Historia del straperlo

"Estraperlo" was an iconic term of the great Kampfzeit, or time of conflict, of the fifteen years in Spain between 1934 and 1949. It emerged in 1935 in an attempt to blackmail about an alleged bribery, although it was never proven by exact evidence. It was a trivial matter that the animosity between personalities and political interests, very well calculated by the left and badly calculated by the leaders of the center and right, turned into a crisis of parliamentary government, a key crisis that in a few months led at the beginning of the collapse of the constitutional Republic. Later, the memory of the word in the popular imagination was applied more and more to the expansion of the "black market" in the Civil War and especially in the postwar period, since the underground economy was so important under the "autarkic" system of strong government controls and the rationing that conditioned Spanish life in the 1940s. The author in this fascinating work goes back to the background and previous adventures of Daniel Strauss and Jules Perel (or Perels), the two foreign adventurers who promoted a fraudulent roulette device originally baptized as "straperlo" in honor of its owners, before of the more phonetic Hispanicization of this artificial name.