Steps Forward

In 1956, when Madrid University students called a demonstration march to demand freedom from their state-controlled syndicate, police and Falangist goons beat the marchers senseless, one student was shot, hundreds more arrested, and Franco fired his Education Minister for laxity. Last week the students finally got what they wanted. To end a three-month series of strikes and demonstrations, the regime published a decree allowing them to organize independent student unions of their own. No blood was spilled, and there were no mass arrests. The Falangist press even welcomed the new unions as "something we always wanted and never could get."

Last week's decree was another step in Franco's march away from isolation and tyranny. With the passions of the Civil War now all but dead, with a booming economy and a growing middle class, and with the political currents of the Western world whistling through Spain's wide-open doors, the pace of the march has been quickening.

Orders from Abroad. Franco may never be considered respectable enough to be granted full membership in the Western community, but he has come a long way. As a de facto member of NATO, Spain last year was given full control of the former U.S. radar defense-warning system, has been promised F-104 fighter-bombers for its air force, plans to zip it up even further, with 70 new F-5 supersonic bombers--to be built in Spain under license from Northrop. Spain still stands in the Common Market waiting room, but it is busily spreading a net of trade agreements all over the world. Commerce Minister Alberto Ullastres picked up a fistful of orders by stumping Africa last month, while two of his fellow cabinet members were ringing doorbells in Japan, the Philippines, Cambodia and Formosa.

Relations with the Communist bloc are also thawing. Although the Caudillo has not gone so far as to establish diplomatic contact, Spain has opened commercial offices in both Budapest and Warsaw, and allowed Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria to send trade missions to Madrid. Spanish soccer teams often entertain Russian opponents these days, even though it means flying the hammer and sickle over Madrid's Santiago Bernabeu Stadium. The Catholic newspaper Ya, which, like the rest of the Spanish press, had for more than two decades been forbidden to publish a Russian dateline, last month opened its own Moscow bureau.

Nowhere is change more dramatically apparent than in Spain's economy, which has boomed beyond the wildest dreams of the young reformers who sit beside Franco in Spain's Cabinet. New factories, skyscrapers and apartment buildings are popping up like handkerchiefs in a bull ring; nearly 200 American companies have set up offices in Spain, and overall foreign investment is pouring in at the rate of nearly $300 million a year. Fourteen million tourists entered Spain last year, and a staggering 16 million--more than one for every two Spaniards--are expected this year. In five years, treasury reserves have jumped from next to nothing to $1.5 billion.

At every step, Franco finds himself confronted by the great, silent struggle between the young progressives and the old-guard Falangists, generals and bureaucrats who still control much of the government machinery. Bills to free the press and grant Spaniards freedom of religion and association have all been given official clearance, only to be watered down before passage.

Mass in Catalan. Even so, the focus of freedom is gradually widening. In Asturias last month, when 1,000 striking coal miners ransacked a local police station, the government's answer was to grant them a 20% pay raise. In Barcelona, the government smiled its approval when priests began saying Mass in Catalan--a language long suppressed as subversive.

Along with the liberalization have come indications that Franco, at 72, may be ready at last to tackle the awful problem of what comes after Franco. The first sign appeared last year, when he went before a meeting of Falangist leaders to hint of government changes. Since then, Spain's press has started debating just what sort of government might be adequate--a topic unthinkable in the past. The Falangist newspaper Arriba last month declared: "Spain has matured. We must make a place in our legal and political system for an opposition, which is the essential element of any democracy." When in the past 25 years had a Spanish newspaper used the word "democracy"--much less "opposition"--without contempt?

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