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Late Spanish Fascists in a Changing World: Latin American Communists and East European Reformism, 1956–1975

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2019

Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer
Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer*
Affiliation:
University of Zaragoza, Departamento de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain
*
maruiz@unizar.es
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Abstract

The main aim of this article is to show how the political evolution of Western and Eastern Europe during the Cold War cannot be fully understood without analysing the political experiences of countries like Spain, which were not at the centre of the period's political decisions but whose evolution was inspired and suggested by strategies outside the political mainstream. In this respect, the internal evolution of Francoist Spain from the mid-1950s through the 1960s portrays a peculiar political situation demonstrating the capillarity of political and social experiences across the Iron Curtain in Europe and Latin America. A minority of influential sectors linked to the Single Spanish Party, the Falange, pursued its own third way, ignoring the Cold War models. They instead looked to what was happening in Eastern Bloc countries, especially after the events in Hungary in 1956, as well as to the political experiments in Latin America, especially the Cuban revolution.

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Contemporary European History , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , August 2019, pp. 358 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Adolfo Suárez['s government] was banana-republic thinking in its most international form. It makes sense. He never lived outside Spain and only read national press that said our friends were Latin Americans and Arabs and that French, English and American liberalism was anti-Spanish.Footnote 1

Francoist Spain arose in a context of interwar ideological radicalisation and was supported by fascist powers: its visceral anti-communism emerged from a fratricidal dynamic. After fascism in Europe was defeated and the Second World War ended, the Spanish regime could only survive by aligning itself with the West in a cold war that was providential for General Franco. The regime kept the memory of the 1936–9 civil war alive, at whatever price, as a means of guaranteeing its longevity. In the 1960s most of Europe still considered Francoist Spain a peculiar regime: a mix of fascism, traditional Catholicism and secular backwardness.Footnote 2

This article argues that political developments in Western and Eastern Europe during the Cold War cannot be fully understood without looking at countries such as Spain, which, although peripheral to the major international events and geopolitical decisions of the era, was nevertheless influenced in its own internal evolution by ideas and practices connected with these external events and which transcended conventional political and ideological barriers. Indeed, the internal evolution of Francoist Spain from the mid-1950s through the 1960s highlights the capillarity of political and social experiences across the Iron Curtain in Europe and Latin America. Although in the 1950s Spain was aligned with the United States in the Cold War (while remaining wedded to interwar fascism), a minority of influential figures in the Falange, the single party created by Franco in April 1937, pursued a ‘third way’.Footnote 3 Rejecting both the North American and Soviet models, they looked elsewhere for inspiration: to developments in Eastern Bloc countries, in Hungary after the events in 1956 and Czechoslovakia with the Prague spring of 1968, as well as to political experiments in Latin America, specifically the revolution in Cuba, which had been part of Spain until 1898.

Decontextualised Fascists: Falangists after 1945

Despite a brief revival of political fortune in the 1950s, the Falangists were in the shadows of power from the late 1940s and especially after the government crisis of 1957, when the men of political Catholicism linked to Opus Dei took hold of key government positions, especially the economic portfolios.Footnote 4 Yet the Falangists remained powerful in some areas, including, for example, among labour and youth. Moreover, they had their own government department (the Ministry of the General Secretary of the Movement, as the Falangist party was called after 1957), a strong presence at a local and an administrative level (most provincial heads were Falangists) and the mass encadrement system, in which people were grouped by age, gender or social class into organisations such as the Women's Section (Sección Femenina; SF), the Youth Front (Frente de Juventudes), the Spanish University Union (Sindicato Español Universitario; SEU) and the official Worker's Union (Organización Sindical Española). In the early 1960s the Secretary General of the Movement, José Solís Ruiz, tried to build a union-based national labour movement that maintained the Falange's social discourse and responsiveness as a counterweight to the ‘right-wing’ (Opus Dei ministers and their allies) faction who sought appropriate the regime and its legacy.Footnote 5

The 1960s witnessed enormous economic growth in the country. As well as bringing prosperity and development, it also created territorial and social imbalances and highlighted deficiencies in social services and welfare provision which created social tensions. Given Franco's age – he turned seventy in 1962 – this was also a period of expectation and planning for the future of the regime. In this context, certain parts of the Falange tried to develop a new project for the future of a post-Franco regime, taking advantage of Minister Fraga Iribarne's new 1966 press law.Footnote 6 Initiatives such as the 1966 ‘Conversations on the Future of Spain’ were launched, in which these Falangists voiced their concerns about the regime's tired and obsolescent approach to contemporary developments and sought to consolidate their own Falangist social base in opposition to those sectors of Spanish society which identified with Opus Dei.Footnote 7 Groups such as the Association of the Former Members of the Youth Front (Asociación de Antiguos Miembros del Frente de Juventudes) encouraged greater social participation, with its leader, Manuel Cantarero del Castillo, a Falangist lawyer, later opting in the 1970s for a peculiar formula of Falangist-rooted socialism. These initiatives were variously described as ‘blue [for the blue shirt of the Falangists] reformism’,Footnote 8 ‘national left’, ‘independent Falange’ and ‘left-wing Falange’, and were best represented by Rodrigo Royo, founder of the magazine SP (in print from 1957 to 1972), the success of which led to the creation of a short-lived daily, Diario SP, from 1967 to 1969.Footnote 9 Other publications that were part of this reformist project included Índice (another personal project of an independent Falangist journalist, Juan Fernández Figueroa), and Falangist university youth journals such as Marzo, Nosotros and Acento Cultural.

These publications were not dependent on the powerful apparatus of the movement nor did they receive any direct financing from it. However, individuals on the editorial board or in management were from the Falange or had a career loyal to the regime. These publications called for political renewal and increased participation, and reported on the injustices of an unequal world as well as on the shortcomings of the regime's daily operations. They were also keenly interested in foreign policy and in providing an open forum for well-educated and informed readers. These were men trained emotionally and politically in the regime who understood that society needed to move past the Civil War but that any modification of the regime's work still needed to be based on it. Although they rejected a return to the status quo ante, which they saw as too close to the Western liberal-democratic model, they were more flexible than the regime when it came to handling different modes of ideological and cultural expression. But they also saw in Franco and in his continuity an inescapable reference point. According to historians such as Gil Pecharromán, these new groups embodied a third generation of Falangists, born in the years around the Civil War and schooled in the Falangist Student Union (Sindicato Español Universitario; SEU) and Youth Front workshops.Footnote 10 These organisations were affected by the February 1956 student crisis, when a protest by Madrid University law students demanding the free election of representatives and criticising the SEU evolved into a clash between Falangists and students. As a result, a nonconformist and critical potential within the dictatorship developed, which, however, did not stop these new generation Falangists from holding positions in the regime. Some of these men, including Rodolfo Martín Villa and Juan José Rosón, went on to launch the Union of the Democratic Centre (Unión de Centro Democrático) after Franco's death and to support the reformist policies of Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez in the democratic transition,Footnote 11 while members of Falangist youth organisations were eventually involved in anti-Francoist opposition.Footnote 12

This critical attitude did not come out of nowhere. It can be traced back to the SEU magazines of the late 1940s, and through the 1950s in Alcalá and La Hora, and into the 1960s on the pages of Nosotros and in particular Acento Cultural, a publication which managed to attract the most talented youth of their generation, resulting in high-quality cultural contributions that also expressed a desire for change. These publications made it possible to go beyond the regime's short-sightedness and open up a world of creative, literary, social and cultural innovations to Spanish youth.Footnote 13 The political maturation process that Francoist society experienced cannot be understood without examining the role of these publications, the new environment in universities, which had become relative ‘safe havens of freedom’ (Espacios – o islas – de libertad),Footnote 14 and the more fluid international context, now removed from the polarisation of the early Cold War. The readership these publications addressed was a youth socialised in the myths of pre-war Falangism, which, although still faithful to Franco and adhering to the ideals of 1930s fascism, had nevertheless adapted to the new international context and the period's changed sensibilities.

These relevant, albeit minority, groups within the political culture of 1960s Falangism paid close attention to alternative projects and initiatives developed in the decades following the Second World War, such as the 1959 Cuban revolution, and also the reformist movements in communist Eastern Europe. The interest which part of the Francoist political class showed in these foreign development provides telling insights into the dynamics of the Spanish regime and its complex political evolution.Footnote 15 The evolution of the Falange as an organisation – a remnant of defeated mid-century fascisms – also casts light on the world of post-war neo-fascisms, post-fascisms and their contradictions.Footnote 16

A World in Turmoil

Starting in the mid-1950s, those most closely observing the social context could see that Spanish society was in turmoil. A new movement emerged which, starting with the events of February 1956, demonstrated that youth's socialisation in the values of fascism had failed.Footnote 17 Universities and other cultural platforms were undergoing a process of review and paradigm change throughout the 1960s which eventually generated ideas of political freedom on university campuses. A young workers’ movement emerged in the early 1960s which challenged the regime from Asturian mines and created the first ‘workers’ commissions’. More generally, the country's economic development and transformation fostered the emergence of social movements at the end of the 1960s and 1970s, as exemplified by the neighbourhood movement.Footnote 18

On economic issues, the static and backward-looking Spain clutching at National Catholicism and the fascist dreams of the 1930s and 1940s was being left behind, subsumed in the emerging consumerism of the era. For the first time, Spaniards had access to a modest first SEAT car, the prospect of a small house on the outskirts of the city that was owned rather than rented, paid holidays and the increasing presence of mass tourism bringing with it new customs that pushed aside the old.Footnote 19 Those parts of the opposition most conscious of this situation started to develop ideas for national reconciliation and overcoming the Civil War, as demonstrated by the strategy of the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España; PCE) designed by Javier PraderaFootnote 20 and Jorge Semprún.Footnote 21 Unlike these centres of outside opposition, the regime as a whole was never able to articulate either a plan for reconciliation or an exciting proposal for a common future. Any attempt always faced the obstacle of what the regime considered to be its foundation: triumph in the Civil War and the values embodied by the uprising of 18 July 1936, which marked the start of the rebellion against the Second Republic.

The year 1956 was, of course, not only important in the case of Spain, but also worldwide.Footnote 22 Events in Hungary, in particular, had a major global impact, including in Spain. As the writer and militant communist Jorge Semprún, a man who truly understood his age, later recalled: ‘the epicentre of the 1956 movement, the beginning of this almost seismic landslide, lies in the Soviet world’.Footnote 23 The change in the PCE's attitude and the start of the reconciliation policy can only be fully understood in relation to Hungary's reformism, itself the product of the de-Stalinisation begun by Khrushchev's ‘Secret Speech’ of February 1956 which denounced Stalin's crimes and his system of terror.Footnote 24 Real and apparent liberalisation, which came about in the communist world during the period and throughout the 1950s, and whose influence stretches into the 1960s, also touched a regime like Spain's, which had survived unchanged because the Cold War had secured General Franco's position. Reports of Stalin's crimes mobilised critics of established authoritarian regimes even – although it sounds paradoxical – in Spain. When Spanish students condemned police action in the first clashes before the crisis of 1956, calling the police chief ‘the Spanish Beria’ (in reference to the notorious Soviet secret police chief), they were, in some ways, comparing the oppression of the Francoist regime to that of Stalinist Russia.Footnote 25

The metaphorical Iron Curtain, therefore, did not prevent events on one side from having repercussions on the other. These repercussions were not a mere reaction of the governing elites, but rather the reaction of a society that was paying closer attention to the realities that undermined the dominant discourse on each side. Media directly linked to the Franco regime, such as the Revista de Estudios Políticos (the publication of the regime's think tank, the Institute of Political Studies), and the Movement's main newspaper, Arriba, closely monitored developments in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death and under Khrushchev. The Revista de Estudios Políticos had a column on international politics which included analysis of changes in the Soviet Union and their influence on Eastern Europe.Footnote 26 Arriba covered the shifting international situation starting in the mid-1950s in some detail: the Bandung Conference,Footnote 27 the episodes of Hungary's political evolutionFootnote 28 and the twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress.Footnote 29 Distrust of any initiative coming out of Moscow, to be expected in the publication that embodied the regime's official position, informed this reporting, and the subsequent invasion of Hungary would become a symbol of the ‘invariability’ of communist conduct which pitted the traditional Catholic Hungary against Soviet terror. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion in November 1956, the Hungarian flag flew at the headquarters of the Falange in Madrid and exiles disembarking in Franco's Spain were given assistance by the regime. Until the new media, closer to what was called the Falangist ‘national left’ in the 1960s, tried to formulate a new view of what was happening behind the Iron Curtain, the regime's textbook anti-communism prevailed. Before 1956 Spain's diplomatic relations with Eastern Europe had very limited content and were defined by the regime's declared anti-communist hostility.Footnote 30

A New International Context: Anti-Americanism and Awareness of the Third World

Franco's Spain, despite being aligned with the West during the Cold War and hosting US bases on its soil after the 1953 accord, nevertheless still identified with that part of Europe that had lost the Second World War. The regime's press, and that of the movement, regularly expressed its continuing identification with the defeated fascist powers in savage attacks against materialism and the US-style liberal model. ‘By definition, the name for any position that condemns the capitalist structure and the communist dictatorship, defending the most advanced social justice and respect for the eternal values of the human spirit’, wrote Rodrigo Royo in Diario SP in 1968, ‘is fascism, although it may bother those who allow themselves to be brainwashed by the rapacious victors of the Second World War’.Footnote 31 The fascist soul of many journalists, writers and men of the regime, even if they sided with the West against ‘Asian’ communism, which for them was the incarnation of evil (meaning it was identifiable with the losing side in the Civil War), did not encompass the political and economic values of the victors of the Second World War.

Capitalism and the materialistic values that Falangist rhetoric rejected were embodied by the United States and prompted memories of the war in Cuba in 1898 when the Spanish press compared the Spanish ‘lion’, noble and devoted to a lost cause, to the American ‘pig’, shamelessly seeking profit. All of these values continued to be associated with the United States in Falangist discourse.Footnote 32 Some of the readers of magazines like SP and Diario SP objected to this portrayal of the United States, and there were frequent letters to the editor complaining of the ‘anti-American’ tone of these publications and bemoaning the excessive attention paid to the evolution of socialist countries or Marxist regimes. There was constant but careful criticism of the United States, the economic power of its multinationals and especially their heavy-handedness in Central and South America. The editor-in-chief of SP, who took over from founder Rodrigo Royo, affirmed that anti-Americanism was one of the core themes of the magazine.Footnote 33 Significantly, in 1969, SP opposed the Spanish–US agreement on renewing military bases.Footnote 34

In its search for new and viable models in the changing international context of the 1950s and 1960s, this independent Falangist press focused increasingly and with fascination on recent phenomena like the Non-Aligned Movement, and states associated with it, that had emerged out of a decolonising world. The hostility which Arab nationalism, especially the creation of the United Arab Republic by Nasser and growing tensions between the Arab world and Israel, aroused in the West only increased Francoist interest in these movements, often expressed in active criticism of US intervention, especially in Latin America and other conflict zones, like Vietnam.Footnote 35 Some of the regimes in the emerging ‘Third World’ were also good examples of ‘middle roads’: modern, ‘new kinds of regimes’ – to use a phrase of the late Cominform leader Andrei Zhdanov – arising from independent or nationalist-socialist revolutions with charismatic unelected figures who embodied the essence of the regime, such as Tito in Yugoslavia, Nasser in Egypt, Castro in Cuba, Ben Bella in Algeria, to name some of the better known. These regimes were strongly nationalistic, often with a single-party system (or at least they did not regularly hold elections), and wanted to express their own voice within the confines of the Cold War. In other words, their situation, from a Francoist perspective, was not that different from Spain's.

Fascination with political ‘middle road’ initiatives was not limited those of the Third World. As a result of its independent and defiant stance in the international arena, General de Gaulle's France was also scrutinised. The two generals – de Gaulle and Franco – were compared and the question was even raised as to whether the Falange might be the inspiration for some of the French government's measures (irrespective of the fact that de Gaulle had fought fascism from the start and had been put in power through electoral means, while General Franco had risen to power hoisted up by European fascisms and held onto his post through a fierce dictatorship).Footnote 36

None of this admiration for the ‘middle road’ detracted from the fact that the Spanish regime did not hesitate in aligning with the West in its anti-communism, as shown by Spain's desire to join NATO when it was created in 1949.Footnote 37 Yet, the regime's discomfort with the Western democratic model was undeniable and would remain. At the same time, however, its attitude towards liberal democracy became more nuanced. During the 1960s the noun ‘democracy’ lost its negative connotation at a point when the idea of citizen participation and involvement in the state's decisions was gradually coming to be seen as inevitable and democracy, therefore, as ‘organic’ or ‘real’.Footnote 38 A new language emerged around ‘participation’, ‘coinciding opinions’, ‘association’ and ‘organic’ democracy as an alternative to a US model of liberal demoncracy, and which represented a better Western fit for a Spain that in 1962 expressed its desire to participate in the European Common Market. Some of the regime's subsequent measures, for example the direct election of representatives by families after the Organic Law of the State of January 1967 was passed, were a demonstration of the need to find a model that made participation and ‘democracy’ compatible with the reality of a dictatorial regime whose doctrinal roots could be found in fascism.Footnote 39

A Changing World: The Case of the Cuban Revolution

In the case of Cuba, the independent Falangist media saw in the guerrillas and their leaders the same élan of the original Falange. While in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel Castro purportedly carried in his pack the complete works of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange.Footnote 40 The magazine SP, for example, was sympathetic to the revolution, appointing Cotón Bustamante, who defined himself as a Falangist-Castroist, as its Cuba correspondent. The paper supported the revolution until the first diplomatic crises between Spain and Cuba in December 1961, when Castro aligned himself with Moscow and Marxist-Leninism.Footnote 41

Initially, SP cultivated the Castro legend: ‘half intellectual, half warrior’, a leader of a war ‘that has ended with the victory of tenacity and faith in pure ideals . . . . He has the combination of prestige and the halo of the hero and the victor. He is the myth of the people . . . . He wants to leave his rifle behind and return to his books but perhaps it is not yet time.’Footnote 42 SP’s Falangist correspondent, who believed this ambitious university graduate was realising the revolution Primo de Rivera had dreamed of, highlighted the Galician origins of Cuba's new strongman and his popularity, describing with enthusiasm Castro's encounters with the people. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was also an object of fascination, and was presented as the embodiment of the spirit of adventure and courage in the Americas.Footnote 43 As with Castro, SP mythologised Che in the first months of the revolution, irrespective of his being a self-proclaimed communist, which in any case was downplayed (‘a Marxist Ernesto – what can I say – who was never active in the party and who orthodox communists accused of being a Trotskyist’).Footnote 44 Following his death in Bolivia in 1967, Che became a role model for independent and social Falangists. In the words of the editor-in-chief of Diario SP, Rodrigo Royo, founder of the magazine and the heart and soul of the Falangist left:

I'm not right or left wing. I'm for Franco, José Antonio Primo de Rivera and José Antonio Girón. In fourth place, I'm for Che Guevara and I think that we have to fight as a guerrilla, a gigantic guerrilla [movement] which the whole of Spain participates in as a mass . . . to take on the problem of education, the problem of housing, the problem of electronics, the challenge of conquering space.Footnote 45

The guerrilla who stands up to injustice and remains true to his cause to the very end was, in the eyes of those like Royo, an exceptional man and worthy of imitation – a copy of Jesus Christ and of José Antonio Primo de Rivera and the embodiment of Hispanic values. ‘At the very end of the day, this famous “Che” had become – and would be from now on and every day hereafter – a perfect example of the Hispanic race, a fabulous interpreter of Spanishness’.Footnote 46 He was chosen – together with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fernando María Castiella – as man of the year by SP magazine in 1967. Diario SP even published Che's The Bolivian Diary in full and in serial form, with a prologue by Castro on the cover of the copy that began the series.Footnote 47

The intensity of the praise for Che was not matched by that for Castro, nor for the Cuban revolution after the first excitement about it had worn off. But over time, and after the missile crisis in October 1962, the tendency in the Falangist press was to justify Castro's reliance on the Soviets in terms of the threat posed by Cuba's US neighbour. As in its treatment of Eastern Europe, the Falangist press highlighted the heterodoxy of Cuban positions and its autonomy vis-à-vis Moscow. Fidel was portrayed as an independent, a reformist, condemned by orthodox communists for being ‘anarchising, [an] exhibitionist and petit bourgeois’, but who, as a consequence ‘did much damage to the main adversary in the cold war’.Footnote 48 Fidel also benefited from his closeness to the much-admired Che. When Che died Diario SP reproduce Castro's eulogy over four pages of the paper.Footnote 49 It was only when Castro supported the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 that this enthusiasm for ‘anti-Soviet’ Cuba faded and the Falangist media became fully aware of how influenced the Cuban model was by Moscow.Footnote 50

Relations between revolutionary Cuba and Franco's Spain remained stable despite these vicissitudes and moments of crisis. Cuba and the figure of Che meanwhile became the focus of the new Falangist generation's interest in the development of political experiments that were again seen as a ‘middle road’ between capitalism and communism. For Royo, Latin America was the epicentre of the world's renewal which would look beyond the Western democratic model:

In this Continent a revolution of incalculable power and transcendence is being forged . . . something very big is going to happen there, in the immensity that is Spanish America . . . an underground flood that will wash all away. Wash away democracy, as a theatre show to lull people to sleep and neutralise the proletarian masses: we know what it is up to, shamelessly, in all the countries in America.Footnote 51

From a Spanish perspective, the nationalist factor played an important role, especially in the case of Latin America, where there was almost instinctive Spanish sympathy for any liberation movement or claim to sovereignty. This approach to the Latin American revolutionary road – valued for its anti-American dimension and its break with Cold War dynamics – revived the search among Falangists for an international middle way and led them to show interest in a further wave of reformist movements coming from Eastern Europe.

Peering Over the Iron Curtain

After the Hungarian tragedy of 1956 the evolution of Eastern European countries grabbed the attention of specialised media like Revista de Política Internacional and the Revista de Estudios Políticos. From the mid to late 1960s these journals – both published by the Institute of Political Studies, an organisation which operated as an intellectual laboratory for the regime's policies and the main site for the preparation of draft laws for the Francoist dictatorship – included articles which displayed a relatively solid knowledge of the workings of communist regimes which went beyond the usual anti-communist clichés.Footnote 52 Attempts were made to learn more about the political-legal dynamics of communist regimes, such as the new Czechoslovakian constitution,Footnote 53 the Polish five-year plans,Footnote 54 the working of their parliaments,Footnote 55 the structure of government and lobbies in China,Footnote 56 the operation of the Soviet representative systemFootnote 57 and the influence of the agreements of Soviet Communist Party congresses.Footnote 58 Cuba was also covered, especially during the initial stages of the revolution.Footnote 59 Beyond these political-legal issues, the Revista de Estudios Políticos also raised more probing questions about the Eastern Bloc, including the nature of communism,Footnote 60 the move from a socialist to a communist society,Footnote 61 the role of a single party in these societies (of special interest for the Francoist regime)Footnote 62 and the new meaning of democracy in Central Europe.Footnote 63 The single party, a common theme in fascist as well as communist regimes, was still seen as a modern and potentially active element for society's democratic transformation:

If the single party can be identified as the defender of a potential democracy in backwards countries, it can also appear as the consequence of the disintegration of democracy itself, when social equalisation and material prosperity consume the process of society's depoliticisation as a consequence of the law we might call the inverse proportion of the effectiveness of parties and the masses’ standard of living [emphasis in the original].Footnote 64

In depoliticised developed countries, ‘politics has been reduced to a mere hobby to fill leisure time, like bridge, or stamp collecting’ and the tendency towards a single party was no longer the stuff of old fascism or post-war communism. Single-partyism was presented as a modern alternative compatible with democracy, a mechanism used by regimes like Kemal Atatürk's Turkey, the India of the National Congress Party and the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico, with Spain and other cases in Eastern Europe constituting modern channels for political representation no less democratic than those countries following the Anglo-Saxon model.

At a more journalistic level, magazines like SP, starting in 1957, and Diario SP, from 1967 to 1969, devoted ample space to international politics and especially to the situation in Eastern Europe, with occasional feature articles which were different from the anti-communist diatribes that other purely propagandistic publications like El Español or Arriba had provided in the past. In the case of Cuba and the Latin American guerrillas, SP and Diario SP showed a genuine interest in the internal workings of the local communist parties and how they differentiated themselves from the Russians. A similarly neutral and informative approach had been taken in the past with reporting on Yugoslavia and the personality of Tito, and had gone one step further in the case of Ceausescu's Romania.Footnote 65 Particular attention was drawn to the significance of the national factor in relation to Moscow in explaining the development of the Eastern Bloc. The commonalities between these reformist movements, certain regimes in Latin America and even Francoism as nationalist movements was also stressed. In this context, Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian communist leader, was portrayed in 1968 as the ‘de Gaulle of communism’ (in so far as the French president also aspired to distance himself from the closed Atlanticism of his bloc) who represented Romania's ‘recovered destiny’, building bridges with the West and especially the United States, and as such was positively assessed as ‘number one rebel’ exemplifying the crisis of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe.Footnote 66 The role of the Hungarian communist, János Kádár, the administrator of the difficult lesson of 1956, was also positively assessed as he attempted to achieve a certain independence from Moscow and take a middle road, especially in economics.Footnote 67

According to an extensive report on the topic of reformism published by SP in January 1968 these symptoms of change and reaffirmation of specifically socialist paths, in addition to the ‘liberal’ tendencies of economic reforms in those countries, meant that little remained of the ‘monolithic system, of the brotherhood at any cost, of the incorruptible unity of the countries in Eastern Europe’ and that the ‘satellites are definitively out of orbit’.Footnote 68 SP argued that the reasons for this were not to be found inside the bloc alone:

The new realities that framed Europe at all levels made most of those ex-satellites. Besides interior independence processes – almost always arising from economic reform, the work of intellectuals, important in countries with a considerable cultural level – and the entente that, in many senses, the Soviet Union and the United States experienced, there were other factors of note: the arrogance of de Gaulle's policies in Europe, which created a whole school, a rejuvenation of national feeling and the mentality of the new technocrats of communism, focusing more on production than on doctrinal intransigence.Footnote 69

Relaxation in international tensions as a consequence of Cold War detente allowed for these historically-rooted national peculiarities and variations to develop. Falangists saw in the crumbling blocs of the Cold War evidence of a middle way, where the national factor, the need to open up economically, and the advance of democratisation was actually happening, without the need for a multi-party system or periodic elections as in the West and with a clear personal leadership, which made them very similar in form to Franco's regime.

This interest in Eastern Europe peaked with the transformations of Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubček.Footnote 70 For many, the Prague Spring was the palpable demonstration of the progressive dissolution of the rigidity of Stalinist Soviet Bloc and the possibility of a middle road materialising. The events in Czechoslovakia after the former Stalinist leader Antonín Novotný was forced to resign as party leader in January 1968 and then as president in March were monitored closely by the Falangist press, with periodicals dedicating their front pages to what they in all seriousness called a ‘test run in democratic communism’.Footnote 71 The magazine SP called critical sectors of the party ‘Czech liberals’ and pointed out how old dogmas were now being questioned. This magazine was sure that socialism was under review, although formally it went unrecognised (‘but really, aren't the latest events in Prague a new road at all levels?’). Many pages were dedicated to detailing the economic proposals of the Czechoslovak Minister of the Economy, Ota Sik, the rehabilitation of those persecuted under Premier Klement Gottwald after the February 1948 communist takeover, the apparent flexibility that the Soviets would demonstrate, and how this process of change was irreversible. The excitement with which these Spanish journalists received these political experiments in Prague was noticeable.Footnote 72

When, in May 1968, the wind started to blow in the other direction due to pressure from hardliners in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, these same Spanish journalists began to tell the story of deterioration until the ‘Soviet sledgehammer’ fell on Prague. The invasion of the country in August 1968 and the halt to liberalisation were described with utmost precision. For the reporters of the independent Falangist media it was clear that the leaders of the Prague Spring had ‘decided to liberalise the country [and] build democratic communism without stopping to think about the consequences’.Footnote 73 The Soviet reaction had quashed not only this specific experiment but any attempt at middle roads. Soviet reaffirmation of Cold War logic would mean the ‘triumph of the injustice of a world of inflexible and signed-and-sealed imperialism’, in which the non-aligned powers and specific and national roads would struggle to find a place.Footnote 74 This was a disheartening picture and, for Falangists, the chief lesson of the episode.Footnote 75 Hopes among Falangists in 1968 that there might be a convergence towards a form of humane socialism from the Spanish side – a ‘more energetic socialism . . . than the socialism in developed countries, and far less authoritarian than the socialism on the other side of the Iron Curtain’ – were dashed.Footnote 76 Soviet intervention was seen by them to have potentially strengthened the position of the Spanish anti-communists in the regime who were pleased by the news of the reaffirmed condemnation of communism and the traditional frontiers of the Cold War.Footnote 77 In 1969, internationally with the reaffirmation of Cold War fault lines between the superpowers, and domestically with the naming of Juan Carlos as Franco's successor, the plans of this ‘national left’ were cut short. Consequently, they set up a regent to continue Francoism as an alternative to a monarchy which they saw as being predisposed towards the most ‘right-wing’ sectors in Spain.

Conclusion: A Contradictory Post-Fascist Spain in a Changing World

Francoism, a regime based initially on a fascist doctrine, was forced to adapt to the changing times and requirements of the 1960s. Although it was never the plan to renounce its origins and nature, the regime needed to connect with a new generation, new languages and the new political realities of the period. This is especially true of the independent Falangists: a situation I have characterised elsewhere as being ‘post-fascism’.Footnote 78 Cuban revolutionary anti-imperialism helped shape the so-called ‘national left’ who identified with the publications discussed in this article. During the 1960s these Falangists developed a global sensibility, as did many groups from a new generation across Europe both on the right and left, with internationalist leanings, sympathies for anti-imperialism and a positive attitude towards Third-Worldism. They also harboured a deep-rooted anti-Americanism that was in part the result of their own socialisation under Francoism. These new Falangists also displayed an almost instinctive empathy for any liberation movement or claim to self-determination, viewing these as being new opportunities for developing a ‘third way’. What this third way should look like, however, was kept purposefully vague, because they had no concrete image of it beyond the reform of the Francoist system. But this search nevertheless led them to show interest in reformist movements coming from Eastern Europe.

The most vocal defender in the 1960s of bridging the gap between the Falange and socialism, Manuel Cantarero del Castillo, author of a moderately influential book on the subject, argued that Primo de Rivera's ideas connected with a broader concept of socialism than that of the Eastern European variant or of the Second International.Footnote 79 He also championed increased political participation and democratisation while continuing to reject, as other Falangists did, the Anglo-Saxon political system as a historic relic.Footnote 80 Some Falangist writers spoke of ‘socialism with a human face’ to refer to what they were attempting to do in Spain in future-proofing the regime of 18 July.Footnote 81 Indeed, the raison d’être for these ‘left-wing’ Falangist groups was the need to complete the unfinished economic and social aspects of the revolution born inconclusively on that day in 1936. As in fascist Italy, but in a very different context, a ‘second revolution’ – the idea that younger and more radicalised fascists would eventually take power and create a fully fascist regime unencumbered by the Church, the Army and landowners – was necessary to make the revolutionary impulse of 18 July effective.Footnote 82

But can these groups be characterised as ‘reformist’, similar to those in communist regimes who argued for greater popular representation and participation, a break with the binaries of the Cold War and the reaffirmation of national characteristics? Characteristics which scholars like Vladimir Kusin applied to Eastern Europe would clearly be difficult to identify in Spain.Footnote 83 Yet, in both cases, there was a desire to traverse Cold War divisions, to reopen economic discussions and to extend political participation, albeit from the other end of the political spectrum. The major difference between these independent Falangist sectors and those who led reformist projects in Eastern Europe or Latin America was the inclusive and constructive enthusiasm of the latter versus the maintenance of the civil division of the former. In all likelihood it was the legacy of the Civil War and how it was perpetuated by the regime that made it impossible for these groups to take the leap and move from a peculiar, innovative and abstract socialism – the bastard son of fascism – to a democratic socialism or a participative platform able to make the political and social transformation necessary to overcome past hatreds. The Francoist regime continued to repress and kill its enemies to the very end, resistant to any kind of political openness or liberalisation. Francoism was unable to evolve as a system, and the project to reconcile Spaniards for a shared future life never took root.

Perhaps the most important question to address is how was it that these Falangists were subsequently able not only to move towards acceptance of a liberal democratic regime, but also to actively collaborate in its construction? These were the same groups that were descended from and had been shaped by the fascist tradition, linked by sentiment and family to the victors of the Civil War, integrated and assimilated professionally and socially in the Francoist regime. The answer is not unequivocal as is it is impossible to speak either of a cohesive group of ‘national left’ or of reformist Falangist ‘blue reformers’. Some of these reformists, those who had fought hard to get the 18 July regime to adjust from the inside, eventually concluded that the regime was incapable of reforming, and that there was no other way than to converge with surrounding liberal democracies. Others continued to be linked to the regime but were already pessimistic about any future commitment to it. Still others continued in their posts until the end but, seeking personal survival, adapted to the new democratic regime. Finally, a small group held the ‘socialist–Falangist’ position until the end. It was this complex and diverse group of ‘blue reformers’, many of them notorious enthusiasts of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, that helped facilitate the passing of the 1976 Law for Political Reform, which, in turn, made the 1977 general elections and the end of the Francoist Cortes possible. They participated in the formation of the Union of the Democratic Centre, the party formed around Adolfo Suárez, Spain's first democratically-elected prime minster of the post-Franco era, which counted on the support of these former ‘blue reformers’ throughout the Suárez administration (1977–81).

In the end, all these Falangists were, in practice, far more conservative than their earlier sympathies for Cuba or the Third World suggest. Pragmatism prevailed because it was clear from the final years of the dictatorship that there could no project in Spain other than political convergence with Western Europe, and that hopes for a ‘third way’ were but a strange result of the crossover between the old fascist indoctrination and the space temporarily opened up by international events and developments of the 1960s. Spanish Social Reform (Reforma Social Española; RSE), a party based around ideas of democratic Falangist socialism for which Cantarero del Castillo was a candidate in the 1977 elections, did not win any seats and disappeared immediately. Traces of independent Falangism nevertheless remained, such as in the foreign policy of Suárez, who established relations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, met with Fidel Castro, and opposed entry into NATO. However, this end should not obscure the fact that these post-war Falangists – uncomfortable with a monolithic Francoism that was incapable of broadening its base and appeal – forged a political culture which put significant sectors of the population in touch with ideas far removed from insular Francoist Spain, and in doing so helped ensure that an isolated and closed society was able to favour a process of socio-political change.

Acknowledgements

This research has been funded by the research project HAR2012-36528, ‘Continuity and Change in Spaniard’s Political Behaviour during late Francoism and Transition into Democracy from a Comparative Perspective (1966-1982)’, granted by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Gobierno de España.

Footnotes

1 Alonso Álvarez de Toledo, ‘El muro de Berlín iba a caer de todos modos, pero yo le di el primer empujón’, XL Semanal, 2 Nov. 2014, 64.

2 Paxton, Robert O., ‘Franco's Spain in comparative perspective’, in Carnicer, Miguel Ángel Ruiz, ed., Falange. Las culturas políticas del fascismo en la España de Franco (1936–1975) (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2012). The classic and most influential work about the nature of the regime is Linz, Juan José, ‘An Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Spain’, in Allardt, Erick and Littunen, Arjö, eds., Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems: Contributions to Comparative Political Sociology (Helsinki: The Academic Bookstore, 1964). The best biography about Franco is Preston, Paul, Franco: A Biography (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993).

3 For the global dimensions of fascism, see Morgan, Philip, Fascism in Europe: A Biography 1919–1945 (London: Routledge, 2003). The Falangist movement made its appearance with a certain degree of difficulty in the context of international debates about fascism. Some of the most recent books on this subject are: Pinto, Antonio Costa and Kallis, Aristotle, eds., Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe, 1919–1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). See also Iordachi, Constantin, ed., Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives, (London: Routledge, 2010). The historiography on the Falange is extensive. The first academic study is Payne, Stanley G., Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961). More recent works include Thomàs, Joan M., Los fascismos españoles (Barcelona: Planeta, 2011). Two informative reviews of Falangist historiography are Thomàs, Joan M., ‘Los estudios sobre las Falanges (FE de las JONS y FET y de las JONS): revisión historiográfica y perspectivas’, Ayer, 71, 3 (2008), 293–318; and Julián Sanz Hoya, ‘Falangismo y Dictadura. Una revisión de la historiografía sobre el fascismo español’, in Ruiz Carnicer, ed., Falange. There are a number of studies of a sectorial, local and regional character, but studies that integrate, in a comparative way and at a European level, the Falange into the wider Francoist dictatorship still remain to be done.

4 The Opus Dei, currently a personal prelature of the Catholic Church, was founded by father José María Escrivá de Balaguer, later canonised by the Vatican, who created a priestly society in 1928. On Catholicism and the Spanish Church in public life see Lannon, Frances, Privilege, Persecution and Prophecy: The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1975 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

5 Àlex Amaya Quer, El acelerón sindicalista. El aparato de propaganda de la Organización Sindical Española entre 1957 y 1969 (Madrid: Asociación de Historia Contemporánea/ Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2013). As in all fascisms, the Falangist discourse speaks about revolution, workers welfare and social transformation. Some ministers, such as José Antonio Girón, made social rhetoric an identity feature. See Carme Molinero, La captación de las masas. Política social y propaganda en el régimen franquista (Madrid: Cátedra, 2005).

6 The New Ley de Prensa e Imprenta provided an opportunity for the appearance of a number of new newspapers and editorial initiatives, but the elimination of prior but not later censorship resulted in innumerable fines against magazines and in entire books being pulled from shelves. See Richard Gunther, José Ramón Montero and José Ignacio Wert, The Media and Politics in Spain: From Dictatorship to Democracy (Barcelona: Institut de Ciencies Politiques I Socials, 1999).

7 José Luis Rodríguez Jiménez, ‘El reformismo azul en el tardofranquismo. Las “Conversaciones sobre el futuro político de España”, la “carta de los 39” y el Grupo Parlamentario Independiente’, in Javier Tusell and Álvaro Soto, eds., Historia de la transición y consolidación democrática en España (1975–1986) (Madrid: UNED, 1995), 253–67.

8 Julio Gil Pecharromán, El Movimiento Nacional (1937–1977) (Barcelona: Planeta, 2013), 265–70.

9 The magazine SP distributed 21,000 copies a week in the years 1966, 1967 and 1969, and 24,000 in 1968. For comparison, in 1968, an influential magazine such as Cuadernos para el Diálogo distributed 30,000 copies and the progressive Triunfo 60,000. See Javier Sánchez Aranda and Carlos Barrera del Barrio, Historia del periodismo español. Desde sus orígenes hasta 1975 (Pamplona: EUNSA, 1992), 495 and 453–4. Diario SP did not last long enough to gain reliable distribution but its influence can be confirmed in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section, one of the most dynamic in the press at the time.

10 Gil Pecharromán, El Movimiento Nacional (1937–1977) (Barcelona, Planeta, 2013), 38.

11 For a classical view of the democratisation process, see Raymond Carr and Juan Pablo Fusi, Spain, Dictatorship to Democracy (London: Allen &Unwin, 1979). See also Paul Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain 1969–1982 (London: Routledge, 1987) and Víctor Pérez Díaz, The Return of Civil Society: The Emergence of Democratic Spain (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998). For the end of Francoism from the inside, see Ignacio Sánchez Cuenca, Atado y mal atado, El suicidio institucional del franquismo y el surgimiento de la democracia (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2014), 15.

12 Alfonso Lazo, Historias falangistas del sur de España. Una teoría sobre vasos comunicantes (Sevilla: Espuela de Plata, 2015), 355.

13 On the SEU's magazines, see the important book by Jordi Gracia, Estado y cultura. El despertar de una conciencia crítica bajo el franquismo, 1940–1962 (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006) and Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer ‘La voz de la juventud. Prensa universitaria del SEU en el franquismo’, Bulletin Hispanique, 98, 1 (1996), 175–99.

14 Espacios (o islas) de libertad is widely used term in Spanish historiography to talk about the cultural exceptionality of the universities in a sea of repression and authoritarianism. This concept stresses the contrast between the cultural and political mobilisation of the campus and the conformist and repressed outside world.

15 For a relevant – and controversial – contribution to the debate around reformism inside Francoism see Cristina Palomares, The Quest for Survival after Franco: Moderate Francoism and the Slow Journey to the Polls, 1964–1977 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2006).

16 For further discussion of this point, see Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson and Michalina Vaugham, The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe (London: Longman, 1995); Giuseppe Parlato, Fascisti senza Mussolini. Le origini del neofascismo in Italia, 1943–1948 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006); and Ferrán Gallego, Neofascistas. Democracia y extrema derecha en Francia e Italia (Barcelona: Plaza&Janés, 2004).

17 For an overview of the Francoist university and the student movement, see Miguel Angel Ruiz Carnicer, ‘Spanish Universities under Franco’, in John Connelly and Michael Grüttner, eds., Universities under Dictatorship (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University State University Press, 2005). See also Elena Hernández Sandoica, Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer and Marc Baldó, Estudiantes contra Franco (1939–1975). Oposición política y movilización juvenil (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2007).

18 Pamela Radcliff, Making Democratic Citizens in Spain: Civil Society and the Popular Origins of the Transition, 1960–1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); Tamar Groves, Nigel Townson, Inbal Ofer and Antonio Herrera, Social Movements and the Spanish Transition: Building Citizenship in Parishes, Neighbourhoods, Schools and the Countryside (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

19 Nigel Townson, ed., Spain Transformed: The Franco Dictatorship 1959–1975 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

20 Pradera (1934–2011) was a writer, journalist, political analyst and editor, who was also a communist militant in close contact with Semprún. Grandson of a well-known Carlist linked to the regime, in the 1950s he became a driving force within the University of Madrid's PCE. See Nieto, Felipe, La aventura comunista de Jorge Semprún. Exilio, clandestinidad y ruptura (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2014), 289. Juliá, Santos, Camarada Javier Pradera (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutemberg/Círculo de Lectores, 2012).

21 Semprún (1923–2011) was a writer, politician and scriptwriter who was a militant Spanish communist until his expulsion in 1964. He was the main contact with the inner new opposition to the dictatorship. He was Minister of Culture between 1988 and 1991 in the government of Felipe González.

22 See Hall, Simon, 1956: The World in Revolt (London: Faber&Faber, 2016).

23 Semprún, Jorge, ‘Memorias de nuestros personajes’, in Pina, Antonio López, ed., La generación del 56 (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2010), 169.

24 Juliá, Camarada, 53.

25 ‘Estudiantes, los que tuvimos la ingenuidad’, Jan. 1954, author's personal collection.

26 See Camilo Barcia Trelles, ‘El ayer, el hoy y el mañana internacionales’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 86–7 (1956), 200, and Camilo Barcia Trelles, ‘El ayer, el hoy y el mañana internacionales’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 94 (1957), 230. I would like to thank Professor Nicolás Sesma at the Université Grenoble-Alpes, an expert on the Instituto de Estudios Políticos, for his help finding some of these texts.

27 ‘Ha comenzado la conferencia de Bandung’, Arriba, 19 Apr. 1955, 1. The Bandung Conference (Apr. 1955) was the first attempt by several states (Egypt, India and Indonesia, among others) with a colonial past to coordinate and promote internationally their common interests outside of the political binaries of the Cold War.

28 ‘Imre Nagy y Rakosi’, Arriba, 20 May 1955, 13.

29 José Ignacio Gómez Tello, ‘Nota internacional. Krustchev inaugura el Congreso’, Arriba, 15 Feb. 1956, 9.

30 One of the few works to discuss the relationship between Spain and Eastern Europe before 1956 is Eiroa, Matilde, Las relaciones de Franco con Europa Centro-oriental (1939–1955) (Ariel: Barcelona, 2001).

31 Rodrigo Royo, ‘Nuevo fascismo’, Diario SP, 30 May 1968.

32 Balfour, Sebastian, ‘“The Lion and the Pig”: Nationalism and National Identity in Fin-de Siécle Spain’, in Mar-Molinero, Claire and Smith, Angelo, eds., Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberium Peninsula (Oxford: Berg, 1996). For a wider perspective, see Berman, Russell A., Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2004). For Spain, see de Miguel, Daniel Fernández, El enemigo yanqui. Las raíces conservadoras del antiamericanismo español (Zaragoza: Genueve Ediciones, 2012) and Seregni, Alessandro, El antiamericanismo español (Madrid: Síntesis, 2007).

33 Interview with Luis Ángel de la Viuda, 27 May 2015. De la Viuda was the director of SP from September 1967 to November 1968 and then to 1972 director of news for Radio Nacional de España, the only Spanish radio authorised to broadcast news. He was later appointed as assistant director and then director of Televisión Española (TVE), the Spanish national public television station.

34 ‘USA, sí. Bases, no’, SP, 58, 29 June 1969.

35 See, for example, ‘Egipto+Siria+Yemen: Nueva nación árabe’, SP, 40, 9 Feb. 1958.

36 ‘De Gaulle descubre la Falange’, Diario SP, 9 June 1968, 1.

37 On Spanish foreign policy and the United States, see by Viñas, Ángel, En las garras del águila. Los pactos con Estados Unidos, de Francisco Franco a Felipe González (1945–1995) (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003).

38 How the notion of democracy was relativised is demonstrated in texts that aim for a certain theoretical relevance like Gaucher, François, ‘La crisis de la democracia en un mundo en mutación’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 106 (1959), 167–85; see also Heras, Jorge Xifra, ‘Democracia, despolitización y partido único’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 122 (1962), 63–84. In some way, these texts assume that the interwar period's notion of liberal democracy has been left behind and point to how open and varied the term was by then, encompassing regimes with very different practices, even being compatible with the existence of a single party.

39 On the Francoist regime's definition of itself and its visions of ‘democracy’, see Landrín, Nicolás Sesma, ‘Un alineamiento para el Movimiento. Rodrigo Fernández-Carvajal y la redefinición del sistema político franquista’, Rúbrica Contemporánea, 3, 5 (2014), 89–108.

40 That is, according to Carlos Franqui, a key figure in initial propaganda work for Castro's regime. See Santiago Pérez Díaz, ‘Un amor tormentoso’, El País, 2 Dec. 1996.

41 For early interest in the development of the guerrilla movement, including focus on Castro, see ‘Cuba. Batista vs. Castro’, SP, 5 (9 June 1957), 13. For sympathetic reception of Castro's victory, see ‘Triunfó en Cuba el Movimiento “26 de julio” acaudillado por Fidel Castro’, SP, 88, 11 Jan. 1959, 13. The cover title of this issue is ‘Cuba: Fidel Castro Victorioso’.

42 ‘El vencedor: Fidel Castro’, SP, 88, 11 Jan. 1959, 19.

43 ‘Che Guevara . . . soldado . . . de fortuna’, SP, 93, 15 Feb. 1959, 14–6.

44 Manuel Cabrera, ‘¡Patria o muerte!’, SP, 369, 22 Oct. 1967, 11.

45 ‘Carta del Presidente-fundador. Más dinero’, SP, 411, 4 Aug. 1968, 17.

46 Rodrigo Royo, ‘Buenos días. La muerte del “Che”’, Diario SP, 17 Oct. 1967, 1.

47 ‘Diario del Che en Bolivia’, Diario SP, 12 July 1968, 1 and supplement.

48 ‘Soviéticos contra castristas’, SP, 372, 12 Nov. 1967, 23–6.

49 ‘Fidel Castro afirma que el “Che” fue rematado después del combate. Texto íntegro del discurso del primer ministro cubano’, Diario SP, 20 Oct. 1967, 9–12.

50 ‘Cuba. Diez años de soledad’, SP, 446, 13 Apr. 1969, 38–42.

51 Rodrigo Royo, ‘Carta de Bogotá. Ya viene la revolución’, SP, 89, 18 Jan. 1959, 5–7.

52 Landrín, Nicolás Sesma, Antología de la ‘Revista de Estudios Políticos’ (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2009), introduction.

53 Glejdura, Stefan, ‘La nueva constitución de Checo-Eslovaquia’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 117–8 (1961), 191–214.

54 García, Leandro Rubio, ‘Polonia ante el plan Quinquenal 1961–1965’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 116 (1961), 123–38.

55 Aranegui, Manuel D., ‘El régimen parlamentario en Polonia’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 169 (1970), 163–71.

56 Domes, Jürgen, ‘La estructura del Gobierno y de los grupos de mando en la China comunista’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 128 (1963), 103–36; and Lu, Juan C. L., ‘El sistema de gobierno Chino’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 149 (1966), 99–142.

57 de Aranegui, Manuel, ‘El régimen parlamentario en la URSS’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 176–7 (1971), 113–38.

58 de Pablo, Luis Santiago, ‘El XXII Congreso del PC de la URSS’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 122 (1962), 85–112.

59 Reboll, Antonio Lázaro, ‘Cuba: las leyes constitucionales de la revolución’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 119 (1961), 199–215; and Rodríguez, Emilio Maza, ‘Castro, la revolución cubana y la autodeterminación de los pueblos’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 124 (1962), 175–90. These articles, while critical of revolution's embrace of communism and alignment with Moscow, also underline the United States's responsibility and the involvement of Miami-based extremists, while paying attention to the peculiarities of the Caribbean political system.

60 Uscatescu, George, ‘Tres meditaciones sobre el comunismo’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 119 (1961), 105–16.

61 de Pablo, Luis Santiago, ‘El tránsito del socialismo al comunismo en la ideología soviética actual’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 121 (1962), 23–82.

62 Heras, Jorge Xifra, ‘Democracia, despolitización y partido único’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 122 (1962), 63–82.

63 Kirschbaum, Joseph M. K., ‘Hacia una nueva democracia para la Europa central’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 125 (1962), 177–200.

64 Xifra Heras, ‘Democracia’, 68–9.

65 Not all of the mentions of the evolution of Eastern Europe are included, since they appeared in most weekly editions. But see, for example, ‘Rumanía. Presidente a la medida’, SP, 377, 17 Dec. 1967, 33. An extensive report on the topic of reformism, qualified as ‘revisionism’ in Soviet terminology, is found in ‘Europa del Este. La epidemia del revisionismo’, SP, 381, 14 Jan. 1968, 26–32, which reviewed the topic of economic and political ‘liberalisation’ in all of the countries in the Eastern Bloc.

66 See Santiago de Pablo, ‘El tránsito del socialismo al comunismo en la ideología soviética actual’.

67 ‘Europa del Este. La epidemia del revisionismo’, SP, 381, 14 Jan. 1968, 26–32.

68 Footnote Ibid., 32.

69 Footnote Ibid.

70 Williams, Kieran, The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak politics, 1968–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Navrátil, Jaromír, ed., The Prague Spring '68 (Budapest: CEU Press, 1998). Dubček was elected by SP readers as man of the year in 1968, in the unlikely company of the Minister of Public Works, Federico Silva Muñoz. SP, 431, 29 Dec. 1968). The election followed the American magazine Time’s formula.

71 SP, 393, 7 Apr. 1968, cover. Six dense pages were dedicated to analysing the fall of the Czech leader and how the country was opening up: ‘Checoslovaquia. Cierto viento del Oeste’, SP, 7 Apr. 1968, 34–9.

72 See, for example, ‘Rumanía. Presidente a la medida’, SP, 377, 17 Dec. 1967, 33.

73 ‘Checoslovaquia, vuelta al redil’, SP, 414, 1 Sept. 1968, 31.

74 ‘Carta del director. Ottobre ruggente’, SP, 418, 29 Oct. 1968, 18.

75 ‘Informe. Siete días en Praga’, SP, 434, 19 Jan. 1969, 40–1.

76 ‘Entrevista con Manuel Cantarero’, SP, 262, 7 June 1968, in which he states: ‘among the political trends of the future, I foresee a wide socialist sector which left-wing Falangists should appear in’.

77 Manuel Cantarero del Castillo, ‘Enhorabuena por la mala hora de Praga’, SP, 415, 8 Sept. 1968, 12.

78 For use of the concept of post-fascism see Carnicer, Miguel Ángel Ruiz, ‘Fascismo, posfascismo y transición a la democracia. La evolución política y cultural del franquismo en relación al “modelo” italiano’, Itinerari di recerca storica, 28, 1 (2014), 67–88. For the Italian case, see also La Rovere, Luca, L'eredità del fascismo. Gli intellettuali, i giiovani e la transizione al postfascismo 1943–1948 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008).

79 Among many examples, see his ‘La Falange y el socialismo’, SP, 445, 6 Apr. 1969, 36–46.

80 The subject of the relationship between Falangist doctrine and socialism has a continuous presence in the magazine SP and in Diario SP and Índice. Reports, copies of speeches and the defence of the need to move towards a socialism unrelated to the Second International, the socialism of the defeated parties in the Civil War, was a constant. Throughout 1969 the magazine Indice focused heavily on the definition of the left and of socialism and its relationship with the Falange in articles, collaborations and debates.

81 Carlos Iglesias Selgas, ‘Un socialismo de semblante humano’, Diario SP, 20 June 1969, 5; Rodrigo Royo, ‘La Falange es socialista y democrática’, SP, 416, 15 Sept. 1968, central supplement.

82 ‘Buenos días. El abuelo Franco’, Diario SP, 1 Oct. 1967, 1. About this ‘second revolution’ in Italy, see Parlato, Giuseppe, La sinistra fascista. Storia dia un progetto mancato (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000).

83 Kusin, Vladimir.V., ‘An Overview of East European Reformism’, Soviet Studies, 28, 3 (1976), 338–61. The disappointment of some of these countries in terms of the expectations created was not unlike what happened in Spain and helps to understand why many people moved away from the regime.

Ibid
Ibid