Turning Point
From FRANCISCO SUAREZ
MADRID
HAVING asked the ritual question of whether he liked Spain, journalists assembled for a press conference last week in Barcelona were taken aback to hear the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, who had come to give a series of lectures on Poetry and Contemporary Man' in the Italian Institute, answer drily that he did not, but in the light of Quasimodo's political convictions this was not surprising. In the last two months alone, at least a seore of Spanish Communists have been arrested in Catalonia, the Asturias, and in Andalusia, accused of illegal propaganda. Some were allowed to go home; others, brought to Madrid to be • tried in due course in accordance with the decree of martial law proclaimed in the autumn of 1960. And a number of Anarchists have also been arrested.
Nevertheless it has been observed on several occasions recently that the Spanish security forces are less enthusiastic in the fulfilment of their repressive duties than they used to be. There are indications of solidarity between the police and the discontented sectors of the population; the symptoms of social pressures from below which have indeed manifested them- selves in various ways since the twenty-fifth anniversary of General Franco's ascent to absolute power, which seems to have marked a turning-point in Spanish internal politics.
Much was made in the Spanish press of the general amnesty in connection with the anniver- sary, by which all prisoners having served• twenty years or more of their sentence were to be released forthwith.. Those whose sentence did not exceed two years were to'serve no more than half their time; all other terms were reduced by one-fifth. But the decree contains a number of booby-traps;especially for political prisoners. It does not apply, for example, to those who have been affected by a previous amnesty (granted upon the death of Pope Pius MI); and it may be'denied to those whose behaviour has not been perfect in the eyes of the prison authorities- which means that prisoners may depend upon a more or less arbitrary decision of the officials in charge of the prison.
Among those who will benefit, though, will surely be Federico Monsalve Flores, a former high official of the Institute of FOreign Currency, condemned last November to eighteen years and payment of about £300,000 in costs and itidem- nity to the Spanish State. The foreign currency scandal broke loose about two years ago, when it came to light that enormous fortunes were being smuggled abroad, transactions which had attained such proportion that the authorities were finally obliged to step in, although this meant involving some pillars of the regime. Eventually Monsalve was chosen to be the scapegoat; though he certainly was not the only guilty party, his name alone was published in the press.
While radio and television have not yet tired of glorifying the twenty-fifth anniversary of the present reie, tbe ..o,noosigon is busy and divided as always.. in Tiontlouse a number of parties, including the Socialists, signed a joint anti-Franquist, but at the same time anti- Communist, manifesto. Indalecio Prieto, former Minister of the Republic and leader of the exiled Spanish Socialists in Mexico, travelled to Paris for the special purpose of meeting Don Juan, Pretender to the Spanish throne. Follow- ing the advice of his councillors, Don Juan can- celled the meeting at the last moment.
Meanwhile Jose-Maria Gil Robles, leader of the Christian Democrats and resident in Madrid, is fulminating against one Mauritio Karl (real name Carlevilla, but he likes to sound German), the author of such masterpieces as The Sexual and Political Biography of Stalin. In his intro- duction to a recent edition of The Private Corre- spondence of Largo Caballero, which has since been banned and withdrawn, Karl insisted that Caballero was right in saying that Gil Robles could very well have staged a rightist coup d'etat in 1934, if he had insisted on being Minister of War and had appointed General Franco to be Chief of Staff. Robles seems to find it most embarrassing to be accused by a Falangist of having delayed the Fascist victory by two years; he has immediately written an open letter- to General Franeo, declaring that he (the Caudillo) knew that such a possibility had never existed; and he is suing Karl for libel.
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