Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, No.

2, 2000

Franco as cyborg: ‘The body re-formed by politics: part flesh, part

machine’ 1

FRANCISCO LARUBIA-PRADO

‘The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the
prison of the body.’ (Michel Foucault)

After frequent reports in the media about the impending demise of General Franco,
for several weeks after his death the American satirical television show Saturday
Night Live kept interjecting the following statement during its news section: ‘And
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead’. Humour aside, Saturday Night
Live’s interjection forces us to reflect upon democratic Spain’s inheritance from
Francoism. In addition, the joke reminds us, twenty-five years after the event, of
General Franco’s prolonged agony and its most explicit representation: the pictures
published by La Revista del Mundo in its 29 October 1984 issue.2 In those striking
pictures (see Figure 1), Franco is represented as a cyborg, a partially organic and
partially mechanistic entity.3 The political and even existential trajectory of the
General could be synthesized as that of an ‘Africanist’ military man with a
predominantly nineteenth-century education and mentality who burst into the
twentieth century by force of arms, and was forced to engage with a capitalist
modernity which, by raising Spaniards’ living standards, rescued his regime in the
1950s and 1960s but eventually condemned it to obsolescence, finally, on his
deathbed, becoming part of our postmodern times with their insistence on the
artificiality of all borders. For, in this deathbed photograph of Franco-as-cyborg,
the frontier between human being and machine disappears.
In this essay, I take the notion of cyborg as a metaphor for ontological
hybridity, where one essential component will always be related to technology. I
also understand the image of Franco-as-cyborg as a powerful symbol of the
political trajectory of Franco and his regime, a trajectory that has profoundly
marked Spain’s recent history. Thus, the figure of the cyborg will become in my
essay what Michel Foucault has dubbed a dispositif or analytical tool for re-
articulating a cultural approach to traditional historiography. My methodological
approach is indebted to Hayden White’s belief that History as a discipline is rooted
in the literary imagination (1978: 99). What will become apparent in the course of
my essay is that the figure of the cyborg as dispositif can give a powerful new
intelligibility to the historical text, approximating the by now almost forgotten
figure of Franco to contemporary sensitivity. With respect to the three instances (or
cyborgologic moments) on which my analysis will focus, the critical vocabulary of
the cyborg will show that the ‘politics of Francoism’ – that is, the political
discourse and praxis of an entire era in Spain’s history – displayed at key moments
a fundamental constitutive schism. This schism duplicates the symbolic and
ontological hybridity of the cyborg.
1463-6204 print/1469-9818 online/00/020135-18 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
136 Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Figure 1. Front cover of La Revista del Mundo, 29 October 1984.

Reproduced by kind permission of Grupo Zeta.
Franco as cyborg 137

I shall deal first with the image of General Franco intubated in his bed at La
Paz Hospital in Madrid as a trope representing the ambiguous trajectory of a
regime that, while preaching ad nauseam an organic, nationalist ideology, was
nevertheless desperate for technological advances that would assure its own
survival. Second, I shall address the two most crucial moments in Franco’s
political life, starting with the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9 as seen from the
Francoist side. It was during the Civil War that the mythification of Franco as a
hero linked to the ancestral heroes of romance began to take shape. This link with a
mythical tradition deeply rooted in the European – and certainly in the Spanish –
popular imagination through the appropriation of archaic legends and heroes had a
very specific objective: the subliminal legitimization of the leader of an insurgent
military movement radically opposed to democracy. I shall then discuss the most
crucial moment of the Franco regime once established: namely, the fight for
survival during the 1950s. This stage was marked by a deep cleavage between
political discourse and political praxis. As in the Civil War, the 1950s were
marked by the rhetoric of ‘National-Catholicism’ and its organic nationalism,
which emphasized national pride and independence and the unity and indivisibility
of the fatherland above all other values. Simultaneously, however, Francoism
implemented policies encouraging a bureaucratic élite to promote industrial and
technological development, contrary to the regime’s official discourse. Finally I
shall turn, in dialogue with María Zambrano, to some considerations that further
link General Franco’s death with the figure of the cyborg from a philosophical
point of view. In doing so, I hope to enhance an understanding of the relationship
between culture, politics and technology.

I A few drops of cyborgology

‘I wish to express the transformations of bodies in new forms.’ (Ovid)
Nowadays, the figure of the cyborg is routinely associated with popular cultural
phenomena such as Terminator, Robocop, the Borg episodes in Star Trek: The
Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, or, most recently, the film The Matrix
(Wachowsky Brothers, 1999). In fact, the term ‘cyborg’ (cybernetic organism) was
created in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan Kline to refer to alterations that
might be induced in the human body to make it adaptable to extra-terrestrial
environments. This approach to space travel was considered a rational alternative
to the more difficult and expensive adaptation of space to the conditions necessary
for human survival. This initial understanding of the notion of cyborg is reflected
in the famous rat – one of the first cyborgs – weighing 220 grams (see Figure 2),
equipped with an osmotic pump under its skin that injected chemicals in a
controlled manner so as to alter its biochemistry.
Cyborgology has become a more complex field than it was when Clynes and
Kline published their now famous essay ‘Cyborgs and Space’ in the journal
Astronautics (reprinted in Gray 1995: 29-33). For cyborgology has gone beyond a
purely scientific discourse and, through a questioning of the foundations and
138 Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Figure 2. Rat equipped with osmotic pump under its skin.

corollaries of such a discourse, has developed its own mythical, instrumental and
imaginative meanings. Indeed, there is no consensus today about the meaning of
the term ‘cyborg’ (Gray 1995: 4). However, roughly speaking one can consider the
term to cover a whole spectrum of relations between the organic (vegetable,
animal, human) and the technological (machines of every kind, technical
knowledge). Indeed, Gray, Mentor and Figueroa-Sarriera state (Gray 1995: 2) that
the term ‘cyborg’ denotes the association of the organic and the technological, of
that which has evolved and that which has been fabricated, as well as the actual
integration of flesh that dies and circuits that do not die, of living cells and
artificial cells. Such connections erase boundaries. The cyborg body, a hybrid
entity midway between the automated and the autonomous, is its own agent but at
the same time is subject to control by external agents (González in Gray 1995:
267-8).
For Donna Haraway the cyborg is both a social and an imaginative, fictive,
political reality. It thus defies the clear-cut definitions consecrated by metaphysics
as the foundations of Western culture (1991: 149). The transgressive figure of the
cyborg short-circuits our usual intellectual habits and compels us to confront a new
condition of being. This condition takes as its point of departure a life formula
based on the constitutive fragmentation of being, a fragmentation already in place
since we are bodies connected to machines or to other bodies through machines
(Gray 1995: 5, 7). Life on planet Earth can no longer be understood without some
degree of technological mediation. As Haraway remarks, after the irruption of the
cyborg and its corollaries, certainty as to what can be considered ‘nature’ is fatally
undermined. This is so because the notion of the cyborg destroys forever any
notion of unity as ‘fusion’, and any narrative of imagined original innocence and
purity (Haraway 1991: 153). It is not surprising then that, in her ‘cyborg
manifesto’, Haraway connects the cyborg myth with that most mechanistic of
tropes, irony, and attaches it to a highly organic concept, faith: ‘At the centre of
my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg’ (1991: 149; my
emphasis). Thus, the figure of the cyborg, in its constitutive hybridity, not only
interpellates the metaphysics of origins, but also questions the meaning of such
notions as ‘totality’, ‘transcendence’, and, of course, ‘human’, as well as the
traditions engendered through the historical development of such notions (González
Franco as cyborg 139

in Gray 1995: 275).

The concept of the cyborg does not necessarily deny these notions, but
redefines them as historically impure. Hybridity – our dependence on technologies
and our being conditioned by those technologies – has existed since humans first
used tools such as stone hammers or vehicles with wheels (Gray 1995: 6). But only
with today’s unprecedented technological consumerism has the latter become, as
Ortega y Gasset would say, a ‘belief’ in which we dwell, a kind of second human
nature. In this new ‘post-human’ cyborg era, we witness the transition from
‘natural selection’ to technologically controlled selection of people and nations. As
Hayles observes, at the end of the twentieth century we human beings are to a great
extent ‘made’ (Gray 1995: 321). According to Macauley and Gordo-López (Gray
1995: 434), this new human condition implies a symbiotic relation – and I would
add a ‘differential’ relation in a Heideggerian sense – between flesh and technology
as each reconfigures the other.
The ethical significance of the cyborg is strictly neutral. If for Lovelock’s Gaia
the cyborg has no direct ethical character or effects, for Haraway the cyborg is an
unquestionably liberating figure, a powerful sign of cultural heteroglossia, even if
its spurious pedigree is spattered with militarism (1991: 151, 181). Franco as a
cyborgologic figure is faithful to that pedigree: the ethical diktat used by his regime
to cast itself as the ‘moral majority’ never offered a gesture of reconciliation to
those holding different views. However, the cyborg’s significance can also be
attuned to contemporary cultural anxieties. In this sense, I believe that the figure of
the cyborg contains the discursive potential to become – against any moral
majority – an affirmative expression of tolerance, reflecting what might be called a
‘vital majority’.

II The post-human body: Franco as cyborg

‘This is my body, which is given for you.’ (Luke 22: 19)
The central notion of cyborg ontology is, as already suggested, that of hybridity,
resulting from the incorporation of technology as a fundamental component of
organic beings. The symbiosis between the constitutive elements of the cyborg
cannot be comprehended from a purely organic or a purely mechanistic worldview.
The cyborg positions itself in the space of an non-synthetic difference: a
relationship of supplementarity between opposites equally necessary to its
existence. The new ontological condition of Franco-as-cyborg (as represented in
Figure 1) becomes apparent when one reads the startling final medical report
issued by the ‘equipo médico habitual’ of twenty-four doctors who treated the
General during the course of his illness. The report was intended to cast light on
the causes of his demise:
Enfermedad del parkinson. Cardiopatía isquémica con infarto de
miocardio anteroseptal y de cara diafragmática. Úlceras digestivas agudas
recidivantes, con hemorragias masivas reiteradas. Peritonitis bacteriana.
Fracaso renal agudo. Tromboflebitis ileo-femoral izquierda.
140 Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Bronconeumonía bilateral aspirativa. Choque endotóxico. Paro cardíaco.

(Pozuelo Escudero 1980: 244-5)
Quite apart from the ‘maquinaria especial’ (Fusi 1985: 249) brought to the
Francisco Franco Hospital during Franco’s stay there, following the onset of acute
thrombo-phlebitis on 6 July 1974 which for the first time removed him as Head of
the Spanish State, the medical and surgical instruments deployed to keep him as
stable as possible during the final 476 days of his life were impressive. According
to his last personal physician, Dr Pozuelo Escudero, the dictator used several
prosthetic devices in his mouth (1980: 147); he was also receiving monitored
cardiac telemetry, so that, when he presided over the council of ministers or
received a dignitary, his medical team was constantly monitoring him in order to
intervene if need be (1980: 219-20, 224, 225). After his hospitalization, the use of
different kinds of machines to perform EEGs (electro-encephalograms), plus the
use of urinary bladder catheters, vascular access catheters, intubation for
ventilatory support, various chest tubes and surgical drains, was permanent.
Among other procedures, the doctors performed three life-and-death operations,
daily dialysis, peritoneocentesis, blood transfusions, and a partial gastrectomy
called ‘Billroth 1’ that left him practically without a stomach (1980: 229-36).
Finally, he underwent hypothermic preservation (1980: 241) followed after death
by embalming (1980: 248). All of this belongs to the field of cyborgologic
technology, for these are restorative technologies whose purpose is to restore lost
biological functions, as well as normalizing technologies designed to return the
organism to a lost ‘normality’ (Gray 1995: 3). And, of course, the ‘equipo médico
habitual’, through its technical know-how, also formed part of Franco’s new
cyborgologic ontology (Hogle in Gray 1995: 207). To all of this sophisticated
medical paraphernalia, one must of course add the organic, incorruptible arm of St
Teresa and a miraculous robe of the Virgen del Pilar: clearly, it was felt that all
options had to be covered.
The bout of thrombo-phlebitis was the beginning of Francisco Franco’s
clinical Calvary. Although he resumed his duties as Head of the Spanish State on 2
September 1974, he never really recovered from it. From then on, his health
worsened steadily. The strain of returning to power in September clearly took its
toll. Here, the international reaction to the execution of the five members of ETA
and FRAP (Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriótico) shot on 27 September
1975 was a key factor. The dictator addressed his supporters for the last time on 1
October 1975 at the traditional Plaza de Oriente rally, at which he habitually
responded to his enemies (domestic as well as foreign) when feeling under attack.
At this rally, in words that have become emblematic of Francoist rhetoric, he
attributed the international repudiation of his regime to ‘una conspiración
masónico-izquierdista de la clase política, en contubernio con la subversión
terrorista-comunista en lo social’ (Preston 1994: 959). That very day, Franco
caught the ‘gripe de Oriente’ that would lead to the cyborgologic situation depicted
in Figure 1.
In such a situation, Franco had to face his own fragmentation through the
Franco as cyborg 141

insertion into his body of technological devices that would substantially affect his
organic unity for as long as he lived. That is, his life began to depend on the
addition of mechanical parts that inevitably and progressively configured an
ontologically alternative totality to what is traditionally regarded as ‘organic
being’.4 Indeed, Franco was heard by doctors to mutter: ‘¡Qué duro es esto!’,
‘¡Déjenme ya!’, ‘¡Dios mío, cuánto cuesta morir!’ (Fusi 1985: 269). Franco’s
difficulty in dying contrasts oddly with the notorious casualness and coldness with
which he ordered the death of others.
The suffering Franco on his deathbed represents a state of ‘impotent
consciousness […] his disrupted body (boundaries) extends the cyborg’s collapse
of organism and machine [….] His lack of lower body at this point only underlines
the obvious metaphor of his search of self’ (Fuchs in Gray 1995: 299; my
emphasis).5 In Figure 1 – as in the rest of the report in La Revista – Franco shows
only his torso. This partial depiction of an intubated Franco becomes emblematic
of the split identity that in so many ways he always incarnated: machine and
organism; monarchical military man yet also servant of the Republic; devout
Catholic yet also dictator responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths during
peace time; supporter of the Axis powers yet also leader courting the allies; a
public figure who did little that was not informed by political calculation yet who
frequently boasted of having absolutely no interest in political affairs; autarkic
fascist railing against liberalism but also the leader who ended up embracing
liberal capitalism. Franco’s self was always a riddle to observers. Sáinz
Rodríguez, a minister in Franco’s first government, said that Franco ‘tiene el aire
de una esfinge pero no tiene secreto’ (The Spanish Civil War 1987). For Aristotle
the secret of human personality is inseparable from the political realm; thus he
regarded the human being as a political being (1959: 7). In the case of a politician
like Franco, I take the lack of political consistency to be inseparable from the lack
of an underlying unified personality. Franco’s political identity did not exist
beyond the mask created by official scenography and the superficial features that
made possible the continuous highly personalized assertion of his power. Among
the features of the romance hero attributable to Franco there is one that fits
perfectly with the lack of ‘secrets’ in Franco’s personality. As Frye notes (1973:
304-5), in romance the writer does not attempt to create ‘ “real people” so much as
stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes [….] The romancer
deals […] with characters in vacuo’. In Forster’s critical language (1970: 67-8),
Franco would be closer to the ‘flat character’ of romance than to the ‘rounded
character’ of the novel who possesses a complex personality or ‘secret’.
The Franco regime was never adverse to ideological revisionism in matters
pertaining to its own ideological foundation when necessary – for instance, at the
end of the 1950s. The only non-negotiable matter for Franco was his own
continuity as Head of an authoritarian Spanish State. Thus, despite the fact that
‘no se recuerda que desde Felipe II mandara nadie en España tan amplia y
terminantemente como él mandó’ (ABC 1975: 1), Franco lacked, beyond what to
many seemed an excessive hunger for power, what Ortega y Gasset called a ‘yo
142 Francisco LaRubia-Prado

insobornable’; that is, the kind of conviction that becomes the true foundation for
the ethical dimension of human existence.
Franco’s post-organic body becomes a sign that reveals a state of affairs in
Spanish culture. Before the prosperity generated in Spain at the end of the 1950s
and during the 1960s, it would have been very difficult to see in a dying Francisco
Franco – even if the technology had been available – the image of a cyborg. In the
1960s and 1970s, though, this becomes feasible because the social dimension of
the cyborg image emerges not only from the symbiotic relationship between the
organic and the mechanistic, but also in moments of social change and the ensuing
cultural crisis. Spain during the 1970s was an established middle-class society but
without channels for political and cultural expression. Economic liberalization was
never accompanied by political liberalization, producing tremendous levels of
frustration. The recumbent image of the dictator, connected to assorted gadgets
without which his continued organic existence would not have been possible,
becomes, in the 1970s, a striking representation of what Jennifer González has
termed the ‘subjugated cyborg’. The visible human parts of the subjugated cyborg
are ‘passive and receptive’, says González, who adds that the image of such a
cyborg is defined – as is obvious in Figure 1 – by his ‘blind silence’ (Gray 1995:
273). The notion of the subjugated cyborg comes from a 1993 advertisement for
fax machines: ‘Eclipse Fax: if it were any faster, you’d have to send and receive
your faxes internally.’ As in the photographs illustrating the report in La Revista,
the only part of the human body that one could see in the fax ad was the torso (in
this case of a woman). González notes:
It is clear from the image that the woman is on her back [....] Her
shoulders are bare, implying that she is unclothed. Mechanical devices
comprised of tubes, metal plugs, cables, hoses and canisters appear to be
inserted into her ears, eye sockets and mouth. Two electrodes appear to be
attached to the woman’s forehead, with wires extending out to the sides,
almost like the antennae of an insect. A futuristic Medusa’s head of wires,
blinded with technology, strapped to the ground with cables and hoses,
penetrated at every orifice with the flow of information technologies.
(Gray 1995: 273)
González also sees the cyborg as the sign and witness of changed human
perceptions (Gray 1995: 270). Franco as a subjugated cyborg, like the fax
machine, generates information and visually emblematizes the radical
transformation of a country, Spain, whose complexity the dictator could never
fathom beyond the ideological parameters set by the Civil War and economic
autarky.6
Like the above-mentioned fax machine, Franco also became, in his subjugated
state, a very special commodity. In fact, one may ask to what extent ‘humanness’
existed in the last moments of his life – during his last two days he was
unconscious – or whether he ceased to be a cyborg and became a mere commodity
for political consumption. Linda Hogle raises this question in connection with the
Franco as cyborg 143

case of a person who suffers an accident and whose brain stops functioning (Gray
1995: 203-16). Doctors wish to keep the victim alive artificially to preserve the
organs for transplants. The question here is: at what point is the human component
of that body so degraded that it lacks the humanity to be a cyborg, becoming
simply a coveted piece of merchandise? Franco’s case raises similar questions from
the moment when, unconscious, he underwent hypothermic preservation two days
before his death.
The determination to keep the dictator alive through artificial means had a
powerful political motivation. In his waning days, he became a valuable political
commodity for the most conservative sector within the regime led by his son-in-
law, the notorious Marqués de Villaverde. For that sector it was imperative to keep
Franco conscious until 26 November 1975, so that he could reappoint Alejandro
Rodríguez de Valcárcel to his post as President of the Consejo del Reino, since his
appointment ended that day. Once reappointed, Rodríguez de Valcárcel would be
in a position to counteract any ‘dangerous’ move by the new Head of the Spanish
State, King Juan Carlos de Borbón, in the selection of a new Prime Minister.
Franco’s death on 20 November thwarted the hopes of Francoism’s die-hard
supporters.
By contrast with the manipulation of Franco’s body before his death, which
caused the moribund dictator intense pain and was ended only on his daughter’s
insistence, the manipulation of his image after his accession to power had his full
endorsement. The ontology of the cyborg, unlike that of organic beings, excludes
natural evolution and selection. A fundamental part of any cyborg’s being is made,
built, constructed (Hayles in Gray 1995: 321-2). Organic beings are born, they
grow, become old, and die. Cyborgs are not born from a seed or embryo, they do
not experience youth or growth – although they can become worn out or need
tuning. They can additionally be assembled and disassembled. This was the case of
Franco – and of other dictators – while in power. No one thinks of Franco as a
child nor as a young man, except as a young military officer. In his biography of
Franco, Juan Pablo Fusi swiftly dispatches Franco’s childhood thus: ‘Tras una
infancia anodina y cursar sus estudios primarios y elementales en colegios locales,
en 1907, con el ingreso en la Academia Militar de Toledo, comenzaba la que
habría de ser una de las más rápidas y brillantes carreras militares del Ejército
español del siglo XX’ (1985: 34).
Dictators such as Franco tend to burst abruptly into the life of a country
through war, revolution, a political convulsion, or an internal fight within a
political organization that has already identified or will identify itself with the state
– or a combination of these situations. After obtaining power, the dictator officially
projects an iconic and radically assertive image of himself. Ignacio de Zuloaga’s
portrait of Franco (Figure 3) epitomizes the sparkling inner clarity that any
atemporal iconic image of a dictator must possess if it is to tap into people’s
mythical imaginations. Despite its Felliniesque facial features, Zuloaga’s
representation of Franco bespeaks conviction and firmness, contrasting with a
background of unruly clouds that the shapely general, wearing his blue falangista
144 Francisco LaRubia-Prado

shirt and a pair of reassuring high boots, keeps in check by the very force of his
presence. Zuloaga’s representation of the Caudillo aspires to quell anxieties,
inviting the spectator to trust in the portrayed figure’s serene composure,
regardless of the explicit sectarianism illustrated by the fascist attire. Furthermore,
in this painting the image of Franco is offset by a landscape representing ‘la
España profunda’ – the kind of landscape that Zuloaga knew how to depict so
masterfully: a bare nature deprived of such living obfuscations as rivers, trees or
birds. Here nature, in its pristine bravura, emphasizes the intrepid Caudillo’s
firmness and distinction. A city can be made out in the distant background, for the
urban milieu cannot escape the protection of the providential figure portrayed.
Indeed, as a true son of the mother country’s ‘nature’, Franco provides a guarantee
of salvation for the inhabitants of the city – traditionally prone to disobedience –
whether they like it or not. The Caudillo’s figure clutches a phallic flagstaff with a
flashy gilded tip, from which the national flag hangs, draping over his right arm
and coming to rest on the ground. From his sacred vantage point, the flag, the
human figure and the soil become part of the same inseparable unity. We are, then,
contemplating the iconic image of a providential hero who places himself

Figure 3. Ignacio de Zuloaga’s portrait of Franco.

Reproduced by kind permission of the Museo Zuloaga.
Franco as cyborg 145

above constraints of space and time. Franco’s figure seeks to be eternally present
by subliminally displaying the features of mythic heroes of the past (it recalls
Hubert Lanziger’s painting The Flag Bearer where Adolf Hitler is represented in
Wagnerian attire). By denying temporal change, this ‘prefabricated’ representation
of Franco becomes the true – perhaps the only – guarantee of stability for the
community’s future, since it concentrates in itself the essences of the mythical
past, our present reality (since the figure is in power ‘now’), and our future
fortunes. Organic beings come from a past, they change in the present, and renew
themselves in the same temporal experience that projects them towards the future.
By denying temporality, Franco’s anti-organic iconic image constitutes in its
thematic and technical conception a profoundly cyborgologic representation.
In addition to portraying himself as an eternal, triumphant symbol of
permanence, Franco re-formed or re-invented himself at different moments of his
career, while always maintaining his own position as captain of the Spanish vessel.
I shall now go on to examine the circumstances that brought Francisco Franco to
power as another example of his cyborgologic ontology.

III The heroic deed: Franco and the ‘Crusade’

‘No olvidéis que los enemigos de España y de la civilización cristiana están
alerta.’ (Francisco Franco Bahamonde)
As is well known, Francisco Franco Bahamonde attained power in 1939 after
victory in a bloody Civil War fought against the second Spanish Republic, referred
to by the Francoist propaganda machine as the ‘cruzada de liberación’. The
Nationalist uprising was thus presented as a movement of national salvation pitted
against destructive forces alien to the ‘essence’ of Spanish, Western and Christian
culture. The narrative of Francoism follows the same traditional plot that, since
time immemorial, has inspired all manner of insurgent movements. It shares many
features with the ‘romance’ genre, linking the latter with the cyborgologic
experience. As in romance, the official – that is, Francoist – version of the Crusade
has its villain (s), its hero, its female figure, its father figure, and an apocalyptic
atmosphere of confrontation between the forces of good and evil. This atmosphere
is captured by the falangista poet Dionisio Ridruejo in his ‘Oda a la guerra’.
There, as Juan Cano Ballesta has noted, Ridruejo ‘llega a pintar con pinceladas
casi bíblicas, un mundo ensombrecido por la angustia, el “feroz presentimiento” y
el “sabor de escombros en el aire”. La sociedad española se debate […] entre
“gritos y sollozos”, envuelta en tinieblas, tempestades y amenazas de muerte’
(1994: 38). In the Francoist narrative, the destructive being sent by the forces of
evil, characteristic of romance, takes the form of the ‘red army’, its soldiers and,
above all, its weaponry. The ‘red hordes’ – an image of archetypal otherness –
fight in the name of a decadent system – liberal democracy – for popular
sovereignty, agrarian reform, secularization and other values that, for the
Nationalists, configured ‘la anti-España’, thus being responsible for the onset of a
dark age. The Republican army is represented in terms of the purest fascist
146 Francisco LaRubia-Prado

sensibility in José María Pemán’s Poema de la bestia y el ángel, written during the
Civil War:
La Bestia encarnó entonces, en un carro de muerte.
Sapo inmenso de hierro invulnerable. (1947: 1032)
Like a cyborg – a machine covered by organic matter – the Republican Beast
covers itself with an organic component:
Para engañar al cielo
los jinetes del monstruo,
taparon su armadura
con ramaje de olivo y de manzano. (1947: 1034)
In the Spanish – as opposed to German and Italian – fascist imagination, the
machine is associated with the destruction of beauty, spirituality and the sacred. It
is also associated with evil and impiety, with liberalism, the foreign and, above all,
with the Soviet Union (Cano Ballesta 1994: 45). By contrast Pemán describes the
Angel which confronts the Beast thus:
Es rubio como una espiga
a punto de madurar...
Sano es como una amapola
y puro como un San Juan. (1947: 1035)
Although hardly fitting Peman’s idealization, Franco, like the soldier in Pemán’s
poem, represents the forces of good in the official narrative of the Crusade. He
opposes the forces of evil in the Civil War, just as, in the name of the empire, he
fought the ‘Moors’ in Africa. Confronting the ‘red hordes’, their tanks and their
unspeakable crimes, Franco occupies the place of the human in this idealized
crusading narrative; he is also the Saint George who fights and defeats the dragon-
toad of steel.
In romance, the hero is always an exceptional male with a clear sense of his
own destiny, ready to accomplish a great deed that will save a people or a
community (Frye 1973: 184, 186-7, 304; Dudley 1997: 37-65). In Don Quijote,
this feature of romance is present whenever the protagonist proclaims that a
specific adventure has been reserved for him (Dudley 1997: 154-62). Chastity is
another feature of the romance hero, as the cases of Percival, Amadís or indeed
Don Quijote illustrate. Immersed in the problems of the fatherland, Franco, like a
romance hero, deprives himself of sexuality, as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
stresses in his Autobiografía del general Franco. And when in romance a
territorial leader loses divine favour, then we encounter the wasteland (Darrah
1981: 52); in the Francoist narrative this is obviously the Republic.
The clash between the hero and an enemy who, given its dehumanizing and
dehumanized nature, has no name beyond terms or notions such as ‘the Beast’ or
‘the red hordes’, leads to the engendering by the hero, through his phallic cannons,
of the Church of Christ in Spain. The Crusade becomes his ‘sexual’ act as,
Franco as cyborg 147

Figure 4. ‘Aparición de Franco ante el Sagrado Corazón’ (Costus 1981 )

Reproduced by kind permission of Galería Sen, Madrid.

through his valiant struggle against those who burnt convents and churches,
Franco makes possible the being of Christ on Earth (or at least on Spanish
territory, though Franco’s partisans also projected his mission as universal).
Thus, the general becomes the symbolic father of Christ. The paternal figure of
Christ in relation to mankind becomes a filial figure in relation to Franco.
Franco’s divine fatherhood makes him the very origin of the law. Franco, as a
Catholic, worships his son Christ. One cannot help but suspect that, in this Oedipal
inversion/identification with his father/son Christ, Franco was in fact worshipping
himself.
Franco’s protagonism as Christ’s father is reflected in Costus’s 1981 painting
‘Aparición de Franco ante el Sagrado Corazón’ (see Figure 4). In this painting,
Christ as Son is speechless with admiration as he slightly looks towards his left,
suggesting that – like Semele before her lover Zeus – it would be fatal for him to
openly admire Franco’s radiant face in all its splendour. Welcomed with humility
by the Son, Franco smiles as he rides his magnificent white horse enveloped in an
ascending cloud. In turn, Franco pierces the ethereal atmosphere with his phallic
arm erect. His fascist salute becomes an ostentatious exhibition of the rank that his
unquestionable paternity grants him in relation to the Son.7
Spain, in turn, was equated in the mythifications of Francoist narrative with
the female figure of romance. The nation was always conceived as a desired
woman by fascist poets and politicians. For José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Spain
148 Francisco LaRubia-Prado

was ‘la amada cautiva’ or ‘la dama España’. For Eugenio Montes, Spain was a
‘novia’; and Giménez Caballero produces the perfect tale for those truly in love
with the motherland: ‘España es una mujer, y una gran mujer. Y las mujeres, como
España – en su plenitud de gracia y de fecundidad –, sólo están reservadas a los
valientes que sepan conquistarlas y fecundarlas’ (cited by Cano Ballesta 1994: 30).
Spain, the lady of romance, found in Franco the conqueror and fertilizing hero for
whom providence had reserved her. The moment of the potent General’s conquest
and fertilization of Spain to which Giménez Caballero refers is the dawn of Spain:
the longed-for daybreak to which Spanish fascism sings its most exalted songs
(Cano Ballesta 1994: 38-45). The ultimate meaning of this dawn, once the
‘natural’ order of things has been re-established after the defeat of the Beast by the
Angel, is articulated mutatis mutandis – as Spanish citizens would later discover –
by Kyle Reese, the protagonist of James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator,
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killer cyborg, when he screams at Sarah
Connor, the lady of Cameron’s romance: ‘Do exactly what I say. Exactly. Don’t
move unless I say. Don’t make a sound unless I say. Do you understand?’ In short,
Franco was designated as the true chosen one, a typically cyborgologic function
(Haraway in Gray 1995: xv; Hogle in Gray 1995: 213).8 The dictator always
thought that his mission was divine – that is, that he had been sent by God –
whence the numismatic motto ‘Francisco Franco Caudillo de España por la
G[racia] de Dios’ that Franco minted around his own effigy in legal tender.
In the film Raza (Sáenz de Heredia, 1941), Franco, as scriptwriter, kills the
paternal figure Churruca as well as his own brother, so as to be the sole substitute
for the father. Franco is represented in the film in idealized form by its protagonist
José who, shot by a firing squad, dies and miraculously resuscitates as did Christ.
As Kinder suggests (1993: 152), this resurrection is an idealized enactment of the
stomach wound received and survived by Franco in 1916, as he led an attack on
Moroccan positions at Ain Yir hill.9 His resurrection in Raza, along with his
identification with Christ and the reversal of their respective roles, provides
another example of the ontological hybridity that places Franco’s figure beyond the
organic/mechanistic dichotomy. Whether by his own design (Raza) or as an effect
of his regime’s propaganda needs, Franco becomes simultaneously human and
divine. Hence the appellatives used by the regime’s coryphaei and the media:
‘campeón de la milicia, del cielo y de la tierra’, ‘general-sacerdote’, ‘jefe-
taumaturgo’, ‘césar y pontífice’, ‘enviado de Dios hecho general’, ‘espada del
Altísimo’, ‘broncínea voz con diamantinos armónicos’, ‘ministro de Dios’,
‘semidiós inasequible’, among others (Fusi 1985: 188). In this sense, Franco’s
figure, a hybrid and ready-made figure indeed, projects itself as that of a ‘cyborg a
lo divino’. If the ironic figure of the cyborg is, as we have already seen, at the very
centre of Haraway’s metaphysical blasphemy (1991: 149), the manifold
ontological hybridity of Francisco Franco transforms him, in a parodic gesture,
into a blasphemy of his own sanctity.10
Franco as cyborg 149

IV The trans-systemic system: Francoism as a cyborg political regime

‘We believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human
transformations.’ (F.T.Marinetti)
Just as cyborgs were initially conceived by Clynes and Kline to adapt to different
extra-terrestrial environments, so Franco possessed a talent for adapting himself to,
and surviving, virtually any political environment. His chameleon-like nature, as
Preston calls it, repeatedly kept him in power, as amply displayed in his
simultaneous flirting between 1943 and 1944 with the Axis powers and the Allies
(Preston 1993: 482-500). This cyborgologic adaptation to the external environment
was evidenced even more clearly in his regime’s radical change of economic – and
to a certain extent political – orientation as it shifted from a fascist-inspired
autarky to the pro-capitalist technocracy proclaimed by the Opus Dei members
who held key positions in Franco’s cabinet from 1957 on: an adaptation precisely
to technology.
The contradiction between National-Catholic ideology and economic
development opens up the issue of the role of technology in the attainment of
modernity. García de la Huerta reminds us that, for Heidegger, McLuhan and
Russell, technology is the main agent in the globalization of culture and history
(1992: 133). Technological transferences, which entail exchanges of signs and
cultural patterns at a global level, hinder the maintenance of diversity among
cultures involved in the process of modernization. Thus, modernization based on
the import of technologies dilutes cultural purities; individual cultures tend to
become progressively assimilated by a global culture in a process of historical and
cultural globalization (1992: 136). This double movement resulting from
technological dependence helps to explain how the incorporation of Spain into
international capitalism led to the disappearance of its cultural difference with
regard to an economic and geopolitical environment (Western Europe)
characterized by opposition to such a difference.11
The fundamental disappearance of Spain’s cultural alterity had unquestionable
political repercussions. The economic success that resulted from Spain’s
integration into a free market economy highlighted Franco’s anachronism as a
leader without political solutions for a complex society. In addition, it underscored
the inadequacy of the political class that propelled the reforms – the technocrats.
The latter – a group of technical experts particularly knowledgeable in the
administrative sciences – became the most politically powerful class in Franco’s
Spain; García de la Huerta notes that such technical experts tend to be the class
that legitimizes power in authoritarian states (1992: 141-2). The technocratic
élite’s take-over of the state apparatus from the Falange’s ideological élite
frequently reduced Franco, incapable of understanding decisions based on purely
technical factors, to a figurehead whose role was to ratify their decisions.
The reason why the ideal of modernity – based largely on promotion of the
importance of technology in a free market economy – was incorporated into the
regime was, of course, that the power generated by capitalism boosted an
150 Francisco LaRubia-Prado

established but weak Francoist state, even if it meant the radical suppression of the
regime’s previous history and its replacement by ‘una temporalidad abstracta,
homogénea, donda la partitura podía escribirse a voluntad’ (García de la Huerta
1992: 147). Francoism’s historical self-revisionism reveals the cyborgologic,
hybrid composition of a political regime that gives up its own organicity and
fragments itself in a historical discontinuity with respect to its own foundation, and
in the undoing of its own discourse as National-Catholic rhetoric embraces the
logic of the capitalist technological devil. It is not difficult to conceive the
technocratic Francoist State after 1957 as a cyborg regime since it adopts an
authoritarian institutional configuration where total assent was expected in
exchange for the economic miracles brought about by technology. In such a State,
just as doctors and technicians form part of the cyborg, so the technocrats form
part of the cyborg-state. In such a state citizens become what Gray (1995) has
called degraded cyborgs, ‘assimilated’ to and by authoritarianism through the
mind-control exercised by consumerism and the official propaganda machine.

V Conclusion
‘Qualis vita finis ita’ [As his life was, so was his death] (Latin aphorism)
In this essay, I have used the dispositif or grid of intelligibility of the cyborg to
give meaning and intelligibility to the defining moments of Francoism. My starting
point was the photographic representation of General Franco on his deathbed.
There is something very powerful about the notion of ‘the death of Francisco
Franco’. The Spanish philosopher and writer María Zambrano (1904-91) insists
that Franco’s death was:
una muerte que se fue produciendo, en pedazos, sin esa unidad que tiene
la muerte en cualquier ser viviente, aunque no sea un hombre [....] Y es
que esa muerte carecía de unidad, de identidad, se diría que no era una
muerte sin que por eso estuviese en las antípodas de la vida [....] Era una
muerte apócrifa. Era una pseudomuerte. O acaso algo peor. (1995: 43)
Zambrano stresses the lack of unity, the progressive fragmentation that occurs
in the body of General Franco: a death ‘in pieces’. Dis-integration. Being human
becomes disconnected from the notion of the organic, producing ontological
perplexity. As Zambrano notes, this lack of unity poses a question regarding the
identity of the creature on display: what is dying? Without organic unity, the
definition of death becomes problematic; the facticity of death becomes contingent,
it admits discursive rebuttal. Thus Zambrano concludes that, in effect, the death of
Franco is not death as such; it is a false, apocryphal death. Contrary to the running
joke of Saturday Night Live, Franco would not remain dead because the unity and
continuity of his organic being never died. Obsessed with unity – with ‘la unidad
de las tierras y los hombres de España’; with a Spain that was ‘una, grande, libre’
and an ‘unidad de destino en lo universal’ – Franco himself died, ironically, not
‘one’ but a hybrid entity: a cyborg. In this, his death was indeed a reflection of his life.
Franco as cyborg 151

Notes
1
The phrase that constitutes my subtitle comes from the description by Robert Hughes, in The
Shock of the New (1991 ), of one of the key obsessions of the Dada movement: the war cripple
found everywhere in Berlin after World War I.
2
So far as I am aware, the source of the photographs that appeared in La Revista is officially
unknown. In his book Los últimos 476 días de Franco (1980 ), Dr Pozuelo Escudero claims that he
was given a large sum of money to take photographs of Franco on his deathbed but refused to do
so. However, Paul Preston (1994: 778, 961 ) reports that Franco’s son-in-law, the Marqués de
Villaverde, ‘had already made full use of his own camera’ (1993: 778 ). Access to these
photographs is now very difficult since La Revista is available in neither the Hemeroteca
Municipal de Madrid nor in the Hemeroteca Nacional. My thanks to Fuencisla Muñoz for her
assistance here.
3
Both Payne (1993: 254 ) and Vilarós (1998: 19) refer to Franco’s mechanical state during his last
days.
4
An organic being is defined as one in which the whole is more than, and previous to, the sum of
its parts (Pepper 1970: 181-231, 280-314 ).
5
Fuchs’s words refer to Robocop who, like Franco, shows only his torso as he hangs from wires
in a laboratory.
6
According to the leading Opus Dei tecnocrat and notable Francoist, Laureano López Rodó, ‘a
Franco había que amueblarle de ideas el cerebro’ (quoted by Preston 1994: 863 ).
7
Franco additionally usurps José Antonio’s ideological paternity in order to reabsorb his thinking
and himself become the de facto father of the Falange. See the statements by Falange member
Narciso Perales in the TV documentary The Spanish Civil War.
8
Hogle observes that the material and metaphorical realities of the cyborg occupy a social space
as text that is present in the ‘reification of the social values of altruism and the belief in a common
good’ (1995: 213 ). Haraway notes that, in contemporary culture, the cyborg is often inserted into a
discourse of salvation (Gray 1995: xv).
9
This ‘resurrection ’ matches the popular cultural perception of the cyborg as an entity that does
not die easily. See, for instance, the film Terminator where the Terminator ‘resurrects’ from the
inferno when the petrol tank he was driving blows up. The conjunction of the human (human
voice) and the machine (tape recorder) also played a crucial role in Franco’s last moments, when
he recorded his own story (Pozuelo Escudero 1980 ). The forms of treatment recommended by Dr
Pozuelo also in many cases involved technology; for example, walking up and down airplane steps
borrowed from Iberia Airlines and installed in the gardens of El Pardo Palace (Franco’s official
residence).
10
The hero as a semi-divine figure has a pagan origin, christianized by Franco just as Chrétien de
Troyes christianizes Celtic romance.
11
It is not coincidence that the slogan used to promote tourism at the time was ‘España es
diferente’.

Works cited
ABC (21 November 1975 ) (special issue on Franco’s death).
Aristotle (1959 ) Aristotle’s Politics and Athenian Constitution (London: Dent).
Cameron, James (1984 ) The Terminator (film).
Cano Ballesta, Juan (1994 ) Las estrategias de la imaginación (Madrid: Siglo XXI).
Causa General (1946 ) (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado).
Darrah, John (1981 ) The Real Camelot: Paganism and the Arthurian Romances
(London: Thames & Hudson ).
Dery, Mark (1995 ) Velocidad de escape (Madrid: Siruela).
Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow (1983 ) Michel Foucault (Chicago: University of
152 Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Chicago Press).
Dudley, Edward (1997 ) The Endless Text: ‘Don Quijote’ and the Hermeneutics of
Romance (Albany: State University of New York Press).
Forster, E.M (1970 ) Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt ).
Frye, Northrop (1973 ) Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
—— (1976 ) The Secular Scripture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Fusi, Juan Pablo (1985 ) Franco (Madrid: Taurus).
García de la Huerta, Marcos (1992 ) ‘La técnica y la difusión del ideal de modernidad’, in
Estudios sobre sociedad y tecnología (Barcelona: Anthropos ), 131-59.
Gray, Chris Hables (1995 ) The Cyborg Handbook (New York: Routledge).
Green, Miranda J. (1992 ) Dictionary of Celtic Myths and Legends (London: Thames &
Hudson ).
Haraway Donna J. (1991 ) ‘A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-
feminism in the late twentieth century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New
York: Routledge), 149-81.
Hughes, Robert (1991 ) The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf ).
Kinder, Marsha (1993 ) Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain
(Berkeley: University of California Press).
La voz y la obra de Francisco Franco, caudillo (1983 ) (Madrid).
McDonough, Peter, Samuel H. Barnes and Antonio López Pina (1998 ) The Cultural
Dynamics of Democratization in Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
Memoria de la Transición (1996 ) (Madrid: El País).
Morandé, Pedro (1984 ) Cultura y modernización en América Latina (Santiago:
Universidad Católica de Chile).
Payne, Stanley (1993 ) Franco: el perfil de la historia (Madrid: Espasa Calpe).
Pemán, José María (1947 ) Obras completas, vol. I (Madrid: Escelicer).
Pepper, Stephen C. (1970 ) World Hypotheses (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Pozuelo Escudero, Vicente (1980 ) Los últimos 476 días de Franco, 5th ed. (Barcelona:
Planeta).
Preston, Paul (1993 ) Franco (London: HarperCollins); Spanish translation 1994
(Barcelona: Grijalbo/Mondadori ).
Sáenz de Heredia, José Luis (1941 ) Raza (film).
Tamames, Ramón (1977 ) La república. La era de Franco (Madrid: Alianza).
The Spanish Civil War (1987 ), 2 parts (Granada Video).
Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel (1993 ) Autobiografía del general Franco (Barcelona:
Planeta).
Vilarós, Teresa (1998 ) El mono del desencanto: una crítica cultural de la transición
española (1973-1993 ) (Madrid: Siglo XXI).
Wachovsky Brothers (1999 ) The Matrix (film).
Weller, Peter (1990 ) Robocop II (film).
White, Hayden (1978 ) Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press).
Zambrano, María (1995 ) ‘La muerte apócrifa’, in Mercedez Gómez Blesa (ed.), Las
palabras del regreso (Salamanca: Amarú).