Franco’s Famine: Malnutrition, disease and starvation in post-Civil War Spain 9781350174641, 9781350174672, 9781350174658

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Franco’s Famine

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Franco’s Famine Malnutrition, disease and starvation in post-Civil War Spain Edited by Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco and Peter Anderson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco and Peter Anderson, 2022 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco and Peter Anderson have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: W. Eugene Smith © 1965, 2017 The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith / Magnum Photos All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The editors and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Arco Blanco, Miguel Ángel del, editor. | Anderson, Peter, 1964 March 22- editor. Title: Franco’s famine : malnutrition, disease and starvation in post-civil war Spain / edited by Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco and Peter Anderson.  Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021012888 (print) | LCCN 2021012889 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350174641 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350174658 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350174665 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Famines—Spain—History—20th century. | Food supply—Spain—History— 20th century. | Nutrition policy—Spain—History—20th century. | Spain—Economic conditions—1918-1975. | Spain—Economic policy. | Spain—Social conditions—1939-1975. Classification: LCC HC385 .F7123 2021 (print) | LCC HC385 (ebook) | DDC 363.80946—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012888 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012889 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-7464-1 ePDF: 978-1-3501-7465-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-7466-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgements

vii ix xiv

Introduction: Famine, not hunger?  Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco and Peter Anderson 1 Part I  Famine and malnutrition in Spain: Political and socio-economic conditions 1

The famine that ‘never’ existed: Causes of the Spanish famine  Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco 19

2

Agricultural crisis and food crisis in early Francoism: Hunger seen through the lens of biophysics  Manuel González de Molina, David Soto Fernández, Juan Infante Amate and Antonio Herrera 36

3

Tracing the physical consequences of famine and malnutrition in Franco’s Spain  José Miguel Martínez-Carrión and Javier Puche Gil 57

Part II  Famine, poverty and daily life 4

Iniquitous famine: Marginalized mothers and children  Peter Anderson 81

5

When there was nothing. An ethnography of the years of hunger in post-war Extremadura: Memory and representation of scarcity  David Conde Caballero, Lorenzo Mariano Juárez and Julián López García 100

6

‘Pícaros De Posguerra’. Turning to crime to survive famine and malnutrition in early Francoism (1939–52)  Gloria Román Ruiz 114

Part III  International responses 7

‘Starving Spain’: International humanitarian responses to Franco’s famine  David Brydan 137

Contents

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Part IV  The politics of cooking 8

The production of autarkic subjectivities: Food discourse in Franco’s Spain (1939–59)  Lara Anderson 159

9

A recipe for rationing: Women, cooking and scarcity during the early Franco dictatorship, 1939–47  Suzanne Dunai 179

Part V  Memories of malnutrition and famine 10 Remembering the Spanish famine: Official discourse and the popular memory of hunger during Francoism  Claudio Hernández Burgos and Gloria Román Ruiz 205 Bibliography Index

225 255

Illustrations Figures 1.1 Rainfall in Spain 1901–2011 3.1 GDP per capita in Spain in 1991 (1950 = 100), and Spain’s relative real GDP per capita in a European comparative perspective (EU 15 = 100), 1920–70 3.2 Male daily agricultural salary in real terms and real private consumption per capita (1964 = 100) 3.3 Calories available for consumption per capita per day and male height by draft date in Spain, 1920–70 3.4 Evolution of the average height of Spanish conscripts, 1930, 1954 3.5 Comparison of heights of children of school age in different neighbourhoods of Madrid in 1942 3.6 Anthropometric indicators in Spain, 1955–65 (Index 100 = 1955) 3.7 Average male height in Europe, cohorts from 1911–15 to 1961–5 (recruits from 1930–5 to 1981–5) 3.8 Evolution of the average male height in four regional areas of Spain, by year of conscription (1935–65) 3.9 Height of conscripts in Extremadura (thirty-three municipalities) according to rural or urban place of residence (conscripts of 1934–69). Three-year centred moving average (in centimetres) 3.10 Average heights in the autonomous regions in Spain and differences in centimetres between the Basque Country and Galicia. Cohorts born between 1934 and 1965

23

59 60 61 63 65 67 68 69

71

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Tables 1.1 Cost of Living Index in Spain (1939–50) 7 2.1 Apparent Net Biomass Consumption (Deducting Losses) in Tonnes (t) and Per Capita in Kilograms (kg) of Fresh Edible Food (1900–80)39

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2.2 Apparent Consumption per Food Group (Grams/Per Capita/Day in Fresh Edible Food) 40 2.3 Apparent Consumption of Biomass in Kilocalories (kcl), Deducting Losses (1900–80) 41 2.4 Absolute and Relative Contribution of Fats, Carbohydrates and Lipids from Apparent Food Consumption in Spain, 1900–80, in Grams (g) and Kilocalories (kcl) 44 2.5 Apparent Intake of Calcium (mg/capita/day) and Vitamin A (µg/capita/day) 45 2.6 Land Use, Spain, Million Hectares 46 2.7 Biomass Domestic Extraction in Mt (megatons) of Tons of Dry Matter 47 2.8 End Uses of Domestic Extraction in Millions of Tons of Dry Matter 48 2.9 Evolution of Livestock Live Weight, 1900–70. In Metric Kilotons (kt) 49 2.10 Livestock Production in Tons of Dry Matter, 1900–70 51 2.11 Spanish Trade of Biomass in Metric Kilotons (kt) of Dry Matter, 1900–7052

Contributors Lara Anderson is Associate Professor in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her main research area is Spanish food culture, and her most recent monograph, with University of Toronto Press, looks at food discourse as a site of both control and resistance during the first two decades of the Franco regime. She has published extensively on many aspects of Spanish food discourse, such as culinary nationalism, food and politics, and food and gender in leading international journals. She has also co-edited a journal issue entitled Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies, which delineates the emerging field of Hispanic Cultural Food Studies, inserting Hispanist voices into the arena of food studies and making food central to a praxis of cultural studies in the transhispanic world.  Peter Anderson is Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century European History in the School of History at the University of Leeds, UK. His research has focused on the history and memory of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. He has published widely on the violence carried out by General Franco’s regime during and after the Spanish Civil War. His latest research examines the origins and practice of child-removal in early-twentieth-century Spain. He has also published work on the refugees and humanitarianism in the Spanish Civil War and on the history and memory of the International Brigades. David Brydan is Lecturer in the Modern History of International Relations at King’s College London, UK. He works on the history of modern Spain and the history of international cooperation in the twentieth century. His recent publications include Franco’s Internationalists: Social Experts and Spain’s Search for Legitimacy (2019) and Internationalists in European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (2021). David Conde Caballero (PhD in Anthropology with Extraordinary Doctorate Award) is full-time Professor at the University of Extremadura, Spain, and author of the only doctoral thesis that has addressed post-war hunger in Spain from a culturalist perspective. He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Studies on Society, Culture and Health (GICSA), the International Commission

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on Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (ICAF) and the International Network of Studies on Culture and Hunger (CIEMEDH-UNED). He has made multiple contributions to congresses, seminars and conferences dealing with the symbolic and cultural aspects of food and hunger. He is the author of the successful book Cuando el pan era negro. Recetas de los años del hambre en Extremadura. Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco is Associate Professor and head of the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Granada, Spain. His work centres on the study of fascism, the Spanish Civil War and postwar Francoism. Some of his books published in English are as follows: with Alejandro Quiroga (Eds.), Right Wing Spain in the Civil War Era: Soldiers of God and Apostles of the Fatherland, 1914-45 (2012); with Peter Anderson (Eds.), Mass Killings and Violence in Spain, 1936-52: Grappling with the Past (2014). Currently he is working on a book about the Spanish famine. Suzanne Dunai is an independent scholar who completed her PhD in History at the University of California San Diego in 2019. Her dissertation entitled ‘Food Politics in Postwar Spain: Eating and Everyday Life during the Early Franco Dictatorship, 1939-1952’ analyzes the political motivations of food policies during the period of rationing in Spain (1939-1952) and their social consequences. She is the recipient of a Fulbright student grant and Hispanex grant, which has funded the research for several publications on Spanish everyday life during the 1940s. Manuel González de Molina is Full Professor of Modern History at Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain. He is the coordinator of the Agro-Ecosystems History Laboratory (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain), President of the Spanish Society for Agricultural History (http://www​.seha​.info) and member of the editorial board of the ISI-refereed journals Historia Agraria (Agrarian History Review), Anthropoce and Sustainability. He was minister of the Department of Organic Agriculture of the Andalusia Government (Spain) from 2004 until 2007. He has authored several books, among the most recent of which are The Social Metabolism: A Socio-ecological Theory of Historical Change; Energy in Agroecosystems: A Tool for Assessing Sustainability and The Social Metabolism of Spanish Agriculture, 1900-2008: The Mediterranean Way Towards Industrialization. He is the author of a hundred articles published in journals such as Environment and History, Ecological Economics, Land Use Policy, Environmental History; Regional Environmental Change; Ecology and

Contributors

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Society; Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems; Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Claudio Hernández Burgos is Associate Professor at the University of Granada, Spain. He holds a PhD from the University of Granada (2012). He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University and a visiting fellow at the Università della Sapienza (Rome), Italy; the London School of Economics, UK; and the Universidad Autónoma (Madrid), Spain. His research interests centre upon the Spanish Civil War, the political construction of Franco’s regime, the study of social attitudes towards the dictatorship and the history of everyday life. He is the author of several articles in international journals, and two books: Granada azul. La construcción de la Cultura de la Victoria durante el primer franquismo (2011) and Franquismo a ras de suelo. Zonas grises, apoyos sociales y actitudes durante la dictadura (2013). He is also the editor of No solo miedo. Opinión popular y actitudes sociales bajo el franquismo (2013) and Ruptura: The Impact of Nationalism and Extremism on Daily Life in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) (2020). Antonio Herrera is Lecturer of History at the University of Granada, Spain. He has been Associate Professor at University Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain). He has worked on peasant conflicts during the transition to democracy in Spain, coauthor of Social Movements and The Spanish Transition (2017) and author of La construcción de la democracia en el campo (2007). His field of study is rural social history and he has analysed the role of peasants in democratization processes. He has been a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, at the University of Harvard and at the University of Pittsburgh, and has participated in collective works published in several countries focusing on environmental conflicts. He is currently leading a research project on Social Movements and Democracy in the Spanish Countryside. Juan Infante Amate is Associate Professor in Economic History at the Department of Applied Economics at University of Granada, Spain. He has studied Business Administration and Management, and has a Master’s degree in Agroecology and a PhD in Environmental History. His research has focused on the study of the historical roots of current economic and environmental problems. He has done research stays in European, North American and Latin American universities, the last one as Associate Scholar at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, UK, between 2017 and 2018. He has received several awards for his research, including the Felipe Ruiz Martín Award of the Spanish

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Association of Economic History and the Research Award of the Society for Agrarian History Studies. Julián López García is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology (UNED), director of the International Centre for Social Memory and Human Rights Studies (CIEMEDH-UNED) and coordinator of the Anthropology area of the UNESCO Chair ‘Science and innovation for sustainable development: production, global food and food security’. He has directed twelve research projects focused on indigenous peoples of America, anthropology of food and social memory. He is the author of 12 books, and editor of 19 books and more than 100 articles and chapters. His latest publication is “Good news for another Amerindian future” in Julián López García and Óscar Muñoz – eds. – Circular Utopisms: Amerindian Contexts of Modernity, 2021. Lorenzo Mariano Juárez is Senior Lecturer (Tenured) and Deputy Director of Relations with Latin America of the International Commission of Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (ICAF). He has been Deputy Director of the Development Cooperation and Volunteerism Office of Uex for the last two years. He is the author of more than 100 publications including scientific articles, books and book chapters. Winner of the Extraordinary Doctoral Award, he won the second edition of the Award for the best Doctoral Thesis of the G9 Group of Universities. He has been a visiting professor at the Universidad San Carlos de Guatemala and a visiting scholar at the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies, CUNY, New York. He is a member of the research group ‘American Ethnology’, and is part of the ‘Observatory of Food in Mexico’ and the International Network of Studies on Culture and Hunger (CIEMEDH-UNED). José Miguel Martínez-Carrión is Professor of Economic History at the Department of Applied Economics of the University of Murcia, Spain. He has been editor of Agrarian History and general secretary of the Spanish Association of Economic History (AEHE). Among his books is The Living Standard in Rural Spain, ss. XVIII-XX (2002). He is Guest co-editor in the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History: ‘Inequality and Well-Being in Iberian and Latin American Regions since 1820’ (2019) and International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health: ‘Biological Living Standards and Nutritional Health Inequality in Transition to the Developed World’ (2021). His most recent contribution on the impact of Franco’s autarky has been published in Social Science & Medicine (2021).

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Javier Puche Gil is Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Economics and Economic History of the University of Zaragoza and researcher at the Instituto Agroalimentario de Aragón, IA2 (UNIZAR-CITA), Spain. His main line of research is focused on the so-called Anthropometric History. His recent publications come from this field of study (Social Science & Medicine 2021; Ler História, 2019; Revista de Historia Económica-Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 2019, 2017; Journal of Interdisciplinary History; 2018; Nutrición Hospitalaria, 2018; Revista de Historia Industrial, 2016; Economics and Human Biology, 2014). He is currently the co-editor of the Colección de Monografías de Historia Rural de la Sociedad de Estudios de Historia Agraria (SEHA). He has carried out three research stays at the Universities of Tübingen (Germany), Roma Tre (Italy) and Porto (Portugal). Gloria Román Ruiz completed her PhD at the University of Granada, Spain, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Radboud University, the Netherlands, and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She has been a visiting researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences and at Bristol University, UK. Her line of research has been focused on the study of the everyday life during Franco’s dictatorship (1939–79). In particular, she has analysed the small resistance practices during the Spanish years of hunger and the social politics of the regime to extend its popular support. She has published the monographs Franquismo de carne y hueso. Entre el consentimiento y las resistencias cotidianas (2020) and Delinquir o morir. El pequeño estraperlo en la Granada de posguerra (2015). She has been one of the editors of the collective book Tiempo de dictadura. Experiencias cotidianas durante la guerra, el franquismo y la democracia (2019). She is also the author of several articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Historia Agraria, Historia Social or Bulletin of Spanish Studies: Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America. David Soto Fernández currently works as Associate Professor in Economic History at the Department of Applied Economics, Santiago de Compostela University, Spain. He previously held the position of Associate Professor in Contemporary History at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, Spain, where he is a member of the Agroecosystems History Lab. He does research in rural and environmental history. He has co-authored the books The Social Metabolism of Spanish Agriculture, 1900–2008 and Del pasado al futuro como problema. La historia agraria contemporánea española en el siglo XXI.

Acknowledgements The two editors and a number of the authors received funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) for the research project ‘La hambruna española: causas, desarrollo, consecuencias y memoria (1939-1952)’. Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco’s research is further funded by a 2020 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators, BBVA Foundation.

Introduction Famine, not hunger? Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco and Peter Anderson

As we show later, at least 200,000 people died from hunger or malnutritionrelated diseases in Spain during the 1940s following the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). General Franco’s officials censored news of starvation, while newspapers celebrated his regime’s efforts to increase the birth rate and reduce child mortality. At the same time, journalists kept quiet about the malnutrition afflicting both children and adults. They also drew a veil over malnutritionrelated diseases such as typhus sweeping Spain. Economic development from the 1960s and a delicate transition to democracy after 1975 helped maintain the silence. Since then, historians of the post-Civil War period have often focused on mass killings by the Franco regime. Accordingly, euphemisms such as the ‘hunger years’ have remained in place, explaining shortages in Francoist terms through natural disaster, the consequences of the Civil War or the collapse of trade in the Second World War. This book challenges these explanations and shows that the 1940s are better understood as the years of Franco’s famine rather than the ‘hunger years’. As scholars of famine have noted, government policy plays a critical role in creating famines that owe more to questions of trade policy, distribution and access to supplies than to a lack of food or natural disaster.1 Famine also involves much more than malnutrition, and researchers have shown that it is associated with a rise in food prices and the cost of living alongside the use of unfamiliar substitute foods, the prevalence of infectious diseases, migration, growth in crime and the loss of custody of children.2 This book provides a political explanation of the Spanish famine and shows that the Franco regime’s policy of food self-sufficiency, or autarky, created a system of price regulation that placed restrictions on transport as well as food sales. As a result, food production declined massively, hoarding took place on an enormous scale and a vast and deeply iniquitous black market flourished: all at a time when wages plunged and prices soared. Many Spaniards died of starvation

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Franco’s Famine

but even more perished from disease, while a significant number of parents gave up their children and many ordinary people turned to crime to survive. To understand why the famine has been miscast as the ‘hunger years’ and why all this happened, we first need to explore how the famine remained silenced for many years and then examine the nature of the famine itself.

The silencing of the famine ‘Franco has died.’ This was the leading headline across the majority of newspapers in special later editions produced on 20 November 1975: the day of Franco’s death in a Madrid hospital. Reading over the headlines feels like touching the curtain of silence that the dictator’s regime drew over the famine that cursed Spain in the post-Civil War years. The Catholic newspaper Ya, following the same path as the rest of the press, cast Franco in a sympathetic and human light as an elderly man who had always shown concern for the future of his country. The newspaper also highlighted what it presented as his prodigious work ethic. Rigorous biographical studies have since demonstrated the shortcomings of these eulogies.3 The journalists, politicians and historians who in the wake of the general’s demise rushed to praise Franco neglected to mention the post-war period. Among the wealth of photographs of the demised leader’s time in office splashed across the newspaper editions marking Franco’s demise, his meetings with Hitler or with Mussolini are conspicuous by their absence. Nor do we see photographs of the mass demonstrations presided over by Franco with the crowd, and the dictator himself the first among them, making the fascist salute. No mention is made either of the terrible difficulties faced by Spaniards in what are popularly known as the ‘hunger years’ (1939–52).4 This twisting of the historical record after Franco’s death represents nothing less than the final chapter in the regime’s nearly forty years of distortion and silence around the Civil War. To fill this silence, between 1939 and 1975, the regime forged a series of myths that explained away the suffering of the 1940s through three factors, each of which its apologists claimed lay beyond Franco’s control: severe drought, which led to a sharp decline in agricultural production; international isolation caused by the Second World War that prevented food imports; and the social and economic consequences of the Spanish Civil War.5 In the Francoist vision, the 1950s brought about Spain’s re-integration into the international community and the subsequent ‘years of development’ fostered by the regime’s own policies. In the 1960s, as economic growth picked up an

Introduction

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impressive pace, this narrative that the dictatorship had on its own ushered in progress and prosperity became ever-more established and accepted.6 Franco’s death and the subsequent consolidation of a democratic system gradually saw new voices emerge that questioned some of the regime’s myths.7 Studies appeared which outlined some of the hardships and suffering of the 1940s.8 Film-makers made a particularly important contribution and only after Franco’s death was the director Basilio Martín Patino able to release his film Canciones para después de una guerra (Songs for After a War). His powerful film offers a moving portrayal of a Spain divided in two in which poverty and misery existed alongside a desire among the victors for revenge.9 Poetry and novels which offered accounts of the ‘hunger years’ also began to appear in print, although some of them were first published outside Spain.10 For their part, historians began to question official versions of the past. Through the 1980s, economic historians demonstrated that Francoist economic policy in the post-war years, and above all the policy of autarky, played a decisive role in  the collapse of the economy and in forging the poverty endured by much of the population during the 1940s. They also demonstrated that autarky was imposed with military and imperial goals in mind and that the regime kept in place its policy despite the terrible effects on the population. They did so in  part because social groups which supported the regime often benefited from autarky: perhaps most infamously of all by trading on the black market. In the 1990s, historians published more studies that undermined Francoist myths and which outlined the repression and violence deployed to consolidate the regime’s hold over the population. This terror also helped dismantle unions and facilitated the imposition of harsh new labour relations. Despite these developments, the historiography of Francoism has largely neglected the issue of Franco’s famine.11 Given that historians have largely overlooked the famine, we should not be surprised that it has remained largely hidden from Spanish society. All the more so given that the transition to democracy in the wake of Franco’s death was facilitated by the popularly termed ‘Pact of Forgetting’. Under this tacit agreement, political leaders from the old Francoist parties and the new generation of politicians agreed to work together by leaving the past and its rancour behind. Instead, they focused on building a new future.12 In this context, little public debate took place on the past and the state made no effort to promote a more inclusive collective memory. Not until the early 2000s would Spanish governments change course. They did so in good measure because new social movements emerged which demanded action to overcome the injustices left in place by the refusal to confront the past. The exhumation of the remains of

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Franco’s Famine

people executed by the Franco regime, and left in undignified anonymous mass graves, proved especially powerful. The work of the well-known ‘Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory’ played a particularly important role in pushing the socialist government led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to pass the popularly termed ‘Law of Historical Memory’ in 2007. It is especially telling that in the important debate fostered by the exhumations and the law, the Spanish famine went completely unmentioned and undiscussed. We can explain this partly because the overriding priority lay in exhuming and giving a decent burial to the remains of around 114,000 people that continued to lie in mass graves.13 Moreover, Spanish society could hardly discuss a topic that historians had largely neglected. One result is that collective memory continues to cast the 1940s as the years of hunger: a concept minted during the Franco regime and shaped by official propaganda. We can see this in the testimony of one of the participants in the research carried out for this book. Our participant, from Granada province, finds the 1940s a difficult time to remember because of ‘the suffering of our friends and neighbours’. In his moving testimony, he recalls deaths caused by starvation and malnutrition, people ill with tuberculosis and women who were raped in ‘exchange’ for food. But he never describes the 1940s as a period of famine and never places the suffering in the context of the regime policies.14 Instead, he sees the 1940s as painful years, caused by wider circumstances and which simply had to be overcome.15 His testimony helps show how Francoist collective memory continues to exert a hold over the population and how Spain’s democracy is yet to challenge this benign interpretation of the past. As the historian Óscar Rodríguez-Barreira has pointed out, we need to conceive of the 1940s not as the hunger years but as a time of famine. Equally, we should bear in mind his point that we should place the Spanish experience in its wider European context of the time and famines suffered in countries such as the Ukraine, Greece and the Netherlands.16 As the book shows, the Spanish famine grew from different political causes. In the Ukraine, the terrible Holodomor grew out of Soviet collectivization policy, although the ground was prepared by poor harvests in previous years, especially in 1931. As a result, around 4.5 million people perished.17 In Greece, the ‘great famine’, O Katohikos limos, resulted from Nazi occupation and plunder, although the allied blockade and the Greek need to import grain also played a role.18 The Hongerwinter in the Netherlands took place in the winter of 1944–5 and killed 22,000 people. It arose through a combination of factors including freezing temperatures which made transport by barge difficult, a German embargo on food transport and

Introduction

5

the Nazi destruction of docks and bridges to impede the allied advance and fighting on the ground.19 By contrast, the origins of the Spanish famine had little to do with environmental factors and occurred after rather than during war. Moreover, the blockade experienced by the Spanish during the Second World War proved far less severe than that suffered by other countries such as Germany during the First World War.20 Certainly, Spain suffered a partial blockade and found normal trade curtailed through the navicerts system. That said, through the navicerts the British allowed limited commerce in food and other supplies in the hope of forestalling Spanish entry into the Second World War on the side of the Axis powers. This means the Spanish famine grew not so much from the consequences of the war but from political decisions – in Franco’s case, from the determination to press ahead with the economic self-sufficiency of autarky. This is why this book follows the lead made by innovative scholars of ‘Famine Studies’ and especially those who have studied the famines from the end of the First World War to the conclusion of the Second World War. One of their many important contributions has been to show the social significance of the history and memory of famine across a number of societies. This book endeavours to place the Spanish famine within this wider European context by conceptualizing what happened in Spain as a famine with political causes. It does this by also exploring where the famine took place, what consequences it had and how it has been remembered.

The famine Between the end of the Civil War in 1939 and the disappearance of rationing in 1952, Spain endured a period of profound food shortages and poverty.21 The number of deaths peaked at two points: between late 1939 and 1942 and in 1946. In these years, famine stalked Spain and particularly afflicted poorer and marginalized social groups.22 The exact number of victims remains unknown. Some scholars have attempted  to calculate the figure based on estimates only for the period between 1939 and 1942. To do so, they relied primarily on the data gathered for demographic studies and the national censuses carried out in 1930 and 1940. A number of problems exist with these statistics – particularly in relation to mortality rates and their geographic distribution. Many of the deaths during the war were registered in the place of death and not in the place of residence. Moreover, a majority of these deaths were registered in the early post-war years

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Franco’s Famine

and mixed fatalities from the conflict with those who perished in the famine. The censuses also present a range of statistical difficulties. For instance, the 1940 census overestimates population numbers by 500,000 inhabitants.23 Moreover, the doctors signing death certificates refrained from directly naming starvation but relied, instead, on a number of more politically acceptable euphemisms that disguised the tragedy: terms such as ‘weakness’, ‘cardiac arrest’ and ‘avitaminosis’ all loom large in the official record.24 Such problems with the sources have led to a wide variety of mortality estimates for the period between 1939 and 1942. These range from the 194,000 deaths calculated by Ortega and Silvestre to the 223,200 claimed by Salas Larrazábal. Nevertheless, the consensus allows us to state that more than 200,000 people perished in only three years as a consequence of the famine and the disease it bred.25 For the rest of the 1940s, historians continue to struggle to find data that allows them to judge the effects of the famine. This is particularly the case for the year 1946 when the number of deaths from famine soared once again. To establish these figures, historians will need to carry out more research and continue their studies to include the period until the end of rationing in 1952. These future studies will also need to consider other indirect effects of the famine, such as a rise in suicides, a decrease in fertility rates or a reduction in stature for people who grew up in the period.26 At this stage, it is easy to imagine that these studies will force historians to revise upwards the figure of 200,000 victims who lost their lives between 1939 and 1942. The famine exerted its grip most firmly across an arc stretching through southern Spain that took in the regions of Murcia, Castilla de La Mancha, Extremadura and Andalusia. Although food was produced in the countryside, city and town dwellers were often issued ration cards that entitled them to more and better quality food than their rural counterparts. Nevertheless, the famine affected both the rural and urban areas alike. The poorest sectors of society, many of whom had supported the defeated Second Republic against General Franco, suffered the most. They included rural and urban waged workers, women, the elderly and children hailing from families impoverished and broken apart by the war or the dictatorship’s programme of executions, incarcerations and purges. For the period between 1939 and 1951, we can identify the presence of three crucial features that define a famine: first, the high rise in the cost of living, endured with extremely low wages or no income whatsoever; second, the onset and spread of infectious diseases that killed vulnerable members of society; and third, death by starvation, which the regime would attempt to conceal. In regard to food prices, the cost of living in Spain rose dramatically after the war, in good measure due to unprecedented inflation.27 The post-war years have been

Introduction

7

described as an era of ‘accelerated inflation’, causing serious difficulties for the working class. The regime’s statistics (from the Spanish Office for Statistics) identified a 75 per cent rise in the consumer price index between 1935 and 1940 alone. Nevertheless, an assessment by the Higher Council of Chambers of Commerce, which was more focused on actual market prices and analysed up to sixty different products, noted an increase of 145.2 per cent for the same period.28 The rise in the cost of living persisted throughout the entire decade, although the regime went to some lengths to suppress the data.29 Items that suffered particularly sharp price rises included food, clothing and footwear, as revealed by the regime’s own statistics (see Table 1.1).30 Housing, household or other expenses also underwent a steep increase but did not rise at the same level as that of basic necessities.31 Consequently, this rise in the cost of living hit the poorest groups in society who had to spend a greater proportion of their income on essentials. With regard to wages, we should note first that the Franco regime ushered in much harsher labour relations. The dictatorship banned all unions and persecuted, imprisoned and executed labour leaders. A fall in wages and the deterioration of working conditions soon followed. In the agrarian sector, wages remained frozen and day labourers suffered extreme exploitation in an asphyxiating working environment, which simultaneously served the interests of large, medium and small landowners.32 The contrast between post-war wages and a high cost of living placed the feeding of the lower classes in jeopardy. A British report on working conditions stated that in 1940, in Seville, the wages of industrial workers had increased by 25 per cent compared to 1936; the cost of living, however, had climbed by 100 per cent.33 During the worst phase of the Spanish famine, the situation grew even more dire. By 1941, the price of basic foodstuffs had soared by 300 per Table 1.1  Cost of Living Index in Spain (1939–50) Cost of Living Index (July 1936 = 100) Second Semester 1939

1940

1950

177.7 190.1 105.8 134.9 127.4 153.6

214.6 204.7 108.9 162.8 145.8 178.1

649 688.3 202.9 463.7 367.1 529.3

Food Clothing and Footwear Housing Household Expenses Other Expenses General Index Source: Spanish Statistical Office ([1952], p. 151).

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Franco’s Famine

cent.34 The authorities eventually recognized the problem and, in the same year, the Falange’s provincial secretary in Seville expressed his ‘anguish concerning the horrendous hunger’, for ‘not only are unrationed basic commodities lacking, but also prices are fixed out of reach of the lower classes, and the rations are not enough by themselves to sustain a proper diet’.35 Living off the official rations allowed by the dictatorship did indeed represent a terrible challenge. The products allowed did not provide enough food to maintain good health and were limited to a reduced number of items from which it was hard to scrape together a meal. Moreover, sometimes even the promised supplies failed to appear, as was often the case with olive oil (a crucial Spanish staple) or bread.36 Faced with these severe shortages, people turned to the black market. Those with access to the means of production (agricultural or industrial) or to product distribution (merchants or state employees) could ensure their sustenance, either because they had access to food or because they could easily afford the high cost of living and obtain what they needed on the black market. Waged workers or the unemployed faced a bleaker reality. They tried to survive by resorting to food substitutes (ersatz products) to make up their needs, a common practice adopted in Nazi-controlled Europe as well.37 The poor also consumed food that had not previously formed part of the normal Spanish diet.38 At the worst stages of the famine, a British traveller who was passing through Spain reported that ‘the poor live off acorns and chestnuts’. He also mentioned that once, in El Campillo (Huelva), a donkey perished and people jumped at it to tear off any hunk of its flesh they could lay their hands on.39 The fall in production, coupled with supply problems and the spectacular rise in the cost of living, led to dietary deficiencies that rendered the population more susceptible to disease.40 In 1941, the diplomat Arthur Yencken, who worked in Spain for the British Foreign Office, observed that in most cases deaths did not result directly from disease but, rather, from low levels of resistance to infection caused by profound weakening from malnutrition.41 Disease flourished both from debilitation and the poor health conditions that marred life in Spain after the war. The state proved incapable of tackling a wide range of problems, including those related to hygiene and sanitation; food deprivation; poor housing; and the disarray reigning in the healthcare sector. In these circumstances, infectious diseases gained a firm hold over the population and both morbidity and mortality rates rocketed (especially for infants).42 The regime’s official sources, which tended to conceal information, point to a resurgence of exanthematic typhus, malaria, smallpox, diphtheria, tuberculosis and typhoid fever, particularly

Introduction

9

between 1939 and 1942.43 We should also highlight the massive rise in deficiency diseases, such as pellagra or paraesthetic-causalgic syndrome, which increased the vulnerability of the poorest social groups to epidemics.44 A disturbing typhus epidemic developed between 1939 and 1943. The worst years were 1941 and 1942, when the number of infections rose to 8,500 and deaths surpassed 1,500.45 The Francoist authorities attempted to delay disclosing news of the epidemic.46 Ultimately, it came under control partly with British assistance but most of all following the massive American help funnelled through the Rockefeller Foundation. The Foundation had been hounded out of Spain by 1941, but it continued to work with the Spanish health authorities and sent vaccines to Franco’s regime including, by 1943, thousands of doses of the vaccine developed by the US bacteriologist Herald Rea Cox to treat typhus.47 The geographical spread of exanthematic typhus coincided with the areas we have highlighted as centres of the Spanish famine: Madrid, Andalusia, Castilla de la Mancha, Southern Levante and Extremadura.48 As we have noted earlier, the social groups most afflicted by the disease were those identified with the Republic, among them political prisoners and the poor. In May 1941, the authorities declared an epidemic in Málaga Prison. There was such a dearth of resources to fight the disease that the authorities requested ‘overalls so that [prisoners] do not remain naked while their clothes are being disinfected’.49 In Málaga, more than 75 per cent of those who died from typhus were day labourers.50 In other cities, the epidemic spread across the poorest neighbourhoods, as acknowledged by the authorities in Granada. The British consul in Madrid arrived at the same conclusion for the capital when he stated that ‘the most affected neighbourhoods were the poorest’.51 Death by starvation was a major cause of mortality in post-war Spain,52 although the regime would attempt to conceal this fact. The Civil War and the immediate post-war period disrupted the gradual improvement of the nutritional status of Spaniards that had marked the first decades of the twentieth century. As demonstrated in Chapter 2 of this book, an acute nutritional crisis emerged during the 1940s, with tragic consequences for the population. Diets at the time were characterized by low calorific consumption, calcium deficiency, scarcity of animal proteins and a relative deficiency of iron and many vitamins.53 Calorie intake levels, alongside those of proteins and other nutrients, would not be restored until the 1950s. During the post-war period, 30 per cent of the population were unable to consume the required number of calories (some 2,250 kcal), with devastating effects on their health.54 Malnutrition also exercised a major impact on the height of children growing up and especially those from the

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Franco’s Famine

poorest groups in society. Anthropometric studies specifically show a dramatic drop in male height. The lower classes and the poorest regions, like southeastern Spain, would suffer the biggest decline in heights compared with other areas, such as Catalonia.55 Despite their public denials, the Francoist authorities acknowledged deaths from starvation in their internal correspondence. In September 1939, just months after the end of the Civil War, the civil governor of Almería province requested help from Madrid, warning of ‘deaths by hunger’.56 Other governments also had observers on the ground who were deeply aware of this problem. In November 1940, a British military official who had visited southern Spain informed the ambassador that ‘many actual deaths from starvation’ were taking place.57 In 1941, another informer told the British that ‘large swathes of the population are dying of hunger or nearing starvation’.58 Once again, the majority of deaths occurred in southern Spain. Between 1940 and 1941, there was an increase of more than 20 per cent in mortality rates compared to 1935 in the provinces of this region.59 The situation improved in 1942, although the distressing levels of poverty and destitution persisted into the 1940s. Everything worsened in 1946, however, when a drought damaged the crops grown during the 1944–5 season, and we see a return to the registration of deaths by starvation.60 The victims of this tragedy were those most vulnerable to the extreme conditions spawned by Francoist economic policy, such as waged workers, children, widows and the elderly – groups which, for a variety of reasons, could often not access the food needed to survive.61

Overview of the chapters The book explores this famine through a range of lenses. Chapter 1 examines the  shortcomings of enduring Francoist explanations of the 1940s as years  of hunger. As we have seen, these explanations attributed shortages to the ravages of war, drought and international isolation. The chapter shows that the Francoists exaggerated the devastation of war and the effects of drought while ignoring the regime’s own export of foodstuffs to Nazi Germany as well as its refusal to deal with ‘enemy’ regimes. Most of all, Francoists silenced the devastating effects of the regime’s decision to adopt autarky, which closed off imports, discouraged production and encouraged hoarding and fostered a black market. Chapter 2 brings Francoist arguments on food production into question and shows how the food crisis of the 1940s and 1950s came about through Francoist policy that

Introduction

11

reversed the gains in production achieved in the early twentieth century. The chapter draws on a sizeable and important array of statistics to make the point. To provide just one example, the production of cereals, legumes and potatoes declined between 27 per cent and 37 per cent in the 1940s. This reversal in the steady increase in yields seen in previous years helped create the food crisis of the 1940s. The low prices set by the state and the shortages of fertilizers resulting from the regime’s autarkic policies rank high among the reasons for this catastrophe. Chapter 3 explores the effect of the famine on the height of Spaniards – one of the most revealing ways of demonstrating the consequences of food shortages. Anthropometric studies show that Spaniards lost height through the 1940s and into the early 1950s. Although the decline did not prove as severe as in other parts of Europe, it was more enduring. Once again, some regions in Spain suffered more than others with the worst-affected regions falling in the south and south-east of the country where the loss was a little under one centimetre in height. Poorer social groups also suffered more acutely than the better off. While university students and the professional classes did not lose height, members of the working class and the less highly qualified did. Chapter 4 explores how poor families weakened by shortages in the war, the Francoist repression and the collapse in living standards found themselves in all too many cases forced to give up all or some of their children to state care. Chapter 5 brings the focus of the anthropologist to bear upon the everyday experience of famine. Drawing on interviews with fifty-nine people who lived through the famine in Extremadura, one of the hardest-hit regions, the chapter recounts the histories of people forced to eat food previously considered inedible or dangerous. This included the consumption of puppies or even poisoned meat. Chapter 6 explores another characteristic of famines such as those experienced in the Stalinist Ukraine or in the Netherlands in the Second World War: the turn to crime to survive and especially by women and minors who stole food and traded on the black market. The poverty of the post-war years, however, also reached across classes, and even regime supporters became involved in poaching and smuggling in order to survive. Chapter 7 turns to the international dimensions of the famine. It explores the paradox of the vast international aid sent to Spain in its Civil War against the paltry assistance received in the post-war period. The most important explanation for the shortfall in aid in the post-war period centres on the Franco regime’s hostility to outside support which led most humanitarian workers to withdraw from Spain between 1939 and 1941. Instead, the Franco regime chose

12

Franco’s Famine

to donate money to other countries afflicted by hunger and to understate the crisis in Spain. Chapter 8 explores the ultra-nationalist beliefs that lay behind Francoist ideas of autarky and how these conceptions became part of the discourse about food. Spaniards were encouraged to consume nutritious food such as oranges and rice. Cookery books imparted the message that citizens should eat national dishes such as rice and celebrated increases in rice production as a symbol of hope. This discourse disguised the difficulties most Spaniards experienced in obtaining rice or the fact that for many years the Francoist authorities were exporting oranges to Nazi Germany. Chapter 9 continues the focus on cookbooks and shows that even middle- and upper-class groups struggled to produce meals in times of austerity. Cookbooks provided recipes for undesirable leftovers and provided scores of ways of cooking the limited food available. One publication provided eighteen recipes for potatoes. Other books offered a fantasy outlet for people going hungry, silencing the famine and allowing people to escape in their minds the miserable reality of their living conditions. These recipes provided a window onto a world beyond the reach of Spaniards with step-by-step instructions on how to make food popular in countries such as Austria, Denmark, India and Turkey. Chapter 10 examines how Spaniards have remembered a famine which the regime denied and which became eclipsed by the developmental discourse that emerged during and after Spain’s rapid economic growth from the 1960s. It was also a famine which many remembered as afflicting the stigmatized underclass rather than those who explained their own later social mobility and success through the regime’s discourse of economic growth. The chapter shows that many people accepted the regime’s explanations for food shortages caused by events such as the Second World War. At the same time, they also remembered cases that the Franco regime tried to hide, such as neighbours who starved to death and the solidarity of those who shared food with one another in order to survive perhaps the most testing ordeal in Spain’s twentieth century.

Notes 1 Sen explained famines through the ‘failure of the exchange of entitlements’. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1–8. 2 Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 4–6.

Introduction

13

3 Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Paul Preston, El gran manipulador: la mentira cotidiana de Franco (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2008). 4 Ya, 20 November 1975. The special edition had eighty-eight pages. 5 Ricardo de la Cierva, Historia del franquismo. Orígenes y configuración (1939–45) (Barcelona: Planeta, 1975). 6 Ricardo de la Cierva, Historia del franquismo. Aislamiento, transformación, agonía (1945–75) (Barcelona: Planeta, 1978). See the memoirs of some Francoist ministers: Laureano López Rodó, Memorias, 4 vols (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1990–1993); Gonzalo Fernández de Mora, Río arriba: memorias (Barcelona: Planeta, 1995). 7 Michael Richards, After the Civil War: Making Memory and Re-making Spain since 1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 277–303. 8 Rafael Abellá, Por el Imperio hacia Dios. Crónica de una Posguerra (1939–1955) (Barcelona: Planeta, 1978). 9 Canciones para después de una guerra. Basilio Martín Patino, 1971. The film could be premiered only in 1976. 10 For instance, poetess María Beneyto published Biografía breve del silencio (n.p: n. e., 1975) in 1975. Novelist Juan Marsé published Si te dicen que caí (Mexico: Novaro, 1973) in Mexico, and Agustín Gómez-Arcos edited L’Enfant Pain (Paris: Seuil, 1983) in French. 11 An analysis on the historiography of post-war Spain and hunger in Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco, ‘El hambre: una reflexión historiográfica para su inclusión en el estudio del franquismo’, Alcores, no. 23 (2019): 161–83. 12 Paloma Aguilar, Memoria y olvido de la Guerra Civil española (Madrid: Alianza, 1996). 13 Encarnación Barranquero and Lucía Prieto, La derrota bajo tierra. Las fosas comunes del franquismo (Granada: Comares, 2018). 14 ‘Los años del hambre’, testimonio escrito de Antonio Carvajal. Pinos Puente, Granada, 2018. 15 More examples: Sofía Rodríguez López, Memoria de los nadie. Una historia oral del campo andaluz, 1914–1959 (Seville: Centro de Estudios Andaluces, 2015). 16 Óscar J. Rodríguez-Barreira, ‘Cambalaches: hambre, moralidad popular y mercados negros de guerra y postguerra’, Historia Social, no. 77 (2013): 149–50. 17 The figure in Declan Curran, Y. Luciuk Lubomyr and Andrew G. Newby, Famines in European Economic History: The Last Great European Famines Reconsidered (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 168–9; Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York: Allen Lane, 2017). 18 Violetta Hionidou, Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 33–48. Polymeris Voglis, ‘Surviving Hunger: Life in the Cities and the Countryside during the Occupation’, in Surviving Hitler and Mussolini: Daily Life in Occupied Europe, eds. Robert Gildea, Olivier Wieviorka and Anette Warring (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 16.

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Franco’s Famine

19 Ingrid de Zwarte, The Hunger Winter: Fighting Famine in the Occupied Netherlands, 1944–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 20 Mary E. Cox, Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany, 19141924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 21 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco (ed.), Los años del hambre. Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2020). 22 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘Famine in Spain During Franco’s Dictatorship (1939–1952)’, Journal of Contemporary History 56, no. 1 (2021): 3–27. 23 José Ortega and Javier Silvestre, ‘Las consecuencias demográficas’, in La economía de la guerra civil, eds. Pablo Martín Aceña and Elena Martínez Ruiz (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2006), 55–8. 24 Payne claimed that between the end of the war and 1945 at least 200,000 people perished due to malnutrition or related diseases, which does not seem quite realistic in light of the research conducted that reaches or exceeds that figure for the period between 1939 and 1942. He did not, however, cite his sources for such an estimate. See Stanley Payne, El régimen de Franco (Madrid: Alianza, 1987), 267. 25 The figures offered by each scholar for the period between 1939 and 1942 are as follows: Salas Larrazábal, 223,200; Díez Nicolás, 214,000; Ortega and Silvestre, 194,000. Maluquer de Motes provides data only for the period between 1936 and 1942, setting the number of deaths at 600,000. See Ramón Salas Larrazábal, Pérdidas de la guerra (Barcelona: Planeta, 1977); Juan Díez Nicolás, ‘La mortalidad en la guerra civil española’, Boletín de la Asociación de Demografía Histórica 3, no. 1 (1985): 55; Ortega and Silvestre, ‘Las consecuencias demográficas’, 76; Jordi Maluquer de Motes, ‘La incidencia de la Gran Depresión y de la Guerra Civil en la población de España (1931–1940): una nueva interpretación’, Revista de Demografía Histórica 25, no. 2 (2007): 150. 26 Conxita Mir Curcó, ‘La violencia contra uno mismo: el suicidio en el contexto represivo del franquismo’, Ayer, no. 38 (2000): 192–3; David S. Reher, ‘Perfiles demográficos de España, 1940–1960’, in Autarquía y mercado negro. El fracaso económico del primer franquismo, 1939–1959, ed. Carlos Barciela (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003), 8–9; Javier Puche Gil, ‘Guerra Civil, autarquía franquista y bienestar biológico en el mundo rural valenciano (1936–1949)’, Historia Agraria, no. 52 (2010): 129–62. 27 Carlos Barciela, María I. López, Joaquín Melgarejo and José A. Miranda, La España de Franco (1939–1975). Economía (Madrid: Síntesis, 2001), 57–8; Manuel J. González, La economía política del franquismo (1940–1970). Dirigismo, mercado y planificación (Madrid: Tecnos, 1979). 28 Jordi Maluquer de Motes, La inflación en España. Un índice de precios al consumo, 1830–2012 (Madrid: Banco de España, 2013), 76.

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15

29 The National Archives (TNA), Public Record Office (PRO), Foreign Office (FO) 371/73342, British Embassy Report, 8 March 1948. In 1947, the cost of living experienced a 12.6 per cent rise, whereas in 1946 it surged to 35.5 per cent. 30 Spanish Statistical Office (1952), 151. 31 Maluquer, La inflación en España, 78. 32 Carme Molinero and Pere Ysàs, Productores disciplinados y minorías subversivas. Clase obrera y conflictividad laboral en la España franquista (Barcelona: Siglo XXI, 1998); Teresa Ortega López, ‘Las miserias del fascismo rural. Las relaciones laborales en la agricultura española, 1936–1948’, Historia Agraria, no. 43 (2007): 544–8. 33 TNA, PRO, FO 371/24508, Labour Conditions in Spain, 1940, 139–66. 34 TNA, PRO, FO 371/26890, Postal Censorship Reports, 1941, 41–50. 35 General Archive of the Administration (AGA), Presidency of the Government (PG), National Delegation of Provinces (DNP), Box 20574, Monthly Report, Seville, January 1941. 36 Abellá, Por el Imperio hacia Dios, 68. 37 Carlos Velasco Murviedro, ‘Sucedáneos de posguerra’, Historia 16, no. 131 (1987): 11–20. Interview with Luisa Hernández-Carrillo Ibáñez (born in 1930), Campotéjar (Granada), 12 July 2018. For examples in occupied Norway, see Guri Hjeltnes, ‘Supplies Under Pressure: Survival in a Fully Rationed Society: Experiences, Cases and Innovation in Rural and Urban Regions in Occupied Norway’, in Coping with Hunger and Shortage under German Occupation in World War II, eds. Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Peter Haslinger and Agnes Laba (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), 71–4. 38 David Conde Caballero, Hambre. Una etnografía de la escasez de posguerra en Extremadura (Badajoz: Diputación de Badajoz, 2020). For this phenomenon in occupied Belgium, see Dirk Luyten, ‘Between Employer and Self-Organisation: Belgian Workers and Miners Coping with Food Shortages under German Occupation (1940–1944)’, in Coping with Hunger, 147. 39 TNA, PRO, FO 371/26890, Postal Censorship Reports, Economic Conditions, 1940, 40–50. 40 José Luis Barona Vilar, La medicalización del hambre: economía política de la alimentación en Europa, 1918–1960 (Barcelona: Icaria, 2014), 102. 41 TNA, PRO, FO 371/26891, Yencken Report, 22 August 1941, 69–71. 42 Esteban Rodríguez Ocaña and Fernando Martínez Navarro, Salud pública en España: de la Edad Media al siglo XXI (Sevilla: Escuela Andaluza de Salud Pública, 2008), 87–8. 43 Spanish Statistical Office, Fallecidos por enfermedades infecciosas, Yearbook 1951. 44 Rafael Huertas and María I. Del Cura, Alimentación y enfermedad en tiempos de hambre: España, 1937–1947 (Madrid: CSIC, 2007), 139–81.

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45 Ramón Navarro García (ed.), Análisis de la sanidad en España a lo largo del siglo XX (Madrid: Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo, 2002), 210–11. 46 Isabel Jiménez Lucena, ‘El tifus exantemático de la posguerra española (1939–1943): el uso de una enfermedad colectiva en la legitimación del nuevo estado’, Dynamis 14 (1994): 189. 47 Esteban Rodríguez Ocaña, ‘Tifus y laboratorio en la España de posguerra’, Dynamis 37, no. 2 (2017): 512–15. 48 TNA, PRO, FO 371/26891, Sir Samuel Hoare Report, 1941. TNA, PRO, FO 371/26890, 11 April 1941, 140–1. 49 Historical Archives of the Province of Málaga, Civil Government. Supplies. Box 12397, 20 May 1941. 50 Isabel Jiménez Lucena, El tifus en la Málaga de la postguerra (Málaga: Universidad, 1990), 103. 51 AGA, PG, DNP, Box 20569, Monthly Report, Granada, April 1941; TNA, PRO, FO 371/26890, 11 April 1941, 140–1. 52 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘Morir de hambre. Autarquía, escasez y enfermedad en la España del primer franquismo’, Pasado y Memoria, no. 5 (2006): 241–58. 53 Joan Ramón Villalbí and Rafael Maldonado, ‘La alimentación de la población en España desde la posguerra a los años ochenta’, Medicina Clínica, no. 90 (1988): 46. 54 Xavier Cussó Segura, ‘El estado nutritivo de la población española 1900–1970. Análisis de las necesidades y disponibilidad de nutrientes’, Historia Agraria, no. 36 (2005): 341 and 345–6. 55 José M. Martínez Carrión, Javier Puche Gil and Josep M. Ramón Muñoz, ‘Nutrición y desigualdad social en la España de Franco: evidencia antropométrica’, in La dictadura franquista. La institucionalització d’un règim, eds. Antoni Segura, Andreu Mayayo and Teresa Abelló (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2012), 281–4. 56 AGA, PG, DNP, Box 20495, Telegram, September 1939. More examples: AGA, PG, DNP, Box 20495, 20 September 1939; AGA, PG, DNP, Box 20495, 1 March 1940, 26 February 1940. 57 TNA, PRO, FO 371/24509, Telegram, 29 November 1940. 58 TNA, PRO, FO 371/26890, Postal Censorship Reports, 1941, 40–50. 59 Juan Diez Nicolás, ‘La transición demográfica en España’, Revista de Estudios Sociales, no. 1 (1971): 108–10. 60 José M. Lorente Pérez, ‘La gran sequía del año agrícola 1944–1945’, in Calendario meteorofenológico (Madrid: Servicio Meteorológico Nacional, 1945), 79–83; interview with Diego Gutiérrez González (born in 1933), Granada, 13 December 2018. 61 Antonieta Jarne, ‘Vencidos y pobres en la Cataluña rural: la subsistencia intervenida en la posguerra franquista’, Historia del Presente, no. 5 (2005): 173–5; interview with Juan Rodríguez Ortega (born in 1937), Cástaras (Granada), 14 October 2018.

Part I

Famine and malnutrition in Spain Political and socio-economic conditions

18

1

The famine that ‘never’ existed Causes of the Spanish famine Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco

In 2011, Spain’s Royal Academy of History (Real Academia de la Historia) published the Spanish Biographical Dictionary. The project was funded by the national government, which at the time was headed by the conservative José María Aznar. The entry for Francisco Franco flowed from the pen of Luis Suárez, a medievalist linked to the Francisco Franco National Foundation. The text failed to describe Franco as a dictator, stating, instead, that he built ‘an authoritarian regime, albeit not a totalitarian one’. It did not mention either the savage crackdown ordered by Franco against Republicans or opposition parties and even referred to some of the essential legislation enacted by the dictatorship as a ‘constitution’. A scandal erupted.1 Many well-known historians and intellectuals voiced their objections, called for explanations and demanded a correction to these and many other fallacies contained in the book.2 Suárez served up a series of long-standing Francoist myths to legitimize Franco and his regime. Lurking among the myths stood a narrative overlooked by many of the historians and intellectuals who had denounced Suárez’s tactics: the explanation given for the ‘Years of Hunger’ (1939–52) – the post-war period marked by economic stagnation, food scarcity and poverty.3 Suárez tiptoed over this terrible period and the adoption of autarkic policies, which resulted in an economic decline followed by a very slow recovery after the end of the war. In turn, he explained this period by alluding to the destruction that took place during the Civil War (1936–9), low rainfall with poor harvests and the international isolation caused by the Second World War. The controversy surrounding the biographical dictionary provides a vivid example of the long-raging battles over the history and the remembrance of the events in Spain during and after the Civil War. Despite the dictatorship’s

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one-sided narrative, research carried out since Franco’s death in 1975 has brought into question the many myths and silences perpetuated by the general’s regime. One of these silences, which until now has remained mostly ignored, surrounds the post-war famine concealed by the Franco regime which for too long has remained unchallenged. Accordingly, this chapter questions the Francoist interpretation of the Spanish post-war period that continues to shape public opinion today.4 The chapter first discusses the way Francoists endeavoured to explain away post-war misery and scarcity as mere hunger. It rejects the central Francoist explanations of wartime destruction, drought and international isolation. Instead, it shows that the post-war years witnessed a famine caused by the regime’s economic policy which promoted autarky in line with its ultranationalist aspirations.

Francoist explanations: War destruction, drought and international solation Francoists manufactured a myth whereby the terrible 1940s became the aftermath of three factors for which the regime could not be held accountable: the socioeconomic consequences of the Spanish Civil War; the ‘persistent drought’ over the post-war period, which resulted in a dramatic fall in production and the ensuing hunger; and the international isolation stemming from the Second World War (1939–45) and the later blockade imposed on Spain for its close relation to fascism – something which would have prevented the import of foreign goods and foodstuffs.5 The initial justification for the hunger and misery was the havoc caused by the Civil War. On 31 October 1939, Ramón Serrano Suñer, minister of Governance and head of the Political Council of the Falange (Franco’s political ‘movement’), delivered a speech in which he addressed the difficulties of supplying the nation. The explanation given at the time placed the blame for the destruction of the Spanish economy on ‘the criminal protraction of the war by the Reds’. The conflict had curtailed production and arable land (with a reduction of ‘more than 12 per cent in cereals and legumes’ harvested), ‘a 40 per cent reduction in rolling stock’ and road transport. This, he claimed, had generated foreign market losses and hastened ‘industry’s collapse’. The strains of war in the enemy camp also meant that consumer needs rose ‘in recently liberated areas, with no means of supply whatsoever’.6 Francoists maintained similar arguments through the 1940s and into the 1950s. In 1950 the minister of Industry and Commerce, Juan Antonio

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21

Suanzes, declared unequivocally that the overall shortage and difficulties were ‘basically the outcome of the last war’.7 At the war’s conclusion on 1 April 1939, the victors certainly discovered a country ravaged by war and with its economy in tatters. The conflict depleted significant resources, such as the metallic reserves of the Bank of Spain and a large portion of private savings, already destroyed by the war or eaten up by inflation. The war had also caused great material damage. Nevertheless, we cannot argue that this damage ‘reached catastrophic levels’. The fishing sector remained relatively unaffected, as shown by the fact that the poorest regularly resorted to it as a source of food in place of unobtainable beef.8 In the agrarian sector, the impact was limited and crops harvested from trees such as olives and citrus fruits were little affected. Cattle losses (8 per cent of the national livestock population) were easy to recover, particularly because the cattle-breeding areas of the country remained largely free of fighting.9 Mining and industry, especially in the important Basque Country (captured by the summer of 1937) had recovered and, indeed, had increased production by the end of the war. In this the Francoists had much to thank their enemies as the Republican authorities had opted not to dismantle or sabotage industrial facilities during their retreat.10 It has been widely argued that the transport sector was the hardest hit. But some studies have questioned the figures released by the regime after the war and point out that, even if substantial losses were sustained, these could not have been large enough to prevent a recovery in the short term.11 The loss of human lives, something which the regime always failed to acknowledge, significantly and badly affected the economy. Directly or indirectly, 346,000 people lost their lives because of the war. After the rebel victory in April 1939 and amid a ruthless repression by Francoist forces, 50,000 Republicans were executed.12 Most of the war’s victims were men (76.3 per cent), and their loss led to a reduction in productivity in an economy where women had been displaced from the labour market. We should also include the purge of qualified personnel or their exile abroad, replaced by a less skilled labour force marked by extreme allegiance to the regime.13 The loss of human resources plays a major role in explaining the fall in production: experience and skills were all destroyed by the war and the implacable Francoist crackdown.14 The fall in production is also explained by the regime’s economic policies which, as we shall see, proved decisive in producing the deterioration in living conditions. The dictatorship presented the notion of the persistent drought (‘pertinaz sequía’) as one of its prime explanations for the decrease in both agricultural and electricity production (in a country that made great use of hydro-electricity).

22

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The claim appeared first in the official press and especially in the mid-1940s. In both newspapers and in General Franco’s speeches the allusions to drought appear again and again through the 1940s, although the droughts that did occur took place only in 1945–6 and in 1948–9.15 How convincing is drought as an explanation? A drought can be defined as ‘a range of abnormally dry weather conditions, which result in serious hydrological resource deficits and crop losses’. The World Meteorological Organization relates the onset of droughts to the development of rainfall 60 per cent lower than normal over more than two consecutive years.16 It is difficult to determine the periods of drought during the 1940s: first, because it is characteristic of the Mediterranean climate and prevalent in most of the Iberian Peninsula; second, we are unable to call on overall national data, since the network of meteorological observatories became established only through the 1940s; third, droughts were not evenly distributed throughout the peninsula, despite commonly affecting large swathes of that territory. Nevertheless, several studies demonstrate that it is not possible to speak of a sustained drought in the 1940s. A number of scholars close to the Franco regime published research in which they drew attention particularly to 1945, when rainfall decreased, affecting the following year’s crops.17 Another study even assessed humidity, appraising the tentative evapotranspiration for different agricultural regions and years, and confirming that the worst years were 1944–5 and 1948–9, when the peninsular south and centre endured an arid and semiarid climate, respectively.18 More recent studies reveal that there could have, indeed, been some years of drought during the post-war period (particularly in 1944–5 and, to a lesser extent, in the period between 1948 and 1950), but whose consequences were greatly exaggerated.19 These ideas are confirmed when interpreting the data related to the entire twentieth century (Figure 1.1). We can observe a variability in precipitation and the inherent dryness of the Mediterranean climate. If we compare the 1940s with other decades, we notice that the simple moving average (SMA) is greater than in the 1920s or 1930s. In fact, it is in the 1950s when rainfall decreases. In the post-war period, there were years that equalled or surpassed the mean rainfall of a given decade (1939–43, 1947 and 1951), and there were periods in which precipitation was particularly low (1944–5, and, to a lesser degree, 1949–50).20 Therefore, the characteristic dryness of the Mediterranean climate and the specific drought of some years are not enough to justify whatsoever the fall in production and the food crisis of the 1940s (and neither the initial phase of the famine, from 1939 to 1942, nor the scarcity experienced throughout the entire

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Figure 1.1  Rainfall in Spain 1901–2011. Source: Global Climate Monitor (www​.glo​ balc​lima​temonitor​.org).

decade). However, the drought that occurred in the middle of the decade, along with the policies implemented by the regime, would, indeed, contribute to the return of hunger with the ‘small famine’ of 1946. The circumstantial drop in rainfall affected the southern regions in particular, a fact that conditioned agricultural production as a result of the alleged reduction of organic and inorganic fertilizers. Some of the northern regions (Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, Basque Country, Navarra) remained exempt from the effects of the Mediterranean climate and were unaffected by these dynamics.21 It is worth asking whether the regime could have done anything at the time to tackle that circumstantial rainfall scarcity. It could have adjusted its economic policy, putting an end to intervention, promoting more remunerative prices and dismantling its economic autarky. This would have led to an increase in arable land, a rise in production (fostered also by the use of agricultural supplies), better distribution of food and the arrival of foreign imports. It could have further developed a network of reservoirs to counter the drought. The war had halted the projects laid out by the Republican National Plan of Hydraulic Works (1933), and although in 1939 the New State trumpeted its own General Plan of Public Works, it was not until the 1950s that a considerable rise in construction activity began to take place.22

24

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Lastly, the Francoist regime alluded to the international context to explain what have become known as the ‘hunger years’. It was an explanation that was first used during the Second World War and to account for the economic blockade against the country. After 1945, the regime blamed the ‘international isolation’ imposed on Spain by the allied powers. A synthesis of both explanations can be found in the words pronounced in 1961 by former minister Juan Antonio Suanzes in a speech to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Franco’s rise as head of state. At a time of full economic liberalization, he justified the implementation of autarky in 1939 as ‘inevitable’, a result of the ‘vast damage caused by the War of Liberation and the Red madness’ and the ‘difficulties stemming from the [world] war’. In 1945 and 1952, however, by ‘communist initiative and inspiration or imposition’, Spain witnessed ‘the most inexplicable and unfair persecution’ and was isolated internationally.23 The dictatorship was distorting reality once more, for the autarkic economic policy had been voluntarily adopted by the Franco regime. Ultranationalist in nature, autarkic philosophy expressed a profound distrust towards the international arena, which the regime believed to be replete with Spain’s enemies. Thus, the country had to direct all its efforts to mobilizing its national resources and achieving a positive balance of payments without ‘enriching’ its possible adversaries. This entailed maximizing exports (a goal which the regime never seriously tried to reach) and renouncing imports, especially foodstuffs or raw materials which, according to the impassioned nationalist speeches made by Francoist officials, could have been easily produced in the country. The interests of the ‘New Spain’ justified the social costs of this policy.24 Nevertheless, we can recognize the limited role of international relations during the harsh famine years between 1939 and 1942. At this point, the Franco regime maintained close relations with the Axis powers and in June 1940 moved from a position of ‘neutrality’ in the Second World War to one of nonbelligerence. The regime even went so far as to occupy the international city of Tangier and Franco contemplated joining the war on the side of the Nazis. In response, Britain and the United States adopted their policy of ‘carrot and stick’ towards Spain. They established a partial blockade in an effort to force Spain into realizing the cost of joining the Germans. At the same time, the British launched their policy of ‘navicerts’ to persuade the Franco regime of the value of the allies to the Spanish economy, and to force the general’s regime to maintain its neutrality and to refrain from supplying Germans with goods. Only with these certificates in place could the Franco regime import cereals, phosphates and other basic products from overseas. In this sense, the blockade proved far

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from total, and what isolation there was resulted most of all from the ideological position of the Franco regime.25 The regime’s propaganda made no mention either of the international aid received or the foreign trade conducted with other nations during the post-Civil War years. Throughout the Second World War, Spain established strong commercial relations with Germany, while rejecting the credits offered by Western powers for the country’s reconstruction, clearly from political considerations.26 In many ways, Hitler’s government turned Spain into an economic satellite. Spain sent Germany foodstuffs and minerals, essential for feeding the Spanish population in probably the most critical moment after the Civil War. For instance, in 1940 the country ran a trade surplus of 7 million pesetas (gold) owing to the export of foodstuffs to Germany, and in 1941 that surplus rose to 92.4 million pesetas (gold) during one of the harshest months of the famine. Its closeness to the Axis and its policy of ‘non-belligerence’ in place between June 1940 and October 1943 cost Spain many of the commercial opportunities the world war offered. As Ángel Viñas pointed out many years ago, ‘ideology triumphed over economics’.27 The Franco regime also sent goods and food to Germany to pay back debts accrued from the military support the Nazis lent Franco in the Civil War. The relative power relations between the two countries also meant that the Francoists were keen to ingratiate themselves with Hitler. This meant that the outcomes proved very unfavourable for Spain and especially as Germany’s pressing needs in the Second World War led to strong demands. As a result, Spain’s balance of trade deficit with Germany soared exponentially. This disrupted Spain’s own economic recovery and prevented the regime from pursuing emergency policies to alleviate the distress of its own starving population.28 This context helps explain why British diplomatic personnel at the time felt so shocked at the export of essential foodstuffs that were vital for the Spanish population. In July 1940, the ambassador in Madrid wrote to the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, admitting that ‘Spain’s contribution to the German cause will mean the semi-starvation of her people. The entire crop of new potatoes in the Valencia district had been bought up by Germany . . . . Tomatoes and fruit in very large quantities are also en route.’29 During the Second World War, some international organizations sent aid to Spain in response to the critical situation in the country. In only six months, the American Red Cross distributed ‘20,000 tons of food valued at $4,000,000’.30 Even the hard-pressed UK helped Spain. Notwithstanding the difficult international context, the British embassy signed a contract with the Ministry of

26

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Commerce and Industry to supply Spain with stores of Canadian wheat held by Britain in the United States.31 But soon after the end of the Civil War and at the onset of the Second World War, some organizations that had previously offered humanitarian assistance now left the country, pressured by the regime’s aversion to their presence there (see Chapter 7 in this volume). When the Second World War ended, the Franco regime signed agreements with other countries, which to a limited extent helped ease some of the dire socioeconomic conditions. The import of Argentine wheat and corn throughout the post-war period prevented the situation from growing worse. Certainly, the 1946 agreement with the government of General Perón, sold to the Spanish public opinion as a great political victory, proved decisive in easing the famine.32 On a smaller scale, commercial exchanges of foodstuffs and raw materials between Spain and Eastern European communist nations took place after 1945 with the intervention of companies or third countries.33 Furthermore, at different times throughout the decade, Spanish diplomacy proved able to handle freight from different parts of the world, as shown by the telegrams describing wheat shipments from Pakistan, Portugal, United States and Italy.34

The main cause: Autarkic policy The effects of the Civil War, the periods of specific drought and the international context may have played a role in the socio-economic evolution of Spain during the post-war years. Nevertheless, as we have attempted to demonstrate so far, these factors cannot by themselves explain the famine. Instead, we need to focus on autarky, the economic policy adopted by the regime, which magnified the effects of the Civil War and contributed decisively to the collapse of the economy and the decline in living conditions.35 The Spanish famine must be understood as a phenomenon inherent to the famines that ravaged Europe at this point in the twentieth century, which were largely rooted in the interventionist, authoritarian or totalitarian policies implemented by anti-democratic governments – rather than the weather.36 As Amartya Sen has pointed out, the state and its policies play a critical role in the origin of contemporary famines, as scarcity does not reside simply in the lack of food but, rather, in the obstacles encountered by different social groups to accessing food in specific situations.37 In the Spanish case, the destruction caused by war or occasional droughts might have exercised a limited impact on production and on the socio-economic situation. However, the vast bulk of

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the shortages had their roots in the autarkic policy pursued by the dictatorship. We also need to take into account the strict control over production exercised by state institutions as well as the obstacles encountered by the poor and the politically repressed in accessing basic foodstuffs through the 1940s. During the war, the rebels were, on the whole, able to feed the population in the parts of the country they occupied since they controlled vast amounts of raw materials and many of the country’s prime agricultural areas. They also benefited from the inestimable help of foreign companies and ‘fascist’ countries (Germany, Italy and Portugal). They further militarized production and disciplined labour relations, increasing the country’s economic output.38 After the war, the New State abandoned its successful economic policies and embraced fascist-inspired autarky. Under autarky, the state sought to exert an iron-fisted control over production and trade with a view towards fostering industrialization and turning Spain into a strong imperial power. The regime aimed to create a balance of payments surplus by stepping up domestic industrial and agricultural production, regardless of their opportunity costs, renouncing imports and promoting exports.39 The Civil War and the post-war years entailed a disruption to the economic growth experienced in Spain between 1850 and 2000. By 1940, income per head had fallen by 20 per cent compared with 1930, and it barely expanded during the post-war period.40 The gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 3.39 per cent between 1935 and 1940, rising to a mere 1.37 per cent during the 1940s. Flawed government policies exerted a critical influence on the economic recovery of the country, as some comparisons with other European nations have shown.41 Unlike France, Belgium, Austria, Italy, Germany or the Netherlands, which suffered the devastating effects of the Second World War and yet achieved a rapid recovery, Spanish GDP needed twelve years to reach the levels it had before the war.42 The regime’s autarkic policy hindered the development of agriculture during the post-war years.43 The policy led to a reduction in cultivated areas, and there was a decrease in the use of fertilizers, which, unsurprisingly, spurred a decline in yields.44 Similarly, the imposition of low wages and the rigid control of the workforce brought down costs but removed incentives to raise productivity.45 Livestock levels also fell, mainly due to the difficulties in finding pasture for grazing, since these areas were given over to crop production. Livestock also suffered due to the decline in demand for an expensive product at a time of hardship. This led to a drop in meat production (with its corresponding proteins) and the restricted availability of manure with which to increase yields.46 This mattered particularly because autarkic policy had triggered a return to a sort

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of grassroots agriculture, a strictly organic farming, disrupting a decade-long growth model.47 In some cases, the fall in production was such that it left the primary sector unable to feed the population.48 Some of the regime’s internal documents acknowledge the roots of the problem: in 1946, the National Delegate of Trade Unions, Fermín Sanz Orrio, submitted a report to the minister of Agriculture urging an about-turn in policy to achieve ‘a rise in agricultural production’ and improve nutrition. The report recognized that ‘the fall in agricultural production, the inefficient collection and distribution system, the emergence of a black market and the overflow of money have accounted for the current unsustainable situation which hangs over each and every Spaniard’.49 Difficulties also beset industrial production. A thriving national industry (both heavy and military) was essential to Francoism since it would help achieve the imperial aims of the New Spain. Thus, following its autarkic ideals, the state pushed for industrialization through its own policies and by founding the National Institute of Industry (INI – Instituto Nacional de Industria), inspired by fascist Italy. The INI exercised a firm grip over the country’s industrial sector, placing ‘national interests’ before private ones and discouraging individual business enterprises.50 The results were disastrous, and the sector would not recover until the progressive economic liberalization of the 1950s and the ultimate forsaking of autarky in 1959.51 Autarkic policy also explains the halt in growth that Spanish industry had enjoyed during the first third of the twentieth century. Productive levels in 1930 were surpassed only in 1950, which led some scholars to label this period as ‘the dusk of Spanish industrialization’.52 Post-war industrial production rates had a slower development than in the rest of the European countries, further distancing Spain from Europe. A reason for this stagnation was the fall in consumption during the Civil War but also an inefficient economic policy.53 Economist Higinio París Eguilaz, a regime official, took notice of this in 1949, submitting a report to the Generalísimo (Franco) in which he proposed easing off autarky to boost production, reduce the cost of living and ensure supply.54 Not every branch of industry grew at the same rate. Consumer goods, so important for improving living conditions, were especially affected by autarkic policy, since it granted (as in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany) absolute priority to military, chemical, metal and mechanical engineering industries. Beset by post-war scarcity, these sectors absorbed the largest levels of public investment and enjoyed preferential treatment for imports, energy consumption, raw materials and capital resources. This would have devastating consequences for the common citizen.55

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The dire economic downturn also affected commerce and supply. After the war, Francoism took its autarkic ideals to an extreme. It gained control of an unprecedented number of foodstuffs, setting an official tax rate aimed at containing prices, and imposed rationing over most of the essential goods, with the objective – in theory – of ensuring minimal sustenance to all Spaniards.56 It also instructed farmers on which crops they should grow and how many hectares they had to sow. After the harvest, it forced farmers to relinquish part of their yields to the state. In this context, the control, transport and distribution of goods came under the sway of a cumbersome and inefficient bureaucracy.57 This entire system remained in place, to a large extent, until 1951–2. It coincided exactly with the years of ‘hunger’. The outcome was harrowing: many basic foodstuffs were erased from the official market and were only to be found at astronomical prices in the underground economy. Official rations alone were never enough, and the supply of scarce and poor-quality foodstuffs made surviving a severe challenge. As noted, agricultural production fell, but a good part of it was funnelled through extra-official channels. For its part, the distribution of goods by the regime was completely inefficient, failing to supply the different regions and removing products from the market in the midst of unprecedented state corruption.58 Scarcity, supply regulations and poor prices paved the way for the rise of the black-market phenomenon across the country. This was a reaction to the tight (and enduring) regime control over a variety of foodstuffs, most of them subject to official supervision. In reality, the scarcity was somewhat fictitious: any item could be found on the black market for those who had the money to pay for it. Further, those with access to any state-controlled product could hide it from the authorities and sell it as estraperlo (illegally) in the underground market. This was the case for many farm workers, who formed a key social pillar of support for the dictatorship and were able to control supply and even profit from trading on the black market. We could state the same for regime officials at all levels of government, since they enjoyed privileged access to supply and managed to set up lucrative schemes with utter impunity.59 In 1950, economist París Eguilaz addressed another report to Franco in which he once again underscored the prejudices stirred up by autarky. Fixing prices, the economist argued, was another source of problems which had sparked an emergency in a black market ‘favoured in many cases by official supply agencies, a direct result of the corruption of some of its officials’. He also acknowledged that all this had led to an inefficient rationing which offered poor diets, and huge profits for speculators and business owners.60 Certainly, General Franco did not lack news and reports about the

30

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effects of his economic policies. One of the reports kept among his personal documents stated that the autarkic policy of supply was driving ‘thousands of human beings, whose income cannot meet the prices of these items, to hunger, anaemia, tuberculosis and eventually death’.61 Given the gravity of the situation, it is worth examining the policies implemented by Francoism. Despite the prevailing famine and misery, it seems surprising that the regime opted to reduce and control public spending.62 As noted, the regime resorted to wheat imports, as well as international aid in food and medicine, to minimize the extent of the tragedy. Nevertheless, its institutions were in charge of food distribution at all times. The best example of this is Auxilio Social (Social Aid), an organization linked to the Falange and inspired by Nazism, engaged in developing a social welfare policy for those in need. Hunger, therefore, turned into an element of social control against any acts of dissidence.63 In spite of the inefficiency of autarkic policy, acknowledged at the highest levels of the regime, this economic model would not be easily abandoned. From the summer of 1951 onwards, however, influential factors – such as the weakening of the Spanish economy and the protests that had begun to spring up against the cost of living and supply issues – for example, the Barcelona tram workers’ strike of March 1951 – would hasten this process.64 The dictatorship’s inertia until then can only be explained by the benefits the social groups closest to it obtained from a system in which corruption, sinecures and the black market had become the norm.65 Such was the case for Franco himself and many of his ministers, as well as several officials and those in positions linked to the Falange. General Franco never considered corruption as a serious offence and actually used it to secure the support of several like-minded and right-wing political currents (familias políticas) to hold on to power indefinitely.66 Ironically, the development of autarkic policies and the deterioration of living conditions produced positive outcomes for the regime. The lower classes endured the post-war years in a state of malnutrition, with meagre diets and resorting to survival strategies in an attempt to stay alive. The ubiquitous control by a regime that had destroyed all freedoms, unions and political parties and that controlled the supply of basic foodstuffs for the needy clearly defused any possible opposition. Likewise, the regime’s grassroots supporters enjoyed easy access to supplies or even profited from it, deepening their support for Francoism.67 The outcome of these dynamics was the survival of the Franco regime. Despite harsh socio-economic conditions and international isolation, the dictatorship eventually managed to control the social and political attitudes

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of the population and overcome the long post-war period. The famine and the years of hunger, paradoxically, saved Francoism. But this was a high price to pay.

Notes 1 For an analysis of the volume and the controversy surrounding it, see José Luis Ledesma, ‘El Diccionario Biográfico Español, el pasado y los historiadores’, Ayer 4, no. 88 (2012): 247–65. 2 El País, ‘Franco, ese (no tan mal hombre)’, 30 May 2011, https​:/​/el​​pais.​​com​/d​​iario​​ /2011​​/05​/3​​0​/cul​​tura/​​13067​​06402​​​_8502​​15​.ht​​ml (accessed 2 July 2020); El País, ‘Contra el falseamiento de la historia’, 2 June 2011, https​:/​/el​​pais.​​com​/d​​iario​​/2011​​ /06​/0​​2​/cul​​tura/​​13069​​65602​​​_8502​​15​.ht​​ml (accessed 2 July 2020). The controversial entry was eventually modified and rewritten by Juan Pablo Fusi. 3 An exception to this was Andreu Mayayo, ‘Los historiadores se alarman ante la hagiografía de Franco’, Público, 30 May 2011, https​:/​/ww​​w​.pub​​lico.​​es​/cu​​ltura​​s​/his​​ toria​​dores​​-alar​​man​-h​​agiog​​raf​i a​​-fran​​co​.ht​​ml (accessed 2 July 2020). 4 Pío Moa, Los años de hierro: España en la posguerra (1939–1945) (Madrid: Esfera de los Libros, 2007). 5 These explanations have been reproduced in Francoist or post-Francoist historiography, such as the work by Ricardo de la Cierva, Historia del franquismo. Orígenes y configuración (1939–1945) (Barcelona: Planeta, 1975) and Historia del franquismo. Aislamiento, transformación, agonía (1945–1975) (Barcelona: Planeta, 1978). See also José Luis Comellas, Historia de España Contemporánea (Madrid: Rialp, 2014), 525–6. 6 ‘Las dificultades actuales’, ABC, 1 November 1939, 8. 7 Juan Antonio Suanzes, The Spanish Commercial and Industrial Policy (Madrid: Foreign Economy and Commerce Department, 1950), 24 and 37. 8 William D. Robinson, John H. Janney and Francisco Grande “Covián, ‘An Evaluation of the Nutritional Status of a Population Group in Madrid, Spain, during the Summer of 1941’, The Journal of Nutrition 24, no. 6 (1942): 565. 9 Carlos Barciela, ‘Crecimiento y cambio en la agricultura española desde la guerra civil’, in La economía española en el siglo XX. Una perspectiva histórica, eds. Carles Sudrià, Jordi Nadal and Albert Carreras (Barcelona: Ariel, 1987), 258. 10 Carlos Barciela, ‘La economía y la guerra’, Pasado y Memoria, no. 8 (2009): 27. 11 Francisco Cayón García and Miguel Muñoz Rubio, ‘Transportes y comunicaciones’, in La economía de la Guerra Civil, eds. Pablo Martín Aceña and Elena Martínez Ruiz (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2006), 265. 12 Javier Rodrigo, Hasta la raíz. Violencia durante la Guerra Civil y la dictadura franquista (Madrid: Alianza, 2008), 48.

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13 A prime example of this are the notable Republican economists in exile, who opposed autarky. See Manuel Martín Rodríguez and Eloy Fernández Clemente, ‘Sesenta economistas académicos del exilio (1936–1939)’, in Economía y economistas españoles en la guerra civil, eds. Enrique Fuentes Quintana and Francisco Comín (Madrid: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2008), 435–64. 14 Carlos Barciela, ‘Guerra Civil y primer franquismo (1936–1939)’, in Historia económica de España. Siglos X–XX, eds. Francisco Comín, Mauro Hernández and Enrique Llopis (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002), 337–8. 15 See, for instance, ‘El anhelo del agua’, ABC, 19 August 1945, 1; ‘El Manzanares ha desaparecido’, ABC, 30 August 1945; ‘Otoño en el Retiro’, ABC, 14 October 1945. There are further news reports at the end of the decade, such as ‘La sequía en el Retiro’, ABC, 6 March 1949. See also Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Textos de doctrina política: palabras y escritos de 1945 a 1950 (Madrid: Publicaciones Españolas, 1951). 16 Jorge Olcina Cantos, ¿Riesgos Naturales? I. Sequías e inundaciones (Mataró: Davinci, 2006). 17 José María Lorente, ‘Sequía agotadora’, Revista de Geofísica, no. 3 (1945): 193–4; José María Lorente, ‘La sequía del invierno 1944–1945 en España’, Revista de Geofísica, no. 4 (1945): 263–6; Antonio Dué Rojo, ‘Años de sequía’, Revista de Geofísica, no. 12 (1953): 227–33. 18 Cayetano Tamés, El régimen de humedad de España durante el periodo 1940–1953 (Madrid: Ministerio de Agricultura, 1954), 18 and 26. 19 José Miguel Ruiz Pérez, ‘La pertinaz sequía en las cuencas hidrográficas del óvalo valenciano (1930–1960)’, Cuadernos de geografía, no. 91–2 (2012): 112. 20 Low precipitations in the period between 1948 and 1950 did not affect all areas in the same way. In the Levante, this phenomenon spread only along the provinces of Teruel, Cuenca and Albacete, leaving the productive coastal areas untouched. Ibid., 106. 21 Tamés, El régimen de humedad, 10–30. 22 Joaquín Melgarejo, ‘De la política hidráulica a la planificación hidrológica. Un siglo de intervención del Estado’, in El agua en la historia de España, eds. Carlos Barciela and Joaquín Melgarejo (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2000), 299–303. 23 Juan Antonio Suanzes, ‘Franco y la economía’, in 8 discursos de Suanzes (Madrid: INI, 1963), 139–43. He would deliver another speech the following year in which he insisted on the ‘international conspiracy against Spain’ that had condemned the country to isolation. See Ibid., 28. 24 Ángel Viñas, ‘Autarquía y política exterior en el primer franquismo (1939–1959)’, Revista de Estudios Internacionales, no. 1 (1980): 65–70. 25 Ángel Viñas, Guerra, dinero, dictadura. Ayuda fascista y autarquía en la España de Franco (Barcelona: Crítica, 1984), 250–1. Michael Alpert, ‘Las relaciones

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26

27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

33

anglo-hispanas en el primer semestre de la “guerra caliente”’, Revista de Política Internacional, no. 160 (1978): 27–8. Enrique Moradiellos, Franco Frente a Churchill: España y Gran Bretaña en la Segunda Guerra Mundial (1939-1945) (Barcelona: Península, 2007). Ángel Viñas, Julio Viñuela, Fernando Eguidazu, Carlos Fernández and Senen Florensa, Política comercial exterior en España (1931–1975), Tomo I (Madrid: Banco Exterior de España, 1979), 280–9. Viñas, Guerra, dinero, dictadura, 255–6 and 264. Ibid., 255–6. Rafael García Pérez, Franquismo y tercer Reich. Las relaciones económicas hispano-alemanas durante la segunda guerra mundial (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1994); Rafael García Pérez, ‘España en la Europa hitleriana’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie V. Historia Contemporánea, no. 7 (1994): 47–8. With regard to minerals, the case of tungsten exported to Germany is highly significant. See Joan María Thomàs, La batalla del Wolframio: Estados Unidos y España de Pearl Harbor a la Guerra Fría (1941–1947) (Madrid: Cátedra, 2010). TNA, PRO, FO 371/24508, Yecklan to Halifax, 1–7–1940. Keesing’s Contemporary Archives, vol. 4, July 1940–June 1943 (London: Keesings Ltd., 1940–43), 4848. The first shipload was of 15,000 tons of wheat. See Edgar Allison Peers, ‘Spain Week by Week’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 18, no. 70 (1941): 94. Raanan Rein, La salvación de una dictadura: alianza Franco–Perón, 1949–1955 (Madrid: CSIC, 1995), 72–88. Matilde Eiroa, Las relaciones de Franco con Europa Centro-Oriental (1939–1955) (Barcelona: Ariel, 2001), 183. Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco (FNFF), documents 13855, 13378, 12088 & 7099, respectively. See, among others, Viñas et al., Política comercial; Albert Carreras, ‘La producción industrial española, 1842–1981: construcción de un índice anual’, Revista de Historia Económica 2, no. 1 (1984): 127–57; Carlos Barciela, ‘Los costes del franquismo en el sector agrario: la ruptura del proceso de transformaciones’, in Historia agraria de la España Contemporánea. 3. El fin de la agricultura tradicional (1900–1960), eds. Ramón Garrabou, Carlos Barciela and José I. Jiménez Blanco (Barcelona: Crítica, 1986); Pablo Martín Aceña and Elena Martínez Ruiz, La economía de la Guerra Civil; Fuentes Quintana and Comín, Economía y economistas. The Greek case may be a perfect example of this. See Violetta Hionidou, Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2006). Also, for The Netherlands, Ingrid de Zwarte, The Hunger Winter: Fighting Famine in the Occupied Netherlands, 1944–45 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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37 Sen explained famines through the ‘failure of the exchange of entitlements’. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1–8. 38 Michael Seidman, Victorious Counterrevolution: The Nationalist Effort in the Spanish Civil War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 247–8; Lina Galvez Muñoz, ‘Produciendo para la revolución y produciendo para la reacción. Trabajo y guerra civil’, in La economía de la Guerra Civil, 488–9. 39 See, among others, Carlos Barciela, María I. López, Joaquín Melgarejo and José A. Miranda, La España de Franco (1939–1975). Economía (Madrid: Síntesis, 2001), 23–8; Albert Carreras and X. Tafunell, Historia económica de la España contemporánea (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006); Santos Juliá, José Luis García Delgado, Juan Carlos Jiménez and Juan Pablo Fusi, La España del siglo XX (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003), 353. 40 Ibid., 434. 41 Leandro Prados de la Escosura, El progreso económico de España (Madrid: Fundación BBVA, 2003), 133 and 230. 42 Barciela, ‘La economía y la guerra’, 27. 43 Barciela, ‘Los costes del franquismo’. Christiansen argues that the decrease in corn yield was the result of the produce commercialized in the black market, as well as the lack of fertilizers and working livestock, rather than state intervention. See Thomas Christiansen, The Reason Why: The Post Civil-War Agrarian Crisis in Spain (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2012). 44 Mikel Buesa, ‘Industrialización y agricultura: una nota sobre la construcción de maquinaria agrícola y la producción de fertilizantes en la política industrial española (1939–1963)’, Agricultura y Sociedad, no. 29 (1983): 240. 45 José Manuel Naredo, ‘La agricultura española en el desarrollo económico’, Garrabou, Barciela and Jiménez Blanco, Historia agraria, 455–99. 46 Alberte Martínez López, ‘La ganadería gallega durante el primer franquismo: crónica de un tiempo perdido, 1936–1960’, Historia Agraria, no. 20 (2000): 205–11. 47 Ramón Garrabou, ‘Políticas agrarias y desarrollo de la agricultura española contemporánea: unos apuntes’, Papeles de Economía Española, no. 73 (1997): 145. 48 Alicia Langreo and Luis Germán, ‘Transformaciones en el sistema alimentario y cambios de dieta en España durante el siglo XX’, Historia Agraria, no. 74 (2018): 172. 49 AGA, Agricultura. Secretaría General Técnica. Caja 7535, 15–11–1946. 50 Elena San Román, Ejército e industria: el nacimiento del INI (Barcelona: Crítica, 1999), 299–302; see also Pablo Martín Aceña and Francisco Comín, INI. 50 años de industrialización en España (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1991). 51 Francisco Comín and Pablo Martín Aceña, ‘La política autárquica y el INI’, in Los empresarios de Franco. Política y economía en España, 1936–1957, eds. Glicerio Sánchez Recio and Julio Tascón (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003), 41.

The Famine that ‘Never’ Existed

35

52 Carreras, ‘La producción industrial’, 144–7. 53 Albert Carreras, ‘La industria: atraso y modernización’, La economía española, 303–6. See also Jordi Catalán, La economía española y la Segunda Guerra Mundial (Ariel: Barcelona, 1995). 54 FNFF, Document 26015, 30–6–1949; Carlos Barciela, ‘Franquismo y corrupción económica’, Historia Social, no. 30 (1998): 93. 55 Barciela et al., La España de Franco, 118. Enric Morellá, ‘El producto industrial de posguerra: una revisión (índices sectoriales, 1940–1958)’, Revista de Historia Económica 10, no. 1 (1992): 125–43. 56 Officially, the rationing system made no distinction between the ‘victors’ and ‘vanquished’ from the Civil War. Instead, it grouped people in three groups and awarded food amounts according to differing deemed needs. In practice, those close to the regime proved able to benefit from the black market. Nevertheless, in the official sense the Spanish case differs from the situation in Germany after the Second World War when members of the army and civilian collaborators with the Nazis received lower rations. See Atina Grossmann, ‘Grams, Calories, and Food: Languages of Victimization, Entitlement, and Human Rights in Occupied Germany, 1945–1949’, Central European History 44, no. 1 (2011): 118–48.  57 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, Las alas del ave fénix. La política agraria del primer franquismo (1936–1959) (Granada: Comares, 2005), chapter 2. 58 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, Hambre de siglos. Mundo rural y apoyos sociales del franquismo en Andalucía Oriental (1936–1951) (Granada: Comares, 2007), 227–89; David Ginard i Ferón, ‘Las condiciones de vida durante el primer franquismo. El caso de las Islas Baleares’, Hispania 62, no. 212 (2002): 1099–128. 59 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘La corrupción en el franquismo. El fenómeno del “Gran Estraperlo”’, Hispania Nova, no. 16 (2018): 620–45. 60 FNFF, Document 25989, La situación económica actual de España, 1950. 61 FNFF, Document 10918, ‘La voz de la calle’, July 1946. 62 Francisco Comín, ‘Sector público y crecimiento económico en la dictadura de Franco’, Ayer, no. 21 (1996): 167–8. 63 Ángela Cenarro, La sonrisa de Falange: Auxilio Social en la guerra civil y en la posguerra (Barcelona: Crítica, 2005). 64 Michael Richards, ‘Falange, Autarky and Crisis: The Barcelona General Strike of 1951’, European History Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1999): 568–73. 65 Carlos Barciela, ‘El lobby agrario en la España franquista’, Los empresarios de Franco, 111–20. 66 Paul Preston, Un pueblo traicionado. España de 1874 a nuestros días: corrupción, incompetencia política y división social (Barcelona: Debate, 2019), 393–6. 67 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘Hunger and the Consolidation of the Francoist Regime (1939–1951)’, European History Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2010): 458–83.

2

Agricultural crisis and food crisis in early Francoism Hunger seen through the lens of biophysics Manuel González de Molina, David Soto Fernández, Juan Infante Amate and Antonio Herrera

Introduction This chapter aims to deepen our understanding of the early years of Francoism when an unprecedented food crisis in Spain’s contemporary history occurred. Despite being known as ‘the hunger years’ in the popular imagination, the depth, severity and duration of the crisis are often overlooked and treated as the logical consequence of the Civil War. This was the explanation defended by the regime itself, which blamed it on the ‘Red destruction’.1 In the present study, however, we will see how the food crisis was, in fact, the lasting reflection of the agrarian sector’s structural crisis and of the economic policy that regulated its functioning over almost two decades, between 1940 and 1959. The food crisis cannot thus be interpreted as an outcome of the war, of an inefficient agrarian sector that was not yet industrialized, or the logical starting point of an agrarian sector that would achieve a stable and abundant food supply a few years later, thanks to the dictatorial regime. This supply had already been achieved in the first decades of the twentieth century, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, despite the severity of the 1929 crisis. To characterize the crisis and its depth, we first need to analyse the production and consumption of food between 1940 and 1960, and then frame it within the agricultural sector’s long-term evolution to appreciate its true dimension. This chapter is structured in four sections: the first section presents the sources used to trace the evolution of the food supply throughout the twentieth century and describes the methodology used to process the data. The second section presents the results of the study, showing the long-term evolution of

Agricultural Crisis and Food Crisis in Early Francoism

37

apparent food consumption and the duration of the food crisis. It was also possible in this section to assess the depth of the crisis by analysing the Spanish diet’s nutritional composition based on its main indicators. The third section analyses how the agricultural sector and foreign trade operated in this period. The aim is to identify the structural causes of the food crisis from a metabolic perspective. Finally, conclusions are drawn on the scale and causes of the crisis.

Sources and methods In recent years, a considerable number of studies analysing food consumption data have been published in Spain. We have several estimates of the national food balances for the period before the Civil War as well as those drawn up by García Barbancho for the mid-1920s and 1950s.2 García Barbancho’s data was revised upwards by Xavier Cussó.3 Simpson’s data had already been put into question by Prados de la Escosura, also due to its suggesting an overly poor diet in 1900.4 This latter opinion is shared by Cussó and Garrabou in their analysis of the consumption of cereals, legumes and potatoes.5 For the second half of the twentieth century, we also have the food balance series published by the Ministry of Agriculture in the yearbooks of Agricultural Statistics (series between 1952 and 1982) as well as the FAO series since 1961. Moreover, the Family Budget Surveys are available from 1958, prepared and published by the Institute of National Statistics, offering direct consumption estimates. For the period between 1940 and 1988, we have the estimate made by Rodríguez Artalejo et al.6 We lack, however, a methodologically homogeneous series for the entire twentieth century that would allow us to evaluate long-term dietary changes. This is why we chose to build a series to fill this gap. We achieved this by estimating total flows of biomass produced, appropriated and consumed within Spain between 1900 and 1980. Data on these flows have been taken from a much broader study conducted into the metabolism of Spanish agriculture based on Economy-Wide Material Flow Accounting (EW-MFA).7 This is a well-known methodology that has, however, had to be adapted to the specificities of the agrarian sector.8 A detailed explanation of the methodological proposal and the changes made to adapt the metabolic methodology to the food field can be found in González de Molina et al.9 The EW-MFA methodology provides high-quality information about all the biomass produced in the country – in other words, the actual Net Primary Productivity (NPPact) of Spanish agroecosystems and the different categories

38

Franco’s Famine

they encompass. Among these are the proportions of biomass that are destined for human consumption, either directly or indirectly, through livestock. This methodology distinguishes between the domestic extraction (DE) and domestic consumption (DC) of biomass. This latter element is the result of adding imports from third-party countries and subtracting exports from DE. Consequently, DC enables the apparent consumption of human food and the cost of animal feed in terms of biomass to be reconstructed, taking into account the net foreign trade balance.10 The sources used to calculate biomass output are the statistics provided by the Spanish government, with different degrees of quality and regularity between 1900 and 1980 (most of these publications are available online).11 We have reconstructed the evolution of DE based on the construction of seven points in time between 1990 and 1980, employing five-year averages on yields.12 For the calculation of livestock production, we have used data on meat and milk productions available in Spain’s Agrarian Statistics yearbooks (MAPA, several years). As for inputs, we have mainly used the same yearbooks, which offer data about the consumption of each type of fertilizer in terms of nutrients, the installed power of farming machinery, the consumption of pesticides and so forth. The data from the yearbooks have been supplemented with figures from FAOSTAT. This has allowed us to reconstruct the apparent consumption of food. Apparent consumption alludes to the quantity of biomass, both plant and animal, produced within Spain and used for human consumption, adding imports and deducting exports. In this respect, the methodology employed shares some of the assumptions used by the FAO to construct its food balance sheets.13 We have deducted the proportion of production allocated to seeds and other uses (fundamentally animal feed but also industrial uses), and we have also deducted the non-edible part of foods (pips, peels, stones). Unlike the FAO food balances, which provide annual food consumption data, our data represent five-year averages and do not take into account variations in stock. Since our aim is to assess not only the nutritional content of diet, but also the transformation experienced by the agrarian sector, we are particularly interested in ‘gross’ quantities of foods destined for human consumption directly or indirectly, through livestock. Consequently, the metabolic methodology is the most suitable and coherent approach to take when working towards this goal, bearing in mind that it ensures the required coherence in the data and in their elaboration. The food balance series published annually by the FAO offer percentages of losses per product throughout the food chain, but not for those losses produced

Agricultural Crisis and Food Crisis in Early Francoism

39

within the home and in other food consumption activities outside the home. For these types of losses, we only have current information. The most recent and complete study about this subject was carried out for the FAO by the Swedish Food and Biotechnology Institute.14 It compiles information about losses for the five major processes (production, handling and storage post-harvest, processing and packaging, distribution and consumption), and seven geographical areas. The results show a percentage of losses in consumption that is much greater in industrialized than non-industrialized countries. These types of losses are difficult to estimate for the past. We have extrapolated loss values taking a linear approach up to the 1960s, assuming that in that year the percentages of losses would be similar to those found today in Southeast Asia. We have considered that in previous years there would be no significant variations; this is a rather low level of losses along the food chain.

Results: A long and deep food crisis Table 2.1 shows the amount of both vegetal and animal biomass aimed at endosomatic metabolism in tons. Total biomass multiplied by 2.8 during the entire study period, apparent consumption grew significantly between 1900 and 1933 and grew again, to an even greater degree, from 1960 until 1980 (60 per cent). The major driver of this growth was animal biomass that multiplied by 5.5, while vegetal biomass increased by a factor of 2.3. While animal biomass contributed just over 16 per cent of total consumed biomass at the beginning Table 2.1  Apparent Net Biomass Consumption (Deducting Losses) in Tonnes (t) and Per Capita in Kilograms (kg) of Fresh Edible Food (1900–80) Vegetal Biomass Year

Net

1900 1910 1922 1933 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

8,809,163 9,216,040 10,872,487 12,584,553 10,655,118 10,803,102 13,930,829 17,015,648 20,064,341

Per Capita 474 464 511 522 414 388 459 504 535

Animal Biomass Net 1,722,193 2,076,013 2,378,680 2,701,503 2,913,993 3,298,027 4,546,685 7,120,757 9,513,501

Source: Authors’ compilation based on agrarian statistics.

Total Biomass

Per Capita

Net

Per Capita

93 105 112 112 113 118 150 211 254

10,531,356 11,292,053 13,251,168 15,286,055 13,569,112 14,101,128 18,477,614 24,136 405 29,577,841

567 569 623 634 527 506 609 715 789

Franco’s Famine

40

of the century, that percentage had risen to 32 per cent in 1980. The trends are easier to identify when analysed in per capita terms. As shown in Table 2.1, per capita consumption increased by 38.7 per cent, that is, demand for food biomass grew not only because of population growth but also because of diet changes. The change was led by animal biomass: while the consumption of vegetal biomass per capita grew by only 12.9 per cent, animal biomass almost tripled (2.7). This increase was constant over time, including during Franco’s autarkic period, but has been much more intense since the 1960s. The apparent consumption of animal biomass per capita grew modestly during the first half of the century (27 per cent since 1900), but between 1960 and 1980 increased to reach almost 700 grams/person/day. While animal biomass represented barely 16 per cent of total consumed biomass in 1900, by 1980 that percentage had doubled (32.1 per cent): a transition from an essentially vegetal diet to a diet where livestock products were beginning to play the perhaps excessive role it has today.15 The same table disaggregates previous data per food groups, revealing a substantial decrease in the consumption of cereals, legumes, roots and tubers and, conversely, a significant increase in the consumption of meat, dairy products, fish, oil and alcoholic beverages. Table 2.2 shows the energy value expressed in kilocalories per person per day. Consumed calories increased in line with biomass consumed, that is, by Table 2.2  Apparent Consumption per Food Group (Grams/Per Capita/Day in Fresh Edible Food) 1900 Cereals Legumes Roots and tubers Vegetables Fruits Nuts Oilseeds Alcoholic drinks Oil Sugar Meat + fat Eggs Dairy products Fish Honey Total

1933

1940

1950

1960

1970

320.5 326.0 208.3 224.7 280.0 216.4 46.6 49.3 32.3 35.6 35.9 35.6 241.1 383.6 280.1 249.3 287.0 263.0 263.0 276.7 260.2 238.4 281.4 293.2 101.4 93.2 104.7 98.6 118.0 172.6 13.7 8.2 10.9 8.2 8.2 5.5 2.7 2.7 4.4 5.5 7.1 8.2 265.8 216.4 179.1 145.2 141.5 254.8 30.1 43.8 33.2 30.1 40.0 49.3 16.4 30.1 21.2 24.7 59.1 82.2 38.4 54.8 28.6 32.9 56.3 106.8 8.2 11.0 7.2 11.0 14.9 27.4 197.3 216.4 250.3 252.1 290.8 391.8 11.0 24.7 24.0 27.4 48.7 52.1 1.1 0.8 0.7 0.5 0.7 0.8 1,557.3 1,737.8 1,444.4 1,384.1 1,669.0 1,959.7

Source: Authors’ compilation based on agrarian statistics.

1980 189.9 18.2 255.6 306.0 233.0 7.6 11.1 312.6 72.9 62.8 156.5 31.6 453.3 53.6 0.9 2,160.7

Agricultural Crisis and Food Crisis in Early Francoism

41

20 per cent between 1900 and the year 1980. Except in the 1940s and 1950s, the amount of biomass loosely satisfied basic energy requirements. These requirements were calculated by Cussó and Cussó et al. and determined at around 2,260 for 1900; 2,314 for 1960; and 2,434 for 2011.16 The most significant fact, however, is that this increase is mainly due to food intake of animal origin. The cereals group, including legumes and potatoes, used to form the basis of the diet and shifted from accounting for 62 per cent of ingested energy in 1900 to just over 33 per cent in 1980. In contrast, meat, eggs and dairy products used to provide 8.3 per cent of energy in 1900, increasing to 19.8 per cent in 1980. Oil consumption had also increased and provided almost a fifth of the calories in this year (21.3 per cent). If we add oil, mainly olive oil, both groups of foods, accounting for 41 per cent of calories, were the basis of the Spanish diet.17 Agricultural growth allowed the feeding of the Spanish population until the Civil War undoubtedly on an essentially vegetarian diet. Caloric intake in the 1930s was similar to that provided by the German or Austrian diet and higher than the average diet in Holland, France, Italy or Greece.18 Table 2.3 shows also the severity of the food crisis that Spain experienced until the beginning of the 1960s. It would take two decades to overcome the crisis. Indeed, shortly before the Civil War began, the amount of kilocalories per capita ingested by a Spanish citizen per day was 29 per cent higher than needs, an amount that would not be reached until the beginning of the seventies. Indeed, in the 1960s food consumption recovered and reached 2,774 kilocalories, a still lower figure than in 1933. Calorie intake continued to recover, but it was not until well into the 1960s that per capita consumption exceeded that Table 2.3  Apparent Consumption of Biomass in Kilocalories (kcl), Deducting Losses (1900–80) Year

Total Biomass

Vegetal Biomass

Year

kcl

%

kcl

%

kcl

%

1900 1910 1922 1933 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

2,552 2,621 2,869 2,922 2,209 2,160 2,774 2,944 3,069

100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

2,328 2,370 2,588 2,646 1,959 1,888 2,400 2,406 2,409

91.2 90.4 90.2 90.6 88.6 87.4 86.6 81.7 78.5

224 251 281 276 251 272 374 538 659

8.8 9.6 9.8 9.4 11.4 12.6 13.4 18.3 21.5

Source: Authors’ compilation based on agrarian statistics.

Animal Biomass

42

Franco’s Famine

of 1933, as shown by the average value for 1970. In the 1980s, the kilocalories intake exceeded 3,000 kilocalories, higher than that between 1900 and 1933 and beyond needs. Perhaps the most striking fact is that this increase was achieved through the rising intake of products of animal origin. Diet changes compared to the first third of the twentieth century seem obvious: while cereals, legumes and potatoes provided 60 per cent of calories in 1933, their contribution has been reduced to 33 per cent in 1980, while meat, eggs and dairy products have gone from providing 8.7 per cent to 20 per cent in the same period. Undoubtedly, the Civil War must have had an impact on the food supply, from production to consumption. But, unlike what happened in other European countries that suffered an even bloodier and longer lasting war, that is, the Second World War, the food crisis lasted much longer in Spain. Its severity was unprecedented, unmatched even in the worst period of the late-nineteenthcentury crisis (Table 2.2). In gross terms, the apparent consumption of food decreased by 11.2 per cent between 1933 and 1940. The cause was the drop in the vegetable sector (15.3 per cent), which failed to offset the increase in foodstuff of animal origin by almost 8 per cent in 1940. The latter increased by 22.1 per cent in 1950, reducing the effect of the fall in total consumption. These data lead us to believe that the crisis was being overcome by the end of the 1940s. The crisis could thus be blamed on the ravages of the war regarding the production and supply chain. But these data are raw. If we consider apparent per capita consumption, the 1950 indicators worsen notably. Compared to the period of the Second Republic, the drop was 17 per cent in 1940 and 20.2 per cent in 1950: ten years had passed since the end of the war. Although, in gross terms, food of animal origin increased in significant percentages (by 8 per cent in 1940 and 22 per cent in 1950), in per capita terms, the increase was weak (0.9 per cent and 5.3 per cent, respectively) and failed to compensate the drop in foods of plant origin (−20.7 per cent in 1940 and −25.7 per cent in 1950). We must also remember that the given data is an average of the five years around the end of each decade. This means that the crisis began even earlier and lasted throughout the 1950s. In 1960, apparent food consumption was still below the per capita consumption in 1933 (−2.2 per cent). The per capita consumption achieved during the Second Republic did not recover until well into that decade. In 1970 it was only 12.7 per cent higher. Accordingly, Spain undoubtedly suffered a serious food crisis. It spanned two decades and was at its deepest around the late 1940s and early 1950s, many years after the war. During these years, the contribution of cereals, legumes and potatoes, which had been the basis of the diet during the first third of the twentieth century,

Agricultural Crisis and Food Crisis in Early Francoism

43

dropped by 31 per cent in 1940 and by 32.8 per cent in 1950. The weight of this food group went from 43.7 per cent to 36 per cent in 1940 and 1950, respectively. The weight of food of animal origin increased slightly, from 16.2 per cent in 1933 to 21.4 per cent in 1950. Generally, consumption decreased in all food groups except three: fruits, milk and milk derivatives and fish. In the latter case, the drop in exports made it possible to increase domestic consumption.19 From an energy point of view, drops in intake were also pronounced. In 1940, vegetable foods contributed 26 per cent less in 1940 and 28.6 per cent less in 1950. Overall, caloric intake fell by almost a quarter compared to 1933 and even more in 1950. The total amount of kilocalories available to meet food needs fell from 2,922 kilocalories in 1933 to 2,209 in 1940 and 2,160 in 1950, below basic needs. Conceivably, in view of the figures and levels of inequality in Spanish society at that time, the nutritional deficiencies must have been rather acute for the most disadvantaged social groups, as collected by the testimonies of the time and studies on height and biological living standards.20 The data thus confirm that the nutritional conditions deteriorated during the years of autarky, leading one to believe that deficiencies were even more pronounced and lasting than had been assumed. Given shortages of grain and straw, the crisis led to a greater use of pastures, thus limiting falls in herds of livestock and its associated products. In this way, although in absolute terms the availability of livestock products decreased, in relative terms, their role increased. During the 1940s and 1950s, the caloric intake of meat, eggs and, above all, milk was over 10 per cent and oil increased its relative presence in the diet, this diet being energy-insufficient, as seen earlier. Table 2.4 shows the protein composition of food consumed throughout the twentieth century. According to calculations by Cussó, the Spanish population’s protein requirements, between 35.6 and 35.8 grams per person per day, were amply covered.21 A steady and prolonged tendency to substitute vegetable proteins with animal proteins can be observed despite the fact that during most of the time period it was vegetables that provided the bulk of the proteins. The table shows the growing role of meat and dairy products in protein intake to the detriment of cereals, legumes and potatoes. Table 2.4 also shows the composition of consumed foods in carbohydrates and in lipids or fats. A very high percentage of carbohydrates have been provided by plant foods and only to a small extent by foods of animal origin, although this grew in the 1970s and 1980s. As for fats, a distinctive sign of Mediterranean consumption patterns has been the intake of vegetable fats, among which olive oil stands out. However, throughout the period the consumption of animal origin fat was increasing and by the 1980s

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44

Table 2.4  Absolute and Relative Contribution of Fats, Carbohydrates and Lipids from Apparent Food Consumption in Spain, 1900–80, in Grams (g) and Kilocalories (kcl) Proteins

Carbohydrates

Lipids

Years

g

kcl

%*

G

kcl

%*

g

kcl

%*

1900 1910 1922 1933 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

67 72 78 81 58 59 76 82 84

268 288 312 324 232 236 304 328 336

10.5 11.0 10.9 11.0 10.5 10.9 11.0 11.1 10.9

381 406 420 432 313 313 405 385 338

1,524 1,624 1,680 1,728 1,252 1,252 1,620 1,540 1,352

59.7 62.0 58.6 58.9 56.7 58.0 58.4 52.3 44.1

56 56 70 74 60 57 77 95 127

502 504 630 666 540 513 693 855 1,143

19.7 19.2 22.0 22.7 24.4 23.8 25.0 29.0 37.2

*Percentage of annual per capita consumption in kcl. Source: Authors’ compilation based on agrarian statistics.23

it reached almost a third of the total. The contribution of fats in this decade came basically from olive oil, meat and dairy products (around 90 per cent). The percentages provided by the nutritional assessment of the Spanish diet, based on official data provided by the Panel of Food Consumption, are quite similar.22 Meat consumption had more than quadrupled, from 38 grams/capita/day in the 1900s to 2,156 grams/capita/day in the 1980s, pork and chicken meat having grown the most. Milk consumption increased from 197 grams/capita/day to 453 grams/capita/day and that of eggs from 8 grams to 31 grams/per capita/day. We can observe a similar evolution in terms of energy: at the beginning of the century, carbohydrates contributed almost 60 per cent of the total amount of ingested calories. But from the 1970s, their importance would gradually drop, reaching 44 per cent in 1980. In parallel, the weight of fats grew and fats of animal origin became increasingly widespread. Until the 1970s, typical Mediterranean diet consumption patterns would predominate in Spain, implying adaptations to the conditions and dynamics of Spanish agroecosystems.24 However, since that decade, typical developed country food consumption patterns have been adopted,25 moving increasingly away from the WHO recommendations,26 a phenomenon that has been called the ‘Westernization’ of the diet.27 The food crisis of the 1940s represented a rupture in this overall pattern of improvement. As Table 2.4 shows, the consumption of proteins rapidly declined sharply, particularly vegetable proteins. Carbohydrate consumption also declined, although this to some extent was partially compensated by the intake of lipids whose consumption declined much less steeply. Overall, the supply of vegetable

Agricultural Crisis and Food Crisis in Early Francoism

45

Table 2.5  Apparent Intake of Calcium (mg/ capita/day) and Vitamin A (µg/capita/day) Year

Calcium

Vitamin A

1900 1910 1922 1933 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

560 600 623 611 631 587 717 845 912

421 415 397 394 343 399 397 493 547

Source: Authors’ compilation based on agrarian statistics. Calcium and vitamin A content in foods obtained from Moreiras, Tablas de composición de alimentos.

foods fell without the consumption of foods derived from animals making up for the loss. There is no historiographical consensus regarding the data and the consequences of dietary limitations of two basic nutrients. Barbancho’s estimates, recalculated by Cussó, as well as Simpson’s calculations reveal significant calcium and vitamin A deficiencies.28 Our data (Table 2.5) shows notably higher vitamin A and calcium contributions compared to that of Cussó, though this contribution still represents only 85 per cent of the intake. Despite this, they are also below the basic needs (800 milligrams per capita per day for calcium and between 750 and 900 micrograms for vitamin A). The data thus confirms the existence of a significant lack of these nutrients, mainly due to a low consumption of dairy products. It is worth delving into the scope of these deficiencies on morbidity and mortality, on height and other indicators of the Spanish population’s biological living standards in order to duly substantiate our statements. In any event, the 1940s and 1950s data show that the drop in calcium and vitamin A intake could be minimized and even increased compared to that of 1933, thanks to the increase in the consumption of dairy products. In 1950, the diet’s vitamin A content was higher than in 1933 and quite similar in calcium. In fact, the apparent consumption of dairy products increased by 24 per cent in 1940 and by 35 per cent in 1950. In 1960 it was already 70 per cent higher than that of 1933.

Exploring the causes of the food crisis Until the 1970s, domestic agricultural production accounted for Spaniards’ food consumption to a very high degree and, therefore, changes in production can

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Table 2.6  Land Use, Spain, Million Hectares Cropland Closed Forest Coppice Dehesa Pastures and Shrubland Unproductive Total

1900

1933

1940

1950

1960

1970

16.5 2.8 7.1 3.0 16.9 4.2

20.4 3.6 5.8 2.6 14.0 4.2

18.8 3.8 6.1 2.6 15.0 4.2

19.9 3.7 5.6 2.8 14.4 4.2

19.9 3.7 5.6 2.8 14.4 4.2

20.5 6.7 4.8 4.0 10.7 3.7

50.5

50.5

50.5

50.5

50.5

50.5

Source: González de Molina et al., The Social Metabolism.

largely explain changes in food consumption habits. Nevertheless, this linkage had dramatic consequences, causing an unprecedented food crisis when the Franco regime’s international isolation and its autarkic policy reduced the flow of biomass. In the previous period, between 1900 and 1936, the production had grown by 52 per cent, confirming findings from previous studies according to which this period was one of agricultural growth and sector ‘modernization’.29 Land productivity grew by 1.2 per cent per year and labour productivity by 1.9 per cent.30 In comparative terms, the productivity factor evolved in parallel, similar in size to that of other European countries.31 In Table 2.6 we summarize the changes in land uses based on six differentiated categories.32 The main process of change emerged from opposing trends between cultivated areas and woodlands. Cultivated areas grew continuously from 1900 to the 1970s, reaching almost 21 million hectares. They have steadily declined ever since, reaching a little more than 16 million hectares by today. Woodlands followed an opposite trend. In the mid-nineteenth century, Spain’s total forested area was about 32 million hectares (Mha), occupying almost two-thirds of the land. By 1900, the first year for which we can make a reasonable estimate, it had fallen to 29.8 Mha. In 1960, the figure was 25.9 Mha. More than 6 Mha, one-seventh of the country’s territory, had been deforested. DE of biomass, that is, biomass appropriated directly or indirectly by Spanish society, grew by 17 per cent throughout the period (see Table 2.7). The maximum levels of relative extraction (28 per cent) occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, when production difficulties caused by Francoism led to the highest level of appropriation of biomass, in a context of falling yields. The general trend was towards an increase in DE from cropland, increasing by 198 per cent compared to 1900. The opposite happened in the other land uses. The biomass extracted

Agricultural Crisis and Food Crisis in Early Francoism

47

Table 2.7  Biomass Domestic Extraction in Mt (megatons) of Tons of Dry Matter 1900

1933

1940

1950

1960

1970

Crops Harvest Residues Pastures Woodlands Total t/ha

11.2 13.2 14.1 11.1 49.5

16.7 15.8 16.9 11.3 60.7

12.7 12.8 23.2 11.0 59.8

13.8 14.6 22.6 10.7 61.7

19.9 15.4 18.8 9.3 63.5

24.8 19.4 6.1 7.7 58.1

Crops Harvest Residues Pastures Woodlands Domestic Extraction per ha

0.68 0.80 0.52 0.37 1.07

0.82 0.78 0.76 0.43 1.31

0.68 0.68 0.98 0.40 1.29

0.70 0.74 0.99 0.40 1.33

0.98 0.76 0.90 0.36 1.37

1.19 0.93 0.31 0.30 1.24

Source: González de Molina et al., The Social Metabolism.

from the pastures and woodlands decreased, respectively, by 57 and 30 per cent from 1900 to 1970. Biomass aimed at human food accounted for 9 per cent in 1900, rising to 13.8 per cent in 1970. The major change, however, concerned biomass aimed at animal feed. As early as 1900, it represented 56 per cent of extracted biomass, which is logical since the main agricultural tasks were carried out using farm animals. In 1970, that percentage rose to 57.1 per cent, reaching its highest percentage in 1960 with a share of almost two-thirds. Since that decade, around 40 million tons of dry matter have been used to feed livestock, despite animal traction no longer being used. On the other hand, DE aimed at timber and firewood decreased considerably, from 32 per cent in 1900 to 23 per cent in 1970, mainly due to the lesser weight of biomass energy use, thanks to the arrival of gas to Spanish households. According to the data in Table 2.8, virtually all crops increased their production throughout the twentieth century. The crops that grew the most were industrial crops and artificial meadows and fodder. The only exceptions were legumes, which went from 4 per cent of total extraction of crops at the beginning of the century to 2.4 per cent in 1970. Potato production increased until the 1970s, undoubtedly due its key role in the peasant diet. According to an increasingly widespread historiographical consensus, the first two decades of Franco’s dictatorship can be qualified as simply tragic. Spanish agriculture’s ‘modernization’ experienced a sharp reversal, widening the gap with other European countries. Livestock activity was also affected by the decreasing availability of animal feed, which, in turn, aggravated the shortage of fertilizers.33 Powerful state intervention, through the National Wheat Service (Servicio Nacional de Trigo), guaranteed low prices to avoid wage increase and

Franco’s Famine

48

Table 2.8  End Uses of Domestic Extraction in Millions of Tons of Dry Matter 1900

1933

1940

1950

1960

1970

Human Food Feed Seeds Wood and Firewood Raw Materials Burned Residues

4.4 27.8 0.6 16.0 0.7 0.0

6.6 36.6 0.9 15.7 0.8 0.0

4.9 37.2 0.6 16.3 0.6 0.0

5.3 39.0 0.7 15.9 0.6 0.2

7.1 405 0.8 137 0.7 0.5

8.0 33.2 1.1 13.4 0.8 1.5

Total

49.5

60.7

59.8

61.7

63.5

58.1

5.5 0.5 1.1 0.6 0.5 0.7 0.5 1.8

7.9 0.7 1.0 1.0 1.1 1.5 0.7 2.9

5.0 0.5 0.9 0.8 0.8 1.5 0.5 2.7

5.9 0.5 0.7 0.9 0.8 1.2 0.7 3.1

7.6 0.7 0.8 1.1 1.0 1.5 1.3 6.1

10.7 0.6 1.2 1.1 1.1 1.7 1.9 6.5

11.2

16.7

12.7

13.8

19.9

24.8

End Uses (Without Residues) Cereals Legumes Grapes Olives Potatoes Fruit and Vegetables Industrial and Others Artificial Meadows and Fodder Total

Source: González de Molina et al., The Social Metabolism.

ended up subjecting agricultural policy to industrial policy, providing poorly remunerative prices that failed to stimulate agricultural production growth.34 Falling agricultural and livestock production caused shortages in the domestic market and a sharp drop in food availability. During the first decades of Francoism, land use and DE were the opposite of the general trends we have just mentioned. Cropland acreage was reduced by 8 per cent in 1940 and 2.5 per cent in 1950. DE on these lands suffered a much deeper drop: 24 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively. The decrease in DE per hectare explains this steep fall: 17 per cent in 1940 and 14.6 per cent in 1950. Given the shortage of fertilizers, it was possible to replace nutrients only through more extensive crop rotations, which had to include the fallow again. This explains the yield drop and thus the DE per hectare. Furthermore, difficulties to import tractors and disposing of the necessary fuels did not allow reducing herds of animal labour, releasing biomass for human consumption. The yield drop and big animal feed needs explain, therefore, the reduced amount of food available for the population. Table 2.7 illustrates this: the biomass destined for animal feed increased by 1.6 per cent in 1940 and by 6.5 per cent in 1950, while human nutrition decreased by 25.7 per cent in 1940 and by 20 per cent in 1950

Agricultural Crisis and Food Crisis in Early Francoism

49

compared to 1933. Basic foodstuffs – cereals, legumes and potatoes – declined the most, between 27 per cent and 37 per cent. All this in a context in which population growth was strong again. Things would begin to change in the 1950s, once autarkic policy had proved to be unviable. At the end of that decade, coinciding with the start of the so-called ‘Stabilization Plan’ (1959), the agricultural industrialization process began. Liberalization led to the sector’s rapid transformation. It was financed by foreign investment, remittances from emigrants and income from tourism. Yields per unit area multiplied thanks to the use of the green revolution’s complete package: improved seeds, synthetic chemical fertilizers, phytosanitary treatments and irrigation. Production quickly recovered, doubling between 1900 and 1960, tripling by 1980 and almost quadrupling by the end of the century. Cereal production, so far on the decline, promptly rebounded thanks to the growing demand for feed grains. The livestock censuses of the first half of the twentieth century have been questioned by historiography. We have examined their reliability and have corrected them wherever reliability problems were found (see Table 2.9).35 Overall, Spain’s livestock changed fundamentally throughout the twentieth century, shifting from organic-based livestock, closely linked to the territory, to livestock of an industrial nature, mostly stabled, landless and thus much more dependent on stockfeed, industrial inputs and international trade. This change brought about a notable growth of total herds, from 2.1 megatons to 3.4 megatons in 1970, with significant transformations to their composition, destination of products and services, management and feeding. Table 2.9  Evolution of Livestock Live Weight, 1900–70. In Metric Kilotons (kt) Years

Bovine Ovine

Goats

Porcine Equine

Poultry

Rabbits

Total

1900 690 543 102 1933 1339 630 151 1940 1454 662 225 1950 1422 544 175 1960 1198 648 100 1970 1402 545 79 Inter-Annual Variation 1900 = 100

141 373 430 292 309 315

636 794 723 754 655 418

43 67 54 53 90 661

8 13 15 7 78 39

2163 3366 3562 3248 3078 3458

1900 1933 1940 1950 1960 1970

100 265 305 207 219 223

100 125 114 119 103 66

100 156 126 124 209 1533

100 156 186 88 966 479

100 156 165 150 142 160

100 194 211 206 174 203

100 116 122 100 119 100

Source: Corrected livestock censuses.

100 149 221 173 99 78

50

Franco’s Famine

The first third of the twentieth century was a period of livestock growth. Significantly, this increase was consistent with a notable rise in agricultural production. Throughout the first thirty years of the twentieth century, most of biomass DE growth was concentrated in cultivated lands. These cultivated lands also continued to expand at the expense of pasture and coppice. However, this fact did not affect the growing numbers of livestock, since the biomass aimed at livestock feed also increased. The reason was the rising amounts of animal feed harvested on cropland (forage crops, artificial meadows, cereals and legumes for feed, harvested residues, etc.), leading to a rise in its share of total feed from 49 per cent in 1900 to 54 per cent in 1933. This was due to a moderate growth in land productivity that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century and increasing DE from pasture land, despite reductions in its surface area. Imports of feed were not significant during these years. After 1936, the analysis of censuses and livestock production yields shows opposite and seemingly incompatible results. Apparently, livestock must have declined considerably during the Civil War, a drop that is not reflected in the census after 1936. This census presents an even larger livestock than that of 1933. An examination of the censuses shows that 1940 and 1950 data plausibly appear to be adjusted to livestock feeding capacity. How can we explain this ostensibly odd livestock evolution? Our data do not invalidate the sector’s likely depression after livestock destruction during the war, but they show an abnormally high number of offspring in the 1940s census. Our hypothesis, which would need to be confirmed by a subsequent study, is that considerable efforts must have been made during those years to recover livestock, allowing many more offspring to reach adulthood. This would explain why livestock production was as low as shown in the statistics, while the censuses indicated such high values. On the other hand, during the second half of the twentieth century, the Western world adopted an industrial or intensive livestock model, closely linked to the considerable increase in products of animal origin in diets. The Civil War and the autarky delayed Spain’s adoption of this model, in lockstep with the industrialization of agriculture and of the Spanish economy generally.36 The evolution of livestock production logically reflected these transformations (Table 2.10). Meat production grew considerably, by 86 per cent compared to 1900, which explains why apparent consumption could increase from 14.1 kilogram per capita per year in 1900 to 21.1 kilogram in 1933, that is, an increase of 50 per cent.37 This level of consumption would not be reached until the 1960s.38 Pork and beef grew the most, by 157 per cent and 86 per cent, respectively. Egg production also grew (55.6 per cent), as also milk production (42.1 per cent).

Agricultural Crisis and Food Crisis in Early Francoism

51

Table 2.10  Livestock Production in Tons of Dry Matter, 1900–70 Beef Lamb Meat Goat Meat Pig Meat Horse Meat Poultry Meat Rabbit Meat Total Meats Eggs Wool Cow Milk Sheep Milk Goat Milk Total Milk Honey

1900

1933

1940

1950

1960

1970

53,838 44,487 9,468 40,641 0 4,115 491 153,040 12,728 21,933 104,417 17,147 36,577 158,141 4,908

105,626 52,892 14,121 104,444 0 6,403 764 284,249 19,805 25,442 177,739 8,672 38,223 224,634 4,908

41,514 26,429 5,228 73,397 0 6,255 3,342 156,166 19,347 32,605 226,804 13,748 38,749 279,300 5,149

52,763 39,289 6,857 82,522 1,632 4,673 4,453 192,190 31,435 24,762 259,956 13,610 33,155 306,721 5,391

81,744 58,492 5,844 135,268 6,298 20,962 4,939 313.347 46,535 25,575 316,742 30,860 36,208 383,810 6,295

148,877 74,284 6,401 256,874 5,458 207,104 11,306 710,308 97,860 21,660 523,777 30,326 33,155 587,258 6,816

Source: Agrarian statistics and author’s compilation. The meat is expressed in live weight.

Within milk production, cow milk grew the most, by 70 per cent. Other livestock productions remained stable or grew slightly, for example in the case of wool or honey production. But the livestock production declines in the 1940s and, to a lesser extent, in the 1950s. Biophysical production data obtained from official post-war statistics show reductions in food available for livestock, due, above all, to the drop in surface and DE both in grains and in residues from cropland, as we have seen earlier. This led to a more intense use of pastures than in the 1930s and is consistent with the drop in total livestock production (−12 per cent) and especially meat (−45 per cent), reflected in Table 2.10, compared to 1933. Difficulties in importing animal feed and raw materials for manufacturing chemical fertilizers, made it unfeasible to maintain the livestock feeding model of the first third of the twentieth century as described earlier. Indeed, international trade contracted notably during the 1940s and 1950s due to the autarkic economic policy and international isolation. Imports decreased by 8 per cent compared to 1933 and exports by even more (−52 per cent), in such a way that the physical trade balance was clearly positive, increasing by 25 per cent compared to that year. It should be noted, however, that the flow of foreign biomass trade did not reach significant levels until the 1970s. For example, imports accounted for 1.7 per cent of domestic consumption in 1933, while exports barely accounted for 0.7 per cent of domestic biomass extraction. In total, the commercial physical balance of Spain showed net imports of 579 kilotons, equivalent to only

Franco’s Famine

52

0.95 per cent of the domestic consumption of biomass. This percentage rose to 1.21 per cent in the early 1940s, as a result of a drastic reduction in exports, which fell by half, and a much smaller reduction in imports (−7.8 per cent). It may seem that this was a logical behaviour given the country’s context of reconstruction and difficulties to relaunch the economy. Yet it is harder to explain the data of 1950: imports dropped sharply, reaching 52 per cent of 1933 import levels, that is, almost half, while exports doubled in relation to the 1940s. The physical balance was reduced to a figure hitherto unseen: although it was still favourable to imports, it represented only 0.08 per cent of domestic biomass consumption. In the midst of a serious food crisis, trade flows were practically non-existent: exports barely accounted for 0.8 per cent of DE and, what is worse, imports represented only 0.9 per cent of domestic consumption. Logically, the lack of food would have been compensated by imports and export restrictions. Table 2.11 shows just the opposite: in 1950 food imports halved and exports almost tripled, making it possible for almost 140 kilotons of net food to leave the country. This latter behaviour surely exacerbated the food crisis. Table 2.11  Spanish Trade of Biomass in Metric Kilotons (kt) of Dry Matter, 1900–70 1900

1933

1940

1950

1960

1970

134.8 107.1 21.8 351.5 158.2 773.3

99.6 140.9 13.3 505.6 258.7 1,018.0

456.3 165.3 61.6 143.8 111.5 938.5

231.8 82.8 34.1 93.2 89.7 531.6

721.2 570.3 105.9 497.1 311.6 2,206.0

645.8 3,014.3 25.7 1,315.0 297.6 5,298.4

140.0 39.7 3.2 58.8 72.3 314.0

282.8 31.0 2.7 74.7 47.5 438.8

132.6 15.9 1.7 40.5 19.2 210.0

370.8 33.8 2.1 49.4 27.9 484.0

499.5 50.5 9.3 69.4 7.8 636.6

899.1 186.2 40.4 276.2 62.8 1,464.7

−5.2 67.4 18.6 292.8 85.9 459.4

−183 109.9 10.5 430.9 211.2 579.2

323.6 149.3 59.9 103.3 92.3 728.5

−139.0 49.0 32.0 43.9 61.8 47.7

221.6 519.7 96.6 427.7 303.8 1,569.5

−253.3 2,828.1 −14.7 1,038.8 234.9 3,833.7

Imports Food Feed Seeds Wood and Fuelwood Raw Materials Total Exports Food Feed Seeds Wood and Fuelwood Raw Materials Total Physical Trade Balance Food Feed Seeds Wood and Fuelwood Raw Materials Total

Source: Agrarian statistics and author’s compilation. The meat is expressed in live weight.

Agricultural Crisis and Food Crisis in Early Francoism

53

The inconsistencies in economic policy were also evident in other key areas of the agricultural sector. In a context where increasing food production should have been given priority, imports of agricultural sector inputs were restricted. As we have shown elsewhere, the post-Civil War period began with a very sharp drop in the use of nitrogenous and phosphoric fertilizers (by −56 per cent and −33 per cent, respectively).39 The consumption of nitrogen would not recover until well into the 1950s. The lack of this macronutrient forced rotations that were little intensive and thus managed to restore fertility through atmospheric deposition or the partial use of legumes. This partly explains the yield drop per area unit that we saw in Table 2.7. In other words, imports of chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen, would have maintained Spanish agriculture’s progress towards intensification and specialization, which had been taking place since the beginning of the century and especially since the 1920s. Further integrating agriculture and livestock and managing the land more efficiently would probably have allowed a greater intensification, at least, of agricultural production in the absence of chemical fertilizers; but the Franco regime remained passive regarding the forced return to an organic management regime, one that had already lost the agrosilvopastoral integration that had made it work in the past.

Conclusions Between 1940 and 1960 there was a significant food crisis in Spain. In contrast to the idea that hunger and malnutrition were a matter of the first decades of the century, overcome during Franco’s dictatorship and thanks to the economic progress favoured by the regime, the data shows that ‘the hunger years’ were an exclusively Francoist phenomenon. It was not the post-war difficulties that caused the famine. The persistence and the depth of the crisis make it possible to speak of a structural crisis, caused by the dictatorship, its economic policy and fierce repression after the end of the war.

Notes 1 Carlos Barciela, ‘Algunas cuestiones sobre la agricultura española durante el franquismo’, Áreas, no. 10 (1989): 91–3. 2 James Simpson, ‘La producción agraria y el consumo español en el siglo XIX’, Revista de Historia Económica 7, no. 2 (1989): 355–88; Manuel González de Molina,

54

3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10

11 12

13

Franco’s Famine David Soto Fernández, Eduardo Aguilera and Juan Infante Amate, ‘Crecimiento agrario en España y cambios en la oferta alimentaria, 1900–1933’, Historia Social 80 (2014): 157–83. Alfonso García Barbancho, ‘Análisis de la alimentación española’, Anales de economía, no. 66 (1960): 72–119. Xavier Cussó, ‘El estado nutritivo de la población española 1900-1970. Análisis de las necesidades y las disponibilidades de nutrientes’, Historia Agraria 36 (2005): 329–58. Leandro Prados de la Escosura, ‘La estimación indirecta de la producción agraria en el siglo XIX: réplica a Simpson’, Revista de Historia Económica, no. 7, 3 (1989): 703–18. Xavier Cussó and Ramón Garrabou, ‘La transición nutricional en la España contemporánea: las variaciones en el consumo de pan, patatas y legumbres (18502000)’, Investigaciones en historia Económica 7 (2007): 69–100. Fernando Rodríguez Artalejo, José Ramón Banegas, Auxiliadora Graciani, Ramón Hernández and Juan Rey Calero, ‘El consumo de alimentos y nutrientes en España en el período 1940-1988. Análisis de su consistencia con la dieta mediterránea’, Medicina Clínica 106, no. 5 (1996): 161–8. David Soto Fernández, Juan Infante Amate, Gloria Guzmán, Antonio Cid, Eduardo Aguilera, Roberto García-Ruiz and Manuel González de Molina, ‘The Social Metabolism of Biomass in Spain, 1900-2008: From Food to Feed-Oriented Changes in the Agro-Ecosystems’, in Ecological Economics, no. 128 (2016): 130–8. Manuel González de Molina, David Soto Fernández, Gloria Guzmán, Juan Infante Amate, Eduardo Aguilera, Jaime Vila, Roberto García-Ruiz, The Social Metabolism of Spanish Agriculture, 1900-2008: The Mediterranean Way towards Industrialization (Switzerland: Springer, 2020). Eurostat, Economy-Wide Material Flow Accounts (EW-MFA): Compilation Guide 2013 (Luxembourg: European Statistical Office, 2015). González de Molina et al., The Social Metabolism. Gloria Guzmán, Eduardo Aguilera, David Soto Fernández, Antonio Cid, Juan Infante Amate, Roberto García-Ruiz, Antonio Herrera, Inmaculada Villa and Manuel González de Molina, Methodology and Conversion Factors to Estimate the Net Primary Productivity of Historical and Contemporary Agroecosystems (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Historia Agraria, 2014). http://www​.magrama​.gob​.es​/es/ estad​istic​a/tem​as/pu​blica​cione​s/anu​ario-​de-es​tadis​ tica/​ The methodology utilized for these calculations is set out in Guzmán et al., Methodology and Conversion, and explained in Gloria Guzmán and Manuel González de Molina (eds), Energy in Agroecosystems: A Tool for Assessing Sustainability (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2017) and Soto et al., ‘The Social Metabolism’. FAO, Food Balance Sheets: A Handbook (Rome: FAO, 2001).

Agricultural Crisis and Food Crisis in Early Francoism

55

14 Jenny Gustavsson, Christel Cederberg and Ulf Sonesson, Global Food Losses and Food Waste: Extent, Causes and Prevention (Rome: FAO, 2011). 15 González de Molina et al., The Social Metabolism. 16 Cussó, ‘El estado nutritivo’. Xavier Cussó, Gonzalo Gamboa and Josep PujolAndreu, ‘El estado nutritivo de la población española, 1860-2010: Diferencias de género y generacionales’, in Documento presentado al XII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Española de Historia Económica (Salamanca, 2017). 17 González de Molina et al., ‘Crecimiento agrario’. 18 Cussó, ‘El estado nutritivo’. 19 Xán Carmona and Jordi Nadal, El Empeño industrial de Galicia (A Coruña: Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, 2005). 20 José M. Martínez Carrión, Javier Puche Gil and Josep M. Ramón Muñoz, ‘Nutrición y desigualdad social en la España de Franco: evidencia antropométrica’, in La dictadura franquista. La institucionalització d’un règim, eds. Antoni Segura, Andreu Mayayo and Teresa Abelló (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2012), 279. 21 Cussó, ‘El estado nutritivo’. 22 Gregorio Varela Moreiras, José M. Ávila Torres, Carmen Cuadrado, Susana del Pozo, Emma Ruiz Moreno and Olga Moreiras Tuny, Valoración de la dieta española de acuerdo al panel de consumo alimentario (Madrid: Ministerio de Agricultura, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente, 2008), 48. 23 Grams of protein and carbohydrates have been multiplied by 4 kilocalories and lipids by 9 kilocalories, according to Olga Moreiras, Ángeles Carbajal, Luisa Cabrera and Carmen Cuadrado, Tablas de composición de alimentos (Madrid: Pirámide, 2011). 24 González de Molina et al., ‘Crecimiento agrario’. 25 European Commission, ‘World Food Consumption Patterns – Trends and Drivers’, EU Agricultural Markets Briefs, no. 6 (2015): 8. 26 Rodríguez Artalejo et al., ‘El consumo de alimentos’. Roser Nicolau and Josep Pujol, Aspectos políticos y científicos del modelo de la transición nutricional, evaluación crítica y nuevos desarrollos. Documentos del Trabajo de la Sociedad española de Historia Agraria. DT-SEHA n. 11-05 (2011) (www​.seha​.info). 27 John Kearney, ‘Food Consumption Trends and Drivers’, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, no. 365 (2010): 2801. 28 Cussó, ‘El estado nutritivo’, 343. 29 Grupo de Estudios de Historia Rural, Estadísticas Históricas de la producción agraria española, 1859-1935 (Madrid: MAPA, 1991). James Simpson, La agricultura española (1765-1965), la larga siesta (Madrid: Alianza, 1997). 30 Domingo Gallego, ‘Pautas regionales de cambio técnico en el sector agrario español (1900-1930)’, Cuadernos Aragoneses de Economía 3, no. 2 (1993): 241–76. Modified

56

31

32

33

34

35 36

37 38

39

Franco’s Famine by David Soto Fernández, Historia dunha agricultura sustentable. Transformacións productivas na agricultura galega contemporánea (Santiago: Xunta de Galicia, 2006). Miguel Ángel Bringas, La productividad de los factores en la agricultura española (1752-1935) (Madrid: Banco de España, 2000). Ernesto Clar, Miguel MartínRetordillo and Vicente Pinilla, ‘Agricultura y desarrollo económico en España, 1870-2000’, in Estudios sobre el desarrollo económico español, eds. Domingo Gallego, Luis Germán and Vicente Pinilla (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2016), 183. A detailed account of the methodology used to estimate them can be found in Juan Infante Amate, David Soto Fernández, Iñaki Iriarte, Eduardo Aguilera, Antonio Cid, Gloria Guzmán, Robert García-Ruiz and Manuel González de Molina, La producción de leña en España y sus implicaciones en la transición energética. Una serie a escala provincial (1900-2000). Sociedad Española de Historia Agraria, Documento de Trabajo no. 14-16 (2014). Available at http:​/​/eco​​npape​​rs​.re​​pec​.o​​rg​/ pa​​per​/a​​hedta​​ehe​​/1​​416​.h​​tm. Lourenzo Fernández Prieto, El apagón tecnológico del Franquismo. Estado e innovación en la agricultura española del siglo XX (Valencia: Tirant Lo Blanch, 2007). Carlos Barciela, ‘Los costes del franquismo en el sector agrario: la ruptura del proceso de transformaciones’, in Historia agraria de la España Contemporánea. 3. El fin de la agricultura tradicional (1900–1960), eds. Ramón Garrabou, Carlos Barciela and José I. Jiménez Blanco (Barcelona: Crítica, 1986). Carlos Barciela and Inmaculada López Ortiz, ‘El fracaso de la política agraria del primer franquismo, 1939-1959. Veinte años perdidos para la agricultura española’, in Autarquía y mercado negro: EL fracaso económico del primer franquismo, 1939-1959, ed. Carlos Barciela (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003), 56–93. The method used to verify and correct the figures is explained in González de Molina, The Social Metabolism, Annex I. Juan Infante Amate, David Soto Fernández, Eduardo Aguilera, Roberto GarcíaRuiz, Gloria Guzmán, Antonio Cid and Manuel González de Molina, ‘The Spanish Transition to Industrial Metabolism: Long-Term Material Flow Analysis (1860– 2010)’, Journal of Industrial Ecology 19, no. 5 (2015): 866–76. González de Molina et al., ‘Crecimiento agrario’, 167. Manuel González de Molina, David Soto Fernández, Juan Infante Amate, Eduardo Aguilera, Jaime Vila and Gloria Guzmán, ‘Decoupling Food from Land: The Evolution of Spanish Agriculture From 1960 to 2010’, in Sustainability, no. 9 (12) (2017): 23–48. González de Molina, The Social Metabolism.

3

Tracing the physical consequences of famine and malnutrition in Franco’s Spain1 José Miguel Martínez-Carrión and Javier Puche Gil

Introduction The famine that prevailed in Franco’s Spain through the 1940s has attracted new interest in the recent historiography.2 It is considered the worst food catastrophe in contemporary Spain and one of the severest famines in Europe in the twentieth century. The post-war famine has also proved a highly controversial issue, and specialists are beginning to discover its hidden costs and true scale. For decades, historians have unanimously agreed on the devastating economic consequences of the autarkic policies pursued during the early years of the Franco regime. A host of studies reveal the reduction in agricultural and industrial production, in foreign trade and investment and, most of all, in per capita income and consumption.3 They also demonstrate the deterioration in education levels and labour skills.4 However, the debate remains on the effects that the greater economic depression exercised on standards of living, nutrition and health as well as their most important consequences on hunger, poverty and deprivation.5 This chapter examines the effects of Francoist autarkic policy, the economic depression it produced and the effects on the nutritional levels of the Spanish population. It adopts an anthropometric history perspective and uses adult height as the principal indicator of net nutrition. It also explores how diet and height varied across different parts of Spain and across different social classes. The study of the evolution and cycles of human height is one of the most significant fields of research in economic history.6 For four decades, anthropometric history has developed on a global scale. Its principal objective is to analyse the impact of socio-economic processes, or the environmental transformations and conditions

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of inequality generated by these processes, on the size and measurements of the human body.7 In Spain, anthropometric history has grown more prominent over the last decade through more than a hundred studies that cover the last three centuries. Studies of the effects of the Franco regime on biological standards of living have proliferated in recent years, particularly those discussing the impact of autarkic policy and the territorial and socio-economic dimensions of the famine. This chapter reveals important findings drawn from data for adult height, mainly from men, found in military conscription records. The results show that the reduction in adult height was severe and more prolonged over time than in other European countries during the famines of the Second World War. The deterioration of biological well-being reached its peak in the mid-1940s, extending across a good part of the country until 1953. Significant regional differences can be appreciated, and the territorial and socio-economic inequalities increased, revealing the magnitude of the nutritional crisis.

The economic context of the famine and its effects on height At the end of the Civil War (1936–9), Spain lay immersed in a profound economic depression that caused serious problems in the production and distribution of food. The principal indicator of wealth, GDP per capita, decreased considerably during the war years and experienced a prolonged slump until 1951, according to the estimates made by Leandro Prados de la Escosura (2016, 2017). The GDP and GDP per capita levels of 1935 were not reached again until 1952, and the 1929 levels were not reached until 1954 (Figure 3.1). Spaniards lost almost two decades in terms of their economic standard of living. Spain’s relative real GDP per capita in a European comparative perspective lagged very far behind. After the collapse caused by the Civil War, the relative recovery of the Spanish economy between 1940 and 1945, shown in Figure 3.1, could be explained by the problems experienced in the main European economies born from their participation in the Second World War. Subsequently, in the 1950s, Spain’s GDP per capita was at around 55 per cent of the average for Western Europe.8 The principal economic indicators show a similar evolution in income. The gross formation of fixed capital, which we would normally call investments, fell spectacularly and recovered again in the mid-1950s. Real private consumption per capita dipped sharply and did not recover until 1956.9 As a result of the steep rise in inflation prevailing since 1940, which reached a rate of 29.9 per cent in that year and 31.2 per cent in 1946,10 together with the meagre growth

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Figure 3.1  GDP per capita in Spain in 1991 (1950 = 100), and Spain’s relative real GDP per capita in a European comparative perspective (EU 15 = 100), 1920–70. Source: GDP per capita in 1991 Geary-Khamis US$, Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Spanish Economic Growth, 1850–2015 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). The database, in its updated version until 2019, is freely accessible at https://espacioinvestiga​.org​/bbdd​ -chne/. Data on Spain’s relative real GDP per capita (EU 15 = 100), Albert Carreras and Xavier Tafunell, Entre el imperio y la globalización: Historia económica de la España contemporánea (Barcelona: Crítica, 2018), pp. 463–6.

in nominal wages, the loss of purchasing power was tremendous. The real wage data estimated by Jordi Maluquer de Motes (2005) for agriculture are illustrative and reveal a deterioration in the standard of living for the agricultural population of almost 50 per cent during the autarkic period. In real terms, the wage levels of 1936 were not reached again until 1964 (Figure 3.2). The persistence of the economic depression until the beginning of the 1950s was reflected in nutrition. The study by Demetrio Casado (technical secretary of Cáritas Nacional),11 Perfiles del hambre (1967), highlighted, the nutritional problems that afflicted Spaniards and indicated that in Spain in the 1940s ‘there were widespread cases of hunger with their resulting effects of morbidity and mortality’.12 Although the food problems ‘were not assessed globally in scientific and precise terms’, Casado’s analysis drew on abundant news articles and data on the nutritional problems observed in those years by many specialists. Specialists in the history of science and medicine have highlighted the construction of a ‘hunger neurology’, revealing avitaminosis and the diseases of almost epidemic

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Figure 3.2  Male daily agricultural salary in real terms and real private consumption per capita (1964 = 100). Source: Male daily agricultural salary in real terms. In Jordi Maluquer de Motes and Montserrat Llonch, ‘Trabajo y relaciones laborales’, Estadísticas históricas de España, cords. Albert Carreras and Xavier Tafunell (Bilbao: Fundación BBVA, 2005): Table 15.21, 1221. Real private consumption per capita in Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Spanish Economic Growth, 1850–2015 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). https://espacioinvestiga​.org​/bbdd​-chne/.

proportions suffered by the population between 1936 and 1947.13 Considered as the first bromatological and food sociology research projects in Spain, particularly noteworthy are those by Francisco Grande Covián and his team from 1939,14 Francisco Vivanco, Gregorio Varela and Olga Moreiras from the mid-1950s15 and those of Alfonso García Barbancho in around 1960.16 The great food depression of the 1940s is confirmed in the recent estimates of the consumption of energy and nutrients. All of the calculations highlight the scale of the nutritional crisis suffered by the Spanish population between 1936 and 1950. The recovery was slow and late (from around 1955), but was not complete until the end of the 1960s. The official estimates of national bodies (Ministry of Agriculture) and international organizations (FAO) and different groups of historians17 certify the impact of the extraordinary dimension of the food depression (Figure 3.3). The data are irrefutable: the reduction in the intake of calories, proteins and lipids per inhabitant per day was alarming until 1947.18 Milk and lactic products, animal proteins which are fundamental for children’s growth, were scarce. These products did not constitute a principal element of the diet until the 1960s.19 Together with the supply problems, agricultural restrictions and macroeconomic conditions, there were also problems of demand: the

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Figure 3.3  Calories available for consumption per capita per day and male height by draft date in Spain, 1920–70. Source: Estimates for calories per capita per day are based on (a) Josep Pujol and Xavier Cussó, ‘La transición nutricional en la Europa occidental, 1865-2000. Una nueva aproximación’, Historia Social 80 (2014): 133–55; (b) AHL (Agroecosystems History Laboratory at the University Pablo de Olavide, Seville) and Manuel González de Molina, David Soto Fernández, G. Guzmán Casado, Juan Infante Amate, E. Aguilera Fernández, J. Vila Traver and R. García Ruíz, Historia de la Agricultura española desde una perspectiva biofísica, 1900-2010 (Madrid: Ministerio de Agricultura y Pesca, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente. Secretaría General Técnica, 2019); (c) Alfonso García Barbancho, ‘Análisis de la alimentación española’, Anales de economía 66 (1960a): 72–119; and 67 (1960b): 271–363; (d) Anuario de Estadística Agraria, Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación (AEA-MAPA); (e) FAO statistical database (FAOSTAT). Male height: 1900–68, East-Levant Sample in José Miguel Martínez-Carrión and Javier Puche Gil, ‘La evolución de la estatura en Francia y en España, 1770-2000. Balance historiográfico y nuevas evidencias’, Dynamis 31, 2 (2011): 153–76; from 1969 (Statistics INE – Ministry of Defence). The data were estimated using three-year centred moving averages.

low household incomes. However, even when the economy and consumption recovered at the beginning of the 1960s, the increase in the relative price of milk cancelled part of the income effect derived from the rapid economic growth. Consumers displayed a fairly passive response to their growing purchasing power. In 1961, the per capita consumption of milk was much lower than in Greece or Italy. Within the wider European context, Spain consumed more milk

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than only Portugal, and its consumption of lactic products was much lower than that of Western Europe.20 Spain did not close the gap with the European consumption pattern of lactic products21 or the large differences found between the large cities and the small towns and between regions until the 1980s.22 Nutritional deficiencies prevailed until the end of the 1960s, despite the improvements in the standard of living at the beginning of this decade. Almost thirty scientific studies on the diet of the Spanish population published in ‘Anales de Bromatología’, between 1958 and 1966, and surveys published in other journals indicated the very low intake of calories and animal proteins and the deficit of vitamins, calcium and nicotinic acid. The results revealed significant nutritional inequality between social groups until the 1960s.23 We cannot say that there was institutional passivity towards the deterioration of the nutritional status. Making a virtue out of necessity by optimizing the scarce resources was the objective of many families and institutions, focused on nutritional and gastronomic education.24 But the nutritional problems persisted into the 1950s and continued even in the following decade. In 1971, a substantial and wellevidenced report authored by Gregorio Varela, a prestigious nutritionist who was the first president of the Spanish Society of Nutrition created in 1978, raised the alarm about the situation: ‘The most absolute anarchy exists in this sector (nutrition). The great importance of nutrition has not been acknowledged by the national leadership and less so by the Government.’25 Within this historical context, the average height of Spaniards decreased.26 A consensus had emerged from a number of research projects carried out with different national and regional samples that the effects of the war and the post-war period were disastrous for the biological standard of living and the nutritional health of the majority of Spanish society. According to José Miguel Martínez-Carrión and Javier Puche Gil, the average height of the conscripts of a wide sample of the Eastern Mediterranean region of Spain recorded a decrease of at least 1 centimetre (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). The highest average of 1936 was not reached again until the draft of 1950. For the country as a whole, and based on the sampling carried out by Gloria Quiroga on a national scale with data of conscripts, the highest height obtained in 1934 was not reached again until the mid-1950s. The estimates made by this author reveal a reduction of 1.5 centimetres between 1934 and 1938, in the epicentre of the Civil War, and a deterioration that lasted until 1946. The physical height of Spaniards, in general, decreased for at least a decade. We cannot say that the reduction in male height was spectacular, but the slump observed in the height of the conscripts from 1936 to 1947 reveals the nutritional deficiencies and the size of the Spanish famine

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Figure 3.4  Evolution of the average height of Spanish conscripts, 1930, 1954. Source: Spain-Eastern Coast Series, see José Miguel Martínez-Carrión and Javier Puche Gil, ‘La evolución de la estatura en Francia y en España, 1770-2000. Balance historiográfico y nuevas evidencias’, Dynamis 31, no. 2 (2010): 153–76; National sample, see Gloria Quiroga, ‘Estatura y condiciones de vida en el mundo rural español, 1893-1954’. El nivel de vida en la España rural, siglos XVIII-XX, ed. José Miguel Martínez-Carrión (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2002), 461–95.

during the years of the Civil War and, most of all, during Franco’s autarchy of the 1940s (Figure 3.4). As average height is the result of net nutrition, its reduction between 1937 and 1941–50 stemmed from factors influencing growth during the adolescence (growth spurt) of the conscripts measured in the 1940s. During the Civil War and, most of all, in the immediate post-war period, poverty increased, income and consumption per capita decreased, the hours of the working day grew, principally in agriculture and construction,27 and certain environmental diseases spread, such as rickets, typhus, typhoid fever and tuberculosis.28 The interactive accumulation of all of these factors influenced the negative trend in height. There is an abundance of contemporary literature describing short, thin and sickly bodies that were physiologically weakened as a result of the nutritional deterioration and the poor living conditions that delayed child growth and corporal development at least until the 1950s.29 The specialists indicate that the average adult height reflects the influence of the environmental conditions experienced in childhood and adolescent puberty.

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The anthropometric data suggest that adolescent growth was delayed during the years of the war and the long post-war period. The reduction in height of almost 1 centimetre or more according to the different estimates indicates the impact of the nutritional deficiencies on the final adult height in these years. Although the environment in the first three years of life is a determinant for final average height, we maintain that the childhood environment in the 1920s (when the conscripts who were measured in the 1940s were born) could not have been so harmful for physical growth. On the contrary, the 1920s were a period of economic growth and improvements in human well-being. After the First World War and the influenza pandemic of 1918–20, the decrease in mortality resumed, particularly affecting the fall in child mortality. Furthermore, between 1920 and 1935, significant advances were made in public health and personal hygiene.30 Therefore, a large part of the reduction in the height of the conscripts measured in the 1940s can be attributed to the context experienced in the years prior to the measurement of their heights. These conscripts experienced adolescence during the ‘hunger years’. The second stage of the fastest physical growth, the adolescent growth spurt in children between the ages of eleven and eighteen experienced negative effects from the beginning of puberty as it coincided with the hardships of the war and the post-war period. The worst points in the nutritional crisis were experienced during the first years of the post-war period. Not everybody suffered the costs of the war and post-war years. The unequal effects of the famine can be seen in Figure 3.5 which shows the differences in the heights of school children aged six to fourteen in different centres in Madrid. From the National Institute of Medical Research of the General Directorate of Health, where Francisco Grande Covián and his team worked, clinical trials were carried out among school-aged children in order to confirm the impact of the nutritional problems in the first years after the war. In this case, the heights of the children from a poor neighbourhood that had been hit hard by the Civil War, the Madrid suburb of Puente de Vallecas, were compared with those of the children from the Colegio de Estudio located in the neighbourhood of Chamberí, a wealthy district. Financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, the trial and its results revealed the deficiencies of B complex vitamins, causing the muscular cramps and muscle weakness suffered by the children from the poor neighbourhood. Malnutrition due to dietary deficiencies affected 75 per cent of the school-aged population of Puente de Vallecas while in the school in Chamberí it affected just 2 per cent.31 The hunger-related neuropathies were described in many studies published in clinical medicine journals during the 1940s.32

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Figure 3.5  Comparison of heights of children of school age in different neighbourhoods of Madrid in 1942. Source: Own elaboration based on Francisco Grande, J. R. of Carvallo and F. Jiménez García, ‘Alimentación y desarrollo infantil’, Revista Clínica Española 12, no. 1 (1944): 158.

What do we know about the height of women? The differences in adult height by sex (known as sexual dimorphism) can reflect a slight differential for boys and girls during their growth phase. Under conditions of environmental stress, such as significant deficits in terms of hygiene (health or food deprivation), the growth of girls is less affected than that of boys. It has been found that boys and girls have different degrees of eco-sensitivity.33 With data from the National Health Surveys by generational cohorts, recent studies on the Spanish case reveal that Spanish men born after approximately 1940 were able to benefit from institutionalized diets (during rationing or military service) in the early years of adulthood when their growth cycle had probably not yet finished. We know for certain that girls are less sensitive to environmental changes and that they finish their growth cycle earlier. Both of these factors could explain the lower increase in inter-generational height among Spanish women born during the 1940s and 1950s.34 Socio-economic status also influenced height. Occupation, wealth, education, living and working conditions, among other determinants of the standard of living, were associated with different height gradients. Some studies have indicated the relationship between height and education through literacy. Social inequalities with respect to access to education are significant for the conscripts between 1930 and 1960. In the Valencia region, the educational divide widened

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among the cohorts between 1919 and 1943.35 In the south of Castilla-La Mancha and in southeast Spain, the height of the illiterate conscripts fell spectacularly among the conscripts of the years between 1935 and 1939 and 1950 and 1954, born between 1914–18 and 1934–8, respectively.36 During the ‘hunger years’, the social divide measured in terms of occupation and wealth widened. Inequality increased and resulted in increased differences in the heights of the different social classes. Following the HISCO-HISCLASS classification of professions, the average heights of day labourers, agricultural labourers and less qualified workers decreased, while the average heights of university students and highly qualified specialized workers or non-manual workers with a medium level of education suffered less or almost not at all. In parallel, inequality increased, particularly in the 1940s, which is evident in the increase in the coefficients of variation, a measure of dispersion conventionally used in inequality studies.37 As a whole, the anthropometric results of the studies carried out among conscripted young men, and those conducted among schoolchildren in the 1940s, suggest that, in addition to the huge loss of economic well-being, Spaniards also suffered a reduction in biological well-being which prevailed until the beginning of the 1950s. The anthropometric findings show that the reduction in adult height in Spain was not so severe, but was more persistent over time than in other parts of Europe. Many European countries and regions suffered famines and severe food restrictions in the period around the Second World War.38 In Italy, the Netherlands and, most of all, Greece, there were deteriorations in the nutritional status, with significant reductions in adult height.39 Almost at the end of the autarkic period, in 1958, a medical and nutritional study of the armed forces carried out by the Interdepartmental Committee on Nutrition for National Defense, of the United States, revealed deficits in vitamin A, riboflavin and proteins, although the military population did not exhibit serious deficiencies. The study also detected health inequalities among the personnel of the three armed forces and their geographical distribution: the least healthy due to a greater prevalence of infectious diseases were the soldiers of the army and those in the southern sub-plateau, coinciding with the least qualified and lowest income population.40 The recovery of the economy and biological well-being began tentatively in the mid- 1950s and decisively from 1959, just after the approval of the stabilization and economic liberalization plan. The anthropometric data available from the Spanish Statistical Office (INE) reveal a gradual improvement in height and, most of all, weight from 1955 (Figure 3.6). In contrast to height, which reflects the nutritional status in the years prior to measurement, weight and lung

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Figure 3.6  Anthropometric indicators in Spain, 1955–65 (Index 100 = 1955). Source: Own elaboration based on data from the INE.

capacity increased more quickly. This increase adjusted as the standards of living increased, and particularly the intake of energy and consumption of nutrients. After the Second World War, the economic recovery of the 1950s stimulated the growth in heights in Europe. Western Europe experienced spectacular economic growth and an overall increase in standards of living.41 Although Spain did not benefit from the Marshall Plan, the increase in height of those born in the 1950s and 1960s was remarkable, partly due to the considerable increase in standards of living they experienced in adolescence but also to the low starting point. Spain was among the countries with the lowest heights in Europe (Figure 3.7). In any event, the increase in the average height of southern Europeans was extraordinary from the 1950s. The Spanish cohorts born between 1946 and 1950, who were adolescents in the fast economic development phase of the 1960s, obtained the greatest increase in height per decade in the whole of Europe. Despite the strong growth spurt in terms of height recorded for Spaniards, the distance between the tallest Europeans remained.42

Exploring the regional disparities and territorial differences The anthropometric studies carried out for the Franco era that explore the territorial and socio-economic inequalities are becoming well known.43 The

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Figure 3.7  Average male height in Europe, cohorts from 1911–15 to 1961–5 (recruits from 1930–5 to 1981–5). Source: Timothy J. Hatton and E. B. Bray, ‘Long Run Trends in the Heights of European Men, 19th-20th Centuries’, Economics and Human Biology 8 (2010): 405–13.

anthropometric data for different Spanish regions reveal that the periods of nutritional deprivation were fairly long and, in some cases, lasted until well into the 1950s. The reduction in biological well-being was recorded in a good part of Spain, as we can see in the stagnation of the average height until 1953. The anthropometric data suggest that the ‘hunger years’ lasted beyond the 1940s. Figure 3.8 shows the strong contrasts in the biological standards of living between northern and southern Spain. Based on research with municipal data on military conscription, we can observe significant results for large population groups: the Basque and Catalonian conscripts were among the tallest in Spain, while those from Andalusia, Extremadura, Murcia and Castilla-La Mancha recorded the shortest average heights. Despite the considerable differences in regional heights, the decrease in the nutritional status was particularly acute in the years of the Civil War and the post-war period, between 1937 and 1946. The populations in southeast Spain recorded the most significant reductions, together with those of Hellín in Castilla-La Mancha and Vizcaya in the Basque Country.

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Figure 3.8  Evolution of the average male height in four regional areas of Spain, by year of conscription (1935–65). Source: Own elaboration based on data facilitated by (a) southeast Spain (Almería, Murcia and Alicante): José Miguel Martínez-Carrión and Juan José Pérez Castejón, ‘Creciendo con desigualdad. El nivel de vida biológico en la España rural mediterránea desde 1840’, in El nivel de vida en la España rural, siglos XVIII-XX, ed. José Miguel Martínez-Carrión (Alicante: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante, 2002), 424–82; (b) Region of Valencia: Javier Puche Gil, ‘Evolución de los niveles de vida biológicos en la Comunidad Valenciana, 1840-1948’, Investigaciones de Historia Económica 7, no. 3 (2011): 380–94; (c) Hellín (Albacete, Castilla-La Mancha): José Cañabate Cabezuelos and José Miguel Martínez-Carrión, ‘Poverty and Rural Height in Inland Spain during the Nutrition Transition’, Historia Agraria 71 (2017): 109–42; (d) Biscay–Basque Country: Pedro M. Pérez Castroviejo, ‘Biological Welfare during the Economic Development of the Basque Country: Biscay, 1850-2000’, Revista de Historia Industrial 64, no. 2 (2016): 183–12.

The Valencia region recorded a less intense anthropometric deterioration. In all of these regions, the increase in height that was recorded from the beginning of the twentieth century stopped during the Civil War of 1936–9. This marked a turning point in the health and nutritional status of the Spanish population. The data referring to the conscripts of 1947–8 provide information about the recovery in height. In the populations of southeast Spain, including Hellín in the province of Albacete, this recovery did not commence until the beginning of the following decade. In Murcia and Alicante, the height levels reached during

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the pre-war period, even in 1937, were not exceeded until 1959. According to the anthropometric data, the nutritional deficiencies could have lasted in the poorest rural areas until the mid-1950s. The data suggest that the rural world was hit harder than urban environments throughout Franco’s autarky. The rural sample studied for a group of fourteen towns in Castilla y León reveal a different evolution. The drop in height shows that the Republican (Franco’s opponents in the Civil War) areas were hit more severely. However in the Francoist area, from Burgos to Zamora, the reduction in height was barely perceptible. With very low starting points, the average height for the whole of the sample stagnated between 1942 and 1951 and increased slightly throughout the 1950s. The increase became noteworthy only after 1960, a little over two centimetres in that decade.44 In contrast, the rural areas of the region experienced increases in height of a little over 4 centimetres, from 163.7 centimetres between 1942 and 1946 to 165.2 centimetres between 1947 and 1951 and 168.4 centimetres between 1952 and 1956.45 The data suggest that these were golden years for the agricultural sector in Castilla y León, although the data could be biased due to the low number of observations of the sample at the end of the period analysed. It is argued that the accumulated stock of public infrastructure in the region of Castilla y León was hardly damaged during the war which meant that it did not suffer many of the problems that other regions experienced. Furthermore, the ample provision of cereals and grains (principally wheat), which was the main food source, could have alleviated the famine and improved the nutritional status of part of the population, which, however, could have been suffered by certain population segments. In fact, the heights of salaried workers did not increase during the autarkic period as they were much more vulnerable to the rising inflation and food rationing. This contrasts with the height of the small rural landowners, which increased considerably.46 The research carried out with anthropometric data from thirty-three municipalities in Extremadura shows an evolution in height that was slightly more satisfactory during the ‘hunger years’ than that observed in the Republican areas. Significant reductions cannot be observed, but the average height of the conscripts in Extremadura measured in 1936 was not recovered until the draft of 1948 (Figure 3.9). In this quasi-stagnation in the post-war period, the authors found differences between the heights of the conscripts of Cáceres and Badajoz, both provincial capitals. Being shorter, the former exhibited a poorer anthropometric performance than the latter. Cáceres, the poorest province of Extremadura, suffered a reduction of eight millimetres between 1944 and 1946. Breaking down the Extremadura sample into residential groups, we can observe

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Figure 3.9  Height of conscripts in Extremadura (thirty-three municipalities) according to rural or urban place of residence (conscripts of 1934–69). Three-year centred moving average (in centimetres). Source: Antonio M. Linares Luján and Francisco M. ParejoMoruno, ‘Las medidas del hambre. Guerra, autarquía y desnutrición en perspectiva antropométrica’, in Los ‘años del hambre’ Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista, ed. Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2020), 310.

a profound rural–urban divide throughout the twentieth century.47 During first autarkic years, the divide widened due to the decrease in height in the rural areas. Between 1940 and 1947 the differences in height in favour of the urban environment were more than two centimetres, although the urban conscripts suffered an anthropometric disruption around 1950–1. One of the principal manifestations of the inequality in heights can be observed across different city neighbourhoods. In the large cities, as in the case of Madrid, neighbourhoods were usually stratified according to socioeconomic status. As it was a major city undergoing a process of strong demographic growth due to immigration from the beginning of the 1940s, the study of height by neighbourhood constitutes an excellent analysis for determining the impact of the famine in rich and poor areas. The study carried out by Carlos Varea on the city of Madrid, with data on the height of conscripts from 1936 to 1974, born between 1915 and 1953, analyses the urban spatial segregation and social stratification associated to the differences in height and also the impact of the different economic and political situations experienced by Franco’s dictatorship. The results show that height increased significantly among the conscripts who lived in the middle and upper-class districts (5.85 centimetres) and

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the lower-class districts (6.75 centimetres).48 In spite of the positive trend throughout the century in both social groups, the height of the lower social classes fluctuated to a greater extent than that of the higher social classes. The stability of height among the rich is consistent with the greater economic stability and availability of resources of this social group (employment, housing, assets, wealth) and probably the privileges granted by the Franco regime, given the closeness of these classes to the economic and political power in the state capital. In contrast with the greater stability of the upper classes, we can observe a reduction in height of more than 1 centimetre among the conscripts from the poorest neighbourhoods, which was much more significant between 1944 and 1949. The nutritional inequality increased among the conscripts of 1942 and 1948 and, although it decreased in the following years, it increased again in the 1960s, but not so significantly as it had done in the ‘hunger years’ during the 1940s. The seriousness of the nutritional problem in the rural areas and poor neighbourhoods of the cities motivated the School Services of Food and

Figure 3.10  Average heights in the autonomous regions in Spain and differences in centimetres between the Basque Country and Galicia. Cohorts born between 1934 and 1965. Source: INE, Gloria Quiroga, ‘Medidas antropométricas y condiciones de vida en la España del siglo XX’ (PhD Dissertation, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 2002).

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Nutrition (SEAN) created in 1954 to promote the EDALNU Programme. Functioning since 1961, the programme benefited from the support of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and one of its objectives was the diffusion of milk supplements, which was decisive for the growth of Spanish schoolchildren. This fact was particularly relevant in the rural environment where there was a very low consumption of milk which was considered as a type of ‘food-medicine’, reserved for vulnerable groups, such as pregnant and breastfeeding women, the elderly and the infirm. Powdered milk began to be distributed in schools from 1959 and liquid milk from 1962. With the improvement in income and consumption per capita the standards of living and nutritional health increased. Height, which began a new growth process with greater impetus than in previous decades, affected all of the Spanish regions and a process of inter-regional convergence began (Figure 3.10).49 The differences between the Basque conscripts, the tallest, and the Galician conscripts, among the shortest, decreased among the cohorts born in 1934 and significantly from 1948. In spite of this, the tallest corresponded to the richest regions and the shortest to the poorest regions. The correlation between height and wealth measured by income per capita on a regional scale was high during the period.50

Conclusions This chapter has analysed the effects of the nutritional crisis and the inequalities in the biological well-being caused by the famine associated with the autarkic policies of the early years of the Franco regime. With data on average height drawn from a series of anthropometric research projects carried out in recent years, the dimension of the deterioration of the nutritional status suffered by a large part of the population has been reviewed. The results show that the reduction in adult height was severe and more prolonged over time than in other parts of Europe during the famines of the Second World War. The deterioration of biological well-being reached its height in 1947, but lasted in a good part of the country until 1953. The ‘hunger years’ persisted beyond the 1940s. Significant regional differences can be appreciated and the territorial and socio-economic inequalities increased, revealing the magnitude of the nutritional crisis. The economic and nutritional recovery began tentatively in around 1955 and became decisive after the passing of the stabilization and economic liberalization plan of 1959, reflected in the beginning of a process of relative inter-regional convergence.

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Notes 1 This chapter has received financial support from the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of Spain, project PGC2018-095529-B-I00, the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain, project HAR2016-76814-C2-2-P, the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain, project PID2019-109470GB-I00, Interreg-Sudoe project VINCI-SOE3/P2/F0917 (FEDER-European Union), the Government of Aragon, through the Research Group ‘S55_20R’, and from the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) ‘Building Europe from Aragon’, and the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of Spain, Research Network RED2018-102413-T. 2 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco (ed.), Los ‘años del hambre’. Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2020). See also Carlos Barciela, ‘Los años del hambre’, in España en crisis. Las grandes depresiones económicas, 1348-2012, eds. Enrique Llopis and Jordi Maluquer de Motes (Barcelona: Pasado y Presente, 2013), 165–92. 3 On the turning point caused by the Civil War and Franco’s autarky in the evolution of the macroeconomic magnitudes, see Leandro Prados de la Escosura and Blanca Sánchez-Alonso, Economic Development in Spain, 1815–2017 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Jordi Maluquer de Motes, España en la economía mundial. Series largas para la economía española (1850-2015) (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Económicos, 2016) and Albert Carreras and Xavier Tafunell, Entre el imperio y la globalización: Historia económica de la España contemporánea (Barcelona: Crítica, 2018). 4 Clara Eugenia Núñez, ‘El capital humano en el primer franquismo’, in Autarquía y mercado negro. El fracaso económico del primer franquismo, ed. Carlos Barciela (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003), 27–53. 5 Vicente Pérez Moreda, David-Sven Reher and Alberto Sanz Gimeno, La conquista de la salud. Mortalidad y modernización en la España contemporánea (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2015); Arco Blanco, Los ‘años del hambre’. 6 John Komlos and Inas R. Kelly (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Economics and Human Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 7 For recent overviews of anthropometric history and its principal debates on the cycles, see Richard H. Steckel, ‘Anthropometrics’, in Handbook of Cliometrics, eds. Claude Diebolt and Michael Haupert (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2019), 1153–71. 8 Carreras and Tafunell, Entre el imperio y la globalización, 35–7. 9 Jordi Maluquer de Motes, La economía española en perspectiva histórica (Barcelona: Pasado & Presente, 2014), Apéndice A.3, 626–7. 10 Jordi Maluquer de Motes, La inflación en España. Un índice de precios de consumo, 1830-2012 (Madrid: Banco de España, 2013).

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11 Caritas Española was an institution created in 1947 by different Catholic charity organizations and Acción Católica Española. Its objective was to provide charity and welfare and it became independent from Acción Católica in 1957. 12 Demetrio Casado, Perfiles del hambre. Problemas sociales de la alimentación española (Madrid: Ed. Cuadernos para el Diálogo, 1967). 13 María Isabel Cura and Rafael R. Huertas, Alimentación y enfermedad en tiempos de hambre. España 1937-1947 (Madrid: CSIC, 2007). Josep Bernabeu and Josep L. Barona (eds), Nutrición, Salud y Sociedad. España y Europa en los siglos XIX y XX (València: Seminari d’Estudis sobre la Ciencia/Universitat de València, 2011). 14 On the studies by Grande Covián, see Jesús Manuel Culebras, ‘Grande Covián y la malnutrición infantil en la Guerra Civil Española’, Nutrición Hospitalaria 30, no. 3 (2014): 695–8. 15 Gregorio Varela, Olga Moreiras-Varela and Concepción Vidal, ‘Niveles de nutrición en las diferentes regiones y estratos sociales’, Anales de Bromatología 17 (1965): 163– 237; a systematic review can be found in Josep Bernabeu-Mestre, Ureña Alberola María T., Esplugues Pellicer Josep Xavier, Eva María Trescastro-López, María Eugenia Galiana-Sánchez and Isabel Castelló Botía, ‘Las ciencias de la nutrición en la España de la segunda mitad del siglo XX: estudio bibliométrico descriptivo de la revista Anales de Bromatología (1949-1993)’, Nutrición Hospitalaria 27, Suppl. 2 (2012): 18–25. 16 Alfonso García Barbancho, ‘Análisis de la alimentación española’, Anales de economía 66 (1960): 72–119; and 67 (1960): 271–363. 17 Xavier Cussó and Ramon Garrabou, ‘La transición nutricional en la España contemporánea: las variaciones en el consumo de pan, patatas y legumbres (1850-2000)’, Investigaciones de Historia Económica 7 (2007): 69–100; Josep Pujol and Xavier Cussó, ‘La transición nutricional en la Europa occidental, 1865-2000. Una nueva aproximación’, Historia Social 80 (2014): 133–55; Manuel González de Molina, David Soto Fernández, G. Guzmán Casado, Juan Infante Amate, E. Aguilera Fernández, J. Vila Traver and R. García Ruíz, Historia de la Agricultura española desde una perspectiva biofísica, 1900-2010 (Madrid: Ministerio de Agricultura y Pesca, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente. Secretaría General Técnica, 2019). 18 Mª Dolores Marrodán, Pilar Montero and Mohamed Cherkaoui, ‘Transición nutricional en España durante la historia reciente’, Nutrición Clínica y Dietética Hospitalaria 32, Suppl. 2 (2012): 55–64. 19 Fernando Collantes, ‘La evolución del consumo de productos lácteos en España, 1952-2007’, Revista de Historia Industrial 55 (2014): 103–34. 20 Fernando Collantes, ‘Nutritional transitions and the food system: expensive milk, selective lactophiles and diet change in Spain, 1950-65’, Historia Agraria 73 (2017): 119–47.

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21 Fernando Collantes, ‘Más allá de los promedios: patrones de segmentación del consumo de productos lácteos en España, 1964-2006’, Investigaciones de Historia Económica 11, no. 2 (2015): 103–15. 22 Ismael Hernández Adell, Francisco Muñoz-Pradas and Josep Pujol-Andreu, ‘A New Statistical Methodology for Evaluating the Diffusion of Milk in the Spanish Population: Consumer Groups and Milk Consumption, 1865–1981’, Investigaciones de Historia Económica 15, no. 1 (2019): 23–37. 23 Varela, Moreiras and Vidal, ‘Niveles de nutrición en las diferentes regiones y estratos sociales’, 163–237; María Tormo-Santamaría, Eva María Trescastro-López, María Eugenia Galiana-Sánchez, Mercedes Pascual-Artiaga and Josep BernabeuMestre, ‘Malnutrición y desigualdades en la España del desarrollismo: las encuestas rurales de alimentación y nutrición’, Nutrición Hospitalaria 35, Extra-5 (2018): 116–22. 24 This was visible in the attitude of the new institutions created in response to the nutritional crisis, see María Tormo-Santamaría and Josep Bernabeu-Mestre, ‘Making a Virtue of Necessity: Food Education and Gastronomy in the Spanish Civil War and Post-war Period (1936-1952)’, International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science 100231 (2020): 2; Eva María Trescastro-López, Josep BernabeuMestre and María Eugenia Galiana-Sánchez, ‘Nutrición y Salud Pública: políticas de alimentación escolar en la España contemporánea (1931-1978)’, Asclepio 65, no. 2 (2013): 26; Eva María Trescastro-López, ‘La educación en alimentación y nutrición en el medio escolar: el ejemplo del Programa EDALNU’, Revista Española de Nutrición Humana y Dietética 17, no. 2 (2013): 84–90. 25 Gregorio Varela, Domingo García Rodríguez and Olga Moreiras, La nutrición de los españoles. Diagnóstico y recomendaciones (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios de Desarrollo Económico, 1971), 319. 26 We have used the height series of the Spanish eastern coast, which is probably the most similar to the national average, see José Miguel Martínez-Carrión and Javier Puche Gil, ‘La evolución de la estatura en Francia y en España, 1770-2000. Balance historiográfico y nuevas evidencias’, Dynamis 31, no. 2 (2011): 153–76. The most recent estimate of average height can be found in Antonio D. Cámara, José Miguel Martínez-Carrión, Javier Puche Gil and Josep Maria Ramon-Muñoz, ‘Height and Inequality in Spain: A Long-Term Perspective’, Revista de Historia Economica-Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History 37, no. 2 (2019): 205–38. 27 Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Spain’s Historical National Accounts: Expenditure and Output, 1850-2015, Working Papers in Economic History, WP 16-07 (Carlos III University of Madrid. Figuerola Institute of Social Sciences History, http://hdl​.handle​ .net​/10016​/16, 2016). 28 Moreda, Reher and Gimeno, La conquista de la salud; Cura and Huertas, Alimentación y enfermedad en tiempos de hambre.

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29 Casado, Perfiles del hambre, 96–7. 30 Moreda, Reher and Gimeno, La conquista de la salud. 31 Francisco Grande, ‘El desarrollo físico comparativo de dos grupos de niños en edad escolar y distinto nivel económico’, Revista Clínica Española 12 (1944): 155. 32 Tormo Santamaría et al., ‘Malnutrición y desigualdades en la España del desarrollismo’, 116–22. 33 Antonio D. Cámara, ‘Sobre la asociación entre dimorfismo sexual en estatura y estado nutricional de hombres y mujeres en el largo plazo’, Nutrición Hospitalaria 35, Extra. 5 (2018): 123–8. 34 Antonio D. Cámara, ‘A Biosocial Approach to the Living Conditions: Intergenerational Changes of Stature Dimorphism in 20th-Century Spain’, Annals of Human Biology 43, no. 2 (2015): 168–78. 35 José Miguel Martínez-Carrión and Javier Puche Gil, ‘Alfabetización, bienestar biológico y desigualdad: la Comunidad valenciana, 1850-1970’, Historia Agraria 47 (2009): 167–86. 36 José Miguel Martínez-Carrión and Juan José Pérez Castejón (2002), ‘Creciendo con desigualdad. El nivel de vida biológico en la España rural mediterránea desde 1840’, El nivel de vida en la España rural, siglos XVIII-XX, ed. José Miguel MartínezCarrión (Alicante: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante, 2002), cuadro 8, 454; José Cañabate Cabezuelos and José M. Martínez-Carrión, ‘Crisis nutricional y brecha social en la España de la autarquía. Un estudio de caso a partir de la talla adulta’, Nutrición Hospitalaria 35, No Extra. 5 (2018): 108–15. 37 María Isabel Ayuda and Javier Puche Gil, ‘Determinants of Height and Biological Inequality in Mediterranean Spain, 1859-1967’, Economics and Human Biology 15, no. 1 (2014): 101–19; José Cañabate Cabezuelos and José Miguel Martínez-Carrión, ‘Poverty and Rural Height in Inland Spain during the Nutrition Transition’, Historia Agraria 71 (2017): 109–42. 38 José Miguel Martínez-Carrión, ‘La talla de los europeos, 1700-2000. Ciclos, crecimiento y desigualdad’, Investigaciones de Historia Económica-Economic History Research 8, no. 3 (2012): 176–87. 39 For Italy, see Javier Puche Gil and Pedro Mª Pérez Castroviejo, ‘Estatura y salud nutricional en la Italia mussoliniana, 1922-1939’, Ler História 74 (2019): 161–85. Vittorio Daniele and Renato Ghezzi, ‘The Impact of World War II on Nutrition and Children’s Health in Italy’, Investigaciones de Historia Económica 15, no. 2 (2019): 119–31, https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​016​/j​​.ihe.​​2017.​​​09​.00​​2. For the Netherlands, F. R. M. Portrait, T. F. van Wingerden and D. J. H. Deeg, ‘Early Life Undernutrition and Adult Height: The Dutch Famine of 1944–45’, Economics & Human Biology 27, Part B (2017): 339–48. For Greece, Anastasios Papadimitriou, ‘Growth and Development of Greek Children in the Twentieth Century’, in Secular Growth Changes in Europe, eds. Eva. B. Bodzsár and C. Susanne (Budapest: Eötvös University Press, 1998).

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40 Pedro Fatjó, Francisco Muñoz-Pradas and Roser Nicolau, ‘Un estudio médico y nutricional de las fuerzas armadas españolas realizado en 1958 por el ICNND de EE.UU’, Nutrición Hospitalaria 35, Extra. 5 (2018): 91–8. 41 Dudley Baines, Neil Cummins and Max S. Schulze, ‘Population and Living Standards, 1945-2005’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, vol. 2. 1870 to the present. Stephen Broadberry and Kevin H. O´Rourke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 390–420. 42 Timothy J. Hatton and E. B. Bray, ‘Long Run Trends in the Heights of European Men, 19th-20th Centuries’, Economics and Human Biology 8 (2010): 405–13; Martínez-Carrión, ‘La talla de los europeos, 1700-2000’, 176–87. 43 José Miguel Martínez-Carrión, Javier Puche Gil and Josep Maria Ramon-Muñoz, ‘Nutrición y desigualdad social en la España de Franco: evidencia antropométrica’, in La dictadura franquista. La institucionalització d'un règim, dirs. Antoni Segura, Andreu Mayayo and Teresa Abelló (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2012), 171–84; Cabezuelos and Martínez-Carrión, ‘Crisis nutricional y brecha social en la España de la autarquía’, 108–15; Carlos Varea, Elena Sánchez-García, Barry Bogin, Luis Ríos, Bustar Gómez-Salinas, Alejandro López-Canorea and José Miguel Martínez-Carrión, ‘Disparities in Height and Urban Social Stratification in the First Half of the 20th Century in Madrid (Spain)’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16, 11 (2019): 2048. 44 Javier Moreno Lázaro and José Miguel Martínez-Carrión, ‘Secular trend in Castile and León (Spain): 1830-1990s’, Revista Española de Antropología Física 30 (2010): 1–12. 45 Ricardo Hernández and Javier Moreno, ‘El nivel de vida en el medio rural de Castilla y León. Una constatación antropométrica, 1840-1970’, Historia Agraria 47 (2009): 143–66. 46 Ibid., graphic 8, 157. 47 Antonio M. Linares Luján and Francisco M. Parejo-Moruno, ‘Las medidas del hambre. Guerra, autarquía y desnutrición en perspectiva antropométrica’, Los ‘años del hambre’. Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista, ed. Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2020), 293–316. 48 Carlos Varea et al., ‘Disparities in Height and Urban Social Stratification in the First Half of the 20th Century in Madrid (Spain)’, 2048; Carlos Varea, José Manuel de Terán, Elena Sánchez-García, Haiqian Ma, Sergio López-Medel, Daniel Pérez-Cava and Luis Ríos, ‘Estaturas generacionales y residencia por distritos en la ciudad de Madrid durante el siglo XX’, Nutrición Hospitalaria 35 (2018): 83–90. 49 José Miguel Martínez-Carrión and Ramón María-Dolores, ‘Regional Inequality and Convergence in Southern Europe: Evidence from Height in Italy and Spain, 18502000’, Revista de Economía Aplicada 74, XXV (2017): 75–103. 50 Casado, Perfiles del hambre, 181.

Part II

Famine, poverty and daily life

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4

Iniquitous famine Marginalized mothers and children Peter Anderson

We don’t eat under this regime and while food rots in warehouses the only ones who can eat are those with big salaries or with a huge range of political contacts.1 Complaint voiced in a barber’s shop, Fuente Obejuna, 1950 Historians have tended to label post-war shortages that killed perhaps 200,000 people through disease and starvation as producing hunger rather than famine. The term ‘hunger’ obscures from view both the policies that made the crisis and their unequal effects.2 These effects are crucial, and the iniquitous distribution of food stands as startling testimony to the politically made famine in Spain. Crucially, autarky and price controls restricted production, prevented imports and encouraged hoarding. It is also the case that the better off and those with strong ties to the regime frequently flourished. By contrast, the poor and those who suffered the political repression all too often succumbed to hunger and disease. The regime also oversaw a chaotic national food market in which some regions boasted of plenty while others counted on very little. The regime’s failure to better distribute food was compounded by the shortcomings of its oftenpraised welfare system. This chapter studies the iniquitous effects of the famine as a means of challenging the dominant idea in the literature that Spain suffered from hunger rather than famine and that the ‘hunger’ resulted primarily from poor harvests and isolation in the Second World War.3 Instead, it looks at how policies and political repression affected the marginalized groups who suffered the famine. Too often the historiography has looked at policy, Francoist welfare services, calorific intake and the development of health services rather than the effect

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on those who suffered.4 One powerful way of studying these effects is to look at poverty-stricken mothers and children whose close relatives suffered during the Francoist repression. They proved among the most vulnerable groups, and by examining their experience we can peel away Francoist propaganda, overcome the neglect in the existing historiography and give a place in the historical record for the voices and experiences of neglected groups. We can also see beyond the effects of the famine on health and look at how it created the conditions in which families were split apart and children taken into care. It is also important to trace these effects from the Civil War. The historiography tends to view hunger as a post-war phenomenon and to view the Franco zone in the Civil War as well-fed.5 This occludes the way in which victims of the Francoist repression during the conflict suffered hunger and lost their children. We also need to appreciate that the hunger suffered in government-held territory debilitated ordinary people and made them more susceptible to shortage and disease after the Francoists took control. Given that the Franco regime endeavoured to present itself in the best light and whitewashed the famine by highlighting the developmental success of the 1960s, it is hard to research the suffering of socially marginalized groups. Doing so requires carefully gathering information from archives and memoirs and a considerable amount of research. This chapter does this by drawing on diplomatic papers in London, the archives of the Quakers in London, the records of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York state and medical reports, as well as documents from child-welfare organizations in Barcelona, Córdoba, Madrid and Pamplona. It also draws on civil court records from the Pozoblanco region in southern Spain in addition to contemporary press accounts in Spanish and English, and memoirs.

Hunger in the Franco zone in the Civil War Despite the historiography, which has praised Francoist food production and distribution in the Civil War, hunger existed in Francoist territory during the conflict.6 The long-silenced Francoist repression proved the principal cause of the suffering. Serious research into the killings only began many years after the general’s regime collapsed. We now know that the rebels and insurgents killed at least 130,000 people behind the lines during and after the Spanish Civil War. The killing began with the army rebellion that began the conflict. The insurgents swiftly took large parts of northern and western Spain and mass killings rapidly

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commenced. In the La Rioja province, 2,000 were killed following the July revolt.7 In Pamplona province, 2,822 men and 35 women were shot. A further 305 died from abuse or malnutrition in prison during the war.8 The iniquitous effects of the political violence on relatives proved readily apparent to visiting Quaker relief workers. They noted in northern Spain in the autumn of 1937 that many hotels boasted full menus and cafes were busy. On the other hand, there were crowds of women and children with no income because their husbands and fathers had been killed or were imprisoned. These refugees were ‘ragged, driven out by hunger’ and in many cases living on the street.9 A Quaker relief worker had a similar experience in La Arboleda in the Burgos area in March 1938: These families – some of them large – obviously below the poverty line, were universally minus the breadwinner. With the father dead, in prison, or missing, the children live by begging or by what little the mother or older children may earn. This is not the first town we have found in such circumstances, but La Arboleda is an extreme one. Our heartstrings torn, we promised to be back soon with at least some cod-liver oil.10

These were no isolated incidents. We know, too, from the documentary record of the Provincial Council for the Protection of Children in Navarre Province that the families of executed or jailed left-wing activists suffered deeply in everyday life. In one case from village of Lerín, a father was arrested on 24 July 1936 for being a member of a socialist meeting house. This left his wife looking after her four children aged between ten and four, while expecting her fifth child. By February 1937, the newly born daughter was suffering from malnutrition ‘because of the insufficient diet of the mother’. Two of the older children had been given the right to eat in a Falangist feeding station but a skin condition prevented them from eating there.11 Faced with this dire situation some mothers opted to place their children in care where they believed they would be better fed – a judgement supported by an eyewitness who left testimony that children ate better in Francoist care homes than in feeding stations run by the regime’s welfare service Auxilio Social (Social Help).12 In Pamplona, a number of women chose to part with their children in order to save them from hunger, starvation and disease. In September 1936, one woman whose husband was considered ‘extremely dangerous’ and who had been ‘detained as a result of the Patriotic Movement’ declared that she ‘found it impossible to keep supporting her unfortunate children’. Fearing for their wellbeing, she handed them over to a local Catholic charity home.13

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The shortcomings of Francoist welfare in the Civil War stood out to international volunteers. In November 1937, Quaker relief workers visiting newly occupied Oviedo found hundreds of children without blankets. They also encountered children in need of milk and cod liver oil. Many also went without shoes and stockings.14 Children from families like these frequently could survive only by eating at Francoist feeding stations and although they often made a difference they could also prove inadequate. We know a great deal about the hunger experienced by the children who ate at these stations from the memoir left by Manuel Pato Manzano. He was five years old at the start of the Civil War and lived with his family in Asturias in the north of Spain. During the conflict, his father was captured by the Francoists and sentenced to death – a sentence later commuted and reduced a number of times until he left jail when his son was twelve years old. His mother was left on the verge of destitution by the father’s imprisonment. In his rural home, he remembered they had hardly any food. Just the odd potato, perhaps an occasional turnip, a few old apples and a handful of chestnuts or hazelnuts. These, he said, formed the daily diet and saved them from dying of hunger.15 The family soon moved to the city of Oviedo where his mother found work which paid just thirty pesetas a month for extremely long hours. It could take the whole of this salary to buy one tin of condensed milk. With her meagre earnings, his mother had to support herself, her son and to try and supplement her husband’s paltry prison rations.16 This poverty helps explain why the young boy went to eat in an Auxilio Social feeding station where ‘the majority of us had a father dead or in jail’.17 Here they ate a stew with a little piece of bread – day after day. Many of his fellow children fell ill with typhus and hunger. He noted that ‘Every day the road to the cemetery was crowded with relatives who had lost a loved one; the processions were large and the successive mourning formed an endless line of those going to the last destination of those who died as a result of epidemic, tisis and hunger’.18

Hunger in government territory in the Civil War Although historians have tended to explain the post-war hunger as a result of the effects of the Second World War and international isolation, we need to recognize that the Civil War left much of the population in governmentheld territory, and especially in besieged Madrid, debilitated by hunger. In the years before the conflict, the capital had grown into a major world city with nearly 1,000,000 inhabitants in 1930.19 Over the summer of 1936, General

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Franco’s Foreign Legion forces rapidly advanced on this metropolis. The insurgents unleashed a full-scale assault in November 1936, which resulted in a stalemate by the end of the month. The capital remained under siege, with the only road out leading to Valencia, until the war concluded in late March 1939.20 The siege severely compounded the supply problems besetting the government side. From the start of the conflict, the Francoists controlled some of the best pasture lands in Spain. This meant that meat and milk soon fell into short supply in the Republic. Coordination between government agencies and supply problems also meant that fruit, vegetables and rice became scarce.21 Besieged Madrid suffered particularly badly and as early as September 1936, eggs, potatoes and sugar stood in short supply.22 As the siege tightened, the number of lorries bringing fish from Valencia plummeted from the seventy or eighty that had arrived a day before the war to just one a day. By February 1937, the government had introduced rationing, with each person entitled to 100 grams of lentils, 100 grams of chickpeas, 75 grams of green beans, 150 grams of rice and half a kilogram of fruit and vegetables a week.23 The ration supplied only 830 calories a day and over the course of the conflict some people lost 30 kilograms in weight.24 We possess graphic testimony of what all this meant to the people at the sharp end of the shortages. In the Civil War, Quaker relief workers published a letter received from a Madrid citizen: For nine months we have fed on nothing but rice; sometimes without even salt or oil to cook it with (we cook with oil) just simply boiled rice. We have stood as much as eight or nine hours in line to buy a cabbage – at exorbitant prices – and sometimes at the end of the long wait in which we took turns so as not to exhaust ourselves, there were no cabbages left, and we returned home empty handed. Some women have stood up all night in order to get bread, and then to receive an amount always insufficient.25

People’s health began to suffer. We know this from the studies undertaken by Dr Francisco Grande Covián, a physiologist at the Institute of Medical Research in Madrid, which revealed that citizens were suffering from a range of illnesses including pellagra, caused by a poor diet, and with symptoms such as dermatitis, diarrhoea and mental disturbance. Tuberculosis and beriberi were also reported.26 The problems grew particularly serious over the winter of 1937–8 as the shortages of meat and dairy products began to bite even harder. Vitamin deficiencies also became serious. Citizens in poorer neighbourhoods such as Puente de Vallecas suffered much more gravely from vitamin B shortages

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than others from better-off areas such as Chamberí. As a result, the poor began to suffer from muscle spasms and cramps.27 As children require a good diet to ensure growth and development, they proved especially vulnerable. In early 1938, a Quaker relief worker estimated that around 100,000 children in Spain were suffering from malnutrition, a further 200,000 were ailing because of malnourishment and about 100,000 were in a state of starvation or pre-starvation. Children were afflicted also as a result of the lack of soap and up to 80 per cent were suffering from skin diseases.28 By the end of the war, the situation had grown even more dire. The International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain noted in early March 1939 that the death rate among children in Madrid had reached twelve times the normal figure. It added that babies were being born at half the normal weight. The Times quoted the Commission’s report to state: ‘The civil population in Madrid, including the children, are receiving probably not more than 800 calories a day. This means the loss of about 1lb in weight a day, and could not be endured for more than two or three months without resulting in death.’29

Post-war famine and disease in Franco’s prisons The Francoists finally won the war at the end of March 1939, speedily occupied Madrid and brought its debilitated population under their control. Triumphal claims that copious quantities of food were being supplied to the hungry accompanied the Francoist occupation of Madrid. The Granada-based newspaper Patria ran a characteristic story on 4 April 1939, boasting that the city of León had sent its fifth expedition of lorries to Madrid (which the Francoists had captured at the end of March). This consignment brimmed with 12,500 kilograms of beans, 15,000 kilograms of sugar and 20,000 kilograms of flour.30 The Francoists also bragged in the press about the feeding stations they had installed across Spain where citizens could find ‘great quantities of bread, flour, beans’ as well as ‘condensed milk, tinned fish’ and that ‘mothers and children’ in particular were feasting on the rich delights supplied by the regime.31 The Francoist propaganda hid the brutal reality of famine in its own territory. While it is true that hunger in Francoist territory during the Civil War proved far less serious than in the government zone, this should not blind us to some of the severe shortages that afflicted the population. In particular, we need to take into account the political repression, social inequality, misguided economic policy and geographical variation that allowed some to prosper while others suffered.

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If we do not, we risk falling into a Francoist propaganda trap. One of the central themes of this propaganda was that the welfare organization Auxilio Social helped alleviate poverty in newly occupied parts of Spain. While  Auxilio Social certainly alleviated hunger, its resources proved inadequate to meet the scale of need. The organization also played a distinctly partisan role and remained closely tied to the regime, and became referred to as the ‘smile of the Falange’ (the fascist-leaning movement in Francoist Spain). We gain an insight into this propaganda in a publication from Zaragoza in 1937. Here the Francoist press boasted that in the provincial capital Auxilio Social had opened a food station at 28 Palafox Street with ‘abundant and healthy food’ to feed 700 people. It also bragged that in September 1937, 1,372 people had received meals in this one feeding station. Children were receiving two meals a day.32 Political prisoners form the most obvious group for whom such claims ring hollow and particularly jailed mothers and young children imprisoned with them. General Franco’s final victory in the Civil War in late March 1939 brought thousands of women and their children into prisons where many suffered from malnutrition and disease and perished in squalid conditions. A long tradition existed in Spain in which women prisoners lived alongside their children in jails. In 1874, rules were developed for jails in Madrid which created special prison sections for pregnant or nursing mothers. In 1928, the rules restricted the age of children in prison to four years old or, in exceptional cases, seven. This rule remained in place until 1940 when the Franco regime placed the limit at three years old. After this age children would pass into the hands of the Council for the Protection of Infants.33 By 21 April 1939, the Francoists had already placed 3,500 female prisoners in the Madrid women’s prison in the Ventas neighbourhood – three times its official capacity. All were political prisoners and often they were rounded up with their young children, and even those over the age of four. We possess copious testimony of the horrors the mass jailing of children, and especially very young children, produced. The communist activist Trinidad Gallego found herself crammed with thirteen other prisoners in a cell built for two prisoners.34 Another imprisoned communist activist, Juana Doña, testified that there were over 1,000 mothers with their children in the Ventas jail some of whom had two or three children with them.35 Prisoners in Franco’s jails endured especially low rations. In Barcelona’s terribly overcrowded women’s prison, inmates ate only small bits of potato with some cabbage, turnips, carrot and lentils cooked in a little water, day after

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day.36 In 1940, in the jail at Alcalá de Henares the inmates drank weak coffee for breakfast and ate rice with pumpkin or cabbage for the main and only meal of the day. Each prisoner was provided with 50 grams of bread with this meal.37 One cause of the hunger comes from the infamous hawking on the black market by prison authorities of products such as sugar and olive oil designated for prisoners.38 The terrible deficiencies did not escape the comment of the prison doctor in Zaragoza who noted that prisoners’ diets fell short in vitamins and proteins. He pointed out the obvious consequence that over the long term they became weak and easy victims to disease.39 Unsurprisingly, deaths ensued and in the post-war period, 144 prisoners died from starvation in 16 months in three prisons in Almendralejo in Badajoz province.40 As well as hunger, prisoners endured poor sanitary conditions. Former prisoners have left testimony of jails where there was only 1 toilet for 500 prisoners.41 We also have accounts of the mother’s gallery in the Ventas prison with its suffocating and bitter smell of urine and excrement so overpowering that it made people nauseous.42 In Zaragoza prison, one woman left vivid testimony of the horror: ‘They gave us a bath tub full of water a week. We had to use this for drinking, washing ourselves and the children, washing clothes . . . this water had to make do for forty-five mothers with their forty-five children.’43 Disease soon began to take hold at the Ventas prison and other women’s prisons across Spain. At the well-studied Ventas prison, fifty-eight women died between 1939 and 1941, fourteen of them under thirty years old.44 Children perished in even larger numbers and former prisoners have testified that as many as six or seven died a day from diseases such as meningitis and bronchitis.45 Dysentery, scabies and lice were also rampant.46 So too were measles, whooping cough and typhus.47 Other witnesses claim that in Torrero prison (Zaragoza), which had fifty-five children, forty-two perished in one week.48 A prisoner working as a midwife in Ventas prison claimed that nearly all the children she helped into the world died.49 The former prisoner Ana Morales has also testified that of the twenty-five children she knew in the Ventas prison, ten succumbed to death.50 Tuberculosis also took hold and accounted for 36 per cent of all deaths in the prison at Puerto de Santa María in Cádiz province in 1940.51 The consequences on the prisoners separated from their children by death and indignity were as terrible as might be imagined. One woman imprisoned in the Ventas jail testified: I had a girl like a sun. She’d just been born when they arrested me. She died here last year. There was a terrible epidemic and, without water, hygiene or any care, the children died like flies. Six or seven a day and sometimes more . . . while we

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waited for the burial, and as we didn’t know what to do with them, their little corpses piled up in the toilet . . . the mothers had to stand on guard to prevent the rats getting at them.52

Post-war famine, disease and child removal in everyday life Beyond the prison wall and in everyday life, women and children also suffered acutely. This occurred despite the fact that Francoist occupation frequently ushered in a bounty of food for the hungry population. After the conquest of Barcelona in January 1939, observers were quick to recognize that the Francoists distributed food supplies with some generosity. Milk and bread, in particular, were noted to be on sale.53 Nevertheless, the ability of the Francoists to maintain supply in the long run remains in doubt. In May 1939, relief experts noted that ‘food supplies often remain in the ports for many months’.54 Those distributing food also had to compete with the military for the trains and lorries they needed. Moreover, the war had led to a decline in agricultural products to distribute. In May 1939, a Quaker relief worker noted that these factors were leading to starvation: ‘We visited a town yesterday within an hour and a half drive of Murcia where the need is especially great and where the responsible people of the place told [us] that people actually died from lack of food, under present conditions.’55 Beyond issues of supply, Quaker relief workers noted that the problem came from the lack of purchasing power of many ordinary Spaniards. High levels of unemployment rendered people particularly vulnerable.56 These problems largely flowed from the regime’s own policies. The Francoist authorities decreed that salaries should return to the levels they held just before the conflict, although prices remained the same. Purchasing power immediately plummeted by between twenty-five and thirty per cent.57 Through the 1940s, the government continued to dictate salaries and in 1951 earnings had grown only by 2.7 per cent since 1939. This meant that in towns such as Sabadell, wages at the end of the 1940s were marooned at 65 per cent of their purchasing power in 1936.58 The regime also set prices and in May 1939 introduced rationing. As official prices did not take into account transport costs, producers frequently resorted to the flourishing black market.59 The regime further embarked on a policy of economic self-sufficiency which led to restrictions on imports and shortages of foreign exchange, and limited the purchase of foreign foodstuffs to the Italian and German markets.60 Dr John Janney of the Rockefeller Foundation, on a factfinding tour of Spain in October and November 1940, found that regime policies

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also shaped the shortages. In Zaragoza he noted that the quality of milk was poor ‘because the prices have been pegged at below production cost and the difference is made up with water’.61 He also had it ‘on best authority’ that the olive oil crop in 1940 ‘is being exported for foreign credit’ leaving locals with huge shortages.62 All of this left those relying on official rations and supplies in great danger, and research shows that in the badly affected province of Almería in 1943 people had to obtain between 65 per cent and 73 per cent of their calories on the black market.63 This did not necessarily save them as products bought on the black market were often adulterated: lentils, a staple of the time, could be mixed with grit and infested with weevils. The shortages were so great that people resorted to eating food formerly reserved for animals such as carob and acorns. To combat the cold, people also resorted to the black market where coal came soaked in water so that it weighed more and also mixed it with stones.64 The black market operated to the advantage of the well off and those who enjoyed close connections to the Franco regime. This meant that figures such as the mayor of the Carmona in Seville province, or the Civil Governor of Gerona between 1939 and 1942, became implicated in black market activity.65 The army also largely enjoyed impunity and barracks could become a centre for blackmarket profiteering, as they did in Carabanchel. Here soldiers enjoyed abundant and cheap food and also sold foodstuffs to restaurants. Soldiers even slaughtered animals on the base and hawked the meat on the black market.66 Meanwhile, poor and impoverished political opponents suffered serious persecution. Eighty per cent of those prosecuted in Almería for black market offences held no property, most were involved in small transactions of less than 15 kilograms and the vast majority hailed from the underclass or working class of street sellers and day labourers, or were widows.67 While the better off prospered, the everyday poor who were impoverished even further by the war could lose custody of their children if they were caught trying to survive by trading on the black market. We can appreciate this in a petition sent by a woman from Doña Mencía in Córdoba province to her provincial governor in November 1943: Last year I was prosecuted in the Prices Court (Fiscalía de Tasas) for carrying a small amount of sugar and received a fine of 1,000 pesetas and because I cannot pay the fine and as I have no resources I now have to serve a one-hundred day prison sentence. I am not asking for clemency and ask only that my poor son

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be taken into care where he can be given the care and food that he needs . . . . I would like to add that I no longer trade on the black market and I did it just once to be able to earn something to be able to feed my children.68

In these circumstances, it should cause no surprise that hunger or starvation became the lot of many Spaniards, and especially women and children, in the worst-affected areas. As US health experts noted, food in Spain was produced and sold regionally, and the country suffered from a poor overland transport system.69 This helps explain why Dr Janney of the Rockefeller Foundation found in a trip in the autumn of 1940 that some of the best food-producing areas of Spain such as Pamplona, San Sebastián and, to an extent, Zaragoza were well provisioned. He also encountered terrible suffering below a line stretching from Badajoz through Madrid and passing between Barcelona and Lerida to the French frontier.70 This shows that the inequities of food distribution spoke not just to social marginalization and political repression, but also to the poor distribution and coordination carried out by the regime. Accordingly, in Pamplona Janney saw ‘several truckloads of potatoes’ and ‘plenty of bread’, while he also observed that in Málaga the authorities were struggling with one-quarter of the normal wheat supply needed to provide bread for the population.71 In the worst-affected areas, the least fortunate starved to death. In Garrucha in Almería province, in a not untypical case, between March and September 1939 thirty-nine people died from starvation.72 British diplomatic staff reported back to London on the dreadful scenes of starvation they witnessed, and in 1941 the ambassador, and Quaker, Sir Samuel Hoare noted: ‘the food situation grows daily worse and the very high proportion of deaths now occurring in hospitals in Seville is due to malnutrition: many cases of deaths through actual starvation are reported. There are well authenticated cases of persons dying in the streets from hunger.’73 Confidential reports on public opinion sent by the Falange (Franco’s fascistleaning political movement) also offer considerable insight into the widespread nature of the hunger and the deep social inequity in its effects. In the southern mining town of Peñarroya in January 1941, the Falange reported: ‘There are hundreds of children, men and old people, in great misery and begging for alms, and because there are so many of them there is no help for them, as the levels of unemployment and hunger are far greater than at any previous time.’74 By April 1941, the Falange reported that sixty-six people had died from hunger in the first 4 months of the year. Miners were also collapsing at work as a result of hunger and lack of energy. In February 1941 thirty-two people had died in the nearby town of Pueblonuevo, twenty-three in Peñarroya and

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seventeen in Belmez, five of whom had perished from beriberi. In March, in nearby Belalcázar eight people were dying a day from hunger.75 For those who did not starve, malnourishment could lead to typhus and tuberculosis. In Palma de Mallorca the incidence of tuberculosis began to rise. In 1941, staff in the city’s clinic cared for 10,454 patients; by 1943 the numbers had risen to 12,081; in 1945, to 24,201; and in 1949, to 23,745.76 Children proved particularly vulnerable and 40 per cent of the city’s children showed signs of the disease.77 Tuberculosis especially afflicted the urban poor such as a shoeshine and his partner who earned a living selling coal and fruit that she stole. They lived in one of Barcelona’s poorest areas with their four children and the woman’s mother. They had sold all the clothes they had except the ones they wore and went barefoot. By 13 October 1941, the mother had died of tuberculosis and the  children had gone into care for a year until relatives could take in the youngsters.78 Marginalized groups afflicted by the disease often lost their jobs and struggled to care for their children and could petition for them to go into care homes.79 The suffering this caused comes across vividly in a letter sent by one mother in Barcelona to the Council for the Protection of Children: After having my husband at home ill with tuberculosis for a long time, last week he went to hospital, I have 5 children and, in truth and with great pain, I can’t look after them, and all day they are in the street and I am ill. Two of my husband’s brothers have already died young of tuberculosis. The children are well but it’s a great danger, as everyone tells me, to live in such poverty, without having enough to eat, without air, without light, when I am ill and there are five more tenants in the house.80

Madrid suffered terrible food shortages too that created the circumstances for child removal. Medical research in 1941 in the Madrid working-class area of Puente de Vallecas found profound undernourishment. In a study of 106 families composed of 561 people, doctors found that meat, eggs and cheese were practically unknown, while milk was consumed only occasionally. They observed that the ‘bread was coarse’, while fruit ‘was out of the reach of these people’.81 The researchers also found that whereas in Boston (Massachusetts) the average nine-year-old girl weighed 25 kilograms, in Madrid she weighed just 15 kilograms.82 Dr Janney of the Rockefeller Foundation reported to British diplomats that this study also revealed that ‘adults have only one-third to onequarter of the necessary amount of calories, and the children one-fifth’.83 This helps explain the onset of deficiency diseases they recorded in the form of skin lesions and aching muscles alongside two cases of edema.84

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The problems endured through the decade. This is shown by research carried out in 1948 in the working-class Madrid neighbourhood of Cuatro Caminos between May and July 1948 on eight-four families composed of 429 people.85 Doctors found that, on average, people consumed 1,100 calories a day. Families hardly ate potatoes, chickpeas or lentils (in normal times, cheap Spanish staples). Milk was rarely consumed and eggs hardly at all, while meat remained a rarity. Instead, people relied on bread, green beans and rice. They also enjoyed access to lettuce and carrots.86 Hunger like this could lead to parents in Madrid pleading for their children to be taken into long-term care. One woman from the humble Lavapiés district did just this in 1944 when she asked Madrid’s juvenile court to take in her second daughter and allow her to join her first daughter in a care home. The court investigated and took the girl into care after finding that ‘She is unemployed despite spending all day looking for work . . . she is so poverty stricken that most days she can’t feed her daughter and has to turn to her friends to provide her with the odd piece of bread’.87 The poor and politically repressed, however, were not simply victims. Instead, children of political prisoners could sometimes use their agency and make efforts to save themselves. A thirteen-year-old girl’s father was in prison, and one day her mother left her alone when she went to the villages surrounding Madrid to find food. Without anything to eat, the girl sold wool from a mattress in order to buy food. When the social workers visited the family they found they lived in a cave with just an old cloth to cover the entrance.88 In other cases, children made sacrifices to try and help relatives. This happened in one family from Embajadores Street in the poor Lavapiés district of the capital. The father had worked as a policeman for twenty-four years, but the Francoists imprisoned him for collaborating with the Republican government. In 1940, the twelveyear-old son left home with a sixteen-year-old friend because the family ‘didn’t have any means of support’. They hoped to find work somewhere outside Madrid and believed that if they left, the passes entitling them to eat at an Auxilio Social feeding station would transfer to their mothers and sisters. When an official investigated the case, it was found that the entire family was suffering from typhus.89 Sometimes relatives could save children, especially if they lived in areas less badly afflicted by the famine. One girl from Madrid whose mother and father were political prisoners was living in an overcrowded attic flat with relatives. The social worker who visited her noted that she was wearing nothing more than four miserable rags. She was saved by a charity that provided her a train ticket

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to Galicia (a largely agricultural region in northern Spain much less affected by the famine) where she managed to stay with her grandmother. The social worker commented that in Madrid she was being ‘eaten away because she did not have good food’ but after spending some time in Galicia she had begun to look much better.90 Mothers also tried to save their children by placing them in Francoist care homes. One mother had fallen into destitution after her husband went to jail for serving in the Republican army. None of her relatives could help support her because they had fallen into poverty, too. This left her to support two children: a young son and a baby daughter. On 19 November 1940, she declared to the authorities that she ‘had no resources at all’ and asked for the boy to be taken into a care home ‘where he can be fed and educated’. She kept the baby girl with her because she knew she could take her to an Auxilio Social feeding station.91

Conclusion Franco’s famine has often slipped from view behind notions of a well-fed rebel zone during the Civil War, the strong performance of Francoist welfare services, notions of the ‘hungry’ 1940s and the emphasis on food production rather than the effects of hunger and starvation. These interpretations obscure the shortages experienced in the conflict by those who suffered the Francoist repression and the failures or unwillingness of the Francoists to distribute food to those who needed it most. Above all, the interpretations neglect the reality of prison, execution and social marginalization, as well as the iniquitous effects of autarky and the black market in producing hunger, disease, death and family destruction. The physical repression, the black market and food shortages all forced some of the most marginal and powerless groups such as women and children into the deadly embrace of hunger and disease. These women and children had often become debilitated by the severe shortages in the government zone during the Civil War. Nevertheless, they struggled as best they could to survive, but in many cases their families split apart and children went into state care. In many instances, parents faced little choice but to hand over some or all of their children into the care of the authorities. In such ways, parents lost their right to bring up their children according to their own beliefs, and siblings became separated from one another.

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Notes 1 Archivo Histórico Provincial de Córdoba (AHPC), Audiencia Provincial de Córdoba (APC) – Fuente Obejuna, Caja 5504, Sumario 153. 2 On the shortcomings of economic self-sufficiency, see C. Barciela, M. I. López, J. Melgarejo and J. A. Miranda, La España de Franco (1939–1975). Economía (Madrid: Síntesis, 2001), 23–8; A. Carreras and X. Tafunell, Historia económica de la España contemporánea (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003). Hunger even features in book titles. An example is María Isabel Del Cura and Rafael Huertas, Alimentación y enfermedad en tiempos de hambre. España, 1937-1947 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cinetíficas, 2007). 3 For an example of this pro-Francoist view, see Ricardo de la Cierva, Historia del franquismo. Orígenes y configuración (1939–1945) (Barcelona: Planeta, 1975). 4 On policy failure, see Carlos Barciela (ed.), Autarquía y mercado negro. El fracaso económico del primer franquismo (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003). A fine study of Francoist welfare is Ángela Cenarro, La sonrisa de Falange: Auxilio Social en la Guerra Civil y en la posguerra (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006). On health services and calorific intake, see Del Cura and Huertas, Alimentación y enfermedad. 5 On Francoist successes, see Michael Seidman, The Victorious Counterrevolution: The Nationalist Effort in the Spanish Civil War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). 6 Seidman, The Victorious Counterrevolution. 7 Antonio Hernández García, La represión en La Rioja durante la Guerra Civil (Logroño: Almazán, 1984), 11–26. Other examples and studies include María Jesús Souto Blanco, La represión franquista en la provincia de Lugo (1936-1940) (Coruña: Edicios de Castro, 1998); Gregorio Herrero and Antonio Hernández, La represión en Soria durante la Guerra Civil Tomo I (Soria: Ingrabel, 1982); Julián Casanova, Ángela Cenarro, Julita Cifuentes, María Pilar Maluenda y María Pilar Salomón, El pasado oculto. Fascimo y violencia en Aragón (1936-1939) (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, 1992). 8 Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in TwentiethCentury Spain (London: Harper Press, 2012), 183. Altaffaylla Culture Taldea, Navarra 1936: de la esperanza al terror (Tafalla: Altaffaylla Culture Taldea, 1986). 9 Library of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain (LRSF), FSC/R/SP/2/ 4 ‘Mission to Nationalist Spain, June to October 1937’. 10 LRSF, FSC/R/SP/2/ 6, Smith to Picket 31/03/1938. 11 Archivo de la Administración de la Comunidad Foral, Junta de Protección de Menores de Navarra, (AACFJPMN) 215389, Exp. 271 de 1936. 12 Manuel Pato Manzano, Mater admirabilis. Vivencias de la Guerra Civil en Asturias (Barcelona: Viena, 2003), 161.

96 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33

Franco’s Famine AACFJPMN, 215389, Exp. 269 de 1936; similar case Exp. 528 de 1936. LRSF, FSC/R/SP/2/ 6, Smith to America Service Committee 29/11/1937. Pato Manzano, Mater admirabilis, 99. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 147. Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal, ‘La sociedad urbana y la irrupción de la modernidad en España, 1900-36’, Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 38, Núm Esp. (2016): 255–83, 260. Luis Diez, La batalla del Jarama (Madrid: Obreron, 2005), 13; José Manuel Martínez Bande, La lucha en torno a Madrid (Madrid: San Martín, 1990), 159–245; Gabriel Cardona, Historia militar de una guerra civil: estrategias y tácticas de la guerra de España (Madrid: Flor del Viento, 2006), 131–40; John F. Coverdale, ‘The Battle of Guadalajara’, Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 1 (1974): 53–75. Josep L. Barona and Enrique Perdiguero-Gil, ‘Health and the War: Changing Schemes and Health Conditions during the Spanish Civil War’, Dynamis 28 (2008): 103–26, 121–2; María Valls Gómez, ‘El abstecimiento en la retaguardia republicano. El caso de Granada, 1936-1939’, Revista del CEHGR 25 (2013): 217–36. Carmen Gutiérrez Rueda and Laura Gutiérrez Rueda, El hambre en el Madrid de la Guerra Civil 1936-1939 (Madrid: La Librería, 2014), 30. Ibid., 40–6. Ibid., 40–6, 65. Spain: The Work of the Society of Friends and Save the Children International Union (London: Friends’ Service Council, No Date, No Page Numbers). To My Neighbour (London: Friends’ Service Council, No Date). Jesús M. Culebras, ‘Trastornos neurológicos relacionados con la malnutrición en la Guerra Civil Española (1936-1939)’, Nutrición Hospitalaria 29, no. 4 (2014). Ainhoa Campos Posada, ‘Madrid ‘la ciudad espectro’. La utilización del hambre como arma de guerra y postguerra por el franquismo’, en Los ‘años del hambre’. Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista, ed. Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2019), 77–96. LRSFB, FSC/R/SP/2/ 3, ‘Memorandum regarding the Proposed Relief Work of the International Commission in Republican Spain’. The Times, 14/03/1939, ‘Food Dearth in Spain: Suffering Among Madrid Children’. Patria, 4/4/1939, ‘León envía víveres a Madrid’. Patria, 2/04/1939, ‘Auxilio Social prosigue su magnífica labor en nuestra provincia. En todos los pueblos liberados funcionan comedores’. Renacer, diciembre 1937, 17. María Dolores Serrano Tárraga, ‘La consideración del género en la ejecución de las penas privativas de libertad’, Estudios Penales y Criminológicas XXX (2010): 481–544, 499–504.

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34 Francisco Hernández Holgado, Mujeres encarceladas. La prisión de Ventas: de la República al franquismo, 1931-1941 (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003), 115, 60, 138. 35 Juana Doña, Desde la noche y la niebla. Mujeres en las cárceles franquistas (Madrid: Horas y Horas, [1978] 2012), 164. 36 Consuelo García, Las cárceles de Soledad Real. Una vida (Madrid: Alfeguara, 1982), 103. 37 Domingo Rodríguez Teijeiro, ‘Morir de hambre en las cárceles de Franco (19391945)’, Historia Contemporánea 51 (2015): 641–66, 648. 38 María González and Gorosarri-Eduardo Barinaga, No lloréis, lo que tenéis que hacer es no olvidarnos. La cárcel de Saturrarán y la represión franquista contra las mujeres, a partir de testimonios de supervivientes (Donosta: Titarttalo, 2010), 148. 39 Iván Heredia Urzázi, ‘Terror, miseria y violencia. Mujeres en la Cárcel de Torreo (Zaragoza, 1936-1939)’, in Cárceles de mujeres. La prisión femenina en la posguerra, ed. Ángeles Egido León (Madrid: Sanz y Torres, 2017), 149–83, 169. 40 Rodríguez Teijeiro, ‘Morir de hambre’, 649–52. 41 Tomasa Cuevas, Presas. Mujeres en las cárceles franquistas (Barcelona: Icaria Editorial, 2005[Kindle Edition]), 581–90. 42 Mercedes Núñez, Cárcel de Ventas (Paris: Ebro, 1967), 37. 43 Cited in Urzázi, ‘Terror, miseria y violencia’, 149–83, 162. 44 Hernández Holgado, Mujeres encarceladas, 151. See also Giuliana di Febo, Resistencia y movimiento de mujeres en Españ 1936-1976 (Sin Lugar de Publicación: Icaria, 1979), 35. 45 Hernández Holgado, Mujeres encarceladas, 160–1. 46 Doña, Desde la noche, 164. 47 Tomasa Cuevas, Mujeres de la resistencia (Barcelona: Sirocco, 1986), 184. 48 Ibid., 65. On the prison, see Urzázi, ‘Terror, miseria y violencia’, 149–83. 49 Cuevas, Mujeres de la resistencia, 185. 50 González and Barnaga, No lloréis, 145. 51 Rodríguez Teijeiro, ‘Morir de hambre’, 641–66, 648. 52 Núñez, Cárcel de Ventas, 18. Similar case in di Febo, Resistencia, 37. 53 LRSF, FSC/R/SP/2/ 2, Alfred Jacob to FSC 10 February 1939. 54 LRSF, FSC/R/SP/2/ 4, ‘Report of Mission of the Director to Spain (April 13-May 5, 1939)’, 4. 55 LRSF, FSC/R/SP/3/1, Easterling to Thomson, 18/05/1939 (Murcia to London). For food shortages in Barcelona just after its occupation, see Friends Service Council, Minutes of Spain Committee, FSC/R/SP/M1 3-9-36 to 11-7-40 Minute 9 February 1939. 56 LRSF, FSC/R/SP/2/ 2, ‘Report on Visit to Vich, Manlleu, Tobello, Bibas, Ripolli, Campdevanci (25th October 1939)’ by Alfred Jacob to Friends Service Council. 57 Carme Molinero y Pere Ysàs, ‘El malestar popular por las condiciones de vida. ¿Un problema político para red régimen franquista?’, Ayer 52 (2003): 255–380, 257.

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58 Ibid., 258. 59 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘Morir de hambre. Autarquía, escasez, enfermedad en la España del primer franquismo’, Pasado y Memoria. Revista de Historia Contemporánea 5 (2006): 241–58, 245. 60 Francisco Alía Miranda, ‘La España que vio el embajador Pétain: hambre y descontento social en 1939’, Historia Social 82 (2015): 73–91, 83. 61 ‘Notes of Food Situation in Spain made in October 1940 by Dr. J. H. Janney Rockefeller Foundation-Lisbon’, Rockefeller Foundation, 1.1 700, Box 11, Folder 66, folio 6. 62 Ibid., folio 8. 63 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, Hambre de Siglos. Mundo rural y apoyos sociales del franquismo en Andalucía Oriental (1936-1951) (Granada: Comares, 2007), 308. 64 Carlos Barciela, Recuerdos del Madrid de la posguerra (Alicante: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante, 2013), 180–2. 65 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘La corrupción en el franquismo. El fenómeno del ‘gran estraperlo’, Hispania Nova. Revista de Historia Contemporánea 16 (2018): 620–45, 634–6. 66 Barciela, Recuerdos, 80–1. 67 Miguel Gómez Oliver y Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘El estraperlo: forma de resistencia y arma de represión en el primer franquismo’, Estudios de Historia Contemporánea 23 (2005): 179–99, 186. 68 AHPC, Series Asuntos Sociales. Caja Una. Junta Para la Protección de Menores, Expediente 188, 30 November 1943. 69 ‘Proposal for a Nutrition Study in Spain’, 2. RFA, 1.1, 700 Box 11, Folder 66, Letter 77, Janney to Warren, Enclosure. 70 Janney, ‘Notes of Food Situation’, 7–8. 71 Ibid., 3–6. 72 Del Arco Blanco, Hambre de siglos, 312. 73 The National Archives (TNA): PRO, FO, 371/ 26890, C 2182, Folio 72, Hoare to London, 8/02/1941. 74 Archivo General del Estado (AGA), Presidencia 51/20548, Folio 34, Parte Mensual de Enero de 1941. 75 AGA, Presidencia 51/20548, Folios 47, 48, 54. 76 David Ginard i Ferón, ‘Las condiciones de vida durante el primer franquismo. El caso de las Islas Baleares’, Hispania, LXII, no. 3 (2002): 1099–128, 1124. 77 Ibid., 1124. 78 Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (ANC), Fons 334, JPMB, Ingreso 556, 02.00 Expedientes internos, M.T. 79 An example in ANC, Fons 334, JPMB, Ingreso 556, 02.00 Expedientes Internos 2849, JFR.

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80 ANC, Fons JPMB, Inventari 334, Núm 113, Exp. 404 de 1945. Similar case in ANC, Fons 334, JPMB, Ingreso 5566, 02.00 Expedientes de Internos, 3057, AGS. 81 William D. Robinson, John H. Janney and Francisco Grande (Covián), ‘An Evaluation of the Nutritional Status of a Population Group in Madrid, Spain, During the Summer of 1941’, The Journal of Nutrition 24, no. 6 (1942): 557–84, 565. 82 William D. Robinson, John H. Janney and Francisco Grande, ‘Studies of the Physical Characteristics of Selected Children in Madrid, Spain, in 1941’, The Journal of Pediatrics 20, no. 12 (1942): 723–39. 83 TNA, PRO, FO. 371/26891, C9527/3/41, Hoare to London, 194/08/1941, folio 48. 84 Robinson, Janney and Grande, ‘An Evaluation’, 563–72. 85 F. Vivanco, J. L. Rodríguez Miñón, A. Merchante, J. Palacios, J. Peraines and J. M. Segovia, ‘Observaciones sobre el estado nutritivo y situación alimentaria de la población madrileña. I. Comunicación. Técnicas empleadas en estos estudios’, Revista Clínica Española 33, no. 3 (1949): 166–72, 169. 86 F. Grande Vivanco, J. M. Palacios, J. L. Rodríguez Miñón, J. M. Segovia, J. Perianes and A. Merchante, ‘Observaciones sobre el estado nutritivo y situación alimentaria de la población madrileña. II. Comunicación. Resultados obtenidos del análisis de las dietas y de su comparación con las cantidades consideradas como aporte adecuado’, Revista Clínica Española 33, no. 4 (1949): 245–57, 250–3. 87 AGA (7) 14.2 51 15004 Exp. 1508 de 1939. 88 AGA (7) 14.2 51 14998 Exp. 1075 de 1939. 89 AGA (7) 14.2 51 14981 Exp. 51 de 1937. 90 AGA (7) 14.2 51 15007 Exp. 47 de 1940. 91 AGA (7) 14.2 51 15012 Exp. 314 de 1940.

5

When there was nothing. An ethnography of the years of hunger in post-war Extremadura Memory and representation of scarcity David Conde Caballero, Lorenzo Mariano Juárez and Julián López García

On 1 April 1939, the Spanish Civil War ended: the date marks a poignant moment, most of all for those from the defeated side. Hundreds of thousands of families became immersed in a climate of mistrust, suspicion and confrontation. To this would be added hunger and starvation – suffering which grew from the policies that came with Franco’s victory. The economic strategy of the new regime developed ad hoc and focused almost exclusively on the personal decisions of Franco, who, lacking any formal training, repeatedly dismissed the reports of his advisers, selecting only those which met with his objective of creating a new autarkic economic order.1 The choice he made proved unsuitable for a country with a poor internal market and an inefficient taxation system, and plagued by fraud. The country also lacked its own fuel resources while also suffering from relatively low levels of literacy as well as relatively poor scientific and technological development.2 The regime made all of this far worse by fixing the price of basic foodstuffs, which encouraged hoarding and fuelled the black market. The result was an unprecedented shortage of raw materials, and inflation.3 Consequently, the Spanish national income fell by 23 per cent compared to pre-war levels. This represented the country’s worst macroeconomic data for the entire twentieth century, and Spain became one of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries on the European continent.4 Ration cards symbolized the shortages and poverty.5 They came about through a decree issued on 28 June 1939, and were made up of a series of coupons referred to colloquially as ‘stamps’. Through them, the regime aspired to mitigate the shortages by guaranteeing, in its own words, basic consumer goods

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to the population. What was presented as a solution soon made matters worse. The regime itself knew this only too well and its own political movement, FETJONS, noted: ‘It is completely impossible to live with the amounts they give in rationing.’6 Over time, ration cards grew into powerful symbols of a Spain besieged by food shortages and hunger, which were in some cases as bad as in other European countries during and after the Second World War. Certainly, in terms of calorie consumption, the Spanish post-war hunger was in many cases comparable to that which was so dramatically suffered by the people interned in the German concentration camps, or those who were victims of the Great Dutch Famine of 1944 or the Greek Famine of 1941–4.7 In the case of Extremadura, the agrarian region in the southwest of Spain discussed in this chapter, an already poor region sank into even greater poverty and misery.8 The roots of this tragedy lay not in the damage caused by the Civil War but in the policies pursued by the Franco regime.9 It is also a relatively underexamined region and so offers a strong case study of the results of regime policies. This is why the chapter draws on more than four years of ethnographic fieldwork, which involved fifty-nine interviews.10 These interviews produced a wealth of detail on the experience of hunger, the meaning people gave to their experience and how the ‘facts’ about hunger were constructed socially as well as how they are remembered today. Accordingly, this chapter does not look at issues such as the number of calories consumed in Spain. Instead, it looks at the meaning of hunger: an issue neglected by anthropologists of Spain, despite the famine representing the greatest social disaster of the twentieth century.

Extremadura: A land of the rich, the poor and day labourers In order to understand the complex relationships in the post-war period between food and society, as well as between hunger and culture, we need to understand the Extremaduran society of the time. The region formed one of the poorest areas of southern Spain.11 Its deep social problems were obvious to the authorities. Between 17 December and 19 December 1940, Franco visited several places around the province of Badajoz, accompanied by the ministers of Agriculture, Public Works and Labour. They declared that the province of Badajoz had ‘the deepest social problem of all Spanish provinces’.12 The area’s stark social divisions stand out in the memories of our informants: as one put it, ‘the rich were very rich, and they did not mix with the rest, they did

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not even speak to the poor’.13 These social tensions dated back years. In 1932, agricultural workers attempted to redistribute land.14 The landowners responded by calling in the military to enforce the status quo ante.15 Franco’s victory reinforced this social order and maintained the high levels of landownership in the hands of just a few people.16 Landowners also drew support from farm managers, civil servants and members of the Catholic Church. At the bottom of the social hierarchy lay the ‘forgotten’. The ranks of this forlorn group were made up of the politically persecuted who frequently proved unable to produce the ‘certificate of good conduct’ needed to find work. Alongside them stood the widows and orphans of the Civil War who, according to the victors, had fought for the ‘wrong’ side.17 They shared their poverty with day labourers: workers on extremely insecure contracts and with very low incomes.18 In postwar Extremadura, most of them were ploughmen who were only provided with ‘two miserable donkeys and a primitive plough’. According to the definition given by the Institute of Agrarian Reform (1936), the unfortunate members of this group lacked sufficient land to make a living.19 Beside them were temporary braceros (unskilled labourers), without any assets,20 who most of the time were only hired for limited activities and, often, with salaries much lower than those of other workers.21 In addition, among the lower echelons of the Extremaduran peasant hierarchy, we find a variety of specialists: gañanes de sementera (farmhands), wheat harvesters, holm-oak cutters, ‘vareadores de encinas’ (holm-oak shakers), temporary swineherds, acorn pickers, sheep shearers and shepherds.22 In short, day labourers formed an extraordinarily complex group, something well reflected in the differing pay rates – although these were always inadequate.23 In addition, these groups endured the anxiety produced by the seasonal nature of the work and the fact that contracts could be fixed by the season or even by the day. Every morning, day labourers went early to public squares with the hope of being chosen for work by the foremen. Only the luckiest managed to secure work for just 120 days per year.24 Much of the hunger and starvation in post-war Extremadura stemmed from the poverty bred by underemployment. This is certainly the case in the testimonies we recorded about hunger. Antonia, an interviewee from the south of Badajoz province, whose father was a day labourer, well remembers just how harsh life was: There were many day labourers in these lands and the work was very poorly distributed. About eight to ten families gained good work . . . the others went hungry because they paid such low wages . . . they were paid, they paid a

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pittance. Then the problem was that there was no money, that was the problem . . . because most of the time was spent without work, as there was no work, nor was there anything to do [. . .]. My dad worked in the field in what he was able to find . . . . Because they did not work every day . . . there were menial jobs and they were given some wages but only from time to time. And when there was no work then they lived on borrowed money . . . usually asking around to see who could lend them something [ . . . ]. And that’s the reason why our life has been so bad. Well, look, it was so bad because we were living on crumbs and air, we didn’t have anything, and my dad had six children and men earned very little, so it was difficult. Then the years of hunger came . . . . You can have no idea about the severe hunger we went through, without bread and without anything, just whatever people were able to give us because my dad earned so little, he earned very little money.25

Behind the classic dichotomy of the rich and the poor, the landowner and the day labourer, however, lurk a wide range of intermediary groups. They hailed mainly from among those who enjoyed permanent contracts and included caretakers, foremen, overseers or herdsmen. It was also possible to find those who enjoyed some financial security from activities such as cultivating their own small vegetable gardens to produce onions, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce or legumes. Growing these vegetables not only helped them to improve their diet but also provided them with currency in the common barter system.26 This privilege comes across in the testimony of José Luis, who lived in the town of Cáceres: There were those that had orchards, had a little field, had many animals, had pigs, had chickens, . . . and they of course, were much better off than us because we did not have those things [. . .] in the villages they had many more animals and even vegetable gardens, of course, they had tomatoes, peppers and they grew all that and they could make a salad and we could not do that. And besides, they could even go on wheeling and dealing with it . . . .27

We can also place many of the inhabitants of the big cities of Extremadura and towns with populations above 10,000 within this category of the intermediary group.28 In Extremadura, large cities and towns were made up of professionals from various trades, craftsmen, low-ranking officials, modest merchants and small entrepreneurs. They enjoyed greater access to food that came from rationing, soup kitchens and even the ‘black market’ or bartering than did the rural poor.

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For some, ‘there was almost nothing’ Not all groups suffered from shortages in the same way; nor could all wield the same survival strategies. For the most favoured classes, the post-war years tend to be remembered simply as ‘uncomfortable’. These groups, of course, could draw on greater resources to buy what they needed on the black market. Aida, the daughter of a civil servant with his own land and who lived in the town of Badajoz, remembers her relative privilege: There were many things available on the black market. Bread, for example, we could buy on the black market, it was a delicious white bread, and it did not seem any different to the bread we had enjoyed before. In addition, we could get almost everything this way, as long as we had the money. Perhaps those who went hungry were those who did not have the means to obtain goods on the black market, but in my house those were happy times, it was uncomfortable at times, but little more . . . if we did not eat one thing we ate the other, I did not go hungry at any time. Did I not tell you that we have a farm? Moreover, with the cash obtained we were eating without further problems. There were no more problems in going to buy the ones that we needed.29

The experience of the poorest, however, proved radically different and the impoverished remember the acute food shortages: ‘Food was scarce, you could not find anything. There was almost nothing.’30 This phrase, repeated again and again by our informants, refers to the disappearance of the normal foodstuffs that people relied upon prior to the war, to the point that they had nothing to eat. Paco, the son of peasants who lived in the south of Badajoz province, probably the worst-affected area, retains disturbing memories of this situation: There was such hunger in those days that when it rained, in the autumn, peasants would take out the grain they had collected in the summer . . . people from my village, those of us who were the poorest, went to collect this grain to be able to mill it and to have something to eat. I have seen and lived this situation.31

Equally dramatic is the testimony of Florentina, whose parents lived in a big city but experienced hardships like some of the poorest groups in rural areas: Young children needed to eat, and there was nothing better than new-born puppies, ‘dogs’, to feed them. Their meat was very tender, it was a belly-filling meal for them, and they did not even know what they were eating them. In fact, when they ate them, it was just to save the day as their grandmothers and mothers were struggling to have something for them to eat.32

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In the face of this situation, the poorest adopted a variety of strategies.33 Some employed what a number of authors have described as ‘weapons of the weak’,34 and ethnographers have formulated as the use of ‘cultural resources at critical moments’.35 We can see that, in times of convulsion, hatred, impositions and divisions, these resources acted as true social stabilizers. The strategies adopted included tactics to acquire food, but beyond this, people endeavoured to cope by ascribing cultural meanings to food in what Goody has termed as ‘kitchen of hunger’.36 These tactics are best understood through the lens of anthropology because it allows us to appreciate the social significance people gave to the food they ate. In this regard, it is important to note that the testimony we have collected brings out not only the suffering produced by the famine in Extremadura but also the great efforts people made to maintain the social value and meaning of food. Carmen, the daughter of day labourers, remembers this in the case of bread, whose cultural importance was so great that people went to enormous lengths to try and produce it in whatever way they could: Acorn bread, well acorns were ground into small pieces and then using one of those huge 5 kg tins of old-style sardines, the acorn ‘meat’ was placed inside, and it would go directly to the heat until it was cooked and, it was then, later, eaten from there. We made a small loaf of bread every day, but it was hard, with a very hard crust.37

By turning to anthropology we can gain a greater understanding of such acts. In a classic work with the Siriono people (Bolivia), Allan Holmberg concluded that hunger is indissoluble from ‘thinning or cultural loss’.38 In addition, Caparrós39 states that the more we are satiated, the more we can become human; by the same token we become more bestial as hunger grows. Rossi40 also argues that in the presence of extreme hunger, customs are pushed aside and the hungry rush to devour food, devastating social norms in the process. This can lead to the breaking of social bonds, such as parents denying food to their children, saving the best part of the rations for themselves, or hiding the bread to eat it later in solitude. It can also mean that people change their ideas of what is edible even to the point of endangering their health. We can see this process at work in postwar Extremadura and, above all, among the poorest day labourers and those impoverished by the Francoist repression. The testimonies of Ángel, Cornelio and Juana, all from areas with high numbers of day labourers, show how people came to violate traditional cultural norms. Ángel, who endured great hardship in Cáceres province, stated: ‘When there was no bread we would fight, like beasts fighting for food devoid of humanity.’41

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Cornelio testified: Hunger, so hungry, hungry . . . . I call it the hungry year [1941] because I remember very well, as if it had been this morning. I remember perfectly, for example, when our female pig died after eating poison that my parents had acquired to deal with a swarm of locusts and had left it in a sack; and the pig came chewed it, swallowed it and died. And I remember perfectly that they buried the pig near my house, because in my house we did not eat what was poisoned. However, there were people from here in the town who found out and were asking to find out where the pig was buried. And . . . they took her away. And they ate it . . . and it was poisoned . . . but they were very hungry and anything was good . . . .Even the pigs that were buried that had trichina . . . and a man goes to unearth it to eat it. And he did not care if the animal was sick, he gave it to his children. If they did not have something else . . . what was that poor man going to do.42

For her part Juana noted: There were those who didn’t have any food . . . some who ate nothing more than grass, the poorest people perhaps ate nothing more than dandelions and beans . . . which led to swelling in the legs . . . and in the arms, they suffered terribly because they probably did not have oil to cook with . . . and there were people who swelled with hunger . . . such hunger . . . people swelled up. We suffered all possible misery . . . think about this – the rich could dump dead animals in piles of manure and people would go running there to collect them, sprinkled the corpses with salt so they would not taste rotten and they ate them.43

The violation of cultural norms did not always happen, of course, and there were limits some people would not cross. Birds of prey like vultures, for example, were rarely consumed. That said, a number of the participants do remember how some people became ‘real beasts’. Crescencia, the daughter of a Republican soldier killed in the war, tells of the misery experienced by families left alone and reduced to such poverty that they were forced to rely on herbs growing wild in the countryside: Like beasts, of course, of course. We ate what we could as if we were real beasts. Other wild herbs grew a lot when it rained because in those years there were all those vineyards full of herbs. Those herbs, the regajo (Montia Fontana), the aderones (Rumex Induratus) were eaten by many people. The regajos in ensalá (salad) . . . because that grew a lot in the fields. You went there with a pair of scissors, you cut it more like that, and if you were very hungry, you ate them just like that . . . . And the common sorrel ‘aderones’. That herb grows in the sembrao (sown field). But that was called the bird’s tongue. Because they are very fine.

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Then there are those who called them ‘Moorish Aderones’, which are larger. They are a little leaf like that, a bigger leaf. And we also ate many of those . . . . And they used the carob trees, food that was for the animals, which opened them to remove the seeds that were put to soak replacing lentils. As if we were beasts. That’s for the cattle, but they were eaten by people because of the hunger that we passed.44

Memory and representations of a ‘hunger always of others’ The literature on narrative, memory, experience and facts has grown exponentially over the last few decades.45 In contrast to scholars who search for historical ‘truth’, researchers interested in memory see it as an essential instrument to help us understand who we are: social beings built from a particular blend of facts, fictions and invented memories. For these scholars memory allows us to talk about the past, but from the perspective of the present. It also allows us to communicate who we were in the past, but through who we are now, or what we want to be in the future. Accordingly, memory is always an act of creation with which we build both individual and collective identity. Working with this memory, in this case of hunger, from a phenomenological approach (the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience), has allowed us to delve into an interesting debate and to see how a puzzling fact emerges from many of our interviews. We came across many stories in which the narrator insists that the hunger we have been describing happened to others, the neighbours, rather than themselves. Accordingly, we face a post-war hunger denied in the immediacy of personal experience. Despite the many stories we have recounted outlining the depth of hunger, a number of the participants remembered feeling neither satiated nor hungry in the post-war years: instead, they present themselves in a liminal state. Mari Carmen stated this directly: ‘One can say that this is a double-edged sword, neither hunger nor satiated.’ Narratives like these typically begin in an archetypal way: ‘We did not go hungry . . . but there were many people who really suffered.’ Others stressed that they suffered hunger only before they managed to find a way of overcoming their temporary difficulties. These reconstructions made from the perspective of the present acknowledge the real existence of hunger but deny its serious effects on the narrators. Such narrators frequently present a story of personal success and social advancement wrenched from hardship. In this way, stories of personal success are used to pass the stigma of hunger to others.

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Other chapters of this volume highlight the dimensions of hunger, demonstrating that deaths by starvation were common in southern regions like Extremadura. Anthropometric studies used to show the conditions of life in the post-war period demonstrate the great nutritional deficiencies in the Extremadura of the time.46 How, then, can we explain this situation in which stories of hunger exist alongside narratives of denial? In order to understand this clear contradiction, it is essential to take into account the importance of the symbolic analysis of scarcity and the capacity to ‘reconstruct’ the facts – something that, in our opinion, is usually not taken into account in the existing historiography. Moreover, in much of the existing literature, bread is used as a symbol of the presence or absence of hunger, but the strategies behind the use of this symbol to explain liminal positions between feeling satiated and hungry have gone unanalysed. Nevertheless, as anthropologists know, some foods have the ability to cut through narratives of denial.47 They become authentic systems resonant with cultural meanings.48 Food that is particularly nutritious in caloric terms often becomes redolent with cultural meanings, clad in a certain halo of semi-divinity.49 Inevitably, the lack of these culturally significant foods leads to the representation of hunger. This is precisely what has happened in the construction of the ‘Memory of Hunger’ in Extremadura. Bread particularly matters because regardless of the presence of other foods, its absence forces the reality of hunger out into the open. As one participant noted: ‘If you don’t eat white bread, it’s like you don’t eat. You could eat meat or whatever you want, if you did not have good bread you were still hungry the same. You do not know the hunger that we spent without bread. Without bread what there was hunger, hunger for the real.’50 By turning to this absence of bread, participants were able to bridge the gap between ‘hunger’ and ‘shortage’ by invoking the impossibility of obtaining bread. It was when talking about the difficulties in obtaining bread that our participants became anxious and sad, and the bitter memory of hunger became part of their narrative. This is not to say that those participants who spoke only of ‘shortage’ did not experience terrible hunger but, rather, that the memory of bread allows us access to the years of hunger which in the present-day are enveloped in silence or stigma. Carmen’s words gives us a strong insight into this situation: ‘How much, let me tell you, we missed bread. It was what we missed most . . . when we couldn’t have it we could do nothing but be hungry.’51 To conclude, we cannot understand the reality of hunger only through work on calorific intake or the effects on human height. Food, after all, holds a rich variety of cultural meanings and white bread in Spain holds particular

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importance. This means that the absence of bread both brought a shortfall in caloric intake and made it difficult for people to fashion narratives that allowed them to escape the stigma of hunger. This phenomenon continues to shape the way people today remember the hunger in the face of contemporary silence on the topic. The benefits of the phenomenological approach in the treatment of the memory of hunger and the inclusion in the interpretation of its presence and effects under the prism of culture are enormous, as outlined in this text. When our informants tell us that they escaped hunger or that they suffered less than their neighbours did, they are not obscuring the presence or the deleterious effects of hunger. On the contrary, although it seems paradoxical, they are giving social transcendence to ‘that fierce worm that gnaws minds and not only bodies’, which is the metaphor we have used in other contexts to refer to hunger.

Notes 1 Matilde Eiroa, Viva Franco. Hambre, racionamiento, falangismo (Málaga: Junta de Andalucia, 1995). 2 There is a generalized agreement among specialists in the history of the economy who have shown that it was in autarky, and not so much in the consequences of the conflict, that we find the origin of the social and economic situation that was lived in Spain in the immediate post-war period. Among them we can mention authors such as Carlos Barciela et al., La España de Franco (1939-1975). Economía (España: Editorial Síntesis, 2001); Enrique Moradiellos, La España de Franco, 1939-1975: política y sociedad, vol. 33 (Madrid: Editorial Síntesis, 2000). 3 Such became the issue that the illegal trafficking of wheat, to take just one example, reached over 50 per cent of the commercialized crop, reaching, according to Carlos Barciela, ‘El “estraperlo” de trigo en la posguerra’, Moneda y Crédito: Revista de economía 154 (1981): 17. In the period between 1944 and 1945 alone, more than 13 million metric quintals of wheat circulated illegally on Spanish territory according to Miguel Ángel Almodóvar, El hambre en España: una historia de la alimentación (Madrid: Grupo Anaya comercial, 2003). 4 Eiroa, Viva Franco. Hambre, racionamiento, falangismo; Moradiellos, La España de Franco, 1939-1975. 5 On 14 May 1939, the rationing system for basic necessities was established throughout the country by the General Commissariat of Supply and Transportation (CGAT), an organism that was created by Law of 10 March 1939 and Decree of

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8

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Franco’s Famine April 28 of the same year. It was responsible for regulating, controlling the supply and rationing of essential items throughout the country. Carmen Molinero and Pere Ysàs, ‘El malestar popular por las condiciones de vida ¿Un problema político para el régimen franquista?’, Ayer 52 (2003): 255–80. Rafael Abellá, Crónica de La Posguerra, 1939-1955 (Barcelona: Planeta, 2008); Ingrid de Zwarte, The Hunger Winter: Fighting Famine in the Occupied Netherlands, 1944-45 (Amsterdam: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Hachette, 2015). Extremadura is a Spanish autonomous community that is located in the southwest of the country, which borders Portugal, and is composed of the provinces of Cáceres and Badajoz. This is historically a region with poor access to communication, sparsely populated and impoverished, which in the post-war years was characterized by a fragile economic situation whose origin, according to Juan García-Pérez, ‘Realidades demográficas y cambios económicos en Extremadura durante el Primer Franquismo (1936-1939). Una aproximación’, in Extremadura durante el Primer Franquismo (1939-1959). Actas del IV Encuentro Historiográfico del Grupo de Estudios sobre la Historia Contemporánea de Extremadura (Badajoz, 2010), can be traced back to the high volume of income and wealth controlled by the aristocracy and the regional upper bourgeoisie. In addition to this, it was necessary to unite a very limited development of the industrial activities and another one, almost residual, of the miners that, next to the economic policies of Franco already mentioned, motivated a situation of such poverty that it ended up generating really dramatic shortages of scarcity. The standard of living with respect to the rest of Spain went from 69.5 per cent in 1935 to 66.3 per cent of the Spanish average in 1940 according to Antonio M. Linares and Francisco L. Parejo, ‘Estatura y esperanza de vida: Una propuesta de revisión de las series antropométricas españolas a partir de una medida alternativa de sobrevivencia’, Documentos de trabajo de la Asociación Española de Historia Económica 15 (2015): 26. A fieldwork based primarily on oral sources. To this end, a total of fifty-nine people who lived through the post-war times were interviewed in the first person, of which forty were women and nineteen were men; thirty-seven lived in the province of Cáceres in the post-war period and twenty-two of them lived in the province of Badajoz. However, we have also tried to cater to the recommendations that authors such as Paul Thompson, La voz del pasado (Valencia: Edicions Alfons El Magnànim-Institució Valenciana D’Estudis i Investigació, 1988) or Ronald Fraser, ‘La formación de un entrevistador’, Historia y fuente oral 3 (1990): 129–50 have made about combining oral testimonies with other type of file research and/or consultation of local newspapers.

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11 José Antonio Pérez-Rubio, Yunteros, braceros y colonos, la política agraria en Extremadura (1940-1975) (Madrid: Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación, 1995). 12 Juan García-Pérez, ‘La economía extremeña durante la noche larga del franquismo autárquico. Caracteres generales y evolución del sector agrario’, in Una sociedad silenciada y una actividad económica estancada: el mundo rural bajo el primer franquismo (Cáceres: Ediciones del Ambroz, 2015), 134. 13 Testimony of Maruja (Los Santos de Maimona, Badajoz. 13 October 2017). 14 Sergio Riesco Roche, La lucha por la tierra reformismo agrario y cuestión yuntera en la provincia de Cáceres (1907-1940) (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2006); Pérez-Rubio, Yunteros, braceros. 15 Cazorla, Miedo y progreso: Los Españoles de a pie bajo el franquismo, 1939-1975. 16 José Antonio Pérez-Rubio, ‘Los yunteros, un segmento social desaparecido en Extremadura. Los desahucios de las dehesas (1940-1960)’, Agricultura y Sociedad, no. 70 (1994): 197–232. 17 The consideration of ‘red’, ‘widow of red’ or ‘orphan of red’ became a true social stigma. At that time the jobs were considered as a real ‘war booty’, so this greatly complicated the lives of those who ‘happened to be under suspicion’, according to Del Cura and Huertas, Alimentación y enfermedad en tiempos de hambre: España, 1937-1947,71. They found themselves in a situation that some authors have defined as ‘civil death’, according to Isaaías Lafuente, Tiempos de hambre. Viaje a la España de posguerra (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1999), 83. 18 Many were attracted by a knock-on effect to work in the field as a possible solution to their economic problems. However, many of them ended up as cheap, low-skilled labour, and at the expense of strong demands by an employer that imposed the acceptance of working hours without limitation of hours, lack of Sunday rest or the provision of night work, according to Pérez-Rubio, Yunteros, braceros, 294. 19 Ibid., 114–15. 20 Ibid., 193. 21 Pérez-Rubio, Yunteros, braceros, 276. 22 Eusebio Medina-García, ‘Historia de la frontera: La pastora’, Arenal. Revista de Historia de las Mujeres 17, no. 2 (julio-diciembre 2010): 423–32. 23 Pérez-Rubio, ‘Los Yunteros, un segmento social desaparecido en Extremadura. Los desahucios de las dehesas (1940-1960)’, indicates how, in the late 1940s, the mean salary received in Extremadura was only enough to cover 68 per cent of daily expenses, while food expenses accounted for approximately 88 per cent of the total (Ibid., 308). To get an idea of salaries, the same author speaks, for some farms in Cáceres, in 1943, of the following figures: ‘Reapers, 5.48 pesetas per day of work; sow farmers, 2.43 pesetas; reapers of barley, 4.85 pesetas per day’ (Ibid., 281–2).

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24 García-Pérez, ‘La economía extremeña durante al “noche larga” del franquismo autárquico. Caracteres generales y evolución del sector agrario’. 25 Testimony of Antonia (Campanario, Badajoz. 05 July 2016). 26 Fernando Flores del Manzano, ‘Formas de vida tradicionales en Extremadura en el tránsito del siglo XIX al XX’, Revista de estudios extremeños 54, no. 3 (1998): 1031–62. 27 Testimony of José Luis (Cáceres, Cáceres. 23 November 2015). 28 Traditionally known as ‘agro-cities’. 29 Testimony of Aida (Badajoz, Badajoz. 14 August 2015). 30 Testimony of José Luis (Cáceres, Cáceres. 23 November 2015). 31 Testimony of Paco (Fuente del Maestre, Badajoz. 04 September 2017). 32 Testimony of Florentina (Badajoz, Badajoz. 13 June 2015). 33 In this sense, it is impossible not to mention the volume of Barranquero y Prieto, Así sobrevivimos al hambre: estrategias de supervivencia de las mujeres en la posguerra española, where the authors work with the same thesis proposed here of a multiplication of cultural and social strategies in the area of the province of Malaga. On an international level, it emphasizes with this same argument the increase of strategies in the presence of hunger in the environment of the Viennese experience after the Second World War that can be found in the classic text by Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann, ‘El hambre en la memoria colectiva de la población vienesa’, Historia, Antropología y fuentes orales 38 (1999): 113–30. 34 Óscar J. Rodríguez-Barreira, ‘Auxilio Social y las actitudes cotidianas en los Años de Hambre, 1937-1943’, Historia del presente 17 (2011): 127–47. Óscar RodríguezBarreira, ‘Lazarillos del Caudillo. El hurto como arma de los débiles frente a la autarquía franquista’, Historia Social 72 (2012): 65–87. Óscar Rodríguez-Barreira, ‘Miseria, consentimientos y disconformidades. Actitudes y prácticas de jóvenes y menores durante l a postguerra’, in Óscar Rodríguez-Barreira, El franquismo desde los márgenes. Campesinos, mujeres, delatores, menores… (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 2013), 165–86. 35 Michael Carrithers, Culture, Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life, vol. 2 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). 36 Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 37 Testimony of Carmen (Herrara del Duque, Badajoz. 04 March 2015). 38 Allan R. Holmberg, Nomads of the Long Bow: The Siriono of Eastern Bolivia, vol. 20 (American Museum of Natural History, 1950), 81. 39 Martín Caparrós, El Hambre (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2014). 40 Paolo Rossi, Comer (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013), 35. 41 Testimony of Ángel (Alcuéscar, Cáceres. 13 December 2015). 42 Testimony of Cornelio (Orellana la Vieja, Badajoz. 22 July 2015). With regard to the testimony shown here, the consumption of food in poor condition became a

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problem of public health at the time in Extremadura. Given the importance of pork in rural society in Extremadura and the lack of control, the situation became such that its hidden consumption became a danger given the recurrence of diseases such as trichinosis. Testimony of Juana (Deleitosa, Cáceres. 3 October 2015). Testimony of Crescencia (Montehermoso, Cáceres. 5 October 2016). Bandhauer-Schöffmann, ‘El hambre en la memoria colectiva de la población vienesa’; Elena Espeitx and Juanjo Cáceres Nevot, ‘La memoria de la escasez alimentaria en la Barcelona de la posguerra (1939-1953)’, STVDIVM. Revista de Humanidades 16 (2010): 163–87.; Alicia Guidonet, ‘Memoria oral y alimentación: estrategias de supervivencia durante la Guerra Civil Españolas (1936-1939) y la posguerra (1939-1955)’, Arxius de ciències socials 24 (2011): 47–58. Francisco M. Parejo-Moruno and Antonio M. Linares Lusán, ‘Guerra y posguerra en Extremadura: el impacto de la crisis alimentaria sobre el nivel de vida de la población rural’, XIV Congreso Internacional de Historia Agraia. Available at https​ :/​/ww​​w​.res​​earch​​gate.​​net​/p​​rofil​​e​/Fra​​ncisc​​o​-Par​​ejo​-M​​oruno​​/publ​​icati​​on​/29​​60602​​24​ _Gu​​erra_​​y​_pos​​guerr​​a​_en_​​Extre​​madur​​a​_el_​​impac​​to​_de​​_la​_c​​risis​​_alim​​entar​​ia​_so​​ bre​_e​​l​_niv​​el​_de​​_vida​​_de​_l​​a​_pob​​lacio​​n​_rur​​al​/li​​nks​/5​​6d1f9​​e108a​​e4d8d​​64a5f​​0f0​/G​​ uerra​​-y​-po​​sguer​​ra​-en​​-Extr​​emadu​​ra​-el​​-impa​​cto​-d​​e​-la-​​​crisi​​s​-ali​​menta​​ria​-s​​obre-​​el​-ni​​ vel​-d​​e​-vid​​a​-de-​​la​-po​​blaci​​on​-ru​​ral​.p​​df.; Linares and Parejo, ‘Estatura y esperanza de vida: Una propuesta de revisión de las series antropométricas españolas a partir de una medida alternativa de sobrevivencia’. Igor de Garine and Valerie de Garine, Antropología de la alimentación: entre naturaleza y cultura (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Antropología, 1998). Jesus Contreras, ‘El pan y la evoución de la cultura alimentaria’, Nutrición y Obesidad 5, no. 1 (2002): 1. Derrick Jelliffe, ‘Parallel Food Classifications in Developing and Industrialized Countries’, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 20, no. 3 (1967): 279. Testimony of Ángel (Alcuéscar, Cáceres. 13 December 2015). Testimony of Carmen (Herrara del Duque, Badajoz. 3 April 2015).

6

‘Pícaros De Posguerra’. Turning to crime to survive famine and malnutrition in early Francoism (1939–52) Gloria Román Ruiz1

This chapter examines the economic misdemeanours committed during the years of hunger (1939–52) which – like the black-market economy, smuggling or theft – were quite common during other European famines. The aim is to demonstrate that those illicit practices were motivated by extreme need and were not restricted to the ‘vanquished’ in the Civil War (1936–9), but, rather, were common to those in ‘intermediate areas’ and even to the social support groups of the Francoist regime. Likewise, the text attempts to elucidate this everyday small-scale criminality primarily as a quest for sustenance and specifically as acts of resistance. Yet, they could also fall within the realm of Eigensinn practices: that is, as displays of an autonomy which were not necessarily political in nature. Last, it stresses how those offences that infringed autarkic regulations were decisive for the survival of the lower classes. The first section of this chapter analyses the profile of small ‘estraperlistas’ (individuals engaged in estraperlo or illegal trading), smugglers and thieves during the post-war period, and the second section, their motives for breaking the law. Drawing mainly on monthly reports issued by provincial authorities, available at the Administration’s General Archive (Archivo General de la Administración), the text also relies on judicial sources from different provincial and municipal archives to offer a national – and everyday – perspective of the social processes studied herein.

‘Lack of work and lack of bread’ The impression a traveller gets when passing through the province is devastating. It immediately reveals a people seemingly under forced malnutrition. In the

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Linares–La Carolina region, this feeling is exacerbated; it is as if one would be stepping into a country of beggars. On roads and highways, all you see are rags and starving faces. In short, lack of work and bread.

Report by the provincial head of the Movement in Jaén, January 1940. On Sunday, 21 March 1921, during the 10.00 am mass, the priest in Huércal Overa (Almería) stated that neither the government nor its laws were Christian and went on to question General Franco’s morality. He proceeded to lash out against the new authorities’ failure to tackle the unemployment problem, lamenting their use of the recent war as an ‘excuse’ for joblessness. He labelled the actions taken by the authorities against some young men in Guadix (Granada), who had been caught stealing, as ‘criminal’. He also criticized the spending of millions of pesetas on public entertainment ‘while the people starved to death’ and the silence of the press in this regard. A few months later, during the mass he held on Palm Sunday and in the presence of the major local authorities, he once more lambasted the dictatorship. He refered to the ‘drunkenness and indignities’ that followed the ‘liberation’ of the village by Franco’s troops, all the while pounding on the high altar and drawing support in the form of ‘stifled applause’ from some among the audience. When he finished the homily, he added the recent decrees and rules issued by the state and provincial authorities, fining those who give alms to panhandlers or professional beggars, were impious, atheist and anti-Christian, just like the authorities issuing them . . . . The authorities had no right to impose the sanctions, and only priests could claim the right to control alms giving and only then when hunger and poverty were not rife; because the authorities have not met their responsibility to alleviate suffering we are worse off than during the Red [Marxist] period, which has led tomany deaths from starvation, despite doctors not certifying deaths by starvation, for they lack self—respect and sign off the deaths as caused by other conditions. As a result, I will not prevent anyone from giving alms or allow anyone to follow the orders, and he or she who does obey is impious, atheist and anti-Christian.

One of those present in the church – a collaborator with the Information and Investigation Services of the FET and JONS (or Falange, the single political party) – denounced the priest to the Francoist provincial authorities, who assessed that his statements had been ‘aggressive and demoralizing’ to the regime, as well as provocative and ‘full of a defeatist spirit’. In turn, he was punished with his immediate transfer to a parish in Velefique (Almería), ‘a place in the mountains almost secluded from the core of the population’.2 With his claims, this priest sought to shine a light on a reality that the dictatorship tried to silence with censure and propaganda: that of hunger and – specifically – famine (1939–42

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and 1946).3 Overall, he attempted to incite from the pulpit non-compliance with the regulations of the Vagrancy Act (‘Ley de Vagos y Maleantes’), passed by the Republican government in 1933 and enforced with renewed intensity by Francoism since 1940 and, particularly harshly, from 1945. The bill criminalized beggars who importuned people in the streets for food and punished those who gave them alms – all of this in the midst of a full-fledged food crisis.4 As this rebellious priest pointed out, the Francoist authorities were to a large extent responsible for the extreme poverty. During the 1940s, they opted for economic autarky, which involved the control of a wide range of staples whose prices were set at fixed rates. They also imposed the rationing system, which would remain in place until 1952. The results of these t policies were disastrous. The items assigned through official channels with the use of rationing cards were of very poor quality and not enough for sustenance. An example of this comes in the amounts granted to each person for the month of September 1942 in Baleares: a quarter litre of oil, 250 grams of sugar and 500 grams of beans. Rice was an item that, for several months, had remained ‘completely unknown’, and pasta soups ‘all the more so’, whereas legumes were ‘also lacking’ and sugar was impossible to obtain. The very provincial authorities acknowledged that those amounts were not enough to ‘feed a normal person for two or three days’, much less thirty. And they expressed their ‘amazement’ at ‘the fact that there were no daily cases of deaths by physical impoverishment’, something they attributed to ‘the magnificent resilience of the Spanish race’.5 Moreover, in this autarkic context, the prices of the main basic foodstuffs skyrocketed to the point of reaching levels the authorities themselves qualified as ‘astronomical’. Not only that, the prices of ‘thousands of other items necessary for life’ also increased, such as soap, clothing and shoes. In the summer of 1941, their prices had risen between 200 per cent and 250 per cent in relation to July 1936. Simultaneously, salaries fell sharply – in the countryside starvation wages were paid – and labour strikes increased dramatically.6 As a result, workers sustained a huge loss of purchasing power that, in the words of the provincial head of the Falange in Granada, made ‘the economic sustenance of families almost impossible’ to achieve.7 Still in 1947, his counterpart in Cuenca continued to admit that salaries were unrelated to ‘the price of basic foodstuffs’.8 In provinces such as Zaragoza or Murcia, many workers refused to work if they were not given food, ‘especially legumes, oil or fats and bread’, because otherwise they would rather ‘remain unemployed and eat whatever Auxilio [Social] gives them or whatever they can steal’.9 It should also be noted that what was distributed through the welfare and assistance network was not enough either. Auxilio Social’s soup kitchens were

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overwhelmed.10 In many similar sites in Seville, for instance, assistance had to be restricted to one meal per day, and others had to shut down completely owing to the lack of supplies. The official rationing that each one of these soup kitchens received comprised 540 grams per person per month, which represented a sixth of what was needed and was, therefore, ‘utterly insufficient’.11 When the situation became unsustainable, the option was to provide unheated meals, as was the case with Baleares’ soup kitchens in September 1941. Some local Falange heads, as in Menorca or Ibiza, warned that such a resolution left beneficiaries with no other recourse but to ‘die of hunger’.12 Certainly, the outcome of all this was hunger, disease and even death.13 As could be expected, the working class was the hardest hit because, as the Balearic official explained, ‘wealthy persons’ could always complete their diet with ‘pastries, sweet fruits and any item of their liking in the black market by paying excessive prices’. This was not the case of the disenfranchised, who were forced to ‘entrust their health and their very existence to products of poor nutritional value’ for which they also paid ‘incredibly high prices’.14 For these groups of people, an alternative to their routine misery was migration to the great cities around the country, where the system of rationing worked far better than in the rural areas.15 But those unable, or who did not dare, to take that step had to ‘make a living’ by resorting to illicit activities to feed themselves or obtain some sort of income.16 These activities were essentially small-scale estraperlo (black-market activity), smuggling and minor theft, although other practices such as begging and poaching were equally widespread. As Óscar Rodríguez pointed out, on the basis of official data from the National Institute of Statistics and judicial sources, criminality was on the rise during the post-war years, in particular crimes against property, which reached their peak between 1940 and 1943, coinciding with some of the worst years of hunger. Gómez Westermeyer calculated the rate for these kinds of crimes, mainly petty theft and food theft, at 66 per cent in post-war Murcia.17 These economic crimes were decisive for the survival of the poorest families and, in all likelihood, the number of deaths due to malnutrition would have been even greater had these routine strategies outside the fringes of the law not been employed. Some made them their way of life, which explains why many of those arrested were common recidivists. Entire families could resort to small-scale economic fraud, as demonstrated by the involvement of fathers, sons and brothers in these types of activities. It was a ‘survival criminality’ carried out by poor men and women who, on foot, by donkey, bicycle or railway

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wagon, transported small amounts of basic items for personal consumption or distribution in neighbourhoods, whose residents tended to be complicit. Such was the case of a day labourer from Terque (Almería), who was caught redhanded by the civil guard when clandestinely transporting two wineskins – one of the featured products in estraperlo – on a herd of horses, for sale in the village at inflated prices. Or the trader from Almería, who had 45 kilograms of sugar sequestered at the railway station, one of the favourite places for small smuggling and estraperlo operations. Although the man pointed out that he was on his way to transport the goods to Guadix (Granada) ‘to distribute them among his relatives’, he would have likely attempted to resell them.18 Food thefts are a clear marker of the small scale of these post-war economic picaresque schemes.19 They generally involved the theft of animals, wild fruit and other foodstuffs. As detailed in an official report by Salamanca’s civil governor in 1941, thefts in the province’s villages were centred on ‘pork products (bacon, cold meat, butter, etc.), as well as chickpeas, lentils and other products derived from household slaughter’.20 Usually, the stolen items were devoured on the spot by the hungry petty thieves, or else were transported to their homes to be shared with relatives. Accordingly, when the civil guard arrived to search the premises, the perpetrator would have already eaten whatever had been stolen. Firewood theft was also customary, used for cooking and heating, or sold to gain some pesetas to buy food. We find several examples of this in the province of Granada. In 1947, a young man from Píñar was caught red-handed while stealing firewood from a hill; he explained that he wanted it ‘to sell it and be able to get some bread’. And in 1950, a couple of day labourers from the same village were found carrying branches of an olive tree on their backs which, according to their statements, they pretended to sell to ‘buy food for their children, because the wage they earn is not enough to cover their household needs’. Similarly, an unemployed local from Torre-Cardela had already sold the firewood in the village’s bakery when he was discovered, having ‘used the money to take care of the family’s sustenance’.21 This type of small-scale criminality was quite common in other contexts related to hunger, such as the Holodomor, the famine that swept Stalin’s Soviet Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. Episodes of grain theft in the countryside were a recurrent problem during that period in practically every village and were committed by both solitary individuals and groups of women and men. The phenomenon became so widespread that Soviet officials passed a decree, popularly known as the Three Spikelets Law (‘Ley de las tres espigas’), to defend the property of the kolkhoz, the Soviet collective farms. In its second section, it

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established the death penalty by firing squad to all those who stole from those farms. However, that extreme punishment would only be applied in exceptional cases. This regulation was later amended to exclude small-scale theft, which was punished with a ten-year prison sentence. Capital punishment was reserved for the ‘systematic theft of grain, sugar beet, etc. and animals’.22 Clandestine schemes to obtain food and petrol were also quite frequent during the Hongerwinter, the Dutch famine that coincided with the end of the Second World War (1944–5). Trading in the black market stood out among these popular responses to hunger, which would end up becoming a significant problem for the authorities. Other notable activities were the falsification of identity cards to obtain food and the buying and selling of rationing cards and coupons, as well as theft at distribution offices and soup kitchens.23

‘Swarms of ragged and hungry children’: Postwar estraperlistas, smugglers and thieves Only outside the law, that is, resorting to estraperlo, can a family gather enough to avoid starvation.24 Small offenders in Spain’s ‘hunger years’ came from the most disenfranchised sectors of society. Among them, women occupied a prominent place. Many of them were war widows or had husbands ‘on the run’ or imprisoned, with several dependent children.25 Some were engaged in estraperlo, dedicated to the trading of controlled foodstuffs, as was the case with Adoración Estrada, aged only seventeen. In July 1949, this young woman was caught by an undercover agent while trying to hide a sack of bread in a doorway in Granada, which she had brought from her home village in Berja (Almería) by bus.26 Or the two women from Uleila del Campo (Almería), who in July 1951 were apprehended while transporting oil without the required travel permit. One of them, aged sixty-six, explained that she had been buying oil in small quantities and that, once she had put it all together, she intended to take it to Almería ‘to sell it on the black market’. The other retorted that she had bought it from other female neighbours and that it was intended for home consumption. Or, in short, the two women who were surprised around the same dates in the Sierra Alhamilla highway in Almería with 22 kilograms of wheat flour, 27 kilograms of soap, 10 kilograms of noodles, 15 kilograms of chickpeas and 8 kilograms of beans hidden in several bags and cardboard boxes. They both stated that they had bought them in

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Guadix (Granada) and were thinking of reselling them ‘to earn some money to attend to their economic needs’.27 Many other women resorted, either specifically or habitually, to food thefts. In general, women collected wild fruit or farmyard animals such as chickens, whereas men more often stole firewood and larger animals such as goats. Sometimes they acted in groups, for instance, when a collective theft of wheat spikelets was committed by six women in La Carlota (Córdoba) in September 1948.28 When found, some of them attempted to protect their husbands, especially if they had a criminal record, because they considered them more vulnerable to Francoist repression. Rosa González, from Píñar (Granada), did this in 1946 when she had 9.5 kilograms of stolen olives confiscated from her home. She quickly exonerated her husband, claiming he had no idea ‘whatsoever’ about the goods.29 Besides estraperlo and theft, many women during the post-war years engaged in the smuggling of basic items as a means to earn a living. They were the matuteras, who lived in the localities of Málaga and Cádiz in the vicinity of Campo de Gibraltar. They travelled to the Gibraltar border area almost daily, carrying eggs, barley, slaughtered meat and other products. Upon their return, they brought back saccharin tablets, coffee, vitamins, soap, tobacco or nylon stockings, which they concealed underneath their loose clothes – with ‘many pockets everywhere’ and ‘a sort of girdle’ – and would later sell them to their fellow neighbours.30 Pepe Garrido, a neighbour from Arriate (Málaga), whose father ran a store where the matuteras used to buy their supplies, remembers that these women were ‘always in a hurry, either to arrive or to leave’, and that sometimes, on their way to catch the train, the civil guard would be waiting for them, and would then seize their goods and take them to the barracks, which meant losing a whole ‘day of work and sacrifice’. Nevertheless, frequently they managed to dispose of or and hide the package in a drain in order to return and pick it up later.31 Children were also actively involved in the post-war economic crimes. According to the Asturias’ provincial authorities in 1945, ‘true swarms of ragged and hungry children’ roamed the streets, committing all sorts of ‘raids and petty crimes’. For the regime, this was a ‘disgrace for the population’ and posed the danger of turning into a ‘social scourge’ and a ‘school of theft’.32 These children were minors from poor families, victims of Francoist repression and the food crisis. Despite the dictatorship’s propaganda, the Falange’s welfare and assistance bodies created specifically for children, such as the children’s homes sponsored by Auxilio Social, which took in the most needy as residents, were far from

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solving the problem. In fact, children not only starved in those homes but were also subjected to humiliations and abuse.33 In this context, children had little option but to turn to crime as a contribution to their frail domestic economies. Their relatives would frequently rely on them, assuming their punishment would be more lenient were they to be apprehended. The truth is that many of these children eventually ended up in juvenile courts.34 One of those minors was the son of a man dubbed ‘Longaniza’ (‘Pepperoni’), a young man aged fifteen from Píñar (Granada) who in 1942 stole 118 kilograms of chickpeas, which he hid in the attic of his family home. Although he initially stated before the civil guard that he had acquired these legitimately from crops growing wild, he ultimately confessed that ‘for four or five nights, and similarly during the day’, he had been gathering chickpeas from the country property his father worked on ‘because we have needs at home’.35 Minors would often act in groups, as in one occasion in that same locality in 1944 when several children between the ages of twelve and sixteen, rendered desperate by hunger, plucked and ate ten or twelve melons and watermelons from the Santísima Trinidad country house’s vegetable garden. ‘Already full’, each of the children took a couple home, as well as several kilograms of peppers and onions. When caught, they had already distributed and eaten most of the stolen goods between their relatives and themselves.36 Post-war economic fraud also included the active participation of armed resistance fights, or guerrillas (or Maquis). They were the vanquished who, after the end of the Civil War and stigmatized for their actions, were forced to seek refuge in the mountains for fear of reprisals and to escape the starvation to which they had been condemned in their own villages. There, they continued engaging in armed struggle against the dictatorship, assisted by the clandestine Communist Party of Spain in, and a significant part of, civil society. The ‘fugitives’, as they were called by Francoist authorities, survived with the help of a network that provided them with supplies, but also by carrying out thefts and burglaries in local country houses.37 What is interesting about these collective actions is their generally violent and politicized nature, given that their victims were carefully chosen from among the main business and land owners. An example of this occurred in Alpandeire (Málaga) in November 1940, when seven armed men showed up at Las Mimbres farmhouse demanding the owner give them food and forcing him ‘to kill some chickens’.38 Other localities in Granada were also subject to robberies of this kind, which the authorities attributed to ‘the Reds (leftists) up there in the hills’. In the winter of 1940–1, for instance, masked men burgled a country property in Píñar, in which they seized two animals saddled

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up with everything they could find ‘to eat and wear’. And in February that same year, a group – never identified – broke into a neighbouring house in Laborcillas and took ‘2,000 pesetas, twelve loaves of bread, three hams and a shotgun’. They attempted to carry out two other robberies by threatening a caretaker and the village tobacconist.39 A few months later, a similar event took place in Purullena, when a dozen ‘bandits’ burst into the home of a long-standing, or old-shirt (‘camisa vieja’), Falangist in the village. He was forced to hand over several hams and pork shoulders, as well as bedding and clothes.40 As these cases show, many of those obliged to turn to crime as a means of survival came from the realm of the vanquished in the Civil War. A large part of the poorest groups had identified with the now-defunct Republic, and this collective had to endure a new level of vulnerability after the war when the new authorities – far from seeking a reconciliation – imposed their victory. The ‘disaffected’ (‘desafectos’) were victims of Francoist physical repression, which had left many of these families completely disrupted, and economic repression was used in the seizing of their property.41 In the climate of extreme political polarization of the 1940s, many people had to close down their family businesses after being branded as ‘Reds’, and many others refused to turn to Francoist assistance as it was too humiliating to bear. The alternatives for these men and women were essentially reduced to everyday delinquent practices. An instance of this can be found in 1940 in Torre-Cardela (Granada), where a neighbour with a leftist background nicknamed ‘El Pájaro’ (‘the Bird’) stole a goat from a pen. Investigations conducted by the civil guard revealed that, prior to the ‘Glorious National Movement’, the man had maintained a ‘somewhat doubtful’ conduct by having affiliated with Popular Front parties. Besides, according to that information, he had been engaged in selling stolen livestock in the village during the war.42 But the post-war food crisis was severe and widespread enough to affect other social sectors belonging to the ‘grey areas’ – that is, those groups in between the supporters and the clear opponents – and even the regime’s social support groups,43 although it is also true that those who had welcomed Franco’s victory fared better, especially those with good standing, making it easier for them to circumvent punishment or be recipients of aid from official institutions. A similar case was that of post-war offenders, who attempted to ‘seek a living’ by resorting to illicit activities, adopting a variety of socio-political attitudes towards the regime or most of the time acting without any ideological motivation and driven by poverty. The political affiliation with the ‘New Spain’ was not an obstacle for devising schemes to alleviate their poor economic situation, even if that implied

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breaking Francoist laws. This can be assessed from the data provided by the mayor of La Carlota (Córdoba) regarding the political background of some of the individuals denounced for wild-fruit theft around the municipal boundaries. In November 1949, he referred to one individual who had stolen chickpeas as an ‘excellent worker’. And in June 1950, he claimed another one was a ‘person of good moral, public and private conduct’. In these cases, the mayor attributed the offences to ‘the circumstances of unemployment’ the locality had been enduring and underscored that these had been small scale.44 The case of a citizen from Chiclana de Segura (Jaén) is revealing. This man was fishing and poaching on a routine basis, using gillnetting and snares without a licence. He had spent time in prison for starting a fire in the Sierra Morena, as a result of his activities. The man acknowledged that one day he had been fishing along with another neighbour and that they had caught 8 kilograms of fish, which they ‘ate in their own homes’. Moreover, he specifically stole food growing wild, as he did in the beginning of September 1949, when he was caught harvesting chickpeas. He resorted to these activities to obtain food for his family – a wife and three young children – ‘because he was unemployed’. But, despite having broken Francoist laws, in the reports offered up by the local authorities he was described as a man ‘of good conduct in all respects’ and a ‘sympathizer of the current regime, with no records of hostile activities of any kind’.45 Another post-war offender close to the ‘New Spain’ was Pilar Toro, a woman from Bérchules (Granada), wife of a former soldier and widowed at the early age of twenty-four. Her late husband had been a Francoist army officer during the war and would later work as a prison governor. He passed away soon after the war ended, victim of a disease contracted as a consequence of ‘the many sufferings and ailments on the frontlines’. With two dependent young children and an elderly mother, the woman found no other alternative but to resort to estraperlo, obtaining supplies in Granada with the use of some relatives’ ration cards which she would then resell with a surcharge in the village. In the winter of 1950, she was apprehended while attempting to transport several bags of roasted coffee (a total of 11 kilograms) with the help of a lorry driver. Yet, her condition as the widow of a Francoist officer allowed her to gather favourable reports among local officials – the priest, civil guard commander, mayor and even the chemist, doctor and director of a marching band. They all agreed that she was a woman of unimpeachable public, private, moral, social and political conduct, besides being ‘religious and a strong supporter of the national cause’ and deserving of ‘the respect of all her fellow neighbours’. The priest explained that she ‘quite frequently attends to acts of worship and receives sacraments

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of penance and communion. She likewise sees that her children do not miss their catechism, also receiving the holy sacraments themselves quite frequently.’ Certainly, they all denied she was engaged in the habitual and illicit trading of controlled items, arguing that they themselves had requested coffee for their own consumption. These supporting statements allowed her to avoid paying a fine, set at 2,170 pesetas.46

‘For being hungry’: Subsistence, resistance and Eigensinn practices Burglaries of farms and thefts from arable lands are on the rise, with veritable caravans of individuals taking away carobs, almonds and other foodstuffs. This, of course, would not take place under normal circumstances, but with the worsening of living conditions, the theft of edible items increases.47

As the Pilar case shows, small offenders during the post-war years were driven mainly by extreme necessity and without any sort of political motivation. Furthermore, the strong presence of minors and women – less politicized than their male counterparts at the time – in small-scale criminal activities reinforces this idea. For most, it was only a matter of subsistence, as the offenders themselves explained to the authorities upon arrest. This occurred, for instance, in Píñar in 1940, with the protagonists of a collective theft of wheat. The group, of Roma origin, acted at night and was caught the following morning because one of the women had lost her dress belt at the scene. By then, they had already exchanged part of the loot for bread. They all justified their actions as due to necessity. The brain behind the action claimed he came up with the idea ‘to be able to feed his family’. And one of the women added that she had done it ‘to attend to the sustenance of three young children of hers and due to her husband being in jail’.48 Nevertheless, some were able to exaggerate their poverty to receive a more favourable treatment. This seems to have been the strategy pursued by two neighbours from the same village in Granada, who reaped 13 kilograms of barley from a private property. Caught in the act, they explained that ‘they were forced into it by the bad situation they are in’. The authorities, on the other hand, believed that ‘their economic situation, rather modest albeit poor, is not that crippling’ and that they both possessed ‘enough means of sustenance to attend to their domestic needs’.49 Others went further and expressly denied in their statements having intentionally turned to crime to undermine the regime. This was the case of a man who, in 1941, was caught in Granada selling fraudulent

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items, although he assured that it ‘was never the intention of the accused to defraud the tax office or smuggle politically charged items that could jeopardize our beloved country’.50 The idea that poverty was the reason for the small economic offences carried out during the post-war period is deeply rooted in popular memory. Consuelo Castillo, a resident of Santa Fe (Granada), thus explained these occurrences of food theft, arguing that petty thieves used to take food ‘to eat’.51 This conviction that offenders broke the law to survive elicited the understanding of the rest of the community and drove many of them to cooperate or help their disadvantaged fellow neighbours. These community networks of solidarity also explain how the process of selecting the victims of these thefts worked, seeing to it that they were committed outside local neighbourhoods in order to avoid jeopardizing those bound by neighbourhood ties.52 However, this does not mean that some of these thefts or the estraperlo and smuggling activities did not represent small acts of resistance in the form of ‘weapons of the weak’, as Scott pointed out, implying a sort of affront to power.53 Even though the search for subsistence was the primary motive behind the actions of small post-war offenders, in many cases there was an ulterior motive involved: that is, the more or less manifest will to express their discontent with the unpopular autarkic policies which they deemed unfair and damaging to their own interests. The irritating images of shop windows in many patisseries, displaying plenty of exquisite cakes and ice creams, added to the general discontent, for only the upper classes were able to afford their prices, or the news regarding exports of foodstuffs abroad or large quantities of grain or potatoes going to waste in warehouses through the incompetence of the politicians in charge. The very authorities recognized that the popular sentiment towards the dictatorship was highly conditioned by supply issues. In 1945, Asturian officials claimed that ‘lacking higher ideals, the working masses’ main cause for satisfaction or else discontent was dependent on an increasing or decreasing abundance of foodstuffs for their sustenance.’54 Murcia’s authorities, on the other hand, referred in 1946 to the ‘supply barometer’ as a gauge of political attitudes of the middle and lower classes. For their part, officials in Asturias acknowledged that same year that ‘in politics, people reason with their stomach’, in reference to the discontent among miners owing to the lack of oil55 – hence the existence of a deep-seated uneasiness in the face of the supply crisis. The provincial head of the Falange in La Coruña stated in 1941 that ‘hunger was more than enough reason for the rise in gossip and criticism so often found in the streets’.

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Likewise, he explained that, after 12 months without oil supply, the ridiculous amount of 2 octiles (some 0.58 litres) had begun to be included in the province’s rationing, which had provoked ‘the people’s anger’, channelled through mockery and derision. His counterpart in Salamanca expressed himself in similar terms, when in 1946 he admitted that neighbours were ‘losing their patience’ in light of ‘the failure’ of those responsible for the food supply, implying that everyday conversations revolved around this issue.56 Even though all these post-war economic offences were driven by necessity, some of them also hide political or infrapolitical connotations.57 This was evidenced in those cases where the victims were not ‘equals’ but, rather, the ‘powerful’. It is worth underscoring the burglaries of sites belonging to the regime’s official institutions, such as the warehouses of the National Wheat Service. In Puebla de Don Fadrique (Granada), almost 2,000 kilograms of wheat were taken in 1940. The Falange’s provincial chiefs placed the blame on the ‘disastrous’ transport conditions, given the urgent need to receive the grain and the lack of appropriate sacks, arguing also that ‘because of the hunger that at the time reigned over the distribution area, some of the lorries were robbed, taking advantage of the large slopes’.58Another Francoist organization that was a target of these petty thieves was Auxilio Social. Two soup kitchens in Seville were burgled in December 1941. In the first one, they stole sixteen bread rolls from the pantry and, a few days later, cortadillos (lumps), oranges, buns, soap and floor mops. In the second, they took away, among other items, ‘three kilos of soap, five acorns [and] fourteen breads and a half ’. The perpetrators, acting at night, broke in through a window. At least one of the three suspects arrested for the burglaries was a minor.59 Likewise, economic offences that were accompanied by displays of hostility against the Franco regime – even if they were merely symbolic in nature – also represented small acts of resistance in the sense Scott gave to the term.60 A revealing example of this took place in Buñol (Valencia), where a series of burglaries were committed in Hogar Infantil (Infant Home) soup kitchens in July 1941. The items removed were mostly foodstuffs, but blankets and towels were also taken. What is striking is that the perpetrators left placards with ‘insulting phrases’ against the Falange and El Caudillo, as well as slogans of support for the Iberian Anarchist Federation (Federación Anarquista Ibérica), which clearly stated their political motivations and the fact that this had not been a random target.61 The majority of the post-war economic offences, perhaps, were not mere acts of subsistence or resistance but, rather, Eigensinn – a concept coined by

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Alf Lüdtke in 1986, referring to ‘indocility’ and the ability of ordinary women and men to negotiate the established conditions with those in power.62 That is to say, both food theft and the small estraperlo and smuggling acts revealed the autonomy that poor men and women in 1940s Spain were able to preserve in such a hostile context as that of the first period of Francoism, without necessarily any political connotations. Despite their feelings of confusion and despair, and far from staying idle, they took action. But their aim was not to subvert the new state but, rather, to sate their hunger and make their daily lives more bearable. This framework may encompass individuals like Pilar Toro, who were supporters of the regime but remained under conditions of extreme vulnerability after the war and who were forced into clandestinity to survive, with all the risks this implied – seizure of goods, fines and, if unpaid, banishment or prison. Nevertheless, it seems that these types of illicit activities were not only a major influence in the destabilization of the regime but may have also contributed to its very stabilization. This was linked to the profile of those involved, who were rather modest, and to their intentions, essentially their subsistence. Another significant factor is that these offences were prosecuted and punished harshly, and the dictatorship used these measures for its propaganda against fraud. Furthermore, small estraperlistas, smugglers and petty thieves were often mere figureheads for bigger criminals – mostly, social support groups of the regime – and their activities were a guarantee of the latter’s good business performance. Generally, criticism of shortages was directed more against local officials than against the dictatorship or the dictator. Lastly, these picaresque survival subterfuges were somehow able to neutralize popular unrest by emerging as a last resort that allowed the needy to get by during those critical moments.63 There are several statements attributing economic offences to this essential role in the survival of families. Constancio Zamora, a citizen from Chiclana de Segura (Jaén), for instance, claims that estraperlo ‘contributed to the support of the people’s economy’. Pepe Garrido, from Málaga, speaks in the same vein when stating that smuggling ‘was a way out to alleviate hunger’, which benefited people like his father, who managed to support eight children thanks largely to this activity.64

‘Not only vanquished and not always resistance’: Conclusions As with Francesillo, the rogue who features in La forja de un ladrón, the novel by Francisco Umbral set in Valladolid in the 1940s, the post-war offenders’ identities and motivations for turning to crime were both diverse and changing. Far from

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the dichotomy that reduces possibilities to ‘subsistence’ or ‘resistance’, the reasons for violating Francoist laws were often multiple and varied throughout time. This complexity can be clearly distinguished in the aforementioned character, the son of a ‘father killed by firing squad and a sick, Red mother’. Francesillo begins to engage in petty theft and estraperlo, and steps into the world of the ‘white bread black market’ at a tender age. At first, he does this due to hunger. But then, once he manages to sustain himself and even make a decent living, he continues committing offences – now focusing on money, not food. He starts selling loaves of estraperlo bread and ends up stealing purses at Francoist rallies. The young man becomes a professional petty thief with a penchant for money and his trade. He engages in crime to ‘undermine society, gracefully taking money away and making a mockery out of crime’.65 As in the case of the Ukrainian or Dutch famines, during the years of hunger in Spain a significant small-scale economic criminality blossomed, focused mainly on estraperlo (or the black market), smuggling and food thefts and committed by individuals in the fringes of society. Women and minors were two of the groups at the forefront of these activities and the hardest hit by the shortages; they fell into these illicit acts to contribute to their family economies. The case of the guerrillas is of particular importance: frequently involved in this type of fraud, they used to carefully select their victims from among prominent landowners or Falangists in the village. Yet, post-war economic offenders came from across the political spectrum, not just from the vanquished side. Misery was so intense and long-lasting that it affected both those groups identified with the grey areas and the supporters. As we have attempted to demonstrate throughout this chapter, there were thieves of excellent socio-political conduct, neighbours ‘sympathetic’ to the new regime who were forced into poaching or widows of ‘victors’ who practised estraperlo as a means to support their own. They all turned to crime to earn their living in a context of extreme necessity, without their sympathies towards the New Spain becoming an obstacle for it. In relation to the above-mentioned offenders, the vast majority of the economic offences during the 1940s were motivated mainly by hunger or poverty. As Michael Seidman argued in regard to Madrid during the Civil War, these sectors often gave more importance to their personal and family interests than to collective affairs, just as their material necessities prevailed over any display of ideological discontent.66 Thus, hunger represented an element of political neutralization, pushing subjects to focus on their quest for survival instead.

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This, however, does not exclude the fact that some of these illicit activities also had a political motive. In such cases, there was an underlying discontent against the mismanagement of hunger by the authorities, whom they blamed for the shortages. This unrest may have also involved individuals who had formerly supported the regime but who now felt betrayed in the face of the unprecedented food crisis, and they could have even amended their views towards the dictatorship when considering the misery they had to endure. Burglaries of warehouses and soup kitchens belonging to official institutions, or displays of explicit hostility, were clear examples of these acts of everyday resistance. Notwithstanding these offences, similar actions with a more or less express intention to destabilize the regime would have been scarce.

Notes 1 The author is a member of the research projects ‘Historia y memoria del hambre: sociedad, vida cotidiana, actitudes sociales y políticas de la dictadura franquista (1939–1959)’ (HAR2016-79747-R; Spanish Ministry of Economy; University of Granada) and ‘Heritages of Hunger: Societal Reflections on Past European Famines in Education, Commemoration and Musealisation’ (NWA. 1160.18.197; NWO; Radboud University / NIOD Institute), which funded the research that formed the basis of this chapter. 2 General Archive of the Administration (AGA), National Delegation of Provinces (DNP), Provincial Chief, 20564, ‘Informe actitud del párroco de Huércal’, Almería, 28 March 1941; and ‘Denuncia actividades contrarias al Movimiento del cura párroco de Huércal’, Almería, 1 July 1941. 3 Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco, ‘Famine in Spain during Franco’s Dictatorship (1939–1952)’, Journal of Contemporary History 56, no. 1 (2021): 3–27. 4 Iván Heredia, ‘Control y exclusión social: La ley de Vagos y Maleantes en el primer franquismo’, in Universo de micromundos. VI Congreso de Historia Local de Aragón, eds. Carmelo Romero and Alberto Sabio (Zaragoza: PUZ, 2009), 109–22 and 114–15. 5 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20545, ‘Parte mensual’, Baleares, 1942. 6 Teresa Mª. Ortega, ‘Las miserias del fascismo rural. Las relaciones laborales en la agricultura española, 1936–1948’, Historia Agraria, no. 43 (2007): 531–53. 7 AGA, DNP, Jefatura Provincial Chief, 20569, ‘Informe general de la política de esta provincia’, Granada, August 1941. 8 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20666, ‘Parte mensual’, Cuenca, 1947. 9 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20579, ‘El Jefe Provincial expone el problema que plantea la escasez de racionamiento’, Zaragoza, 20 November 1941; and 20557, ‘Sobre el estado de abastecimientos’, Murcia, 29 April 1941.

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10 Oscar J. Rodríguez, ‘Auxilio Social y las actitudes cotidianas en los Años del Hambre, 1937–1943’, Historia del presente, no. 17 (2011): 127–47. 11 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20574, ‘Parte mensual’, Sevilla, 1941. 12 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20545, ‘Auxilio Social. Sobre orden de suprimir los auxilios de frío en todos los pueblos de la provincia’, Baleares, 10 September 1941. 13 Michael Richards, Un tiempo de silencio. La guerra y la cultura de la represión en la España de Franco, 1936–1945 (Crítica: Barcelona, 1999): 16. See also Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco, ‘Morir de hambre: autarquía, escasez y enfermedad en la España del primer franquismo’, Pasado y memoria, no. 5 (2006): 241–58. 14 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20545, ‘Parte mensual’, Baleares, 1942. 15 Enrique Tudela, Marcharse lejos. Migraciones granadinas a Barcelona durante el primer franquismo (1940–1960), PhD thesis (Universitat de Barcelona, 2018), 117–60. 16 Regarding this concept, see Pablo Palenzuela, Buscarse la vida: economía jornalera en las marismas de Sevilla (Sevilla: Área de Cultura, Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, 1996). 17 Óscar J. Rodríguez, ‘Lazarillos del Caudillo. El hurto como arma de los débiles frente a la autarquía franquista’, Historia Social, no. 72 (2012): 65–87 and 72–4; Juan F. Gómez Westermeyer, Historia de la delincuencia en la sociedad española. Murcia, 1939–1949. Similitudes y diferencias en otros espacios europeos, PhD thesis (Universidad de Murcia, 2006), 105. 18 AHPA, Civil Government, 4492, ‘Partes Guardia Civil’, 25 January 1951 and 13 February 1951. Regarding railway stations as black-market spaces, see Gloria Román, Delinquir o morir. El pequeño estraperlo en la Granada de posguerra (Comares: Granada, 2015), 125–7. 19 Rodríguez, ‘Lazarillos del Caudillo’. 20 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20560, ‘Parte mensual’, Asturias, 1945. 21 Píñar Municipal Archives (AMP), Justice of the Peace, 151/1, ‘Atestado por hurto de leña’, 26 February 1947; (1950), 132/1, ‘Atestado por hurto de ramaje verde de olivo’, 18 February 1950; (1950), 133/1, ‘Atestado por hurto de leña’, 10 September 1950. See Lázaro Miralles, ‘Supervivencia y comunidad bajo el hambre. La delincuencia en los barrios populares durante el franquismo: el caso del Albaycín y el Sacromonte en Granada’, in Los ‘años del hambre’. Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista, ed. Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2020), 222–48. 22 Robert W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931–1933 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 158–68. 23 Ingrid De Zwarte, The Hunger Winter: Fighting Famine in the Occupied Netherlands, 1944–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 164–202. 24 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20658, ‘Parte mensual’, Cádiz, 1941. 25 Irene Murillo, En defensa de mi hogar y mi pan. Estrategias femeninas de resistencia civil y cotidiana en la Zaragoza de posguerra, 1936–1945 (Zaragoza: PUZ, 2014);

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26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34

35 36 37

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Francisco Alía et al., ‘Mujeres solas en la postguerra española (1939–1949). Estrategias frente al hambre y la represión’, Revista de historiografía 26 (2017): 213–36. AHPA, Civil Government, 5236, ‘Informes, denuncias y reclamaciones’, 30 July 1949. Historical Archives of the Province of Almería (AHPA), Civil Government, 4492, ‘Partes Guardia Civil’, 1951. La Carlota Municipal Archives (AMLC), General Affairs (1935–1947), 20, ‘Correspondencia’, 25 September 1948. AMP, Justice of the Peace, 145/2, ‘Atestado por hurto de aceitunas’, 22 November 1946. Encarnación Barranquero y Lucía Prieto, Así sobrevivimos al hambre: estrategias de supervivencia de las mujeres en la posguerra española (Málaga: CEDMA, 2003), 231 and 236–42; Gloria Román, ‘El pan negro de cada día. Memoria de los años del hambre en el mundo rural alto-andaluz’, in Los ‘años del hambre’. Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista, ed. Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2020), 345–66 and 358–9. Statement by Pepe Garrido, an Arriate (Málaga) neighbour, from the documentary ‘Estraperlo, memoria del hambre’, broadcast in programme no. 55 of La Memoria, Andalucía TV, 1 April 2018. AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20569, ‘Expone la necesidad de poner remedio a las incursiones de los elementos rojos refugiados en la sierra’, Granada, 9 June 1941. Ángela Cenarro, ‘Los niños del Auxilio Social. Historia, memoria e identidades’, Historia Social, no. 76 (2013): 145–63 and 159. Carme Agustí, ‘Golfillos de la calle. Menores, marginación y control social durante el primer franquismo a través de los expedientes del Tribunal Tutelar de Menores de Lleida’, in Novísima. Actas del II Congreso Internacional de Historia de Nuestro Tiempo, ed. Carlos Navajas y Diego Iturriaga (Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja, 2010), 309–22. AMP, Justice of the Peace, 131/2, ‘Juicio verbal de faltas por hurto de garbanzos’, 1943. AMP, Justice of the Peace, 153/1, ‘Juicio verbal de faltas por hurto de hortalizas’, 1944. Peter Anderson, The Francoist Military Trials: Terror and Complicity (1939–1945) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Mercedes Yusta, ‘Una guerra que no dice su nombre: los usos de la violencia en el contexto de la guerrilla antifranquista (1939–1953)’, Historia Social, no. 61 (2008): 109–26; or Jorge Marco, Hijos de una guerra: los hermanos Quero y la resistencia antifranquista (Granada: Comares, 2010). AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20535, ‘Se autoriza para entregar la cantidad de 1.000 ptas. a los familiares del Jefe Local de Alpandeire’, Málaga, 21 November 1940.

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39 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20569, ‘Dando cuenta de que partidas de rojos realizan hechos vandálicos en diversos pueblos de la provincia’, Granada, 4 April 1941. 40 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20569, ‘Expone la necesidad de poner remedio a las incursiones de los elementos rojos refugiados en la sierra’, Granada, 9 June 1941. 41 For the post-war economic repression, see Miguel Gómez et al. (eds), El botín de guerra en Andalucía. Cultura represiva y víctimas de la Ley de Responsabilidades Políticas. 1936–1945 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2014); Julio Prada, Marcharon con todo. La represión económica en Galicia durante el primer franquismo (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2016). 42 AMP, Justice of the Peace, 130/2, ‘Iznalloz, Juzgado de Instrucción Criminal, causa nº 22’, 17 May 1940. 43 On this concept, see Claudio Hernández Burgos, Franquismo a ras de suelo. Zonas grises, apoyos sociales y actitudes durante la dictadura (1936–1976) (Granada: EUG, 2013). 44 AMLC, General Affairs (1949–1950), 20; ‘Informe de vecino con antecedentes por robo’, 16 November 1949; ‘Correspondencia sobre informe de un vecino dedicado al hurto’, 6 June 1950; or ‘Correspondencia sobre vecinos dedicados al hurto’, 22 October 1951. 45 Chiclana de Segura Municipal Archives, Justice of the Peace, 106, ‘juicio de faltas’, 8 September 1949. 46 Historical Archives of the Province of Granada (AHPG), Treasury, 116, File XXIII–1–10, R7, ‘Asuntos (expedientes) en tramitación’, 28 November 1950. 47 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20569, ‘Expone la necesidad de poner remedio a las incursiones de los elementos rojos refugiados en la sierra’, Granada, 9 June 1941. 48 AMP, Justice of the Peace, 131/2, ‘Hurto de trigo’, 24 July 1940. 49 AMP, Justice of the Peace, 153/1, ‘Hurto de cebada’, 18 June 1944. 50 Royal High Court Archives of Granada (ARCG), Administrative Board of Smuggling and Fraud, 33682, ‘Ejecutorias de contrabando’, 1941. 51 Statement by Consuelo de Castillo [1944], interviewed in Santa Fe (Granada) on 26 March 2015. 52 Conxita Mir, Vivir es sobrevivir. Justicia, orden y marginación en la Cataluña rural de posguerra (Lleida: Milenio, 2000), 187–210. Miralles, ‘Supervivencia y comunidad bajo el hambre’, 227 and 234. 53 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985). 54 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20660, ‘Parte mensual’, Asturias, 1945. 55 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20676, ‘Parte mensual’, Murcia, 1946; and 20660, ‘Parte mensual’, Asturias, 1946. 56 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20549, ‘Parte mensual’, La Coruña, 1941; and 20680, ‘Parte mensual’, Salamanca, 1946.

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57 For this concept, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990), 199. 58 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20531, ‘Denuncia del Jefe Local de Puebla de Don Fadrique’, Granada, 17 July 1940. 59 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20574, ‘Remite copia de los escritos dirigidos al Delegado Nacional de Auxilio Social’, Sevilla, 26 November 1941, 10 December 1941 and 13 December 1941. 60 Scott, Weapons of the Weak. 61 AGA, DNP, Provincial Chief, 20562, ‘Parte mensual’, Valencia, 1941. 62 Alf Lüdtke, ‘Eigensinn’, in Alltagskultur, Subjektivität und Geschichte. Zur Theorie und Praxis von Alltagsgeschichte, ed. Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1994), 139–53; Thomas Lindenberger, ‘La sociedad fragmentada: “activismo societario” y autoridad en el socialismo de Estado de la RDA’, Ayer, no. 82 (2011): 25–54. See also Claudio Hernández, ‘Tiempo de experiencias. El retorno de la Alltagsgeschichte y el estudio de las dictaduras de entreguerras’, Ayer, no. 113 (2019): 301–15 and 309–14. 63 Gloria Román and Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco, ‘Resistir con hambre. Estrategias cotidianas contra la autarquía de posguerra y su incapacidad para desestabilizar a la dictadura franquista (1939–1951)’, Ayer (forthcoming); Carme Molinero and Pere Ysás, ‘El malestar popular por las condiciones de vida: ¿un problema político para el régimen franquista?’, Ayer, no. 52 (2003): 255–82. 64 Statements by Constancio Zamora [1940], interviewed in Chiclana de Segura (Jaén) on 4 September 2014, and Pepe Garrido, an Arriate (Málaga) neighbour. 65 Francisco Umbral, La forja de un ladrón (Barcelona: Planeta, 1997), 38 and 160–1. 66 Michael Seidman, ‘Individualisms in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War’, The Journal of Modern History 68, no. 1 (1996): 63–83.

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Part III

International responses

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7

‘Starving Spain’ International humanitarian responses to Franco’s famine David Brydan

In September 1941, the American magazine Time published an article on hunger and malnutrition in Madrid under the title ‘Starving Spain’, one of a number of similar reports which appeared in Britain, the United States and elsewhere during the period.1 But despite the international awareness of Spain’s post-war social crisis, the famine failed to attract the kind of international humanitarian response that characterized similar crises of the period. This inattention was particularly striking given the extent of international humanitarian support to Spain during the Civil War, and the general boom in international food aid and humanitarian relief during the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Spanish Civil War represented one of the largest international humanitarian campaigns of the era, with a wide array of humanitarian volunteers and organizations providing food, welfare services and other material support.2 Although most humanitarian relief was directed towards the Republic, many organizations also provided relief in the rebel zone, often working alongside Francoist authorities and social services. Many of the same organizations and individuals continued to provide humanitarian relief across Europe during and after the Second World War. Why, then, did Spain’s post-war crisis fail to elicit an international humanitarian response? Spain’s post-war famine coincided with a new era of international food coordination and cooperation, in which hunger was increasingly seen as a global issue. This was reflected both in transnational voluntary efforts to provide emergency food relief and in attempts to coordinate global food production and distribution. Both developments had been evident during the First World War and its aftermath. The Russian famine of the early 1920s had been met with largescale humanitarian campaigns in both Europe and the United States, helping to

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kick-start the growth of transnational humanitarian organizations during the interwar period.3 At the same time, organizations such as the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization began to lead international nutrition research, helping to promote new global perspectives on food science and food politics.4 By the time of the Spanish Civil War, international humanitarian aid was underpinned by the networks of voluntary agencies and workers that had been developing over the previous decades, and food relief was shaped by a growing awareness of dietary and nutritional science. The period of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath witnessed a culmination of these processes. New international relief agencies were set up during the conflict, most notably the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).5 They worked alongside a wide array of private voluntary organizations to provide food and other material aid to liberated Europe from 1944.6 After the war these organizations were joined by new humanitarian bodies within the UN system, including UNICEF which took over many of UNRRA’s resources and projects after 1947. At the same time, wartime Allied coordination of food production and distribution helped to underpin the creation of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in 1945. Early plans for a ‘World Food Board’ quickly ran aground, but the organization led new debates about global food policy and security, and campaigned to make hunger a key global issue in the post-war era. Meanwhile, the dawn of the Cold War and America’s post-war economic hegemony transformed food aid into a key plank of US foreign policy, either through multinational programmes such as the Marshall Plan or through the donation of surplus food supplies as part of bilateral agreements, particularly with ‘Third World’ countries.7 This chapter will examine how and why famine in Spain failed to provoke an international humanitarian response despite all of these contemporary developments. It will explore how international reactions were shaped by the impact of the Second World War, by Spain’s political isolation and, above all, by the Franco regime’s hostility to outside support. Drawing on the records of governments and NGOs in Britain and the United States, it will show how foreign observers had a good understanding of living conditions and Francoist social policies after 1939, and to some extent saw Spain as a laboratory for post-war relief and rehabilitation. But the hostility of Francoist authorities and social organizations such as Auxilio Social, combined with the constraints caused by the Second World War, meant that most humanitarian workers and organizations withdrew from Spain between 1939 and 1941. The political and diplomatic isolation of the Franco regime saw it excluded from the work of organizations like UNRRA and UNICEF, which could

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have helped to re-establish international relief programmes in Spain after the war. The regime’s efforts to establish its international legitimacy by promoting Spain as a ‘social state’ meant that it was unwilling to draw attention to its domestic social crisis by asking for foreign aid. Indeed, it continued to encourage and promote Spanish humanitarian donations for relief efforts abroad throughout the period of Franco’s famine. Large-scale food aid would begin to arrive from the United States only after the signing of the Pact of Madrid in 1953, after the worst of the famine was over. But this was only possible in a context in which social conditions were generally improving, when US aid could be presented as a charitable gift to the needy rather than as a response to a self-inflicted humanitarian crisis. International intervention, or the lack thereof, is an important part of the story of Spain’s famine, and of Spain’s political isolation more broadly during the early stages of the Franco regime. It helps to explain why hunger had such a devastating impact even after the Civil War had drawn to a close. And it demonstrates the tragic consequences of Francoist hostility towards the outside world for the people of Spain. But it also tells us something about the history of aid, relief and humanitarianism, a subject which has drawn increasing attention from historians over recent years.8 Histories of humanitarianism often rely on the institutional archives of relief organizations, either private NGOs or international bodies. While these can offer rich material for historians, they also involve important lacunae and blind spots, most obviously the voices of ‘recipients’ of humanitarian aid. But inherently they also tell us most about crises that have prompted large-scale relief efforts. It would be easy to assume that these crises were the most important or significant ones of their period, the events on which historians should focus their attention. But the case of Spain draws our attention to the overlooked humanitarian crises of the past, the suffering of people who did not enjoy the attention or support of NGOs and international relief organizations. In particular, it helps to demonstrate the mechanisms by which particular crises fail to elicit international attention. The story of Spain’s famine suggests that the provision of international humanitarian support has less to do with objective assessments of human needs than with the political context in which a crisis takes place.

Understanding and addressing famine after the Civil War The Spanish Civil War provoked one of the largest international humanitarian campaigns of the era. Over the course of the conflict, dozens of overseas

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humanitarian organizations provided food supplies, medical equipment and volunteers, often setting up their own sites to care for children, refugees and the sick within Spain. As with international military intervention, much of this humanitarian support was provided to one particular side in the conflict. Thanks to the level of international mobilization in favour of the Republican cause, the majority was provided to the loyalist zone through aid agencies set up by leftwing parties, organizations and sympathizers. On the rebel side, international humanitarian support came largely from overseas Catholics, particularly in the United States. But many organizations also provided non-partisan relief to both sides of the conflict, including the British and American Quakers, and the Save the Children Fund. Pro-Republican humanitarian organizations did not generally see it as feasible to continue working in Spain after the end of the Civil War, due to both Francoist hostility and their own unwillingness to cooperate with the new regime. The majority either shifted their work to Republican refugees in France or disbanded their operations. But the remaining organizations, those which either saw themselves as non-partisan or who had provided support to the rebel zone, faced no such automatic impediment. Many had worked specifically to alleviate hunger in rebel Spain during the Civil War, primarily through direct food donations, and it was certainly conceivable that they continue to work to combat hunger across Spain in the aftermath of the Civil War. Two groups, the Quakers and the Rockefeller Foundation, did, indeed, continue to work in Spain after the end of the war for a limited period. Their work involved detailed studies of the food situation in different regions of Spain, and demonstrates the extent to which Spain’s famine was understood by relief organizations. The group perhaps best placed to continue offering humanitarian support after the end of the Civil War were the Quakers. Quaker relief efforts during the war came from both the United Kingdom (the Friends Service Council) and the United States (the American Friends’ Service Committee), beginning towards the end of 1936 and often involving collaboration with other international relief agencies such as Save the Children.9 Over the course of the war, the Quakers established canteens to feed children and distribute milk, ran homes or ‘colonies’ for children evacuated from major cities, set up health clinics and provided regular food aid to refugees. The Quakers also played an important role in broader humanitarian efforts established during the war, including the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief in the UK which coordinated the work of various relief agencies. In 1938 they helped to establish the International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain, a multi-agency body coordinating

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donations from national governments and distributing them within Spain, with the initial aim of providing one hot meal a day for every refugee child. The bulk of their work took place in the Republican zones of Catalonia and south-eastern Spain, but also included substantial relief efforts in rebel zones. Led primarily by American Quakers, relief in rebel-held areas included distributing blankets and clothing, and running canteens in conjunction with Save the Children and the Spanish Red Cross. The decision to provide support on both sides of the conflict reflected the Quaker commitment to ‘non-political’ aid, despite the Republicanleaning sympathies of many of their relief workers. Towards the end of the war it was estimated that Quakers were feeding 350,000 children in Spain each day.10 After Franco’s victory in early 1939, much of the Quakers’ relief work in the Republican zones naturally shifted to the support of Spanish refugees fleeing to France. But despite differing views within the Quaker community, there was a general agreement that relief efforts needed to continue within Spain after the rebel victory. As a fundraising pamphlet published by the British Quakers in March 1939 argued, ‘Recognition of General Franco’s Government may change the political aspect, but the need for food remains.’11 One of the strongest advocates for continuing support was the American Quaker and head of the International Commission, Howard Kershner, who not only saw a continued practical need for relief, but also worried that withdrawing from Spain following the rebel victory would undermine the message of impartiality which had underpinned Quaker humanitarianism during the war.12 Quaker relief, which began in its modern form during the First World War, was linked to a particular theological and ethical commitment to peace and reconciliation. This meant that the notion of ‘neutrality’ played a central role in Quaker humanitarian work, but was one which had been severely challenged in the politically charged context of the Spanish Civil War.13 Others envisaged Quakers playing a role as mediators, helping the Spanish people achieve reconciliation in the aftermath of the conflict, or continuing their pre-war work of spreading the Quaker faith.14 The International Commission formally ended its work in Spain in August 1939, but leading Quaker activists hoped to continue distributing medicine, food and clothing for as long as the need persisted.15 Developing new plans for post-war relief required ongoing assessments of the food situation in Spain. Quaker relief workers remaining in the country sent regular updates to the relief committees in Britain and the United States about food conditions, particularly in Catalonia where widespread shortages were reported in October 1939.16 Howard Kershner and his American colleague John Rich also made a number of tours of Spain between 1939 and 1940 to assess the

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food situation. In May 1939, Kershner wrote that although food was ‘very scarce and of very poor quality’, this was primarily a problem of distribution rather than supply, and that things were expected to improve with the approaching harvest.17 But following a subsequent tour in June he was reporting ‘near starvation conditions’ in regions such as Almería. By September it was clear that the year’s harvest would not have the positive impact that had been hoped. Food shortages were still confined to certain regions, but Kershner described an ‘appalling need’ across the south and suggested that winter would bring ‘bitter hunger’ to all but a minority of Spaniards.18 Returning for the last time in March 1940, he witnessed ‘great scarcity’ in Valencia and Malaga, commenting that it was ‘a mystery’ how people managed to sustain life in such conditions. The Quakers were not alone in investigating and reporting on hunger in Spain in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Rockefeller Foundation, particularly its International Health Division, had been instrumental in the development of Spain’s public health system during the first few decades of the twentieth century.19 Its involvement in the Spanish Civil War had been limited, but after the end of the war the organization saw Spain both as a country in need of technical assistance, and as one which represented a potential laboratory to test post-war reconstruction practices which would be needed across Europe after the end of the Second World War. One of its main priorities was the study of malnutrition, and Rockefeller officials played a key role in disseminating what little information there was about the post-war famine outside of Spain. It was a Rockefeller report, for example, which provided the basis for the Time magazine article which appeared in 1941. The initial Rockefeller study of the food situation in Spain, carried out by the organization’s Lisbon representative John Janney, was one of the most detailed international surveys of post-war hunger in Spain.20 Between October and November 1940 his group travelled around almost all of Spain, undertaking a brief survey of food supplies in key towns and cities. The report highlighted the lack of key foodstuffs, particularly bread and olive oil, the importance of the black market and the role of Auxilio Social in food distribution. The report emphasized the differences in food supply across different regions. Whereas cities such as Pamplona, Valladolid and Zaragoza were faring fairly well and did not have to ration bread, the south and east of the country were identified as the areas of highest need. Visiting a school in Seville, Janney reported that he had ‘never . . . seen such example of undernourishment’.21 Over 60 per cent of the children, he estimated, were suffering from anaemia. The school could feed less than thirty of the 700 children who needed meals, and desperate mothers

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would come daily to beg for food for their children because there was none at home. In Almería, he described how children would scrabble around the floors of bars to try to find uneaten scraps of discarded food. The children who were eligible for publicly supplied meals, he estimated, were receiving no more than 400 calories a day. Reports from both the Quakers and the Rockefeller Foundation paid considerable attention to the work of Auxilio Social, the principal Francoist welfare service of the period and the organization through which all overseas food aid had to be distributed. Although some of their relief workers refused to work with the organization, Quaker views of Auxilio Social’s efforts and approach were often quite positive. Howard Kershner worked closely with the organization, and was generally complimentary about its work and personnel, including leading figures such as Mercedes Sanz Bachiller. Even relief workers more hostile to Francoist authorities such as the British Quaker Norma Jacobs praised the organization’s ‘astonishing’ work establishing new services in Barcelona in the summer of 1939 and its ‘evident desire to please the people who are to receive help’.22 Reporting in 1940, however, Rockefeller views of Auxilio Social’s expertise and professionalism were far less complimentary. Janney’s main impression was of the organization’s inability to cope with the task at hand. Food, he reported, was produced in the most unsanitary of conditions. Local directors had no understanding of calorie or vitamin requirements, and menus were entirely dependent on local availability. These deficiencies were largely blamed on ‘faulty administration’ caused by the rapid rise in demand and the lack of adequately trained staff. He also noted how frequently informants were unwilling to comment on the work of Auxilio Social in cities where ‘political feeling still runs high’.23 Despite official denials, foreign relief workers heard persistent reports that Auxilio Social was using relief as a tool of Francoist propaganda and social control. Groups like the Quakers and the Rockefeller Foundation thus clearly had a good understanding of the food situation in Spain in the aftermath of the Civil War, at least up until the summer of 1940. And this knowledge was used to provide substantial support to tackle hunger across the country, although at a level far below what had been provided during the war itself. Quaker relief was facilitated by the ‘Burgos agreement’ struck between Kershner and Francoist authorities in February 1939, in which Quakers agreed to the demand that all aid should be distributed through Auxilio Social in return for agreements about protecting aid workers and monitoring distribution. Initial problems emerged when some food aid was lost during the rebel advance and confiscated

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by Francoist troops, prompting long arguments with the new regime. But these were eventually resolved, and the Quakers shipped hundreds of tons of powdered milk, cereals, sugar, dried vegetables and medical supplies to Spain between 1939 and the summer of 1940.24 It also continued to provide smallerscale direct support to certain families in Barcelona. The Rockefeller Foundation was less interested in direct aid programmes, although it did facilitate limited supplies of wheat, rice and milk powder from the American Red Cross before 1941, helping to overcome fears that supplies would find their way indirectly into German hands, and sending American staff to monitor Auxilio Social distribution.25 Instead, its main project was a major study of nutrition in the working-class Madrid suburb of Vallecas, which it ran until 1941 before handing it over to Spanish researchers.26

Withdrawal and isolation Certain humanitarian organizations thus understood the food crisis in Spain and continued to provide food aid after the end of the Civil War. But by 1941 they had all withdrawn, and Spain received no further humanitarian support from abroad until the early 1950s, after the worst of Spain’s famine had passed. This withdrawal and lack of international engagement resulted partly from the disruptions caused by the outbreak of the Second World War, and partly from the shifting international attitudes towards the Franco regime, which this provoked. As the international conflict drew nearer, anti-fascist sentiment grew in Europe and North America, and Franco’s links with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany came to be seen as increasingly problematic even among those who had been sympathetic to the rebel cause during the Civil War. But the primary reason was the hostility of the Franco regime towards international aid and humanitarian support. Even before the end of the Civil War, the scale of international aid to Spain had been affected by significant reductions in public donations. British Quakers were forced to launch a new drive for donations in March 1939, reminding the public that ‘Spain Still Needs Our Help’.27 In the United States, the final months of the war had witnessed a new national donation drive to raise money for food supplies to feed children in besieged Catalonia, primarily led by Republicansupporting organizations. After the region’s fall, three million bushels of wheat that had been purchased with these donations were left stranded in the United States due to lack of funds to pay for shipment. The American Quakers, who had

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agreed to ship the wheat, were forced to turn to pro-Francoist aid organizations and the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), the social organization of the American bishops, to try to raise new funds to pay for the shipment.28 By this point, however, political opposition and the approach of the Second World War had also undermined public enthusiasm for the Spanish aid in the United States, even among previous supporters of the rebel cause. In July 1939 Cardinal Gomá proposed a tour of the United States to raise money for the church and its charitable institutions. The American bishops, however, asked him to postpone the tour. The official reason was that American Catholics were being asked to donate to a number of other important causes at the time, including support for refugees from Germany, for the Chinese Catholic Church and for post-earthquake reconstruction in Chile. But the real reason was the changed international political context. ‘The political situation now is strained’, wrote the NCWC’s General Secretary to Cardinal Gomá, ‘and it is difficult for us to understand the attitude of the German Government towards the Church. The interests of Spain in this country unfortunately suffer because of this international situation.’29 The approach of the Second World War, in other words, had opened everyone’s eyes to the existential threat posed by fascism. However strong the Franco regime’s Catholic credentials, it would be very difficult to persuade the public to donate to a movement so obviously tied to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. As it was, the only relief provided by the American Catholic Church to Spain after the Civil War was a small programme to distribute food and clothes in Madrid via the wife of the US ambassador in Madrid.30 The outbreak of the Second World War also placed obvious practical obstacles in the way of aid to Spain. It sparked the escalation of new humanitarian crises across Europe, drawing the attention of both funders and aid organizations away from Spain. The Quaker-led International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain, for example, first shifted its focus to child refugees in general, and by August 1940 had transformed itself into the International Commission for War Refugees.31 Practical obstacles also proliferated. As soon as war broke out, the UK government restricted the export of food and the transfer of money abroad. Pressure on shipping also made transport difficult to arrange, even prior to the Allied naval blockade of Spain, which would be implemented later in the war. These obstacles immediately disrupted the distribution of supplies from British Quakers, which had already been collected for Spain.32 Foreign aid workers who had remained in Spain after the end of the Civil War gradually began to return home as international hostilities escalated. By the time the United States entered the war at the end of 1941, all foreign relief activity in

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Spain had ended, with representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation the last to withdraw. Beyond the political and practical obstacles caused by the Second World War, however, the key reason for the withdrawal of international humanitarian aid from Spain was the active hostility and discouragement of the Franco regime. Francoist authorities had broadly welcomed international aid during the Civil War, partly to counter the impression that the Republic enjoyed international support, but disagreements and political difficulties between the regime and international relief agencies quickly multiplied once the war had ended. The Franco regime was not monolithic, especially at this early stage, and certain officials and organizations were relatively open with foreign organizations and partners about the extent of post-war hunger. The director general of Health, José Palanca, spoke with Rockefeller officials about the extent of hunger and malnutrition in Spain, and was receptive, although not always enthusiastically, to outside help.33 The military background of officials like Palanca made the Department of Health seem a more palatable partner in the distribution of aid for organizations such as the American Red Cross, who were wary of the political implications of working with the Falangist Auxilio Social.34 Although Quaker officials such as Kershner were willing to work with Auxilio Social and formed good relations with some of its leading officials, this was deeply resented both by other aid workers and by the wider Quaker community within the United States. Indeed, Kershner’s decision sparked a heated debate at home about the partnership between supposedly ‘non-political’ Quaker aid programmes and an organization widely accused of using food aid for overtly political ends.35 But good relations with certain branches of the new regime could not make up for the general atmosphere of hostility towards outside aid and relief workers. The early insistence that all food aid had to be distributed through Auxilio Social reflected a general rejection of independent welfare activity, particularly if it originated from abroad. The seizure of Quaker food aid by the military in 1939, in direct contravention of the Burgos agreement, demonstrated the limited influence that sympathetic Francoist officials were able to exert within the apparatus of the New State. Quakers were in a particularly difficult position because of the hostility to Protestant groups on the Spanish right, but the difficulties they faced reflected a general rejection of all things foreign rather than specific objections to their religious beliefs.36 In the summer of 1940, for example, one of the last remaining Quaker workers in Spain, Alfred Jacobs, was stopped near the French border and accused of spying for the British government.37 Although he was released soon after, he and his family were required to leave Spain immediately.

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His wife, Norma Jacobs, penned a damning report for the British Quakers before they left, bleakly entitled ‘Death in the After-War’. In it she lamented the Quakers’ failure to meet the ongoing material and spiritual needs of the Spanish people in the aftermath of the Civil War. But she laid the blame for this failure squarely at the feet of the Franco regime. For Spain’s present rulers, she wrote, ‘it is a sacred principle to trust absolutely no one except themselves. From every wall, paradoxical as it may seem to anyone who followed the history of the war, they arrogantly proclaim that Spain needs no one except God and her own energies to follow the path of salvation.’38 This was certainly evident in the regime’s external propaganda, which emphasized its own ability to meet the material needs of the Spanish people in the aftermath of the Civil War. In the summer of 1939, for example, the NCWC fielded calls from some American Catholics to organize a nationwide collection for Spain. The organization deferred to the new Spanish ambassador in Washington who requested that they wait for an official appeal, but argued that the level of suffering in Spain was not actually that bad, and certainly not as bad as it had been previously.39 This was the first serious indication that the Franco regime was seeking to play down the post-war famine to international audiences, and actively to discourage international aid. Francoist officials and external propaganda generally emphasized the success and self-sufficiency of Spanish welfare services, downplaying the extent of hunger in Spain and denying any need for outside support. Auxilio Social produced elaborate English-language brochures for distribution to foreign governments and organizations. Lauding the range and effectiveness of the organization’s working during the Civil War, they argued that a much more limited provision was necessary after it was over. ‘Although a few isolated cases may remain’, one such publication argued, ‘the momentary work of these Kitchens on behalf of the victims of war will cease to be required; as in our New Spain there must be no man without bread, and bread earned by his own honest labour.’40 The withdrawal of the Quakers and the Rockefeller Foundation between 1940 and 1941 broadly marked the end of international interest in Spain’s postwar hunger until the early 1950s. That did not mean the outside world was not aware of what was going on. Rather, it reflected the fact that the issue did not spark widespread popular interest, and was viewed by national governments through the prism of the Franco regime’s political stability. The Time magazine report of 1941 provided detailed information about the food situation in Spain and the Rockefeller Foundation’s nutrition programme in Vallecas, but was tucked away in the medical section on the inside pages. Similar reports in other foreign newspapers

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were given equally little prominence.41 Both the US and British embassies reported back fairly regularly to their governments about food supply problems. But they normally did so only when these problems threatened to provoke major protests or strikes, such as in the shipyards of El Ferrol in July 1946.42 Ultimately, however, the lack of international attention to Spain’s famine reflected the Franco regime’s efforts to play it down. Throughout the post-war era, for example, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ monthly Englishlanguage bulletin, Spain, regularly published articles lauding the success of Francoist social provision. But it also publicized Spanish donations to the hungry and suffering in other countries. An article in May 1946, for example, explained how children attending a religious festival in Barcelona had donated 100,000 pesetas ‘for the starving children of the devastated countries of Europe’. Another in June 1946 stated that, during the Second World War, Spanish Catholic Action had contributed 27 million pesetas that was sent to the Vatican to distribute to ‘orphans and other victims’ of the war, which was combined with a 2-millionpeseta contribution from the Spanish government. It also stated that the Spanish government had sent ‘eighty trucks loaded with food and clothing for the Belgian children’ after the country had been liberated in 1944.43 In part this can be attributed to a genuine disinterest in solving a famine which was largely caused by the regime, and which furthered its political interests. But the idea of the Francoist ‘social state’ was as important to the regime’s search for international legitimacy as it was for its domestic propaganda, and it could not be damaged by admitting the extent of Spanish hunger or revealing the inadequacies of the Francoist social system by asking for outside help.44 Aside from this active discouragement from the Franco regime, the lack of international humanitarian support was also a function of Spain’s absence from the key international actors in the fields of relief and food aid. The most important relief organization between 1943 and 1947 was UNRRA, set up to provide aid to liberated Allied countries. Spain, which did not form part of the Allied coalition and was not liberated, was obviously excluded from its original mission. Although its post-war field of activity rapidly expanded to countries such as Italy, Austria, and even Hungary, there was never any discussion of incorporating Spain. From 1947 much of UNRRA’s material and financial resources were transferred to UNICEF, which took the lead in international food relief programmes. As a result of Spain’s exclusion from the UN and its technical agencies, Spain was again denied this support, and it was not until an agreement was signed in May 1954 that UNICEF supplies and funding began to arrive in Spain.45

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American food aid Spain was later reinstated as a major recipient of international food aid, but only after the worst of the post-war famine had passed. Thanks to its political and economic dominance of the post-war years, the United States had become the world’s major donor of food aid and relief. As such, food aid for Spain became tied up with the wider development of US–Spanish diplomatic relations, and by extension with the development of the Cold War. The Franco regime’s hostility to outside assistance rapidly crumbled with the signing of the Pact of Madrid in 1953, which immediately opened the door to large-scale food aid.46 For the United States, food packages provided an easy propaganda victory in the context of the early Cold War. But for the Franco regime, the end of the most acute phase of post-war hunger meant that food aid could be presented, not as a response to the failure of the Francoist social system, but as a normal part of an international charitable programme. One of the largest private providers of food relief in the aftermath of the Second World War was the US organization CARE. Although Spain did not feature on the organization’s radar in the immediate post-war period, discussions about the provision of food packages began to take place between CARE and the Spanish government in February 1950. However, the CARE regional director was told by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that ‘the Spanish Government was unwilling to make a direct contract with CARE because it had not asked for foreign assistance since 1936’.47 Negotiations about food packages continued intermittently over the following three years, but in the end the two parties could reach agreement only for the provision of books and academic equipment from 1952.48 Strikingly, the agreement also provided for the donation of books by the Spanish Foreign Ministry to American universities, ‘apparently’, according to the State Department, ‘in the desire to make the agreement appear aimed at an exchange program rather than simple aid to Spain’.49 In the context of the ongoing controversies about the status of Franco’s Spain within the post-war international system, the idea of foreign aid continued to meet hostility from the regime. This attitude immediately changed with the signing of the Pact of Madrid in September 1953. Just a few days later, the State Department and the US embassy began discussing plans to send Christmas food parcels to Spain.50 Unlike with the previous offer of CARE food aid, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately confirmed it would welcome the parcels. The Franco regime was keen to emphasize that these parcels were a normal part of US charitable activity,

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not a measure designed to address a specific social breakdown within Spain. A Spanish government communique explained that the American people are in the habit of preparing Christmas food packages and presents which are distributed to thousands of needy families, to help them to celebrate the holidays in an atmosphere of greater comfort and happiness. This year, through the help of the American Government, this program has been extended to include certain foreign countries, among which is Spain.51

Accepting food aid, then, only became possible in a context where the most acute phase of post-war hunger had passed, and support was required only by the kind of ‘needy families’ present in all Western states. US authorities also did not regard the packages as a response to a humanitarian crisis, but, rather, as a charitable donation to specific ‘needy’ communities. ‘While Spain does not have acute unemployment or refugee problems’, US embassy officials argued, ‘there are areas of depressed economic condition where concentrated need [for] additional food [is] known to exist.’52 Instead, the parcels were intended primarily to create goodwill for the United States and to further its foreign policy objectives. In the context of the Cold War, the donation of surplus foodstuffs was intended to demonstrate the economic and moral superiority of the Western capitalist system. In the words of one American official, food parcels were proof of ‘the ability and willingness of the free world . . . to produce at high levels and to share with less fortunate peoples the fruits of well-organized and well-governed private enterprise’. Such proof contrasted sharply with the ‘economic difficulties, low production and scarcities, and the harshness of the regimes in Russia and Iron Curtain countries’53 In total 500,000 Christmas food parcels were delivered to Spain in 1953, and a further 300,000 in 1954. The Christmas food parcels were part of the global distribution of American surplus food which had begun in 1950. In Spain they quickly morphed into the Ayuda Social Americana (ASA) programme, which provided powdered milk and food supplies to children and other groups in Spain for over a decade. The launch of the programme was directly linked to Spain’s gradual integration into the international system and the UN’s specialized agencies from 1951. It was originally the brainchild of Maurice Pate, the Executive Director of UNICEF, following his first visit to Spain in 1954.54 The aid itself was donated by the US government but was channelled through Caritas in Spain and the NCWC in the United States. It was originally intended to provide 4 months’ supply

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of milk to children in schools, but was later extended to poor families and to the sick and disabled in orphanages, homes for the elderly, hospitals and sanatoria.55 By 1956 the programme had reached over half of all parishes in Spain and over 50,000 schools, providing food to the value of 4 billion pesetas, or $104 million.56 By the time the programme ended in 1969 it claimed to have reached over 4 million Spaniards, and provided goods worth over 11 billion pesetas.57 Although Auxilio Social had some involvement with the distribution of ASA, the dominance of Caritas reflected the increased prominence of the church, as opposed to Falangist, social organizations in Spain after 1945. The sheer size of the programme dwarfed Caritas’s other activities, contributing over 60 per cent of its total budget in 1965.58 For Caritas, and for the church more generally, ASA helped to establish footholds in poor, working-class neighbourhoods where its influence was weakest. In the context of the Cold War and of the church’s mission to re-Christianize Spain, it was a weapon with which to eradicate the legacies of Republicanism and communism, and to win new adherents to the faith. In May 1958, the Caritas journal reproduced a letter from a parish priest in Girona, which encapsulated Catholic attitudes towards the ASA. In his parish, the priest wrote, lived an old man who, like most of his neighbours, was completely distanced from the church, and who ‘under the Republic hung the Communist flag from the balcony of his house whenever the occasion permitted’. When he fell ill with cancer, however, the priest had begun to provide him with ASA food supplies, and this support had gradually encouraged the man to look upon the parish ‘with more benevolence and friendliness’. When his health suddenly deteriorated, the priest visited his home and found that he had constructed a small cross from two toothpicks. Visiting again the next day, the old man insisted on receiving the sacraments, and just a day later he died. The priest was clear about the role that the ASA had played in winning over this particular convert from communism to Christianity. ‘God bless the American Aid’, he wrote, ‘which wins souls for the Lord!’59 Ultimately there were a number of different factors behind the lack of international intervention in Spain’s famine. In part it was the result of external events such as the outbreak of the Second World War, which prompted the final withdrawal of organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. More importantly, however, it was also dictated by the actions and attitudes of the Franco regime, particularly by the insistence that foreign organizations work through Auxilio Social, but also by the regime’s knee-jerk hostility to foreign

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interference and its insistence that there was, in fact, no real hunger crisis. Beyond that, it also reflected the broad international indifference to the Spanish situation throughout the period. Hunger in Spain was never a priority for Allied governments, or for the international agencies that emerged from the Allied coalition. As the end of the war approached, there were far more urgent humanitarian crises across Europe which demanded international intervention, often in countries for which the Allies bore direct administrative responsibility. Public opinion, despite, or perhaps because of, the attention given to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, was no longer focused on the Spanish situation. There were other, apparently far more urgent, and certainly less politically problematic demands for food aid which both governments and individual donors could prioritize. Hunger in Spain was not entirely unknown, but it was widely ignored. What does the Spanish case tell us about the wider development of international food aid and humanitarian assistance during this period? Perhaps the most obvious lesson is that the provision of food aid was in no way dictated by objective need. We do not know how the severity of the Spanish post-war famine compared with the other European countries that did receive international food aid during the period. But, crucially, neither did international organizations and voluntary agencies at the time. Spain was ignored, not on objective grounds, but on practical and political ones. What was crucial was not international awareness of hunger, but international attention. And attention was driven either by recipient governments and populations highlighting their own needs, or by the political or military priorities of donor countries. Postwar Allied relief was thus focused initially only on ‘liberated’ countries, but was quickly expanded to former Axis states when the Allies began to worry about the political consequences of social collapse. When food aid did return to Spain after 1953, it was as a function of both US and Spanish political priorities, and of the international Cold War context. So although the mid-twentieth century certainly witnessed increasingly coordinated global action against hunger among national governments, international organizations and humanitarian NGOs, it was a period in which food aid was driven by the political priorities of Western states as much as by objective assessments of humanitarian need. The case of Spain, a humanitarian path not taken, suggests that histories of humanitarianism need to focus beyond the organization and work of relief organizations to consider the process by which certain crises become the focus of international attention, while others do not.

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Notes 1 ‘Starving Spain’, Time, 1 September 1941. 2 Gabriel Pretus, Humanitarian Relief in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013); Eric R. Smith, American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2013). 3 Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 189–247; Thomas Davies, NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 77–122. 4 Josep L. Barona, The Problem of Nutrition: Experimental Science, Public Health and Economy in Europe, 1914-1945 (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010); Josep L. Barona, From Hunger to Malnutrition: The Political Economy of Scientific Knowledge in Europe, 1918-1960 (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2012). 5 Jessica Reinisch, ‘Internationalism in Relief: The Birth (and Death) of UNRRA’, Past & Present 210, no. 6 (2011): 258–89. 6 Johannes-Dieter Steinert, ‘Food and the Food Crisis in Post-War Germany, 1945– 1948: British Policy and the Role of NGOS’, in Food and Conflict in the Age of the Two World Wars, eds. Frank Trentmass and Flemming Just (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 7 Frank Trentmann, ‘Coping with Shortage: The Problem of Food Security and Global Visions of Coordination, c.1890s–1950s’, in Food and Conflict, 13–49; Ruth Jachertz and Alexander Nützenadel, ‘Coping with Hunger? Visions of a Global Food System, 1930–1960’, Journal of Global History 6, no. 1 (2011): 99–119. 8 Matthew Hilton et al., ‘History and Humanitarianism: A Conversation’, Past & Present 241, no. 1 (2018): e1–e38. 9 On Quaker relief efforts, see Farah Mendelsohn, Quaker Relief Work in the Spanish Civil War (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002); Daniel Maul, ‘The Politics of Neutrality: The American Friends Service Committee and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939’, European Review of History 23, nos. 1–2 (2016): 82–100. Contemporary sources include Friends Service Council, Quaker Service in Spain, 1936-1940 (London: Friends Service Council, 1941); and Donald S. Howard (ed.), Recent Relief Programs of the American Friends in Spain and France (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1943). 10 Howard E. Kershner, Quaker Service in Modern War (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950). 11 Friends Service in Spain, ‘Spain Still Needs Our Help’, 1939, Library of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain (LRSFB), Friends Service Committee archive (FSC), PAM 3/98. 12 Kershner, Quaker Service, 99–100.

154 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Franco’s Famine Maul, ‘The Politics of Neutrality’. Norma Jacobs, ‘Death in the After-War’, undated, LRSFB, FSC/R/SP/2, folder 2. Robert W. Balderston to John F. Reich, 12 May 1939, LRSFB, FSC/R/SP/2, folder 4. Alfred Jacob, ‘Report on Visit to Vich, Manlleu, Tobello, Bibas, Ripoli, Campdevanci’, 25 October 1939, LRSFB, FSC/R/SP/2, folder 2. International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain, ‘Report of Mission of the Director to Spain (April 13 – May 5th, 1939)’, LRSFB, FSC/R/SP/2, folder 4. Kershner, Quaker Service, 165. Josep L. Barona and Josep Bernabeu-Mestre, La salud y el estado: el movimiento sanitario internacional y la administración española, 1851-1945 (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2008). J. H. Janney, ‘Notes on the Food Situation in Spain’, October 1940, The Rockefeller Foundation Archives (RFA), box 11, file 66, record group 1.1. Ibid. Norma Jacobs to FSC, 26 August 1939, LRSFB, FSC/R/SP/2, folder 2. Janney, ‘Notes on the Food Situation in Spain’. Friends Service Council, Quaker Service, 16–19; Kershner, Quaker Service, 138–65. ‘Memorandum of interview of Dr. R. B. Hill with Mr. E. J. Swift and Mr. Norman H. Davis, of the American Red Cross, at Washington, D.C., December 9, 1940’, RFA, box 11, file 66, record group 1.1. María Isabel Del Cura and Rafael Huertas, Alimentación y enfermedad en tiempos de hambre, España, 1937-1947 (Madrid: CSIC, 2007). Friends’ Service in Spain, ‘Spain Still Needs Our Help’. Talbot to NCWC, 15 February 1939, American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives (ACUA), US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Office of the General Secretary, Series 1, Box 50, Folder 13. Ready to Gomá, 15 July 1939, ACUA, USCCB Office of the General Secretary, Series 1, Box 50, Folder 13. Ready to Hayes, 21 April 1944; and unknown to Stritch, 13 June 1944, ACUA, USCCB Office of the General Secretary, Series 1, Box 50, Folder 13. LRSFB, FSC/R/SP/2, folder 5. Emily Hughes to Alfred Jacobs, 28 September 1939, LRSFB, FSC/R/SP/2, folder 5. RFA, box 11, file 66, record group 1.1. McIntyre to Ready, 24 July 1941, and Carroll to Ready, 1 August 1941, ACUA, USCCB Office of the General Secretary, Series 1, Box 50, Folder 13. Kershner, Quaker Service, 109–17. On the treatment of Protestants in Franco’s Spain, see Mary Vincent, ‘Ungodly Subjects: Protestants in National-Catholic Spain, 1936-53’, European History Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2015): 108–131. On hostility to foreigners on both sides during

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44

45 46

47

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the Civil War, see Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas, ¡Fuera el invasor!: nacionalismo y movilización bélica durante la guerra civil española, 1936–9 (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2006). Alfred Jacob to FSC, 11 July 1940, LRSFB, FSC/R/SP/2, folder 5. Norma Jacobs, ‘Death in the After-War’, undated, LRSFB, FSC/R/SP/2, folder 2. Ready to Kelly, 29 April 1939, and Cardenas to Ready, 2 May 1939, ACUA, USCCB Office of the General Secretary, Series 1, Box 50, Folder 13. ‘Auxilio Social’, 1939, ACUA, USCCB Office of the General Secretary, Series 1, Box 50, Folder 13. For example, ‘Hunger in Spain’, The Times, 14 January 1941; ‘Relief in Spain a Difficult Task’, New York Times, 23 August 1941. Bonsal to State Department, 9 July 1946, The National Archives, College Park, Maryland (NACP), record group 59, Department of State, dec. file 1945–1949, series 852.5, box 6350. ‘Spanish Help for European Suffering Children’, Spain, 25 June 1946; and ‘Children of Barcelona Donate 100,000 Pesetas for Aid to the Starving Children of Europe’, Spain, 25 May 1946, ACUA, USCCB Office of the General Secretary, Series 1, Box 50, Folder 13. On the importance of the Francoist ‘social state’ to Spain’s international legitimacy, see David Brydan, Franco’s Internationalists: Spanish Social Experts and Spain’s Search for Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). J. Bosch Marín and M. Blanco-Otero, U.N.I.C.E.F (Madrid: Dirección General de la Sanidad, 1955), 15–25. On relations between the United States and the Franco regime, see Angel Viñas, En las garras del águila: los pactos con Estados Unidos, de Francisco Franco a Felipe González, 1945–1995 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003). American Embassy, Madrid, to Department of State, 13 March 1950, NACP, Record Group 59, Department of State, 1950–4 Central Decimal File, Series 852, Box 5031. ‘Copy of the C.A.R.E. Agreement with the Spanish Government’, 12 February 1952, NACP, Record Group 59, Department of State, 1950–4 Central Decimal File, Series 852, Box 5031. Daniel V. Anderson to Department of State, 7 March 1952, NACP, Record Group 59, Department of State, 1950–4 Central Decimal File, Series 852, Box 5031. Dunn to Secretary of State, 5 October 1953, NACP, Record Group 59, Department of State, 1950–4 Central Decimal File, Series 852, Box 5031. Dunn to Secretary of State, 7 December 1953, NACP, Record Group 59, Department of State, 1950–4 Central Decimal File, Series 852, Box 5031. Dunn to Secretary of State, 5 October 1953, NACP, Record Group 59, Department of State, 1950–4 Central Decimal File, Series 852, Box 5031.

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53 American Embassy, Madrid, to Department of State, 30 March 1955, NACP, Record Group 59, Department of State, 1955–9 Central Decimal File, Series 852, Box 4622. 54 Foreign Operations Administration to American Embassy, Madrid, 5 January 1954, NACP, Record Group 59, Department of State, 1955–9 Central Decimal File, Series 852, Box 4622. 55 ‘Ayuda Social Americana’, Cáritas, January–February 1958, 8. 56 ACUA, US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Office of the General Secretary, Series 1, Box 49, Folders 5–8. 57 AACNP, Jesús García Valcárcel file, ‘La Caritas de Jesús García Valcárcel y sus Relaciones con la A.C.N. de P. y el Centro de Fundaciones’, 4. 58 ‘De donde procede el dinero que distribuye Cáritas?’, Cáritas 56–7 (April–May 1965): 8–9. 59 Cáritas, May–June 1958, 17.

Part IV

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The production of autarkic subjectivities Food discourse in Franco’s Spain (1939–59) Lara Anderson

This chapter looks at the role played by food discourse in the production of autarkic subjectivities in Franco’s Spain (1939–59), in particular how it taught readers the ‘right’ approach to food in Spain’s post-war economy. If notions of self-sacrifice and a belief in Spain’s capacity to feed its own people were central to autarky, so too was a ‘taste’ for indigenous foodstuffs. Official food discourse produced readers or citizens with such tastes while also giving them a daily experience of themselves as autarkic subjectivities. Another way in which official discourse sustained autarky was through what I label ‘gastronomic patriotism’, or ‘gastronomic xenophobia’. Given that autarky was part of a broader desire to seal Spain off from outside influence,1 it follows that official food discourse produced a gastronomic map of Spain that was proudly free from external influence. This notion of Spanish food culture as pure or closed off from ‘corrupting’ foreign influence impacts not just on the contours of Spanish gastronomy, but also on individual subjectivity as Spaniards come to define themselves in these terms, too. Questions surrounding food’s materiality come up a lot in research about food, so I want to clarify from the outset that I am not writing here about food as a material object, or what people ate. Rather, I look at food discourse – or, as one scholar describes it, ‘the talk of food’.2 As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson reminds us, food discourse is universal to all cultures, given that ‘in every culture people talk and write about food’.3 Indeed, if the material object of food is valued for the way it becomes part of us, then food discourse should be seen as equally important for the role it plays in the ‘creation of [our] social worlds’,4 or in the construction of our national culture.5 It is important not to lose sight of the fact that what people write and say about food is as significant as what they actually ingest.

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Harnessing the political potential of food and food discourse is of particular importance in times of social, political and economic change.6 Representing a monumental transformation of the social and political fabric of Spanish society, food discourse, I posit here, was an integral part of the social order at the heart of Franco’s ‘New Spain’. Through food texts, Spaniards were instructed in the uptake of their place in a highly gendered, ultra-nationalist and economically and culturally autarkic Spain. Food instructions, preparation procedures, domestic manuals, descriptions of meals in literature and the media, images of dishes, accounts of national or regional food habits, information about food in official reports and domestic magazines all made explicit to Spaniards what was expected of them in a totalitarian and ultra-conservative Spain. Explaining the unprecedented control of the population wielded by the Franco regime, Michael Foucault’s writing on biopolitics sheds light, scholars argue, on how the ‘new regime achieved institutional stability and political hegemony through strict physical and psychological repression’.7 Foucault’s original discussion of biopolitics looked at the way that modern political power managed individual bodies and populations. In the area of food studies also, the term ‘biopolitics’ has been fruitful, providing us with a better understanding of how cultural representations of food and food discourses can push citizens and/or consumers into different subject positions. If government food policy is one of the ways in which people are regulated or controlled, another equally important yet less tangible area involves the cultural practices surrounding food, along with media and textual representations of food. In previous research, I have shown how food texts commissioned by Miguel Primo de Rivera’s authoritarian government and other governing bodies attempted to manage the eating body, thus functioning as a biopolitical device which linked the Spanish citizenry to the nation.8 Vexed by Spain’s economic retraso (stagnation), Primo de Rivera believed that one of the solutions to such problems lay in protectionism. A strong, protectionist National Economic Council was created in 1924 to oversee relevant governance and changes to legislation. Official food discourse – advertising campaigns encouraging the consumption of local products and foodstuffs, as well as cookery books calling for greater consumption of Spanish oranges and rice – was also used to shape consumer and citizen behaviour in ways that supported the government’s focus on modernization and economic protectionism. The daily act of eating or reading about a more modern diet was framed to encourage Spaniards to experience themselves as modern subjects.

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The Primo de Rivera dictatorship’s use of food discourse to control consumer behaviour and shape the contours of Spanish food culture would influence the Franco regime’s own recourse to such discourse. Primo de Rivera, though failing to realize many of his ambitions, ‘inaugurated policies that were to become corner-stones of the Spanish right and eventually of the Francoist state’.9 This is certainly true for Spanish food culture. During the final stages of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, official institutions commissioned food texts that would remain all but canonical throughout most of the Franco regime. Similar to the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, during the Franco regime we can view authoritarian food discourse as a potent biopolitical tool. As part of Francoist biopolitics, individuals were managed and submitted to strict discipline and appropriate behaviour, as the State promoted a stoic, patriotic, ultra-nationalist, gendered and healthy body. This served to obscure the very real experience of hunger during this time. Many foodstuffs were rationed for a number of years after the Civil War, and these rations were often not sufficient. For instance, the formal government rations only provided approximately a quarter of daily rice needs.10 Official discourse and food media converged to control the citizenry’s behaviour and thinking about Spanish food culture and identity.

Eat more oranges An important function of food discourse from the first two decades of the regime was to create a taste among readers for autochthonous foodstuffs suited to Spain’s autarkic political economy, such as oranges. In producing readers or subjects with a taste for local, rather than foreign foodstuffs, official food discourse sustained the Francoist biopolitics as individual taste was managed for the well-being of the collective body. Significant, too, was the way in which this discourse produced in readers a belief in Spain’s capacity to feed her own people, while remaining closed off to food imports. The official food discourse looked at here comes primarily from the publication Alimentación nacional (National Nutrition ), which was published bimonthly between 1941 and 1953 by the Comisaría General de Abastacimientos y Transportes (The General Commission for Supplies and Transport). The ideas contained in Alimentación Nacional found their way into the No-Dos of the time – the weekly Francoist newsreel shown obligatorily in all Spanish cinemas and the only newsreel permitted in the country – as well as into cookery books dedicated exclusively to oranges.

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Through a biopolitical lens, it is possible to view these texts about, and images of, oranges as playing a critical role in upholding Francoist governance. A range of experts, including government authorities, speak authoritatively about oranges, thereby putting into circulation a truth discourse about this Spanishgrown fruit. While biopower relies on state efforts to monitor populations, biopolitical interventions critically also require non-state actors, such as the media. Together, these different government agencies and the food media promote a discourse about food consumption that targets individual behaviour as the solution to Spain’s food problems. According to this all-encompassing discourse about food, if Spaniards put patriotism before their own individual preferences, the country will be able to remain economically and culturally ‘free’ from outside forces. Similar to official food writing during the Primo de Rivera regime, a 1943 article in Alimentación Nacional puts out a call to Spaniards to consume more oranges. During the Primo de Rivera regime, oranges were linked both symbolically and literally to the regime’s politics. If, in the early 1930s, orange consumption was used as a way to create citizens with a belief in regeneration and modernization, just some ten years later oranges would be drawn on in an attempt to produce autarkic subjectivities. The Franco regime cast the orange as the ideal produce of autarky in its attempts to create an increased appetite among Spaniards for this locally grown fruit. The shift in the symbolism of oranges is an important example of the ways in which officials appropriated Spanish food culture for broader political and cultural purposes. In both regimes, an oversupply of oranges was a driver of the ‘eat-more-oranges’ campaigns, yet the meaning attached to orange consumption varied considerably. Until the 1960s, especially during the post-war period, the Spanish economy depended on oranges and ‘during the period of European reconstruction, [the orange] became, thanks to foreign currency, a saving grace of autarkic Spain’.11 Indeed, the centrality of oranges to the Spanish economy has led scholars and journalists to conclude that it was ‘a frost in 1956 [that] forced Franco to authorize the stabilization plans that changed the country’.12 One scholar to have provided a short history of oranges during the Franco regime is Vicente Abad. Describing the official and centralized control of orange consumption and production during the early part of the regime, Abad writes in great detail about El Sindicato Nacional de la Naranja (the national orange trade union), which was officially opened on 11 July 1940 in Madrid. According to Abad, this Sindicato was the product of Falangist ideology:13 ‘The dominance of the Falangist group would be decisive when it came to configuring the internal structure and functions of the

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orange trade union, which was intended to exercise total control over the entire citric economy and adopted an interventionist attitude that affected all aspects of the same.’ The fascist and interventionist control of the citrus economy rendered the orange an ideal foodstuff of autarky, for this fruit could be cast not just as indigenous to Spain, but also as the product of the political economy of autarky itself. Indeed, commenting on the unique place of the orange in post-war Spain’s autarkic economy was El Sindicato de Frutos (the fruit trade union), which in 1949 described the orange as one of the ‘most controlled fruits within the entire national economy’.14 The political relevance of oranges to fascism was due also to the fact that during the immediate post-war period, oranges were exported to Germany as part of Spain’s war debt to the Germans:15 ‘The signing of the Hispano-German treaty at the beginning of October 1940 provided for the export of 300,000 tons of oranges, and a new marker of the Spanish authorities’ weakness, with the Nazis taking on exclusive distribution of the fruit.’ The oranges sent to Germany in the immediate post-war period represented, according to Abad, half of Spain’s orange supply, so it was necessary also for the Spanish State to ensure local consumption of oranges in the later years of the dictatorship. According to figures provided by the Ministerio de Agricultura,16 as well as statistics cited in Abad’s study, exports of oranges went down between 1944 and 1947. Given the fall in exports, it stands to reason that Alimentación nacional embarks on a campaign to increase the domestic consumption of oranges within Spain. Certainly, according to one of the early articles (from 1943) in this official food periodical, exports of Spanish oranges ‘suffer the usual limitations imposed by wartime’, which means that ‘the Spanish east experiences hours of anguish’.17 According to the article, the Spanish government will do everything possible ‘to ensure the precious fruit reaches all corners of our homeland’.18 Accompanying the article is a map of Spain replete with drawings of Spaniards patriotically consuming Spanish oranges. Such an image produces readers or citizens who see their own Spanishness or national identity as dependent on orange consumption. The function of this is twofold: on the one hand, the government seeks to support local orange growers; on the other, it seeks to produce a citizenry that understands food culture in terms of what is locally produced. Of interest, too, is Alimentación nacional’s report on a short film titled ‘La naranja’ (‘The Orange’), which ran at the Avenida José Antonio theatre. The cartoon-style film tells ‘the history of the orange up to its appearance in Spain, even noting the aggregate production figure’.19 Relevant to the view inherent to Francoist autarky that Spain should be both economically and culturally shut

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off from the rest of the world is the way in which the article deals with the film’s narration of the orange’s introduction to Spain at the time of Arab rule. According to the article, once in Spain the orange abandons ‘its exoticism and, thanks to our soil and our sun, which give it new life’ and is quickly embraced as a national treasure.20 As a fruit that grows prolifically in Spain, the orange symbolizes Spain’s capacity to feed her own people. However, in order to maintain the notion – inherent also to autarky – of Spain as culturally shut off from the corrupting forces of foreign influence, the article must first free the orange of its exotic and foreign origins. Spain’s oranges are also rendered 100 per cent Spanish through references to their ubiquity in Spanish art and literature. Alimentación nacional reminds readers of the important place of oranges in the literature of Azorín, which sought, as critics have shown, to define an eternal notion of Spanishness. Also mentioned are Joaquín Sorolla’s depiction of orange gardens in his typically Spanish landscapes, such as ‘Entre naranjos’ (‘Among the orange trees’), which he painted in 1903 for the well-known Argentine medical doctor José R Semprún. Sorralla’s painting – described as ‘a cheerful picture of a Valencian theme’21 – is important not only for what it says about the bonds of Hispanidad but also for its idyllic depiction of the culture or lifestyle associated with Spanish oranges. With Azorín and Sorolla occupying a place as canonically Spanish in the style and content of their work, Alimentación nacional casts oranges as iconic for their place in the cultural production of two such Spanish greats. The Spanish orange also features in the No-Dos. On the 1 January 1951, ‘La Naranja y su Riqueza’ (‘The Richness of the Orange’) was shown as part of Imágenes, Revista Cinematográfica. A 10-minute short film opens with images of an idyllic Spanish countryside replete with orange-laden trees. Workers are depicted happily picking this locally grown fruit, which is then sent to factories where women pack and prepare the produce for export to neighbouring European countries, such as Sweden, England, Denmark and France. The images used on the packing boxes include a radiant looking child, as plump and healthy as the orange that is being traded. As well as highlighting the health benefits of citrus fruit, the short film reassures readers that the citrus industry will bolster the Spanish economy. The individual health benefits of oranges are discussed, too, in Alimentación nacional. Oranges are cast as the ideal food of autarky, not only because they are grown in Spain but also, according to this official publication, because they have superior nutritional value. Interestingly, the aforementioned attempts during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship to lift the consumption of Spanish

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oranges spoke also of the orange in terms of medical and health discourse. If, during the Primo de Rivera era, healthy eating is linked to national regeneration and modernization, in the immediate post-war years what oranges can offer is somewhat different. Indeed, in the context of the bleak post-war years, greater orange consumption offers the promise of ‘happiness, health and life’.22 Implicit in such an image is the belief that even during the harsh post-war years, Spain’s naturally abundant foodscape will keep the nation alive, healthy and happy to boot. This health discourse is top-down, but also involves a process of subjectification as Spaniards are directed to produce themselves as healthy, happy and patriotic citizens. Attention to subjectification is crucial to understanding the relationship between biopower, food and structural inequalities. While some Spaniards in the post-war era would have been able to make healthy food choices, due to their privileged access to food, most were not. In a similar fashion to other examples of food biopolitics, vulnerable populations are disciplined to work on themselves in the name of their own health as well as the collective well-being. This discourse about oranges creates a reality whereby Spaniards are made responsible for keeping the nation healthy, as well as supporting its economy through the consumption of locally grown produce.

A taste for rice As explained by Tiago Saraiva, ‘every fascist regime of the interwar period became obsessed with projects for making the national soil feed the national body’.23 Saraiva gives examples from different fascist regimes, writing in the case of Mussolini that the Italian dictator was obsessed with freeing Italy from the ‘slavery of foreign grain’,24 while the Nazis insisted on food independence as a ‘necessary condition for both the biological survival of the race and its political independence’.25 In her study of fascism and food in the case of Mussolini’s Italy, Carol Helstosky notes that the only foods officially endorsed during such times ‘were those that could be produced within Italy’ and that beginning in 1928, ‘ordinary Italians were bombarded with propaganda that stressed the political utility and health benefits of consuming only domestically produced foods’.26 Supporting the notion that Francoist officials would have had Mussolini’s own programme of reform in mind are the many references in Alimentación

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nacional to Italy’s stoic embrace of autarky. For instance, in one of the first issues of the periodical from 1941, there is an article titled ‘Pan y Guerra’ (Bread and War), which describes how27 ‘the Italian people have welcomed the new bread-rationing measures with discipline and serenity. This is evidence of their magnificent spirit of resistance and patriotism. Today, the Italian populace can appreciate the benefits of wheat and of the economic self-sufficiency that Mussolini has achieved.’ This description not only links Francoist food culture with that of Mussolini’s Italy but also makes clear to Spaniards the fortitude of character which is similarly required of them for the greater good of autarky. Mussolini encouraged the consumption of locally grown produce, such as rice and vegetables, so as to conserve wheat stocks and end Italy’s ‘vexatious’ dependence on foreign supplies of wheat. In a similar fashion, the Franco regime also encouraged the consumption of locally grown produce, and in the official publication Alimentación nacional, references to Spanish rice are ubiquitous. In the case of Francoist food discourse, interestingly, officials do not just attempt to shape consumer behaviour and demarcate the borders of Spanish cuisine, they also codify food culture in such a way that readers have the utmost faith in Spain’s culinary self-sufficiency while remaining closed off to foreign imports of food. There were a number of reasons why Spanish officials also chose to focus on rice in their attempts to convince Spaniards of the merit of autarky. First, there was an increase in rice production in the immediate post-war period as compared to the Civil War years. While rice production dropped by around 30 per cent in 1939 as compared to the production rates between 1931 and 1934, it rose again to almost 1934 levels in 1940, with a further increase in the early to mid1950s.28 What was significant about this was the fact there had been a number of successful state efforts in the post-war period to support rice production. As one scholar explains: ‘In order to ensure enough rice to meet demand while avoiding expensive imports – that is, in order to ensure rice self-sufficiency – the authorities took over control of the cereal’s production and distribution.’29 Increases in rice production could be claimed to result not just from State intervention, but also from the mechanisms of autarky itself: the production and distribution of rice was not only centralized, but also managed according to the principles of extreme economic nationalism. Not only, therefore, did the increase in rice consumption prove Spain’s capacity to feed her own people, but it also spoke to the merits of the very political economy that the regime was attempting to promote as viable and sound. Rice was also cast as an ideal fascist foodstuff, and a culinary symbol of Franco’s autarkic political economy, because official rice producers had, since

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the outset of the regime, insisted on the unsuitability of growing foreign rice varieties on Spanish soil. Advantageous, too, was the fact that since the outset of the regime, rice had been fashioned as a political tool at the service of the victors. The federation of rice growers offered Franco a victorious rice chest and an epic story of nationalist heroism on the rice fields of Valencia at the end of the war.30 They narrated to Franco the heroic efforts of rice planters who risked their lives planting rice during Republican bombing:31 ‘The federation did what it could to obtain an exceptional price for this harvest that had cost too much – which had to be planted, weeded and sown many times under fire of the enemy’s machine guns, resulting in wounded and dead amongst those carrying out those agricultural tasks.’ This same publication, published in 1940 by the Federación Sindical de Agricultores de España, gives thanks to State efforts to increase rice production:32 Without the generous support of the Caudillo government, represented by his excellency the minister for agriculture, the reconstruction of the rice economy which we have begun this year would have been impossible . . . . Let us loyally obey the orders of the Caudillo and, by increasing our production, we consider that we are collaborating directly in the great enterprise of making our homeland greater, freer and more powerful. UP WITH Spain.

This book also contains lots of images of rice growers and rice plantations, including prints depicting Spanish rice production by well-known Spanish artists, such as Genaro Lehuerta’s Plantando el arroz (Planting Rice). Lehuerta’s print depicts four workers harvesting rice in unison, with almost dance-like movements. A romantic depiction of rice production, this image does not in any way depict the gruelling physical labour of bending down to harvest rice. All aspects of rice are thus glorified in this publication, from its Spanishness to the way it is harvested and produced. As an apt culinary symbol for the political economy of autarky, as well as proof of the State’s capacity to feed the Spanish nation, it follows that the official publication Alimentación nacional writes of the many virtues of Spanish rice. Within the context of the devastation of Spain’s post-war foodscape, which was blamed repeatedly on the Republicans, rice is held up as a beacon of hope for its capacity to feed the citizenry. This official publication reassures its readers that thanks to State efforts in certain areas of the country, ‘the rice production is heading towards pre-war levels’.33 Alimentación nacional is also quick to point out that on account of this increase in rice production, there has been ‘a change in the physical map of the country. Land that was poor, exhausted, scarcely productive has become rich, productive, and generous’.34 If readers are to

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believe official claims about the viability of autarky, they must first be convinced that Spain will be able to keep the country’s citizenry healthy and strong. The discourse about rice in this publication certainly achieves this aim, as it creates the sense that there is an abundance of this foodstuff in Spain. This official publication also emphasizes rice’s superior notional value, going as far as to describe it as ‘the base of the human diet’.35 This highly nutritious and 100 per cent Spanish foodstuff is discussed too for the ‘productive character it has given the country’.36 Equally important are the ways in which discussions of improved rice production serve to generate gratitude among the citizenry. Reminded on numerous occasions of State efforts to improve rice production after the devastation wreaked by the Republicans during the Civil War, readers are encouraged to feel grateful towards the State for its duty of care in matters of nutrition and food. Alimentación nacional’s discursive codification of rice produces readers/citizens who do not just believe in Spain’s capacity to feed its citizenry on the fruits of autarky, but who are also united in the gratitude they feel towards their country’s leaders. Spanish rice production also features in the No-Dos. On the 1 January 1955, ‘El Arroz y la Paella’ (Rice and Paella) was shown as part of Imágenes, Revista Cinemotagráfica. The short documentary starts off with an image of a paella pan positioned against the backdrop of the Valencian landscape. For most of the documentary, the viewer sees images of rice production, from its plantation to its packing and distribution to other countries. Much of the information given is of a technical nature and serves to highlight the rigorous approach taken to rice production. Francoist authorities took over control of this cereal and this No-Do documentary reminds viewers of the successful State intervention in, and centralization of, rice production. We are shown paella cooked in both domestic and professional settings in this short feature, yet beyond this the actual consumption of rice is not discussed. Rather, the grain – loaded with symbolic meaning that can be harnessed by the regime – features to position Spain as an important rice-producing nation thanks to State intervention and autarkic policies. While Alimentación nacional provides a lot of information about the increased levels of rice production across the Iberian Peninsula, it does not discuss issues relating to rice consumption. An important part of the ration system, ‘the state became the supplier of rice for consumers through the Commission of Supplies and Transport’.37 One scholar estimates that rations in the mid-1940s covered 73 per cent of bread needs, but, as a rationed foodstuff, only 25–30 per cent of daily rice needs.38 Pointing also to a less clear-cut story regarding Spain’s abundant

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supply of rice are official reports such as the following, from the Commission of Supplies and Transport:39 ‘The Minister of Industry and Commerce authorized, in the month of March 1940, the aforementioned federation to effectuate purchases of rice abroad, with the effect that orders have been given to the Spanish Institute of Foreign Currency to make the necessary appropriations.’ Although, according to Radcliff, most of the population did not have access to enough rice and Spain was reliant – as this report indicates, for the early years at the very least – on imports of rice, Alimentación nacional excludes mention of this fact. Indeed, by describing only improved levels of rice production, in the absence of any discussion of the actual levels of rice consumption or of the country’s intermittent dependence on imports, Alimentación nacional creates the impression of Spain as having a surplus of the grain, thereby silencing the very real experience of hunger. Importantly, the views about rice found in Alimentación nacional impact on its textual construction in cookery books of the same period. If rice is codified as highly nutritious in these cookery books, there is no mention of the limited amount of rice that most Spaniards had access to at this time. Likely influenced by official food discourse, these texts create readers or citizens who believe that thanks to State efforts to improve rice production, there is now an abundance of this nutritionally superior foodstuff. With little rice to eat, most Spaniards would probably have not used the recipes in the ensuing cookery books. While they, therefore, may have had little impact on cooking habits, these books can be seen, nevertheless, to take part in the production of readers with a belief in autarky and Spain’s capacity to keep the nation healthy and well-fed. The first cookery book under scrutiny here was commissioned by a state entity. A relatively modest book of some eighty pages, Valencia’s Cooperativa Nacional del Arroz’s 1947 Fórmulas variadas para guisar el arroz (Various Ways to Cook Rice) is made up of three sections: an introduction to ‘the art of ricebased cuisine’ by F. A. Gómez, the president of the national rice federation; a few pages on the health benefits of rice consumption penned by Dr Gimeno Márquez; and, finally, a section containing an array of predominantly Spanish rice recipes. As well as providing relatively simple recipes which make use of typically Spanish ingredients and cooking methods, this cookery book codifies rice as an autochthonous foodstuff, glorified for being perfectly suited to the exigencies of the Spanish physiology. The importance of rice resides, too, in fact that it is the main ingredient of a number of iconic national dishes, including paella, which has, according to Gómez, taken on the status of national dish among foreign visitors to Spain. While Gómez discusses the popularity of

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paella among foreigners, the rest of the cookery book is all but free from foreign influence. Interestingly, the only foreign recipe included in this book is ‘Arroz argentino’ (Argentine rice), most likely reflective of the warm relations between Argentina and Spain at this stage, or as a sign of gratitude to the Perón government for the assistance it rendered to Spain during the first decade or so of the Franco regime. Certainly, Alimentación nacional congratulates the trade agreement between Spain and Argentina for the way ‘it will permit us to receive a million tons of wheat, tobacco and corn in exchange for thirty thousand tons of iron and other products’.40 According to the author, the importance of this trade agreement cannot be underestimated as ‘it has immense importance for our economic balance sheet and a deep spiritual meaning that cannot be overlooked’.41 The importance of both this trade agreement and the notion of Hispanidad to the Franco regime means that the author of Fórmulas variadas para guisar el arroz produces readers or citizens who see their national identity and food culture as open to Argentine influence, in part due to a shared Hispanidad. Hispanidad was a crucial aspect of Francoist ideology, especially in the early years of the dictatorship. The concept was intended to strengthen ties between Spain and Latin America, emphasizing their shared past, language, culture, race and, especially, religion – but all in Spain’s interest. Hispanidad functioned as a ‘triple metaphor’ that conjured and linked the ideas of a national Spanish essence or soul, its crusading role for the Roman Catholic Church and the ‘Golden Age’ of colonial power that connected Spain with its former colonies in ‘Hispanoamérica’.42 Through the inclusion of this Argentinian recipe, the author gives readers permission to think about their national identity as consisting in small part of this notion of Hispanidad that was so central to the regime. Fórmulas variadas para guisar el arroz also upholds official discourse in the way it codifies Spanish rice as nutritious and easy to digest. According to the medical introduction to the book, ‘there is no foodstuff better or tastier than rice’.43 Moreover, unlike other foodstuffs, such as meat, fish and eggs, ‘rice feeds, but does not poison, nor does it load the blood with toxins or uric acid’.44 The daily diet, according to Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, was scarce in proteins,45 with the population often going hungry despite the impression given by contemporaneous cookery books. At a time when most of the animal proteins mentioned here were still very hard to come by for most of the population, casting rice – a product of Spain’s autarkic political economy – as such a superior foodstuff is an excellent example of how this cookery book sustains official discourse. Implicit in these comments about the advantages of Spanish rice is the

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belief that these protein-rich foods that are even harder to come by are somehow superfluous and that a diet rich in the fruits of autarky is more than sufficient. Importantly, such cookery books contribute to a hegemonic nutrition discourse. Their focus on the health benefits of rice links healthy eating to ideas of citizenship. The good Spaniard pursues a healthy lifestyle, because good health is a key requirement for being able to carry out one’s civic duties. In line with Foucault’s biopolitics, these cookery books frame nutrition as a personal choice, masking the fact that the Franco regime’s political economy of autarky was responsible for the situation of food insecurity faced by most of the country. As del Arco Blanco argues, we must pay attention to issues such as hunger in order to develop a sophisticated understanding of Francoist ideology, as well as the daily experience of Franco’s regime.46 Culinary discourse is particularly illuminating on such topics. These texts uphold the Francoist biopolitics because they discipline the individual body to such an extent that eating becomes about civil duty and collective well-being, rather than individual desire. Of interest also are the differences between this 1940 food text and ones that were published in the mid-to-late 1950s. Such a comparison reveals acutely how discursive codifications of rice changed according to broader economic dictates. During the 1940s, when official discourse highlighted Spain’s increased rice production, Spaniards were encouraged to view rice as an ideal foodstuff, yet as Spain was about to enter into a period of modernization and economic growth, rice ceased to be codified as a nutritionally superior ingredient. For instance, in the 1956 cookery book El arroz y el bacalao: formas tradicionales de prepararlos en España e Hispanoamérica (Rice and Cod: Traditional Spanish and Hispanic-American Recipes), we see a shift away from food discourse that directs readers to eat only rice, with the text encouraging the incorporation of other ingredients into meal plans. Indeed, the value of rice, according to these authors, lies primarily in how easily it mixes with other foodstuffs: ‘rice is one of the most commonly used cereals, and it can be cooked with almost everything that can be cooked.’ Another cookery book evincing such a change is Asunta Podesan’s 1959 El Arroz: como base de alimentación. At the time of its publication, Spaniards had access to a great deal more food than in 1947, when they were directed to embrace rice as a superfood of sorts. In line with the greater availability of other foodstuffs, Podesan describes rice as ‘un alimento muy incompleto’ (a highly incomplete food)47 and encourages her readers, primarily Spain’s housewives, to treat rice as an entrée: ‘With this little book, I intend to incorporate Spanish women into the first ranks of knowing how to cook rice, with a series of first

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course dishes.’48 By asking her readers to see rice as an ingredient that mixes well with the more expensive proteins or vegetables, Podesan’s text attempts to produce subjects or citizens who support – and enjoy – Spain’s growing economy. Significantly, to be a compliant eating subject on the dawn of Spain’s period of modernization and economic growth requires citizens to view rice as just one of many ingredients available to them, a stark contrast with earlier cookery books, which since the post-war period had treated rice as a monoingredient of sorts. What is similar, however, about earlier 1940 cookery books and Podesan’s 1959 text is the way she positions rice as an ideal foodstuff, ‘as the base of a childhood diet’.49 Food writers uphold Francoist biopolitics by emphasizing child nutrition. According to scholars of food biopolitics, ‘because children are subjects who are socially constructed as both future citizens and at risk they are thereby seen as valid sites of political intervention in the name of public good’.50 Writing about the importance of keeping children well-fed, food writers in Francoist Spain make clear that the child’s body is a shared responsibility and must be safeguarded for the well-being of the nation. It is significant that the unique and superior benefits of Spanish rice feature alongside recipes and images of portly, cherubic infants. At times of hunger and deprivation, the suffering of children takes on a particularly chilling dimension.51 Readers of these sorts of cookery books are reassured, however, of the power of the Spanish State and its autarkic political economy to provide food that is not just ‘free’ from foreign contagion, but also nutritious enough to keep children looking so well-fed.

An appetite for culinary patriotism Often, in times of national trauma, ‘threats to healthiness and purity of the body politic are identified with the “foreign”’.52 Indeed, in Franco’s Spain there was a full-scale attempt to isolate the Spanish body from foreign influence. One scholar explains how nationhood in post-war Spain referred also to ‘the exclusivity of a self-sufficient, self-controlled and autarkic vision of the state’.53 This connection between nationhood and exclusivity, which would subsequently be discussed in terms of purity, saw an emphasis on maintaining Spain’s traditions, ‘as opposed to being open to new ideas’.54 In a similar vein, Michael Richards insists, the notion of autarky was about so much more than simply the economy and could be viewed as ‘a broader desire to seal off society, to enclose Spain’.55

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Food discourse played an important function in upholding this notion of Spanish nationhood as closed off to foreign contagion in that it took part in the production of a culinary sphere that existed in isolation from other national cuisines. Texts such as La cocina clásica española (Classical Spanish cuisine, 1940–1) as well as Bosch Bierge’s Cocina regional española (Regional Spanish cuisine, 1940) codified Spanish cuisine as proudly free from the influence of other national cuisines. Through their own gastronomic patriotism or culinary xenophobia, the authors of these texts make explicit to readers the right way to think about Spanish cuisine in the context of autarky and self-sufficiency. Such food discourse produces subjectivities who are themselves patriotic/xenophobic, therefore upholding Francoist biopolitics. Alberto León’s La cocina clásica española was published either in 1940 or in 1941. The copy held at the Biblioteca Nacional has the censors’ stamp on it, although the censors’ report at the Archivo Nacional in Alcalá de Henares does not note anything of interest about this text. León’s history of gastronomy starts with a trenchant critique of the negative impact that foreign cuisines have had on the state of Spanish food culture: ‘The old and traditional Spanish cooking, as healthy and rich in delicate condiments as it is delicious in the flavour of its tasty and exquisite dishes, is suffering from the overwhelming push of foreign trends.’56 Citing Emilia Pardo Bazán, León writes:57 ‘The illustrious Condesa de Pardo Bazán states at the front of her book La cocina española antigua y moderna [Ancient and Modern Spanish Cooking] the following well-known words: “There are many dishes of our regional and national cuisine of well-deserved fame . . . which every nation has the duty to preserve.”’ If Pardo Bazán made this comment about food heritage in the context of late-nineteenth-century Spanish nation building, León positions his call to Spaniards to conserve their culinary heritage against the backdrop of autarky. His comments about Spaniards needing to protect their food heritage become part of the broader argument of autarky about the need for each nation to conserve its unique national character and spirit. La cocina clásica española discusses the unsuitability of ‘foreign rules’ to Spain’s foodscape. Foreign cooking, León writes, is unsuited to the Spanish palate and is not ‘in harmony with our climate or our geographic situation’.58 His book of gastronomy, which includes, too, ‘a series of Spanish recipes – for the most part forgotten’59 – proposes a month-by-month plan for the economical and organized housewife. León’s emphasis on seasonal cooking and using the fruits of the Spanish soil reinforces the notion inherent to the political economy of autarky that Spain requires very little foreign food aid. Finally, León positions

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his own gastronomic book of recipes against that of Ángel Muro (1839–97), who was condemned by many Spanish food writers for penning a bestselling collection of Francophile recipes, rather than taking up his patriotic duty of conserving Spanish cuisine.60 In the context of autarky, León’s culinary patriotism produces citizens who understand their duty not only to support local production and consumption but also to protect Spanish cuisine against the negative influence of vexatious foreign cuisines. Gonzalo Bosch Bierge’s Cocina regional Española – also published at the outset of the dictatorship – is as patriotic and protective of Spain’s culinary heritage as León’s food text. For Bosch Bierge, given the richness of Spanish food culture, it made no sense that French cuisine was so hegemonic in Spain throughout most of the nineteenth century. ‘These considerations’, he writes, ‘have prompted us to edit this volume in order to sing the praises of Spanish regional cuisine. We offer here only a small sample, but could multiply this tenfold, so rich is the variety of Spanish home cooking.’61 Supportive of official discourse is his culinary patriotism, bordering on xenophobic, which is exhibited here in relation to French cuisine. The language he uses is reminiscent of the discourse of autarky in that he talks about the need to protect Spanish cuisine from other cuisines and to make sure they do not penetrate the homeland. Bosch Bierge’s call to protect Spain’s culinary borders is replete with references to autarky’s broader aim of sealing Spain off from the outside world, not just economically but also culturally. His food text produces, therefore, readers and citizens who are not just patriotic about their cuisine but are also committed to the desire for isolation inherent in Franco’s political economy.

Conclusion Scholars of Francoist Spain have argued that the regime’s unprecedented cultural and political hegemony must be thought about in terms of a totalitarian biopolitics, which allowed for the control of the population through official organizations. Writers, politicians, teachers, medical professionals and historians, they argue, all took part in the production of a discourse that allowed the regime to indoctrinate the population in Francoist ideology. Addressing an important gap in scholarship, my aim here has been to analyse the ways in which food writers, food professionals, cookbook writers and official organizations discursively took part, too, in this form of control. We have seen examples of the ways in which food discourse was an integral part of the Francoist State’s hold on power. Significantly, discourse about food or

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the ‘talk of food’ is a place where people learn not just about food, but also about the expectations from them in their roles as autarkic subjectivities. Official food discourse sought to produce readers and/or citizens who upheld the principles of autarky. Through texts about food, or descriptions of food in the press, Spaniards were asked not just to consume local foodstuffs, but also to believe in Spain’s capacity to keep the citizenry strong and healthy with recourse to just the fruits of autarky. Such official discourse also produced readers and citizens who upheld the notion of Spain’s cultural isolation, a further key component of autarky. In relation to food culture, this cultural closure resulted in a fervent culinary patriotism, which I identify as a trademark feature of the food culture of the early Franco regime.

Notes 1 See Michael Richards, A Time of Silence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Word of Mouth: What We Talk about When We Talk about Food (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), xxi. 3 Ibid., xvii. 4 Ibid., xvii. 5 See Megan J. Elias, Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 6 See Elias, Food on the Page; Katharina Vester, A Taste of Power: Food and American Identities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 7 See, for example, Iván Iglesias, ‘Performing the Anti-Spanish Body: Jazz and Biopolitics in the Early Franco Regime (1939–1957)’, in Jazz and Totalitarianism, eds. Bruce Johnson, Pedro Cravinho and Heli Reimann (New York: Routledge, 2017), 162. 8 Lara Anderson, ‘A Recipe for a Modern Nation: Miguel Primo de Rivera and Spanish Food Culture’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 52, no. 1 (2018): 75–99. 9 Shlomo Ben-Ami, Fascism From Above: The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain, 1923–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 10 See Pamela Beth Radcliff, Modern Spain: 1808 to the Present (A New History of Modern Europe) (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2017). 11 Miguel Alberola, ‘La ruta de la naranja’, El País Semanal 1, no. 364 (2002): 95. 12 Ibid., 95.

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13 Vicente Abad, ‘Naranjas y autarquía (1936–1960)’, in La fruta dorada: La industria española del cítrico 1781–1995, ed. Generalitat Valenciana (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria de Cultura, Educación y Ciencia, 1996), 183. 14 Quoted in Abad, ‘Naranjas y autarquía’, 194. 15 Abad, ‘Naranjas y autarquía’, 182. 16 See A. Graciana Pérez et al., Consumo de Alimentos en España en el period 1940– 1988: Una estimación a partir de hojas de balance alimentario (Madrid: UAM Ediciones, 1996). 17 Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes, Alimentación nacional, Issue #15 5. 18 Ibid. 19 Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes, Alimentación nacional, Issue #10 4. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Tiago Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 3. 24 Ibid., 65. 25 Ibid., 71. 26 Carol Helstosky, ‘Fascist Food Politics: Mussolini’s Policy of Alimentary Sovereignty’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 9, no. 1 (2004): 5. 27 Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes, Alimentación nacional, Issue #2 24. 28 See the Instituto Nacional de Estadística’s yearly reports on rice: Instituto Nacional de Estadística. Producción de arroz, por provincias: Anuario 1932–1933. 29 Lino Camprubí, ‘One Grain, One Nation: Rice Genetics and the Corporate State in Early Francoist Spain (1939–1952)’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40, no. 4 (2010): 506. 30 See Camprubí, ‘One Grain, One Nation’, 505–6. 31 Francisco Ramón Rodríguez-Roda, Una cosecha de arroz: Ilustraciones especiales de Genaro Lahuerta y Pedro de Valencia (Valencia: FSAAE, 1940), 18. 32 Federación syndical de agricultores de España cited in Rodríguez-Roda, Una cosecha de arroz, 122. 33 Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes, Alimentación nacional, Issue #2 2. 34 Ibid. 35 Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes, Alimentación nacional, Issue #4 6. 36 Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes, Alimentación nacional, Issue #9 1.

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37 Camprubí, ‘One Grain, One Nation’, 428. 38 See Radcliff, Modern Spain. 39 Comisario General de Abastecimientos y Transportes, ‘Asuntos varios: Importacion de arroz: Federacion de industrials elaboradores de arroz’ (Madrid: Archivo General de Administración), Caja CAT (11)7 63/08213. 40 Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes, Alimentación nacional, Issue #12 25. 41 Ibid. 42 Johannes Großmann, ‘Baroque Spain’ As Metaphor: Hispanidad, Europeanism and Cold War Anti-Communism in Francoist Spain, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, no. 5 (2014): 756. 43 Cooperativa Nacional del Arroz, Libro de cocina: Fórmulas variadas para guisar el arroz (Madrid: Cooperativa Nacional, 1947), 4. 44 Ibid., 6. 45 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘Hunger and the Consolidation of the Francoist Regime (1939–1951)’, European History Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2010): 468. 46 Ibid. 47 Asunta Podesan, El Arroz: como base de alimentación (Valencia: Vicente Cortell, 1959), 7. 48 Ibid., 10. 49 Ibid., 11. 50 Kristina E. Gibson and Sarah E. Dempsey, ‘Make Good Choices, Kid: Biopolitics of Children’s Bodies and School Lunch Reform in Jaimie Oliver’s Food Revolution’, Children’s Geographies 13, no. 1 (2014): 44–5. See also Peter Anderson, ‘Madres, niños y hambre en el Madrid de posguerra’, Paper presented at Historia y memora del hambre bajo el franquismo (1939–1951) Conference, 7–8 June 2018, Granada. 51 In a similar vein, it is important to pay attention to the experiences of women in relation to hunger. As Peter Anderson notes, this requires us to consider also topics such as marital dynamics and the power of husbands over their wives: Anderson, ‘Madres, niños y hambre’. 52 Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe, eds. Gisela BrinkerGabler and Sidonie Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 15. 53 Mercedes Carbayo-Abengózar, ‘Shaping Women: National Identity through the Use of Language in Franco’s Spain’, Nations and Nationalism 7, no. 1 (2001): 78. 54 Ibid., 77. 55 Richards, A Time of Silence, 2. 56 Alberto León, La cocina clásica española (Madrid: Editorial Estudio, 1930), 7. 57 Ibid., 7–8. 58 Ibid., 9.

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59 Ibid. 60 See Chapter 3 of my monograph Cooking up the Nation in particular for a discussion of Ángel Muro’s El practicón: tratado completo de cocina al alcance de todos y aprovechamiento de sobras (1894). A bestseller, this cookery book was re-published thirty-five times, but Muro received a great deal of criticism for writing a cookery book that was all but a replica of French cuisine, rather than representative of Spanish cuisine. 61 Gonzalo Bosch Bierge, Cocina regional española (Madrid: Hogar, 1940), 4.

9

A recipe for rationing Women, cooking and scarcity during the early Franco dictatorship, 1939–47 Suzanne Dunai

Food was the foremost concern for all Spaniards during the 1940s: those who had access to food sought to control it, and those who lacked food longed to fill their stomachs with it. While Spanish society was divided between those who had food and those who did not, food – both as a physical commodity and as a discursive subject – was a unifying concern across the country. Cooking literature – publications such as cookbooks, domestic economy manuals, gastronomic texts, recipe collections and nutritional treatises became a form of political communication between the Francoist state and Spanish housewives. On the one hand, cooking literature could disseminate food policy to the general public, coercing conformity to Francoist food culture within the Spanish private sphere. On the other hand, cooking literature and the practice of preparing family meals could be a way for Spanish housewives to express their cultural and political grievances within the parameters of Francoist society, and even to develop creative cooking practices that circumvented some of the repressive food policies of the state. This chapter examines how publications offering cooking instructions and shopping strategies provided Spanish women with a means to engage in the politics of the regime through food discourse and eating habits. Within Spain’s urban centres, food practices were consolidated into a new food culture through Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War and his consolidation of power into a repressive dictatorship. Cookbook authors, domestic economists and journalists for women’s magazines set about adapting cooking literature to reflect the Spanish food situation of the post-Civil War period. Recipes and cooking instructions carried political significance for the regime’s food policy as the

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culture of Francoism promoted a specific feminine identity while suppressing deviations. Meanwhile, housewives’ comments and critiques of the food policy were echoed in publications of the time that passed through the censor and entered the Spanish public sphere for general consumption. Reciprocally, the cooking literature of the time reflects a diversity of sentiment held by Spaniards that ranged from contempt for, to collaboration with, the regime’s food policies. Cultural historians of the early Franco dictatorship have tended to focus their scholarship on the repressive elements of the victors of the Spanish Civil War and the discursive power that they wielded over the defeated population. Michael Richards refers to the culture generated by Franco, the Falange party, the church, and the military as a ‘culture of repression’ used by the dictator to consolidate control over the Spanish population.1 He claims that ‘a whole section of society was defeated and its culture prostrated by a military authority’, which led to ‘a repressive silencing both of alternative concepts of the nation and of a humane vision of political economy’.2 Likewise, Carlos Fuertes Muñoz termed the nationalist discursive production as a ‘culture of victory’. He writes that ‘through mechanisms of communication . . . a memorialization of the battles, heroes, and fallen was fostered. It created a discourse that dominated the public sphere during the war and the 1940s, although it never really went away until the end of the dictatorship. Taken together, these processes forged the “culture of victory”’.3 In both lines of scholarship, historians have relied predominantly on the cultural production of the victors of the Spanish Civil War, implying that the defeated urban culture became a blank slate for the hegemonic imposition of Francoist culture in the aftermath of the total loss of the war. Their reliance on sources published by the victors furthers this narrative of total victory and control of the population, and the documents cited in their works affirm extreme examples of repression, coercion, surveillance and terror suffered by Spaniards via the erasure or censorship of resistance to this hegemonic cultural production. However, by examining under-studied sources such as cooking literature, this chapter sheds light on often-overlooked voices within Spanish culture and society during the 1940s. Cooking literature published during the early years of the dictatorship provided a discursive space that allowed for both affirmation and inconsistency within the official Francoist food culture. As authors strove to communicate the new culinary trends of the post-civil war urban society, their engagement with Francoist food policy became documented within their instructions, recipes, and gastronomy. Cooking literature, while only corresponding loosely with the eating habits and everyday life of ordinary Spaniards, nonetheless provides useful hints and insights into the concerns,

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challenges, ambitions and goals of Spanish housewives. The food habits of the Spanish elite of the previous generation, complete with sophisticated recipes and large portions of luxury eating, were no longer possible for the downwardly mobile urban Spaniards who suffered from the economic and political hardship brought on by the Civil War and the subsequent food crisis of the early dictatorship. Publication of the cookbooks and recipes reflects some level of consumption patterns of its readership, and a close analysis of their contents can provide some insight into the daily life of Spanish housewives. Cooking literature – which includes cookbooks, women’s magazines, recipe collections and domestic economy manuals – appealed to Spanish women who could read and had disposable income to purchase the literature as a luxury good. It also appealed to women who had something to gain from the contents of the book, whether it was a culinary adventure to try a new dish, or a new arsenal of cooking techniques or budget-friendly family meals to improve their culinary repertoire. Literacy and income greatly limited who had access to these cooking guides during the 1940s, and cookbooks that were written for women were generally directed towards housewives of the middle and upper classes. Despite the large number of working-class women who sought domestic work in the aftermath of the war, charged with cooking meals for their employers, their work was largely ignored by cookbook authors in favour of the housewife, considered to be from the middle and upper classes. Cooking literature was written for both professional male chefs and housewives, but housewives were not necessarily the ones who cooked for their families. Some domestic economy manuals and women’s magazines wrote to housewives on how to direct their domestic servants to shop for food and prepare a delicious meal for the family. The working-class women who worked in these homes could then use some of their training and skills to apply in their own homes, albeit with greatly reduced resources. The focus of this chapter is on the literature written for women, specifically directed at upper- and middle-class women, since these were intended to be the dishes in the everyday eating habits in the home and potentially provide a better reflection of consumer habits during Franco’s famine. The first section of this chapter provides a panorama of the culinary culture of repression that the Franco regime implemented at the end of the Civil War in order to restrict food as a commodity and as a subject of discourse. It details two main restrictive bodies – the Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes (General Food and Transportation Commission), commonly referred to as the CAT, and the censors – which attempted to control the food habits and food thoughts of Spanish women. Franco’s consolidation of power was not complete

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at the end of the war when it came to controlling Spanish consumerism or how Spaniards cooked and ate in their daily lives. While Spaniards felt the hardship inflicted by Francoist food policy acutely through hunger and famine, they practised a spectrum of responses to food control, ranging from support, nonconformity, criticism and resistance. The next section correlates the restrictions to the scarcity and monotony of diet experienced during the early dictatorship. It uses leftovers as a lens to view both the social consequences of the famine and the public discourse permitted to be printed indirectly in the form of recipes. Franco’s food policies of the 1940s led to a monotonous diet, indicative of the general economic and cultural stagnation of Spain’s urban centres. An analysis of leftover food, both as a subject of discourse and as a form of commoditymismanagement, signals how Spaniards attempted to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the Civil War and also how Spanish resources were re-purposed within Franco’s New State. The final section addresses an anomaly in cooking discourse that broke with Franco’s culture of austerity and scarcity to provide Spanish housewives a culinary escape from the harsh realities of famine during the early Franco dictatorship. In contrast to the coping skills of survival and ultra-nationalism adopted by most cooking publications of the time, this section explains how certain cooking literature, which I refer to as ‘fantasy culinary literature’, offered Spanish women an escape from the realities of Spain’s food policies, providing a mental means of subversion against Francoist culture. While the Franco regime promoted the economic policy of autarky, inflicting a food culture of nationalism and austerity on Spaniards, fantasy culinary literature subverted the official Francoist food culture of scarcity and hunger, thereby undermining the culture of austerity imposed through autarky. While cooking literature was only a small section of the larger literary discourse of the time, a re-evaluation of the content of cooking literature suggests that Spaniards were highly engaged in politics during the early dictatorship and that how Spanish housewives cooked and served meals to their family carried political implications for Franco’s New State.

The food politics of the early Franco regime The Franco regime attempted to control both public and private spaces through the implementation of an authoritarian food policy, but the logistics of imposing a hegemonic food culture on Spain’s urban population faced many hurdles. Some Spaniards championed the Francoist victory by codifying Francoist ideology

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into food practices. As Lara Anderson points out in one of the chapters of this volume, Francoist ideology was embedded within the food discourse of the early dictatorship, from promoting Spanish-grown products such as oranges or reinforcing rigid gender boundaries between men and women.4 Other Spaniards expressed their discontent by complaining, hoping and talking about food, even when it was in short supply. Women waited outside stores for rations or sought relief through Catholic or state-run relief institutions, and they told jokes about food, complained about the consumer shortages, or shared recipes.5 As one spectator observed from the relief kitchen in Madrid, ‘From the [relief kitchen], the always-unpleasant spectacle of queues disappears into the street, beginning at one in the morning and ending at four in the afternoon.’6 While Franco declared a total victory in the Spanish Civil War, his ambitions for a unified and uniform Spanish food culture were far from hegemonic or nutritionally adequate. The devastation and destruction of the war continued even after Franco declared victory. As Michael Seidman concludes, starvation continued inside cities, with the countryside and corrupt bureaucracies misreporting and mismanaging food transportation and prices.7 As this book demonstrates, a series of famines occurred between late 1939 and 1942, and then again in 1946. During the decade of the 1940s, known as the ‘years of hunger’, Spaniards struggled to survive the food policies that brought them famine and malnourishment. Lines between victors and losers blurred quickly when it came to food, and characteristics such as class, religion and location further fissured individual experiences. Some ‘winners’ did not always have enough food to eat and some ‘losers’ were able to resist or even exploit the restrictive food policies to their own benefit as a way of undermining the regime. Spaniards from the gamut of the political spectrum suffered from food shortages or were disappointed with the food situation, leading to widespread malnutrition and hunger. As one British journalist observed with the arrival of Franco’s army in Barcelona, ‘What affects the vast mass of the population is the ghastly inadequacy of the food supply, and the soaring prices of what is available. Not only Republicans, but definitely the Fascist sympathizers, are bitterly disappointed and as hostile as they dare express.’8 Likewise, Spaniards from both sides of the Civil War found ways to resist the imposition of Franco’s restrictive food culture, most notably through participation in the black market. Historians Encarnación Barranquero Texeira and Lucía Prieto Borrego have concluded that participating in the black market was a form of subversion against the Francoist apparatus and have argued that the presence and pervasiveness of the black market undermined the legitimacy of the regime.9 Another scholar, Gloria Román Ruiz, has researched Spain’s black

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market phenomenon even further, affirming that Spaniards from both sides of the political spectrum took advantage of the grey economy and illicit food trade. She posits that Spain’s post-Civil War society had two black markets with two social consequences: those who exploited the food crisis and those who were exploited.10 Thus, Franco’s ‘total victory’ was limited in two critical ways. One, the repressive regime failed to convert the hearts and minds of Spaniards to the Francoist cause, leaving opportunities for Spaniards to resist the regime’s policies and state structures in the practice of daily life. Second, the aftermath of the war was far from a ‘winner-takes-all’ outcome. Many Spaniards suffered from hardship, hunger, unemployment and terror regardless of their politics or actions during the Civil War. An examination of discourses produced by winners, bystanders and, at times, the losers of the Civil War reveals a greater diversity of ideas and food cultures, even in Spain’s limited public sphere of the 1940s. Rather than generating a ‘culture of repression’ or a ‘culture of victory’, through discourse, non-state voices were able to provide a spectrum of support, acquiescence, nonconformity and outright resistance through cooking discourses in Spain’s public sphere. This revision also places women’s participation and actions prominently within Spain’s public sphere during the early dictatorship, since they were the targeted audience for the cooking in the home. A reassessment of Spain’s urban history of the 1940s includes women heavily engaged in the politics of the early dictatorship, and that reassessment incorporates women’s literature into public discourse. With women’s discourse came recipes, cookbooks and domestic economy manuals, all of which kept Francoist food culture from being installed fully into Spanish cities. With a wider discursive net in place, we can catch more deviations to the official narrative of Francoist culture. With the inclusion of cooking literature, Spain’s public sphere of the 1940s becomes more complex and more resistant to Franco’s cultures of ‘repression and victory’. With Franco’s consolidation of power and a regime of repression established to intervene in the daily lives of Spaniards, two bureaucratic entities were tasked with controlling food within Spain: the CAT controlled the production, distribution and consumption of food commodities; and the censor controlled the production and circulation of cooking literature, thereby controlling the food discourse permitted within the Spanish public sphere. Together, the two bureaucracies aimed to control how Spaniards thought about food and ate food under Franco’s ‘New State’.11 The CAT limited the amount of food that could be bought at a store, performed checks at the train stations and highway entrances to the city to regulate the amount of food brought in from the countryside, and

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implemented a rationing system to control how much each Spaniard was allowed to eat.12 The censor prohibited the publication of material that was considered anti-Catholic, anti-fascist, anti-war or against the Axis powers.13 The CAT was formed to organize the distribution of resources to the conquered population during the war, but evolved to incorporate larger provisioning projects of the Franco regime.14 In many ways, the CAT epitomized the totalitarian aims of the newly formed Francoist state bureaucracy to manage food as a means to control the Spanish population. The ministry was initially developed to combat illicit food production and sale through the black market, but with Franco’s consolidation of power in 1939, its duties were expanded to regulate food commodities for the entire country.15 The organization regulated the prices of consumer goods and controlled transport of food from one town to another, the price it was allowed to be sold at, where it could be sold, the day and time that food vending could occur, and how much of any product people could buy. The ministry instituted the country’s rationing system, determined by region and commodity and distributed initially by household but later by individual ration cards.16 In theory, the CAT possessed totalitarian control of the knowledge of food commodities in that the organization was tasked with generating reports on the quantity of food produced in Spain, where it was consumed, and import and export records for commodities. While the black market did pose several health threats to Spaniards, the power given to the CAT to monitor urban movement and consumption patterns went beyond the hazards of the black market and significantly encroached upon how Spaniards lived their daily lives within cities. For example, lunch had to be served before 2.30pm and dinner before 9.30 pm.17 It was illegal to puree different kinds of beans or peas together because the CAT passed an order that soups could contain no more than one type of legume.18 Likewise, it was illegal for the smell of cooking food to waft into public spaces or for cooking to be seen from the street.19 By the end of 1939, CAT embodied Franco’s food policy to urban Spaniards. The CAT had the full backing of the Francoist government, the Spanish military, the Civil Guard and local authorities to enforce its regulation of consumer goods, and the organization required a lot of resources to implement its regulations. Although other governmental entities also influenced how Spaniards acquired food – the Ministry of Agriculture regulated farming and ranching while the Restaurant and Hotel Syndicate regulated dining establishments – these departments acted to further the reach of the CAT into the consumer habits of urban Spaniards and their everyday eating. The purpose of state intervention into the food supply was justified in the mission of the CAT to prevent scarcity

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of goods during and after the war.20 Yet, for many Spaniards, it created a dependency on the state for the most basic of living necessities and criminalized alternative strategies for survival. In terms of shaping the foodscape of Spanish cities, the CAT had four points of intervention into the practice of eating in everyday life: the organization determined what was a primary necessity for Spaniards, it set prices and profit margins for consumer goods and implemented rationing if a good would be in high demand for its price or consumption value, and it prosecuted crimes that were against the mission and policy of the CAT. No singular organization within Franco’s government structure had a greater effect on how Spaniards interacted daily with food through shopping, cooking and eating. The Francoist state censor, similar to the CAT, tried to intervene extensively into Spanish life, but censorship was deployed in a very uneven way, often turning a blind eye to women’s cooking material. Part of the reason for this was the professionalism by which gastronomy, even within the home, was valued by the Spanish State. Cookbooks were considered technical manuals for both male professional chefs and female home cooks, so authors who were banned from publishing other kinds of materials21 were able to publish their cooking instruction manuals and recipe books.22 Likewise, regional languages were banned from most forms of publications during the dictatorship, but technical manuals were allowed to be printed in regional languages because of their professional worth.23 Thus, the famed chef Ignacio Domenech was able to publish and reprint editions of the instructional cookbooks La Teca: La veritable cuina casolana de Catalunya (La Teca: The True Home cooking of Catalunya) in Catalan and La Cocina vasca (Laurak-Bat) (Basque Cuisine) in Basque.24 Although censorship forced Barcelona to change street names from Catalan words to Castilian words, entire cookbooks made it to print despite the watchful eye of the state censor. But that is not to say that cookbooks were a place of free speech for authors, as many cookbooks were barred from circulation by the Francoist censor as well. Seemingly harmless books such as Manual de cocina eléctrica (Cooking with Electricity Manual), a book that instructed women how to use an electric stove, and 365 Recetas de cocina práctica (365 Practical Cooking Recipes), a cookbook with a recipe for every day, faced at least initial censorship by the state press.25 Even cookbooks that appeared to affirm the values of the regime were censored occasionally, as was the case with the cookbook La Cocina de vigilia (Cooking for Lent), a collection of recipes for religious fasting, and Alberto Leon’s La cocina clásica Española (Classic Spanish Cooking), a book that took pride in Spain’s national culinary heritage.26 Nonetheless, of the surviving censorship records for

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cooking material housed in the Spanish archives, most cookbooks were initially rejected by the censors due to incomplete file submissions and were eventually allowed to be published in Spain.27 One censor report sums up the attitude of the Francoist state to cooking literature well. When reviewing Francisca Bolugas’s domestic economy manual Hogar in 1941, the censor responded with ‘Documental value: none’ but ‘politics: traditional and Catholic ideology’, so the book was allowed to be published.28 Despite the ability to control food discourse through the censor, many cooking publications were printed without incident because they were deemed as unthreatening to the Francoist state. Because cooking literature was marginalized by the policing of the regime, authors and readers enjoyed some level of autonomy in their discourse. The censor’s definition of permissible and prohibited cooking literature was erratic at best, providing avenues for some authors and publishers to express a spectrum of opinions from political non-conformity to outright criticism within some publications. Spanish media was dominated by affiliates of the Franco regime, and the Women’s Section, Falange, and the Catholic Church were the main producers and controllers of media in the 1940s. From magazines to textbooks to radio programmes, the regimes’ so-called ‘families’ projected their ideology into leisure, education and news. Independent presses still existed, but the authors and publishing companies faced the threat of censorship restrictions. Some appropriated the language of Francoism in order to express their ideas, employing themes of traditional gender roles, Spanish nationalism or Catholic morality to contextualize their views within the dominant discourses of the time. Echoes of the regime’s rhetoric within independent publications could signify several different motivations: a fear of the censorship and reprisals for non-conformity, an agreement at least in part with the ideologies of the Franco dictatorship or an opportunity for their writing to appeal to Spaniards who did agree with the regime. Within this literary world of the 1940s, everyday life continued, and Spaniards consumed print culture as a form of political engagement with the New State. Despite the opportunity for discursive diversity afforded by haphazard censorship for cooking literature, it should be stressed that cooking literature was, nonetheless, a very small genre in relation to other printed materials of the time, and the publications had a very limited readership. Food discussions embedded within cooking literature were heavily stratified by class, and abysmal literacy rates and limited economic means greatly restricted the reach of many publications directed towards women. Nonetheless, discussions of food availability, prices and recipes formed part of a larger political discussion and

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engagement with the regime’s policy among middle- and upper-class women. Women’s magazines catered to the Spanish housewife’s worries about dinner and her struggles with securing all of the ingredients on her grocery shopping list. Both male and female authors published cooking literature for a range of cooking levels from novice to professional that stretched from modest to wealthy households. Cooking literature of the post-Civil War era adapted to the culture of scarcity and poverty that was rampant across Spanish cities. Short, serial cookbooks became the common form of printed cooking instruction as women sought recipes for ingredients specific to what they had available. Whereas prior to the outbreak of the war, Spanish cooking literature had tended towards large, comprehensive culinary tomes that offered complete guides to cooking,29 limitations in publishing and the reduction of expendable income to buy cookbooks caused a shift in cookbook publication to smaller compositions that could be bought piecemeal as a household budget allowed. These smaller instruction manuals were printed on cheaper, thinner paper and often contained only black and white images if any pictures were provided at all. The publication of cooking literature adapted to the scarcity and poverty of the time in an attempt to become more affordable for housewives of the upper and middle classes. But even many members of these more affluent classes did not have expendable income for luxury goods like cookbooks. In times of desperation, the cookbooks and recipe collections could be used as fuel for the stove so that the family could eat. One cookbook even provided a recipe for turning old paper into kindling blocks.30 Thus, the cooking literature of the 1940s captured aspects of the poverty and desperation of Spanish society during the early dictatorship.

Franco’s leftovers: Re-creating monotony of the meal In the aftermath of the Civil War, it was necessary for Spain to take the remnants or ‘leftovers’ of the war-torn society and cities and rebuild the country. Foodways were slowly reconstructed through Francoist land redistribution programmes,31 and roads and railways were slowly rebuilt to transport food from the countryside to the city. The ‘leftover’ Spaniards – the ordinary people who survived the war – attempted to rebuild their lives through the rubble of homes and businesses of their bombed-out neighbourhoods. Also ‘leftover’ from the war were social divisions, mistrust and opportunism, all of which became integrated into post-Civil War society. The social, political and

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economic wounds of the war would take decades to heal, and cooking with leftovers took on a symbolic role in which food was re-purposed for a new meal, a new family and a new Spanish society. Similarly, Spaniards re-purposed their jobs, businesses and lives to align with the new requirements of the Franco dictatorship. What followed were years of economic and social stagnation in rights and progress.32 This stagnation could be seen in the Spanish diet, as many Spaniards complained of a monotonous and boring diet, the leftovers of the war. These political issues and circumstances of the early dictatorship can be seen through the cooking literature published during the early Franco dictatorship. Creative cooking with leftovers helped to mask the monotony of a meal and it also helped to stretch scarce ingredients into multiple dishes for the family. The dual demands of eating everything that was available when it was available created a new need for leftovers. Food was too essential to be thrown away, but the Spanish family did not want to eat the same meal over and over again. Hence, Spanish housewives sought recipes to create new dishes with the same ingredients as well as how to use leftovers in new ways. Cookbooks and magazines accommodated this demand by printing recipes and articles that instructed Spanish consumers to consume more with less variety. This section begins by describing the policy that generated such monotonous diets, followed by how the literary culture adapted to the demands of the policy. Franco’s food policy created a stagnation in eating habits, coinciding with the stagnation felt by Spaniards in the realms of economics, culture and international relations. A study in how Spaniards coped with the stagnation and monotony – even if only in terms of food – can demonstrate the social engagement of Spaniards with their circumstances after the war and how they envisioned the nation moving forward. Thematic cookbooks, recipe collections and cooking articles helped with the social problem of hoarding that was endemic in post-Civil War Spain. A government ordinance passed on 1 April 1938 mandated that families could stockpile only up to 2 months of food per person in their homes and anything more would be considered hoarding and punishable according to the law.33 Obviously, such an invasive regulation was near impossible to enforce due to its subjectivity, but some Spaniards, fearful of the terror and violence imposed by Franco’s New State, still attempted to abide by the restrictions of the law. In the worst moments of the Spanish famine, the CAT clarified the limitations on food storage in 1941 with the following guidelines for food to be allocated per person:

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2kg of sugar, 0.8kg of rice, 0.25kg of legumes, 1-2 packages of pasta, 0.75kg cereal or cereal products, 0.8kg cooking fats, 0.8kg of oil, 2kg of flour, 0.4kg of salt, 20 eggs, 0.5kg of sweets, 0.5kg of honey, 0.5kg of nuts, 0.5kg of dried beans, 0.2kg of dry bean soup, 0.4kg of preserved meat or fish, 0.5L of condensed milk, 2 bars of soap, and 1 litre of lighter fuel.34

From these parameters, Spanish women stocked their pantries according to the shelf life of food, the availability of foodstuffs, the prices of goods and the restrictions on food storage placed by the government. Spanish women coped with market fluctuations as best they could, and some Spanish women ignored hoarding restrictions to provide food for their families. If a product went on sale or was in abundant supply at the market, desperate women would have bought as much as they could afford or carry, regardless of the restrictions imposed by the CAT. There is ample evidence from arrest records that Spanish women largely ignored hoarding laws. One creative way to circumvent hoarding laws was to transform the illicit ingredient into a dish or meal before they got caught. For example, Spanish women might have been limited in the amount of meat that they could keep in their home, but if they cooked the meat into a stew, they were no longer in violation of the hoarding laws because the law regulated quantities of meat, not stew. Likewise, Spanish housewives might have stocked up on eggs, but they could quickly cook them into an omelette before they were accused of hoarding, making their contraband uncountable. Eventually the CAT admitted its defeat with regulating eggs, choosing to restrict egg consumption in shelled form, but turning a blind eye to egg regulation when they were used in a recipe like mayonnaise, omelette or egg salad.35 Despite the efforts of the Francoist government to control the daily actions of Spaniards, and despite the efforts of the CAT to regulate food habits and consumerism, the practice of everyday life, especially the acts of cooking and eating, eluded the surveillance and repression of the authoritarian regime. While there is little documentation of the kinds of ingenuity Spaniards could use to circumnavigate the restrictions imposed by the CAT, the specificity of some of the regulatory measures suggests that meal-making was a common way to bypass food restrictions. In 1943, the CAT limited the amount of meat and the quantity of bread that could be made into a sandwich,36 suggesting that at least some Spaniards attempted to increase their meat and bread rations by combining the two regulated commodities into sandwich form. With the transformation of an ingredient into a meal, Spanish women could circumvent the restrictive food policies. Yet, this strategy could also lead to a lot of leftovers.

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The law explicitly limited the quantity of foodstuffs that a consumer could buy and keep in the home, but said nothing of prepared food or variations to the regulated staple. Hiding regulated ingredients into meals was a creative way to avoid the pantry restrictions and a useful way to conserve fuel that too was irregular in its arrival to the cities. The Falangist women’s magazine Medina published a helpful article for housewives on 5 November 1944 entitled, ‘You can do many things by cooking with leftovers.’37 With leftover cocido, a housewife could prepare a hearty beef stew or a beef hash, and with leftover roasted veal a resourceful housewife could prepare croquettes or a casserole.38 It should be stressed, however, that suggestions for leftovers were not common in the 1940s because of an overabundance of the food in the average Spanish household, but they occurred as a consequence of the irregularity of food distribution to the city. Nor were recipes for leftovers published and circulated because Spanish housewives wanted to cook larger meals. There was a popular saying of the time: ‘Reheated stew is better given to the devil’,39 suggesting that leftover foods were unfit for consumption by the family, or inedible. Far from being a desirable eating practice, eating leftovers was necessary for survival in the scarcity that plagued Spanish homes in the 1940s. One cookbook that captured the frustration of food writers and chefs alike was the cookbook entitled Las Sobras: Las 125 Mejores recetas para preparalas (Leftovers: The 125 Best Ways to Prepare Them), which provided readers with several recipes for the use of leftover fried meat, cooked meat, game, fish, vegetables, dry bread, chicken and offal.40 The cookbook assumed that the reader had already prepared more traditional dishes – fried fish, cocido and leftover omelettes, for example – and provided suggestions on how to add sauces, noodles, or vegetables to make new variations to the dish. Bernard de Ferrer engaged the problem of a monotonous diet by both embracing it through the recipes and rejecting it through subtle variation in each dish. On the one hand, creating cookbooks dedicated to only one specific ingredient affirmed the problem of monotony in diet in everyday life. Yet, providing the reader with over one hundred different styles and techniques for preparing a single ingredient into a tasty new dish challenged the government’s food restrictions that produced the monotony. Spaniards might have been limited to beans, fish or soups in their everyday food options, but Bernard de Ferrer’s series offered some escape from a boring meal plan through different variations to the same ingredients. Food made its way to the city in bursts of provisioning followed by days, weeks or even months of scarcity. The food supply and prices of staple ingredients varied on a monthly basis within the municipalities and the rationing of key ingredients varied monthly as well. In the practice of everyday life, food could

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sell out in a store within a few hours,41 as women bought food because it was available and not for consumer preference or with a particular dish to cook in mind. Spaniards had to adapt their diet to the irregularity in the availability of foods. Social historians have correlated the irregular food provisioning of the Spanish population to the adoption of the practice of monotonous diet practices. In Vigo, for example, Antonio Giráldez Lomba found that the Galician diet relied heavily on seafood because of its connection to the coastal supply.42 Encarnación Barranquero Texeira and Lucía Prieto Borrego observed in the case of Málaga that the diet became more monotonous the further inland Spaniards lived.43 In an effort to cope with the dissatisfaction of a monotonous diet, several recipe collections offered solutions to spice up an ingredient or to apply a new cooking technique to a dish to make it seem new and tasty. Women’s magazines were another important source for women providing advice on how to engage the problems of a boring diet. They provided cooking tips based on the availability of different ingredients that were either cheap, in season or had a long shelf life in the home. The magazine Y offered Spanish women eighteen variations of recipes with potatoes in their article, ‘La Patata. La reina de la cocina’ (‘The Potato: The Queen of the Kitchen’).44 The CAT considered the potato a success story in its rationing policy, detailing in a later report how the initiatives for growing potatoes in 1939 led to the abundance of the food throughout the 1940s.45 For several years after this food article was published, potatoes were still a fundamental staple of the Spanish diet as the Spanish famine continued. The women’s magazine provided Spanish women with recipes for potatoes without cooking oil, potato salad, stuffed potatoes, stewed potatoes with almonds, potato dessert, and steamed potatoes in their featured article, ‘!Hoy tenemos las patatas!’ (‘Today we have potatoes!’)46 Potatoes were particularly important to the Spanish diet as they were cheap, versatile and had a long shelf life in the home. In 1946, when VENTANAL published its article on potatoes, the region of Madrid received 5,449,468 kilograms of potatoes that year (5,189,893 kilograms more than its reception of chickpeas for the year, the largest quantity of legume delivered to the capital).47 Regular potatoes for household consumption were priced at 1.25 pesetas per kilogram from January through May of 1946, deregulated during the summer, then reduced in price to 1.20 pesetas per kilogram for the months of September to December.48 Specialty potatoes such as yellow, red, white, new and Dutch potatoes were deregulated the whole year as a specialty product.49 When regulated, prices for potatoes stayed consistent, making them an easy item for a housewife to budget for her family. Months of deregulation of potatoes meant that the food was more likely

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to be available, and women could depend on the food staple’s availability in the stores. While some variation was available to Spanish families through different varieties, in general, potatoes along with other ingredients created a monotonous foodscape in Spain’s cities. Franco’s food policy created ‘boom or bust’ cycles of food provisioning within Spain’s urban centres. At times, truckloads of food such as potatoes, frozen meat or fish arrived to Madrid, but at other times these goods were hard to come by in the city. When food was available, Spanish housewives bought as much as they could, at times surpassing the regulated limits placed on household food storage. To accommodate the sporadic arrival of food, Spanish women learned how to modify their cooking style to accommodate not only the seasonality of staple ingredients but also the food crises that were endemic in city centres of the early dictatorship. Housewives negotiated the restrictions in the marketplace on what they could buy, the economic restrictions on price-setting and the restrictions on food storage that were dictated by law.

Those who can’t eat it, write It: Fantasy in cooking literature While Spaniards coped with the scarcity and monotony of meals during the 1940s famine, cookbook authors adjusted their recipes and culinary instructions to engage in the politics of the food shortage. As the previous section demonstrated, one response to the food situation was to problem-solve, providing tips and tricks to housewives to overcome the paltry food supply in the city. Another response was the complete opposite: to provide housewives a culinary escape from the economic realities of the post-Civil War Spanish cities through fanciful recipes that transported them to a different place and time. This section offers an explanation for the popularity of unrealistic, fanciful recipes that were printed and circulated in Spanish cities during the 1940s. In stark contrast to the very real hunger that many Spanish families faced, some cookbooks of the time promoted impossible recipes that subverted the food policies of the Franco regime. Whereas actual consumption of these recipes was impossible for most urban Spanish families during the time, largely due to the imposition of the economic policy of autarky (ultra-nationalistic economic selfsufficiency), some recipes of the time offered Spanish housewives a discursive taste of other countries and cultures. Many of the ingredients for these recipes were not available within Spain’s devastated cities where many of the cookbooks were published, but that did not stop cookbook authors from including the

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foods in exotic recipes from war-torn nations or describing recipes of peace. This genre of cooking literature presented urban housewives with alternatives to the realities of the Francoist foodscape imposed on Spanish cities. Regardless of whether the recipes could be cooked or not, these recipes existed in print, and therefore could be read and shared among Spanish women as part of the food discourse of the dictatorship. Cooking literature scholars Lara Anderson, Ismael Díaz Yubero and Matthew Wild have demonstrated how food shortages and scarcity, produced by the policies of the Franco regime, were expressed in cooking literature of the 1940s.50 While scarcity and austerity were certainly the dominant theme of cookbooks of the time, scholars have largely overlooked the persistence of outlier recipes of opulence or international cuisine that contradicted the social and economic realities of urban Spaniards of the time. A holistic examination of cooking literature of the period reveals much more diversity in recipes and imaginings of Spanish cuisine. The popular hunger for certain types of food became embedded within the culture of the 1940s, and the longing for certain freedoms and experiences could be expressed through recipes. Recipes provide step-by-step instructions that are intended to take the reader from one situation to another, cumulating in an imagined final dish.51 Recipes can be consumed by both the reading of the instructions and the preparations of them, and some recipes are not intended for physical consumption. Only some recipes and food articles published during the 1940s addressed the very real social conditions of shortages and monotony. Other recipes provided Spanish housewives with an imaginary alternative to the reality of the food culture created by Franco’s food policy. Although the regime greatly limited Spaniards’ ability to consume certain dishes through the circumstances under the autarkic food policy, cooking literature that provided an idealized or imagined alternative food culture persevered during the hardship of the early dictatorship. One genre of literature that gained popularity during the time is what I identify as ‘fantasy culinary literature’. ‘Fantasy culinary literature’ refers to recipes and food stories written for their reading enjoyment and not necessarily for physical consumption as meals. Literary scholar Janet Theophano theorizes that dishes are first ‘tasted’ in the imagination, and are often more fanciful than real.52 Fantasy recipes are specifically written to provide entertainment value to the reader and suggest an alternative vision or imagination beyond what is reasonably possible. Similar to other fantasy genres in novels and movies, many of the cookbooks and recipes published during the early Franco dictatorship, I argue, can be categorized as a form of fantasy literature. This section analyses the

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characteristics of these ‘fantasy recipes’ that provided an alternative to Spain’s social reality, even if the dishes existed solely in the minds of Spanish housewives. Rather than affirming aspects of Franco’s food policy during autarky, these recipes were written to create an imagined alternative to autarky’s veneration of isolation, self-sufficiency, austerity and sacrifice. These recipes provided women with step-by-step instructions to reimagine and recreate an urban foodscape different from Franco’s New State, and some women consumed their nonconformity to the regime’s food policies through fantasy cuisine. Despite the control of food through the CAT and the control of recipes through the state censor, the Francoist state was unable to control the minds and imaginations of Spanish housewives. One example of fantasy cooking literature was the publication of recipes that represented other cultures and places outside of the confines of Spain’s policy of isolationism imposed by the economic policy of autarky. With Spaniards’ mobility greatly restricted due to autarky and the circumstances of the world war, international cuisine became one form of fantasy literature of the time. During the dictatorship, Spanish women could receive a driver’s licence or passport only with the approval of their husband or father, or with the completion of the Social Service requirement through the Women’s Section of the Falange.53 The political restriction on women’s international travel, along with the severe economic limitations that would inhibit international tourism, trapped many women within their communities with little access to the larger world. Although Francoist culture depended on women’s work within the home,54 fantasy culinary literature allowed Spanish housewives to escape the private sphere and enjoy the flavours of the world. One such writer was Genoveva Bernard de Ferrer, who included within her cookbook series a cookbook entitled Platos típicos de la cocina internacional (Typical Dishes from International Cuisine) that was published in Barcelona in April 1947. She divided the book according to the recipes from Germany, the United States, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Hungary, India, the United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain and the Basque Country.55 The recipes ranged from ‘ensalada yanqui’ (Yankee Salad) to ‘espinacas a la francesa’ (French Spinach) and offered an opportunity for readers to imagine a meal from another place and taste. Bernard de Ferrer acknowledged that the exotic ingredients and recipes in the book would seem somewhat convoluted or difficult for a Spanish housewife to follow.56 She stressed in the prologue that the intent of the book was not to overwhelm the reader, but to provide a guide of small variation to everyday cooking that could spice up the

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daily menu. On the one hand, some of the dishes called for simple and available ingredients that would have been conducive to the food situation in Spanish cities for upper and middle-class households, such as the French recipe for lima beans with ham.57 On the other hand, some of the dishes, such as those that included Russian caviar, would have been possible only with the black market, and even then they would not have been prepared and served in most urban households.58 The author occasionally presented the dishes to the reader in the original language, which was the case for the recipes for ‘rizotto’ (risotto) from Italy, ‘Irish stew’ (which was noted as being a popular dish in English-speaking countries), ‘malakoffs’ from Russia, ‘pot au feu’ (pot on the fire) from France and ‘fondue au fromage’ (cheese fondue) from Switzerland.59 Not only were the flavours a representation of the foreign cultures, but the languages of the recipes presented an authentic international experience as well. The cookbook promoted urban cosmopolitanism and a worldly culture that challenged the ultra-nationalism and isolationism representative of autarky. Whereas Francoist culture attempted to isolate and venerate Spanish cuisine above that of other countries, this small collection of 125 recipes subverted Francoist food culture in favour of international understanding and participation. The women’s magazine Menaje: para la mujer y el hogar (Household: For Women and the Home) dedicated an edition of their publication to international cuisine in November 1940. The recipes provided its readership with a brief culinary trip around the world that included Italy, Germany, France, Japan, Russia and England.60 Such a world tour could never have been possible in these deeply embattled countries at the time of publication. The dishes described in the magazine provided culinary snapshots from countries ravaged by the Second World War, facing their own dire food shortages and rationing systems.61 Instead of being a destination or a physical location of escape, these recipes existed only in the minds of the women who read them. The recipes offered an idealized representation of an outside world, a different culture and nation that did not really exist, especially not in Europe at the time. Another cookbook series of the early 1940s, Biblioteca Menaje para la mujer y el hogar (Household Library for Women and the Home) attempted a similar special edition for international cuisine in 1941, but it was never published as a volume separate from its popular magazine series.62 These recipe collections only represented an interpretation of a foreign culture, but still provided their readership with an alternative to Spain’s culture of autarky and national isolation. Recipe ideas from other countries provided the readers with a fantasy of what it was like to travel to another country.

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Fantasy cooking literature provided Spaniards with a means of escaping the circumstances of the early dictatorship through the imagination of fanciful yet unobtainable dishes. Cooking literature published in the 1940s that celebrated international diversity and participation appeared in stark contrast to the culture of austerity, isolation and scarcity imposed by Francoism and the economic policy of autarky. Whereas Franco’s diplomacy during the Second World War hindered Spaniards’ opportunities to travel abroad and explore different countries, some cooking literature of the time treated Spanish housewives to descriptions of food recipes and culture from faraway places. Franco’s policy limited women’s ability to travel, but some recipes acted as a type of culinary passport for them to learn about other cultures and societies through their food. And when Spanish women were able to cook these dishes or share these recipes with their friends and family, they took their family and friends on the culinary journeys as well. The culture of autarky supported nationalistic sacrifice in the practice of everyday life, but some cooking literature of the time rejected such limitations to the imagining of cuisine.

Conclusion Cooking literature of the early dictatorship engaged many aspects of Spanish society and culture, including its politics. Opinions of veiled political critique or non-conformity were written into many of the recipes, cookbooks and culinary literature of the time. Cooking literature was essential for Spanish women to cope with the social implications of Franco’s New State and the food shortages that ensued in the aftermath of the Civil War. Upper- and middle-class housewives used cooking literature as an escape from the pressures and demands of preparing daily meals in times of scarcity. They communicated political issues to Spanish housewives, ranging from autarky to hoarding, shortages to black market, national isolation to diplomacy. The cooking material provided Spanish women with an avenue to engage in the politics of the regime, and the broad literature of the time reflects a wide spectrum of acquiescence, non-conformity and resistance to Francoist food culture. A genre of fantasy culinary literature emerged to provide middle-class Spanish women an avenue to escape the restrictions imposed by Franco’s economic policy of autarky. Even if they only existed on paper and in their minds, the recipes provided women with a world view that contrasted greatly with Spain’s international relations during the Second World War and the Cold War. Other

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forms of coping mechanisms provided suggestions and remedies for the culinary stagnation that was a direct consequence of the economic stagnation under autarky. Cooking authors met the demand of Spanish housewives to provide resourceful, new creations to combat the complaints of a monotonous diet. The rationing system and food policies of the Franco regime placed heavy restrictions on the quantity, quality and price of foods available to urban Spanish families, but many of the cookbooks, recipes and food articles of the time provided women with ways to circumvent the culinary consequences of the government food policy. Similarly, as the government urged Spanish families to adopt a culture of austerity and resourcefulness in their consumption practices, cooking literature aided Spanish women in finding adequate ingredient substitutes in their everyday cooking practices. If Spanish housewives followed one of the recipes in a cookbook or magazine, it was the food policies enacted by the Franco dictatorship that pushed them to learn new ways of cooking meals for their families. A reassessment of cooking literature reflects not only cultural aspects of Spanish society of the time - scarcity, nationalism, and austerity - but also cultural aspects that were at times independent or contradictory to Francoist food culture, offering Spanish women an escape from their circumstances or a form of resistance to the food policies imposed by the CAT. Examination of the recipes and the cooking literature published during Franco’s famine and the early Franco dictatorship suggests that Spanish women were far from being apolitical, despite the postCivil War repression and terror of the Franco regime, and their confinement to the home under strict gender norms. With the politicization of food during the Civil War and the subsequent food crisis, Spanish women expressed their appetite for politics in the food choices and the food literature that they consumed.

Notes 1 Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1. 2 Ibid., 1 3 Carlos Fuertes Muñoz, Viviendo en dictadura. La Evolución de las actitudes sociales hacia el Franquismo (Granada: Comares, 2017), 31. 4 Also: Lara Anderson, Food & Francoism: Food Discourse, Control, and Resistance in Franco Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 28, 70.

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5 Suzanne Dunai, ‘Food Politics in Postwar Spain: Eating and Everyday Life during the Early Franco Dictatorship, 1939–1952’ (PhD Dissertation, University of California San Diego, 2019), 258. 6 ‘Cocina de Hermandad 2, Calle Gongora 5 (Distrito Hospicio) Madrid, 12 enero 1939’ Auxilio Social, departamento central de Auxilio de Invierno. Archivo General de Administración. Fondo Auxilio Social, Caja 3 (122) 1704. 7 Michael Seidman, Republic of Egos: A Social History of the Spanish Civil War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 239. 8 Franco in Barcelona (London: United Editorial Ltd., 1939), 22. 9 Encarnación Barranquero Texeira and Lucía Prieto Borrego. Así Sobrevivimos al Hambre. Estrategias de supervivencia de las mujeres en la postguerra española (Málaga: Servicio de Publicaciones, Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación de Málaga, 2003), 221. 10 Gloria Román Ruiz, Delinquir o morir. El pequeño estraperlo en la Granada de posguerra (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2015), 5. 11 ‘New State’ was a contemporary term used by the Franco regime to describe the reconstruction of Spanish society in the aftermath of the Civil War according to the ideologies of the Nationalists. 12 Richards, A Time of Silence, 135, 139–40. 13 María Josepa Gallofre i Virgili, L'edicio catalana y la censura franquista (1939-1951) (Barcelona: Publicaciones de l'Abadia de Montserrat, 1991), 488. 14 ‘Actuación de la Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes durante el periodo 1939–1964’, Ministerio de Comercio. Archivo General de Administración. Fondo Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes, Caja CAT (11)7 63/02316. 15 Ibid. 16 Dunai, ‘Food Politics in Postwar Spain’, 64. 17 Tomás Espuny Gómez, Legislación de abastos: Exposición metódica de las principales disposiciones vigentes (Tarragona: Imprenta de José Pijoan, 1942), 376. 18 ‘Los purés se clasifican en 1 y 2 clase’ Circular 207. Alimentación Nacional. Año II núm 4, 15 February 1942, 4. 19 ‘Nuestro régimen de hoteles y restaurantes, el menos restringido de Europa. Dos minutas: especial y corriente, fijación de los precios, limitación del número de tapas y entremeses, etc. Reglamentación establecida en las circulares 161, 185 y 250’. Alimentación Nacional. Año II núm 6, 15 April 1942, 9. 20 ‘Actuación de la Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes durante el periodo 1939-1964’, Ministerio de Comercio. Archivo General de Administración. Fondo Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes, Caja CAT (11)7 63/02316. 21 For example, Dr. Andrius Vander was censored for his treatises on sexuality, but not for his vegan cooking manuals. Carmen de Burgos was initially censored for

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25

26

27

28 29

30 31

32

Franco’s Famine her literary writings, but her cookbooks were allowed to continue to print for their culinary instruction. Gallofre i Virgili, L'edicio catalana y la censura franquista (1939-1951), 491–2. Ibid., 248. Ignasi Domenech, La Teca: La veritable cuina casolana de Catalunya, 5 edn (Barcelona: Quintilla, Cardona y Cia, 1947); Ignacio Domenech, La Cocina Vasca (Laurak-Bat), 2 edn (Barcelona: Quintilla y Cardona, 1950?). Manual de cocina eléctrica (Madrid: Asociación para el fomento de aplicaciones de la electricidad, 1941); 365 recetas de cocina práctica (una para cada día del año), 4 edn (Madrid: Ediciones Ibéricas, 1941?). Gonzalo Bosch Bierge, Cocina De Vigilia (Barcelona: Editorial Hogar, 1940); Alberto León, La Cocina clásica española (Ciudad Lineal, Madrid: Editorial Estudio, 1941?). For example, De la Mora and Maria y Pilar de Abia, Cocina ‘de ella y para ella’ (Madrid: CEDIF, 1948). Archivo General de Administración. Fondo Censura de literatura, (03) 050. Caja 21/08446; Ízcaray Calzada, Bernardo eds. Cocinas Bodegas y Frutas Nacionales. Ediciones Españoles, 1944’. Archivo General de Administración. Fondo Censura de literatura, (03) 050. Caja 21/07514. Francisca Bolugas, Hogar (Madrid: Editorial Ciguega, 1941). Archivo General de Administración. Fondo Censura de literatura, (03) 050. Caja 21/07127. For example, El Practicón by Angel Muro Goiri (1894), Emilio Pardo Bazan’s La Cocina Moderna (1917) and La Cocina Antigua (1913) were cooking guides that covered several hundred pages of cooking techniques, kitchen vocabulary, menu creation and recipes. A tome of this scale would not appear again until María Mestayer published Enciclopedia culinaria: La cocina completa under the pseudonym Marquesa de Parabere in the early 1940s as a revised edition of her 1933 cookbook, La Cocina Completa. For further reading, see María Paz Moreno, De la página al plato. El Libro de cocina en España (Gijón: Ediciones Trae, 2012), 149–50. Ignacio Domenech, Cocina de Recursos (Deseo Mi Comida) (Barcelona: Quintilla, Cardona y C., S.L., 1940), 16–7. As the Nationalist army gained Republican territory during the Spanish Civil War, bureaucratic commissions were formed to process land cultivation and food production. Awarding land to supporters of the Franco regime was a top priority, in addition to ranching and meat production. For more information on this topic, see España. Dirección General de Colonización. Servicio de Recuperación agrícola. Memoria sobre la gestión realizada por este servicio desde su creación en mayo de 1938 hasta su extinción en dicimiembre de 1940 (Madrid: Gráficas Faure, 1940). Carlos Barciela López et al., La España de Franco (1939-1975). Economía (Madrid: Síntesis, 2001), 24.

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33 ‘¿Cómo delimitar la línea entre el depósito necesario de alimentos y el acaparamiento ilegal?: En una economía intervenida, el almacenamiento tiene que ser autorizado y regulado por el organismo estatal que dirige el abastecimiento’ Alimentación Nacional, Año I, núm 2. 15 December 1941, 9. 34 Ibid. 35 Tomás Espuny Gómez, Legislación de abastos, apéndice (Tarragona: Imprenta de José Pijoan, 1943), 157. 36 Ibid., 159. 37 ‘Cocina con los restos podéis hacer muchas cosas buenas’, Medina, 5 de noviembre de 1944. 38 Ibid. 39 Antonio Castillo de Lucas, Refranillo de la alimentación: Divulgación de higiene de la misma, a través de los refranes y dichos populares (Madrid: Graficas reunidas, 1940), 122. 40 Genoveva Bernard de Ferrer, Las sobras: Las 125 Mejores recetas para prepararlas (Barcelona: Editorial Molina, 1943). 41 Antonio Giráldez Lomba, Sobrevivir en los años de hambre en Vigo (Vigo: Instituto de Estudios Vigueses, 2002), 208. 42 Ibid., 182. 43 Barranquero Texeira and Prieto Borrego, Así Sobrevivimos al Hambre, 97. 44 ‘La Patata: La reina de la cocina’, in Y: revista para la mujer. núm 31, August 1940. 45 ‘Actuación de la Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes durante el periodo 1939–1964’, Ministerio de Comercio. CAT (n.d.), Fondo Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes, Archivo General de Administración. 46 ‘¡Hoy tenemos las patatas!’, in VENTANAL. Año I, núm 9, August 1942: 12. 47 Delegación Provincial de Abastecimientos y transportes de Madrid. Memoria del ejercicio 1946 (Madrid: Delegación Provincial de Abastecimientos y transportes de Madrid, 1947), 19. 48 Ibid., 102–3. 49 Ibid., 109–10. 50 Anderson, Food & Francoism; Ismael Díaz Yubero, ‘El hambre y la gastronomía. De la guerra civil a la cartilla de racionamiento’, Estudios sobre consumo 66 (July 2003): 9–22; Matthew J. Wild, ‘Eating Spain: National Cuisine Since 1900’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Kentucky, 2015). 51 Janet Theophano, Eat my Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 6–7. 52 Ibid. 53 Kathleen Richmond, Women and Spanish Fascism: The Women’s Section of the Falange, 1934-1959 (London: Routledge, 2003), 17. 54 Anderson, Food & Francoism, 70.

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55 Genoveva Bernard de Ferrer, Platos típicos de la cocina internacional: Las 125 Mejores recetas para prepararlos (Barcelona: Editorial Molina, 1947). 56 Ibid., 7. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Menaje: para la mujer y el hogar, November 1940. 61 For example, the Soviet Union and Italy faced severe food supply shortages and implemented several civilian rationing programmes during the Second World War. See Elena Osokina and Kate Transchel (eds), Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927-1941 (New York: M.E Sharpe, 1999); Carol Helstosky, Garlic and Oil: Politics and Food in Italy (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 62 The series biblioteca gastronómica y del hogar lists several works in preparation by Gonzalo Bosch Bierge including one entitled, Cocina Internacional. There is no record of publication of any of the forthcoming books listed in the series and the last instalment of the series, Cocina de vigilia, was rejected by the censor.

Part V

Memories of malnutrition and famine

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10

Remembering the Spanish famine Official discourse and the popular memory of hunger during Francoism Claudio Hernández Burgos and Gloria Román Ruiz

Height measurement, calorie consumption rates, diseases linked to malnutrition and deaths by starvation all provide objective markers that tell us about the impact of hunger in post-war Spain. Hunger is, however, also a cultural concept. Its intensity and perception vary according to collective and individual experience.1 It is for this very reason that attitudes and behaviours in the face of hunger are equally heterogeneous. Even though hunger and scarcity of food after the Spanish Civil War were tangible realities, it is not possible to examine them in their totality by focusing on statistical data and figures alone. Rather, it is paramount to also understand the so-called years of hunger as a cultural construct, created by official discourses and narratives, specific policies and institutions which managed the misery and social perceptions gained from experiences that gave way to various popular attitudes and responses. This chapter explores the origins of the memory of the years of hunger from this cultural conception of the phenomenon. It specifically attempts to link the official discourse established by Franco’s dictatorship during the post-war years with the memory of hunger and scarcity. The aim is to highlight these connections, in particular the contradictions between them, and to analyse the level of acceptance, rejection or resignification of the regime’s official discourse by the Spanish people. This will allow us to assess the efficiency of the social legitimization strategies pursued by the dictatorship for its consolidation – beginning with the very concept of hunger – and to determine the role that different factors such as the effects of the war, the prevalence of unfavourable living conditions or the desire for a kind of ‘normality’ played in that process.2

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To achieve this, we rely on documents from Spanish and international archives. We also examine the newspapers and magazines of that era for an analysis of the construction of the official discourse of scarcity. Finally, we draw on a wide variety of oral-history interviews gathered over the last decade to assess individual experiences during the post-war period and the development of the popular memory of those years. The first section discusses the production of the official narrative of hunger, by which the dictatorship attempted to demonstrate to the whole of society where responsibility for the situation lay, how it had come about and how it could be improved or solved. The second section examines individual experiences of hunger, analysing popular perceptions and attitudes, as well as their similarities and differences with the official narrative. We show that Francoist explanations of hunger and scarcity enjoyed strong support among some sections of the population, but we also note how these explanations were, in fact, at odds with many of the collective and individual experiences of large numbers of other Spaniards. These sectors of society proved able to forge their own memory of the ‘hunger years’. This approach allows us to delve deeper into the functioning of the regime and, particularly, to better understand the scope, political uses and construction of everyday experiences around poverty – for, after all, hunger was the feature which defined those times.

The construction of the official discourse of hunger In April 1939, a few days after the publication of a dispatch that announced the official end of the war, journalist Francisco Casares celebrated what for him was already a fact: the ‘hateful’ rationing cards distributed around the Republican areas throughout the conflict would be gone in a few weeks’ time. For him, ‘this infamous sign of the Red period, a remnant of socialization’, no longer had any place in the new nation that was about to emerge, where every home would have the bread promised by El Caudillo.3 Reality, however, would be rather different. On 14 May 1939, the brand ‘New State’ decreed the implementation of the reviled rationing across the country.4 Hunger and scarcity would be commonplace for many Spanish families until well into the 1950s, with dramatic consequences.5 The repercussions of the war played a major part in this regard; but, as different studies have shown, the gravity of the economic crisis and, above all, the prevalence of harsh living conditions can be explained only if we consider the nefarious effects of the regime’s autarkic policy (see Chapter 1 of this book).6 As a matter of fact, the confirmation of the ineffectiveness of its measures in the

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battle against hunger was one of the primary factors which helped the regime achieve the inauguration of soup kitchens and the granting of subsidies which had to be supported by an official discourse of hunger. With this distorting discourse, the dictatorship attempted to build its own ‘truth regime’, against which no deviations or alternative interpretations were possible.7 It represented a fictitious narrative with which to explain to the people the reasons for their hunger, who was responsible for it, the proper measures to remedy this ill and the role played by the regime. The first goal the dictatorship pursued though the creation of an official discourse of hunger was its denial of responsibility for the scarcity and misery, showing citizens the ‘real’ causes for these ills and those accountable for them. There were three fundamental justifications given. First, the dictatorship hid behind the excuse of an alleged incomprehension by the victorious powers of the Second World War, which were accused of plotting international campaigns to, among other allegations, smother the Spanish people. Provincial authorities often made use of this argument to justify supply deficiencies and the hunger endured by the population.8 Coupled with the social repudiation of a hypothetical foreign intervention, this reasoning allowed for this official discourse to remain in force into the 1950s. This ploy was so effective that even foreign diplomats ended up acknowledging that international ‘obstacles’ bore some responsibility for the economic situation in Spain.9 Then there was the reference to adverse weather conditions that resulted in bad crops and energy supply deficiencies experienced across the country throughout the 1950s. Even though farmers and provincial authorities had enough reasons to complain about the lack of rainfall, in reality, these misfortunes were deliberately exaggerated and used by the regime to construct the myth of the ‘persistent drought’ (‘pertinaz sequía’) whereby these adversities were part and parcel of the historical fatalism haunting the Spanish agricultural sector and against which there was not much remedy but resignation.10 Yet, if there was ever a cause that stood out among all the excuses used to explain hunger and scarcity, this was the idea that the Second Republic had left the regime with a legacy of poverty. And, if during the Civil War, rebel propaganda had stressed the level of disruption that collectivization created in the Republican areas, once the conflict was over, it was necessary to demonstrate that the lack of resources was the outcome not only of the ‘ineptitude’ of Republican leaders but also of their perversity and moral degeneration.11 The ‘little Red chieftains’ had emptied the national coffers and lived in luxurious manors abroad, after attempting to ‘starve’ their fellow countrywomen and men ‘to death’.12 The

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‘Marxists’ had left a country in ruins: they ‘cut down the forest wealth, shut down irrigation systems, canals, irrigation ditches, reduced the Spanish livestock population to a significant degree’13 In 1939, for instance, officials in Albacete described the situation in the province as ‘bleak’ and blamed it on the ‘reigning anarchy’ and the ‘socialization’ enacted by the Republicans, who had ruled the province during the war.14 The outcome of all this, in sum, was a ‘legacy of hunger’ which would only be resolved by taking drastic measures. The second goal the regime sought with the construction of this official discourse was the legitimization of its autarkic policies, highlighting their positive effects on the national economy. The formerly despised rationing scheme was now justified through a variety of reasons: the ‘exceptional situation’ triggered by ‘Marxist destruction’, the outbreak of the Second World War.15 Moreover, state intervention in distribution and supply was seen as ‘the panacea in the fight against speculation, crisis and injustice’.16 Therefore, the regime resorted to the argument of ‘social justice’, coming across as a protector of the weak and a fighter of corruption.17 In this sense, the official propaganda was a constant reminder that the complaints of those who protested because they were ‘eating less so that others could live’ and who were in direct opposition to the authorities’ decision of ‘distributing foodstuffs equally without distinction of class’ seemed incomprehensible to the regime, for the objective was to ‘assist, preferably, those classes that live off their physical labour; that is to say, the worker’.18 The documents sent from the provinces to Madrid reveal that Francoist authorities were fully aware of both the scope of the hunger among the population and the inefficiency of official policies to alleviate its consequences. In fact, provincial authorities even qualified popular discontent as ‘understandable’ in their reports and described the development of estraperlo (or black market) as ‘inevitable and necessary’.19 Nevertheless, the dictatorship publicly and restlessly advocated autarky. The reason for those judgements was not so much the adopted measures but the attitude of those who took advantage of the ‘righteous Spaniards’ through hoarding and speculation.20 Estraperlo was, therefore, a ‘scourge’ from the Republican era, behind which the ‘enemies of Spain’ hid. But, at the same time, it was a circumstantial problem, and other nations were not exempt. The state, for its part, acted ‘with the utmost rigour’ against it.21 That is why its existence could not outshine the efficiency of the measures implemented to improve living conditions. This was the opinion held in September 1940 by Higinio París Eguilaz, one of El Caudillo’s main economic advisers, for whom to ‘state there was hunger in Spain’ was a forbidden act.22 This reality was shared by Franco himself, who a year before had claimed that ‘things can’t be as bad

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as you make out since I am always offered a banquet and meet smiling faces wherever I go’.23 Official attempts at minimizing and even negating the existence of hunger represented another feature of the official narrative in this regard. We may infer this from the events in Altorricón (Huesca) where, after the news of the death of a child by starvation, local authorities were dismissed not only because of the case itself but also because of the ‘bad impression’ these kinds of events conveyed.24 However, this was also seen in the Sevillian authorities’ unease when, in 1946, a bus full of tourists bound for the city’s April Fair photographed a ‘group of ragged and begging children’ as it passed through the town of Carmona.25 Against this backdrop, the regime endeavoured to build an image of a Spain that was satisfied and well supplied, where nothing was missing. Newspapers and radio broadcasts promoted slimming treatments, offered beauty tips and featured cooking recipes which required items that were out of reach for most of the population.26 Yet it simultaneously promoted a savings culture, for instance, by offering advice on how to design good value meals or how to perform ‘tricks’ to make the best use of resources, disguised under the euphemism of ‘fun economy’.27 In the words of one of the regime’s leaders, they appealed to the ‘inventive genius of the race’ for the population to resort to ingenuity so as to obtain their sustenance.28 Even the regime itself showed its ‘creative capacity’ when it used substitutes to conceal supply issues, as was the case in Almería, where weekly deliveries of coconut or almond oil to replace the Spanish cooking staple of olive oil, were made and well received.29 According to the official discourse, no other solution was possible. Franco himself had said so in May 1939: ‘The character of the Spanish people lies not in the casino, in small groups or in partial desires, but in selfless and hard work aimed at building a true, brand new and great fatherland.’30 Self-denial, sacrifice and resignation would become terms frequently found in speeches made by regime officials, press articles and slogans directed at the population as a sort of flattery whereby these attributes turned into the inherent features of an exemplary Spanishness. There was no room for criticism or gossip. On the contrary, people had to acquiesce to this as a kind of divine providence, for ‘only God knows how long toiling peoples can resist’. The citizens’ attitude had to be one of ‘serene acceptance of current difficulties’ and, as ‘cultured, patriotic and, above all, moral beings’, they had to observe a ‘food discipline at the table, against the tyranny of the stomach’.31 Hunger and sacrifice thus turned into distinctive features of the ‘New Spain’ and, as years went by, in critical foundations of postwar memory.

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Indeed, even though during the 1950s the deterioration of living conditions prevailed in specific areas across the country and among certain strata of the population, the dictatorship was quick to exploit the improvement of the national economy for propaganda purposes. The increase in housing supply, the fall of unemployment rates and the rise in salaries even drove British officials to point out that the situation was ‘very different’ from previous years and that this could help to strengthen the regime’s position.32 From the mid1950s and, particularly, the 1960s onwards, the Francoist authorities began to move away from their victory discourse; in its place, they promoted a narrative that extolled Spanish ‘peace’ and the economic growth achieved over the last two decades. In other words, the regime’s attention was no longer focused on an ‘origin-based legitimacy’ (towards the war) but, rather, on a ‘performancebased legitimacy’ (towards progress), without implying a renunciation of the former.33 Hunger played a major role within the changing discourse. Beginning in the 1960s, the traumatic memory of poverty was paramount for the emergence of attitudes of conformism and consent among a significant part of the population.34 Backwardness and poverty were still everyday issues for many citizens, but the improvement experienced in relation to the post-war years was palpable. In the self-described ‘developmentalist Spain’, nutritional values increased, food grew more varied and the birth of the consumer society began to fill homes with house appliances, cars and other goods which ended up convincing many that the sacrifices endured during the post-war period had finally borne fruit. The ‘memory of hunger’, of poor-quality bread and rationing, would now be a fundamental pillar for the growing discourse of ‘peace and progress’.35 The regime’s leaders knew well that this was the moment to move from the stage of ‘ideological struggle’ to the stage of ‘practical achievements’.36 But that brand new discourse did not consign the post-war years, the hunger or the autarkic policies to oblivion; rather, it conceived of them as an unavoidable step to justify the progress made. As the press recalled, that ‘development’ was the ‘outcome of enormous sacrifices’ which should be defended through peace, an ‘active peace’, in which the memory of the Second Republic, the war and the victory were always present.37 This was remembered on every opening of a housing estate, every unveiling of a factory and throughout the massive propaganda campaigns orchestrated by the regime, just as occurred with the so-called Twenty-Five Years of Peace celebrated in 1964.38 Selfless toil, the end of political disputes, the efficiency of economic policies and, particularly, El Caudillo’s good deeds appeared – according to official propaganda – as the reasons which had allowed

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a ravaged country to reach the level of any other developed nation after the war. Progress, therefore, had to be assessed with the help of memory.

‘La gente se quitaba el hambre a tortazos’:39 Popular memory of hunger I remember a woman came to the store with her child once and asked for some sugar, and the little boy wondered if that was actually sugar. He did not know it.40 Those who managed to survive the harsh conditions of the post-war years were not immune to the official discourse of hunger. Rather, they were, to a great extent, conditioned by it. Thus, some statements reproduce part of the regime’s narrative, which blamed scarcity on wartime destruction and the international arena, that is, the ostracism that condemned the dictatorship from 1945 onwards due to its support of fascist regimes during the Second World War. The assimilation of this narrative, dismantled long ago by economists such as Carlos Barciela, who argued that neither the material damage nor the international isolation had been significant, shows the success of Francoist propaganda in shaping popular mentalities.41 Such was the case of Matilde, born in 1931 into a poor family from Abrucena (Almería), who does not hesitate to attribute the poverty she endured to ‘the blissful war’. Or that of Daniel Castro, born in 1936 in Colomera (Granada), who reflects on the food crisis, arguing that nothing came from abroad, because everything was blocked. When Franco came to power, embassies were shut down here and no one wanted anything to do with it either. As a kid, after the Second World War, I felt that Berlin was like a barren plot, and people said everything was destroyed. Nothing came from there at all.42

And yet, the regime’s discourse with respect to the years of hunger was not assimilated or assumed without question by the whole of society. In fact, many women and men who had suffered the post-war poverty were able to break with the silence and the prevarications which the dictatorship attempted to impose on them. Simultaneously, they were in a condition to build and pass on a counter-hegemonic or dissident memory which challenged the official discourse. Nevertheless, this effort to build and preserve an alternative popular memory of hunger was not without its difficulties. First and foremost, there was a fear of breaking the silence and producing a counter-narrative. We should also consider the physical damage caused by malnutrition and the resulting

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emotional trauma which famine victims had experienced,43 as well as the feeling of shame that pushed many to negate or conceal hunger. This phenomenon, found in the workings of individual memory, could have contributed to silencing the horrors of the famine by transferring responsibility from the dictatorship to the family, from those responsible to the victims. In sum, the popular memory of hunger which can be discerned today can be traced to Francoist discourse only in part. That is, popular memory accepts without question some of the excuses about the scarcity which the regime offered while incorporating other factors that are absent from the official discourse, stray from it or contradict it altogether. This is clearly observed in popular memory of the ‘famine’ the country experienced during the critical years of 1939–45 and 1946, to which the regime’s official discourse makes no reference whatsoever – deliberately concealing it.44 These two periods of famine are also absent from cultural products severely controlled by the regime through censorship, such as cinema or literature. And although the famine has not permeated popular memory to a significant degree, the idea of 1946 as an especially critical year does indeed prevail, even if we consider that the period between 1939 and 1942 was even more traumatic. This could be ascribed to the fact that the scarcity experienced during the initial years of the post-war period has been linked to the effects of the war. Daniel Castro, for instance, states that 1946 – when no wheat could be sown because of the drought – came to be popularly known as ‘the year of hunger’. A neighbour from Chiclana de Segura (Jaén) speaks in similar terms, claiming that 1946 was ‘a really bad year, one of the worst in history’.45 Furthermore, the geographical inequity created by the supply crisis, which manifested differently in villages and cities, is still present in popular memory. This is the reason why the exchange of products was so frequent between town and country, taking advantage of the availability of fruit and vegetables in the latter and items such as coffee in the former. The rationing system worked better in the cities, and at times it could have offered an additional incentive for some migrants. Yet, in the countryside, most families, even the poorest, had a small vegetable garden and some animals for household slaughter. This allowed many inhabitants of rural communities to avoid hunger and alleviate their battered family economies. This is how Daniel Castro, from Granada, remembers those times. He states that, in the province’s capital, ‘there was more poverty than here, because here you could go to the country and pick up fennel, asparagus, herbs, and you could actually feed off the land, and, in the summer, the fig trees, eat figs . . .’, whereas in Granada he even witnessed ‘people eating orange peel’.46

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Although the Francoist discourse of ‘national-ruralism’ lauded agricultural life, the resources which the country offered were not always enough to cover the population’s most basic needs. Many individuals attest to this in their statements and even admit to having experienced starvation in villages.47 One such case is that of Purificación Molero, born in 1937 to a modest family of eight siblings in the district of Ventorrillo de La Laguna (Loja, Granada). She explains that they relied on a ‘small field and some animals’, but that it ‘was not enough for all of us, and we had to eke out a living however we could’. She specifically remembers those times when there was nothing to eat and they were obliged to ‘walk across the countryside looking for thistles to make soup and at least have something to put in our mouths’.48 These families devoted their meagre wages almost entirely to the purchase of food. This is how Manuel Jiménez, who lived in the same country estate as Purificación Molero and was from the neighbouring locality of Alhendín (Granada), remembers the situation. Their preoccupation revolved around the difficult task of filling their stomachs. During his childhood, ‘there was no politics, no nothing’ in his home, ‘we only starved’. Hunger occupied the thoughts of those who, like himself, lived on the edge of survival. When questioned about his hopes for life when he was a child, he explains that, under those circumstances, he ‘had no time to think about becoming anything’.49 Despite official propaganda not making direct reference to it, hunger particularly affected the inhabitants of primitive dwellings (caves, in their more extreme version) where the most marginalized sectors of society, often the vanquished of the Civil War, tended to live.50 As Daniel Castro points out, those who ‘lacked’ food the most were people living in ‘huts, with rush roofs and no tiles’.51 Moreover, hunger and primitive dwellings went hand in hand with nutritional disorders and infectious diseases. These ailments found a suitable breeding ground in feeble bodies and unhygienic spaces and brought about particularly dramatic consequences for high-risk groups, such as the elderly and children. As if that were not enough, they represented a social stigma and a new burden for families, because they used to leave the best ration for the convalescent – which, under normal circumstances, would be reserved for the working men in the house – and assisted them, at their own cost, in obtaining medicines.52 María Fernández, born in 1933 in a village in Cádiz province, contracted typhus at age seven. She still remembers how ‘horrible’ it was to spend more than forty days suffering diarrhoea and drinking only ‘coffee and milk, and [eating] two or three breadcrumbs to trick the enemy [hunger]’.53 In tune with the socially unequal nature of the famine, there are also those who admit to having experienced a ‘lack’ of food or having been ‘in need’,

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without  ever suffering hunger. Such is the case of a neighbour from Santo Domingo de la Calzada (La Rioja), Adoración Espiga, who began working at age eight picking potatoes. She acknowledges that ‘we had nothing to spare at all’. Or of Salud Molina, from Córdoba, who came from a family of day labourers and claims to have been in serious need but without reaching the point of being ‘desmayaícos’ (‘starving’). María Fernández, whose mother used to go to the countryside to sell the fish she was given on credit at the food market and which left a cloud of flies behind her as she walked, tells a similar story. She explains that they did not experience hunger, but they also did not fall ill from eating too much either, and claims that ‘we went to bed without eating anything on more than one occasion’. She still recalls the night when they spent hours waiting for their father and uncle’s arrival, who had gone out to buy some food. They ended up roasting some black chickpeas they had in the house well after midnight. Or the time they cried all day long when a small piece of bread their mother used to keep aside from the ration disappeared. Several years later, her brother eventually confessed to her that he had been the one who had eaten it.54 There is an even wider group of individuals who deny having experienced hunger at home, although they do remember neighbours who were hungry or even died of starvation, malnutrition or some related disease.55 One of the people who has experienced such hunger is Daniel Castro, whose family owned two ‘small pieces’ of land. While he never ‘lacked’ food, he does remember ‘many people who were not eating well, only ate once a day, or never ate at all’, as well as barefoot ‘little creatures’ begging from door to door. The man has not forgotten that the shortage of donkeys during the post-war years was, to a great extent, due to the fact that some people killed the animals ‘to eat them’. Or that there were others who fried eggs and breadcrumbs ‘almost without oil’ or who looked for thistles that grew by the side of the road, ‘took out the spikes and cook them, and that’s what they would eat’. María Medina, born in a Granada village in 1939, remembers the case of a female neighbour in the village who had twins and was always found crying every time people went to visit her because she had nothing ‘to eat and nothing to wear’. Or the child who ‘was poorer than the others’ and would not separate from his friends when they went to their grandmothers’ houses to ask for a slice of bread with sugar. Even more revealing is the statement of María Fernández, who tells of a child who ‘once came and stole a bread, and he ate it all in one bite. Poor soul, he never ate anything and just got sick. That dried bread, with nothing else but water. He began vomiting and even got diarrhoea.’56

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Also absent from Francoist discourse was the extreme need experienced by those teachers deployed in rural areas, which is still etched in the collective memory. The popular saying ‘hungrier than a schoolteacher’ alluded to their poverty and gained popularity during the post-war years. Many of them lived off the alms that the neighbours gave them in solidarity, usually the parents of the children they taught to read and write. It was a way of showing gratitude for the enormous effort they made by going to those faraway places, often quite isolated and poorly accessed, in order to teach their children in exchange for a miserable salary.57 María Fernández remembers that the teacher from her home village, Prado del Rey (Cádiz), went about ‘barefoot, had lice, was pretty dirty’ and that her mother used to keep ‘a plate of food’ of ‘whatever was available’ [for him], and he would be ‘really glad’. For his part, Daniel Castro keeps a similar image of Cervera, a teacher who was really bright but walked ‘barefoot, with nothing to wear and nothing to eat’. María Medina speaks similarly of the teachers in her village, Beas de Granada (Granada). The neighbours gave them courgettes and potatoes from their own crop because they ‘did not live very well’. And after the household slaughter, ‘well, a slice of ham for (the teacher) Doña Antonia, a blood sausage for Doña Antonia’.58 In short, it is logical to think that the presence of hunger in popular memory is under-represented. This negationist phenomenon may have to do primarily with the feelings of shame, and even guilt, which are still evoked in many women and men when it comes to admitting that they suffered starvation in their childhood.59 Acknowledging this extreme situation has uncomfortable implications, such as assuming a certain failure by their parents, in charge of guaranteeing family sustenance. Others – in particular those who experienced a decline in their socio-economic status after the war – state that, despite the scarcity endured, they tried to maintain their dignity and their pride. It was not easy for these groups to accept before their communities the stigma of being ‘poor’, which befell them every time they showed themselves in public queuing at the door of welfare facilities, such as Auxilio Social’s soup kitchens, or begging in the neighbourhood.60 Francisca Fernández’s statements are quite telling in this regard. The younger of seven siblings from a family in Loja (Granada) who survived thanks to her father’s casual labour in the country, she recalls that, even in the 1960s, they used to ‘politely’ reject the pies they were offered at the store where she and her mother would go shopping for ‘the essentials for cooking’. One of those times, ‘the shopkeeper took my hand and put the pie in my hand, and me with my hand wide open as if the pie itched’. And, until her mother allowed her to, she could not eat it because she ‘always said we [were]

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poor, yet honourable’. In other words, their everyday misery should not, in any way, tarnish the family honour. That same feeling accompanied Francisca over the years and revealed itself, for example, during a school campaign to collect funds ‘for the little Black children in Africa’. She would go from house to house requesting some kind of help from the neighbours, and they, instead of giving her money, offered her snacks and told her ‘to come on in to eat’. Eventually, she gave up after knocking on three doors because she was ‘ashamed’.61 The manifestation of attitudes of conformism, assimilation and normalization of scarcity were also frequent, especially among children, who did not know anything different. In relation to the harsh living conditions in the country, María Medina acknowledges that ‘that’s the way it was back then’. Salud Molina, a neighbour from a locality in Córdoba province, recognizes that ‘because we were used to being poor, we were all happy’. The most paradigmatic example of this is what occurred with bread, the greatest symbol of the post-war years. For those who obtained it through rationing, bread used to be brown.62 María Fernández, from Cádiz, remembers that bread was round and ‘really, really brown’, because it was made of ‘that dark-brown wheat from Argentina’, and she compares it with cow ‘manure’. Nevertheless, this rather unappetizing description is not an obstacle for her to remember ‘how tasty it was’: ‘My goodness, that was the best thing in the world. There just wasn’t anything else, really. It tasted like glory.’ A neighbour from Mijas (Málaga), interviewed in the 1960s by historian Ronald Fraser, claimed likewise: ‘I’ve eaten lemon peel and was very happy to be able to do so.’63 Furthermore, despite having lived in abject misery, many of them have the idea that there was always someone who was worse off. This could be attributed to the relativization of scarcity in times of hunger but also to the desire to preserve a certain pride or family honour. Salud Molina, for instance, states that ‘compared to other people’, they experienced ‘fatigue’, although not much – at least not as much as others, who had to go begging even for matches to light a candle. She claims that, unlike other families, they did not suffer hunger because they had a small garden that provided them with green beans, potatoes and some fruit; however, she does acknowledge that, at other times, they had ‘enough to eat, but rather on the low side’.64 Despite the fact that the post-war Francoist ideal of femininity assigned women a passive role circumscribed in the private realm of the home, necessity obliged them to assume a very significant role as guarantors of family sustenance during those critical years. They were not alone in this task and relied on their children’s assistance, some of whom still recall today how they used to queue

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for bread while they waited for their mothers’ arrival with their ration cards.65 Their responsibility in the family economy was crucially important in those cases where the husband had been a victim of Francoist repression. A prime example of this were the prisoners’ wives, who set aside part of their ration for their husbands.66 Two of those women were María Fernández’s aunt and mother. When her uncle and father were imprisoned, they would take coffee to the jail every day because ‘nothing was given to them there’. One day, they learned that the former had been executed and the latter had been beaten up. The terrible suffering experienced by the vanquished and their families, victims of violence and hunger, explains why they would sometimes externalize trauma to such an extent as to lead them to their deaths, which itself carried a huge symbolism.67 In the case of María’s father, who survived the brutal aggression in prison, as well as the physical and psychological stigma related to hunger, the family memories passed on through generations point to his death at age fifty-nine as a consequence of ‘depression, fear and distress. He began suffering from stomach pains and never recovered.’68 Male and female attitudes towards hunger in the post-war period proved varied. Many of them did not hesitate to denounce young estraperlistas, smugglers or petty thieves, largely affirming Francoist propaganda – which encouraged people to fight against speculators and hoarders considered ‘crooked Spaniards’ – from the pages of the press. Yet collective memory seldom refers to such telltale behaviours. On the contrary, it tends to underscore displays of solidarity, which were widespread during those critical years. Many of those who enjoyed a better economic situation were able to help their fellow neighbours, particularly in small rural communities. Francisco Arco, for instance, member of a family who owned some land and livestock in Montejícar (Granada), remembers that his mother would give ‘chickpeas or bacon’ to those who knocked on their door and that, when they slaughtered pigs, she would make more blood sausages and chorizos to distribute them later. Francisca Fernández, from Granada, also explains that some neighbours and family members would help them when they had no food, and vice versa.69 But solidarity among the local community would not always be enough to circumvent scarcity. Many of them were obliged to devise strategies to trick hunger or set about illegal activities for survival, such as estraperlo (blackmarket trading) and smuggling, which involved a great number of women and helped many families to thrive – or, in short, to commit food theft of wild fruit and firewood for cooking and heating (see Chapter 6). However, displays of solidarity towards these hungry petty offenders were also common and were

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spurred by feelings of empathy. Francisco Arco, who was robbed of olives and firewood on several occasions, points to this when he wonders, ‘how would you possibly take the firewood away from them’ when they were family men with ‘three or four little dependent children’?70

Conclusions ‘Outcomes cannot be judged without thinking of the difficulties’ in producing them. Francisco Franco expressed himself with these words in 1946, one of the hardest years for the economy due to the droughts, the international isolation and the inefficiency of the policies adopted by the regime to alleviate the decline in living conditions affecting a vast number of Spaniards. In his speech, El Caudillo explained in detail the ruinous state he found at the end of the Civil War owing to the ‘pillage of gold’ or the ‘disappearance of 35,000’ heads of cattle, which were essential for a country whose economy largely relied on agriculture. He concluded by justifying state policies and the regime’s commitment to ‘social justice’: ‘People know what they have gone through . . . but do not know the sleeplessness, foresight, determination and almost miraculous means with which these difficulties were overcome.’71 Franco’s words summed up perfectly the essential foundations that articulated the official narrative of hunger: the Republican leaders’ responsibility for the existing situation, the regime’s efforts in resolving it and the conviction that the policies set forth until then were the best means to achieve this. It would not be long before the distorted image of the post-war years which the dictatorship offered was belied by a cruel and miserable reality. As we have seen in the second section, the everyday life of many families had a closer brush with famine, hunger and scarcity than was conceded in official propaganda. Thus, in contrast to the official narrative, the memory of 1946 – one of the worst years of the famine – remains engraved in people’s minds as a critical year. The same can be said of the hunger endured by those living in caves or by rural teachers, or of the ‘lack’ of food or ‘need’ that many families experienced in the villages, despite Francoist discourse extolling and idolizing country life. Some even went so far as to accept hunger as ‘normal’. It is worth noting that, because of the inherent limitations of the workings of individual memory, many women and men who survived the post-war period deny having experienced hunger themselves out of shame or pride. Many of them do acknowledge, however, having known hungry neighbours or family members. Some lent a helping hand in solidarity, but that

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was not enough for the majority to avoid resorting to illegal economic activity to make a living, as did many war widows who had no other choice but to assume the role of head of the family. Social discontent against scarcity and the role of autarkic policies in producing it show the extent to which the state’s perspective and that of the rest of society differed. Calls for sacrifice, self-denial and for an understanding of the existing circumstances also reveal the abyss between the official discourse and the popular perception of hunger. Nevertheless, the gap between them does not mean that the propaganda narrative which the dictatorship employed was sterile or had been abandoned. As the economic situation began to improve slowly – especially from the mid-1950s onwards – the official narrative of the poverty endured during the 1940s acted as a useful legitimization tool for the regime’s work by demonstrating that the overcoming of the post-war years had been the result of dogged persistence and the determination to improve the Spanish people’s living standards. And although for many sectors of society the progress achieved was evident, this narrative continued to be a fallacy, since not everyone attributed this progress to the regime’s good deeds, and there were many people still living deep in backwardness. Just as in the post-war era, official memory and the popular memory of hunger continued to share both connections and divergences.

Notes 1 James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2007); Alice Weinreb, ‘“For the Hungry Have No Past nor Do They Belong to a Political Party”: Debates over German Hunger after World War II’, Central European History 45, no. 1 (2012): 50–78. 2 Claudio Hernández Burgos, ‘The Triumph of “Normality”, Social Attitudes, Popular Opinion and the Construction of the Franco Regime in Post-War Rural Spain (1936–1952)’, European History Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2016): 291–310. 3 Quoted in Rafael Abella, Por el Imperio hacia Dios. Crónica de una posguerra (Barcelona: Planeta, 1978), 13. 4 ‘Orden Ministerial de 14 de mayo de 1939 estableciendo el régimen de racionamiento en todo el territorio nacional’, Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE), no. 137, 17 May 1939. 5 María Isabel del Cura and Rafael Huertas, Alimentación y enfermedad en tiempos del hambre, España 1937–1947 (Madrid: CSIC, 2007). A recent study on the subject can be found in Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘Famine in Spain During Franco’s Dictatorship’, Journal of Contemporary History 56, no. 1 (2021): 3–27, 5.

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6 For a general overview, see Joan R. Rosés Vendoiro, ‘Las consecuencias macroeconómicas de la guerra civil’, in Economía y economistas en la guerra civil, eds. Enrique Fuentes Quintana and Fernando Comín (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2008), 339–64. For the effects of autarky, see Carlos Barciela, ‘The Disaster of Leviathan: The Economic Crisis of Autarky in Spain’, The Journal of European Economic History 44, no. 3 (2015): 175–99. 7 The concept of truth regime appears in several of Foucault’s works, although we adhere to the reflections found in Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Paris: Gallimard–Seuil, 2004). 8 Archivo General de la Administración (AGA), Presidencia, Delegación Nacional de Provincias (DNP), 51/20666, ‘Parte mensual de asuntos provinciales’, Córdoba, December 1945, and ‘Parte mensual de asuntos provinciales’, Cuenca, May 1946. 9 The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA), Foreign Office (FO), 371/89526, ‘Economic Situation in Spain’, 20 October 1950; National Archives and Records Administration of the United States of America, Foreign Relations, Volume III, ‘Interest of the United States in Effort Toward the Liberalization of the Spanish Government’, 5 January 1948, 1016–20. See also Boris N. Liedtke, Embracing a Dictatorship: US Relations with Spain, 1945–53 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), especially 64–89 and 90–119, and Florentino Portero, ‘Spain, Britain and the Cold War’, in Spain and the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century, eds. Paul Preston and Sebastian Balfour (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 210–27. 10 Some examples can be found in Duero, 29 February 1944; ABC, 6 February 1944; and Alimentación Nacional, no. 64 (January 1946). For its application by the regime, see Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Diccionario del franquismo (Barcelona: Dopesa, 1977), 76. 11 Archivo General Militar de Ávila, Zona Nacional, ‘Noticias de las Emisoras Rojas’, 4 October 1938, 1815–4. See also Michael Seidman, The Victorious Counterrevolution: The Nationalist Effort in the Spanish Civil War (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2011) and Suzanne Dunai, ‘Home-Front Cooking: Eating and Daily Life in Republican Cities during the Spanish Civil War’, in Spain at War: Society, Culture and Mobilization, 1936–1944, ed. James Matthews (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 177–93. 12 Quoted material belongs to Ideal, 22 March 1939; ABC, 2 April 1939; and ABC, 12 April 1939. See also Ainhoa Campos Posada, ‘Madrid “la ciudad espectro”. La utilización del hambre como arma de guerra y postguerra por el franquismo’, in Los ‘años del hambre’. Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista, ed. Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2019), 81–100, at 94–5. 13 AGA, Cultura, 75, ‘Consigna de la Delegación General de Prensa’, 3 November 1939, quoted in Roberto Fandiño, El baluarte de la buena conciencia. Prensa,

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20 21 22

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propaganda y sociedad en la Rioja del franquismo (Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 2009), 140–1. AGA, Gobierno Civil, 44/2790, ‘Memoria del Gobierno Civil de Albacete’, 1939. For other examples, see Alimentación Nacional, no. 27 (January 1944). Alimentación Nacional, no. 12 (December 1941) and no. 14 (November 1942). Benito Cid Llave, ¿Crisis?, ¿Escasez?, ¿Especulación?, ¡Racionamiento! (Madrid: n.p., 1944). Carme Molinero, ‘El reclamo de la “justicia social” en las políticas de consenso del régimen franquista’, Historia Social, no. 56 (2006): 93–110. Quoted material belongs to Alimentación Nacional, no. 1 (November 1941) and no. 6 (April 1942). AGA, Presidencia, DNP, 51/20508, ‘Parte quincenal de asuntos provinciales’, Alicante, June 1940, and 51/20569, ‘Parte mensual de asuntos provinciales’, Granada, February 1941. ABC, 15 November 1941; Ideal, 28 April 1942; and Revista para la Mujer, July 1942. See also Abella, Por el Imperio, 137–8. See, for instance, Alimentación Nacional, no. 6 (August 1942). Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco, 27070, ‘Informe de Higinio París Eguilaz sobre los fallos de la política económica’, 20 September 1940, quoted in Antonio Cazorla, Miedo y progreso. Los españoles de a pie bajo el franquismo (1939–1975) (Madrid: Alianza, 2016), 92. TNA, FO 371/23168, ‘Telegram’, 17 November 1939. AGA, Presidencia, DNP, 51/14106, ‘Informe confidencial’, Huesca, 29 August 1939. AGA, Presidencia, 51/20692, ‘Parte mensual de actividades provinciales’, April 1946. Another example can be found in the work by Eugene Smith, ‘Spanish Village’, Life, 9 April 1951. For additional cases, see David Conde Caballero, Tiempo sin pan. Una etnografía del hambre de postguerra en Extremadura, MA thesis (University of Extremadura, 2018), 176–83. For instance, AGA, Cultura, 21/00012, ‘Charla de belleza’, 7 September 1942; Medina, no. 5, 24 April 1941. For a detailed analysis, see Suzanne Dunai, Food Politics in Postwar Spain: Eating and Everyday Life during the Early Franco Dictatorship, 1939–1952, MA thesis (University of California, San Diego, 2019), 156–7, and Conde Caballero, Tiempo sin pan, 152–5. For this adjective, see Medina, no. 105 (March 1943). Other examples can be found in Alimentación Nacional, no. 2 (December 1941) and no. 4 (February 1942), as well as in Ideal, 19 July 1942. See also Gloria Román Ruiz, Delinquir o morir. El pequeño estraperlo en la provincia de Granada (Granada: Comares, 2015), 34–40. Quoted in Daniel Arasa, Historias curiosas del franquismo (Madrid: Robinbook, 2005), 183.

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29 Quoted in Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, Hambre de Siglos. Mundo rural y apoyos sociales al franquismo en Andalucía Oriental (1936–1951) (Granada: Comares, 2007), 272–3. 30 ABC, 20 May 1939. 31 Quoted, respectively, in Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Discursos y mensajes del Jefe de Estado: 1951–1954 (Madrid: Publicaciones Españolas, 1955), 9, and Alimentación Nacional, no. 68 (May 1946) and no. 6 (April 1942). 32 TNA, FO 371/124173, ‘Franco’s Regime Housing Policy’, 28 March 1956, and TNA FO, 371/136645, ‘Internal situation of Spain’, 8 November 1958. 33 Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 120. 34 Carlos Fuertes, Viviendo en dictadura. La evolución de las actitudes sociales hacia el franquismo (Granada: Comares 2017), 76–7. 35 See, for instance, TNA, FO 371/153226, ‘Annual Review for 1959’, 11 January 1960. 36 Fuertes, Viviendo, 154. 37 Regarding traumatic memory, see Silke Arold-de Simine, Mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 71–86. 38 For more on this subject, see Asunción Castro and Julián Díaz (eds), XXV Años de paz franquista. Sociedad y cultura en España hacia 1964 (Madrid: Silex, 2017). 39 ‘People whetted their hunger however they could.’ 40 Statement by Carmen Martínez (Alhama de Almería [Almería], 1936), interviewed by Gloria Román on 8 May 2015. 41 Carlos Barciela, ‘Introducción’, in Historia agraria de la España Contemporánea. 3. El fin de la agricultura tradicional (1900–1960), eds. Ramón Garrabou, José I. Jiménez and Carlos Barciela (Barcelona: Crítica, 1986), 382–3. 42 Statement by Matilde (Alhama de Almería [Almería], 1931), interviewed by Gloria Román on 19 April 2015, and Daniel Castro (Colomera [Granada], 1936). 43 Statement by Carmen Martínez (Alhama de Almería [Almería], 1936), interviewed by Gloria Román on 8 May 2015. 44 Del Arco Blanco, ‘Famine in Spain’. 45 Statements by Daniel Castro (Colomera [Granada], 1936), interviewed in 2019 for the project Cápsulas de memoria. Implicación del alumnado en el trabajo con fuentes orales y elaboración y transferencia de material de carácter docente sobre la historia reciente de España (UGR–INN–205) (from hereon, Proyecto Cápsulas), and Juan Rodríguez (Chiclana de Segura [Jaén], 1948), interviewed by Gloria Román on 10 September 2014. 46 Ibid. 47 For the popular memory of post-war misery in Andalusian country, see Sofía Rodríguez, Memorias de Los Nadie. Una historia oral del campo andaluz (1914– 1959) (Sevilla: Centro de Estudios Andaluces, 2015), 459–96.

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48 Statement by Purificación Molero (Ventorrillo de la Laguna [Loja, Granada], 1937), interviewed in 2019 for Proyecto Cápsulas. 49 Statement by Manuel Jiménez (Alhendín [Granada], 1937), interviewed in 2019 for Proyecto Cápsulas. 50 Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco and Gloria Román Ruiz, ‘La casa se cae sola. Infravivienda, hambre y enfermedad durante el primer franquismo’, in De la chabola al barrio social. Arquitecturas, políticas de vivienda y actitudes de la población en la Europa del sur (1920–1980), ed. Daniel Lanero (Granada: Comares, 2020), 75–94. 51 Statement by Daniel Castro (Colomera [Granada], 1936). 52 Gregorio Santiago, ‘Cuando el hambre no solo mata: trastornos y enfermedades alimenticias en la España de los años cuarenta’, in Los años del hambre. Historia y memoria de la posguerra franquista, ed. Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2020), 271–91. 53 Statement by María Fernández (Prado del Rey [Cádiz], 1933). 54 Statements by Adoración Espiga (Santo Domingo de la Calzada [La Rioja] and Salud Molina (Córdoba, 1939), interviewed in 2019 for Proyecto Cápsulas, as well as María Fernández (Prado del Rey [Cádiz], 1933). 55 Gloria Román, ‘El pan negro de cada día. Memoria de “los años del hambre” en el mundo rural alto-andaluz’, in Los años del hambre. Historia y memoria de la postguerra franquista, ed. Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco (Barcelona: Marcial Pons, 2020), 345–64, 350 and 352–3. 56 Statements by Daniel Castro (Colomera [Granada], 1936), María Medina (Beas de Granada [Granada], 1939) and María Fernández (Prado del Rey [Cádiz], 1933). 57 For poverty as a distinctive feature of post-war teachers, see Óscar J. Rodríguez, Pupitres vacíos: la escuela rural de posguerra. Almería, 1939–1953 (Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, 2015), 6 and 90. 58 Statements by María Fernández (Prado del Rey [Cádiz], 1933), Daniel Castro (Colomera [Granada], 1936) and María Medina (Beas de Granada [Granada], 1939). 59 Regarding the workings of memory, as well as the needs and interests abided by the sources in their statements, see Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Alessandro Portelli, ‘¿Historia oral? Historia y memoria: la muerte de Luigi Trastulli’, Historia y fuente oral, no. 1 (1989): 5–32; Ronald Fraser, ‘Historia oral, historia social’, Historia Social, no. 17 (1993): 131–9; Julián Casanova, ‘Así se recuerda lo que sucedió. La historia oral de Ronald Fraser’, Ayer, no. 90 (2013): 219–29, especially 223. 60 Carlos Gil, ‘Tengo grabado todo aquello. La memoria de los años cuarenta tiene nombre de mujer’, in Ésta es la España de Franco. Los años cincuenta del franquismo

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61 62

63

64 65 66

67

68 69 70 71

Franco’s Famine (1951–1959), eds. Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco and Claudio Hernández Burgos (Zaragoza: PUZ, 2020), 29–55. See also Cazorla, Miedo y progreso, 128–9; Conde Caballero, Tiempos sin pan, 368–70. Statement by Francisca Fernández (Loja [Granada], 1966), interviewed in 2019 for Proyecto Cápsulas. For additional commentary about the normalization and meaning of bread, see Elena Espeitx and Juanjo Cáceres, ‘La memoria de la escasez alimentaria en la Barcelona de posguerra (1939–1953)’, Studium: Revista de Humanidades, no. 16 (2010): 163–87. He was Miguel Moreno, fishmonger by trade, maternal orphan and brother of many siblings. See Ronald Fraser, Mijas. República, guerra, franquismo en un pueblo andaluz (Barcelona: Antoni Bosch, 1985), 101. Statements by María Medina (Beas de Granada [Granada], 1939), Salud Molina (Córdoba, 1939) and María Fernández (Prado del Rey [Cádiz], 1933). Statement by María Fernández (Prado del Rey [Cádiz], 1933). Irene Abad, ‘Las mujeres de los presos políticos en Aragón. La invisibilidad de una categoría heredada de la guerra civil española y prolongada durante todo el franquismo’, Rolde: Revista de Cultura Aragonesa, no. 116 (2006): 30–41 and 35–6. For a commentary about the attribution of symbolism to death (in this case, the executioners’ deaths), see Ana Cabana, La derrota de lo épico (València: PUV, 2013), 264–5. Statement by María Fernández (Prado del Rey [Cádiz], 1933). Statements by Francisco Arco (Íllora–Montejícar [Granada], 1932), interviewed in 2019 for Proyecto Cápsulas, and Francisca Fernández (Loja [Granada], 1966). Statement by Francisco Arco (Íllora–Montejícar [Granada], 1932). Alimentación Nacional, no. 76 (June 1946).

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254

Index Abrucena  211 Agrarian Statistics Yearbooks (Anuario de Estadística del MAPA, Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación)  38 Albacete  69, 208 Alcalá de Henares  88 Alhendín  213 Alicante  69–70 Alimentación Nacional, (National Nutrition) magazine  161–9 Almendralejo  88 Almería  10, 90, 91, 115, 118, 119, 142, 143, 209, 211 Alpandeire  121 Altorricón  209 American Friends’ Service Committee  140 American Red Cross  25, 144, 146, 147 Anales de Bromatologia  62 Andalusia  6, 9, 68 Argentine, commercial agreements with  26 wheat from  215 Arriate  120 Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory  4 Asturias  23, 84, 120, 125 Austria  27, 148, 195 diet in  41 autarky  1, 3, 5, 20, 24, 26–30, 40, 57, 70, 71, 81, 89, 94, 100, 116, 159, 162–6, 168, 171–5, 182, 193, 195–8 autarkic food policy  194 autarkic political economy  161, 166, 167, 170–3, 197 autarkic Spain  160, 162 autarkic subjectivities  159, 175 effects  11, 206 effects on agriculture  27–8, 30 effects on food consumption  43

effects on industrial production  28 effects on prices  116 ending  49 impact on international trade  51 impact on livestock  27–8, 50–5 impact on scarcity  219 inconsistencies  53 in Italy  166 legitimization of  207 nutritional deficiencies  45, 73 reduction of biomass  46 Auxilio Social (Social Aid)  30, 83, 84, 87, 93, 94, 116, 120, 126, 138, 142, 143, 146, 147, 151, 215 avitaminosis  6, 59 Ayuda Social Americana (ASA)  150, 151 Azorín  164 Badajoz  70, 88, 91, 101, 102, 104 Baleares  116 Bank of Spain  21 Barcelona  82, 87, 89, 91, 92, 143, 144, 148, 183, 186, 195 Basque Country  21, 23, 195 conscript height  68, 73 Beas de Granada  215 Belalcázar  92 Belgium  27, 195 aid for Belgian children  148 Belmez  91 Bérchules  123 Beriberi  85 Berja  119 Berlin  211 Bernard de Ferrer, Genoveva  191, 195 black market  8, 11, 28–30, 88–91, 94, 100, 102–4, 114, 117, 119, 128, 142, 183–5, 196, 197, 208, 217 blockade  5, 20, 24–5, 145, 211 Bolivia  105 Boluga, Francisca  187 Bosch Bierge, Gonzalo  173, 174

256

Index

Boston  92 braceros (unskilled labourers)  102 Britain  24, 26, 137, 138, 141, see also United Kingdom embassies  148 government  146 bronchitis  88 Burgos  70, 83 Burgos agreement  143, 146 Cáceres  70, 103, 105, 110 Cádiz  88, 120, 213, 215, 216 Campo de Gibraltar  120 Cantabria  23 Carabanchel  90 Cáritas  59, 150, 151 Carmona  90, 209 Casado, Demetrio  59 Casares, Francisco  206 Castilla La-Mancha  6, 9, 66, 68 Castilla y León  70 Catalonia  10, 141, 144 conscript height in  68 Catholic Church  102, 170, 187 American catholics  145 catholic relief institutions  183 catholics  140 Chinese Catholic Church  145 Caudillo  126, 167, 206, 208, 210, 218, see also Franco, Francisco Chamberí  64, 86 Chiclana de Segura  123, 127 Chile  145 civil guard  118, 120, 122, 185 Cold War  138, 149–52, 197 Colegio Estudio  64 Colomera  211 Comisaría General de Abastecimientos y Transportes (General Commission for the Supplies and Transport, CGAT/CAT)  161, 168, 169, 181, 184–6, 189–91, 195, 198 Communist Party of Spain  121 Cooperativa Nacional del Arroz  169 Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE)  149 Córdoba  82, 90, 120, 123, 214, 216 Cox, Herald  9

Cuatro Caminos  93 Cuenca  116 deficiency diseases  1, 9, 59–60, 92 Denmark  164, 195 diphtheria  8 Doménech, Ignacio  186 Doña, Juana  87 Doña Mencía  90 Dysentery  88 Eastern Europe, commercial relations with  26, see also iron curtain countries Economy-Wide Material Flow Accounting  37 EDALNU Programme  73 edema  92 Eigensinn pratices  114, 121, 126 El Campillo  8 El Ferrol  148 England  164, 196 ersatz products  8 estraperlo (black market)  29, 114, 117–20, 123, 125, 127, 128, 208, 217 estraperlistas  127, 217 Europe  137, 138, 144, 145, 196 European countries  164 Nazi-controlled Europe  8 Western Europe GPD per cápita  58 Extremadura  6, 9, 11, 100–3, 105, 108, 110 conscripts’ height  68, 70 nutritional deficiencies in  108 Falange  8, 20, 30, 87, 91, 101, 115–17, 120, 125, 126, 180, 187 feeding stations  83 ideology  62–3 information and investigation services  115 welfare bodies  120, 151 (see also Auxilio Social) Familias políticas (political families)  30, 187 Federación Sindical de Agricultores de España  167 First World War  5, 64, 137, 141

Index Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)  60, 138 FAOSTAT  38 food balances  37–9, 73 France  27, 141, 164, 196 diet in  41 Republican refuges in  140 Francisco Franco Foundation  19 Franco, Francisco  2, 30, 101, 167, 183, 208 army  183 commercial agreements  26 consolidation of power  181, 184, 185, 205 diplomacy  197 famine  1, 3, 181, 198 famine victims  1, 5–6, 10 Foreign Legion  85 government structure  186 information  30 links with the axis  5, 24–5, 144 personal decisions  5, 100 political economy  174 rise as head of state  24 scholars close to  22 speeches  22, 209, 218 troops  115, 144 victory  87, 102, 122, 141 victory in the war  86–7, 100, 179, 182, 184 Francoist regime/Francoism autarkic ideals  29 (see also autarky) authority’s implication in black market  90 biopolitics  161, 171–3 care homes  83, 94, 183 catholic credentials  145 censorship  1, 115, 180, 184, 186–7, 212 culture  180, 184, 195, 196 discourse  19–20, 187, 211–13, 215, 218 discourse of hunger  1–2, 207, 218 economic damages  47–9 economic policies  21 failure to distribute food  81 food culture  166, 179, 180, 182–4 food discourse  166, 194 food policy  179–80, 182, 189, 193, 195, 198

257

foodscape  194 goals  206–7 GPD per capital fall  27, 58, 100 hostility to outside support  138–40, 144, 146, 148, 151 ideal of femininity  216 ideology  170, 171, 174, 182–3 imposition of scarcity  197 increasing social divide  66 land redistribution programmes  188 laws  123, 128 myths  19–20 political stability  147, 174 prisons  87 production difficulties  46 propaganda  4, 25, 82, 86, 87, 115, 120, 143, 147, 149, 206, 208–11, 213, 217, 219 regime policies shaping shortages  90, 94, 101 relations  24 repression  7, 19, 21, 82–3, 86, 91, 94, 120, 122, 180, 181, 184, 198, 217 responsibility in the hunger years  53 social control  143, 160 social policies  138, 148, 149 state bureaucracy  29, 185 support groups  30, 114 welfare bodies  143 Friends Service Council  140 Fuente Obejuna  81 Galicia  23, 94 conscripts’ height from  73 diet  192 Gallego, Trinidad  87 García Barbando, Alfonso  60 Garrucha  91 General Directorate of Health  64 Generalisimo  28, 115, see also Franco, Francisco General Plan of Hydraulic Works  23 Germany  5, 10, 12, 27, 28, 144, 145, 195, 196 commercial relations with  25, 89, 163 diet in  41 Hispano-German treaty  163 Girona/Gerona  90, 151 Gomá, Cardinal  145

258

Index

Gómez, F. A., (national rice federation president)  169 Granada  4, 9, 86, 115, 116, 118–24, 126, 211–15, 217 Grande Covian, Francisco  60, 64, 85 Greece consumption of milk in  61 deterioration of nutrition in  66 diet in  41 Greek famine  4, 101 Guadix  115, 118, 120 Guerrillas  121, 128, see also Maquis Halifax, Edward, (Lord)  25 Hellín  68, 69 Higher Council of Chambers of Commerce  7 Hispanidad  164, 170 Hitler, Adolf  2, 25, 28 Hoare, Sir Samuel  91 Hogar Infantil, (Infant Home)  126 Holland  195, see also Netherlands diet in  41 great Dutch famine  101, 128 (see also Hongerwinter) Holodomor  4, 118, 128, see also Ukraine Hongerwinter  119 Huelva  8 Huércal Overa  115 Huesca  209 Hungary  148, 196 hunger neurology  59–60, 64 Iberian Anarchists Federation  126 Ibiza  117 India  12, 195 influenza pandemic  64 Institute of Agrarian Reform  103 Institute of National Statistics  37 Interdepartmental Committee on Nutrition for National Defense  66 International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees  86, 140, 141, 145 International Commission for War Refugees  145 international aid  25 international isolation  2, 10, 19, 20, 24, 46, 82, 138, 139, 196, 197, 211, 218

impact on international trade  51 International Labour Organization  138 iron curtain countries  150 Italy  26–8, 41, 144, 148, 165, 195, 196 autarkic policies  166 commercial relations with  89 consumption of milk  61 deterioration of nutrition  66 Jacobs, Alfred  146 Jacobs, Norma  143, 147 Jaén  115, 123, 127 Janney, John  89, 91, 92, 142, 143 Japan  196 Kershner, Howard  141–3, 146 La Arboleda  83 Laborcillas  122 La Carlota  120, 123 La Coruña  125 La Rioja  83, 214 Las Ventas prison  87, 88 Latin America  170 Lavapiés  93 Law of Historical Memory  4 League of Nations  138 Lehuerta, Genaro  167 León  82 León, Alberto  173, 174, 186 Lérida  91 Lerín  83 lice  88, 215 Loja  213, 215 London  82 Madrid  2, 9, 10, 25, 64, 71, 82, 84, 85, 91–3, 128, 137, 139, 144, 145, 162, 183, 192, 208 food sent to  86 occupation of  86 Pact of Madrid  139, 149 Málaga  9, 91, 120, 121, 127, 142, 192, 216 Málaga prison  9 malaria  8 Maquis  121 Márquez, Gimeno  169 Marshall Plan  67, 138 Martín Patino, Basilio  3

Index Matuteras  120 measles  88 Medina (magazine)  191 Mediterranean diet  44 Menaje para la mujer y el hogar (magazine)  196 meningitis  88 Menorca  117 Mijas  216 Ministry of Agriculture  60, 163, 185 food balance series of the  37 Ministry of Industry and Commerce  21, 26, 169 Montejícar  217 Morales, Ana  88 Moreiras, Olga  60 Murcia  6, 89, 116, 125 conscripts’ height in  68–70 Muro, Ángel  174 Mussolini, Benito  2, 28, 165–6 National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC)  145, 147, 150 National Delegate of Trade Unions  28 National Economic Council  160 National Health Surveys  65 National Institute of Industry (Instituto Nacional de Industria, INI)  28 National Institute of Medical Research  64, 85 National Institute of Statistics  117 National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief  140 National Plan of Hydraulic Works (republican)  23 national rice federation  169 National Wheat Service (Servicio Nacional de Trigo, SNT)  47, 126 Navarra  23, 83 navicerts  5, 24 Netherlands  27, see also Holland deterioration of nutrition  66 famine  4, 11 New York  82 NO-DO (Noticiario Documentales Cinematográficos)  161, 164, 168 North America  144 nutritional crisis  9, 60

259 ‘hunger years’ duration  68 impact on height  62 malnutrition due to dietary deficiencies  64, 86 nutritional problems  62

Oviedo  84 Pakistan  26 Palanca, José  146 Palma de Mallorca  92 Pamplona  82, 83, 91, 142 Pardo Bazán, Emilia  173 París Eguilaz, Higinio  28, 29, 208 Pate, Maurice  150 Pato Manzano, Manuel  84 pellagra/paraesthetic-causalgic syndrome  9, 85 Peñarroya  91 Peñón de Gibraltar  120 Perón, Juan  26, 170 persistent drought (pertinaz sequía)  20– 2, 207 Píñar  120, 121, 124 Podesan, Asunta  171 Portugal  26, 27, 110, 195 consumption of milk  62 Pozoblanco  82 Prado del Rey  215 Prices Court (Fiscalía de Tasas)  90 Primo de Rivera, Miguel dictatorship  160–2, 164–5 Provincial Council for the Protection of Children  83, 87, 92 Puebla de Don Fadrique  126 Pueblonuevo  91 Puente de Vallecas  64, 85, 92, 144, 147 Puerto De Santa María  88 Purullena  122 Quakers  82–6, 89, 91, 140–6 rationing  5, 6, 8, 29, 65, 70, 85, 89, 100, 101, 103, 105, 109, 116, 117, 119, 123, 126, 142, 161, 166, 168, 185, 186, 190–2, 196, 198, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 216, 217 in the Second World War  196 resistance, in everyday life  129, 184

260

Index

Restaurant and Hotel Syndicate  185 Rich, John  141 Rockefeller Foundation  9, 64, 82, 89, 91, 92, 140, 142–4, 146, 147, 151, 216 International Health Division of the  142 Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis  4 Russia  150, 195, 196 Russian famine  137 Sabadell  89 Salamanca  118, 126 San Sebastián  91 Santa Fe  125 Santo Domingo de la Calzada  214 Sanz Bachiller, Mercedes  143 Sanz Orrio, Fermín  28 Save the Children Fund  140, 141 scabies  88 School Services of Food and Nutrition (SEAN)  72–3 Second Republic areas during the war  70, 82, 94 blaming of the  20, 24, 36, 167, 168, 207–8, 218 humanitarian relief  141 international mobilization in favour of  140, 144, 146 memory of the  210 per capita consumption of food  42 Second World War  1, 2, 5, 12, 19, 20, 24, 25, 81, 84, 119, 137, 138, 142, 144–6, 148, 151, 196, 197, 208, 211 aftermath  149 economic consequences of the  58 food crisis originated by the  11, 42, 66, 73, 101 victorious powers  207 Semprún, José  164 Sen, Amartya  26 Serrano Suñer, Ramón  20 Sevilla/Seville  8, 90, 91, 117, 126, 142, 209 cost of living in  7 Sierra Alhamilla  119 Sierra Morena  123 Sindicato de Frutos (fruit trade union)  163 Sindicato Nacional de la Naranja  162 Siriono people  105

smallpox  8 Social Service (Servicio Social)  195 Sorolla, Joaquín  164 Southeast Asia  39 Southern Levante  9 Spain (monthly bulletin)  148 Spain Royal Academy of History  19 Spanish Catholic Action  148 Spanish Civil War  84, 128, 138, 139, 142, 161, 168, 179, 181, 183, 184, 205, 218 aftermath  25, 143–5, 147, 182, 188, 197 debts caused by  25 demographic consequences of the  21 economic consequences of the  19– 21, 26, 27, 36 economic policy of the rebels during the  27, 82, 86, 94 ending  100 fall in consumption during the  28 Francoist occupation and distribution of food  89 hardship brought on by the  181, 211 impact on food supply  41 impact on livestock  50, 218 international humanitarian support during the  137, 139–40, 152 memory of the  19, 210 politization of food during the  198 rebel propaganda  207 rice production during the  166 vanquished  213 victors of the  180 Spanish Institute of Foreign Currency  169 Spanish Red Cross  141 Spanish Society of Nutrition  62 Spanish Statistical Office (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE)  7, 66 Stabilization Plan  49, 66, 73 Stalin, Josef  118 Suanzes, Juan Antonio  20–1, 24 Sweden  164 Swedish Food and Biotechnology Institute  39 Switzerland  195, 196 Tangier  24 Terque  118

Index Three Spikelets Law  118 Time (magazine)  137, 147 Torre Cardela  118, 122 Torrero prison  88 tuberculosis  4, 8, 30, 63, 85, 88, 92 Turkey  195 Twenty-Five Years of Peace  210 typhus  1, 8, 9, 63, 84, 88, 92, 93, 213 Ukraine  11 famine in  4, 118 Uleila del Campo  119 Umbral, Francisco  127 underground economy  29, see also black market United Kingdom  25, 140, 195, see also Britain government of the  145 United Nations (UN)  73, 138, 139, 148, 150 United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF)  138, 148, 150 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)  138, 148 United States of America (USA)  24–6, 66, 137, 139–41, 144–6, 149, 195 authorities  150 embassy  148, 150 foreign policy  138, 152 Vagrancy Act (Ley de vagos y maleantes)  116

261

Valencia  25, 65–6, 85, 142 anthropometric deterioration  69 landscape  168 rice fields of  167 Valladolid  127, 142 Varea, Carlos  71 Varela, Gregorio  60, 62 Vatican  148 Velefique  115 VENTANAL (magazine)  191 Ventorrillo de la Laguna  213 Vigo  192 vitamin deficiencies  10, 45, 59, 62, 64, 66, 85, 88, see also avitaminosis Vivanco, Francisco  60 Vizcaya  68 Washington  147 Weapons of the weak  105, 125 whooping cough  88 Women Section (Sección Femenina)  187, 195 World Meteorological Organization  22 Worlds Health Organization (WHO)  44 Y (magazine)  191 Ya (newspaper)  2 Yenken, Arthur  8 Zamora  70 Zaragoza  87, 90, 91, 116, 142 Zaragoza prison  88

262

263

264

265

266