When the Americans toasted in Sant Sadurní

With Catalonia at 40 degrees and the historic record of 40.5°C at the Fabra Observatory, it's not that Trump's threats don't matter, but rather that they can't be hotter (or so we hope). When in less than 24 hours, Trump threatens Denmark over Greenland, Iran with a ceasefire, and Spain with a trade cut, it's clear we're facing a new operation to "flood the zone" with short, blunt, and provocative headlines that set the agenda, as the sinister Steve Bannon advised him during the 2016 campaign.

There's no doubt that the American president has the power to complicate our lives whenever he wants with his capricious administration of rewards and punishments. But political, economic, military, cultural, and human relations are not severed overnight, and there are many interested parties who don't want them to be.

I've been flipping through newspaper front pages in Catalonia from 1952. The United States had decided that Franco's anti-communism was very useful for fighting the Cold War, and that the fact that he was a dictator and a former ally of Hitler and Mussolini was a dispensable detail. In January of that year, ships from the American VI Fleet docked in the ports of Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia, and Palma de Mallorca. American sailors went to Les Corts to watch the Barça-Atlètic de Madrid league match (5-2), the Orfeó de Sants went to sing on the deck of the flagship, the cruiser Des Moines, a group of officers visited the Canals i Nubiola wineries in "San Esteban Sasroviras" and the Codorniu wineries in Sant Sadurní, where a "delicate lunch" was served and "champagne" from Codorniu's reserves was toasted. Three-quarters of a century ago, and I'd say that, despite Trump, the toasts will continue.