Havana, Sep 7 (EFE).- They learn Catalan, they listen to Spanish folk music and take courses in Spanish cooking. There are thousands of Spaniards who have been living for decades in Cuba who are trying to keep in touch with their roots and with a homeland where some of them have never set foot.
There are 70,000 Spanish citizens currently living in Cuba, of whom 17,000 received their citizenship from Madrid in 2009 - and it is expected that even more will do so in 2010 - thanks to the "grandchildren law" that has allowed people who left Spain during the 1936-1939 civil war and subsequent repression to reclaim their Spanish passports.
They are grandparents and great-grandparents now in Cuba, but they have the relationship of grandchildren with Spain since it was their grandparents or great-grandparents who arrived with their suitcases here in the 1920s or '30s coming from an impoverished Spain to a prosperous Cuba.
"Spain rediscovered its emigrants in the (19)90s," says Havana-born Sergio Rabanillo, the president of the Federation of Associations of Castile and Leon, and it managed to revitalize several societies of emigrants that had languished in communist Cuba.
So, now there are many associations made up of Canary Islanders, Galicians, Basques or Asturians in which folklore courses - singing and dancing - as well as cooking classes are offered, but the advanced age of their members means that they also have other more pressing concerns.
Workshops to occupy the elderly and exercise classes are offered, and the regional associations also function as aid centers for the old "gallegos" (Galicians), which is how all Spaniards are called in Cuba and in certain other countries in the Americas regardless of what part of Spain they came from.
"We're a type of mega-NGO," says Susana Monis, with the Work and Immigration Section of Spain's embassy in Cuba, which provided aid last year amounting to 5 million euros ($6.36 million), most of it in the form of pension payments.
The payments, which in the case of retirement pensions come to 2,530 euros ($3,205) annually for each beneficiary, are a real oxygen cylinder for the Cuban economy, which has been tottering after the fall of the Soviet bloc, and they turn each Spanish grandparent into a bona fide means of support for whole Cuban families.
The most emotional thing - Monis says - was when the Spanish National Social Services Institute, of Inserso, began offering travel packages and the elderly people with Spanish roots could visit the beaches at Torremolinos or along the Costa Brava just like any retired Spaniard.
In addition, the Inserso tickets are issued with an open return so that, if they want, travelers can prolong their trips and visit the villages where their grandparents were born.
"My father had great hopes of seeing the old market in Triufe, but where he remembered cows and pigs, he found stalls of Moroccans selling plastic items and knickknacks," says Sergio Rabanillo by way of explaining the change between the Spain that his father abandoned in 1915 and the one he found when he returned in 1995.
The Rabanillos' trip was part of another program launched by several of Spain's autonomous regions called Plan Añoranza, which consists of buying an airline ticket so that an elderly Spaniard may return to his birthplace, provided that a relative will give him lodging.
Maria Antonia Marcos, who heads the federation of Asturian associations in Cuba - only 262 of whose 18,000 members were born in Spain - has visited Cangas de Onis several times thanks to Plan Añoranza, according to what is said in the federation's centers where portraits of Che Guevara and Spain's King Juan Carlos both hang.
In the federation's restaurant one can eat "fabada" (bean stew with pork) and hear Asturian folk music played on real bagpipes that come directly from Oviedo, but the regulars there - almost all of them born on the island - still maintain a nostalgia for their youths of rum and Caribbean living.
Carmelo Gonzalez, the president of the 45,000-member Canary Islands Association, doesn't delude himself, saying: "Emigration is very old. Here we try to recover as much as possible the Canary Islands spirit, but without being utopian."
"In the Americas, the (Spanish) spirit is being lost, and when it's regained it's not so much out of love of Spain as it is for economic reasons," he says.
