Foreign Tourists and Black Markets

Despite what the officials in Romania and Spain had planned for their citizens, they had their own personal agenda. The liberalization of everyday life in the 1960s, along with the two states’ new approach to consumption, whetted the ordinary people’s appetite for a more comfortable and modern life. Yet the Romanian state could not keep up economically with its initial promises, as its economic policy remained focused on heavy industry and production. For its part, the Spanish state focused more on building a society that would meet the expectations of foreign tourists rather than its own citizens. But keeping the two separate proved impossible. Consequently, ordinary citizens in the two countries started using the states’ interest in tourism to meet their own needs, which were primarily economic.

In Romania, foreign tourists helped to overcome the shortages in official commerce. Although in the late 1960s and early 1970s the socialist regime itself aimed to meet consumers’ needs, it had limited resources to accomplish this because the overcentralized decision-making continued to allocate more resources to investments in heavy industry rather than in light industries. At the same time, a lack of capital made it difficult for both government and local authorities to adjust policies to consumers’ needs. This led to a proliferation of the black market, in which some foreign tourists were active participants.⁴ Because tourist workers had day-to-day contact with foreign tourists, they were viewed with suspicion by the secret police.⁵ In particular, the Securitate suspected that tourist workers established informal relations with these tourists and used these encounters to transfer goods to the underground economy. One way of preventing tourist workers from befriending Western tourists was to make use of patriotic rhetoric, according to which tourist workers should fulfill their duties as socialist citizens. Tourist workers were periodically instructed to defend themselves against the negative influence of “fake” tourists. A 1974 “Note on the counterrevolutionary preparations of tourist workers from Sibiu County” noted that “tourist workers should report to their superiors any foreign tourists’ suspicious behavior within 24 hours,” or even act themselves if they believed that those individuals could endanger national security.⁶ The note warned tourist workers that, on various occasions, foreign tourists had taken advantage of tourist employees’ weaknesses and offered them presents.

Most of the alleged wrongdoings related to consumption. What the note did not mention was that those gifts were Western commodities that could not be found in Romanian shops. In fact, buying goods from foreign tourists and reselling them to Romanians became a daily occurrence. For example, I. N., a sailor on a motor launch boat, bought various objects, such as wristwatches and clothes, from some foreign tourists who stayed at “Delta” Hotel, one of the main hotels in Tulcea. He may also have had the opportunity to buy gold jewelry but refused, because, he said, “he had enough jewelry at home.”⁷ The Securitate only learned of this from an informer who heard I. N.’s wife bragging about this occurrence.

The Romanian authorities’ lack of success in containing tourist workers’ activity is suggested by a new set of norms that the Politburo of the Romanian Communist Party approved in June 1977.⁸ The decision, “Norms for regulating the receiving, handling, and using of objects (gifts) offered by foreign citizens to Romanians working domestically and abroad,” prohibited them from accepting the following goods: “T.V. sets, wristwatches, cameras, leather office folders, household appliances, cosmetics, fishing tools, razors, liquor, and cigarettes.”⁹ Employees who could not refuse gifts because of courtesy issues had to write an explanatory note the same day and surrender the gifts to the communications protocol office.¹⁰ The banality of Western goods that were bought but also listed as forbidden in the Romanian law reflects not only the fascination of both regular citizens and certain officials in Romania with Western goods, which they regarded as being of better quality, but also the danger of “the little things” from the socialist state’s viewpoint. Regardless of their low material value, these commodities embodied the capitalist West and were a constant reminder of the Romanian socialist state’s poor performance in providing quality consumer goods.

The network of informal commerce obviously required two parties: tourist workers and foreign tourists. Of course, such activities were not without risks. In January 1965, after the New Year’s Eve celebration in a hotel in Poiana Brașov, a ski resort in Prahova Valley, a Romanian tourist with code name “Codin Dumitrescu” passed a note to the Securitate office in Brașov denouncing his fellow travelers, who allegedly bought goods from West German tourists.¹¹ He especially mentioned Kristen, an ethnic German from Brașov, who visited a foreign tourist in a hotel room and purchased some tights. Although in fashion, these were difficult to find in Romanian stores.¹² As the town of Brașov and the surrounding area used to have a large German-speaking community, communication with West German tourists was easy, and the opening of borders in the 1960s brought the possibility of family reunification with relatives from West Germany. Moreover, with that came the opportunity for commodity exchanges, which took the form of small enterprises through which goods from West Germany were sold to Romanians on the black market. The location of these exchanges was fluid, as it ranged from hotel rooms to people’s homes, making it more difficult for the Securitate or militia to trace them.

But it was not just Western goods that were sold on the black market. As most tourists arriving in Romania were from neighboring socialist countries, it was common for them to bring goods to supplement their travel money. Romanian tourists, too, when traveling to neighboring socialist countries, became part of these informal networks. One Romanian tourist who went to Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s remembers how she sold Romanian textiles and cognac, highly regarded in the socialist Bloc, and bought a camera from Prague.¹³ Moreover, the open border project in the 1970s between Poland, the GDR, and Czechoslovakia, which facilitated free border crossings between the countries without any formalities, further contributed to an informal circulation of goods in the socialist Bloc. Based on the model already in place in the European Economic Community, the project aimed to expand tourist exchanges between the three countries.¹⁴ Although Romania was not part of this endeavor, it closely followed its development, and commodities from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland reached Romanian citizens via tourists from these countries, who could easily travel to Romania. Numerous examples of these transactions can be found in Romanian archives, especially in the former Securitate’s archives. For instance, in 1976, a note from the Economic Service of Argeș Militia to the local Securitate office cautioned about Polish tourists selling goods. The note read: “From the available data, we know that on 16 May 1976, two Polish vehicles traveled to Mihăesti village [in Argeș County] and sold clothes and jewelry to various villagers. Details about this could be obtained from Sima, the storekeeper of the local general store, who also bought some fabric for a men’s suit.”¹⁵ This was not an isolated case. In fact, the Polish tourists’ practice of selling goods was a widespread phenomenon. Also in 1976, the militia and the Securitate from Suceava County put together a file about the commercial transactions between Polish tourists and members of the Polish community in northern Romania. But these transactions extended well beyond the Polish community. For example, a set of photos showed a man in his sixties, together with his grandchild, buying Marlboro cigarettes, a highly coveted good in socialist Romania, from a car with a foreign license plate.¹⁶ Foreign cigarettes worked as currency in informal relations within the Romanian socialist society.¹⁷ The photo, taken by a Securitate officer, reflects the banality of such activities and the state’s limited ability to deal with them.

From a socialist point of view, money should serve as an instrument of accounting (transactions between the state and other countries, payment of salaries in order for people to meet their basic needs, etc.), but for these informal transactions between citizens of socialist countries, the availability of cash remained essential.¹⁸ Although money had become less useful in the official commercial outlets as there were few available commodities for purchase, it was essential in the framework of informal exchanges taking place on the black market.¹⁹ Romanian lei were valuable to Polish tourists as they could avoid buying them at a higher price on the official market. Furthermore, like the Romanian state, the Polish state protected its monopoly over the zloty, the national currency, and limited the amount tourists could take out of the country.²⁰ By selling goods to Romanians, Polish tourists supplemented their pocket money and became consumers in the Romanian socialist economy. However, the Romanian authorities, especially the secret police, did not follow this line of thought and regarded informal commerce as a practice that compromised and delegitimized the authority of the socialist system.

The authority of the Romanian state was further compromised when informal commerce involved currency exchanges. Foreign currency was a state monopoly and owning only a few dollars or Deutsche Marks could put one in prison.²¹ While foreign tourists were allowed to bring any quantity of hard currency into the country, and in the case of tourists traveling on an individual basis, even required to have at least $10 for each day of their stay, they could not carry Romanian currency over the border.²² A 1967 guidebook published in English advised tourists to exchange their remaining Romanian currency at “a bank, bureau de exchange, or the nearest National Tourist Office” before leaving Romania.²³ When arriving in Romania, tourists could exchange money at the “exchange bureau of the National Bank of Romania, in big hotels, airports, ports, and railway stations, as well as at all National Tourist Office agencies and branch offices in Bucharest and throughout Romania.”²⁴ At the same locations, tourists could also exchange travelers’ checks. To prove that they exchanged all available lei with the customs office when they left the country, foreign tourists were instructed to save all their receipts.²⁵ Yet this practice was not cost-effective for Western tourists because, while purchasing lei at an elevated price, they were forced to sell it for a lesser amount at the end of their sojourn. This led many of them to engage in informal transactions whenever possible.

In the 1960s, when tourism from the capitalist West intensified, the smuggling of both Romanian and foreign currencies became routine. A 1965 secret police report noted that “The cases that we have discovered prove that such illegal transactions [foreign currency smuggling] involve both foreign and Romanian currency.”²⁶ Strikingly, Western tourists were active participants in smuggling Romanian currency, which turned into a profitable business. The same 1965 Securitate note emphasized that “Some foreign citizens purchased and took out of the country Romanian currency with the purpose of selling it abroad at a better price or exchanging it for other currencies. The currency exchange took place not only through some exchange offices from abroad but also between private citizens. These individuals intend to visit our country and need Romanian lei.”²⁷ Austrians and West Germans who had emigrated from Romania were the main figures in such exchanges. This was the case with Ernst Fabritius from Austria, who coordinated illegal currency exchanges with his brother Richard Fabritius, a Romanian citizen living in Sibiu (formerly Hermannstadt). In one case, Ernst Fabritius carried 200,000 lei (equivalent to $12,000 USD) across the Romanian and Hungarian borders. The case was discovered when a jealous neighbor informed on him. When finally caught by the Romanian authorities, Fabritius told them he “only exchanged 80,000 lei and brought the rest of the money back to invest it in jewelry, as the currency exchange business was not that profitable.”²⁸

This was hardly an isolated case. Between 1963 and 1965, another Austrian tourist, Iosif H., sold various Western commodities, such as razors, markers, and tablecloths, to obtain revenue in Romanian currency. He then used the Romanian money to buy goods from a Viennese store that accepted lei or sold it to prospective tourists to Romania.²⁹ His ultimate goal was to exchange Romanian money for dollars. The Viennese shop that accepted payments in lei officially sold Romanian folk artifacts, but in the background it actually operated an efficient network of currency exchange. Clearly, the socialist state was not the only beneficiary of Romania’s opening to foreign tourists. In addition, some citizens of capitalist countries started to speculate in Romanian currency in the West. As a city in between the socialist and capitalist blocs, Vienna became a significant location in this network. At the end of the 1960s, a tourist delegate of a foreign firm in Romania noted that “passing through Vienna, I saw that there are large quantities of Romanian money that sell for 20–22 lei per one US dollar.”³⁰ This suggests a well-established network that dealt with the smuggling of Romanian lei as well as the Romanian socialist state’s inability to bring this phenomenon to a halt.

Tourist representatives (delegates) of foreign firms that sent tourists to Romania showed particular interest in this illegal currency market, as they too sought to collect large amounts of Romanian money to exchange it for more attractive currencies. Besides directing all commercial relations between their firm and the Romanian state, they also worked directly with tourists and Romanian guides. One such tourist representative who worked for a Danish travel agency, Karen H., would ask the tourists in her group to sell her their remaining lei instead of going to the bank at the end of the sojourn. Afterward, she would sell the lei to the next group of tourists. She even went so far as to discourage them from using official channels to buy the necessary Romanian currency.³¹ Two delegates of a Swedish travel firm are known to have done the same. Although the secret police suspected the Swedish travel agents, it failed to gather enough proof against them and ultimately abandoned the case.³²

Tourists also seized the opportunity to supplement their revenue. For instance, a West German tourist, Hans B., bragged about the fact that he did not exchange Deutsche Marks in Romania as he was able to buy lei at a more reasonable price in West Germany, where “one could find as many lei as s/he wants for 8 lei a Deutsche Mark.”³³ Moreover, he exchanged money with other tourists in his group. As he visited Romania every year, he taught Western tourists how to deal with the authorities and work around the system to make some extra money. To some extent, it was the inflexibility of the Romanian socialist state that made this possible. By imposing an artificially calculated exchange rate, it made tourists search for alternative ways to obtain Romanian currency, thereby lowering the state’s profits from tourism. More market-oriented Western tourists, who applied capitalist practices to the socialist economy, discovered ways to circumvent the system.

Ordinary Romanians also partook in illegal currency exchange. Nic C., a tour guide with the ONT–Carpathians, recalls how he used to buy Deutsche Marks from tourists who needed lei and wanted a better exchange rate than that available in the official exchange shops in the 1980s: “I went to the tourist and asked him, ‘How much do you want to change?’ And the tourist told me, ‘200 Deutsche Marks.’ Then I told the tourist, ‘Go to your delegate (the firm’s representative which sold the trip in her/his home country) and give him the money, and then you will get the lei (Romanian currency) from him.’ This is how we were doing this.”³⁴

Tourist workers also used foreign currency, either to buy goods from tourists from other socialist countries, or to buy goods from hotel shops that they would then sell to the tourists in exchange for their currency; the tourists would then sell the Romanian goods elsewhere. An underground network developed between Romanian tourist workers and tourists from socialist countries. Once they sold their merchandise, tourists from socialist countries acquired a large quantity of Romanian currency that was useless, as they could not carry it out of the country. Their only option was to look for possibilities to exchange this money for a more valuable currency, such as Deutsche Marks. Romanian tourist workers helped them to perform this transaction. Nic. C. used to make such transactions in order to supplement his meager income: “It was illegal. Yes, it was, but we were doing it. The Polish people used to come here [to Romania], and they craved Deutsche Marks. You would have charged them 10 lei for the Deutsche Mark that you bought with 8 lei, and you could make much money out of that.”³⁵

In this way, the currency exchange system brought together tourists from capitalist and socialist countries, Romanian tourist workers, and Romanian citizens. Despite the Romanian socialist regime and the Securitate’s intentions to limit such private, illicit commercial activities, ordinary people living on both sides of the Iron Curtain commonly exchanged goods and often obtained substantial profits as a result of these exchanges. Moreover, as more Romanians acquired a taste for consumption, they investigated how to acquire coveted, albeit forbidden, Western goods. A peculiar situation occurred against this backdrop: when the police found someone engaged in such illegal activity, they used the evidence to either turn the arrested person into an informer or to become part of the informal network by demanding bribes or a certain share of the profits. On the one hand, the Securitate needed a large network of informers to justify its existence; on the other hand, Securitate agents also became frustrated by the mounting restrictions the party imposed in the 1980s. In many instances, Securitate agents not only tolerated illegal activities but took a share of the proceeds. This is the message that one interviewee, Nic. C., clearly conveys:

Let me tell you one story. We had a guy who worked in the Romanian Embassy in Bonn, and after he retired, he came to ONT–Carpathians to work as a supervisor of tourist guides; he was our supervisor. And every week, he was making his “rounds” and stuffed his bag with cigarettes, perfume, and so forth, from what we were getting … and I have to tell you that he had a big bag. So big that one of my colleagues joked and told him that we’d buy him a tiny bag when he asked what we were going to get him for his birthday.³⁶

The ambiguous relationship between lower-ranking Securitate agents and tourist workers or delegates of foreign firms speaks to the complexities of everyday life under socialism and calls into question the idea of totalitarian control that some scholars put forth to explain the Romanian communist regime.³⁷ In fact, conspicuous consumption and the various means by which individuals attained a certain lifestyle came to function as a form of banal resistance to the regime. The definition of the regime also changed in the last decade of the communist era in Romania. In the late 1970s through the 1980s, it was Ceaușescu’s family and a close circle of apparatchiks who came to personify both the regime and the state. This led to a sharp decline in party members’ and rank-and-file police operatives’ allegiance to the leadership. Instead, these rank-and-file agents started to use their position to cope with shortages and to make ends meet. This became such a generalized practice that the socialist regime had little means to stop it. A system based on personal networks became a generalized phenomenon, which affected not just petty day-to-day interactions in socialist Romania prior to the 1980s but, at times, the functioning of the whole socialist economy and political system. For most citizens who engaged in such activities, it was a way of procuring food, clothes, and other necessities, but it also crept into the inner circle of the political elite (nomenklatura) and secret police. Some apparatchiks would use their position to obtain various economic advantages or trade their services for monetary rewards. During the 1980s, the so-called blat system (defined as informal contacts and personal networks used to obtain goods and services) became so widespread that some scholars have regarded it as ingrained in the economic structure of state socialism.³⁸ But as the following discussion shows, such practices were not confined to socialist states.

In Franco’s Spain, the situation was both similar and different. The advent of large-scale foreign tourism offered ordinary people and elites alike the opportunity to overcome isolation and the constraints of economic autarchy.³⁹ Unlike in Romania, the Spanish state made no attempts to curtail Western-style consumption. On the contrary, it openly admitted that tourism brought important changes in people’s lifestyles, which helped to modernize Spain.⁴⁰ Yet both the regime and the Catholic Church attempted to control some of these changes in order to not compromise the Francoist state’s authority or the people’s morality. For example, they became less permissive when foreign tourists circulated certain books, music, and newspapers forbidden in Spain or when Spanish youth or women adopted habits that the regime deemed inappropriate.⁴¹ Also, the Francoist state sought to impose a strict implementation of tourist regulations to prevent unapproved increases in state-regulated hotel and restaurant prices, and to eliminate illegal activities such as tax evasion or clandestine tourist activities. Nevertheless, as in Romania, despite official intentions, incidents such as these occurred frequently. Most importantly, before 1962, when Manuel Fraga became the Spanish minister of information and tourism and more thorough verifications began to take place, this information came to light not because of the inspections of Spanish authorities but due to tourists’ complaints.⁴²

Much smuggling activity centered around Gibraltar, a British colony that served as an entrance to tourists visiting southern Spain. Whereas Málaga, the main town in the region, was barely connected by flight to London, at the Gibraltar airport, three flights a day arrived from London.⁴³ Because of the large number of tourists arriving through Gibraltar, the border between Spain and Gibraltar had to stay fairly open, which allowed tourists and smugglers from both Spain or Gibraltar to freely cross the border. A 1954 article published in Arriba⁴⁴ openly accused Gibraltar and the British government of supporting smuggling activities in Spain: “Here you can see thriving under the suzerainty of the British queen a colorful population composed of thousands of functionaries and metropolitan employees, with their families, and billions of Jews, Indians, and exiled or renegade Spanish, Maltese, and Cypriotes, all contrabandists, populating the small ‘city’ against the backdrop of this painful and unjust almost fictional reality.”⁴⁵

As in socialist Romania, the Spanish state sought to control the circulation of the peseta and any foreign currency tourists brought to Spain. In the 1950s, tourists could enter the country with 10,000 pesetas but exit with only 2,000 pesetas. Foreign money could be exchanged in special places marked with the inscription “tourism/turismo” and located only at banks, hotels, and tourist agencies that were “authorized to run such activities.”⁴⁶ As in the Romanian case, tourists were obliged to keep all receipts and to fill out a form detailing all transactions, which they needed to show at the border when leaving the country.⁴⁷ As the number of tourists increased and the authorities were confronted with more and more cases of foreign currency smuggling, they decided to relax the requirements; in the 1960s, they stopped inspecting currency exchange receipts.⁴⁸ Nonetheless, until the end of the Franco regime in 1975, foreign currencies could only be exchanged in special places authorized for such purposes.

The surge in the number of foreign tourists offered ordinary Spanish citizens the possibility of renting an extra room to tourists; later, many opened small bed-and-breakfast accommodations or small hotels. Nevertheless, even to rent out a room, private individuals had to be registered with the Provincial Delegations of the Ministry of Information and Tourism and meet several criteria to host tourists.⁴⁹ Authorization from local authorities and the Ministry of Information and Tourism was required to open a hotel. In addition, according to a Ministry of Information and Tourism order from July 19, 1952, hotels had to list in all rooms and the entrance hall the authorized prices, according to their category, in Spanish, French, and English. Furthermore, all tourist establishments had to inform their clients about the existence of a complaint book. The tips for the tourist workers were also limited to 15 percent of the total price of luxury accommodations and 12 percent for the rest.⁵⁰ However, tourist workers did not follow this requirement very closely. One inhabitant of Málaga, who witnessed what he called “the questionable behavior of some tourist workers,” denounced this to the local newspaper in an anonymous letter:

Dear Sir, [w]hat is happening with the hotel industry in our time is lamentable, and I hope that this will make the tourists go to other places. These days, tourist employees have become accustomed to receiving tips, and if a tourist doesn’t offer them, he won’t get any attention or help from the hotel workers. I have seen tourists who carried their own luggage to the car, and nobody bothered to help [them]. It is common to see tourists about to leave the hotel who are surrounded by hotel employees asking for tips. Are the hotel workers so badly paid that they humiliate themselves in front of foreigners? In the north, announcements that call for tourists not to pay tips are placed in the dining room, at the entrance, etc., while here, we humiliate ourselves like that. Foreign gentlemen told me this only happens in Andalusia and Spain.⁵¹

It was not just the tourist workers who adjusted to the newly available opportunities; so too did hotel owners. There were many instances when hotels did not offer the promised amenities or charged more than allowed for their category. In 1959, a North American tourist complained about the room costs at the Hotel La Perla in Granada. An investigation showed that the hotel charged tourists higher prices than those for its declared category. Hence, for a room that cost 712.30 pesetas, the owner charged 1,023.80 pesetas.⁵² For charging 311.50 extra pesetas, the hotel’s owner was fined 3,000 pesetas, the equivalent of $30 USD.⁵³ In another example, a major hotel in Barcelona, the Hotel Majestic, lacked signs with the approved prices in every room and a complaint book.⁵⁴

There were also many cases of private individuals who opened guesthouses without having obtained an authorization. This was the case of Jaime Gélida Miralles from Tàrrega, Catalonia, who opened a small hotel called Pensión Monteserrat and received guests for a number of years. When he received a visit from representatives of the Ministry of Information and Tourism, the owner defended himself by saying that everybody knew about his business, including the mayor, the police (Guardia Civil), and many other local officials.⁵⁵ Moreover, the pension had already been closed when the Ministry of Information and Tourism’s inspectors decided to pay him a visit. Despite its lack of authorization, the pension of Mr. Gélida Miralles seemed to function properly as he regularly presented his guests’ arrival and departure dates to the Guardia Civil.⁵⁶ Despite this, the inspectors of the Ministry of Information and Tourism decided to fine him 1,000 pesetas, approximately $16, a relatively insignificant amount.

Cases in which local authorities knew about illicit tourist facilities extended far beyond this. What is less clear is whether or not local authorities accepted remuneration for not reporting such enterprises. In 1962, the local authorities in Cullera, a small village in northeastern Spain, decided to allow a private firm to build tourist facilities on the beach in their attempt to take advantage of the tourist boom. Within a couple of years, Cullera became a prosperous tourist resort, but without the knowledge of the Madrid authorities, who had never authorized the project.⁵⁷ Only in the 1970s did the Ministry of Information and Tourism in Madrid ask the resort to do what was necessary to meet the legal requirements. The lack of authorizations was, in fact, endemic, and very few tourist establishments were entirely legal, despite the continuous outcry by some Spanish authorities about this situation.⁵⁸

The Spanish state did not always turn a blind eye to the lack of authorizations or other wrongdoings. After 1962, when a special department in charge of inspections was established within the Ministry of Information and Tourism, inspections did become more frequent. However, tourist business owners reacted to these inspections by invoking the importance of tourism to the Spanish economy and particularly for their respective communities. A hotel owner who was fined for not following the official prices wrote to Rodriguez Acosta, the deputy minister of information and tourism, and asked for leniency, which was granted.⁵⁹ Similarly, tourist officials often acted like they did not want to enforce the law, as this might have run counter to the state’s tourist initiative or, in some instances, run counter to their personal interests. Personal connections were essential and often used to obtain an authorization license or other advantages. For instance, Rodriguez Acosta received a request from a close friend to approve a hotel credit. The aspiring entrepreneur wanted to open a tourist and eating establishment in Tarragona, Catalonia, but he attempted to avoid the twisted bureaucratic process by using his personal acquaintance with Acosta.⁶⁰ Thus, as in Romania, informal business relations became a key component in the relationship between entrepreneurs and state authorities of tourism, both of whom benefited.

However, not everyone in the Spanish government understood how tourism worked, and some regarded tourism simply as a source of state revenues. In 1964, the Madrid District and the Ministry of the Interior decided to impose an extra tax on luxury hotels, although Manuel Fraga, the minister of information and tourism, opposed this measure. Because of this new regulation, hotels in Madrid paid five times more in taxes than hotels of a similar category in Barcelona.⁶¹ Despite a personal letter to Camillo Alonso Vega, the minister of the interior, Fraga’s request to cancel this resolution was ignored, and the decision went forward.⁶² The divergent views on tourism between the Ministry of Information and Tourism and the Ministry of the Interior reflected somewhat different attitudes toward tourism in Spain. More conservative groups close to the military and Church still disagreed with the policy that allowed for the influx of foreign tourists. They viewed tourism as a necessary but temporary solution to help Spain overcome its economic crisis.

Many of this group were convinced that the presence of foreign tourists encouraged criminality among the lower classes. In fact, this was not the case. In 1962, the police discovered a network of high functionaries of the Tétouan Civil Government in Morocco, a former Spanish colony,⁶³ who, together with Spanish functionaries in Málaga, forged passports that they sold to Spaniards.⁶⁴ The article, published in SUR, the main newspaper in Málaga, noted that the members of the fake passport network belonged to three very esteemed Spanish families in Tétouan. Hence, it was not the opening of Spain to international tourism that was responsible for this crime, but rather the state’s policy that did not allow all Spanish citizens to own a passport.⁶⁵ Besides showing how the smuggling of goods and documents worked at the Spanish–Moroccan border, this occurrence illustrates that the illegalities were part of an intricate network that included members of both the Spanish and Moroccan elite.

This was not an isolated case. In many instances, Spanish tourist entrepreneurs’ and local officials’ relations with central authorities in Madrid went beyond the established legal rules. Although there were attempts to bring errant tourist entrepreneurs to order, these undertakings met with limited success. Furthermore, both tourist business owners and local bureaucrats learned to defend their position by manipulating the state’s interest in developing tourism. Indeed, the Spanish state’s attitude was ambivalent. Although some voices opposed tourism, the influence of Manuel Fraga and the Ministry of Information and Tourism and the impressive revenues that international tourism delivered ultimately prevailed. Therefore, the state allowed societal liberalization to continue, and despite a lack of political freedom, ordinary people were free to pursue their consumer rights.

In both socialist Romania and Francoist Spain, international tourism and the arrival of foreign tourists offered ordinary citizens the possibility of dissociating themselves somewhat from the ruling political regimes. By interacting or working with foreign tourists, ordinary Romanians and Spaniards engaged in day-to-day economic activities that implicitly challenged state authority. Although open resistance toward the dictatorships was minimal in both countries, the economic maneuverings could be regarded as a form of opposition toward the regimes. Moreover, the extra revenues and contact with foreigners helped tourist entrepreneurs and workers in the two countries to secure a more comfortable life and to become less dependent on the state’s benevolence. Ultimately this allowed them to create a space of their own, which Alf Ludtke termed an Eigen-Sinn, “a self-willing distancing from authority.”⁶⁶ At the same time, these practices weakened the two states’ authority, which in the Romanian case became even more evident after the 1989 Revolution and the adoption of neoliberalism as an economic system that advocated for a minimal state in a system dominated by personal favors and networks. To a certain extent, Spain was spared these tumults because of the regime change in 1975 followed by its early admission into the European Economic Community in 1986, which allowed for access to capital but also for an enhanced system of checks and balances.⁶⁷

Gift-Giving and Theft as “Silent Escapes”

The black market and the blat system that developed around it were just one consequence of the tension between the two states’ wish to retain some control over their previously closed societies and the sudden opportunities and temptations that the arrival of foreign tourists presented to ordinary people at the level of everyday life. Personal exchanges, such as gift-giving, were another type of common occurrence that my interviewees remember fondly, especially in the Romanian case. Gifts are part of the ritualistic relationship between tourist workers and foreign tourists in many geographical settings and historical contexts.⁶⁸ In the particular context of the economic shortages of socialist Romania, gifts played an important role. In socialist Romania in the 1960s–1980s, gift-giving had both social and economic meanings and was part of an intricate communication process between foreign tourists and tourist workers.

Cristina, a tour guide with ONT–Littoral, remembers how tourists would ask her every year what kind of presents she would like to receive. “Perfume, what kind of perfume, champagne, what kind of champagne, cigarettes, what kind of cigarettes?”⁶⁹ Alexandra, who worked as a waitress in the restaurant of a three-star hotel in Neptun, Romania, remembered having the same type of conversations with foreign tourists who would come back to Romania on a recurring basis. “Tourists would always ask: What should I bring you next year when I am coming back? And you would have said: ‘Bring me some chocolate, or some tights, or some perfume.’ It varied according to each one’s preferences and needs.”⁷⁰ Tourists were well aware of the difficulty of getting foreign goods in Romania, so they used these gifts, in most cases inexpensive things, to get better treatment or preferential services. Cristina assumed that “They all knew, either because they used to come every year or because their friends who visited Romania told them. They were well informed. They were so accustomed to offering gifts that they continued bringing things after the revolution, even when we didn’t need them so much.”⁷¹

Besides gifts to individual tourist workers, a common practice at the end of each sojourn was for tourists to collect money from the group and buy goods from the tourist shop for all the hotel personnel. Margareta T., a former waitress at Doina Restaurant in Neptun, nostalgically remembered these events: “At the end of the sojourn, there was a festive dinner, and each employee would get a small package from the tourists. They were all very nice people, mainly old people, already pensioners.”⁷² As her recollections are from the late 1980s, when the shortage of consumer goods became endemic and imported goods from capitalist countries were a rare find, the gifts from Western tourists eased the economic pressures of finding and acquiring certain commodities and also offered some sense of pampering and even luxury to these tourist workers.

As Caroline Humphrey argues in her study about personal property in socialist Mongolia, material possession matters, and it holds both identity and ritualistic significance in one’s life.⁷³ Regardless of how insignificant the gifts that tourist workers received were, they were significant in the context of the consumer goods shortage in socialist Romania of the late 1970s and the 1980s. For tourist workers, these goods opened a window onto a world that was not physically accessible to them, as they could not easily travel to Western countries. As many of these tourist workers were originally from rural areas, it was a common practice to send some of the received gifts to their extended family, given that the lack of consumer goods was greater in those areas.⁷⁴ In the 1980s, fewer goods were accessible in regular shops, and, increasingly, special connections were needed in order to obtain more fashionable and better-quality clothes, electronics, etc. The situation worsened in 1983, when Nicolae Ceaușescu decided to pay the country’s entire external debt and limit the import of “unnecessary goods.” The state used patriotic rhetoric to explain to ordinary citizens why cuts were necessary. However, the result was that people started to resent the regime and those in power. Moreover, the social impact of the lower number of Western tourists was also important as it became easier for the Securitate to watch the relationships between Romanians and foreigners (legislation in this respect also became stricter). Despite the decline in the number of foreign tourists, the image of “the West” increased in the imagination of ordinary Romanians. The erratic contact with Western tourists in the 1980s and the growing differences in material culture meant that those foreigners who vacationed on the Black Sea Coast became both prosperous and exotic in the popular imagination.⁷⁵

Spain did not face a similar shortage of goods in regular shops, but the commodities that foreign tourists brought became tempting as many were still inaccessible to regular Spaniards. Most locals only yearned for what they regarded as the high-quality stuff that tourists from West Germany or the United States owned, and some engaged in illegal activities as there was a market for these things. Hence, theft became common in large cities and coastal regions where tourists roamed. Thefts from tourists’ hotel rooms were also a matter of concern. In 1956, a Swedish tourist recounted the theft of some personal belongings, and he inquired in a local newspaper about the hotel’s responsibilities regarding the stolen objects.⁷⁶ He was told that the hotel was responsible for stolen objects but not for lost ones, occurrences for which the hotel was cleared of any responsibility.⁷⁷ As most hotels denied responsibility in cases of stolen objects, this became quite endemic and tested the reaction of the Spanish Guardia Civil, which was not always prompt in solving these cases. In 1970, two American tourists went as far as to complain to Alfredo Sánchez Bella, the minister of information and tourism at that time, about the mugging of their car.⁷⁸ In their letter, they went on to narrate their experience with the Málaga police, which failed to document the theft of the suitcases stolen from their car and the $1,500 worth of damage inflicted on the car:

Finally, at 9:00 a.m., an inspector would see us, and a police report was made out. Naturally, there was much difficulty here because of the language barrier, and we could not get any policemen to come back to the car to remove the shoes the thief left on his own or to take fingerprints which were left all over two of the windows. If any extra effort had been put forth by the Málaga policemen they could have probably have made some progress on the theft before we had to leave. But all they did was rush us out and we had to have the American Consul Office call to get them to give us a copy of the police report.⁷⁹

This gruesome burglary, the reaction of the Guardia Civil, and the reply from the American Consulate illustrate both the challenges and the opportunities that international tourism brought about in Spanish coastal areas starting in the 1950s. Most likely, the police did not have the means—given the high number of tourists—or even the desire to crack down on these practices as sometimes they resented the tourists for their better things and at times condescending attitude.

Both Romanians and Spaniards regarded the wealthier foreign tourists who visited their countries as a form of escape from the daily pressures of their material lives, but also felt slightly jealous from what they perceived as the tourists’ enhanced material culture. This tension led to further frustrations in relation to the authorities in the two states, which manifested through a silent dissent in the Romanian case and “small” illegalities to which the police turned a blind eye in the Spanish case.

Foreign Tourists, Sexuality, and Prostitution

Both socialist Romania and Francoist Spain put women’s bodies on display in order to promote tourism.⁸⁰ But when it came to sexual mores, both states were suspicious of behaviors that went beyond established social norms. Both states rejected young people’s desire for a more liberal view on sexuality. Additionally, they strictly forbade prostitution, which they defined not as a remunerative activity but as any extramarital sexual behavior involving women. How did foreign tourists, with their comparatively easygoing attitude and, at times, their demand for prostitutes, get around official policies in Romania and Spain?

In Romania, despite the initial promises of socialist ideology, women’s sexuality was under the regime’s watchful eye.⁸¹ “She came with her boyfriend to the seaside but was rooming with me as they were not married.”⁸² This is how one of my interviewees, Ileana M., described the situation during her vacation on the Black Sea Coast in 1981. Because of the scarcity of accommodations on the Romanian Black Sea Coast and the preference for foreign tourists, single Romanian tourists had to share rooms with random people of the same sex but could not share a room with their partners.⁸³ When telling me about this case, Ileana, a college graduate and translator of French who used to do translation work for foreign tourists, dropped this information and suggestively winked at me, then returned to her story without offering any explanation. This was, however, more than other sources conveyed. Hotels would not book two people of the opposite sex in the same room unless they were married, a rule that shows the conservative approach of the socialist regime regarding women’s sexuality and its attempts to enforce “morality.” As this regulation only concerned Romanian tourists, it also worked as a way to prevent them from embracing foreign tourists’ more liberal approach to sexuality.

In the late 1940s, one of the first measures of the communist regime was to ban prostitution; the “new woman” was expected to be employed in the newly developed factories, where human labor was in high demand. But some individuals, including women, were still out of work from time to time or refused to comply with the regime’s moralizing discourse. The rise in the number of foreign tourists and the desire to obtain hard currencies, along with a lack of professional opportunities, led some Romanian women to become sex workers. The regime attempted to bring this phenomenon to a halt; institutions like the militia and Securitate played an important part in this endeavor. Moreover, some individuals, who unquestionably adhered to the regime’s moralizing rhetoric but who also hoped for some personal gain, helped the state in its efforts to control “prostitution.” Hence, an informative note by a tourist employee from Casa Bucur, a restaurant in Pitești, Argeș County,⁸⁴ spoke about an Austrian tourist, Erich Prohl, who was visited in his room by a local woman, Maria G., “an old client of the militia.”⁸⁵ Although the militia warned the woman not to return to the hotel, she did so the next day at the invitation of the Austrian tourist, who gave her the key to his room.⁸⁶ The Austrian tourist was not aware, but it was illegal for a Romanian citizen to spend the night in a hotel room with a foreign tourist.⁸⁷

According to a 1974 “Note Regarding the Access and Lodging in Accommodation Units,” hotel personnel had to “ensure order and preserve morality” in their hotels.⁸⁸ In order to do so, they had to ensure that hotel guests received visits only in the lobby between 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. Only in exceptional cases and at a guest’s request could visitors enter hotel rooms, but under no circumstances were they allowed to spend the night there, especially if they were visiting a foreign citizen.⁸⁹ Despite this strict regulation, Romanians spent time with foreign tourists in their hotel rooms or in the Romanian citizens’ houses. In September 1978, another informant alerted the Securitate about a young woman having “illicit relations” with foreigners. This time it was a Jordanian citizen. The note informed the Securitate that “the man, named Ali, came in the parking lot and after about 15 minutes, he was greeted by Elvira M, whom the Jordanian seemed to know. They took from the car’s trunk various objects, food, and drinks and headed to the woman’s house where they spent the night.”⁹⁰ Securitate agents and militia regarded these deeds as illegal and going against the moral principles of the quite conservative Romanian socialist regime.⁹¹ In order to control these types of interactions, Securitate agents in Pitești, a town in central Romania, put together a list of fifteen women they assumed were sex workers.⁹² But in most cases, these women were state employees trying to get by and cope with consumer goods shortages. The secret police’s report confirms this assumption: “Our agents have been informed that C. Elena and S. Ioana, saleswomen at PECO [a state-owned store that sold gas and petroleum], had intercourse with foreigners, from whom they received a radio cassette player.”⁹³ Although the Securitate regarded such informal connections between foreign tourists and women with suspicion, many women who interacted with foreigners might not have been sex workers. That some received gifts (but probably not money) suggests that foreign goods served as a form of currency. Also, it shows that access to foreign tourists was not reserved to the educated strata of society, who in many instances had other means of procuring foreign goods. Low-income women also had access to these tourists and used their encounters to cope with material shortages.

Similarly, in Spain, the Franco regime attempted to prevent the spread of more liberal views on sexuality, especially among young people and women.⁹⁴ Two institutions played an important role in this endeavor: the Catholic Church and state censorship. In 1959, following the adoption of a stabilization Plan, Gabriel Arias Salgado, the minister of information and tourism, advised Spaniards “to not subsume the spiritual and religious aspects of life to the material and pragmatic components.” For him, Spanish national identity was closely connected to adherence to Catholic values.⁹⁵ In addition, the Cinema Bureau within the Ministry of Information and Tourism imposed strict censorship on movies shown in theaters and had a policy that denied people younger than twenty-one access to a number of movies.⁹⁶ In fact, Rafael F., a former hotel director in Marbella, Spain, who started his career in tourism as a receptionist in the Hotel Santa Clara in Málaga, recalled his shock upon seeing the French actress Brigitte Bardot in person when she visited Málaga and Torremolinos in 1956.⁹⁷ Until he came of age, he was denied access to her movies, which censors deemed inappropriate for young viewers.⁹⁸ Carmelo Pellejero Martinez, a tourism scholar in Costa del Sol and a professor at the University of Málaga, noted that the most important and long-lasting changes foreign tourists introduced into Spanish society were new life habits and a more liberal view of sexuality.⁹⁹

But in the eyes of Spanish authorities in the 1960s, a more liberal view on sexuality and women’s rights looked like encouraging “immoral and anti-national” practices.¹⁰⁰ This was the line of thought that an employee of the General Security Directorate (Dirección General de Seguridad) in the Balearic Islands most likely followed when he evicted a woman from a local restaurant and accused her of being a prostitute. An anonymous letter addressed to Manuel Fraga complained about these acts:

Sir, the atrocities and brutalities that police commit in our town are unimaginable and similar to those committed by Nazis and Communists. A young policeman attacked an honorable woman, a mother of five, who was sitting in a café and eating an appetizer, and yelled at her while pulling her out in the street: “Come prostitute. I know what you’re up to!” A feeling of hate against police spread out in the town, as many other cases like this have happened. A foreigner witnessing one of these scenes asked me if women in Spain are not allowed to work.¹⁰¹

Dozens more letters addressed to the Ministry of Information and Tourism described similar cases.¹⁰² However, the ministry’s officials took no action against these practices and even felt that the special agent of the General Security Directorate was acting per his duty: “We received anonymous letters against this gentleman [the special agent of the General Security Directorate], a respectable individual, who has performed his professional duties efficiently, and who has limited himself to following the official directives against prostitution, which has economically plundered the Baleares’ cafes and pubs.”¹⁰³ The Francoist state made no distinction between the liberalization of women’s habits and prostitution. Many of its agents deemed the sheer presence of an unaccompanied woman in a café inappropriate. And it was not just state agents who considered the presence of a woman in a café inappropriate, but public opinion as well. A 1963 editorial in Hostelería u Turismo, a magazine for tourist workers, called attention to an article in a local newspaper that accused the women working as waitresses in a café of practicing prostitution.¹⁰⁴ This case reflected the conservatism of Spanish society regarding women and its resistance to change, despite the presence of more liberal foreign tourists. Hence, the foreign tourist’s question regarding women’s right to work in Spain remained a realistic issue. But more importantly, authorities did not recognize this as a matter affecting Spanish society.

Romanian and Spanish officials shared the same opinion on women’s sexuality and their encounters with foreign tourists. Women could be accused of prostitution, as officials in both countries did not distinguish between consensual relationships established over time that might or might not involve a form of remuneration and casual remunerated encounters when defining prostitution. Moreover, the specific conditions in each of the two countries influenced the motivations and meanings of such encounters. In Romania, the lack of consumer goods led some women to engage in sexual relationships with foreign tourists to help them cope with shortages. In Spain, a patriarchal society that made it virtually impossible for women to find a job was the main reason for such encounters. Both states failed to acknowledge these realities, preferring to place the blame on the women, portraying them as citizens who had succumbed to the negative influence of foreigners.

To Control the Ordinary

The improvements in consumption policies in Romania and Spain produced significant changes in everyday life, especially concerning foreign tourists. Encounters with foreign tourists offered ordinary people in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain opportunities to engage in economic activities bordering on the illegal. Although illicit, these activities helped Romanian and Spanish citizens to overcome specific issues that plagued their daily lives, such as the lack of consumer goods, thereby circumventing excessive bureaucratic control and, in Romania, the prohibition on the possession of foreign currencies. The relative economic prosperity that resulted from these activities, modest through it may have been, provided ordinary people in the two countries with a degree of personal space, which offered an alternative to the very politicized official realm. From this perspective, these activities can be regarded as informal resistance to the political regimes in the two countries.

Foreign tourism also had an impact on attitudes toward women and sexuality. Both socialist Romania and Francoist Spain held a conservative attitude toward women and sexuality. However, foreign tourists and their way of life encouraged a more liberal view of sexuality in tourist areas in both countries. Yet for unmarried women, it was compromising and potentially dangerous to be involved in relationships with foreigners or even to share a hotel room with a male partner. The authorities in both countries were suspicious of prostitution, and many saw no difference between casual sexual encounters and paid sex. In fact, judging from the paucity of reports on this in the archives, paid sex appears to have been relatively rare in Romania. More commonly, it seems that Romanian women used relations with foreign tourists to overcome consumer goods and food shortages. In Spain, because official society was reluctant to allow women to work, the cases that the state deemed to be prostitution were, as in Romania, quite ambiguous.

The Romanian and Spanish governments’ decision to encourage foreign tourism deeply affected many ordinary people’s perspectives on consumption. Both official consumption and underground consumption turned individuals in the two countries into consumers of goods, ideas, and more. To a certain degree, this was more than officials in Romania or Spain had planned. Yet both societies became more cosmopolitan and connected to the outside world through the various legal and illegal opportunities that arose from foreign tourism. Paradoxically, the consumption practices fueled by the black market and the blat system helped the two dictatorial regimes, especially the Romanian one, where shortages were more prevalent, to survive as it offered a sense of normalcy.

In both countries, the state attempted to control ordinary people’s day-to-day life, but this proved impossible. Citizens’ interactions with foreign tourists were among the reasons these efforts proved fruitless. The fact that Romania was part of the socialist Bloc, while Spain aspired to be part of the capitalist West, brings us back to the discussion of everyday life “under socialism” or “in capitalist” regimes. These two countries show a striking similarity in how the state attempted to shape its citizens’ lives and how citizens circumvented the state’s efforts. This similarity suggests a need to revisit the arguments, both commonly espoused in the literature, that everyday life in socialist regimes and everyday life in capitalist societies were at different poles and that it was mainly socialist regimes that imposed a certain degree of coercion on their citizens. Although daily life in socialist Romania was more restrictive, especially in the 1980s, everyday life in Francoist Spain also involved limitations. Against this backdrop, foreign tourists came to work as liaisons between the better and more varied consumer culture of the developed capitalist countries of the Northwestern Atlantic world and Romania and Spain. In both countries, it was ordinary people who capitalized on the presence of foreign tourists, and thus overcame the political and economic limitations imposed by the two dictatorial regimes.