Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  At the far end of the fronton, up a set of metal steps, is a six-by-twelve-foot room. This is Cipri, the “factory” where the world’s best pelotas, most of the balls chosen for professional matches, are made. Cipri is short for Cipriano. The first Cipriano Ruiz started making the balls in the nineteenth century. His son, also Cipriano Ruiz, began in the 1930s. In the 1990s they were made by the second Cipriano’s two sons, Cipriano and Roberto. Cipri never had employees, because the business depends on keeping secrets. When a manager orders balls, he tells them which fronton the match will be in. Each court has different walls and a different floor, and the Ruizes know all of them. The manager might have other requests. Make it fast, make it slow, have it bounce high, keep it low. The managers tell Cipri what kind of a match they want.

  When the discovery of America was still new, the first balls were made of rubber. Today they are made of thin, clear, very stretchy latex tape. The tape is wound into hard little balls, which sit in old egg cartons awaiting the next step. Then they are wrapped in pure wool yarn, then in cotton string. When the ball is finished, a goat skin is stitched on in the same way as a horsehide on a baseball. The ball always weighs between 104 and 107 grams. Yet somehow each ball is built for a different performance. This is all the Ruizes will say. Explaining the secretiveness of Cipri, Panpi LaDouche, a native of the Nivelle Valley, said, “It’s like a good gâteau Basque.”

  THE OLD BRITISH freight docks, a huge riverfront operation in the heart of Bilbao that had serviced British industry for more than a century, was closed down in the post-Franco economic restructuring, but soon farmers on the slopes above the city saw a strange new sight below. The metal was whiter and fresher than anything else on the riverfront. And it had the name Guggenheim.

  How Bilbao ended up with a Guggenheim museum, paid for by Basque taxpayers, was a demonstration of the inner workings of the Basque Nationalist Party, the PNV. The project was a party dream, with nationalist motives that involved almost every imaginable calculation other than art. Josu Ortuando, mayor of Bilbao, said, “We were able to win out over Salzburg and other cities because city hall, parliament, and the Basque government could act as one.” Though it is not clear that the other cities wanted to win, what the mayor was referring to was the fact that all three levels of government were controlled by the PNV.

  The Guggenheim Foundation, in financial difficulty, was shopping for a site to build a new Guggenheim, one that would not cost the foundation anything and in fact would generate revenue for it. Tokyo, Osaka, Moscow, Vienna, Graz, and Salzburg were among the cities that had already turned down this financially dubious proposition when the foundation director, Thomas Krens, heard of this curious thing—a Basque government. In the end, the Basque parliament, led by the Basque Nationalist Party, but in coalition with Socialists, approved the project. It was not so much the Basque government or the Basque legislature that was drawn to it as the Basque Nationalist Party. The key figure behind the scenes in the negotiations, the man whose thumb up or down was critical but who held no elected office, was Xabier Arzalluz, the Basque Nationalist Party boss.

  The choice of Bilbao was in itself significant. Vitoria, the capital of Euskadi, was too provincial and geographically too removed from the Euskera-speaking heartlands to be considered. The cultural center of the three provinces is San Sebastián. But the headquarters of the Basque Nationalist Party is in Bilbao.

  The Basque Nationalist Party, now a century-old institution, is the central and anchoring power in Euskadi. The largest political party, it likes to operate as though it were synonymous with government itself. The ikurriña, the official flag of the Autonomous Basque Community of Euskadi, is also the official flag of the party. Often, the sight of the flag means nothing more than a local party headquarters.

  The main headquarters in Bilbao, with its especially large ikurriña, is a modern structure of Stalinist grandeur with two thick, dark, black pillars supporting nothing on either side of a metal detector. It was built in 1993 on the site of Sabino Arana’s house, literally Sabin Etxea, and it is where Arzalluz’s office is located.

  Once you are past the security guards, the metal detectors, and the two pillars—once you are standing on the marble floor of the mausoleumlike lobby, it seems certain that the embalmed corpse of Sabino must be on display nearby. But not even his house is there. Franco, who, like Sabino, understood the importance of symbols, had it destroyed. One of the workers on the demolition seemed to have had nationalist leanings, and he saved a balcony railing, which he kept in his own house during decades of silence. The ornate nineteenth-century ironwork piece now rests above the lobby of the party building, an intentional anachronism.

  The Sabino Arana Foundation, also based in this building, gives annual awards, like a nation bestowing its Medal of Freedom. In 1997, the recipient was the Tibetan government-in-exile. The PNV remembers exile. The 1998 recipient was the Saharan Polisario Front, which has been fighting for decades for independence from Morocco.

  If the PNV had wanted to improve the museums of Bilbao, the city had another museum, the handsome old Bellas Artes, considered one of the better museums in Spain, which could have been expanded.

  But the party leadership had something else in mind. It is what has always been on their minds: nation building. The leadership is well aware that if Euskadi is a nation, it is a tiny nation, and while half the struggle is building the nation, the other half is getting it recognized in the world. The size of their land and their population never seems to moderate Basque ambitions.

  TO CALCULATE the exact cost to Euskadi taxpayers of the Bilbao Guggenheim is complicated, or perhaps the leadership wants it to be complicated. The figure usually mentioned is $100 million, which is equal to $56 for each citizen. After paying for the building, the Basques also agreed to pay the Guggenheim for using the Guggenheim name on the building. Furthermore, the Guggenheim Foundation chooses the art for the Bilbao museum. The survey of twentieth-century art that made up the initial exhibit seemed like leftovers from the Guggenheim warehouse. The museum, with the exception of a few Chillida pieces, pays no homage to Basque art. Even Picasso’s great tribute to Basque suffering, Guernica, was not made available for the opening. Officials at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, where it hangs, said that it could not be moved because it was too delicate for the journey. But many speculated that the Madrileños feared the Basques would never give the painting back—a fear rooted in the almost self-evident fact that it belongs in a major museum of twentieth-century art only a few miles from Guernica.

  And yet the Basque Nationalist Party got what it wanted out of the project. Arzalluz said, “It was expensive, but it was cheap for what we got. When we decided to do it, everyone was against it. But then, it was argued that in the center of Bilbao would be a center of modern art for Europe. Then we saw the light. It is a great thing for the future. More than we ever thought, it is an important building. Everyone recognizes that it is a great building, greater than what is in it.”

  Ramón Labayen, who was the Basque government’s minister of culture at the time the project was first proposed, said, “It is a great opening up to the world.” To bring the world to them was seen as far more important to the Basques than promoting themselves to the world. An internationally prestigious American building would do more to make them a nation than a brilliant display of Basque art.

  By the time the museum opened in October 1997, Bilbao was a city with a lot of plans. But they rarely included the word culture, except in the phrase industrial culture. “From the beginning we wanted something more than culture. It is an investment,” said Mayor Ortuando. “It will be easier to attract investments because of the Guggenheim.”

  This is a city of industry. The hotels here have always offered reduced rates for weekends, because most visitors are Monday-through-Friday business travelers.

  The mayor reasoned, “This was an industrial city that was based on iron mines. At the end of the 1980s we started recovering and
planning the future. The iron mines were exhausted. Where was the future? How do we use our industrial culture, our traditional work ethic, our human capital? What we could do is use new technology. But this would not be enough. We had a deep harbor, a port with a future, and we could be a service center. We started to develop a postindustrial concept with five points.”

  Included in the five-point plan were cleaning up the pollution from the old industry, cleaning the river, separating industry from the center city, expanding the subway system and the airport, building more bridges, enhancing technology and managerial programs in the universities, building new industries . . . After looking at the city plans, the $100 million for the museum does not seem as shocking. But only number five of the city’s five-point plan mentions anything about cultural attractions.

  From the PNV point of view, Frank Gehry was the perfect architect for the project. In his sixties, he had become the international architect of the moment based on several major projects in the U.S. Midwest, the American Center in Paris, and an office building in Prague. He also was smitten with Basque country and expressed a personal affection for things Basque, though this was not necessarily reflected in his work. The last thing the PNV wanted was something uniquely Basque. The party wanted something international. The other appealing thing about Gehry was that he had garnered a reputation as a sculptor. His buildings were said to be works of art in themselves. He told the Basques that if he did a museum, he would regard the building itself as more important than the work in it.

  That was what the Basques wanted: an important building. What they got was a fanciful-looking structure of curves and tilts, at the base of the mountains, seen at the end of Iparraguirre Street, the long straight avenue of blackening nineteenth-century architecture named to honor the author of “Tree of Guernica.”

  The structure has neither the grace nor the originality of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York but seems to almost subconsciously pay homage to that famous softly tapered spiral. As promised, it is more a sculpture than a building. Though interesting to look at from the outside, it offers no new ideas about museum architecture. Inside, the exhibition space may have the boldness but not the fluidity of the Wright building. As in a French airport, you are never exactly sure where to go. It does not have the sense of humor of the Pompidou Center. Nor does it have the traffic. Contrary to the publicity, it did not seem crowded its first year. About 50 percent of the visitors, according to museum figures, were Basques. Basque families, the men in floppy, dark blue berets, wandered through.

  But while the foreign press had predicted huge crowds of international tourists, this had never been the stated goal of the PNV, nor is tourism a priority in the plans for the city. The Basque Nationalist Party got what it wanted when the New York Times architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, called the museum “the most important building yet completed” by Gehry.

  The most intriguing side of the Bilbao Guggenheim is the back. Set against a man-made pond, the shiny titanium structures look like a cartoon port, the sort of place where tugboats with big smiles might dock. The traffic speeding over the high, green La Salve Bridge, across the Nervión, appears to be getting swallowed by this titanium monster. Below on the other side is the infamous Cuartel de la Salve, a Guardia Civil station conspicuous for its Spanish flag, a rare sight in Basqueland. Two heavily armed guards stand in front with bulky bulletproof protection, looking unhappy to be there.

  When asked for her opinion, a woman who lived in the neighborhood near the Guggenheim said, “I don’t know anything about modern art,” which is what Arzalluz also said. A law professor at Deusto, the university that is also just across the river from the museum, Arzalluz passes by twice a day and looks at the Guggenheim. “I like it more each time,” he said.

  Did that mean he did not like it at first?

  “No, no, I liked it. But it’s not that I wanted a Gehry building. We are not modern architecture experts.”

  Most of the non-nationalist parties were strongly against the project but lacked the votes to stop it. Once it was built, most criticism ended. One of the building’s accomplishments was that it produced newspaper and magazine articles around the world about Basqueland, many of which did not mention terrorism.

  But in spite of the publicity, it was still the same old Bilbao, with its ornate, slightly blackened, nineteenth-century architecture, the green Basque mountains showing up surprisingly at the end of streets, and the lentil-brown Nervión River with weirdly colored suds suddenly drifting in the current The government said the river was being cleaned up and it was smelling better. But hotels still lived off of businessmen, not tourists, and continued to give a discount on weekends.

  THE GUGGENHEIM is just the most noticeable part of the plan to change Bilbao. As befitting a Bilbao museum, it has an industrial setting on the Nervión. But the container-loading rail yard next door is slated to be moved elsewhere. The city’s problems and the solutions that are being found are very much like those of other nineteenth-century industrial cities, such as Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Except that Clevelanders are not trying to build a country.

  One thing about which the PNV has always been extremely clear is the importance of money. Throughout history it was the strength of the Guipúzcoan and Vizcayan economy that guaranteed Basque independence. It is believed that a strong economy will someday win it back again. “Today we have a significant degree of power, and that requires pragmatism,” said Arzalluz. “We are not less pro-independence. It is the same line. But to be a David against Goliath requires intelligence. The economy is the first problem. How to build an economy that works within Europe.”

  The death of Franco was an economic disaster for the Basques, though one few regretted. He had used Basque industry as the engine for a false economy, without exports or foreign markets—an economy that was almost completely within Spain and therefore within his control. Basque industry, the oldest in southern Europe, was archaic. This was true of not only steel but shipbuilding and manufacturing. Only a few of the twenty-two paper mills that operated in Tolosa have survived. Eibar on the Guipúzcoa-Vizcaya border has lost its appliance industry.

  Like Bilbao, Eibar was built on the nearby iron fields. In the Middle Ages the town made armor, outfitting the soldiers of the Reconquista. Juan San Martin of the Basque Academy of Language descended from an Eibar armor-making family. Eibar is on a river and its manufacturers learned how to harness water power. By the nineteenth century, it had converted its industry to coffeemakers and other appliances. Later came bicycles, which remain a town specialty. But once Franco died and Spain joined the European Economic Community, Eibar products could not compete with those of more efficient French, Italian, and German industry.

  The crisis would have come sooner and more gently had Franco not been there. The Basque iron fields that had once exported ore to feed British blast furnaces had become exhausted and could no longer supply even enough for Basque industry. But of even greater consequence, by the late twentieth century it no longer required a huge labor force to produce steel, and a steel mill that operated with a large number of workers could not sell its products at a competitive price in the world market. Until 1975, Vizcayan steel mills were not trying to sell in the world market, but only in Franco’s Spanish market.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, Basque industries provided thousands of jobs. In order to carry out his plan of filling Basqueland with non-Basques, Franco had to provide jobs for inmigrantes. But the bloated industries did not die with the Caudillo. In 1975-80, Altos Hornos de Vizcaya was employing 12,000 workers. But for twenty years it had been losing money and the government had been making up the difference. At its height, the steel mill was losing more than $1 billion each year.

  Europe made the abandoning of government protection to industry a precondition for Spain’s entry into the European Economic Community. In any event, it would have been impossible to have preserved the system in an open economy. The Spanish market would have
been overrun with European goods.

  While most so-called rust belt areas have turned to service industries, when the PNV-dominated Basque government took over the management of the Basque economy, it wanted to preserve industry. “The Basque government did not want to lose the industrial spirit of Vizcaya,” said Jon Zabalía, a Vizcayan PNV legislator.

  The policy was to identify the industries that could be saved, many of which were owned by PNV families, and to look for new industries. Altos Hornos de Vizcaya was remade into Aceria Compacta de Bizkaia, a company that produces steel by using computers but without blast furnaces. Three hundred and sixty workers now produce 800,000 tons a year—more than Altos Hornos de Vizcaya used to produce with 12,000 workers. Shipbuilding has been reduced but maintained. La Naval, the longtime Spanish government shipbuilder, restructured with 1,800 workers instead of 5,000.

  A road runs along one bank of the Nervión and a traveler could look across the river, a particularly dramatic sight against a night sky, and see the fiery red glare of exploding blast furnaces, cranes swinging, tall smokestacks releasing dark clouds. Pío Baroja once wrote of this sight, “The river is one of the most evocative things in Spain. I don’t think there is anything else on the peninsula that gives such an impression of power, of work, and of energy, as this 14 or 15 kilometers of river front.”

  Today, it is dark along the Nervión at night. Though there are still a few shipyards and some steelworks, there are no blast furnaces and about 400 industrial buildings have been abandoned. From the death of Franco, for the next fifteen years, Basque jobs were steadily eliminated. Many workers were in their forties and fifties and hard to retrain. They are being permanently supported by Spanish government pensions if they were in the public sector and by the Basque government if they were in private-sector jobs. Thousands from other parts of Spain have gone back to their regions. By 1990, unemployment had reached 26 percent. Since then it has steadily improved. By 1998, it was 20 percent, slightly better than the Spanish average. The per capita income in the Basque provinces is still one of the highest in Spain. But among young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, the ages that Herri Batasuna and ETA are most successful at attracting, unemployment has stayed at 50 percent.