The Dilemma of Credibility: The Spanish Communist Party, the Franco Regime and After

Abstract

IT IS REPORTED THAT WHEN ALVARO CUNHAL CAME OUT OF PRISON IN the late 1950s, he initiated a purge of the leadership of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). Their crime was apparently españolismo – or a sympathy with the broad reformist policy of ‘national reconciliation’ adopted by the Spanish Communists in 1956. The Spanish leaders were aware of this implied slur on their revolutionary seriousness, but as both parties battled for survival against repressive dictatorships, it was not an issue over which to break openly the fundamental solidarity between them. Yet a decade and a half later, with Cunhal seemingly leading his Party down the highroad to socialism and his Spanish comrades probably within sight of their immediate goal of the collapse of Francoism, the theoretical discrepancies have re-emerged. Santiago Carrillo, Secretary-General of the PCE, has been sufficiently critical of Cunhal's attempt to create an Eastern European-style socialism in Portugal to earn Soviet accusations of lack of solidarity. Carrillo has described Cunhal's policy during the last year as ‘a good example of how not to make a revolution’. In doing so, the Spanish leader has not only incurred the displeasure of Moscow, something which he has learned to live with since his stand against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, but also risked serious internal division inside his own party.