The Romanian Case

In 1967, a tourist guidebook by the American travel writer Peter Latham noted that for the 1966–1970 five-year plan, Romania would continue to improve the population’s living standards and cultural levels by “raising wages, improving the supply of goods and raising the volume of services, improving housing conditions, and intensifying the measures for public health and social services.”⁴ Although this information was unusual in a tourist handbook, it was meant to reflect the Romanian government’s growing interest in developing consumption.⁵ The guidebook was intended to be “a complete guide to be read at home, to be consulted in the library and used by tourists and businessman in Romania.”⁶ The information provided was aimed at both regular Western vacationers to Romania and potential capitalist entrepreneurs interested in doing business in this communist country. Latham’s guidebook included a rubric about shopping that listed the leading shops in Bucharest and in Constanța, the largest city on the Black Sea Coast, as well as restaurants and beauty salons, along with their prices, in the main tourist destinations.⁷ The image of Romania as a consumer society was not propaganda but rather reflected the state’s intention to develop international tourism and increase the regime’s political legitimacy both in the eyes of Western tourists and its citizens.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the need to improve services in state commerce became increasingly pressing. More goods were made available, and inchoate advertising attempted to spur peoples’ desires. In official rhetoric, the “worker-buyers” slowly became “consumers,” and in some sectors the officially set prices were abandoned altogether.⁸ In April 1964, the Council of Ministers received a report from the Ministry of Agriculture and CENTROCOOP (the National Union of Consumer Cooperatives) that bragged about the accomplishments of socialist commerce in the first four months of the year: “[S]ocialist commerce did a better job than last year in fulfilling the consumers’ needs with necessary foodstuffs, and as proof, the prices in the official shops became comparable to those in the farmers’ market.”⁹ Thus, a competition of sorts between the socialist shops and the farmers’ market began to take shape, offering Romanian consumers some alternatives to state commerce.¹⁰ While state officials followed this development, they did not put a stop to it, mainly because they came to understand that state commerce alone could not meet the consumer needs.¹¹ Similarly, the authorities began listen to complaints regarding commercial practices in clothing stores, especially in the provinces, and to pay more attention to consumers’ desires. A June 1964 report of the Economic Office within the Central Committee sounded the alarm about these stores’ inability to adjust to demand:

A visit to the clothing stores in Maramureș and Crișana [two regions in northwestern Romania close to the Hungarian border] revealed that the clothing stores are not well supplied with summer clothes.

In the retail stores in Baia Mare, Satu-Mare, Sighet, and Oradea, fall and winter season clothes such as raincoats, winter men’s suits, etc., predominate, while women’s summer dresses, light-colored summer suits for men, or sport articles are in small quantities or lacking altogether.… Because of this, an unhealthy situation is occurring. The merchandise consumers need for that season is not made available, and the goods that remained unsold in the previous season are stocked for the next. This practice is unwise as most do not sell because they are already out of fashion, and consumers do not want them.¹²

This report exemplified the regime’s changing attitudes toward consumption and everyday life practices.¹³ Notably, it emphasized choice over needs: consumers were supposed to have options rather than just purchasing what was made available to them. Furthermore, Romanian officials did not choose the USSR as an inspiration for the country’s retail system but instead looked to the “hated” West, where fashion came in seasons. The same report called for improvements in personnel training and proposed that a number of workers be sent abroad, mainly to France and West Germany, to learn from these countries’ experiences.¹⁴ The report proposed using the reserve budget of the Council of Ministers to cover travel expenditures. This proposal reflects the high priority officials assigned to this undertaking.¹⁵

International tourism proved to be an important aspect of the process of liberalizing everyday life and consumption. Although not the spark that ignited the process, it played a key role in its evolution. Without a dynamic and consumer-oriented economy, a country could not attract Western tourists, who could choose from a variety of tourist destinations. With policy changes underway in the 1960s, tourism promoters had an opportunity to present socialist Romania as a modern and welcoming place. Images of modern stores, restaurants, and cozy farmers’ markets appeared regularly in advertising. For example, a 1967 guidebook to the Romanian Black Sea Coast, published by Meridiane and written in English, included references to shopping areas in its presentation of Constanța, the main city on the coast.¹⁶ According to this guidebook, Tomis Boulevard, the main street of the town, was “lined with numerous shops: a lacto-vegetarian restaurant, a self-service restaurant (Pescarușul/Seagull), a confectionary shop with refreshment bar, etc.”¹⁷ Additionally, other areas in the town were suggested for shopping. The guidebook called attention to Stefan cel Mare (Steven the Great) Street in the city center, where “The great number of shops makes it a convenient shopping area.”¹⁸ Foreigners, mainly Western tourists, were promised the benefits of a more liberal approach to commerce if they chose Romania as their holiday destination. Nevertheless, as these were regular shops, Romanians also had access to them.

Many commercial activities thrived in the framework of the new system introduced by the Romanian socialist regime in the 1960s. Although most of the stores were state-owned, in the late 1960s and 1970s private entrepreneurs could rent and run state-owned shops for profit.¹⁹ The “commissionaires” system was profitable for both the state and the “investors,” until it was suddenly brought to a halt in the late 1970s.²⁰ In the late 1960s and early 1970s, numerous newspaper ads asked people with monetary resources to invest in commercial activities, especially those that presupposed direct contact with the public. Although official documents are silent about these practices, individual memory is not. Ileana M., a French translator, remembers how a pastry shop run by a private entrepreneur in her neighborhood sold the best ice cream available on the market.²¹ The implicit subtext of the commissionaires system was that the regime acknowledged its lack of resources and needed people able to perform commercial activities. This led it to attract individuals who had previously worked in commerce but whose shops had closed at the end of the 1940s and early 1950s.²² These individuals’ skills and money contributed to a revival of commerce and thereby helped foster the rise of consumerism in socialist Romania in the 1960s and 1970s.

Despite the considerable improvements made in consumer services throughout the 1960s, the results were still unsatisfactory, especially when it came to attending to the needs of foreign tourists. On many occasions, Romanian authorities insisted on providing adequate consumer services to foreign tourists. They even attempted to create the necessary framework to educate tourist workers. A report of the Economic Section of the Central Committee from June 1964 proposed the following measures for improving such services in Mamaia and Eforie Nord, two resorts on the Black Sea Coast:

1. The offering of specific training for the tourist workers hired in the summer months should take place before the start of the tourist season, and workers should receive a salary that equals 50 percent of the minimum wage for the specific jobs [for which] the worker receives training.

2. The provision of necessary numbers of qualified workers in hotels and public eating facilities (restaurants) by transferring them from similar units from the rest of the country.

3. The offering of material incentives to tourist workers, such as free meals within the limit of ten lei per diem [a full menu for tourists was 15 lei] and rewards for outstanding work.²³

These measures met the approval of the Committee for Work and Colonies, the State Planning Committee, and most importantly, the Ministry of Finance, which assured that they would be implemented and not relegated to a desk drawer.

Yet, despite these efforts, the results were not always visible to foreign tourists. A 1965 letter by an Austrian tourist pointed out the accomplishments and shortcomings of the emerging Romanian tourist industry. The Austrian tourist had decided to visit Mamaia, mainly because of “the strong advertising.”²⁴ Although the trip was not entirely unpleasant, the tourist, who had visited “all summer resorts in Southern Europe,” felt obliged to explain why Mamaia, the largest resort on the Romanian Black Sea Coast, was not yet an international tourist destination.

Because I want to consider your country, despite the 20-year rupture, as part of the European civilization, I take the time to evaluate your tourism from the point of view of the tourist. I want to show what could be done to bring the resort to our standards and Mamaia to become a truly international tourist destination.…

• Flight attendants should speak some German.
• When tourists arrive at the hotel, at least someone from the management should welcome them. Human beings become completely impersonal when led like a crowd into the hotel.… One never forgets she/he is just a number, an object.
• There are no entertainment options in Mamaia. Build some restaurants with Romanian food, wine, and music!
• It’s not good to make announcements in restaurants only in Romanian as they do, for example, at “Miorița” [a restaurant with Romanian cuisine and folk music], where 90 percent of the clients are Germans.²⁵

Far from dismissing it, the Romanian authorities took the Austrian tourist’s complaint very seriously. Gheorghe (Gogu) Rădulescu, the chief of the Economic Office within the Central Committee, recommended that ONT–Carpathians pursue some of the tourist’s suggestions.²⁶ In the 1960s, the Romanian authorities realized that besides building hotels and tourist facilities, tourism was also about offering good services and leaving tourists with pleasant memories.

But in spite of the Romanian authorities’ struggles to improve the availability of consumer goods, production and distribution bottlenecks continued to make the situation difficult in the 1970s. This situation is exemplified in a 1976 report of ONT–Carpathians about the functioning of restaurants and hotels on the Black Sea Coast and in Bucharest, which acknowledged that although the plan’s targets had been met and even exceeded, there were still many deficiencies.²⁷ First of all, the inspected restaurants were short on foodstuffs, such as meat, fruits, and vegetables: “The supply of tourist facilities with alimentary products was [below] expectations between 15 May and 15 July. For example, the quantities of fresh fruits and vegetables were insufficient, as well as those of meat and dairy products. Also, the restaurants needed more mineral water, soda, Pepsi cola, beer, and ice supplies.”²⁸

If restaurants and hotels had problems with food supplies, the situation was much more dire in regular shops and markets, despite the strong advertising that showed them fully stocked.²⁹ Although in the early 1960s rationing was abolished, in the late 1970s certain products were again rationed; by 1981, most foodstuffs could only be bought with ration cards.³⁰ The socialist regime in Romania decided that it was necessary to revert to rationing in order to deal with what threatened to become endemic shortages. As many agricultural products were exported to neighboring socialist countries or capitalist countries for raw materials like crude oil and technology, they became insufficient to meet domestic consumption.³¹ Moreover, October 9, 1981, the Council of Ministers passed a decree that prohibited ordinary Romanians from stocking foodstuffs, such as sugar, coffee, oil, rice, and flour, that exceeded their needs for a month; the decree made this illegal.³² Individuals could be sentenced to jail for six months to five years if they were discovered doing this. Sugar and oil were rationed nationwide, while meat, milk, and bread were rationed in some rather than all counties.³³ But rationing failed to solve the problem of supply, and food queues became a common sight in the 1980s.³⁴

At the same time, products that were not rationed were impossible to find. One example was coffee, which disappeared from grocery stores altogether.³⁵ Although some viewed the shortages as deliberate, the limited access to consumer goods and foodstuffs negatively affected the socialist economy, as a 1985 report by the Workers Committee for the Control of Economic and Social Activity within the PCR clarified. The report emphasized that the existing cash in the market was higher than the planned amount, while the revenues from commercial activities were 1.4 billion lei lower than the predicted plan values.³⁶ This kind of imbalance threatened to fuel inflation, detrimental even in a centralized planned economy with fixed prices.³⁷

The only region in the country that preserved some traces of the 1960s and early 1970s liberalization was the Black Sea Coast, the most important tourist area in Romania. Despite struggling with an ongoing crisis, the socialist state wished to keep the economy of the Black Sea Coast buoyant. The seaside was the only area in the country where rationing was never introduced, and scarce products such as coffee and Pepsi (Coca-Cola was not present on the market) existed in relatively great variety at kiosks and grocery stores.³⁸ Furthermore, specific products, such as bread, were of better quality and there was a more diverse selection than in the rest of the country. However, in order to preserve this relative well-being, a special political intervention was needed. Constanța’s first secretary, various officials in the government, and the Ministry of Tourism had to lobby for privileged treatment of the Constanța region. For instance, a 1975 note from Janos Fazakas, the minister of domestic commerce, to Nicolae Ceaușescu asked that, between June 1 and September 15, bread products sold on the coast contain a higher concentration of wheat, as in the previous tourist season foreign tourists regularly complained about the quality of bread.³⁹ Ceaușescu approved this request and recommended improvements in consumer services on the seaside, which he deemed “unfit.”

Other suggested measures included extending store hours to twelve business hours per day, along with extending working hours at factories producing the goods to be sold. Because of Ceaușescu’s directive, all stores in the resorts and some in Constanța stayed open on Sundays, and street commerce garnered more attention.⁴⁰ These policy changes shed light on the mechanisms of power in the PCR’s Central Committee, but they also reflect the communist officials’ efforts to keep the foreign tourists coming. Yet, in the 1980s, as the lack of consumer goods affected the other regions of the country, these measures were hardly enough to revive commercial activities on the seaside, although the central and local authorities attempted to improve the supply of foodstuffs and other necessities to the Black Sea region. In 1984, the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Domestic Commerce claimed to have allocated the necessary materials for the optimal functioning of the tourist season.⁴¹ As part of this endeavor, they refurbished 487 of the 536 hotels and 281 of the 382 restaurants and canteens that were part of the plan.⁴² In order to make sure the region would be supplied at least at a minimum level, a food reserve was created, which totaled 2,600 tons of meat, 250 tons of dairy products, and 200 tons of ice cream.⁴³ Moreover, the authorities, who were aware of tourist discontent vis-à-vis available products, planned to “diversify and improve the quality of beverages, including beer” to respond to the grievances of “tourists, especially foreign tourists.”⁴⁴ Also, for 1984, the state planned to deploy more personnel in the seaside region; approximately nineteen thousand tourist workers, of which two thousand were reassigned from high-class hotels and restaurants in Bucharest and other large cities.⁴⁵ In 1985, another report by the Central Committee of the PCR urged that necessary foodstuffs be directed to meet the needs of foreign tourists.⁴⁶ Although hotels and restaurants that housed mainly foreign tourists were better supplied than regular shops, the lack of adequate consumer goods became apparent once the tourists decided to leave their hotels and stroll the forlorn surroundings. The poor services and the lack of entertainment alternatives led to a decline in foreign tourists. In 1983, the number of individual foreign tourists from capitalist countries plummeted by 15 percent, and the number of tourists coming from neighboring socialist countries fell by 36 percent, compared to 1982.⁴⁷ Although the statistics showed a slight improvement in 1984, it was clear that the region had lost its reputation as a desirable tourist area, especially when compared with neighboring socialist countries like Yugoslavia. Ultimately, the overall tendency to limit the buying of foreign goods and replace them with less appealing domestic products affected the Black Sea region as well. From the mid-1980s on, the tourism industry continued its downfall, with declining services and the decreasing availability of consumer goods on the seaside.⁴⁸ In fact, in the late 1980s, some Western tourists who drove to the region brought their own foodstuffs with them.⁴⁹

While this grim reality certainly bothered the socialist regime, it did not abandon its goal to present Romania as a consumer society. However, aware that it could not compete with capitalist countries when it came to the availability of consumer goods, the regime claimed that socialist consumption was different than the capitalist understanding of it. This approach began in the 1960s when the country’s economic development paled in comparison with the capitalist world, continued to diminish in the 1970s, but then reemerged during the Western economic crisis of the 1980s. Thus, when Romania was promoted abroad, the information about shopping was kept brief while the focus was more on cultural and social aspects. Tourist guidebooks published in foreign languages from the 1960s to the 1980s emphasized advances in cultural consumption and social welfare, as this was part of the societal engineering project of socialism. A 1967 guidebook to Romania, edited by a team led by art historian Șerban Cioculescu, included a rubric about museums, while another guidebook published in 1966 by historian Constantin Daicoviciu and philologue Alexandru Graur offered lengthy information about Romanian music halls and theaters, folklore, and radio and television productions.⁵⁰ The guidebook by Daicoviciu and Graur covered issues like education and housing in an attempt to highlight the societal progress of Romania under socialism and its burgeoning welfare state. Included in this new approach were discussions of the increase in the number of hospitals and medical doctors and efforts to eradicate diseases like tuberculosis and improve the population’s sanitary education.⁵¹ For a country that Western tourists historically regarded as backward, this information seemed important as was meant to diminish the fear of falling ill while vacationing in Romania.⁵²

When tourist promotion became more commercial in the 1970s, sanitary and social welfare concerns receded. A guidebook published in 1974 by Edition Touristique under the coordination of the geographer Constantin Darie included comprehensive information about shopping and what could be bought in regular shops in Romania.⁵³ “A large array of goods (textiles, cosmetics, perfumes, drinks and cigarettes, artworks, musical records, books and icons, etc.), as well as beautiful craft objects (carpets, garments, etc.), could be found in the local shops as well as in the department stores (shopping centers) in cities and in the mountain or seaside resorts.”⁵⁴ The guidebook notably stressed that these goods could be acquired with travelers’ checks and not just with lei, the Romanian currency. As Romania was part of a global network, international means of payment, such as credit cards issued by larger suppliers like American Express, Barclaycard, Carte Blanche, Diners Club, or Eurocard were, in theory, accepted by most hotels and major department stores.⁵⁵ Hence, at least from an official point of view, hard currency payment was not an issue.

The selection of goods deserves some discussion as it mirrored the regime’s preference for cultural and folk items, which were believed to embody Romanian national identity and showed some originality compared to other industrially made goods. Among these commodities, one the state treated with growing attention was music and music records. Folk and classical music records became ever-present in shops, while the Romanian airline carrier TAROM sold them at special prices. A 1962 guidebook, Rumania in Brief, had a section about “gramophone records,” which called tourists’ attention to the music of Maria Tănase, Maria Lătărețu, and Fănică Luca, which combined Romanian folk music with fiddle music. Classical music composers such as George Enescu and Mihail Jora were also strongly promoted.⁵⁶ Similarly, pop music (or soft music) was used to attract primarily Romanian exiles in Western countries. Musical records became part of tourist exhibitions abroad, and music became a commodified object that was meant to lure tourists to Romania.⁵⁷ Their symbolic cultural value increased as LPs (long-play records) entered the market, and this was supposed to deliver revenues in hard currencies.

Nevertheless, music and popular culture became instruments used to signal liberalization and the presence of Westerners to Romanian citizens. Impușcături pe portativ (Shotguns on the Stave), a musical released in 1968, includes a scene in which the American jazz singer Nancy Holloway performs in Bucharest.⁵⁸ Holloway is shown getting off a TAROM airplane and singing, in French, “Hello Bucharest, I came to visit you from Paris,” which must have been a refreshing sight for Romanian viewers who could not easily travel to capitalist countries.⁵⁹ The film was shown in the movie theaters all over the country and sold over 1.7 million tickets.⁶⁰ Ultimately, the Romanian version of consumerism merged the drive for profit and the innate desire for commodities with socialist ideology, which emphasized social welfare and societal progress. Although the language was different, this view resembled, to a certain extent, the Fordist viewpoint that wage workers should be better paid so they could become consumers and that this would lead to social homogenization and modernization.⁶¹

To sum up, in the 1960s, consumption patterns in socialist Romania had shifted from autarchy to a “needs only” model that tried to meet consumers’ desires, especially when those consumers happened to be foreign tourists. Officials were aware that despite improvements, goods and services in Romania were still below Western tourists’ standards, and hence the government adopted a number of measures to change this situation. But in the 1980s, against the backdrop of generalized shortages and the pressure to pay Romania’s foreign debt, consumption did not remain a top priority for the Romanian socialist government, especially for Nicolae Ceaușescu and his acolytes. As a bitter irony, in 1981, during a meeting of the PCR’s Central Committee that discussed the consequences of martial law in Poland, one member suggested sending laundry detergent to help Romania’s “Polish friends” with consumer goods. Timidly, another participant noted that the Romanian market lacked laundry detergent, and Elena Ceaușescu, the wife of Nicolae Ceaușescu and an active member of the government, replied that Romanians did not use laundry detergent but homemade soap.⁶²

Tourist Shops: An Island of Prosperity in a World of Shortages

Despite the Romanian regime’s ambivalence toward conspicuous consumption, it did associate tourism with consumerism and sought to encourage foreign tourists to buy as much as possible when vacationing in Romania. A tourist guide of Romania published in 1967 gave the shops’ main opening hours without offering additional details and then mentioned the “special shops” as places where tourists could buy souvenirs and gifts.⁶³ According to the guidebook, the available goods ranged from “handicraft articles (fabrics, embroideries, carpets, wooden, leather, horn, pottery articles, etc.) clothing, leather goods, footwear, foodstuffs, drinks (plum brandy, high-quality dry, semi-dry or sweet wines that were awarded prizes at great international wine competitions), folk, classical or dance music records.”⁶⁴ Cars and even apartments were also sold.⁶⁵ The specificity of these shops was that they were geared toward foreign tourists who possessed hard currency or tourist checks.⁶⁶ This was a practice all Eastern Bloc countries adopted as a way to increase their supplies of Deutsche Marks and US dollars.⁶⁷ Romanian authorities offered a 20 percent discount at these shops to make them more attractive to buyers.⁶⁸ Moreover, after purchase, the goods could be shipped abroad by Comturist stores upon request.⁶⁹

Unfortunately, despite the flexibility of the commercial process in tourist shops, socialist officials had only limited success in their goals. For example, in 1969, the Executive Bureau of the Central Committee complained that the income Romania obtained from commercial tourist activities was lower than that of other socialist countries and looked for ways to improve these revenues.⁷⁰ Although Romania opened its first shops in 1964, its income from this activity only reached $2.6 million USD in 1969. This issue became even more frustrating for Romanian officials when they compared this revenue with that of neighboring countries.⁷¹ The proposed solutions ranged from “making available a large array of merchandise from both internal and external production such as cosmetics, food, cars, apartments, construction materials, and medicines” to selling those goods at reasonable prices (if possible, at lower prices than in their home countries). Although the revenues from tourist shops increased in the 1970s, reaching $21.3 million in 1974, they dropped to $12.1 million in 1977. The main problem remained the difficulty in getting consumers to purchase more expensive goods.⁷² One way to advertise the tourist shops and their merchandise was to feature them in guidebooks published in foreign languages. One such guidebook, published in French in 1974, mentioned that “it is possible to offer watches, cosmetics, radio sets, automobiles, apartments, or even summer homes in tourist areas as gifts to relatives and friends in Romania with the help of [the] COMTURIST Agency.”⁷³ Yet there was an implicit contradiction in this offer, which made it possible for friends or relatives living in capitalist countries to redirect capital to citizens in socialist Romania. This active promotion showed the lengths to which the socialist regime went to make tourist shops profitable. The economic strain of keeping tourist shops running proved quite convoluted because most of the merchandise was imported (cigarettes, beverages, good quality chocolate, electronics, etc.) from capitalist countries and purchased with hard currency.⁷⁴ Despite being a socialist creation, tourist shops functioned according to market principles and had to try to be as attractive as possible to tourists.

Whereas in the 1960s and the 1970s foreign tourists were not very interested in the special shops, as the usual stores sold plenty of goods and gave tourists a chance to get a taste of “real” Romanian products, throughout the 1980s tourist shops began to offer the only possible shopping experience for foreign visitors.⁷⁵ While this might have compromised the image of socialism as a thriving economic system, from a financial point of view it conformed to the Romanian socialist state’s policies. The state sought to obtain more revenue in hard currencies, and tourist shops offered an excellent way to do so.⁷⁶ Aware of the limitations of regular shops, foreign tourists started to buy things at tourist shops, turning the shops into a business venture that would fill gaps in the official economy. Although these activities were borderline illegal, in its craving for Western tourists and hard currencies, the Romanian socialist state turned a blind eye to these doings if they remained small scale.

Ileana M., one of my interviewees, explained how these transactions worked. During a seaside vacation that she took in the early 1980s, she befriended a family of Belgian tourists. The husband, Francois, had been a tourist to Romania since the mid-1970s; he began visiting Romania to find a cure for his persistent back problems. As his health improved, he decided to visit Romania every year to continue the treatment. During this time, he not only learned some Romanian but also witnessed the decline of the Romanian retail sector. When asked, he did not hesitate to buy goods from the tourist shop for his acquaintances. Yet Francois was not doing this only out of generosity; it also allowed him to make some extra money. While the dollar was sold for 11–12 lei on the official market, Francois sold goods at it 50 lei per dollar, thus quadrupling his profits.⁷⁷ The tourist shops thereby became a source of revenue for foreign tourists and a way of overcoming shortages for some middle-class Romanians.

Comturist shops developed as a source of extra revenue for tourist workers too, albeit unlawfully. In 1973, Fernando Rodriguez, a Spanish tourist who stayed at Hotel Nord in Bucharest, complained about the behavior of a shop clerk who managed to scam his wife.⁷⁸ His wife gave the clerk a $20 bill for produce that cost under $10. Because she had some quarters she wanted to get rid of, but also to help the clerk with the change, she gave him the quarters and he was supposed to give her back a $10 bill to finalize their transaction. But to her astonishment, the shop clerk took advantage of the language misunderstanding—the clerk did not speak Spanish while the tourist had no English or German—and denied receiving the $20 bill, claiming to have only gotten $10. Although the tourists asked for the hotel director to verify their complaint, the process took a couple of hours and the $20 bill was never found. As Fernando said, “It could have easily slipped away.”⁷⁹ This incident made the Spanish couple bitter. They had been relatively pleased with their visit before the scam happened.

Sadly, these occurrences were hardly occasional, as an inspection by the Romanian National Bank in September 1977 disclosed. The inspectors checked eighty-four tourist shops in Eforie Nord and found various wrongdoings in sixty-four cases.⁸⁰ The most frequent wrongdoing was not issuing an invoice at the time of sale, or issuing one with handwritten changes and errors in calculation.⁸¹ Some tourist shop clerks had surplus money in their cashiers that they could not justify; in other cases, money was missing. These verifications happened once every 2–3 years, but units were checked serendipitously, and so some shops could not have received an inspector’s visit from the National Bank for years. This leniency may explain the relatively high number of transgressions in just one resort. Some scholars of Romanian communism have described Romania as a closed society ruled by a one-party system with the help of secret police (the Securitate) and a strong bureaucratic system.⁸² Yet, as recent literature on communist societies has shown, the view of the regime pitted against the regular people who tried to escape its authority is rather simplistic.⁸³ Comturist shops and their practices were a reflection of the state’s struggle to keep them running and how certain employees and foreign tourists took advantage of the state’s inability to fulfill anything more than society’s basic needs. The sheer existence of tourist shops, which were established as a luxury alternative to regular shops for foreign tourists, provided a measuring stick for the Romanian population, who saw in them the socialist regime’s double standard. While Romanians were supposed to accept shortages as a reality, foreign tourists were enticed to become consumers in socialist Romania.

The Spanish Case

Spanish tourists began to travel to socialist Romania in the 1970s, due to a recent Cold War diplomatic thaw between the two countries and a significant improvement in living standards in Spain. As in the Romanian case, everyday life and consumption patterns in Spain gradually drifted from autarchy and scarcity in the late 1940s and early 1950s to an inchoate form of conspicuous consumption in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1943, 50,000 couples were looking for housing and monthly rent increased from 150 pesetas in 1939 to 1,000 pesetas in 1945.⁸⁴ Regular people’s dire situation waned throughout the 1950s, and a middle class began to take shape. As a result, GDP per capita increased from 9.750 pesetas in 1950 to 20.557 in 1960.⁸⁵ But progress was slow, as one of my interviewees, a former hotel director in Marbella, recalls.⁸⁶ When asked what made him pursue a job in tourism, he immediately replied that the sight of tourists in the early 1950s convinced him this was a promising career.

Well, it was probably 1953 or 1954 when I first saw tourists [in Málaga]. And I realized it was a special thing about tourists because these people were not afraid of the police; they were even saying hello to them. Even police were surprised to see these people because tourists were few back then and attracted much attention. These people looked very well-fed compared to locals; wore clean, fine clothes; and had very well-kept and very good-quality shoes. But the main thing was once they left the bus to enter the cathedral, I realized—and that was just a miracle—because I was very close to the bus, I looked inside and was in awe. It was a luxurious bus; I didn’t see one like that before because public buses were awful. And I realized it was something extraordinary. It was this smell of well-washed human skin, and it was funny because when I went to school that day, we had a lesson about the formation of national spirit, which was standard Francoist indoctrination. We were told that abroad was terrible, Spain was heaven, and being a Spaniard was a blessing. And I realized it was something very wrong because these people were clean and looked happy while we were not.⁸⁷

This lively memory vividly describes everyday life in Spain compared to the living standards of foreign tourists who seemed to be from another world. Although few, tourists were noticeable to Spaniards, and judgments were made. Their presence was a glimpse into the “outside,” which was inaccessible to most Spaniards, like Rafael, for most of the 1950s.

It was the 1959 Plan of Stabilization that allowed foreign companies to infuse capital into the Spanish economy and engendered significant changes. For one thing, the plan brought about a substantial increase in the number of foreigners visiting Spain. One of my interviewees, a former professor of tourism at the University of Málaga, described the following encounter between foreign visitors and Spaniards as an example of “cultural shock” that still occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s.⁸⁸ After the difficult years that followed the civil war, Spanish citizens had been confronted with a different approach to material culture. Although the regime hailed private property and wealth accumulation as desirable, the unequal distribution of resources created significant gaps between the upper and lower classes in Spain. Hence, while the economic and political elite lived like their peers in richer Western European countries, the working people, broadly defined, had to cope with the realities of economic autarchy and shortages—that is, until the mass arrival of foreign tourists in the 1960s significantly changed this situation. Everyday patterns of life that were common to the well-to-do gradually became accessible to some in the middle class as well. In the 1960s, more households were able to own a car or a TV or to have a telephone line installed.⁸⁹ Automobile ownership became particularly important as it offered more ways to spend one’s free time and a certain degree of individual autonomy vis-à-vis the Francoist state. The number of individuals with a driver’s license (a stark majority of them were men) increased from 4 percent in 1960 to 12 percent in 1966 and 35 percent in 1971.⁹⁰ Other consumer items also became more available; for example, sales of body care products soared, suggesting a new approach to sanitation and aesthetics of the body.

Moreover, advertisements for consumer products became a familiar sight in tourist guides and magazines.⁹¹ A 1963 guide was entirely dedicated to promoting a car called Seat, production of which started in 1950 in a state-owned factory run by Spain’s National Institute for Industry (INI).⁹² The advent of the tourism industry also triggered the introduction of specific restaurant and hotel technologies. Modern kitchen products, such as refrigerators, stoves, and ice cream makers, were advertised in tourist magazines. Hostelería y Turismo, a magazine dedicated to the tourist industry, included in its pages articles about how to use a refrigerator: “One has to note that the use of a refrigerator does not improve the condition of foodstuffs, but only preserves [their] freshness.”⁹³ More hi-tech products, such as dishwashers and ice cream makers, were presented as technologies that any modern restaurant should own.⁹⁴ But once in the market, such products seeped into daily lives. These new technologies had an impact on women’s lives, as in Spanish society they were the ones who performed domestic chores. Whereas in 1960 only 4 percent of the population owned a refrigerator, in 1966, 28 percent of Spaniards had one in their homes, and in 1975, 73.7 percent had one.⁹⁵ Women’s lives were also made easier by the availability of more efficient cleaning products. One advertisement for a window-cleaning product showed a woman wearing a working outfit while gazing at her spotless reflection in a freshly cleaned mirror and advising other women to buy the cleaning product, as it provides “a perfect image” (doble perfecto) and “it cleans and preserves the cleanliness” (porque limpia y conserva la limpieza).⁹⁶

Yet the question remains whether average citizens could afford these products and where they could find them, as only large stores such as supermarkets had the capital to purchase and sell these new and modern products. In 1958, the first supermarkets opened in Spain, but their initial success was limited.⁹⁷ Despite the government’s approval of supermarkets, before 1962 only forty of them had opened in Spain.⁹⁸ Their limited success was mainly due to Spaniards’ inability to pay. A 1964 article discussing the state of supermarkets in Spain noted that the well-to-do purchased goods through the courier system while the poor relied on credit.⁹⁹ This suggests that most newly available goods were purchased by economic elites and that only during the 1970s did they become available to more consumers. Yet researchers studying consumption in the 1960s and 1970s paid less attention to aspects like social differentiation and gender and emphasized other criteria such as age and profession.¹⁰⁰ They assessed that the older the head of the family was, the higher the chances that more money from rents and businesses entered the family budget. Thus, more money was left available for consumer goods after basic expenses were met.¹⁰¹ In the late 1960s, the National Institute of Statistics calculated basic expenses at around 20,000 pesetas per year, while the minimum daily salary was 102 pesetas.¹⁰² By this time, more Spaniards managed to earn enough to make a decent living and even to afford vacations abroad. The growth in ordinary Spaniards’ living standards and the number and variety of available consumer products reflected the economic opening that followed the 1959 Stabilization Plan and the subsequent increase in the number of tourists, and it introduced a new vision of consumption. This new vision appeared gradually, resulting from a long acculturation process and economic accumulation.

Yet despite the increase in Spaniards’ living standards compared to the 1950s, the visions of consumption and consumerism remained different than in Western liberal societies in the 1960s, as an article by sociologists Louis Alonso Benito and Fernando Conde explains.¹⁰³ They argue that despite the common assumption that consumerism, understood as a Fordist-inspired homogenization of societies and cultures, came to cover most of the globe in the mid-to-late twentieth century, Spanish society was late to the process.¹⁰⁴ Because Spanish society remained strongly dominated by the aristocracy and bourgeoisie until the 1960s, social homogenization was delayed compared to other countries, which translated into consumption habits. As the values of the Spanish upper class included reputation, honor, and profitability (called rentisimo and defined as income from business rather than from wage work), they involved a pretty traditional view of society, which prevented the spread of mass consumerism. Thus, well into the 1960s, consumerism was still seen as a bourgeois pursuit that echoed social status. Nevertheless, as Alejandro Gómez del Moral has shown, some societal changes vis-à-vis consumption were visible in Francoist Spain as well.¹⁰⁵ This suggests a tension between the official view of consumption embraced especially by the higher classes and older generations and the more modern and homogenized version of consumerism supported by young people. Both women’s and men’s magazines began to powerfully depict the latter throughout the 1960s, contributing to a change in mentalities.

However, this fragile economic and social liberalization did not extend to the political realm. The Spanish government showed continued distrust toward the political regimes of both Western and Eastern European countries. Francisco Franco’s 1963 New Year’s Eve speech about the “prospects of the future” hailed the superiority of “the Spanish model” over that of Western Europe’s liberal democracies or the communist model of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: “The society of the future is not going to be capitalist and liberal as we know it, or materialistic and barbarian like the despotic Soviet society, but one that resembles our own.”¹⁰⁶ Beyond attempting to manipulate the less-informed Spaniards, Franco presented his dictatorship as an ideal form of governance. This reflected his unwillingness to extend economic liberalization to the political realm and to allow a more democratic society to arise.

Culture Shocks

The arrival of foreign tourists encouraged consumerist practices and mentalities in the relatively autarchic societies of socialist Romania and Francoist Spain, but it was not their presence alone that sparked consumerist practices in the two countries. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the 1980s, the growing number of foreign tourists who visited the two countries brought about a different attitude toward consumption and imports than that adhered to by conservative officials. This translated into the growing availability of high-quality foreign domestic commodities in Romania and Spain starting in the early 1960s. To a certain extent, this contributed to a redefining of “normalization” of everyday life as compared to the 1950s. In socialist Romania, the regime sought to meet consumers’ demands; in fact, numerous party documents reflected this concern as many discussions on this topic took place in the PCR’s Central Committee. In Francoist Spain, the 1959 Stabilization Plan opened the way for foreign goods and technologies. The newly established supermarkets sold these goods, but their availability was limited to the economic elite, as most working people did not have the means to purchase them. However, the surge in the number of foreign tourists brought a measure of economic prosperity to many citizens of Spain who worked in the tourism industry, and soon some ordinary people could afford to buy an automobile, take vacations abroad, or consume more and better products. While in socialist Romania the availability of consumer goods ended in the mid-to-late 1970s, in Spain their availability grew and consumption thrived. Moreover, the change of regime in 1975 in Spain removed restrictions on consumption. In contrast, in the Romanian case, the shortage of goods became widespread, and some goods were rationed from the late 1970s to the 1980s. This happened because of the political decision to curtail imports and to direct a large part of domestic production, especially foodstuffs, to exports.

Despite their different paths from the late 1970s through the 1980s, Romania and Spain both wished to improve the availability of consumer goods. This was due to a general improvement in Europeans’ living standards, which both countries wanted to catch up to despite their very different political regimes. At the same time, both the socialist East and capitalist West were not homogenous notions and countries; subregions in each political bloc had their own specificities. To a certain degree, Romania and Spain shared similar backgrounds characterized by a high polarization between rural and urban areas and a high percentage of the population still living in villages. Their political regimes, which preferred cultural isolation as opposed to increased international exposure, complicated the environment in both countries. For both, the arrival of foreign tourists produced a cultural shock, though the timing was slightly different: it occurred in Spain in the early 1950s and in Romania in the late 1950s and early 1960s.