Uninterested General

Major General Antonio Aranda Mata is still honored in Spain as the stubborn and victorious commander of the Franco forces in the bloody Civil War siege of Oviedo (1936) which lasted 91 days. But one night two years ago Franco police arrested Monarchist Aranda in a brewery where he had been meeting fellow members of the Comite Imperio de Coordination, a clandestine coordinating committee of anti-Franco underground groups. Aranda's civil war record bought him his freedom. He went into retirement, dividing his time between the reading room of the Club Casino de Madrid and his apartment. Police kept an eye on him. Last week, they had reason to look more sharply: Aranda was back in the news.

The Comite Imperio, surviving the brewery raid, had made contact with exiled Spanish socialists in France. Three months ago in Toulouse the socialists held a convention attended by delegates of the American Federation of Labor. The deteriorating economy of Spain, recent strikes in Barcelona and other cities, the reported illness of General Franco (he is expected soon to undergo an operation for a bladder ailment) spurred hopes of a new regime in Spain. The A.F.L.'s European representative, able Irving Brown, made a careful roundup of information available in Toulouse. Brown's conclusions, as reported last week by the New York

Times's roving foreign correspondent, C. L. Sulzberger: 1) recent food strikes in Spain were planned, had the support of monarchists, police, and employers who promised to pay the strikers' wages; 2) the Spanish army is divided and in the event of war, Spaniards will not fight for Franco, but against him; 3) General Aranda heads a monarchist-left-wing socialist opposition.

As of last week, Aranda was silent. To a newsman who tried to interview him at his club, he sent a note saying: "The General wishes to announce that he is totally uninterested in politics . . ."

In part, Brown's report may have been too strong. Item: Aranda is not considered the leading monarchist in Spain. But Aranda has shown in the past that he is willing to take risks for his political convictions. If the divided opposition parties should be able to reach a working agreement, the hero of Oviedo might emerge as the key figure in Spain.

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