Word: ridruejo
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When the Spanish government takes time out to speak to the Opposition it calls on Dionisio Ridruejo. Yet, Ridruejo's speech at Harvard last week in Boylston Hall was his first public address in over three years. He remains one of the few men barred from speaking publicly in Franco's Spain, and since 1955 his name has not appeared in print in that country...
...government fears not Ridruejo's extremist politics (he is not an extremist) but his liberal, intellectual appeal and his unique history...
Until 1942, Ridruejo was a member of the Spanish fascist party, the Falange. That year he left the party and entered a period of introspection from which he was to emerge a democrat and a socialist, in complete opposition to Franco. His conversion is a source of his pre-eminent position within the opposition, for he criticizes the fascists after having been "one of them...
...liberal political stance, however, is also a factor in the government's decision to separate him from public Spain. Traditionally, Ridruejo explained, the government "has not tried to crush the communists, but only the liberals. This is because the government is interested in maintaining the appearance that the only opposition that exists is the extreme left, and the only alternative to the present regime is civil war. Therefore, most acts of opposition are attributed to the extreme left...
Amidst this Spain, however, some true Spaniards remain, and Dionisio Ridruejo is perhaps an archetypical example. He is a professor at the University of Madrid, when it is open, and he is a genuine teacher. He is also a writer, a humanist and human, with brilliant eyes and fine hands with which he speaks. And he loves Spain and knows her as almost no other individual does. But this knowledge only makes him more acutely aware of the tensions and contradictions that exist within present-day Spain to be resolved only upon Franco's death...