Roberto Garvía - Organizing the Blind: The case of ONCE in Spain (Interdisciplinary Disability Studies)

First published 2017
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2017 Roberto Garva

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ISBN: 978-1-4724-7424-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-55268-2 (ebk)

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This book has a long history. It began as a doctorial dissertation, which I published many years ago ( En el pas de los ciegos , 1997). Peter Hall, Vincent Wright, Vctor Prez-Diaz, Robert Fishman, Philippe C. Schmitter, and particularly my thesis advisor, Juan J. Linz, were very supportive at the early stages of the research, pushing me to polish and strengthen my arguments. Later conversations with Mauro F. Gulln, Jos Luis lvarez and Xavier Coller prompted me to thoroughly revise and update my research. This book is the outcome of their encouragement.

I am also very much indebted to Jos Mara Arroyo, Ricardo Gayol, Pedro Zurita, Inocencio Rial and Javier Gutirrez de Tovar for explaining to me the singularity of ONCE and the historical dilemmas that it has gone through since its establishment. Evelio Montes and Ricardo Jimnez, from ONCEs library and archives, have also been extremely helpful.

Lydia Cruz and Lianne Sherlock also deserve to be mentioned here, for their invaluable help with the editing and production of the book. I am also much indebted to Mark Sherry, the series editor, for his support from the very beginning of this project.

I would like to thank my wife, Genevieve, for her patience and support. The book is dedicated to my father, for his invaluable inspiration to me throughout my life.

In 1984, and with 44 medals, Spain was tenth in the Paralympics or, properly speaking, the International Games for the Disabled, as they were officially called, given the reluctance of the International Olympic Committee to share its label. In the 2012 Paralympics, Spain obtained the same position. That Spain fared so well in 2012 can be easily explained. For the last few decades, and due to a growing public concern regarding the disabled population, successive governments have been implementing a broad array of measures to improve their quality of life. But the success of the 1984 Paralympics has a different explanation. Francos dictatorship had collapsed only nine years earlier, and the Spanish welfare state was still in its infancy. What explains the success of the Spanish disabled athletes in 1984 is demography. From the late 1950s to 1963 there was a polio epidemic in Spain. (It was the last one, but an unusually long epidemic, given the reluctance of Francos government to extend the use of the oral Sabine vaccine, for the simple reason that it had been developed with the help of Russian laboratories see Martnez Prez et al ., 2012). By the mid-1980s, because the most popular rehabilitation treatment for polio victims was swimming, Spain had amassed a large number of disabled swimmers. And it was mostly because of these swimmers that Spain fared so well.