It was a typical Spanish Sunday afternoon. Family and friends filled the room, young children competing with the old and infirm for the right to be heard. Amid the general chaos, one old lady turned to me with tears in her eyes and, producing four photos from her purse, said: ‘Here are mis cuatro muertos (my four dead ones)—my father, my husband, my daughter and Generalissimo Franco’.
Her son, a man in his mid-40s, turned to me and said, ‘things were better under Franco—there were jobs, no drugs and the streets were safe. Everyone wants to criticise Franco but he did a lot of good things’.
As a relative newcomer to the country, what does one say when confronted with the melancholy of nostalgia for a dictator who divided Spain and ruled over it ruthlessly for four decades? I smiled weakly.
When you first arrive in Spain, it is easy to be impressed by the country’s transition to democracy. A devastating civil war and nearly 40 years of fascism seem, to the outside observer, to have simply evaporated upon Franco’s death in November 1975. By 1978, Spain had a new constitution and now possesses a democracy so robust and successful that it is almost impossible to imagine this vibrant, somewhat hedonistic nation cast out by the outside world and withering under repression for so many years.
However, if you scratch a little below the surface, Spain is a country with deep scars whose survival as a modern democratic state has depended upon a veil of silence which masks its past.
Every family in Spain is still marked by the civil war and the years of Franco, divided in memory, if nothing else, between those who were for and those who were against Franco. In Madrid, you can buy a souvenir statue of Franco, as easily as a toy soldier. There are statues to Franco in cities throughout Spain and many towns still have a street named Avenida de Generalissimo Franco, as if he were some benign, fatherly figure of folklore rather than a man who admired Hitler and Mussolini, routinely tortured or killed government opponents and, even as late as 1975, demanded the fascist salute of an outstretched arm when greeted. And again a phrase keeps recurring—‘Franco wasn’t all bad, he did some good things’.
And yet, Franco’s time has forever passed. Very few, apart from old men and women lost in the