Spain: The Awakening Land

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Europe. Two years ago, Marbella was a bleached fishing hamlet between Málaga and Gibraltar; it now has three luxury hotels, a golf club, two cinemas, scores of bars and a burgeoning skyline of glassy apartment buildings. In nearby Torremolinos, there is standing room only on the beach on many a hot August noon. The bullfight season, which for a century ended in October, now unofficially extends throughout the year on the mild south coast, and in any season, in any city, there are likely to be as many tourists as Spaniards shouting the olés.

All told, 36 million tourists have spent $3.5 billion in Spain in the past five years, and at an ever increasing rate. Last year's tourist take alone was $1.1 billion, 20% higher than in 1964.

Another major source of hard currency is the money sent home every year by the 850,000 Spaniards now working north of the Pyrenees. Their emigration, encouraged by the government, has brought other benefits as well.

When they return to Spain, they come with new skills that can be put to good use in Spanish industries. More significant, they bring back new European ideas and values, which are helping to change Spanish life.

Civil Process. Politically, too, Spain is better off. The political prisons of the civil war have long since been emptied, the fascist fanatics of the old Falangist Party long since suppressed. Police no longer torture political suspects. The old military kangaroo courts have given way to civil process. Censorship has been somewhat relaxed, and editors have been encouraged to discuss subjects unthinkable a decade ago: two papers last year were allowed to call for a legal opposition party, and a slick magazine published an interview with a film director attacking censorship itself.

Even more impressive was last month's law, passed by a newly resilient Cortes (Parliament), giving Spanish workers the right to strike for higher pay. For nearly three decades, all strikes had been banned in Franco Spain.

There has been considerable progress in freeing the arts. Since 1958, when Antoni Tàpies brought glory to Spain by winning the Venice Biennale, the regime has been furiously promoting young Spanish painters and writers.

Once ignored, Tapies and fellow Prize winners Antonio Saura (Carnegie, Guggenheim) and Eduardo Chillida (Venice, Carnegie) are now treated as VIPs, as is Communist Pablo Picasso (although he has refused to set foot in Spain since the civil war). In 1960, an audience of high officials and intellectuals gave a standing ovation of 30 curtain calls to a play that bitterly attacked the regime.

The government now subsidizes Spanish films of "high artistic merit," has turned the Escuela Oficial de Cine into a lively center of experimental drama.

On the whole, however, political liberalization has been slow and erratic. Most of the old restrictive laws are still on the books, and although they are sel dom enforced, the regime can dust them off at its pleasure, and does. Three years ago, Spanish Communist Julián Grimau was executed under the 1941 Law for the Suppression of Masonry and Communism, which supposedly had been repealed.

Spanish students no longer go to jail en masse for campus demonstrations. But a new law last year empowered uni versity authorities to expel "agitators" and ban them from studying anywhere in