Spain: The Awakening Land

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alone was 125%) and hard to get that Spaniards dubbed them "haigas"—a slang term indicating that their owners were either very rich, very powerful or very crooked. Last year 170,000 vehicles came off the assembly lines of seven separate factories in five Spanish cities, and production is expected to double this year; the entire 1966 output of the Spanish-made SEAT cars is already sold out by dealers. Madrid's streets have become so clogged that the city has had to restrict parking in the downtown area. It has also opened three underground garages, one of which goes down four levels.

Status Symbols. Affluence and mobility have also changed the Spaniard's habits. He is no longer thrilled at the chance to stand in a freezing soccer stadium and cheer for the home team. Soccer attendance has slipped so badly that Real Madrid, European champion for five of the past ten years, has decided to tear down its cavernous Santiago Bernabeu Stadium and build a smaller one. Spaniards are turning to more expensive diversions and status symbols. Madrid now supports 19 legitimate theaters, plus a selection of chic new "theater clubs," exclusive establishments where the up-and-coming young businessman can be seen while he watches the show. Scores of elegant new restaurants and bars have opened in the past few years, and they are always packed to their polished oak rafters with an ever expanding jet set, whom Spaniards call hi-lifers (pronounced hee-leefairs). Grandest of all is a converted palace in old Madrid, where, under 18th century tapestries and paintings of the court, diners are offered the specialty of the house: a whole chicken baked in clay, Roman-style, which is deftly parted by the waiter's silver hammer.

The siesta is disappearing, not because the Spaniard no longer wants his afternoon snooze but because he no longer has time to take it. So crowded have Spain's cities become that it would take him most of his three-hour lunch break to get home and back. The rush to the cities has had another effect as well. It is slowly breaking down the old regional barriers that have always divided Spain. There are still separatists in Barcelona, but their cause is dying fast: half the working force of Catalonia is now composed of forasteros from other parts of Spain.

No one is more delighted at all the bustle than Francisco Franco, the stubby (5 ft. 3 in.) Galician general who is now in his 30th year as "Caudillo (literally: commander or headman) of Spain by the Grace of God." And quite probably, no one is more surprised. For until six years ago, Spain was isolated from most of the world, brooding, stewing in its evaporating juice. Foreign investment was unwanted and restricted, and Franco was as openly anticapitalist as he was antiCommunist. Spanish industries, creaking and featherbedded, stumbled along behind trade barriers that kept most foreign products out entirely and imposed rigid quotas and exorbitant tariffs on the rest.

No one knows exactly how sick the Spanish economy was; the regime had no way of compiling proper statistics and went out of its way to obscure the ones it had. But by 1959 all signs were bad. At least one-fourth of Spain's total imports, from whisky to machinery, were being smuggled in. The peseta was swinging wildly on the black market. Inflation was rising, production was actually falling and,