THE REIGN FROM SPAIN
Hugh Thomas explains why Cuba is looking
forward to its first visit from the present Spanish royal family
IHUGH THOMAS tiene la palabra!' (Hugh Thomas has the floor). I love the expression. I was giving my lecture in the house with the caryatids outside, a well- maintained and beautiful mansion on the Malec& in Havana, made of pink coral stone, with pillars, which has been leased by the Spanish cultural centre. The first- floor room in which I was talking was fairly full but, among those present as I spoke, I could see no familiar faces, even if some of them were, it later transpired, people whom I had met on my last visit to Cuba almost 30 years before. As I spoke, the windows slammed and blew open in the evening wind, the warm tropical rain out- side sometimes splashing in. Beyond, there was the sea, that sea which so many Cubans have sought to cross by raft or fishing boat for Florida and for freedom, many dying in the attempt.
My lecture was remarkably uncontrover- sial, for it concerned the Spanish governor, Diego Velazquez de Cuellar, who had con- quered the island in 1511 and to whom the great Cortes had for a time been secretary before the conquest of Mexico. I talked for a time of the little tropical court with which Velazquez had surrounded himself, and how he would tease his friends with the idea that, when he eventually returned to Spain, he might marry one of the nieces of the de facto Minister of the Indies, Bishop Rodriguez de Fonseca. 'No one had the courage to tell the governor', I asserted, 'that both ladies had long since found husbands.' There was just a gentle chuckle, one of those mild frissons which assure the speaker that what he is saying is at least understood.
I did venture one sentence slightly more daring. 'Like most tropical monarchs,' I remarked, 'Velazquez had jesters and dwarfs to tell him the truth in coded style.' The correspondent of El Pais smiled, the British ambassador nodded thoughtfully, the monsignore in the front row pretended that he didn't hear. Had I known that Nati Revueltas, the green-eyed beauty who, years ago, had been Castro's principal lady friend, was in the audience I might have sought to notice her expression. But I only knew of her presence later. Afterwards, some of the audience brought copies of my history of Cuba to be signed. There is a copy in the national library but it is in the 'reserve' and a spe- cial letter from someone in authority is needed if you want to consult it. What an honour!
In the chair, at my lecture in the house of the caryatids, was the Spanish cultural attaché in Cuba. It was he who had invited me to Havana. Given the close association which has grown between Spain and her one-time colony and the importance that cultural politics has in modern Cuba, he ex officio has much influence. He is the friend of writers who collaborate with the regime and also of those who are published only in Spain, but who nevertheless remain in Cuba. He can give scholarships to Cuban writers for a stay in Madrid. He knows singers and painters and they come to his house, as do bureaucrats of the ministry of culture and historians. He is also the chan- nel of other European aid to Cuba, includ- ing medical assistance. He exercises these responsibilities with a light touch. His presence at my lecture in the lovely house on the MalecOn was a reminder that, a hundred years after a bloody civil war, the second Cuban war of indepen- dence, the most radical regime which Cuba or anywhere else in Latin America has ever experienced now looks on the madre patria, Spain, as her only friend, her closest relation rather, who can perhaps help her out of the impasse to which the revolution has led.
The slightest reflection about Cuban politics of today recalls that Cuba is now in a unique position, for, for the first time, she has now no determining godfather, as she had in Russia for the 30 years from 1959 till 1989, in the United States from 1898 till 1959, and in Spain herself, the colonial power from the days of Diego Velazquez until 1898. But this unaccus- tomed isolation seems to render Cuba uncomfortable, and now it is the last but earliest association which is being curious- ly revived in quite new circumstances.
Spanish activity is not just at an intellec- tual level. Autonomous regional govern- ments in Spain have adopted pillared houses on the Malec& to preserve and redecorate. Outside the Centro Asturiano, the club for people whose roots are in Asturias, I observed a van with on it the words 'Principality of Asturias'. The King and Queen of Spain will visit Havana this year and Castro is looking forward to the occasion, for this 'first socialist president' of Latin America believes that he made friends with these latest and best of the Spanish Bourbons at a summit meeting of Spanish and Portuguese countries in Lis- bon a few months ago.
Not long ago, Castro went to a party at a Western embassy in Havana and, turning to the ambassador, remarked apropos of various ministers of his who were tucking into tapas, 'One of these people will be my Adolfo Suarez. I am too old to be that myself.' Then, while the ambassador was doing his best to take this in, Castro added, 'What a pity that there is no King to help the process along.'
When the Spanish foreign minister, Abel Matutes, was in Havana in October, Cas- tro showed him a throne which has always been in the old palace of the captains-gen- eral and which, so the `comandante' sug- gested, the King might sit upon during his visit — 'unless', he added, 'protocol pre- vents it'. Later in 1999 the turn of Havana will come to act as host for the Spanish and Portuguese heads of government.
These mysterious associations must seem treacherous to the exile community, and I expect there will be some in it who think that my own visit, undertaken largely out of curiosity, was so too. Yet if they act cleverly, the Spaniards, so successful in transforming their own dictatorship into a democracy, could play a real part in Cuba. True, Felipe Gonzalez, when prime minis- ter, did what he could to persuade Castro to join the ranks of democrats and failed. Manuel Fraga, now president of the autonomous government of Galicia, but once the King's first minister of the interi- or at the beginning of the Spanish transi- tion, has been no more successful, though he has made several visits to Havana on the ground that he needs to visit his Gal- lego compatriots.
But perhaps a combination of King Juan Carlos and the conservative government of Jose Maria Aznar could have an effect. Can we not hear a Spanish minister telling the exiles in Miami that the aim must be, as it was in the late 1970s in Spain, `refor- ma, no ruptura' with the institutions of the dictatorship. A `Pinochet solution' may not be inappropriate, even if latterly Gen- eral Pinochet has run into his own remark- able difficulties. Could not, for example, Castro remain for a while as ceremonial president of Cuba, while a directly elected prime minister, perhaps one of those men eating tapas in that Western embassy, Lage or Robaina, could be the beginning of the democratic transformation, and indeed be advised by the King, whom Castro now seems to admire, and even by Adolfo Suarez? There are those in the United States who would see this recovery of Spanish influence as the reversal of the Monroe doctrine, but in Madrid it could be Spain's revenge for 1898. For the alter- native to Spanish political help can only be a reassertion of United States influence which, despite the many Americans anx- ious to abolish the trade embargo and to embark on a new economic policy towards Cuba, could lead to the repetition of old mistakes in underestimating the strength of even post-Castro Cuban nationalism.
In working out for Cuba a new post-rev- olutionary place, the honest recovery of the historical past could play a part too. That happened in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. A lecture on Diego Velazquez cannot be exactly a radical occasion, but it was a modest reminder that Cuba had an absorbing history before 1959, a date which the propagandists of Castro have long sought to present as an equivalent to the year 622 AD in the history of Islam, or 1917 in that of the Soviet Union. The wealth of 19th-century Cuba may have been based on slaves but all the same the island in 1860, still under Spain, was one of the richest colonies in the world, whose prosperous, pleasure-loving upper class lived in the palaces of Havana which the servants of the present regime are cleverly re-embellishing for the benefit of discern- ing tourists. Perhaps further lectures in the house of the caryatids on the first-floor room of that palace looking over the sea can help us make the point. To misquote Shelley, history is capable of saving us.
Lord Thomas is professor of Spanish culture at Boston University. His most recent books are The Conquest of Mexico (1993) and The Slave Trade (1997).
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