Castro bombs in Madrid

National Review, Oct 5, 1992 by Mark Falcoff

When even the Spanish Left pans him, Fidel knows it is time to go home.

MADRID At the second summit of Latin American presidents and the prime ministers of Spain and Portugal, the big story was Fidel Castro's first--and perhaps last--visit to Spain. The event was supposed to give a lift to the sagging prestige of the Cuban caudillo, hard-hit by the collapse of his erst-while Soviet ally. Instead, the visit was a disaster, and Castro cut his stay short by several days. (As the conservative daily ABC observed, perhaps he was afraid that if he remained away from his troubled island much longer, he might not be able to return at all.)

From the moment his plane landed, Castro realized that this was not going to resemble his other overseas visits--to places like Angola or the former Soviet Union. Spain is, after all, a democratic society, with a full range of opinion expressed in parliament and the daily press. While there were small crowds of sympathizers gathered outside his hotel and the conference site, there were also hundreds of anti-Castro demonstrators (many-- but not all--Cuban refugees resident in Spain). One poll showed that more than 55 per cent of Spaniards thought his visit "a bad idea." The lack of popular enthusiasm caused Castro to cancel plans to circulate through Madrid; instead, he mostly stayed in his suite at the sumptuous Ritz Hotel.

At the conference itself, held in the old Senate building attached to Madrid's Royal Palace, Castro--accustomed to being the center of attention--was merely one of two dozen, including such attractive personalities as Nicaragua's President Violeta Chamorro, Argentina's President Carlos Menem, and, above all, the hugely popular King Juan Carlos. Protocol officers were besieged by requests from chiefs of state not to sit next to Castro at the gala opening dinner. (He ended up being sandwiched between a Spanish royal princess and an elderly duchess.)

Castro's speeches were strangely out of tune--worn cliches about imperialism and exploitation. He failed in his two objectives--to get the final document to condemn the U.S. economic embargo (which he persists in calling a "blockade") and to prevent the Latin American presidents from advocating "representative democracy" for the region. Spain's Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez reacted strongly on prime-time television. Repeatedly referring to Castro as "authoritarian," Gonzalez insisted that there could not be genuine integration in the Ibero-American community without "democracy as a common shared value."

Gonzalez repeatedly turned aside attempts by journalists sympathetic to Castro to place the blame for Cuba's problems on the United States. Spain has never accepted the U.S. economic embargo, he said, but "Cuba's difficulties do not rest upon this alone. There are internal factors as well, such as an economic system that is not very productive."

Although Castro had not asked to see him, Gonzalez said that, if he did have the chance, he would ask Castro to release his political prisoners and allow exiles to return freely. Addressing not only his Cuban guest, but also like-minded Latin American politicians, Gonzalez concluded that "the principal danger for democracy is not poverty," but rather "those who do not believe in democracy, and who drag people into populist adventures from which there is no return."

Changing Times

ON THE face of it, Spain should have been the one European country where Castro could still find a sympathetic hearing. His father was born in Galicia, Spain's impoverished northwestern region, and emigrated to Cuba after serving there in the expeditionary force sent to subdue its patriot armies.

In many ways Castro is more Spanish than Cuban, though his "Spain" is about seventy years out of date. Until the 1930s, Cuba itself was the most "Spanish" of Latin American countries---m food, customs, culture, and ethnic composition. Castro's anti-Americanism has always enjoyed wide appeal in Spain--on the Left for obvious reasons, but on the Right as well. Relations between the Cuban revolution and the Franco regime were always correct and sometimes even cordial; as an old-fashioned Spanish nationalist the generalissimo could not resist the spectacle of the hated "Anglo-Saxons" being expelled from the island where they had humiliated his country in 1898. The advent of a Socialist government in 1982 seemed to foreshadow even closer ties, and in fact until recently Spain was one of the two Western European governments to maintain aid programs in Cuba (the other was Sweden).

Times, however, are changing--in Spain, in Latin America, in the world. The collapse of the Soviet bloc has thrown Communist and philo-Communist forces into confusion and disarray. The Latin Americans themselves-- fearful of missing the twenty-first century-are rushing headlong into trade talks with Washington, and speak freely of a "privileged relationship" with the United States. Meanwhile, Spain has entered both NATO and the European Community, and has elected a government which, although Socialist, unambiguously embraces freemarket economics; as a result, Spain's economy is now the fastest-growing in Western Europe. A cultural boom ("la movida") has generated a new sense of self-confidence, and thereby attenuated anti-American sentiments which fed upon feelings of inferiority.