When the Motherland is truly a mother

By: Carlos Alberto Montaner - 19/02/2023

There is a rhetorical way of referring to Spain: “the motherland.” But sometimes that fits reality and is said without hypocrisy. Especially when it involves some sacrifice, and a certain price has been paid. Spain’s socialist government, upsetting its minority partners in its coalition with “Podemos,” the communists, has offered citizenship to 222 Nicaraguan opponents. The comrades are climbing the walls.

That’s very good. The offer was made by José Manuel Albares, the Spanish chancellor. There are 222 European Union passports. If the satrapy formed by Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega and his wife and Vice President, Rosario Murillo, thought to leave without nationality those who dared to do politics in Nicaragua, they were thoroughly wrong. The Spanish passport opens them the door to 27 nations. In addition, they can fly to many places without requiring a previous visa.

The Venezuelans are settled in the Salamanca neighborhood in Madrid, a place that does not know crises judging by the high price of the square meter. There are more or less 400,000 who have settled in the Kingdom of Spain. There are hundreds of entrepreneurs who benefit from franchises or who create them. Thousands more work as clerks in stores that serve Venezuelans. If the flood of Dominicans, Ecuadorians, and Peruvians who arrived earlier—there are a million and a half Hispanic Americans living in Spain—were characterized by poverty, with few exceptions, these Venezuelans, the rich and the poor, have in common the skills and the modernity. Cubans, another substantial source of emigrants, have always seen the Spanish destination as a step towards their integration into the United States, for which the facilities provided to Cubans have always worked well.

Spain is fixing many mistakes. It has offered passports to the descendants of the Sephardim (not so the English, who expelled the Jews in 1209, or the French, in 1306.) On a date as significant as 1492, they were expelled from Castile and Aragon, the kingdoms in which they had lived for hundreds of years. A century earlier, in 1391, the popular pogroms took place, in which many Jews were killed, and the Jewish quarters were burned.

It was a classic case of shooting oneself in the foot. Suddenly, the investments dried up and the advice to the kings of Castile and Aragon for such a distinguished community disappeared almost entirely. It is disputed how many Jews were affected by the expulsion decrees (there were two edicts,) but from March 31 to July 31 some 100,000 people were expelled. They had to sell their properties at deep discounts during that period. The Catholic Monarchs, while teaching Spanish to the New World, a magnificent gift that unified hundreds of pre-Columbian languages and dialects, inadvertently created with the expulsion of the Sephardim a very special commercial network in the eastern Mediterranean.

The truth is that during the Franco regime the exiled Cuban students who came to Spain to finish their degrees were taken very seriously. But Franco died at the end of 1975 and the Cuban exiles had the same fears as the Spanish—that all the passions repressed since 1939 would be unleashed. Not in vain, Cuba had been strongly linked to Spain until 1898, the last of the American colonies that was emancipated. However, what happened was exemplary and unexpected, a surprisingly peaceful transition to democracy and freedoms. Certain Cubans, inside and outside the Island, took note. It was entirely possible to break with communism without the experiment blowing up on our hands.

After the news that the Caudillo had died, events began to accumulate. In 1976 Adolfo Suárez was already the head of the government, and the Cuban opposition depended, inside the island, on the Spanish diplomat Jorge Orueta, and outside, on Carlos Robles Piquer and his brother-in-law, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, and their willingness to present a book—El Radarista—by Spanish-Cuban Commander Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, a social democrat and one of the most important leaders of the revolution. Eloy had to wait in the harshest of prisons, where he was severely tortured, until Felipe González became Prime Minister to be released.

Felipe González, who opened Moncloa to the opposition to Castroism and, at the same time, called Mexican President Salinas de Gortari and asked him to listen to the opposition—something Fidel never forgave him—was replaced by José María Aznar after exemplary elections. One of his first diplomatic triumphs was to achieve a common diplomatic position on the Cuban issue within the European Union. The proposal of the “Common Position” was written in 1996, essentially, by Miguel Ángel Cortés Martín, Popular Party’s deputy and senator for Valladolid.

Aznar’s two terms were characterized by a very clear policy against Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. This did not prevent Fidel from calling Aznar to beg him to intercede for Chávez’s life during the April 2001 coup, which the Prime Minister of Spain did. However, the Common Position remained unchanged. Guillermo Gortázar, in charge of the Fundación Hispano Cubana, and the collection of Revista Hispano Cubana, admirably curated by Grace Piney Roche, offer good examples of this.

The Common Position supported by the 15 nations that were then part of the EU (today there are 27) was maintained until it was not possible to sustain it within the socialist government of J.L. Rodríguez Zapatero in June 2008, barely 3 months after the elections that gave him a second term. Although he could not avoid the contempt of Havana for his insistence on the release from prison and the exile of dissident Raúl Rivero (2005) and his wife Blanca, a lady that became legendary for having participated, Sunday after Sunday, in the marches of the “Ladies in White.” R. Zapatero defended himself against the accusations, alleging that he had not granted Rivero the Spanish citizenship.

Now it is the Nicas’ turn. Two hundred twenty-two people have been granted citizenship at the stroke of a pen. That’s what a mother does. [©FIRMAS PRESS]

*@CarlosAMontaner. CAM’s latest book is Sin ir más lejos (Memories.) Published by Debate, a label of Penguin-Random House, the book is available through Amazon Books.

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