The proud, hardy, melancholy farmers of Spain scratched the dry soil last week with ancient tools. The drought was one of the worst in modern times. In Barcelona, the shortage of hydroelectric power kept the textile plants shut down for six days out of seven. The people, inured to poverty for centuries, looked for help from two sources: from God, in the form of rain, and from the U.S., in the form of money, machines, supplies. They were almost wholly unaware of the controversy that raged in the free world over whether Franco’s Spain should be helped or not.
In the park of the Pardo Palace, outside Madrid, where Madrilenos like to spend sunny Sundays, tough olive trees wilted in the drought. In the palace, walled in and surrounded by army barracks, pudgy Dictator Francisco Franco worked all week on the 16-billion peseta ($1,460,000,000 at the official rate) budget for 1949. About one-third of it would go to the army.
Franco had ten-year-old Juan Carlos, Prince of the Asturias, to lunch. The pale, quick-witted prince, son of exiled Pretender Don Juan (now in Portugal), is being educated in Spain under Franco’s protection, looking toward an eventual restoration of the monarchy. Franco called the princeling “Alteza” (Highness). Don Juan, with Bourbon pride, called the Generalissimo merely “General.”
No Irresistible Surge. The Franco regime is an old-fashioned dictatorship. It is not dynamic and expansionist like Nazi Germany or Bolshevist Russia. It clings to old institutions and traditions, notably the Church, instead of trying to replace them. It is not strongly ideological. It does not propagandize itself as the Utopian answer to everything, or as an irresistible surge of historical force. Franco himself calls his government “provisional” and speaks of a future return to “normalization.”
Organized opposition is ruthlessly suppressed, but no positive effort is made to remold the tough Spanish character. Private criticism is heard everywhere; it is amazingly bold and seems to go unpunished.
To TIME’S Paris Bureau Chief André Laguerre, who was visiting Spain last week, a Madrid policeman said: “Things are bad and getting worse. We’re getting into an inflationary situation. I have a wife and child, and my pay is 14 pesetas [about 50¢ on the free market] a day. I can’t manage much longer. I hope to go to France. I hate to leave Spain, but I’ll go anywhere I can make a living.”
As a rule, the people do not complain of dictatorship but of corruption in the government. Since Franco and his cabinet are not regarded as venal, there is far less complaint against them than against the bureaucracy. A small factory owner complained: “To add a wing to my plant, or to get an import license for a small quantity of raw materials, I know I will have to bribe about six people. So only the rich can afford to expand.”
Yet Franco seemed to be more firmly in the saddle than ever. Organized opposition had been largely obliterated. The most obvious, evidences that Spain is not a free country are the absence of criticism in the press, and the ubiquity of the army, which is the main prop of the regime. Spain has 350,000 to 400,000 well-fed, well-treated soldiers under arms, and if the need arose she could send a million trained men to battle, though with poor and insufficient weapons.
Life in a Pillbox. The bitterness of Spain’s Civil War has largely died down, without being forgotten. Most Spaniards, even those who hate or dislike Franco, shrink at the thought of more bloodshed. The acres of ruins at Madrid’s University City lie just as they have for the past twelve years, except for a few new, chastely designed academic buildings. On each side of a road are two damp, moldering pillboxes, which were occupied by opposing forces at the height of the battle for this area.
“In the Nationalist pillbox,” Laguerre reported, “a destitute family was living, placidly enough. The mother had laid out her washing to dry on the concrete, while her four small children, raggedly dressed but chubby and smiling, played around her skirts or swatted flies. ‘It is a solid house,’ the mother said.
“This is a vital people, whose children, even in rags, look happier and healthier than French children, and who give an impression of stimulation, of intellectual and spiritual strength.”
More Must-Reads from TIME
- L.A. Fires Show Reality of 1.5°C of Warming
- Behind the Scenes of The White Lotus Season Three
- How Trump 2.0 Is Already Sowing Confusion
- Bad Bunny On Heartbreak and New Album
- How to Get Better at Doing Things Alone
- We’re Lucky to Have Been Alive in the Age of David Lynch
- The Motivational Trick That Makes You Exercise Harder
- Column: All Those Presidential Pardons Give Mercy a Bad Name
Contact us at letters@time.com