[The following open letter to Fidel Castro from M. Fernandez appeared in the September 21 issue of Combate, weekly newspaper of the United Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist League and the Communist League of Spain, Fourth International. The translation is by Inter. continental Press/Inprecor.]
Comrade Fidel:
You, your government, and your country recently gave a resounding welcome to Adolfo Suárez, head of the Spanish government and the main leader of the Democratic Center Union (UD) party.*
We do not doubt that you would have preferred to receive a delegation from a revolutionary government. But we also know that wishes are one thing and reality is another, and that relations between parties and relations between states are two very different things.
We have no objections, therefore (although it raised the hackles of a few of us to the Cuban workers state's receiving the head of the Spanish bourgeois govern. ment. Nor do we object to the fact that Cuba, in its transition to socialism, wishes to improve its economic, political, and cultural relations with capitalist Spain. We too want that. We want to keep Spain from being a bastion of anti-Cuban reaction, and we do not see accomplishing this as something to be put off until after the socialist revolution, which is not for today, or, perhaps, for the immediate future.
However, we repeat: relations between states are one thing; relations between parties are another. Diplomatic relations are one thing, but certain opinions you expressed about the political process in Spain at the time of Suárez's visit are another matter entirely. Frankly, when we witnessed your final joint press conference, in which you never stopped praising Suá- rez's virtues and swearing that he had no faults, many of us could not help feeling a vicarious sense of shame. Not only because we could not believe a word you saidamiss is happening there."
The other is: "Suárez is a brilliant and capable man, and, together with Juan Carlos, he has written a very important chapter in Spanish history." These sentences combined can be summed up as follows: the transition is terrific, and we have Suárez and the king to thank for it.
Let's take them one by one. "The transition in Spain is being carried out in a brilliant and progressive way." What is progressive about it? To be sure, the workers have won the right to organize, express themselves, and demonstrate with a considerable degree of freedom. No one questions this gain, which is vital for the struggles to come. But Fidel, don't you know that we already have a draft constitution that, while recognizing these rights, basically restricts them?
Don't you know that the right to selfdetermination, autonomy, and selfgovernment for the peoples of Spain is virtually nothing but a worthless scrap of paper? Don't you know that the dictatorship's state apparatus has been preserved almost intact-its army, its police, its prisons, its bureaucracy? Don't you know that your father's birthplace,
Galicia, is presided over by a bloody family of petty tyrants whose power dates back to the civil war, by a henchman of Suárez? Don't you know that it is he who has really made this transition "brilliant" by managing to "change something so that nothing should change?
"Spain's future seemed doubtful at first, but is has become clear that nothing amiss is happening there." Is that so? What about those killed and the many wounded in Pamplona and San Sebastián, the one dead and two wounded in San Sebastián, the police vandalism in Rentería-are they nothing? Are the trials and jailings of actors and journalists nothing? Are the closing of factories and the dizzying rise of unemployment nothing? Is the impunity enjoyed by the fascist gangs nothing? Aren't these perhaps some of the most and so on.
But this chapter was written by working men and women, by young people, and others. And how did they write it? Through their struggles. Against whom? First against the Franco dictatorship, then against the new representatives of the ruling classes, of the exploiters, of the oppressors—i.e., against Suárez and Juan Carlos first and foremost. The chapter written by Suárez and Juan Carlos is a very different one. It is the chapter of the resistance of the bourgeoisie and its state apparatus to the demands of the working peoples, of the repression of mobilizations, of the restriction of freedoms and rights. It is the opposite side of the story.
Shouldn't you know this in Cuba, of all places, a country that has experienced a wide range, not only of "transitions," but also of "revolutions" that have done very little to change things, that have brought in new rulers, but have changed little or
: in the situation of the ruled, nothing particularly their material conditions?
Now, if it were not for the fact that Suárez has already had to realize that the workers and peoples of Spain are not naive enough to believe him, he could tell them without the slightest embarrassment: "You see? Fidel said it, the king and I have written this page in Spanish history. Vote for the monarchy in the constitutional referendum, and vote for me in the general elections."
Yours would be a sad
"transition"-from the leader of a revolution that gave a powerful morale boost to revolutionists here under the dictatorship, to providing a moral alibi to the chief political representatives of the bourgeoisie and its state.
What the peoples of Spain need from Cuba, Comrade Fidel, is not flattery of Suárez and the king, but just the opposite-solidarity with their demands and their struggle, against the UCD gov. ernment today, against the monarchy tomorrow.
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