Your "Catholic" plumber friends left Spain in 1938 and never returned apparently, having stayed in Argentina through WWII and then moved to NYC.
If they are so Catholic, why wouldn't they return to Franco's quite Catholic Spain?
Why did their family leave when the Spanish Civil War was so close to a Catholic victory?
If they left Spain in 1938 and never returned, then they never lived under Franco, so what makes them experts?
Was theirs a leftist family that saw the handwriting on the wall and got out while the getting was good? Given that they fled Spain 75 years ago, it would be surprising if they are still alive. If they are alive and got out of Spain while the getting was good, it is little surprise that they are scrawling their opposition to Franco on random outhouse walls with a grease pencil.
The war started in July 1936. My in-laws lived there for decades, leaving in the 1960s for economic, not political reasons. They understood what Franco saved them from; their families in Spain through the 1960s were spared the mess occurring elsewhere in Europe and the US.
By 1938, the writing was on the wall for the communists - they had lost the north completely, and were slowly losing ground in the east. Nobody believed in 1938 that Franco wouldn’t win; to the end the communists’ only hope was that the western allies would intervene...
Franco had no problem alining himself with Hitler. Explain that.