The New Basques

Singing a long-forbidden song, a knot of youths surged into Pamplona's Plaza Mayor one day last week and, with a lusty cheer, sent two homemade rockets sizzling into the sky. While police unsuccessfully pursued them, their rockets exploded into a shower of paper flags, each bearing the red field and two green crosses of Euzkadi, the homeland of the Basques. Spain's Basque Separatists are once more up to their old habits of derring-do. In recent weeks they have also planted their outlawed flag on a mountaintop in upper Navarra, ingeniously substituted it for the Spanish flag at a civil ceremony in San Sebastian. Police throughout northern Spain, more over, are searching frantically for a hidden Basque radio transmitter that jams government newscasts and broadcasts Separatist propaganda in their stead.

Despite such comic-opera feats, the cause that the Basque troublemakers are trying to promote--an independent Basque nation--is rapidly dying in Spain. The Basques, once thought of as an exotic race of faithful shepherds living in the remote fastnesses of the Pyrenees, bearing such unpronounceable names as Zugazagoitia and speaking a totally incomprehensible tongue, no longer conform to their old image. From Urzaingui to Munguia, they have taken up Spanish in place of their own archaic language--an agglutinated monstrosity that, according to Basque legend, even the Devil could not learn: in seven years of trying, he mastered only the words for yes (bai) and no (ez). More important, Basques by the hundreds of thousands have come out of their tight green mountain valleys and moved to the cities to become businessmen, industrialists and factory workers.

Far from being isolated, the Basque country has boomed into Spain's most dynamic industrial area and one of its most prosperous. San Sebastian (pop. 149,000) is the nation's summer capital and most fashionable resort, boasts the highest per capita spending rate in all of Spain. Bilbao (pop. 357,000) is a throbbing city of steel mills and shipyards, whose skies are darkened by factory smoke by day and glow with the fires of blast furnaces by night. It is also Spain's banking capital, the headquarters of two of Spain's five great banking chains. And its wide residential avenues, clogged with cars and lined with solid homes, attest to the prosperity of the men and women who have taken to calling themselves "the new Basques."

The new Basques no longer want any part of Euzkadi, which existed as a separate republic only for a few months at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. They would, however, like to regain the local fueros (privileges) that were taken away from them by the Franco government for having fought on the wrong side of the civil war. Under the fueros, traditionally granted by most Spanish governments, the Basques were allowed to collect their own taxes and run their own local governments according to the timeless, almost tribal, lights of their ancestors--who decided Basque affairs in a council that met under an oak tree in the ancient town of Guernica.

Jai Alai & Bulls. The Basques were probably Europe's first indigenous race. They maintained the purity of their blood and culture for centuries by staving off successive invasions by the Romans, Visigoths and Moors. But their great names have been identified not as Basques but as Spaniards. Both St. Francis Xavier and St. Ignatius Loyola were Basques, as was the South American independence hero, Simon Bolivar. Writers Miguel de Unamuno and Pio Baroja shunned their native language, wrote all their works in Spanish. Franco's Foreign Minister, Fernando Maria Castiella y Maiz, and the president of the Spanish Cortes, Antonio Iturmendi, are also Basques.

The Basques have not, of course, given up all of their rich traditions. They still run with the bulls in Pamplona, still play jai alai, still demonstrate their manliness by engaging in aizkolari (wood-chopping contests) and korika-lari (marathon races against trotting horses). And they still wear the black boinas (berets) that are the main contribution of their culture to the Western world. In fact, their oft-heard cries for independence are not nearly so Basque in origin as they are Spanish. They mostly go to prove that the Basque is a practicing member of Spain's community of adamant individualists, whose motto has traditionally been: "?Hay go-bierno? Yo soy contra."--"Whatever the government, I'm against it."

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