Ceuta awakens the ghost of Cuba and the Philippines

BarcelonaThis Sunday The World dares to put on the cover the idea that has been circulating for some time in the fachosphere with a formula reminiscent of Enric Juliana: "Aromas of '98 in the regime of '78." It is a quote in quotation marks from an anonymous voice analyzing the crisis from within, but the fact that they have decided to put it on the front page is significant. Spanish nationalism, which was so happy with the victory of the red, has entered a kind of existential crisis in Ceuta. It's as if it has suddenly become aware of the vulnerability of Spanish enclaves in Africa, and this leads to an irresolvable dilemma for the Spanish: to be able to have a border defensible it would be better to abandon Ceuta and Melilla, but then it would be as much as admitting that the Spanish nation is divisible and not inviolable.

The most curious thing is that they talk about the ghost of '98 and not, for example, about the humiliating Spanish flight from Al-Aaiun in 1975, which has ended with Western Sahara de facto in Moroccan hands. When I had just started in journalism, in 1998, I witnessed a scene that stuck with me. The historic leader of the Polisario, Mohamed Abdelaziz, showed a group of journalists his old Spanish ID card, and wondered if it was worth anything. And the reality is that that ID card ("What does your ID card say?") was wet paper, something that is now being tried to be solved with a law, but too late, very late. I also remember an old family atlas where Spanish provinces called Fernando Poo and Rio Muni appeared. And it is that seven years before the flight from the Sahara, in 1968, Spain had abandoned Equatorial Guinea. But today no one remembers it. Perhaps because it is still taboo to admit that Spain became smaller under Franco and it is preferred to blame the politicians, the Pedro Sánchez of the time, for the loss of Cuba and the Philippines? It must be that.