Spain: The Duchess Prevails

She is only 5 ft. tall and she weighs just 901bs., but Spain’s ponderous judiciary moved to confront her with all the caution of a broken-horned bull facing a top-ranking torero. She was, after all, the Duchess of Medina Sidonia, three times a grandee of Spain, and she had proved herself a troublesome opponent in the past. In 1967, she was arrested for her role in organizing a farmers’ protest march to demand additional U.S. compensation for damages suffered when three U.S. nuclear bombs accidentally fell near Palomares. This time, the problem centered on an explosive novel that she had written called The Strike. After a year of contention, the case reached its climax last week-with a notable victory for the fiery author.

The duchess’s difficulties began in January 1967, when a Paris publishing house brought out a Spanish-language edition of The Strike. Almost immediately, copies of the book were bootlegged into Spain, and it quickly became a cause célèbre on many social levels. The duchess’s restaurant meals were constantly interrupted by waiters who had read the book and simply wanted to shake her hand. The book was avidly read in her home region of Andalusia, where the novel is set. There she is respected not only as a horse woman but for her deep and continuing concern with the problems of the peasants. Separated from her husband, she lives with her three children and has now completed a second novel.

Lamentable Acts. In recent years there has been a mild relaxation of censorship in Spain, but The Strike was such strong fare that the regime took action. After several tribunals dithered over the case, the duchess was finally brought to trial by the Press Court set up in 1967 to handle “press offenses” that fall under the penal code. The trial of the diminutive, 32-year-old duchess took place in the tribunal’s highceilinged, chandeliered chamber.

As she entered, she received several encouraging embraces from spectators, then stood to hear the prosecution charge that her novel “insidiously presents in factual style a denunciation of a community.” The prosecution’s unhappiness turned largely on her portrayal of local officials, including a judge, who join in what the court called “a lamentable series of acts” to quash a peasant strike organized by field hands who want better pay.

The duchess denied that she had sketched the judge from her own personal experiences with the courts. The tribunal, however, was not in the mood for prolonged explanations. At one point, as she tried to explain her position, a judge ordered: “Limit your answers. Make them short.” The two-hour trial ended abruptly when the duchess was cut off as she told the court that she was simply “exercising the right to free expression recognized in the French Revolution.”

Cause for Optimism. For the duchess, the outlook seemed gloomy. But in a surprising move, the press tribunal last week cleared her of the charges, in effect ruling that all works of fiction fall outside existing Spanish legislation. Some observers speculated that in view of conspicuous and longstanding government pressure, the decision represented less a display of leniency from above than a spirited show of independence by the lower courts. The duchess still faces the possibility of trial on similar charges in other courts, but the newly established precedent offered fresh cause for optimism. “In Spain,” the duchess once said, “there are two professions that are equally risky: the torero’s and the writer’s.” The writer’s will seem a little less so from now on.