Año: 1954

  • Llegan en el Semíramis repatriados republicanos y de la División Azul

    TEARS SALUTE

    Barcelona mobs Blue Division

    After absence of a decade and more, 286 Spaniards came home from Soviet prison camps and were greeted amid scenes of delirious emotion. Most of them were hard-bitten veterans of Franco’s Blue Division, captured when fighting for Hitler on the Russian Front. There were also a few sailors, some supporters of the old Spanish republic, even four wizened little old-young men who were children when they were sent to Russia during the Spanish civil war. All, friends and foes of Communism alike, had been in slave labor camps for periods ranging from 10 to 16 years. There were probably 200 Spaniards still left in the camps.

    From the Liberian ship Semiramis, carrying them from Odessa to Barcelona, the returning prisoners made radio-telephone calls to relatives, and these heartbreaking conversations were broadcast to the country. Spain’s tears welled up. When the ship docked, a hysterical mob stormed aboard.

    It was a truly Spanish scene, wild and emotional. Men fell into each other’s arms and sobbed. Women fainted. A cameraman [Carlos Pérez de Rozas y Masdeu] dropped dead of excitement. But it was just as truly Spanish in the irony that came out amid the emotion. «Communism?» mused a repatriated Socialist of the old Popular Front days. «Cabbage, hard work and everyone for himself.» And a veteran of the Blue Division, peering into the sobbing face of Minister of War Agustín Muñoz Grandes who commanded the division in Russia, murmured wryly, «My general, you don’t know how much we missed you.»

  • Con más producción y menos consumo, los viticultores proponen bombas de vino en las gasolineras

    Spain Stuck With Wine For Every Tub
    MADRID (UP) – Wine went begging here at seven-and-a-half cents a bottle while worried authorities wondered how to build up consumption.

    There’s already enough surplus wine, about 50,000,000 gallons of it, to fill every bath tub in Spain, and industry sources estimate the overflow might mount to 375,000,000 gallons, if there’s a bumper crop this year.

    Where are the thirsts of yesteryear?
    1. Spaniards have switched to beer or soft drinks, blaming the change on the increase in price since pre-war days which sent a litre of wine up from one peseta (2½ cents) to three pesetas (7½ cents).
    2. Wine production is at flood-tide. The 1948-1953 average of 400,000,000 gallons annually jumped to 850,000,000 gallons in 1953 and is still rising in 1954.

    Vintners, resting on the wine-drinking tradition, never tried to raise the thirst of their customers until they saw the market running dry this year. Now they have turned to publicity in a big way.

    Advertising points out that Napoleon’s armies stuck to wine and missed all sorts of afflictions plaguing the local populations on their lines of march. Like army uniforms, «wine warms you in winter, cools you in summer,» is a slogan.

    In Barcelona, there is talk of selling wine from gasoline-type pumps at wayside filling stations…