Editor's Letter

!Qué Hombre!

In England, the most venerable of monarchies, the bulimic princess weeps in her palace, imprisoned by protocol in a loveless marriage. Or so we are reasonably led to believe. The melodrama of the Princess of Wales evokes widespread sympathy, but also republican skepticism about the role of royalty in a modem state. A few hundred miles south in Spain, however, there is little doubt that monarchy is a precious national asset. A Juan-come-lately king, with an accursed Bourbon lineage that cannot compare with the sterling Windsors', is hailed not only as the shining symbol of his country but, more important, as the defender of Spanish democracy. Without King Juan Carlos I, his subjects agree, Spain might now be another backward military dictatorship instead of a thrumming free society.

The long siesta is over for Spain. Madrid is a wild, around-the-clock traffic jam—as one Spaniard puts it, "When I want to sleep I go to New York." Several years ago the peseta replaced the deutsche mark as Europe's hardest currency, the entire country is swept up in a massive building boom, and Spaniards now vacation in Switzerland because things are so much cheaper there. This year is one long fiesta. The country is celebrating five hundred years since Columbus sailed off to discover America. Spain has won a place in the European Community, Barcelona beat out Paris for the Olympics, Seville beat out Chicago for the Expo, and Madrid has been named Europe's cultural capital for 1992.

The king, an Olympic sailor himself twenty years ago, has had a hand in nearly every event. But, as T. D. Allman

relates on page 154, he earned his gold medal on February 23, 1981, a night every Spaniard remembers as clearly as Americans do the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. On that evening the Guardia Civil, attired in their black cocked hats and insurrectionary mustaches, burst into the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, and took all of Spain's top elected officials hostage. The country teetered between a return to Franco-flavored Fascism and a second Spanish Civil War. But the coup plotters made one miscalculation: they assumed the king would be with them. Instead, Juan Carlos used all his authority and charm, indeed staked his life, to defend the imperiled constitution. In a historical irony, the monarch became the lone, triumphant defender of democracy.

How did a prince bom into shabby exile manage to win back the throne, survive the manipulations of Fascist dictator Francisco Franco, and lead his country to its current place in the limelight? To take the full measure of the king, T. D. Allman spoke with a broad cross section of Spaniards, from intellectuals to dukes, from pro-Franco society matrons to the country's Socialist prime minister. The overwhelming consensus? If kings were elected, every one would vote for Juan Carlos. Forty million Spaniards can't be wrong. ;Que hombre!

Editor in chief