The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [94]
Franco made these agreements seem to Spaniards like far more than they were. In Spain it was believed that the wily Caudillo had at last duped the United States into supporting him with friendship, money, and development projects. The moment was brilliantly satirized by Luis Garcia Berlanga in the film Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall, in which a small Spanish town, confusing the Defense Pacts with the Marshall Plan, feverishly prepares for the arrival of Mr. Marshall and all the gifts he will bestow. When the small entourage of Americans arrive, they drive through the town without stopping.
The pacts gave the United States a bomber base near Madrid, in Torrejón, and other air bases near Zaragoza, Seville, and Morón de Frontera, as well as the Rota navy base in Cádiz. In exchange for allowing a foreign power to establish bases that were potential nuclear targets next to Spanish cities, Spain got $226 million in assistance, but most of it was of little value. The only developmental assistance was for roads, port facilities, and ancillary defense industries that the Americans would need to operate. They did give military equipment, but only used and dated leftovers from World War II and the Korean War.
But the pacts were of enormous symbolic importance. The Basques were stunned by the betrayal. Aguirre, himself a passionate anti-Communist, accepted the Cold War logic that the United States feared an unstable Spain, but he complained that the move was a “weakening of moral force in the fight against totalitarianism.”
Other Basques, however, especially younger ones, were furious. Xabier Arzalluz, today the most powerful Basque politician, was a young law student in Zaragoza at the time. “People of our generation are bitter,” he recently said. “I have great empathy for Americans. But not for the government, not for the State Department. I feel the same way about the British.” Arzalluz remained loyal to the Basque Nationalist Party, but many of his contemporaries began to question their support. “They thought the party was bourgeois, old and passé,” Arzalluz recalled. “When America signed an accord with Franco, young people didn’t believe that we were fighting Franco anymore.”
The Basques were not the only ones of his generation angered by the pact. An eleven-year-old in Seville, Felipe González, vowed that he would never set foot on U.S. soil. In 1977, preparing to be elected prime minister of the new Spanish democracy, he reneged and visited Washington, D.C.
What the pacts had meant was that Franco would survive, though he always remained somewhat of a pariah. In 1959, concerned about the well-being of his bases, Eisenhower visited Spain. According to accounts of this visit, he was uncomfortable and distant, but he was photographed giving the Caudillo the famous Ike smile, and that was the photo Franco needed to show Spaniards. Eisenhower did seem to be impressed by the huge welcome the Spanish gave him, not seeming to realize that it had been staged by the Falange, the last vestige of the fascist Europe he had defeated.
BUT, THE NEW generation’s disenchantment with the Basque Nationalist Party had not begun with the Defense Pacts.
José Luis Alvarez was born in 1929. Sabino Arana would not have considered him a Basque. His grandfather was not only a Liberal but a maketo—an engraver from Madrid who had moved north at the time of the Second Carlist War, setting up a lithograph shop in Tolosa. José Luis’s father was born in the shop and later moved the family business to San Sebastián, where José Luis was born.
Growing up in the 1930s, José Luis heard Euskera all around him. He heard his Basque mother speaking it with the neighbors.
“What does that mean?” he would ask her.
“I heard it everywhere,