SPANISH LETTER
short spines as it revolves. He is bald and small and his cheeks are taut
and hard as he faces me, his mouth is bitter.
His
wife is passive and
sits with quietly folded hands.
People complain rather freely on very short acquaintance about
the regime: the shortness of the rations, the inferior bread, the black
market, the army, the police, the Falange, and the church.
Madrileiios
speak of the recent referendum on the law of succession as
el rever–
endum,
a priests' affair. It was conducted with the familiar, heavy–
handed efficiency of fascist elections. Workers in the unreliable
barrios
of Mataderos, Vallecas, and Cuatro Caminos received ballots beforehand
with a printed
Si.
Ration books which were not stamped at the polling–
place to show that their holders had voted were invalid after election
day. Nevertheless many people, monarchists as well as republicans,
abstained, and even government figures acknowledged that a consider–
able number had voted
no:
132,000 in Barcelona, 117,000 in Madrid,
36,000
in
Seville. The socialists interpret the referendum as an attempt
by the regime to convince the United States of its stability in order to
obtain a loan. Franco has become very confident since the weeks after
V-E Day when it was thought that he had lost together with Hitler.
The Germans did as they liked in Madrid during the war, and everyone
was therefore greatly surprised that Franco was allowed to remain in
power after their defeat. But Britain and the United States did not stop
selling him the gasoline without which his army, estimated at seven
hundred thousand men, would have been paralyzed. And now, with
the air of future allies, Spanish fascists tell you that no other country
on the continent is so safe and convenient a base for the coming war
with Russia. France and Italy are, or soon will be, communist. Spain is
a strategic center owing to Gibraltar, and Franco's reliability as an old
fighter against communism is appreciated by America. Besides, every–
body knows what magnificent soldiers the Spanish are. It is curious
how much national pride is mingled with the cynicism of the people who
tell you this. Everyone, even communists and socialists, has a touch of
this pride, and fascists and socialists alike joke explosively about the
Italian disaster at Guadalajara: "The order was
'ala bayoneta'
and they
thought it was
'a la camioneta'
"- "To the trucks!" instead of "Bayonet
charge!"
·
There is, judging from the number of political arrests and the
frequency and violence of the attacks in the press on Prieto and other
exiled leaders, a great deal of underground activity. Several republicans
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