The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [100]
By 1968, Franco’s plan had clearly failed. Many young Basques had decided to study economics. Txabi, the singular hero of the student body, had been an economics graduate from Sarriko. Deusto, across the river from the center of Bilbao, was known as a breeding ground for militant Basque nationalism. But Sarriko students thought the radicals of Deusto were too moderate, and said they “hid behind the skirts of the Jesuits.”
“Txabi was a strong model, he still is,” said Joseba Irazu, who, like many Sarriko students of the late 1960s, was an unlikely economics student. He had chosen the school largely because he wanted to stay in Basque country, and he had chosen economics because it was taught there.
Joseba Irazu Garmendia was born in 1951 in Asteasu, a village of stone-walled Basque houses tucked into the velvet green mountain slopes of Guipúzcoa. Although only twenty miles inland from San Sebastián, it was then an isolated community of 1,000 people that waited for two Spanish newspapers to be delivered once a day by donkey. Joseba grew up speaking Euskera at home with his carpenter father and his schoolteacher mother, who had been expelled from the school system because she was Basque. In Asteasu, most people spoke Euskera in their houses, but once they passed the front door, they switched to Spanish.
The new teachers, the ones who had replaced teachers like Joseba’s mother, were pro-Franco. Joseba described his teacher as “Fascist but sensible.” The sensible Fascist once made him hold out his fingers to beat the tips with a stick after Joseba had been overheard speaking Euskera. But the teacher did not do this very often, because he remembered his predecessor, who, after beating the fingertips of two husky Euskera-speaking boys, was tossed out the schoolhouse window by them. “We have a guerrilla tradition,” explained Joseba.
By the late 1960s, when Joseba decided to study economics at Sarriko, Basque life and especially the Basque language were changing. In the 1960s, with limited U.S. help but still largely in isolation, Franco had finely been able to move the Spanish economy—by subsidizing Basque industry. After centuries of being highly competitive in the world, this industry had now become absurdly overblown. Instead of the cheapest steel in Europe, the Basques now produced some of the most expensive. The government was covering the high cost of production and guaranteeing a price-controlled Spanish market. Like Franco himself, this false economy was certain to collapse, but the end was not in sight. For now Spain, especially northern Spain, was enjoying some relief from years of misery.
Without the crushing pressure of economic collapse, the Basques, defiant again, were expressing themselves through culture. “For years the Basque society had been underground like a potato,” Joseba said. “And in the 1960s a new Basque country was born.”
Traditional folk festivals that had been banned after the Civil War were being celebrated once again, and traditional dances and music began reappearing. In 1960, three ikastolas, the first since the Civil War, were opened. While studying economics, Joseba for the first time heard songs, ballads of political protest, in his language.
Singers such as Benito Lertxundi from Guipúzcoa, and a number of singers from the French side, including the mayor of Cambo, Michel Labéguerie, sang songs that every student knew by heart, in a style the Cuban Revolution had learned from Joan Baez and popularized with all the leftist movements of the Spanish-speaking world. Because Franco did not understand the impact of 45 rpm records, college campuses had stacks of Lertxundi’s songs of Basque nationalism sung in Euskera.
“Only 10 percent of the students spoke Basque,” Joseba said, “but everyone knew how to say strike in Basque—greba.”
The most significant cultural advance of the 1960s was that the Basque Academy of Language at last realized its dream of unifying the Basque language. Although the earliest record of written Basque is from the third century, it remained mostly an oral