The Awakening Land
SPAIN
(See Cover)
On Madrid's broad Paseo de la Castellana, the heavy steel ball of a demolition crane slams relentlessly into the 19th century palace of the Marques de Selgas, making room for a high-rise apartment building. On the outskirts of the city, Dodge Darts are rolling out of a vast factory complex that less than a year ago was an empty field. Europe's biggest supermarket opened two years ago on the exclusive Calle Velazquez. In a dim, dark-paneled bar on the Avenida de las Americas, boys in long hair and girls in white Vartan stockings sit carefully cool and immobile as a ye-ye band blasts out a yeah-yeah beat.
Near Badajoz, on the bitter western plateau that the Spaniards named Extremadura because life there was so extremely hard, irrigation has transformed into 5,000 gardens of vegetables and cotton the chalky arid land whose owners were half starved a decade ago. In her new white stucco farmhouse, a wife pauses under a gaudy framed print of Jesus to explain why she has not yet bought a television set: "The neighbors would come in every night and track up my floor."
In Seville, bull breeders in flat-brimmed hats still sip cognac in sidewalk cafes, and aging horses still pull ancient carriages along streets lined with orange trees toward the world's largest Gothic cathedral. But across the Guadalquivir, tens of thousands of spinning bobbins turn raw cotton and wool into finished fabric in one of Europe's largest textile plants. In the main square of Cordoba, an Arab caliphate for 250 years, a transcribed electric guitar chimes the hour in flamenco rhythm. In Bilbao, shipyards work round the clock to keep pace with orders for merchant vessels from all over the world--including Communist Poland and Cuba. "Everything is changing in Spain," says Industrialist Eduardo Barreiros. "The commotion is from top to bottom and bottom to top."
Over the Line. It certainly is. After long years of isolation and decay, Spain is caught up in an industrial revolution that has made it the fastest-growing nation in Europe and is rapidly changing the structure of its society. In the past six years, thousands of new enterprises have created hundreds of thousands of new jobs that have drawn millions of Spaniards from their pueblos to the cities. Foreign investment is coming in. Gross national product has soared 65% since 1960; per-capita income last year passed the mystical $500 dividing line that supposedly separates the "rich" nations from the "poor."
The new prosperity has brought greater opportunity. Blue-collar workers are finding it easier to improve themselves and are forming the beginnings of a mass middle class. They are more acquisitive, not only because they can afford to buy more but also because more can be bought and more easily. The installment plan, introduced eight years ago and now a national institution, has put gas stoves, electric refrigerators and washing machines--now mass produced in Spanish factories--within the range of most city dwellers, and 40% of Spanish families now own a television set.
"We have gone from shoe leather to traffic jams overnight," says a conservative Barcelona banker, and the analogy is apt. Ten years ago, Spain produced no automobiles, and foreign cars were so expensive (the import duty alone was 125%) and hard to get that Spaniards dubbed them "haigas"--a slang term indicating that their owners were either very rich, very powerful or very crooked. Last year 170,000 vehicles came off the assembly lines of seven separate factories in five Spanish cities, and production is expected to double this year; the entire 1966 output of the Spanish-made SEAT cars is already sold out by dealers. Madrid's streets have become so clogged that the city has had to restrict parking in the downtown area. It has also opened three underground garages, one of which goes down four levels.
Status Symbols. Affluence and mobility have also changed the Spaniard's habits. He is no longer thrilled at the chance to stand in a freezing soccer stadium and cheer for the home team. Soccer attendance has slipped so badly that Real Madrid, European champion for five of the past ten years, has decided to tear down its cavernous Santiago Bernabeu Stadium and build a smaller one. Spaniards are turning to more expensive diversions and status symbols. Madrid now supports 19 legitimate theaters, plus a selection of chic new "theater clubs," exclusive establishments where the up-and-coming young businessman can be seen while he watches the show. Scores of elegant new restaurants and bars have opened in the past few years, and they are always packed to their polished oak rafters with an ever expanding jet set, whom Spaniards call hi-lifers (pronounced hee-leefairs). Grandest of all is a converted palace in old Madrid, where, under 18th century tapestries and paintings of the court, diners are offered the specialty of the house: a whole chicken baked in clay, Roman-style, which is deftly parted by the waiter's silver hammer.
The siesta is disappearing, not because the Spaniard no longer wants his afternoon snooze but because he no longer has time to take it. So crowded have Spain's cities become that it would take him most of his three-hour lunch break to get home and back. The rush to the cities has had another effect as well. It is slowly breaking down the old regional barriers that have always divided Spain. There are still separatists in Barcelona, but their cause is dying fast: half the working force of Catalonia is now composed of forasteros from other parts of Spain.
No one is more delighted at all the bustle than Francisco Franco, the stubby (5 ft. 3 in.) Galician general who is now in his 30th year as "Caudillo (literally: commander or headman) of Spain by the Grace of God." And quite probably, no one is more surprised. For until six years ago, Spain was isolated from most of the world, brooding, stewing in its evaporating juice. Foreign investment was unwanted and restricted, and Franco was as openly anticapitalist as he was antiCommunist. Spanish industries, creaking and featherbedded, stumbled along behind trade barriers that kept most foreign products out entirely and imposed rigid quotas and exorbitant tariffs on the rest.
No one knows exactly how sick the Spanish economy was; the regime had no way of compiling proper statistics and went out of its way to obscure the ones it had. But by 1959 all signs were bad. At least one-fourth of Spain's total imports, from whisky to machinery, were being smuggled in. The peseta was swinging wildly on the black market. Inflation was rising, production was actually falling and, despite large doses of U.S. aid, Spain had run completely out of hard currency.
Over the Howls. In desperation, Franco turned to his young Commerce Minister, Alberto Ullastres, a brooding ascetic who had been arguing futilely for change. On a hot July day in 1959, Ullastres announced a sweeping stabilization plan. Credit was tightened, the budget slashed, the peseta devalued to a realistic 60 to the dollar. With the aid of a $400 million international loan, Ullastres threw open Spain's doors to imports necessary to rebuild its economy. And over the howls of government protectionists, he pushed through a series of measures to encourage foreign investors to enter Spain.
The success of the stabilization plan was miraculous. By 1963 Spain had $1.1 billion in foreign reserves and a booming economy. To help it along, Franco was persuaded to go on to an even more ambitious four-year development plan. At the heart of the plan are the seven development "poles" scattered throughout provincial Spain. Borrowing a page from Puerto Rico's successful Operation Bootstrap, Planning Minister Laureano Lopez Rodo offers a five-year tax holiday, duty-free equipment imports, easy credit facilities and attractive plant sites to private industries willing to set up shop in these areas which are starving for capital.
Brittle Glories. Typical is Valladolid (pop. 158,000), a grey stone city on the Castilian plateau. Known to the 8th century Arab invaders as Belad Walid (Governor's Town), it was for 450 years the court of Spain's Christian kings. Ferdinand and Isabella were married there in 1469; Columbus died there in 1506; Cervantes probably wrote the first part of Don Quixote there. But its glories were brittle, and Valladolid faded into a shabby market center and rail junction.
How it has changed. Today Valladolid is a thriving, springing city, ringed with factories. Some 70 companies are moving into town, bringing an investment of $75 million and 8,200 new jobs. Great clusters of new brick apartments have risen from abandoned lots. The city's 14th century university has even started a new department: cinematography. "It's astounding that it could all have happened so fast," marvels local Development Boss Antonio Narro de Povar. "We're beginning to look like a little Madrid."
Luckily for Spain, its development push coincided with a vast surge in the living standards of the rest of Western Europe. Hordes of Europeans with hard money in their pockets began pouring southward across the Pyrenees, lured by cheap prices, fiestas and bullfighting, by clear skies and endless beaches, by the ancient exotic attraction of a semi-Arab land that had dropped out of Europe with the Spanish Armada.
Castles & Beaches. The regime was too smart to look a gift horde in the mouth. It started plugging tourism for all it was worth. Spain's stern moral codes were relaxed to permit bikinis on beaches where 15 years before men had been arrested for not wearing tops. Resort hotels sprouted in bunches, and the government added nine Spanish castles and monasteries to its own network of hostels and inns. Iberia airlines bought 18 new jets and more than doubled its flights to make Spanish beaches easier to reach.
Tourism has boomed beyond the regime's wildest dreams. Spain is now the favorite playground of Europe. Two years ago, Marbella was a bleached fishing hamlet between Malaga and Gibraltar; it now has three luxury hotels, a golf club, two cinemas, scores of bars and a burgeoning skyline of glassy apartment buildings. In nearby Torremolinos, there is standing room only on the beach on many a hot August noon. The bullfight season, which for a century ended in October, now unofficially extends throughout the year on the mild south coast, and in any season, in any city, there are likely to be as many tourists as Spaniards shouting the oles.
All told, 36 million tourists have spent $3.5 billion in Spain in the past five years, and at an ever increasing rate. Last year's tourist take alone was $1.1 billion, 20% higher than in 1964.
Another major source of hard currency is the money sent home every year by the 850,000 Spaniards now working north of the Pyrenees. Their emigration, encouraged by the government, has brought other benefits as well.
When they return to Spain, they come with new skills that can be put to good use in Spanish industries. More significant, they bring back new European ideas and values, which are helping to change Spanish life.
Civil Process. Politically, too, Spain is better off. The political prisons of the civil war have long since been emptied, the fascist fanatics of the old Falangist Party long since suppressed. Police no longer torture political suspects. The old military kangaroo courts have given way to civil process. Censorship has been somewhat relaxed, and editors have been encouraged to discuss subjects unthinkable a decade ago: two papers last year were allowed to call for a legal opposition party, and a slick magazine published an interview with a film director attacking censorship itself.
Even more impressive was last month's law, passed by a newly resilient Cortes (Parliament), giving Spanish workers the right to strike for higher pay. For nearly three decades, all strikes had been banned in Franco Spain.
There has been considerable progress in freeing the arts. Since 1958, when Antoni T`apies brought glory to Spain by winning the Venice Biennale, the regime has been furiously promoting young Spanish painters and writers.
Once ignored, Tapies and fellow Prize winners Antonio Saura (Carnegie, Guggenheim) and Eduardo Chillida (Venice, Carnegie) are now treated as VIPs, as is Communist Pablo Picasso (although he has refused to set foot in Spain since the civil war). In 1960, an audience of high officials and intellectuals gave a standing ovation of 30 curtain calls to a play that bitterly attacked the regime.
The government now subsidizes Spanish films of "high artistic merit," has turned the Escuela Oficial de Cine into a lively center of experimental drama.
On the whole, however, political liberalization has been slow and erratic. Most of the old restrictive laws are still on the books, and although they are sel dom enforced, the regime can dust them off at its pleasure, and does. Three years ago, Spanish Communist Julian Grimau was executed under the 1941 Law for the Suppression of Masonry and Communism, which supposedly had been repealed.
Spanish students no longer go to jail en masse for campus demonstrations. But a new law last year empowered uni versity authorities to expel "agitators" and ban them from studying anywhere in Spain -- a punishment far harsher than a few months in jail. And last month, for the first time in history, the grey-uniformed security cops, whom Spaniards call los grises, defied centuries of university tradition by entering a Madrid University classroom building to break up an "unauthorized" student meeting.
Around the Table. The government is making much of its bills to grant religious freedom and end censorship. Both, if passed, will be a step in the right direction, but both have been bogged down in ministries and parliamentary committees for more than three years, and there seems to be little hope that they will soon become law. Neither measure is all that radical. The religion bill, pushed by Foreign Minister Fernando Maria Castiella to wipe away the image of religious intolerance that has hurt Spain since the Inquisition, would permit the nation's tiny non-Catholic minority (5,000 Jews and 30,000 Protestants) to build their own houses of worship--which, in practice, they are already doing. The press bill, drawn up by Franco's hard-sell Information Minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne, would supposedly allow publishers to choose their own editors, end prepublication censorship. But it would still hold editors criminally responsible for anything the regime decided was offensive.
Franco has been too wise to try to stop Spaniards from talking. "Free speech is abundant," says a confirmed Francophobe, "and it is a right we exercise to the fullest." One of Spain's most cherished institutions, in fact, is the tertulia, an informal club of a dozen or so men who gather around the same marble-topped table in the same cafe every week and, over endless cups of cafes solos and glasses of water, tear the regime apart. Such traditional hangouts as Madrid's Cafe Gijon will have a dozen or more tertulias going at the same time, their participants eagerly trading opinions, rumors and jokes about everything from women to bullfighting, but most often about Franco himself. In one recent cafe joke, Franco asks his seven-year-old grandson what he wants to be when he grows up. "The Caudillo of Spain, just like you, Grandfather," answers the boy. "Don't be ridiculous," huffs Franco. "There's only room for one Caudillo at a time."
Golden Eggs. Every boom brings its dislocation, and Spain's pell-mell rush to industrialize is no exception. The flood of workers to the cities has sharply cut farm production, forcing Spain to import food. Government spending to feed the development plan has brought a new round of inflation at home, and a horrendous $2 billion trade deficit abroad--too much even for tourist dollars to make up for. Many economists fear that Spain is trying to do too much too quickly. "Our economy is the goose that lays the golden egg," warns Ullastres. "If you try to get four golden eggs at once, you're going to make the goose sick. If you try to get more, you'll kill it."
What Spain desperately needs in order to keep its economy expanding is membership in the European Common Market. Twice rejected even for associate membership, Spain is afraid it may be cut off from its biggest and closest trading partner. Italy has already tried to restrict Common Market imports of Spanish oranges, and although the Italians have so far been overruled, they have not given up.
"It is impossible to think of the economic development of Spain on the fringes of Europe," says Lopez Rodo, and both he and Ullastres have been patiently arguing Spain's case for six years. But the decision to keep Spain out is largely political. Though France and West Germany have no objections, the memories of repression and fascism are still too strong for the Belgians and Dutch. Franco sticks in their throats.
Longing for Belonging. Their rejection sticks deep in Franco's throat. It wounds that most Spanish of all human feelings, pride. As long as his borders were closed, the Spaniard could turn his back on the alien world and tell him self he was better off without it. But Spain now wants back in, and all the way. Psychologically, it needs recognition, acceptance, applause.
It longs to belong to NATO, although there is no military necessity for doing so: the defense pacts it signed with the U.S. in 1953 give it the same protection that NATO nations enjoy, and the U.S. military bases on its soil make it an active partner in Western defense. Three SAC bases, near Zaragoza, Madrid and Seville, although now being phased out as missiles take over from bombers, could be used as a U.S. staging area for any trouble in the Middle East or Africa. The great naval base at Rota, on the Atlantic side of the Strait of Gibraltar, is an anchorage for America's European Polaris fleet.
Spain is also anxious to restore itself as Latin America's godfather. The regime has opened its arms to Latino students, 15,500 of whom are now in Spanish universities. It sends books, trucks, heavy machinery and ships to a growing Latin American market, and Franco recently offered Spain's former colonies $1 billion worth of trade credits and technical aid. The motive ran deeper than merely promoting trade.
Spain's feelings for Latin America are no better illustrated than in the refusal of Franco, one of the world's most zealous antiCommunists, to break off relations with Cuba's Fidel Castro. "We have too many Spanish interests to protect to pull completely out of that tormented island," Franco remarked last year. "It is always embarrassing to" deal with Communists; yet we are obliged to maintain some connection with those in Cuba. By so doing, we have protected our citizens there and saved many a Cuban life."
Partridges & Palace. Franco keeps himself remarkably well informed about world affairs, can discuss in detail everything from the importance of NATO to the U.S. presence in Viet Nam. He has become pragmatic about Communism and has made trade agreements with most Iron Curtain countries. "The Iron Curtain has been there for too many years to think that it can come down by a miracle," he said last fall. "We must accept this reality and try to gradually permeate the wall with trickles of trade and cultural contacts. You can't deny that Russian Communism succeeded in making Russia one of the most powerful nations of the world. There must be something good in it."
Continued Franco: "The Soviets may gradually develop their better qualities and eliminate many of their bad points. More contact with the Western world can influence them favorably and induce them to give some freedom to their people and understand the position of the free world. A sort of stabilization of world peace might then possibly be reached."
At 73, Francisco Franco Bahamonde has mellowed considerably. The years, and a strict low-calorie diet, have whittled away his girth but not, apparently, his strength. Always an avid sportsman, he now spends almost as much time hunting and fishing as he does in the Pardo, his 16th century palace just north of Madrid. His stamina is remarkable. He can still bound up hillsides after mountain goats, shoot 300 partridges a day, and wade for hours hip-deep in the icy mountain streams of Asturias.
Cabinet Candy. On a normal day, he rises at 7, breakfasts lightly on fruit juice, tea and dry toast, then retires to his private chapel for morning prayers. By 9 he is in his study, reading the Madrid newspapers and the official reports stacked high on his large mahogany desk. The calm does not last long. At midmorning the palace is invaded by Franco's seven grandchildren (ages one to 14). Trailed by their English nanny, they race down the Pardo's wide granite corridors, past six-foot honor guards and enormous Goya tapestries, and burst into his study. Franco idolizes his grandchildren, spends as much time with them as the press of official business permits.
Franco's busiest day is Friday, when he meets his Cabinet. The sessions have become legendary. They begin at 9 a.m., usually last well past midnight, with an hour's break for lunch. No smoking is permitted, no water provided. The only concession to mortal weakness is a small silver tray of fruit candy at each place around the long oak conference table. But as the day wears on, one minister after another will catch Franco's eye, get his nodded permission to be excused, and tiptoe out of the room for a cigarette or a trip to the men's room. Franco himself never stirs.
He seldom even speaks. Seated in his high-backed chair at the head of the table, the Caudillo allows his ministers to do most of the talking, cuts in only to ask a question, change the subject--or announce his decision. There is no nonsense about majority rule in Franco's Cabinet. The only vote that counts is Franco's.
Nevertheless, he leans heavily on the advice of the 18 men at the table. Among the most influential:
>> Captain General Agustin Munoz Grandes, 69, Franco's oldest comrade in arms and the man who, as Vice President of the Spanish state, will take over interim power at Franco's death. Commander of Spain's Blue Division, which fought against the Russians on Hitler's eastern front, Armed Forces Chief Munoz Grandes is now ailing, lives quietly with his wife in a small apartment in Madrid, avoids publicity.
>> Lieut. General Camilo Alonso Vega, 76, Minister of the Interior and police boss. Known as "Don Ca-mulo" because of his mulish resistance to change, the white-haired former commander of the Guardia Civil is Franco's strong right arm. He can be counted on to put down trouble wherever it breaks out.
>> Jose Solis Ruiz, 52, Minister of the Movimiento Nacional, Spain's bureaucracy-clogged official party, and boss of its labor syndicates. His jowls are heavy and blue, his head is bald, and his speech is thick with the accents of Andalusia, but Pepe Solis is probably the sharpest practicing politician in the land. The father of 13 children, he delights in kissing babies, is a stem-winding orator who always comes out strong on the side of social reform. -- Fernando Maria Castiella, 58, Foreign Minister. Tall and scholarly, Castiella is a progressive Catholic and perhaps the Cabinet's most consistent defender of greater political freedom.
Onetime Ambassador to Peru and the Vatican, he has a burning desire to join Spain to the rest of Europe. He works closely with U.S. Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke, but his relations with the British are somewhat strained: he is determined to win back Gibraltar, once even wrote a violently anti-British book entitled Spain's Claim.
>> Manuel Fraga Iribarne, 43, Minister of Information and Tourism. Ambitious, hard-driving Fraga lives in an apartment on the top floor of his ministry, puts in a 14-hour day six days a week.
Half his time is spent traveling around Spain, dedicating new hotels and other wise promoting new tourist lures; the other half is devoted to overseeing the Spanish press, which, until the long-discussed press law takes effect, still takes its orders from the government.
>> Laureano Lopez Rodo, 45, Planning Minister and development boss. So soft-spoken that he appears almost self-effacing, Lopez Rodo is known as Franco's eminence grise -- partly because everything about him, including his hair, suit, socks, tie and personality, seems grey. The appearance is deceiving. Son of a Catalan industrialist, he spent much of the civil war as an under ground Nationalist agent (code number: 711) in Republican Barcelona, went on to become Spain's youngest law professor, at 25, and an international authority on public administration. He is an avid tennis player, is up at 6:45 each morning and in his office at 8. Brilliant and tireless, he has a corps of loyal followers who have come to occupy top positions throughout the Franco government, including the young Minister of Industry Gregorio Lopez Bravo.
Opus Dei. Lopez Rodo and Lopez Bravo are two of the most prominent among the rising lights who share membership in a remarkable and growing religious organization known as Opus Dei.
Founded by a Spanish priest named Josemaria Escriva in 1928, Sociedad Sacerdotal de la Santa Cruz y del Opus Dei is an "association of Catholic faithful" that seeks to fill a vacuum that Spain's Catholic Church had long neglected: the lack of a means for developing an aggressive, dedicated, militant laity. Escriva wanted to create, much as Ignatius Loyola had done with his Society of Jesus in the 16th century, spiritual shock troops to rekindle the true spirit of Christianity within the church. But instead of retiring into monasteries, he felt, men with a secular calling as well as a sacred one should be able to follow both at once. The solution: in addition to vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, a man would pledge to God all his professional talents.
It made a good mix. Tens of thousands of Spaniards from all walks of life have taken solace from Opus' sessions by reading more about God and the church, by simple communal association, and by studying the things that interest them--whether business administration, bullfighting, coal mining or early English literature. Opus Dei operates a sophisticated commerce school in Barcelona, an agricultural school in Gerona, a retreat for bullfighters in Asturias, a workers' training center in Madrid, and Spain's only "free" (i.e., nongovernment) university, in Pamplona. Last year 15,000 Spaniards attended its theology seminars, 12,000 spent their vacations in its centers of "spiritual retirement," and 20,000 children enrolled in its 143 summer camps. Driven to a fervor that is positively un-Spanish, Opus Dei members have risen to control of one of Spain's largest banks, many newspapers and magazines, a news agency, a jazz club--and to more than a dozen positions of real power within the Franco government.
Public Warning. Success has won Opus many enemies. It is attacked by old-guard Falangists as "liberal," by campus radicals as "reactionary," by labor leaders as an "economic elite." It is often accused of plotting to seize power after Franco dies, and Fray Justo Perez de Urbel, abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Franco's Valley of the Fallen civil-war monument, recently warned it in a newspaper article to stop "playing politics."
There is no real evidence that Opus Dei has political aims. If some of its members hold top positions in the Franco government, others, such as Christian Democrat Florentine Perez Embid and Liberal Monarchist Rafael Calvo Serer, are prominent opponents of the regime. Says Monsignor Escriva: "Opus Dei will always include all tendencies that the Christian conscience will allow."
It is for precisely that reason that Opus Dei has become such an important factor in Spanish politics. Its members are climbing in every significant political movement except the extreme left. They can be expected to hold positions of authority in whatever government eventually succeeds Franco.
Confusing Answer. What will succeed Franco? Spaniards wish they knew. No one expects a return to civil war. "There are too many committed interests ready to stand in the way of radical upheaval," says a shrewd observer of the Spanish scene. But there is bound to be change; the mystery is, what kind. The official answer is that the machin ery for the transition and continuity of the regime already exists, outlined in six "fundamental laws" that date back to 1947--the closest thing Spain has to a constitution. But the laws are confusing, vague, overlapping and even contradictory.
Since Spain is officially a "kingdom without a king," Franco's successor will presumably be a king--who, according to the fundamental laws, must be an "acceptable" Catholic Spanish male who is of royal blood, is at least 30 years old and swears "loyalty to the principles" of the Franco regime. But how much power the king would have and what kind of government he would preside over are open questions. And if the Cabinet, together with the 13-man Council of the Realm, so decides, it can declare all the royal can didates unacceptable and name a regent instead.
To Spanish monarchists, Franco's only legitimate successor would be Don Juan de Borbon y Battenberg, the strapping 52-year-old son of the late King Alfonso XIII. Don Juan's official title is Count of Barcelona, but monarchists already call him King Juan III,* and in his sprawling white villa at the Portuguese resort town of Estoril, he actually presides over a miniature court. Fifteen Spanish grandees take turns coming over from Spain to act as his lords-in-waiting, two career diplomats serve as his ministers, and a 42-man Privy Council advises him on affairs of state.
He also receives a steady parade of his subjects, who are driven by the busload from Spain.
But there is no guarantee that Don Juan will ever get the call. A believer in representative government, he has never approved of Franco, and for good reason refuses to live in Spain: he does not want to be under the shad ow of the Caudillo. As a result, he is cordially distrusted by many Franco stalwarts. Much more manageable, they feel, would be Don Juan's handsome son, Prince Juan Carlos, 27; Franco sent him through Spain's three military academies and gave him a Madrid palace after his wedding to Greek Princess Sophie. Trouble is, Juan Carlos will not cooperate. "I'll never, never accept the crown as long as my father is alive," he maintains, and there is every indication that he means it. In any case, he has proved unexciting in his few public appearances.
Warring Factions. Whoever, and whatever, comes after Franco will not have an easy time of it. Since the civil war, Franco has been the absolute authority in a land whose citizens are by nature anarchists. The keynote of his rule has been "paz social," but even the wily Caudillo has been hard-pressed at times to keep peace amid the warring factions that have made up his regime.
As the civil war has faded, the factions and their causes have changed, but the battles go on. There are now three political power spheres that are almost bound to collide in their rush to try to fill the post-Franco vacuum. Strangely enough, the Movimiento Nacional is not one of them. It has been reduced by Franco to a powerless bureaucracy, without credo and virtually without following, deprived even of the fascist ideals on which it was founded.
The first sphere is labor, organized now into state-controlled syndicates but under the shadow of the great anarchist and socialist unions of the Republic--which still operate underground, still hold the sympathies of many workers. The second sphere is the Christian Democratic Movement, a loose coalition of Catholic groups ranging from the conservative Accion Catolica, which supports the regime, to the left-leaning Catholic labor movements, which oppose it. (Members of Opus Dei can be found in all groups.) The third is the Monarchists, well organized but without mass popular support. And above them all is the army, leaning at the moment toward the monarchists but capable of stepping in at any moment with a pronunciamiento on the pretext of forestalling violence.
Division of Powers. There is a growing possibility that Franco himself may step in to smooth the transition. He is aware of the problems that his death will create, and, painful though it may be, finally seems to be doing something to try to lessen them. Three times in the past 18 months, his speeches have referred to the need to "institutionalize" the regime. With his approval, the first tentative drafts of a new "institutional law" were debated behind the closed doors of last year's final Cabinet meeting.
It is probably the most radical measure that the Cabinet has ever taken up, for it would hand over a good share of Franco's powers to a premier. According to high government officials, there is unanimous agreement, at least within the Cabinet, that Franco's powers should be divided so that his death will not paralyze the regime. But there is no agreement yet, nor any indication from Franco, on when or how the pre mier should be chosen. The liberals in Franco's Cabinet favor direct popular election, would like to see the premier removed entirely from Franco's control, empowered to choose his own Cabinet and held responsible only to an enlarged and more representative Cortes. The old guard, led by Alonso Vega and the military ministers, say Franco must appoint his own premier and control him.
Time is the most important factor. It is to the length of one man's life, and the rapidity of his action, that the continuity of Spain's economic, social and political advancement is tied. True democracy in the Western sense may not be on the horizon, for Franco believes -- and many of his enemies agree -- that Spaniards are so strong-willed that they need a firm hand to keep them in line. The fear is that if Franco disap pears before he has put his house in order, the social fabric of Spain will be stretched to its limit -- or beyond -- by the struggle for power that might follow.
If, however, Franco lives long enough and acts fast enough, and if the econo my keeps laying its golden eggs, Spain's future is bright, indeed. Which is why it is so important that Spain's present boom continue. A few more years of rising prosperity could easily instill the feeling of general well being on which, in anarchist Spain at least, real political maturity must be based.
* Spain itself has never had a King Juan, but four Juans have ruled in the land, two each in the ancient kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. Most famous of them were Juan II of Aragon, father of King Ferdinand, and Juan II of Castile and Leon, father of Queen Isabella.
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