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A Shameful Legacy
By Vicente Echerri
Spain's policy of rapprochement and appeasement toward
Castro has unleashed
an argument, reflected at times in these pages, about relations between
Spain and Cuba. Some condemn the Zapatero government's collaboration with
Castro; while others defend it on grounds of the historic closeness between
the two countries, which is said to transcend parties or ideologies.
I would like to go beyond these viewpoints. In my opinion, Cuba's most basic
problems, its tragic recent history, the political and social abuses that
have derailed its nationhood, have been foisted on us by Spain. The current
accommodation with Castro's tyranny by Spain's socialist government--exactly
like that of Franco's fascist dictatorship in an earlier time--are different
expressions of an old colonial attitude prolonged by a century of hatred
against the United States; a country that has been, for some time now, the
best friend of the Cuban people.
At a time when all of Latin America was waging an independence war against
Spain's colonial administration, the ruling class of Cuba--one of the most
resourceful and enterprising on the continent--found a means of progress and
enrichment in the politics of self-reliance and autonomy that made for a
genuinely wealthy and advanced society. Spanish narrow-mindedness and
obstinacy, the avarice of Spanish landowners who gorged themselves with
abusive rents, the barbarous despotism of Spain's governors and the mob's
resentment against business-owners, cancelled the moderate path of
development and radicalized the Cuban elites, convincing them that rebellion
was the only possible recourse; hence the destruction of our first economic
structures, the ruin and extinction of our genuine aristocracy and the
planting in our national psyche of that hideous ideal, revolution.
In the face of the behavior, like a bad mother's or
perverted
stepmother's, with which Spain opposed the best efforts of Cuba's
colonial society, the United States always represented a national
aspiration and a social model toward which Cuba naturally gravitated, in
that this country was constantly expanding and putting itself in the
vanguard of modernization. From the United States, technological
innovations were constantly reaching us--and so we got the steamboat,
the railroad, the telephone and commercial aviation before Spain herself
did. The Americans gave us, as well, the political ideas of their
burgeoning democracy. It was to the United States, in the nineteenth
century as in our own time, that Cubans who had been dispossessed and
persecuted in their own country were able to come and enjoy political
liberty as well as economic prosperity. And it was the United States
that made possible, with its timely and decisive intervention, the birth
of the Cuban republic.
Of course we are Spaniards by language and blood. We are closer to Spain and
its culture than the rest of Latin America. But just as the Spanish state
was the implacable enemy of our nationhood in past times, so has it been, in
the present--excepting only the final years of Aznar's government--the
willing accomplice of our most determined enemy. Zapatero's policy toward
Castro is therefore no novelty, but the extension of a shameful legacy.
Echerri 2004
*El Nuevo Herald
Diciembre 16, 2004
(Translated by David Landau)
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