Opposition Leader Views Spain's Future Prospects

"If you ask how Spain is, I must answer, 'Spain is not well,'" Dionisio Redrejo, a leader of the opposition to Franco, said last night in Boylston Hall.

"The problem of succession to Franco dominates all problems in Spain--political, economic and moral," he told an audience of over one hundred Faculty members and students. Redrejo spoke in Spanish.

Redrejo saw "only two solutions to the problem of succession--fascism, in the form of another military dictatorship, or the restoration of the monarchy. Neither is a genuine political solution," he said.

He went on to say that if a fascist dictatorship were extended following Franco's death, the Spanish people would rise up in rebellion. The monarchy, on the other hand, can only be considered a temporary solution, he said.

Redrejo spent a good portion of the hour and a half lecture outlining the principle stages of the development of Spain under the Franco government from 1939 to the present. Although he described the political and economic situation in Spain throughout this period as dismal, he cited certain "hopeful" signs, in the student movements begun in 1956, and in the working class movement whose first major strike was held in 1961.

Ultimately, Redrejo said the Spanish people, long passive under the Generalissimo's rule, will lose their fear and take the political initiative necessary to rid Spain of the anachronistic spectre of the army and other traditional reactionary forces. Only then will Spain enter the modern world, he said.