It was just 48 hours, from the morning of Monday the 27th to the morning of Wednesday the 29th of July 1992. It was not the first time, the Galician had already visited the Cuban on the island, but it was the one that attracted the most focus. They toured together Santiago de Compostela, Boiro, Lugo and Láncara, where the birthplace of Ángel Castro, the commander’s father, is located. They ate and drank and played dominoes. They also argued, some chroniclers point out. In any case, that meeting between Manuel Fraga Iribarne and Fidel Castro Ruz, extravagant and flochlorized, nourished the chroniclers of the time, angered the leadership of the Popular Party, upset the socialists who then governed the State and even generated two more decades later, a documentary. The Asturian historian Pablo Batalla Cueto now dedicates a book of almost 250 pages – plus appendices – to delving into that history in which many stories converge, the 20th century in the background. “I have always been interested in equivocal, confusing, paradoxical moments, the thresholds of time,” he tells elDiario.es.
I could have been Fidel Castro (Lengua de Trapo y Círculo de Bellas Artes, 2024) relates one of them, in his opinion. The Cuban communist of Galician origin and the Galician right-winger who had spent part of his childhood in Cuba were two enemies who had survived the vicissitudes of circumstances: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet bloc, on the one hand, the end of the Franco dictatorship in which he had been a minister, on the other. “Azaña said that when a regime falls, its front and back fall,” explains Batalla Cueto (Gijón, 1987), “but Fraga and Fidel manage to survive their time.” To the point that Castro, the bearded commander who on January 1, 1959 overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista, established a single-party socialist system that at some point came to repress homosexuals and then rectified – the book mentions it -, He retired from power in 2008 and died in 2016. Fraga Iribarne, after having participated in successive Franco cabinets, represented timidly open-minded sectors within of him and justified state crimes, he presided over the Xunta de Galicia between 1990 and 2005 and died in 2012.
“We could say that they were two authoritarians and that’s it, what happens is that I wanted to find the complexity, the intricacies of that shared worldview,” he says. That is one of the theses that his essay defends, that of identifying some biographical coincidences as the basis of a personal harmony that was surprising at the time, given the distance of their political positions. His Catholic, Jesuit upbringing – “the Pope’s marines” -, perhaps. An idea of masculinity that included a love of hunting. “Both Fraga and Fidel were cosmopolitan and cultured men, but they had grown up in the village, and never felt at home in the respective capital of their countries,” he argues in writing. The historical stature of the Cuban is obviously superior, but the parallels exist and, in the 90s, they converged.
I could have been Fidel Castro It is, by the way, a more or less literal phrase attributed to Fraga Iribarne, but not the one that triggered the book. “Beyond ideological differences, and we have never denied it, Fidel Castro is one of the many symbols of this Hispanic world that was so many times glorious,” said the then president of Galicia for the Popular Party, “he was divided, he was despised. unfairly and is a symbol of independence.” Batalla Cueto thus traces a certain fascination of the old Spanish right with the Cuban Revolution. “I think that, in some way, Franco saw Fidel as a Hispanic avenger of the affront of ’98,” he points out. The truth is that the Franco dictatorship, by then already thrown into the arms of the US international strategy that accepted it as a pawn in its Cold War against the USSR, never broke relations with revolutionary Cuba.
Playing dominoes with the commander
When Fidel Castro landed at Lavacolla, the airport in the Galician capital, almost everything had already been done a long time. The fall of the Soviet bloc and the intensification of the Yankee blockade had plunged the socialist island into the so-called Special Period. Any hand was welcome and here came Manuel Fraga’s. “Fidel was isolated and Fraga was one of the few who decided not to participate in that isolation,” writes the historian, who refers to “a personal, autobiographical interest” in Fraga who had lived, as a child, in Manatí, province of Tunas, in eastern Cuba. Those childhood memories became, after time and an intense life in the service of the dictatorial State, an endeavor that earned him criticism from both port and starboard. “I don’t give a damn,” he declared. The visit, adds Batalla Cueto, “left a carousel of memorable photos and recordings for history, playing dominoes with him, eating octopus or preparing a queimada for him.”
“I have tried to defolklorize the issue, but without leaving aside the anecdotes,” he confesses to this newspaper. Fellini with bagpipers It is titled – the tribute is taken from an article by journalist On Rúa do Vilar some communist sympathizers threw flowers at him from a balcony. Then he visited Televés, a telecommunications company. Everything in Santiago de Compostela. In Boiro he wanted to know the details of Jealsa, one of the large canneries in the Arousa estuary, whose boss, Jesús Alonso, was always close to the PP. The entire menu is known about his food at Chicolino, a famous restaurant in the town of Arousa, and that its owner received more than a hundred calls from people offering money, “good amounts,” for any cutlery touched by Fidel. “When the news reached the waiters, only the cup of coffee remained on the table,” says the historian. They still preserve it today.
At the Santiago de Compostela hotel where he stayed, Fidel took the opportunity to address more than 300 guests. They were led by Ángel García Seoane, mayor of one of the municipalities with the highest income in Galicia, Oleiros (A Coruña), at the head of a neighborhood candidacy and who defines himself as communist. Xosé Manuel Beiras, the writers Xosé Neira Vilas – who had lived in Cuba precisely until 1992 – or Uxío Novoneyra or the intellectual and artist Isaac Díaz Pardo among the audience. “We want to continue being this wonderful mix of Spaniards, Indians and Africans! We feel privileged for that,” Fidel proclaimed. Dinner was at Vilas, a disappeared establishment in the city that Fraga Iribarne turned into a second home – the first was probably the government headquarters. The next day, Fidel Castro visited the village of Láncara, in the town hall of the same name, in the southern half of the province of Lugo.
“The son of an emigrant who returns to the town to find his origins,” was the formula with which the town’s mayor welcomed him. Castro, accompanied at all times by Fraga, considered it an honor to be a descendant of Galicians – in that “very humble hut”, now a museum, his father, Ángel Castro, was born – and he remembered his companions from Sierra Maestra, several of whom had origins. in Galicia. Sober’s band played the Galician anthem, Láncara named Fidel his adopted son and he greeted his two cousins Victoria and Estelita. Next, seven hundred guests ate octopus, empanada and grilled sardines, ribeiro wine and a queimada. “The parties of the extreme left [sic] Galician gave account of some succulent empanadas thanks to Fraga”, wrote the chronicler of ABCAccording to Batalla Cueto’s book, “while a little further away Cuban journalists who work in Miami […] “They tasted some splendid sardines that Fidel paid them.” A game of dominoes, Fraga Iribarne’s favorite game to the point that he made it a central element of his political propaganda during his time at the Xunta, crowned the day.
Castro and Fraga returned to Santiago. The next day, Wednesday, July 29, Fidel left Galicia ahead of schedule. A press conference already called, the only one of the trip, had to be suspended. Journalist speculation about what happened points to a discussion with the host, who would have pointed out the way to Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas who ended the Somoza dictatorship called elections, after years of violent reaction from the Contras supported by the United States, and They lost to the right. Everything is uncertain.
A Fraguista regime in Galicia
But I could have been Fidel Castro It goes beyond those two days in July 1992. Its author risks an interpretation of the last Fraga, the one who presided over Galicia for four terms with an absolute majority – he lost it in 2005 to a coalition of the Socialist Party and BNG – and the fraguismo, almost a regime. “I wouldn’t say that he is a neglected character. There are several biographies, also critics, with his figure. What catches my attention is the few books written about fraguismo,” says Pablo Batalla. The newspaper archive and the countless more or less volumes of memoirs that the politician himself signed, and that dedicate sections to his experience in power in Galicia, are the materials that the historian has used. And conversations with experts on the object, of course.
“The interesting thing about that period is perhaps how he managed to build cultural peace,” he says, “co-opting leftist and Galician intellectuals to whom he offered positions and institutions.” It was the culmination, you understand, of that diffuse Galicianism theorized in a non-systematic way by Ramón Piñeiro, a Socratic intellectual, a member of the Galeguista Party in the Republic, imprisoned in the postwar period and dedicated to something like cultural resistance from Editorial Galaxia, which he founded in 1950. “Fraga built a regime,” he defends, “with elements that still last. Others cut them from Madrid, like the Single Administration idea.” Batalla Cueto makes an analogy: he had a “sort of intention” to build a Galician PNV. Whether he had it or not is a matter of debate, what is clear is that he did not do it.
What he did build was a public sphere with limited media pluralism. “Media control, which was by no means the only one to apply, helped him,” he says. Public television had prohibited a general shot of the president, to disguise his swaying walk. And institutional advertising and agreements – advertised or not – clamped down a good part of the private ones. “His cultural peace regime also relied on that,” he adds. To the point that some dissident intellectuals could only dissent from the media based in Madrid. The fall from grace of Xosé Cuíña -Batalla Cueto collects from a book by Alfonso Eiré that the councilor even considered joining the BNG- symbolized, in any case, the end of an era. His replacement was called Alberto Núñez Feijóo and he was Aznar’s envoy for the Galician PP. He took advantage of the infrastructure of the regime – media control was not relaxed, on the contrary – but he emptied it of regionalism, branched it out, if possible, even more. Another stage of the same story began.
Moreno Bonilla and Nicolás Maduro
“I don’t like to think that there are no longer these types of characters in politics, so interesting and cultured, that there are,” he comments, “what is true is that today, no one can imagine, as far as I know, Moreno Bonilla receiving Nicolás Maduro in Seville. But what happened with Fraga Iribarne and Fidel Castro was also surprising at that time.” Socialist Cuba endured. The Galician PP returned to power in 2009 and remains there. The difference he perceives is contextual: the world of politics has been simplified, it has become “more hermetic.” And the passages between enemies that interest the historian Pablo Batalla Cueto, are more improbable.
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