Still Young

In the wild, mountainous Asturias coal country of northern Spain, thousands of miners trooped back to work last week. But in many a town, the cafes and shabby little restaurants were still full of dark, rugged men who stubbornly refused to return to the pits. There were still no demonstrations, no agitation, no violence in this biggest strike wave to sweep through Spain in the 24 years of Dictator Francisco Franco's rule.

Since strikes are illegal, Dictator Franco did not speak of strikes at all when he rose to address 10,000 civil war veterans in a park outside Madrid; he referred to "labor conflicts in the north," which, he said, were the result of "the clerical errors of hot-headed priests."

Franco meant the black-cassocked churchmen of H.O.A.C., the independent Catholic Action Workers' Brotherhoods, who were defying Spain's Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as Franco's own police by egging on the strikers. Some priests were now under house arrest. At Mieres, in the heart of Asturias, 200 striking miners sat glumly at the bottom of their pit, refusing to return to the surface until local mine managers agreed to negotiate with the four local H.O.A.C. priests who were in custody.

Franco's officials have arrested perhaps two hundred of the miners themselves, but in general have tried to avoid force. The tough Guardia Civil is noticeably absent; in the mining areas, the grey-uniformed civilian security police are in charge--and as one Spaniard put it, they do not have the "smell" of the tough old order. Moving gently on the money question, the government at week's end granted 5% to 10% pay boosts to almost half the nation's miners.

El Caudillo resented the publicity that Spain's strikes were getting abroad. "It seems paradoxical," he said, "that when life is subject to almost total paralysis in many European countries, under their vacillating political systems, our small labor difficulties should be exploited in this way." Franco touched on the question of who would succeed him, pointed to the Spanish law of 1947 providing for the eventual return of the monarchy. But in case anyone in the audience thought that he was getting too old to handle his country, Franco, 69, added, to resounding cheers: "I feel young, as young as all of you."

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