Spain: Toward a Change

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Spain this year.

Spain's application to hook up with the Common Market (so far. no response from the Six) was an enormous psychological step that fits in with other changes.

Indolence is no longer the fashion among aristocrats; many are out making money.

Businessmen have broader horizons, pursue export sales more energetically. A still small but significant factor of change is the Spanish women. More are going to universities than ever before. Man's traditional supremacy no longer goes unquestioned. Says a shrewd Spaniard: "When does a man work best? When he is pushed by women. In Spain, the women are beginning to push the men.'' Still Backward. Occasionally Franco contributes an article on economics to a Madrid journal, signing his pieces "Hispanicus," and he takes full credit for Spain's economic progress. Actually, much of the credit belongs to huge injections of cash and advice from abroad. Start of the money flow came even before Franco agreed to let the U.S. build air and naval bases on Spanish soil; in a decade the U.S. pumped $503 million into Spain in military aid alone. An even greater sum from abroad has gone to modernize the Spanish economy and implement the 1959 stabilization plan after Spain's disastrous inflation. The plan worked. The soaring prices leveled off; investors regained confidence; gold and dollar reserves soared from virtually zero in 1959 to a whopping $1.1 billion today.

But Spain's progress so far has been tiny compared to what it could be, and has only served to whet the people's appetite for more.

Spain is still painfully backward and depressed. On the edge of Madrid, the gritty Puente de Vallecas district is called "Little Russia" by its occupants—street cleaners, ditchdiggers and the like, who earn as little as 60¢ a day and live in a smelly maze of shacks. Beyond, in the open country, are the peasants who work the huge holdings of absentee landlords for a pittance; in Spain, one-hundredth of the population still owns half of the land. Five million Spanish peasants use no mechanized farm tools at all; as they helped bring in the harvest last week, they had, as the Spanish saying goes, "only their hands." Spain's per capita income is the second lowest, next to Portugal, in Western Europe. Most Madrid families can no longer afford even the lowest-price (80¢) seats at the bullfights, now go more and more to the soccer games, where admission is cheaper. Many people take on two jobs, one in the morning, another in the afternoon, to make ends meet. Concern at the cost of living is so great that able Commerce Minister Alberto Ullastres had to go on TV to soothe housewives, an unprecedented act for a minister in Franco's regime.

What concerns Ullastres is Spain's industry and commerce—creaky, antiquated, often monopolistic. Among its worst aspects are those crude relics of fascism, the labor-management Sindicatos, which fix workers' wages as well as employers' prices, forbid strikes by workers or layoffs by bosses. Collective bargaining within the syndicates has been allowed in the past three years, but government red tape and inflexible employers have left the ordinary workers of Spain embittered.

That is the background of Spain's recent, bitter labor troubles.

The Strike Story. Asturias is a