France’s Guignols are like a cross between Saturday Night Live and the Muppets: all satire and latex.

In a recent video parody of Spanish athletes, disgraced cyclist Alberto Contador sings that he’s got bull’s blood in his veins. Tennis superstar Rafael Nadal croons about his stash of clean blood hidden in his fridge.

This is daily fare on French TV, but here on the south side of the Pyrenees its touched a nerve. Nadal has been among the most outspoken. Maybe because of this second Guignols video which shows him urinating in the gas tank of his own car, then speeding off at 200 miles an hour.

“This isn’t an attack against me,” Nadal told reporters during training this week, “but an attack against Spanish sports and the Spanish people.”

As such, Spain’s foreign minister has duly chimed in. Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said official complaints had been sent to French media outlets, and especially to Canal Plus, which hosts the Guignols.

But why the doping parody to begin with? The cyclist Contador was recently busted. But generally speaking Spanish athletes don’t get caught more than others. The crux of the matter seems to be Spain’s athletic success. It makes some French suspicious. In recent years Spain has come to dominate soccer, basketball, tennis and cycling. Impossible, goes the innuendo, without a little synthetic pick-me-up. For the Spanish, the French are just jealous.

One recent news report on Spanish public television pointed out how France hasn’t won a Tour de France since the 1980s, or even the French Open for that matter. Then the reporter rattles off a long list of Spanish victories.

Missing in this uproar is just how funny the Guignols’ rubber puppets are. Not to mention that they’re rubber puppets. Instead, Spaniards today are gloating over a damning piece of news next door.

A French prosecutor announced he was opening an investigation into Patrice Ciprelli, the husband and coach of legendary French cyclist Jeannie Longo. Ciprelli has admitted to purchasing the banned performance-booster EPO.

He has been banned from the legal profession for 11 years. The court said he could not appeal against the ruling.

Garzon is best known for helping to secure the arrest of the former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet in London.

Marco Werman speaks with The World’s Gerry Hadden.

81-year-old Maria Martin Lopez told Supreme Court judges how when she was six, Franco supporters came to her house and took her mother away.

“They shot her,” Martin said. “My father had me go with him to try to find her body. Later, we found her. They’d stripped her naked, and thrown her clothes in the brambles.”

Martin said they tried to complain to authorities but were told to drop the matter. “If not, they said, we’d end up just like my mother.”

Spaniards like Martin have long been barred from testifying in court by Spain’s Franco-era amnesty law, passed in 1977. But a few years ago Spanish investigative judge Baltazar Garzon challenged the law and began to investigate. He argues that the killings were crimes against humanity.

Garzon used the same principal to have the late Chilean dictator Augosto Pinochet arrested in 1998, despite Chile’s own amnesty law. For trying the same thing at home, Garzon is now in the docket.

Among victims, there is outrage that it is Garzon under investigation and not the crimes themselves. 75-year-old Pino Sosa Sosa, from the Canary Islands told judges that her father’s whereabouts are still a mystery.

“We’re here for justice,” she said. “They took my father from the house, beat him, threw him in jail. They took the sustenance of our house from us, because my mother fell sick afterward. She never could find him.”

Defenders of Spain’s 1977 amnesty law say it remains the only way for Spain to move forward. Digging in the past, they say, could lead to political instability. But during testimony Maria Martin displayed a hand-drawn map of where she says her mother’s remains lay.

“Here, where the stream passes,” she said, anxiously pointing to her scrap of paper. “There, right up next to the bridge.”

Garzon’s prosecutors cut Martin’s and others’ testimony short, arguing the same point that has stunned international human rights groups: That this trial is about whether judge Garzon broke the law, not about who was killed by whom, more than half a century ago.

But beyond the issues of jobs and money, Spaniards seeking their fortunes in “Alemania” [the Spanish name for Germany] run into a whole bunch of cultural challenges. Some of them are well known, others surprise.

I doubt any Spaniard has left for Hamburg or Berlin without having heard that Germans are punctual. Very punctual. Spaniards, it is also widely known, are not.

But because they’re prepared for this difference Spanish workers in Germany usually adapt quickly. I’ll be at work by 8:30 has to mean 8:30. Not 8:45, 9:07 or next Thursday.

But for 20-year-old Patricia Cigala, a native of Murcia in southeast Spain who’s been in Munich for three months, it isn’t Germany’s highly organized work schedule that’s thrown her off. It’s what she sees as Germans’ equally regimented social lives.

“This city is really big,” she said to me, waiting on a freezing morning for a bus that would take her visiting mother to the airport. “Sometimes you find yourself in a (German) acquaintance’s neighborhood and you want to just pop by, unannounced.” She shook her head. “Don’t do it.”

Cigala, who’s found a job in catering, said that in Spain friends and neighbors constantly drop in without warning. Not only are they welcome; it’s a given that they’ll be served coffee, a beer, whatever’s on hand. “Here, you have to have a date,” she said. “A date and a time. And you have to set it up days, sometimes weeks, in advance.”

Cigala said such formality gets under her skin – much more than the cold winter air – but that she was learning to adapt. It was either that, she said, “or move back in with my parents in Murcia, and find a job earning $800 a month.”

20-year-old nanny Ana Abad, from Madrid, has a head’s start on Cigala. Abad’s been in Munich for a year, and said she’s made some close German friends. Sitting in an all-night bar in the Old City, Abad told me, “Germans seem very closed off at first, but in the end you realize that they’re not cold at all. I’ve made true, good friends here.”

She said that she also suffered initially due to the Germans seemingly distant attitude. But she said time, and an open mind, were the keys to winning over the locals.

When I met Spanish architect Ana Garcia Puyol at my hotel it was clear how little time she’d been here. A day, actually. She greeted me with the stiffest, straightest, most uncomfortable handshake I can remember. Very un-Spanish. Very un-German, even.

Turns out she didn’t know that I’ve lived in Spain for the last eight years. That’s where I was coming from, culturally, when I leaned forward for the traditional Spanish double-kiss. She resisted, I backed off, fearing I’d snap her elbow.

Later, when she realized I lived in her home country – and especially that I speak Spanish – her demeanor changed. She relaxed, opened up, told jokes. And I thought, Ana’s warming to me is like a sped-up version of how Germans will warm to her.

At first there’ll be distance. But one day, with persistence, Ana will speak the language, get to know the customs, and the doors will start opening. The demeanor of the Germans she meets will change, they’ll relax, open up, start telling jokes*. She’ll have made friends.

In my experience it’s only then that you can really know whether you want to live in an adopted country, or go home.

*Perhaps nowhere is the breech between Spanish and German culture wider than when it comes to humor. Both sides know it. Each think they’re funnier.

Juan Alberto Fuente and Jose Sandino search for their new home - a youth hostel - in Munich, Germany. They've just arrived from Malaga, in southern Spain, in search of work. Both are experienced industrial engineers but Spain's economic crisis had them sitting on their hands. (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

The number of unemployed people in Spain has surpassed 5 million, according to the government. That’s about 23 percent overall – the highest rate since 1994. For the young, the jobless rate is nearly 50 percent. Now, a generation of desperate Spaniards is seeking work abroad. It isn’t the first time poverty has driven Spaniards from home, but such exoduses have been of unskilled laborers in the past. This time, more of Spain’s best and brightest are leaving.

Munich’s airport shuttle stopped on a recent morning to let off arriving passengers downtown. Among those getting off on the freezing sidewalk were Spaniards Jose Sandino and Juan Alberto Fuente.

Sandino and Fuente are thirty-something industrial engineers, from Malaga, in southern Spain. Each has more than a decade of experience under his belt. But Spain’s economic crisis has left them jobless. And turned them into immigrants.

The two clean-cut, shivering men make their way to an information desk at Munich’s main train station, and try out their beginner’s German. After a long subway ride, and getting lost a couple of times on the street, Sandino and Fuente find their new temporary home. It’s a giant youth hostel, filled mostly with young backpackers.

Their room is small and bare, with two wooden beds, a desk, a closet. It’s hard to believe now, Sandino says, but not long ago his construction consulting firm back home was netting him six-figures. Then the housing sector collapsed and so did his business. Sitting on his bed, he says he can’t believe that just this morning he was saying goodbye to his girlfriend and family.

“This move has been complicated, he said, “because my girlfriend is pregnant, and alone now. Our baby is due in July, then they’ll come join me here, where we don’t know anything or anyone.”

Sandino does know one other person here, his traveling pal and bunkmate Juan Alberto Fuente. They met during an intensive German language course this Fall in Malaga, and decided to take the plunge together.

Fuente says he could have just gone on living indefinitely with his parents, knowing he’d be taken care of, but that was not his goal in life.

“If you send out tons of resumes and no one even calls you for an interview,” he said, “you have to go out and find work. You can’t just sit on your hands for years and years.

It’s not about the money, he said, but about feeling useful.

Spain’s near-23 percent unemployment rate is driving highly educated people like Fuente and Sandino abroad by the tens of thousands. This year more people left Spain than moved there for the first time in more than a generation. And Germany’s a principal destination. Here, unemployment is below 4%. But coming north is hardly a waltz through the edelweiss, says Cristina Rico, a long-time Spanish resident of Munich. The unprepared, she says, usually fail.

Having a tea in a Munich café, Rico said a lot of Spaniards heard about how German Chancellor Merkel called for workers to come last year, and misinterpreted it.

“Spaniards have a distorted idea of finding work in Germany,” she said. “That it’s easier than it is. I’ve seen people come here and turn around and go straight back home. They had diplomas but didn’t speak English or German.”

And thus they had no way to communicate.

Cristina said that over the last year she was bombarded with so many emails from unemployed Spaniards curious about Germany that she started a Facebook page, called Spaniards in Munich. Every day people log on with questions about jobs, housing, healthcare, German courses – and diplomas. In Germany, with its strong vocational schooling, even so-called unskilled jobs require a certificate of study. For example, Rico said, even to work in a pet-store you have to show you’ve been trained for it.

That’s what’s been frustrating 20 year old Spaniard Ana Abad for more than a year. Abad came to Munich from Madrid without first finishing her university studies in communications. Now, she said on a recent evening, she needed that diploma.

“I tried to find internships but it was impossible,” she said. “So I took this babysitting and housecleaning job in order to have money for my German language studies. I hope to finish my communications degree via long-distance by June.
‘
And look for work here, she said.

Several Spaniards interviewed here said if you have a diploma and a decent level of German you can usually find a job quickly. Economist Marten Olsen, with the IESE business school in NY, said one reason is because hiring in Germany is less costly and risky than in Spain. He said the cost of hiring in Spain has risen 24 percent in recent years, because of wage and benefits increases. At the same time, he said, productivity has stayed nearly flat. In Germany, he said, it’s been the opposite.

“Spanish workers have only become a little more productive but wage compensation has gone up a lot,” he said in a video presentation from New York. “Germans a lot more productive than the Spanish ones and wage compensation has been only gone up only a little.”

In other words, he said, it’s become relatively cheaper to hire people in Germany than in Spain.

In the old days, Olsen said, Spain could have devalued its currency, the peseta, to stay competitive. That would help stem the exodus of workers in today’s crisis. But with the euro, that option is out.

Juan Alberto Fuente, one of the engineers who’d just arrived from Malaga, said he wasn’t optimistic about Spain’s future. He said he saw something that shocked him on his way in from the Munich airport, and underscored the current difference between his home and here.

“The first thing I noticed was that there are tons of trucks on the German highways,” he said. “In Spain there are virtually none.”

Truck traffic is a major indicator of how productive your economy is, he said.

With young educated men like Fuente and Sandino leaving, there’s a growing concern that Spain may be undergoing an authentic brain drain. The government has played that down. And Spaniards here in Germany said even if it is true, it’s only temporary. Most said they’ll go back to Spain better educated, with real-world experience and real money in their pockets.

But that’s likely to be years from now.

Spain hasn’t had an effective law against such practice. Now, even writers are starting to complain that their books are being pirated. So Spain’s come up with a law. But its generating controversy, too.

The latest round of that controversy began late one night in December, when Spanish novelist Lucia Etxebarria said she received unnerving news about the sales of her prize-winning books. They were selling like hotcakes. Illegal hotcakes.

“I learned that I have the dubious honor of being among the top writers in Spanish in the world whose works are illegally sold and downloaded online,” she told Spanish TV recently. “I was furious.”

Spain is among the world’s worst offenders for digital piracy, and its breaking new ground, with books. Pirating them is a new phenomenon, since digital books themselves are fairly new.

But there are sites out there now that operate like Napster for Spanish literature lovers. Etxebarria went to her Facebook page and dropped a bomb on the literary world. She would no longer write, she announced. This, from a novelist who’s won some of the top awards for Spanish literature, who’s a household name in many parts of the world.

Lucia Etxebarria (Photo: Xavierphoto/Wiki Commons)

Outgoing socialist Prime Minister Jose Luiz Rodriguez Zapatero told Spanish radio that he tabled the legislation, after seeing how much controversy it was stirring up among Internet activists.

Controversy, because the law allowed authorities to go after not only sites offering copyrighted material for downloading, but also file sharing – or peer to peer – sites that don’t actually host the materials. Also, it would have empowered a special government commission to shut down law-breaking sites within days – too fast, critics say, for a judge to weigh in, as the legislation also called for.

But Spain’s new government, in power for just three weeks, has taken up the cause, pledging to enact the legislation. Conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s new minister for culture, Jose Ignacio Wert, said last week that Spain’s digital pirates’ days are numbered.

“The government will go after anyone and everyone making money off of other people’s creations without permission,” he told reporters. He emphasized that down-loaders themselves would not be targeted.

But Josep Valor, an expert on intellectual property at the IESE business school, says the proposed law is flawed. He says it requires weeks or months of investigation to determine whether a site is in fact guilty of piracy. Plus, he says, the new law puts the onus on virtually all websites to police themselves against what visitors might post. He says that’d be impossible.

“Even if you are a newspaper, or a radio station,” he said in a telephone interview, “and people just write comments, and some of these comments are in fact links, then you are liable for those things?”

Spain’s Internet activists see an even more basic flaw with Spain’s legislation – or any for that matter that seeks to stem the free flow of information online. Victor Domingo, president of the Spanish Association of Internet Users, said digital copies are invisible, and their worth can’t be measured like traditional products.

“If I steal a sausage from you, you no longer have it,” he told Spanish TV. “But if I make a digital copy of something digital of yours, then we both have it. The problem is that the culture industry is based on physical products, for example, books.”

Domingo said the digital reality destroys the old paradigm.

“Instead of accepting that,” he said, “the industry is trying pass a law that tramples on our rights.”

Some Internet activists believe they have a right to share intellectual property online even if it’s copyrighted. They say they won’t give up their struggle to keep the Internet free of restrictions.

One Spanish website, for example, posts videos on how to upload copyrighted material while hiding your own identity, so that authorities can’t catch you.

While activists gear up for more protests, most artists seem pleased. Even the writer Lucia Etxebarria. She now says she’s considering a return to writing, knowing that the government is taking action. Even if its plan is flawed.

Vidal, 23, is part-French, part-Japanese-American and makes music as diverse as her background.

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They believe the world will end in 2012 because of now-famous glyphs on the ancient Mayan calendar said to herald the end of this age.

But there may be a glitch in the glyph: German experts in Mayan doodle-work now tell us that though an age may indeed be ending, the world will absolutely not. Everyone who thought the lights would go out on the next winter Solstice must now unpack their astral suitcases, go home, repaint their houses, figure out how to talk to their kids, look for jobs.

The world is not ending. For a small few the news is no doubt disappointing. It’s more complicated to continue on, on this loony bin of a planet. No doubt there’ll be some resentment toward the ancient Mayans for getting our hopes up. Even though, for all we know, the after-life could be decidedly worse than what we’ve cooked up here.

It’s not the Mayans’ fault that we misread their runes. That we penciled in our escapist desires on their pin-up calendar. They had every right to construct ages and eras out of the infinite spinning of the stars. We do the same thing. Our latest millennium even ended with a misinterpretation of its own: Y2K. When computers were supposed to stop computing.

It may be that we owe the Mayans an apology. Who are we to think we can dodge the thorny issues of our time by just going up in easy smoke in some wintery apocalypse? We are going to wake up on December 22, 2012 to the same problems that will hound us when we go to bed the night before: poverty, injustice, war, famine, and environmental degradation. Much of it stirred up in the fear-shackled minds of men.

Just as we’ll all wake up this Sunday, New Year’s Day, 2012. As a species, we’ll be steering this ship for a while longer yet. How long depends on our courage to face our shared problems… rather than kicking them down the road for the next generation. If we pass the buck I’m afraid we won’t go out with a big, easy Mayan bang, but via a slow, torturous process of self-annihilation…involving a scarcity of food and water for growing populations, the spread of war, a total breakdown in civility. If we let things come to that, we’ll look back on next year’s Mayan opt-out with nostalgia, and even longing.

There is cause for hope in the ancient Mayan prediction, though. It says that all systems based on fear will be transformed. If that’s true, if someone were to really pull that one off, then the Problem behind all of our problems would dissolve away.  Then, a new age truly would be beginning.

Jose Bollo, manager of the Barcelona hobby shop, RC Tecnic, lets shoppers test-fly toy helicopters like this one. He says most people leave with at least one chopper under their arms. Economists say small stores need to be creative to survive during this long economic downturn. (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

Spain’s new Prime Minister has announced spending cuts and labor reform as the country seeks to calm anxious lenders.

The conservative leader Mariano Rajoy was sworn in Tuesday, and inherits big problems. Unemployment is at 22 percent, the highest in the Euro-zone.

In Spain this holiday season all people seem to talk about is crisis, crisis, crisis. But as Christmas approaches, shops and restaurants seem to be mostly full.

In his inaugural address, Prime Minister Rajoy tried to be optimistic, but he also warned citizens that tough sacrifices lie ahead. His administration, he said, has no choice but to slash government spending – by more than $20 billion. He called it a thankless task.

“We’re like those families who find themselves having to feed four people,” he said, “with only enough money for two.”

The crisis is upon us, goes the mantra in Spain these days. 22% unemployment. A flat economy. Soaring interest rates on government debt. And yet, on the street, you can’t help but wonder if things are really that bad.

At a local mall in Barcelona, holiday shoppers are out en masse. Santiago and Lourdes, a young couple pushing a baby carriage, are sort of like the family to which Rajoy eluded in his speech. Lourdes has lost her job as a waitress, Santiago says, but he’s still got his, as a security guard.

“We’re subsisting on half of what we had,” he said, “and this year we’ve made sacrifices. But we’re still spending on the things that count.”

This holiday season what counts are presents. Shopping bags hung from Lourdes and Santiago’s hands, and from the handles of their baby carriage. So how exactly is this crisis affecting this young family?

“We go out to dinner less,” Santiago said. “Instead of going to restaurants, we now gather at friends’ houses.”

So there you have it. As world financial markets batter Spain with unsustainable interest rates, as the government slashes spending for healthcare and education, as the press reports that businesses are making contingency plans in case the euro currency collapse, this hard hit couple cuts out the occasional restaurant meal.

Spanish shoppers flock to local malls during the holiday season, undeterred by the economic crisis. They're probably spending a bit less, experts say, but they're still spending. (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

He said that what probably happens is that if you ask the shop owners they will immediately tell you well shopping is lower than last year, and this will go to the press.
“But if someone says for the year, has it been okay? They’ll say yes, we did a very good year. So they’re not closing down,” he said. “A lot of people are doing well.”

Oliver says that what’s often lost in the way we discuss this crisis is context. Spaniards may be spending less today, he says, but in recent years they’ve been spending – and earning – more than ever. He says that when stores report that sales are off, they may be very well be off – but from record highs.

That’s the case at Ulanka, a shoe store here in the mall.

“People are more concerned with prices this year compared to last,” said manager Asai Juan, “but that sales aren’t off by much.”

Big malls like this don’t tell the whole story, of course. Small independent shops have suffered more in this crisis than the retail chains. But economist Xavier Oliver said the crisis has given small businesses a much needed kick in the pants. The ones that survive, he said, must find ways to stand out.

We’ve been selling this idea in business schools for centuries,” he said, “and no one has believed us till today.”

A crisis, he said, is the time to recreate your operations.

“How can I help consumers, my clients, and do it in a way that they notice that you’re helping them?”

Oliver sited as a model the Apple store, where you can ask questions, take classes and most importantly, touch the products.

A decidedly smaller store in Barcelona uses that same technique. When you walk into the RC Tecnic hobby shop, you see stacks of remote control cars, planes and, set out on the counter, model helicopters. They let you fly them.

Manager Jose Bollo says sales this year are better than last.

“We’re bringing people in by offering sales prices before Christmas instead of afterwards, like most stores do,” Bollo said. “And we let people fly the birds.”

The new Spanish government hopes to help small businesses like RC Tecnic, by lowering taxes and making it easier to hire and fire employees. But those reforms won’t be in place until next holiday season.

Read tweets about Spain

Gerry Hadden’s fond remembrance to George Whitman

Leave What You Can

I profiled George Whitman for The World in 2007. At 93 he was still shuffling down the stairs from his flat in the morning to wander the store and take a coffee in a cushioned rocker on the sidewalk out front. Like his shop, he was a rarity in this day and age, a rebel not out to bring down the system through street protests or politics but through generosity. “Take what you need, give what you can” read one of the many signs hanging in his shop. George gave his whole heart to writers and readers and friends. So much so that at times people wondered if he might drive himself out of business. But his determination to run more than just a book business served him well. And it made him a hero to the tens of thousands of aspiring authors who literally took refuge in his shop over the years.

George Whitman's store Shakespeare and Company. (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

George leaves behind a lot of grateful writers and contented book lovers. And he leaves Shakespeare and Company in the hands of his wonderful daughter, Sylvia, who carries the torch with the same Whitman spirit.

Vivre Shakespeare and Company! Vivre George Whitman!

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: The world of books lost a great champion yesterday. George Whitman, owner and founder of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris passed away at the age of 98. The World’s Gerry Hadden met George at the chipper age of 93 down at the store in Paris. Gerry joins us from Barcelona. Gerry, Mr. Whitman was kind of tied inextricably to the literary Paris of decades past. In person did he convey that kind of romanticism?

Gerry Hadden: Absolutely, he you know, invited me up to his small apartment right above the bookstore, and it was just as you might imagine it — as cozy and sort of cramped and mussy as the bookstore itself. And you know, he was 93 years old at the time, quite frail, prone to taking naps for most of the day with a nurse that was with him all day, and yet he made time for the Public Radio reporter to come up into his house and have a coffee with him. And you know, he just exuded this sense of generosity and adventure, and this sense that literature is something magical.

Werman: So this American who’s born in Salem, Massachusetts, ends up in Paris. What did he do for the book world of Paris?

Hadden: Well, what he did really was take the idea of owning a bookstore and opening it up entirely in several directions. Most notably, what he did was he literally opened his doors to young, starving, aspiring writers. He claimed at one point that he probably let over 40,000 writers, most of them unknowns, sleep in the store. And that was a tradition that he setup from the very first night. And it’s a tradition that continues today with his daughter, Sylvia, at the helm. She said to me back in 2007 when I interviewed both of them that she was a little bit stricter than her father. You know, he would let anybody basically who said they were a writer come in and sleep for a night or two, or a week, or sometimes even months. Sylvia said you know, I now screen them so I get a sense of what their writing project is before I let them sleep there. She was trying to avoid a kind of youth hostile atmosphere. But that said, on average, six writers were sleeping there every single night.

Werman: Oh, my gosh.

Hadden: So as a shopper, you go into Shakespeare and Company, anyone who’s been there has run into a poet sitting in the corner scribbling furiously in a notebook, or a novelist right there by the front window sitting in the light and typing on his laptop. It’s a place where you realize that books are being sold, and read and also created.

Werman: Given that it doubled as kind of a hostile, I guess it didn’t just smell like musty books.

Hadden: It smelled wonderful.

Werman: Gerry, how will you remember George Whitman?

Hadden: I will remember him as a smiling, eclectic lover of books, a champion of books, as a sort of rebel armed with generosity rather than eyre at the system, at the world he saw around him. He was constantly trying to make sure that the bookstore was not becoming overly commercial. He was the champion of poets and writers. And that’s the guy I’ll remember — this old man with long, stringy hair sitting there in his chair over a cup of tea smiling about all the writers he helped in his life.

Werman: Great memory, The World’s Europe correspondent speaking with us about the late George Whitman, owner and founder of Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. You can find Gerry’s story and photos online at theworld.org. Gerry, thanks so much.

Hadden: My pleasure.

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Gerry Hadden’s interview with George Whitman in 2007

Hotel owners say bookings are down. Construction companies are idle. But there’s at least one sector that is actually growing: health and beauty. On a Barcelona street a tandem of beauty-related businesses thrive.

One of these shops is the Marco Aldany hair salon.

Inside, a bank of chairs is occupied, mostly by middle-aged women getting their hair washed, cut and dyed. More women wait on seats by a window. The manager here, Patricia Marquez, darts from station to station, keeping her stylists, and her clients happy.

“The truth is we can’t complain,” said Marques. “We’re lucky. It’s a good salon, and our clients are faithful. And more keep coming.”

This is a place that thrives in Spain precisely because times are otherwise tough. Marquez said that’s because people feel out of control, insecure. Here, she said, with unemployment nearly 23 percent, inexpensive ego-boosts go a long way.

“A person needs to feel handsome, to feel comfortable with themselves. If they don’t look good it doesn’t matter what they do. You have to feel comfortable in your own skin,” Marquez said.

And Marquez said clients are seeking such comfort in her chairs more often, as the economy grinds on. According to a leading Spanish consultancy, the country’s beauty industry is on track to grow 3 percent this year. The overall economy, by contrast, is flat.

One client here today is Francesca, an auburn-haired retiree. She’s on a fixed income, but said she’d never give up her weekly coif.

“Because of our culture and upbringing,” she said, “we older woman feel better with our hair done up rather than letting it get all messy. It’s a question of feeling good about yourself. If it means spending 50 bucks of your pension per month, well, we can allow ourselves that.”

Fifty bucks is a relatively cheap deal for the full treatment, by the way. Economists and sociologists say that makes treating yourself to a new hairstyle or make-over, or manicure, nearly crisis-proof.

“Haven’t you heard about the recent survey in Spain?” a client named Mariona asked at a different salon. “It found that if a Spanish woman were forced to choose between a meal or a make-over, she’d go hungry.”

It’s even more true, given Spain’s grim economic backdrop. The government is slashing spending from healthcare to education. The jobless rate keeps rising. One clue to explain why such gloom would cause people to spend more on their hair or nails can be found on the lips. That is, the Lipstick index. It’s a term coined by Leonard Lauder, of the make-up giant, Estee Lauder, in 2001. Lauder observed that in times of crisis his company sold more lipstick.

The index was hardly scientific but Analda Santano, who runs the cash register at the Cinema Nails salon, said it’s accurate. But its not just about the gloom, she said.

She said people here realize one day the crisis has to end, and that the well-groomed will be well-positioned when opportunity knocks.

“If your hands are a mess,” she said, “people will look at you badly. A woman should have her nails painted. If you’re a man your nails need to be smooth and without any flaking skin on the fingers.”

Haircuts for self-esteem, manicures for jobs that might materialize – businesses selling good looks and grooming come out on top.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero took one controversial step to improve the labor market recently. He banned Romanians from coming to work in Spain. The move has upset some Romanians. But others think it probably wasn’t such a bad idea.

When Romania and a bloc of Eastern European countries joined the European Union in 2004 their citizens faced a seven-year ban on free movement. Western Europe feared a flood of laborers into their markets. That ban expired earlier this year. But in August Spain lobbied successfully to have it reinstated for Romanians, for another 12 months.

Some Romanians, like one Bucharest resident named Adriana, are offended that their right to free movement has been taken away again.

“We are viewed as evil in other countries,” she said. “They see us as thieves. They think Romania is a country where bad things happen.”

It’s About Jobs and Jobs Only

Spain said its concern is about jobs and jobs only. With nearly five million people unemployed, prime minister Zapatero argued that drastic measures were needed to shrink the labor pool. The European Commission agreed.

Some Romanian politicians were furious. Renate Weber is a Romanian member of the European Parliament. She said she recognizes that Spain has too few jobs for too many people, but she questions the Spanish government’s real motives in singling out Romanians.

“The truth is statistically they didn’t come with any evidence that more Romanians would come,” Weber said. “So in this respect I don’t think it was based on evidence of fear from flows of workers. I think it was very much the line of the populist kind of measures.”

Spain’s government may or may not have provided figures, but the anecdotal evidence is there: Some 800,000 Romanians live legally in Spain. They’re not affected by the new restrictions. But an estimated one million more are in Spain illegally.

Worse for Workers

On a recent day in Barcelona, a group of young Romanians moved a small cement mixer into place for an under-the-table construction job. Among them was Nicola Dumas. Dumas, a father of two, has been here for years. These days he can’t find steady work.

Still, Dumas said, he’s far better off here than he’d be back home, where the crisis is just as bad and the state welfare support worse. He said it was a good thing that Spain closed its borders to his countrymen.

“Because a lot of people come from Romania to work and don’t find any. So its not worth leaving home,” Dumas said. “Plus,” he added, “if I’m working and a new guy comes along charging less he could steal my job.”

Not only are the once-plentiful construction jobs for Romanians scarce, but the jobs available are increasingly unpleasant. Dumas said employers are taking advantage of the current situation. Knowing that some Romanian workers are at risk of being kicked out, he said, employers are paying them less and less.

Romania’s minister for European Affairs, Leonard Orban, worried the new labor restrictions in Spain are part of a larger pattern of discrimination.

“Because there was also a decision in Netherlands, where conditions became tougher than before in what is linked to Romanian and Bulgarian workers. So we notice that there are in some countries,” Orban said, “tendencies to create tougher rules.”

But migration research suggests those tough rules aren’t really needed. Far fewer Romanians are leaving home these days. With over a million already in Italy and more than that in Spain, experts say most of those who wanted to leave Romania already did.

That explains why this Bucharest university student named Gabriel is staying home.

“Better to stay here and try to do something here,” he said, “to do something for ourselves and while we’re at it, for our country.”

Meanwhile in Spain, the restriction seems to have done little to lower unemployment. It remains at 23 percent, up a point since the law was put into effect.

Paris Cafe (Photo: Arthur Rabaté /Flickr)

The two countries said proposals for a treaty change agreed on Monday would reinforce governance of the eurozone.

As European leaders grapple with a plan to save the eurozone, the whole notion of a European identity is being called into question.

Creating a European identity has been at the heart of a European Union since its inception, and Brussels spends a lot of money on projects aimed at strengthening that identity; that is, a sense among citizens of the 27-member collective that they belong to something bigger than just their home countries.

And the money Brussels is spending is in euros, the common currency for the 17 members of the eurozone.

From the start, the euro was intended to both symbolize and foster European unity. Euro coins and bills are covered in images and slogans from European history.

Take the 2-euro coin. One side is the French slogan, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”; on the other, a map of the entire continent.

At the Parisien, a small bar in the medieval quarter of Barcelona, the owner, Gregorio said he read last week how French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that if the euro vanishes nothing will remain of Europe.

Gregorio said that scared him.

“Because we could go back to the way things were before,” Gregorio said, “each country for itself. The history of Europe is measured by war.”

He added that the past 60 years of peace in countries in the European Union is unique in Europe’s history, and he thinks the EU and the euro deserve some credit for that.

EU leaders continue to hammer this point, as they seek to save the currency. On Monday, Italy’s interim Prime Minister Mario Monti said he’s worried that the sovereign debt crisis is turning the euro into a divisive tool driving Europeans apart.

The crisis has been driving Europeans apart now for more than two years; witness the many riots in Greece as it’s teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.

The euro didn’t cause the Greek crisis, but many Greeks now see the euro as a symbol of the devastating austerity measures dictated by Europe.

In Spain, voices critical of the euro are on the rise as well.

In Barcelona’s main square, Spaniards line up to test a new ice-skating rink set up for the Christmas season. As Teresa Vallecillos, a factory worker who’s here with her 10-year-old son, pulls out some cash, she said she’s never much liked the euro.

“When we joined the eurozone, shopkeepers rounded up their prices to the nearest euro,” she said. “At the same time, our wages went down.”

Not surprisingly, Vallecillos said she doesn’t consider herself European first.

“I feel Spanish,” she said. “I’ve never noticed any positive change from joining the eurozone.

But euro supporters, like Karel Jannoo with the Brussels-based think tank the Center for European Reform, say people forget that before the crisis, the euro had made Europe richer making trade and travel across the eurozone easier.

It also gave Europe more might in dealing with big trading partners like the US and China.

Jannoo said European leaders haven’t done a good job of talking up the currency’s benefits.

“What you need to do to stimulate a common feeling is to say, look, we have a model of society where you have social security for everybody, schooling for everybody, unemployment benefits for everybody,” Jannoo said. “We are not like the U.S. where the gap between rich and poor is huge.”

Jannoo said the euro’s demise, or diminishment, would be a disastrous step backward for this sense of collective identity.

But if social media sites are any indication, the European identity may already be headed in that direction.

There’s a Facebook page titled, Why Do I Feel European?

No one has posted to it in over a year.

Alessia’s eyes are milky blue. As soon as the baby opened them, her mother Daniela said she knew something was wrong.

“She was born with opaque corneas,” Mrs. Truica said in a recent interview in Bucharest. “No light gets in, so she needs a transplant for both eyes. Without it she will not be able to see.”

The Truicas said they sought out Romania’s best eye surgeon. His advice, said Mrs. Truica, caught them by surprise.

“The doctor told us to go home and wait,” she said. “That he’d fix Alessia’s eyes – in three years.”

That’s because in Romania, there isn’t a single doctor with the expertise to perform this surgery on babies, only on older children. To get treatment now, the Truica’s must go abroad.

In the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Romania had good medical facilities and lots of good doctors. How things went south is complicated, said Radu Craciun, an economist in Bucharest who studies healthcare. Craciun said spending on healthcare has actually gone up in recent years, but the quality has gone down.

“Poor cost management,” he said. “The hospitals have been big spenders without justifying the expenditures. There’s corruption. And wrong relationships between the big pharmaceutical companies and doctors, who all the time recommend the most expensive medicine.”

George Dorin Andreescu, aka Gojira, a doctor who gave up medicine out of frustration with Romania's dysfunctional healthcare system. He's now a famous music DJ, often playing free shows to raise money for people to get medical care outside Romania. (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

And now budget cuts are beginning. At least one hospital has been closed, and salaries for state healthcare workers reduced. As a result, Romania is losing many of its best doctors to better jobs abroad. George Dorin Andreescu was supposed to be one of a new generation of Romanian doctors, the ones who might compensate for the medical brain drain. He graduated from medical school in 2007 but promptly hung up his stethoscope.

‘Everything is falling down, brick by brick,” he said. And I’m terrified of this. When I started, I had hope. And when I finished I was like, I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Andreescu said though Romanians still have the right to free public healthcare, the quality of treatment is now disastrous.

“I can take you a tour of hospitals all over Romania,” he said, ‘and you’d be terrified.”

Andreescy is now a music DJ. His stage name, Gojira. On a recent night he said he was doing more to help a sick person with his music than the state healthcare system was. Gojira was playing a charity party – for Alessia Truica, the blind baby.

Gojira and some of Romania’s most famous bands performed free in an old cotton processing factory in Bucharest. The woman who organized the event, Alina Tiplea, said unless something changed, this was the likely future of healthcare funding for the poor.

“Even though if we don’t manage to have a lot of money,” she said, over the din of loud electronica music, “everyone can find out about the case. And others, maybe they have children and they’ll help out. Others things will come along from this kind of event.”

The Romanian government isn’t oblivious to its healthcare crisis. Beginning next year, it plans an ambitious overhaul. The idea: to let hospitals compete with each other for private insurance contracts. Economist Radu Craciun said healthcare will still be free, but people will be able to buy additional insurance, for the best care.

And if you’re poor and can’t afford it?

“Then you’ll enjoy the so-called basic package,” Craciun said, “which still has to be defined.”

If that basic package isn’t a marked improvement from Romania’s healthcare today, then families like the Truica’s will likely still turn to charity for help.

Romanian electronica gods Suie Paparude get 250 dancing at the charity event in Bucharest for 5-month-old baby Alessia Truica. Truica was born with opaque corneas and needs a transplant to see. (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

A growing number of Spaniards say that because the government has not taken decisive action like cutting spending and making it easier to hire and fire workers, Spain lacks competitiveness. And that made putting the breaks on the mounting sovereign debt impossible.

Bond markets punished Spain this week by demanding nearly seven percent interest on 10-year bonds. Seven percent is considered a country’s breaking point.

Spaniards, mostly young Spaniards, have been protesting since last spring. They also support labor reforms, although not the kind most economists have in mind.

In a plaza in Madrid, a young man complained about a lack of jobs, and the exploitation of unpaid or low-paid interns.

Spanish companies and universities use hundreds of thousands of interns, often college grads looking for experience and a foot in the door. The experience, they get. The foot? It often gets stomped on.

Octavio Granado is Spain’s Social Security chief. He told Spanish radio recently that during this crisis employers have grown too used to calling poorly paid, over-exploited workers “interns.”

Using interns is cheaper. And, that’s good for companies. But former intern and doctoral student Ester Artells says it traps young people in jobs with no future.

“You get a temporary contract for your doctorate, a temporary contract for your post doc work, then another and another. And you never get a real job,” Artells said.

Artells was reached by phone because she works in France now, in Marseilles. She’s a post-doc research scientist. She says she’s paid well there, and, unlike at home in Spain, jobs abound.

Despite their shortcomings, internships in Spain are still well sought after, because the likely alternative is no job at all. The man likely to be Spain’s next Prime Minister is Mariano Rojoy of the conservative Popular Party. He’s promising big reforms to get young people working again.

“The first thing we have to do is reform the constitution to set a ceiling on spending at all levels of government so that no one spends what they don’t have,” Rojoy said. “It’s time to tighten our belts.”

Belt tightening will inevitably lead to more cuts in public sector services, such as healthcare and education and in salaries.

None of that will be popular. But Spanish voters seems to fear contagion from Greece and Italy more.

Polls show Rajoy’s popular party has a big lead over the ruling Socialists going into Sunday’s elections.