A Black Decade: Spain's hunger years

People who suffered the miserable period after the Civil War remember how they desperately searched for food while there was little… or none.

“Destitute lines of people waiting for food from social aid, people dirty and with lice, children eating carob beans, fig bread, sweet potatoes…. People spoke in low tones so that the neighbor did not hear —something that I did not understand by my age—, but everyone was content to have left the hell of the war. At the age of eight I suffered the most possible for a child to suffer, and it has left its marks. Those times give me so much pain that I do not want to remember them. The postwar I can only think of as a distant thing because of how horrible it was.”

These are the words Francisca Díaz Ruano used to describe Spain in the hunger years of the 1940s. Díaz Ruano, a survivor of the postwar era, is the author of La loma del sueño, a book that reflects on the life of an eight-year-old girl during the epoch.

When the Civil War came to an end on April 1, 1939 with the triumph of fascist general Francisco Franco’s Nationalist Army, much of Spain lay in shambles. Franco and his government announced a twelve-year, $516,000,000 reconstruction program. Despite this, Spain fell into even worse conditions. The years of hunger that followed continued the horrors and brutalities Spain had seen during its fratricidal conflict.

The Spanish infrastructure, including its transportation system of both railways and roads, was disorganized due to war damage. Farmers were unable to obtain much-needed fertilizer for the ancient Spanish earth, and as a result insects plagued the crops.

World War II proved a barrier to Spain’s rebuilding as funding and critical resources and materials were difficult to obtain. While the government declared neutrality in the war, the little support Spain did provide landed on the side of the Axis powers, thus provoking reactions from the Allies. According to a New York Times article entitled “Allies’ Blockage of Spain is Seen” from January 29, 1944, both the United States and Britain imposed blockades and embargos on Spain in efforts to force the country to “stop sending supplies and money to German acts of sabotage against Allied vessels, and withdraw Spanish soldiers from the Russian front.” The Allies knew that halting shipments of oil, cotton, and food, and constructing blockades of shipments from South America would nearly incapacitate Spain’s economy.

According to an analysis by Grandizo Munis on Spain a year after Franco’s victory, unemployment in industry sectors was nearly 100 percent in the cities. Those in rural areas fared better than most in the city due to the ability to plant little gardens and work their own land. The average income of a workman in Spain at the time was less than 75 cents a day, reported a New York Times article in 1941. The cost of living was triple that of pre-war times.

Spain’s news media attempted to console the starving population. In March of 1941, one news source wrote of an even greater more widespread famine in the seventeenth century, when “a lark could not fly across Castille without carrying its own provisions.”

The poor flooded cities. While the more fortunate lived in apartments, or a floor of a house, many lived in corrales. Corrales, which were once used to house animals, consisted of a building with an open patio center, with a common kitchen and bathroom and many little square rooms where families made their homes. In such close quarters these people were forced to co-exist, and they shared everything, the good and the bad. Some neighbors fought with each other, while others saved their scraps for the elderly woman next store.

Spaniards who complained were severely punished. The Law of Political Responsibility enacted by Franco subjected all those who directly or indirectly collaborated with the “reds” to high penalties. A private denunciation was sufficient, and punishments could range from confiscation of property to 30 years in prison to death. Munis writes that according to French government sources, in February 1940 the monthly number of executions was 800.

Rosario Ceballos, who was a young girl during the 1940s, talks of how it was an everyday occurrence to find civil guards and soldiers, along with silence, on the streets. People dared not speak anything negative about the government for fear of being marked as a communist.

Angel L. de Quinta, whose parents were young children during the hunger years, recounts how once, when his father Salvador was a young boy, Nationalist soldiers entered the house in search of arms. The family did not have any weapons in the house, but in the midst of the search Angel’s grandfather Juan remembered the plastic pistol his son Salvador owned and began to pray fervently for the soldiers not to find the toy.

Houses had no running water. People had to go and fetch water from faucets in the streets. During the hot months, when water was in greater demand, people would have to get up sometimes before dawn in order to beat the rush, or travel further than normal later in the day. They took baths in bins in the house, using natural soap and often reusing the water.

The ration of meat was set at 100 grams per person, but distribution was not weekly. Simple foods, such as bread, chickpeas, sugar, and olive oil were also rationed. Nothing was wasted. People saved even potato peels to fry for another meal.

Rosario Ceballos describes the process to obtain food. “To buy food we would use food stamps. Sometimes, however, when times were very hard, we would barter with things such as a can of condensed milk in order to buy food. Bread was rationed, and often people would collect their ration and then try reselling it to turn a profit…Selling contraband, while illegal, happened in an unbelievable multitude.”

“Daily meals for my family consisted of some bread and coffee for breakfast, a little portion of garbanzo beans or lentils for lunch, and then coffee and bread, if there was some left, for dinner. Milk was rare,” she adds.

José Martínez Ruiz, who was born in 1940, remembers how the hunger years demanded he become a delinquent at an early age. Because of the limited amount of available food, people were forced to steal, or else starve.

“I used to put on my father’s jacket, which was large on me and had room to hide things, and go to the stores to steal food such as apples, or whatever I could grab.”

Angel’s maternal grandfather Pepe worked as a ticket vendor at a Seville theatre Teatro Triunfo. Angel remembers him telling stories of how plays would be disrupted by the sounds of the actors’ stomachs grumbling.

There is no hiding from the fact that the masses in Spain suffered incredibly during the 1940s. The hunger they faced is something to which few in the developed world or the Spain of today can relate.

“People are eating and you cannot eat,” José says in an attempt to describe the hunger he experienced. “There would be people eating in a pastry store, and all I could do is watch and feel my mouth salivate because my father did not have money to pay.”