SPAIN: A Little Crazy

Both sides had planned carefully. Spanish Republicans had announced a “month of agitation” to attract U.N. attention to Franco repression. But the Caudillo acted first, suddenly uncovered for U.N. gaze a Communist cell conspiring in Madrid, claimed to have bagged the entire central committee of the Spanish Communist Party. He clapped some 70 persons into prison incommunicado. Next day, as if with damp fuses, 14 bombs burst belatedly in front of Madrid food shops.

There were other signs of unrest in Spain. The New York Herald Tribune’s William Attwood got into the antiCommunist, anti-Franco northern Basque provinces last week, found “a facade of order and prosperity that would deceive a casual tourist, a poverty-stricken land where a man who dares to say what he thinks is thrown into jail—or worse.

“. . . The whole absurd panoply of totalitarianism is on display. . . . The multitudes of gaudy uniforms . . . soldiers with red tassels dangling from their overseas caps; the snappy, booted, armed police, with their short clubs strapped to their belts; the civil guard, in their odd tricorn hats; the municipal police in blue, the special border police in green . . . poker-faced plain-clothes men flashing their badges and demanding identification papers. . . .”

Nevertheless, said Attwood, “there is no question but that the underground [resistance] network is an efficient one. . . . Not a week passes but some town in this area is festooned with national flags or showered with clandestine newspapers.”

Confided a Basque bartender, leaning over his bar in San Sebastian: “We are all a little crazy here after nine years of this. We feel like doing something violent.”