Ten Years of Struggle

Ten years have passed since Cornford died on that green hill in Cordoba, ten years in which everything for which he fought and gave his life had to be fought for again and at the cost of the lives of millions of young men and women because of the purblindness of some and the criminal folly of others.

Let us look at that green hill in Cordoba . . . ten years after.

"Not far from the ancient Moorish Mosque of Cordoba in the maze of poor, mean little streets that I have visited, men, women and children are dying of hunger or from diseases resulting from malnutrition. All the usual revolting signs of famine are there—children with hideously swollen stomachs, fragile limbs and wizened emaciated faces, women like human scarecrows with enormous eyes who are unable to move as their joints are swollen, and men so pitifully thin and feeble that to walk a few steps makes them breathless."

Thus a recent report by a Daily Telegraph correspondent in Spain. The food situation in Franco Spain is among the world's worse, the country-being at the mercy of the black marketers who run the fascist Falangist Party for their own benefit. The official daily ration of a Spanish worker is 5 ozs. of bread. 1 oz. of chocolate and three-fifths of an ounce of oil. From time to time there may be potatoes and dried beans. This would make a total of 642 calories a day. As the essential minimum for a worker is 2,750 calories a day, Franco is slowly but surely killing thousands of the Spanish people.

The only way that something more than this starvation diet can be obtained is by recourse to the black market. And while this is no doubt a phenomenon in most European countries since the war, there has been no increase in wages to off-set the astronomical prices on the black market. It is estimated that real wages are only 25 per cent, of the 1936 wages.