Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain.

In Vacationing in Dictatorships: International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain (published by Cornell University Press, 2024) Adelina Stefan tells the story of how post-war Romania and Spain used international tourism for pragmatic economic and political ends, revealing how this opened up unexpected spaces of agency and everyday change under authoritarian rule. Peripheral Histories? editor Priska Komaromi spoke with Adelina about researching and writing a transnational history of tourism in two peripheral postwar European dictatorships.

PH: What inspired you to write a book about tourism under dictatorships, and why did you pick Spain and Romania as case studies?

I started this project in 2010 when I began my doctoral studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Initially, the project was mainly about Romania but my research in the various Romanian and international archives showed the tourist connections between Romania and Spain. This is how I became interested in the politics of tourism in both regimes, the impact that tourism had on both societies and the transformations that the arrival of foreign tourists with their fancy clothes and nice perfumes brought about at the level of everyday life. I wanted to challenge the general misconception that tourism was at odds with communist regimes in Eastern Europe and to show the entanglements and similarities between Eastern and Southern Europe despite the Cold War divide when it came to a sector like tourism. 

PH: Vacationing in Dictatorships highlights the peripherality of both Romania and Spain as central to their approach to tourism and development more broadly. As you argue, although at opposite ends of the political spectrum, both saw the ‘West’ as a yardstick for economic development and used tourism as a means to ‘modernize’ their economies and societies. Could you elaborate on how their peripherality shaped the development of tourism in both countries, what were the main similarities and differences between them?

Indeed, elites in both socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain sought to undertake a process of modernization, which among other things meant catching up with the developed capitalist West. By making Western tourists spend their money in Spain and Romania, tourism was supposed to level the playing field with the developed capitalist countries in Northwestern Europe and bring in coveted hard currencies, which both economies needed to buy technologies from abroad and to modernize their industries. In Spain, the divisas (convertible currencies) and the role of tourism in helping the balance of payments became a common trope in economic discourse, while Romanian economists also argued that tourists could be beneficial to the economy. They saw tourism as part of foreign trade exchanges. For instance, a study from the 1970s concluded that tourism’s economic profitability was similar to that of heavy industry but with fewer costs. Thus, both countries had a very pragmatic approach when it came to tourism and saw their peripherality as an advantage rather than as a hindrance. When promoting themselves on the foreign market, both countries emphasized their low prices (which were also an outcome of low wages), while exoticizing themselves in the eyes of Western tourists as destinations with sun, sea and tranquility away from hectic urban life. To a certain degree Spain embraced this strategy more effectively as their tourist slogan became “Spain is Different.”

Postcard of the hotel Intercontinental in Bucharest in the 1960s, Adelina Stefan's personal collection

Your comparative approach is very interesting and novel in the study of tourism and everyday life under dictatorships. Why did you choose this method, and what were the challenges you faced in taking this approach?

I chose to compare socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain because I discovered that despite their different political regimes and economic systems their views and uses of tourism were quite similar. And this triggered my curiosity. How could two dictatorships that held different ideologies become entangled in the global economy through tourism and what impact did this have on their political regimes as well as on the relationship between the two states and ordinary Romanians or Spaniards? I answered these questions by comparing the politics and impact of tourism in the two countries and tried to use similar sources for both cases whenever available. However, while in Spain I was able to find the collection of the Ministry of Information and Tourism, in Romania the archives of the Ministry of Tourism seem to have vanished in the aftermath of 1989 revolution. Thus, I had to replace them with party archives and the archives of the Institute for Research and Development in Tourism, which was supposed to put together studies for the Ministry of Tourism or for the National Office for Tourism Carpathians, which were the main institutions in charge of tourism in Romania during the communist period. In a nutshell, the biggest challenge was to identify similar sources, and similar stories that could create a coherent narrative. Another challenge was to decide how much detail to bring in so as not to lose sight of the overall structures.

PH: The book does a great job of interweaving histories from above and below and you use a really impressive range of sources to do this. Could you tell us a bit more about your sources, how did you decide on the types of sources to use? Especially regarding the oral history interviews: how did you find your interviewees?  

Oral history interviews were one of my key sources for this book. Truth be told, initially it was easier to find interviewees in Romania because I had a professional and, at times, personal network to rely on, but once I started my research in Spain and I got in touch with scholars working on Francoism, they helped me find people to interview in Spain as well. I am particularly grateful to Carmelo Pellejero of the University of Malaga who was very helpful in identifying potential interviewees. In both countries I was interested in interviewing former tourist workers but also tourists themselves who witnessed the grow of tourism. I treated these interviewees, especially tourist workers, as experts because their memories are important for learning more about how the system worked from the inside. I also wanted to see how tourism fueled social change because most of these people moved from countryside to urban areas and were offered professional and personal opportunities that otherwise would have been nearly impossible. One of my interviewees in Romania acknowledged this and said that her employment in tourism by the seaside saved her from a potential job in a factory somewhere in Moldavia.

PH: In the second half of the book you explore how ‘ordinary people’ skilfully eluded state control when it came to tourism. Could you elaborate on the kinds of interactions that ‘ordinary people’ in Spain and Romania had with foreign tourists and how the state tried to control these interactions?

There were all sorts of interactions, from economic to sexual ones. In Romania, the economic interactions are clearly the most documented in oral history interviews and in the former Securitate archives, now available at the Council for the Securitate Archives in Bucharest. In Spain, contacts with foreign tourists are mostly recalled in oral history interviews because the state’s control over these contacts was more elusive than in the Romanian case. Sometimes, these connections grew into what both states deemed illegal activities. Foreign currency exchange was one of them. In Romania, possessing hard currency was considered a criminal activity, while in Spain hard currency exchange was only liberalized in the 1960s. But despite surveillance and control, ordinary people skillfully took advantage of the presence of foreign tourists and began various entrepreneurial activities that allowed them to gain a degree of personal autonomy or Eigensinn in Alf Lüdtke’s terms.

PH: You argue that both Spain and Romania both had quite conservative societies, especially with regards to sexuality and gender. Could you outline these attitudes, and how they were impacted by the arrival of foreign tourists? 

Both societies enforced quite conservative value regarding women and sexuality. In order for a woman to become a tourist guide in Spain, she needed a certificate of good behavior from her local church, which was obviously issued by a priest based on his own subjective assessment. One can imagine that this prerequisite placed women in Spain in a very vulnerable position because their professional life was conditioned by a complex set of social relations and biases. This was in contrast with the official image of female foreign (Northern European) tourists, which can be seen in films such as Amor a la española (1967) or El turismo es un gran invento (1968). These movies fueled the myth of the Suecas, who were often stereotyped as Scandinavian and who signified everything that Spanish women could not be. In their eyes, the Suecas were sexually free, laid back and without a man to control their life.

Interestingly enough, Scandinavian women were famous in Romania as well, especially when visiting the Black Sea Coast. Here too they were regarded as easy-going and sexually approachable by quite conservative Romanian men. One of my interviewees, a tourist worker in Neptun on the Romanian Black Sea coast openly told me that he had a girlfriend from Norway for a while and that it was the Scandinavian tourist women who hit on men in Romania, not the other way around. It is difficult to quantify the impact of these new habits about sexuality that foreign tourists undoubtedly brought about, but it is certain that in certain regions, especially by the seaside, there was a loosening of social mores and that gradually certain behaviors became normalized through these encounters.

PH: In your final chapter you compare two case studies of beach tourism, the Costa del Sol in Spain and the Black Sea Coast in Romania. Why did you choose these two regions to compare and what can they tell us more generally about tourism in the two different regimes? Why did tourism in Spain flourish, while Romanian beach tourism withered away in the 1980s?

I chose these regions because I think they are a good example of how a former periphery can become a center, if only in the summer months.  Practically, before mass tourism both regions were peripheries in their own countries, but quite importantly they were also located on different edges of Europe. Both the Romanian Black Sea coast and Costa del Sol were exceptionally poor regions before the arrival of tourists. Tourism changed these areas and turned them into cosmopolitan places where modern hotels were built while tourists from all over Europe flocked. Beach tourism was the trump card of both countries as both responded to Northwestern Europeans’ need for sun and sea. While Costa del Sol became a landmark on Europe’s tourist map, after being quite successful in the 1960s and the 1970s, the Romanian Black Sea coast became marred by the worsening of economic and political situation in Romania in the 1980s. This led to various shortages as well as foolish decision making. For instance, although meat was hard to find in usual stores in Romania, it was always present on tourists’ plates, sometimes in higher quantities than needed. At the same time foreign beer, which German tourists constantly asked for, stopped being available. Tourists also complained about worsening services at resorts. By the 1980s, it became common for Romanian tourist workers to rely on foreign tourists to meet their basic needs by buying goods from the tourist shop, the only type of store that was still well supplied.

Postcard of the Pez Espada in Torremolinos, early 1960s. Personal collection of Adelina Stefan.

PH: Finally, how different is the story of tourism and transnational encounter through tourism in dictatorships from the story of European post-war mass tourism in democracies?

The main difference lies in the degree of control that Romanians or Spaniards experienced. In Romania, contacts with foreign tourists attracted a higher degree of surveillance and control from the Securitate (the secret police), while in Spain, the Catholic Church made sure that Spaniards followed the officially prescribed social and sexual norms. Citizens in both countries were supposed to be careful when interacting with foreign visitors, which instilled a certain degree of fear and distrust in both societies. However, this was more present in Romania than in Spain.

Moreover, in Spain, tourism became an official ideology as Spaniards were told that their lives would become better because of tourism. But regardless of the benefits that it brought for ordinary Spaniards, tourism became a political tool that was meant to prove the success of Francoism as a political project. These strategies are specific to dictatorial regimes, which rely on control and coercion in relationship with their own citizens. These aspects affected the foreign tourists less, who were treated well by both regimes because they were regarded as a “necessary evil.”