POLITICS VERSUS FOOD

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 62, Issue 4428, 21 May 1941, Page 5

POLITICS VERSUS FOOD

FAMINE WITHERS LIFE OF SPAIN.

(By

Saville R. Davis

s in the Christian Science Monitor.)

BOSTON, April 11. The story of the. agony of Spain and its people 1 cries out to be told. Until now, the Spanish Government has refused to let the story out. That Government has its reasons which are understandable, even if one does not agree with them. But it does seem that simple humanity must find a way, somehow, to get the facts before the outspje world. Spain is in desperate food. actual state of famine which exist) there is not caused by the British i blockade. I was given categorical assurance to this effect by the highest British sources in Madrid. Britain has promised to permit the feeding of Spain through the blockade, day by day, week by week, as long as Spain stays out of war. The arrival of food will help keep Spain out of war. The need within Spain is so great that the food could not materially aid the enemy. The British have done the best they could to live up to their promise. They have loaned money which has been used up. They have authorised the navicerts, or blockade permits, for enough wheat to lift the famine. The hitch is that Spain cannot pay for the food. Its trade and ability to buy abroad were crushed by the civil war, and kept crushed by mismanagement since then. Spain is too proud to ask for a gift. It is also afraid to let the Red Cross or the Society of Friends make expert surveys of the facts or take over mass distribution of food in Spain, because the power of food distribution is also a power in politics. They cannot afford to have potentially anti-Fascist foreigners mixing in Spanish politics. WORSE THAN POLAND. At this moment, there is not hunger, ■ not malnutrition, but semi-starvation on a large scale in Spain. Worse, this is no sudden blow. The failure of the Spanish crops came on top of four years of hunger and progressive malnutrition during and after the Spanish War. Within the last three weeks, I have z talked to expert social workers who . had just completed first-hand surveys of the food problem in continental Europe, on behalff of American relief agencies. By comparing their findings with my information on Spain, where they were not allowed to go, we came to the following conclusion: Spain is worse off than Poland, Norway, Denmark, or the Netherlands. Neutral diplomats in Madrid, making the best of available information, estimated that 800,000 tons of wheat were necessary to pull Spain through until the next harvest. At the time I left, only 70,000 tons were in prospect or on the way. There is a ghastly joke going the rounds in Spain. Generalissimo Francisco Franco, so it is said, told Reichqfuehrer Adolf Hitler how to defeat Britain at once. “Just send the British my Cabinet Minister in charge of food,” he said, “and the British will be starving in four days.” General Franco’s minister in charge of food has been in office in Spain some 1400 days. When I arrived in Madrid on the way through from Rome I went at once to the office of an old friend. We stood in the window, looking out toward Madrid’s great boulevard, the Recoletos, while he explained to me that food conditions were far worse than when I had stood in that same window four months before. My eye caught and followed a man weaving almost blindly along the sidewalk as we talked. Presently he collapsed and fell in a heap in the gutter. Men are not drunk in Spain. My friend’s Spanish assistant knew in a moment what the trouble was and hurried out. He revived the man, gave him several pesetas, sent him to a cafe, and returned with a haggard look. “This is happening all the time, now,” he said, “everywhere you go in Spain except in a few northern sections. There is nothing we can do. I can’t spare any food; I barely have enough for myself. And what this miserable fellow can buy with the little money I gave him, I do not know.” I went out to the street. There were beggars everywhere, I say “beggars” but that scarcely is the right word. These were not the perennial beggars to whom I had become accustomed in normal times in Spain, who were professionals. BATTLE FOR PESETAS. I always had made it a habit not to give to beggars in Spain. This time, I saw two children who were mostly skin and bones, and took out a couple of pesetas. x In an instant, two more children and two women had rushed up, and each ■was ruthlessly shoving the others aside trying to get at the money. I stood amused for a moment, as this was my first experience with this new beggary, holding the money high out of their reach and waiting for the excitement to calm. And then, seeing the looks on their faces, I realised my amusement was blasphemous. I gave the money to the two original children and immediately a street fight began as someone snatched it away. It took six adults to tear the pitiful group apart. I walked the streets both in Barcelona and Madrid and sometimes saw as many as six or eight persons asking for money or bread in a single .cafe. I inquired from neutral and Spanish friends into the food situation in other sections of Spain. Only in the north and north-west, I was told,'" was there any local accumulation of food. Elsewhere, even in the small towns, the situation had become worse just as rapidly as in Barcelona and Madrid. I went to the house of a social worker whom I had known before—a foreigner whose point of view is widely recognised as impartial. The Government, he told me, is giving the better share of whatever food there is to its own political supporters. The socalled reds, those who sympathised with Republican Spain, were being systematically discriminated against. This was the legacy of the hatred of civil war days, which smoulders, even deeper than ever under the surface to-day. This is why the Spanish Government does not want outside relief organisations controlling the food supply. The Red Cross or the Quakers

insist on distributing food with their own staffs, to avoid waste and favouritism. They would give food to everyone impartially. They would learn about political terrorism in Spain and tell the outside world, so the Government believes. Moreover, a well-fed opposition might be more obstinate to control. At the very doorstep of my neutral friend I was confronted with an example. A woman with shrill, angry cries was chasing a man, who obviously had been begging, away from the tables of her cafe. He was protesting sullenly that he had no work and that his wife, who stood by him, needed food. A crowd gathered, and several mediators stepped between the , two, while the woman demanded that he be arrested. “Es un rojo!” shouted over and over again, pronouncing the dread word. “He is a red. He is a red.” It is only necessary to say those words in Spain to crush anyone. The police take no chances; they strike on the least suspicion. It was fortunate for the man that only civilians were around and these persuaded him to move along as quickly as possible. SOUP FOR SUPPER. I went into the home of a day labourer. He and his wife, her mother, and two children lived in a tiny tworoom flat in the working-class quarter. As I came in, they were eating a thin soup with a little spaghetti*in it. That was their supper. I was entertained at one of the large hotels, which manage to get the best of the food markets with their large buying power. A well-to-do friend ordered filet mignon as part of a massive four-course meal. During the dinner he told me that his clerks Were foregoing an evening meal every other day. It was the only way they could make their ration go around. I went into the house of a Government worker. She was supporting her husband, who was out of work, and seven children on a meagre salary. , “The awful thing about these last months,” she said, “is that there is no bulk food. The bread ration is pathetically small. And there is no thing else to fill you up. There are few peas, no beans, no rice, hardly any potatoes to take the place of bread which we Spaniards literally make the staff of life.” She had given much of her ration to the children, and looked ill-fed herself. I went into the house of an upperclass intellectual and spoke of what 1 had seen on all sides, “What will happen?” I asked. POLITICS TO BLAME. His answer was the answer of fatalistic Spain: “You foreigners,” he said, “do not know how we Spaniards can suffer. We will just go on suffering some more, that’s all.” He gave his small change to the poor on the streets each day, and when his change purse was empty he came back to his comfortable home and steeled himself against thinking further. He saw no solution. I suggested that other countries could send in food. “We Spaniards,” he said, “don’t like gifts.” The Spaniards themselves might see more hope if the food situation were not so thoroughly mixed up in politics. It was politics which caused the peasants to refrain from sowing wheat last year. Some of them wanted to sabotage the regime, and didn’t realise what a grisly sort of boomerang this sort of sabotage would be. In the United States, I pm told, there is opposition to sending food to Spain on the political ground that it would assist the Franco regime, and on the. military ground that it might assist Germany if Spain is drawn further into the German orbit. I put the question to a British friend in Madrid. “You can trust us.” he said, “not to let anything through the blockade which will injure us in the end. Spain is still neutral. We have our Embassy and our own observers here. As you know, important groups in Spain, even within the Government, are swinging more and more over to our side. We find it to our direct advantage now to feed them.” I put the question to Left-Wing i Spanish revolutionaries. “The food is not for the Regime,” they answered. “They have enough. The food is for us, the people. As a starved people we are powerless and submissive. Better fed, we will soon be ‘a power in Spain.”