Donkeys were circulating through the streets of Rota, Cádiz, when Franco agreed with Eisenhower, in 1953, to house the largest European base of the United States Navy there. At first it was traumatic: local farmers lost a huge tract of fertile land that would house more than 10,000 American military personnel and their families. Francoism emerged from its post-war isolation and moved closer to the Western superpower. Everything was going to change a lot there. For the locals, the base would not only be the largest employer in the area, but a source that radiated modernity in a Spain of repression and national Catholicism. Now the donkeys crossed paths with the Cadillacs. They arrived at the base, and immediately crossed the fences, the rock and roll, the Marlboro, the Ray-Ban, the condom, the pill and the Penthouse. Available to anyone with contacts much earlier than anywhere else in Spain.
When 70 years have passed since the Madrid Pacts, Rota anxiously awaits the reinforcement of the base (two new destroyers are coming to expand the anti-missile shield) and not even the Izquierda Unida councilor remembers that “bases out!” but is concerned about the jobs that the facility generates. A museum is going to be inaugurated, called the Hispanic American Multicultural Center, which remembers the history of the base and its relationship with the environment. The neighbors remember the years of splendor, when a Spanish town and an expatriate city from the United States had their closest ties. In the eighties a slow decline began as Washington reduced its military personnel.
Filmin has recovered in its catalog a good documentary about this place that has become a border, Rota n’Roll, who directed Vanesa Benitez Zamora in 2017. It contains excellent archival material and the memories of witnesses from Cádiz, Americans and mestizos, so to speak, because there were many marriages of Americans with local women. The newcomers to the base could not help but marvel at the exoticism of what was next to them, a town of humble farmers and fishermen in the poorest province of a very poor Spain. He shock It was mutual. The children who ran barefoot on unpaved streets had never seen those fighters, those helicopters, those warships; They hadn’t even seen many movies before.
The base was designed so that the staff would not miss anything: there were shops, schools, restaurants, dance venues, baseball and American football competitions. But they did not live locked up: they went out a lot in search of their perfect plan, which they define like this: “alcohol, fights and women.” In the sixties, the base became a highly sought after destination for volunteers who wanted to avoid the Vietnam War (although the piles of corpses stopped here on their return from that front). The surrounding bars offered cheap wine and flamenco to the military. And the displaced culture, that always happens, also permeated the local one. The base radio It was followed with devotion for many miles around. The people of Rota knew before anyone else about Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Creedence and Janis Joplin, because they listened to their albums as they were released on the US market and nothing went through bureaucracy or censorship.
Some young people made their first electric guitars by hand, before getting a Fender, and they made an effort to sing in poor English. The documentary brings together one of those bands, The Radar’s, so that they can pick up their instruments again. There were several groups of local musicians who crossed the fences to perform in venues on the base such as the Teens Club; In the native venues, performances of music from the other side of the Atlantic were also put on.
But Rota n’Roll, despite its name, has as much interest in sociology as it does in the music scene. It is said here that Rota never slept, that he linked one party to another, that there was always an open bar. “Broken was New York in a small way,” says a neighbor. Occasionally, the base opened its doors to Roteños for barbecues and rodeos. But in the town itself a gap opened between two worlds, symbolized by two axes: Calvario Street, the traditional Rota Street, and San Fernando Avenue, where Americans and locals mixed and rock and roll was always playing.
Nor was everything idyllic: the movement favored prostitution. Smuggling operated without many problems despite the controls set up by the Civil Guard at the exit of the base (the Gibraltar fence was closed at the time, the other place conducive to the black market in the province). The director looks for couples of two nationalities, whom the town priest married, and his children; to the maids and waiters who suddenly found themselves immersed in another planet; to the Americans who decided to stay when they finished their military career, and to those who left but remember those as their best years.
“You should have been here in the sixties and seventies,” it is said here. When Spain was finally a democracy and was prospering, when that abyss between the American and Spanish way of life no longer existed, the base began its decline, because there were other geopolitical priorities. Just over 4,000 soldiers remained. And customs changed: they no longer left their comfortable enclosure as much; The locals began to recover some traditions that they had abandoned. The neighborhood became more distant. Just because the base is growing again now, and it won’t grow as much, doesn’t mean that anything will be the same again. The crazy sixties will not be repeated, neither in Rota nor anywhere else.
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