
But the socialist youth got wind of the plan, rounded up all the local fascists and shot them. This comrade’s father was later executed by the fascists and he was left, the oldest son at fourteen years of age, to keep his mother and siblings alive by finding work as best he could.
In the forty years that followed, the workers of Spain suffered brutal repression. In an ironic parody of a famous Civil War song, the Andalusian socialists would sing:
If you want to write to me,
You know where I am lodging:
In the prison of Seville
On the feast-day of the workers.
The situation of the agricultural labourers remained desperate in the 1970s. I had occasion to visit there on many occasions. The only ‘solution’ for many was mass migration, either to the cities or abroad. From Andalusia alone it is estimated that, by the 1970s, 2,000,000 people had emigrated.
Even those fortunate enough to have a job had to put up with appalling conditions of work, excessively long hours and very low pay. Poverty and misery were general for the workers of Spain. Historian Antonio Cazorla Sánchez points out that the stabilisation plan at the end of the 1950s that was supposed to have brought about an economic boom had the opposite effect. The repeal of state intervention and opening up to international capitalism caused a recession that made people’s lives even more unbearable.
Many agricultural labourers depended on seasonal work like grape picking. An agricultural labourer from Andalusia describes the poverty and anger of rural Spain:
The area in which I live supplies the wine for Jerez sherry, which goes to tables throughout most of western Europe. How many who delight in this drink understand the suffering for working people which goes into its production?
My village has a population of about 6,000 of whom ninety-eight per cent are involved in grape picking or grape production, mostly agricultural labourers, with only a few able to live from grape cultivation.
Work begins in March to May when workers thin out the vines and spray them with insecticides. Apart from ploughing, which doesn’t give much work in any case, these initial activities only involve a few workers.
By the month of May the vines are safe from any attack from nature. From June to September or October mass unemployment is the lot of the overwhelming majority of the village. Indeed, the harvest only lasts for twenty days when the grapes have ripened and are ready for picking.
You cut the grapes with a knife so your hands get full of cuts, then you have to carry them on your head, which causes severe headaches and neck pains. The rate of wages for this backbreaking work in the 1970s was very low – around one peseta for each kilogram of grapes picked.4 In order to earn anything like a living wage it was necessary to pick at least 1,500 kilos of grapes every day.
There are no contracts between the agricultural labourers and the landowners, who take us on and kick us out when they like. At the harvest, people come from all over Andalusia and all over Spain. These people live in very bad conditions, some in stables, others in wine cellars, and some in small huts. And after suffering all this, many go away without obtaining work.
The hiring of workers by the landowners takes place early each morning at 6.00 am. The owners come down and examine us to see who are the fittest, who would work the hardest and create the biggest profits. It is like a cattle market, where the owners pick out the best beasts of burden. More accurately, it resembles a slave market in ancient times.
A Vale of Tears
If a man was lucky, he might get a job for several days. But usually the agricultural worker was hired by the day. Very often, the owners chose people from other villages, just to keep local people in their place and to hold wages down. Some of these people worked just for food, a bed, a bocadillo (sandwich) and some wine. Anyone who had the reputation of a troublemaker was unlikely to get any sort of work. These conditions were indeed close to slavery.
In the late 1970s I visited the house of some agricultural labourers in the Andalusian province of Huelva. They lived in a state of absolute poverty. One day I was sitting at the kitchen table talking with one of the sons who, like his father, worked on the land. A very skinny cat was waiting patiently at his feet. After a while the young man threw the cat a piece of bread, which it instantly devoured.
Unable to conceal my surprise, I said that I had never seen a cat eating bread before. Without looking up, he replied dryly: “He’s a coward. The other cats fight for their food. He’ll soon be dead.” This little anecdote told me a lot about the real lives, not of cats, but of human beings in the south of Spain.
Even in the cities of Andalusia, many people had absolutely no income and had to live off their families. I had occasion to observe this when I stayed in the house of a poor family in Seville in the 1970s. The father, not a young man, had been unemployed for many years. He had two sons.
The elder brother suffered from a terrible wasting disease that caused him to lose his fingers, toes and then limbs. He just lay in one of the rooms of their small flat, gradually consumed by a sickness that the family did not have sufficient money to do anything about, given the appallingly bad and expensive private medicine. The heat in summer was unbearable and there was no question of air conditioning to provide relief.
The mother, a cheerful and optimistic woman in the typical Sevillian manner, did her best to keep the family fed. She apologised to me profusely for the frugal meal of eggs and fried potatoes, which is what they chiefly subsisted on. But even that humble fare was lovingly prepared and tasted delicious. The poor know how to make the best of what little they possess, and I will never forget the kindness and warm hospitality of that Sevillian household, so courageous and resilient in the face of extreme adversity.
When I asked the younger son, a young construction worker who had not seen work for over six months, about the condition of his sick brother, he answered simply: “Andalusia is a vale of tears.”
Early Signs of Revolt
The first indications of a revival of the workers’ movement began even as the 1940s drew to a close. In 1947, a walkout of metalworkers and miners in Vizcaya was joined by other workers in the province. The 60,000 strikers were joined by thousands of industrial workers in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa. The province of Vizcaya was placed under a state of siege. Around 15,000 workers were sacked and hundreds arrested.
At the end of 1949, there were smaller strikes elsewhere. In Madrid, 3,000 taxi drivers went on strike. But the most significant event was the Barcelona general strike. In February 1951, the Barcelona authorities announced a forty per cent rise in tram fares – from fifty to seventy centimes. Agitation against the rise began immediately. Posters calling for a boycott were put up, and leaflets protesting the rise were distributed: “Be a good citizen, show your courage. Starting 1 March, walk to work”.
Youths took to the streets in the early morning, handing out leaflets and urging workers to join the boycott with chants of:
If you want your morning to be jolly,
Stay away from the trolley;
And for your next trick
Try throwing a brick.
(Lo que debes hacer cada día,
es no subir al tranvía,
y desahogar tus males,
rompiendo muchos cristales.)
Around ninety-seven per cent of tram users joined the boycott on the first day, and by 4 March this figure had risen to ninety-nine per cent. The streets were filled with people walking to their workplaces, in some cases several miles.
A majority of tram drivers also went on strike. Trams that were still running came under attack and police units were stationed around the city to protect them. The authorities hoped that the boycott would be broken by the thousands of football fans who would travel to Les Corts stadium on the Sunday. But they were to be disappointed. After watching their team win 2-1 against Santander, F.C. Barcelona supporters walked home in the pouring rain rather than break the boycott by catching a tram.
Several days later, the authorities caved in. The tram company had lost 5 million pesetas, and the old fares were reinstated. It was also announced that the seventy people arrested during the boycott would be released. But it was too late. Preparations to turn the boycott into a strike were already underway. A manifesto calling for a strike had been distributed on 4 March. On 6 March, the provincial head of the official state ‘union’ convened a meeting of trade union delegates to denounce the tramway boycott. But the 2,000 workers present used the opportunity to vent their anger and discuss their grievances before the police removed them from the headquarters of the CNS, and they fixed a date for a general strike for the 12 March.
In Barcelona alone, 300,000 workers joined the strike, which spread to the nearby cities of Badalona, Sabadell, Terrassa and Mataró: workers in metallurgical and chemical plants, construction, communications, government workers, and taxi and tram drivers all joined in. Demands were put forward for wage increases and a reduction in the cost of living, but this was a general protest against the regime.
Taken aback by the success of the strike, the authorities mobilised thousands of police and Civil Guard units. Barcelona was turned into an armed camp. Troops were deployed, and four warships carrying hundreds of marines were docked in the port of Barcelona. There were demonstrations and clashes across the city and thousands of strikers were arrested and imprisoned during the strike. But despite everything the strikers held out for fourteen days, after which most workers returned to work.
Fearful of the prospect of further unrest, the authorities released the majority of those arrested, and even ordered employers to pay full wages to those who had been on strike. Although most of the strikers’ demands were not met, the Barcelona strike gave encouragement to workers across the country, as shown by the outbreak of further disturbances in the following months.
Several weeks after the end of the Barcelona general strike, there was unrest in the Basque Country, especially in the industrial areas of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa. In April, a general strike took place in Bilbao, involving some 250,000 workers from the docks, arms plants, metal factories, and textile plants. Strikes also broke out in Navarre; notably a big strike in Pamplona during which workers attacked the Falange headquarters. In May, there were strikes of transport workers in Madrid, as well as further boycotts.
The Barcelona general strike of 1951 was an important development. It led to strikes across the country and signalled the potential for a return to working class militancy in Spain after over a decade of fascist repression. However, seen in retrospect, these early movements, important as they were, were only an anticipation of future developments on a far more dramatic scale. They were the lightning that announced the coming of a storm.
The ‘Years of Development’
With the workers deprived of all democratic rights and genuine trade unions, Spain became a magnet for investors who could make fat profits out of the labour of the Spanish workers. This led to a significant development of industry.
At the end of the Civil War, the peasantry represented sixty-three per cent of the active workforce in Spain. But by 1975, out of a total active workforce of 13,400,000 people, the number of salaried workers had increased to over 9,500,000 (seventy per cent of the workforce), of which 3,600,000 were industrial workers.
Poverty and exploitation caused a massive exodus of workers from Spain. This was partly internal migration from the rural to urban areas in Spain, and from the backward South to the more industrial regions of Bilbao and Barcelona in the North. Around 4,500,000 people migrated from rural areas to the big cities in the 1960s, a million of those went to the province of Barcelona. In ten years, Santa Coloma de Gramenet went from 32,590 inhabitants to 106,711 and Cornellà de Llobregat from 11,000 in 1950, to 25,000 in 1960 and 75,000 in 1970. The twin cities of Ripollet and Cerdanyola grew from 5,000 inhabitants in 1960 to 20,000 ten years later. These were proletarian centres with a high concentration of industrial workers. In Cornellà and Ripollet, manual workers represented over sixty-five per cent of the population. By 1970, over fifty per cent of the population in the region of Baix Llobregat had been born outside of Catalonia.
I saw this myself when I made my first political visits to Spain in the early 1970s. In the biggest working-class suburbs of Barcelona – Santa Coloma, Badalona, Hospitalet, etc. – the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants were immigrants from the South, mainly Andalusia. They were poor exploited people who brought with them the revolutionary fervour characteristic of the land that bore them.
First, one or two of the younger men would leave the village seeking work in urban areas. If they succeeded, they would be followed by others. In the end, the villages were left mainly with old people. Cazorla Sánchez gives the example of one village that between 1963 and 1975 almost disappeared while the nearby manufacturing town of Ibi (Alicante) tripled its population from 6,000 to nearly 19,000. In one case, a whole Andalusian town migrated to the same shanty town in Sabadell. The mayor and local councillors kept their functions in their new place of residence. Between 1959 and 1973, 1 million Spanish people migrated to European countries and another 300,000 to other countries. These are the official figures. Probably another million migrated illegally to Europe. It was especially the younger, more energetic workers who left Spain to work in Europe and particularly to Germany. There, the Spanish migrant workers found themselves in strange lands with different languages and cultures.
They learned about free trade unions and participated in strikes. This was an important training ground for the new generation of union militants, which was to play a key role in the class struggles of Spain. One of those migrant workers was my friend Miguel G., who went to Switzerland to find work. His feelings towards that country and its people were contradictory. On the one hand, he admired their high standard of living and culture, the clean streets, the good food, so different to the poverty he had left behind. But he also experienced the humiliation of racial prejudice. There was a culture shock involved:
We wanted to get some sardines like back home. We went to the fishmonger who gave us some nice sardines that had been cleaned thoroughly in the Swiss manner. We protested that we did not want the innards of the fish removed as it spoiled the flavour. The fishmonger did not know what we were talking about. It took us a long time but finally we persuaded him to give the sardines to us as God had created them. In the end, he was quite happy as it saved a lot of work and we were even happier since we could cook the sardines in the way that suited us.
But Miguel G. spoke with some bitterness about the contemptuous attitude that some of the Swiss people had towards the Spanish immigrants: “They treated us as second-class citizens, like some kind of inferior race. They were real babosos [idiots]” he said. On returning to Spain, he joined the Communist Party. I met him in Madrid where we became good friends.
Appetite Comes with Eating
By the late 1950s the Franco regime had lost whatever mass base it once possessed. It maintained itself mainly through fear, the repressive apparatus and the temporary inertia of the working class. In order to save itself, the regime would have to somehow raise living standards to defuse the growing strike movement that commenced in the early 1960s and continued unabated until the overthrow of the dictatorship.
Franco handed over the management of the economy to ‘technocrats’, who led Spain into los años de desarrollo (the years of economic development) from 1961 to 1973. In those years the Spanish economy grew faster than any nation in Europe. The regime embarked upon a series of economic reforms and appointed a number of neo-liberal technocrats drawn from members of the secretive Opus Dei to key government positions.
An Economic Stabilisation Plan was published in 1959 and over the following decades a series of four-year Economic Development Plans led to rapid industrial development with substantial tax incentives and grants for manufacturing firms to build their plants in designated zones. Vitoria was one of the cities where a number of multinational companies located their manufacturing plants.
During los años de desarrollo the regime attempted to distract the population with the introduction of consumer goods: radio and television sets, washing machines, refrigerators and even cars. Imanol Olabarría, a former priest who went to work in the factories, recalls the change in the circumstances of workers at that time:
Towards the end of the 1950s, when Franco handed the government to the Opus Dei, they organised a campaign [for investment] and one year later Spain received more global investments than any country except Canada. Then came the Development Plan. A few years later I remember that instead of making fire with wood, we started to use a small butane stove. We had a washing machine attached to the sink with a small motor driving a propeller, and a little later the refrigerator, which my mother unplugged when we went out because it used too much electricity. A whole new world!
But the idea of turning the workers away from revolution through improving living standards did not succeed, and were even counterproductive. Appetite comes with the eating, as the saying goes. The more people’s aspirations were raised, the more the discontent grew. Here we have a precise analogy with the growth of industry in tsarist Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. The Spanish proletariat was a young and fresh working class in every sense of the word.
Formally backward agricultural regions such as Navarre became industrialised. From being a centre of fascist reaction during the Civil War, Pamplona now became a centre of militant working-class struggle. The same was true of Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao. In the long run, the development of industry in Spain completely undermined the dictatorship. As in pre-revolutionary Russia, so in Spain, it was the rapid growth of industry and the consequent strengthening of the working class, that prepared the ground for a social explosion.