From Fidel to Franco: Why Communist Cuba Mourned the Death of the Fascist Caudillo

By Andrés Pertierra

Early morning on the 21^st of November, 1975, Francisco Rubiales, the Cuba correspondent for Spanish public broadcaster EFE, was still recovering from drinking with friends to celebrate the demise of the longtime dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco, on the previous day. Suddenly, he received an unexpected phone call from the Spanish ambassador to the island, Enrique Suárez de Puga: “Paco,” began the ambassador, using the common nickname for people named Francisco, “Cuba has decreed three days of official mourning for the death of Franco.”  It made no sense; the Communist government of Fidel Castro was in official mourning for rabidly anti-Communist Caudillo of Spain? Rubiales replied, incredulously, “I don’t believe it, ambassador; it must be a joke.” “I am entirely serious,” came the reply, “I have before me the official decree, signed by [Cuban] President Oswaldo Dorticós.” “Sorry, Ambassador, but I have to see it with my own eyes,” Rubiales insisted. The ambassador eagerly invited Rubiales to the embassy to see the evidence for himself.

Driving from his home in the posh neighborhood of El Vedado to the Spanish embassy in Old Havana, the Spanish journalist sped to his destination in around five minutes and was soon presented with a physical copy of the Cuban government’s message declaring an official mourning period for Franco. Still in a state of disbelief, but bowing to the evidence before his very eyes, Rubiales returned home and sent out an urgent news cable to his superiors at EFE, who eagerly published the surprising bit of news.

Half an hour after submitting the story, Rubiales received a second phone call from a functionary of the Cuban Foreign Ministry (MINREX) chewing him out as a “liar”. “Gallego,” came the voice, using the slang term for all Spaniards regardless of regional provenance, “prepare your suitcases because you are leaving Cuba. You are being expelled for lying. How would Cuba decree an official period of mourning for the death of Franco?” Rubiales retorted that what he had published was true, but the MINREX official refused to believe him and reiterated his instructions to prepare for his expulsion. 

Trying to fix the situation, Rubiales called up Carlos Mora, subdirector for Cuban state media organization Prensa Latina. Mora was similarly unable to believe the story, assuring him that “it is impossible that Cuba has declared an official period of mourning. You must be mistaken. You’ve gotten yourself into a tight spot this time.” 

Still clinging to the hope that he could avoid expulsion, Rubiales insisted on speaking to the then head of Prensa Latina, Gustavo Robreño Dolz. A few minutes later, the latter called him up and reassured him: “Relax. You were right about the decree, but it was meant to be privately communicated to the ambassador and nobody had foreseen that it would be published. You have put us in a right mess.”

The Francoist Spanish ambassador, Suárez de Puga, spent the 21^st of November gleefully driving around Havana to insist that the Cuban flag be lowered to half-mast, in accordance with the official period of mourning. After initial confusion and frantic attempts to confirm the diplomat’s story, each of his stops would eventually acquiesce, only to immediately raise the flags back to full mast as soon as he left.

Sometime later, while Rubiales was interviewing Fidel Castro about Spain after Franco, the Cuban dictator made reference to the embarrassing ‘official mourning’ episode, saying to EFE correspondent “en menudo lío nos has metido” (you got us in a real mess).¹

The Common Link between the Two Ideologically Opposed Caudillos

Fidel Castro’s Cuba was not, of course, being deferential to Franco out of some kind of genuine admiration for the man. The island’s government had a purely realpolitik approach to relations with Francoist Spain; in an era when the US was trying to isolate Cuba diplomatically and economically, Spanish trade and diplomatic recognition were an important lifeline for the government. What was more, trade with Spain could mean a source of consumer goods and capital goods that Cuba’s Eastern European partners might not be able to provide, or at least not with the quality or at the speed that Spanish trade might.

Finally, while we know that Spain’s democratic transition (1975-1977) would become a celebrated process that happened fairly quickly and bloodlessly, at the time the Cuban government reasonably hedged their bets against a hard right takeover that might stop the fragmentation of the ruling coalition that Franco was increasingly unable to hold together in his last years.

While it is true that there are some bits of evidence that some kind of interpersonal rapport existed between the two men, these do not seem to have been the driving factors behind the survival of their countries’ commercial and diplomatic ties. Getting the obvious out of the way first, both men were not only brought up in Hispanic cultures but shared a connection to Galicia in particular; Franco was Gallego and Castro’s father Ángel was a Gallego who stayed in Cuba after the war of independence, eventually becoming a successful landowner in what is now Holguín. In the 2000s, during interviews with Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel would look back on Franco’s refusal to break relations with Cuba with great appreciation, saying the old Caudillo had “acted with Galician stubbornness,” which was also a clear nod to that familial connection. The continued significance of the Galician connection can also be seen in the fact that Castro cultivated a strong personal relationship with the Spanish autonomous region’s head of government, Manuel Fraga, an archconservative, who would later help to host Fidel during the latter’s 1992 trip to Ángel Castro’s hometown of Láncara.²

For his part, Franco appears to have reciprocated this personal admiration, sending a message to Fidel in 1960 telling him to “give hell to the Americans” and describing the Cuban Caudillo around the same time to a Spanish journalist as “very intelligent”, a “great strategist”, and a “good military man” who was undertaking the necessary work of changing Cuba. More concretely, Fidel was quite grateful that Franco never shared intelligence that he had on Castro’s forces with the regime of Cuba’s previous dictator, Fulgencio Batista (1952-1958).³ Whatever interpersonal sympathies there were, however, these merely facilitated the underlying realpolitik reasons for the working relationship between both countries.

The irony of this seemingly ‘odd’ this relationship between anti-Communist Spain and Communist Cuba was, ironically, that in practice it was in many ways quite normal.  Rather than a world divided between East and West, socialism and capitalism, Moscow and Washington, two separate spheres in a massive competition for influence over the emerging Third World, in practice there was an increasingly integrated world economy, regardless of ideology. Just as Cuba was happy to trade with Spain for goods that it could not acquire within socialist bloc trade networks, its Eastern European peers were doing the same with their Western European peers. Full Spanish diplomatic relations with Eastern European states would have to wait until after the death of Franco, but their charges d’affaires were busily operating in Madrid all the same.⁴

As Oscar Sánchez-Sibony takes pains to argue in his book on the political economy of Soviet trade with the global economy, the USSR’s period of maximum autarky in the 1930s was the exception rather than the rule, driven by issues like limited reserves of hard currency and growing geopolitical threats. The transformation of the USSR into a petrostate from the 1970s merely facilitated the expansion of trade with Western Europe that was already ongoing and pursued for economic benefit by not just the Soviet Union but other socialist states.⁵ The expansion of trade and the growing dependence on capitalist creditors in order to compensate for limited reserves of hard currencies among Eastern Bloc countries would, as Stephen Kotkin pointed out decades ago, go on to play an important role in the economic crisis that facilitated the collapse of the Warsaw Pact member states in 1989.⁶

Regime Survival with a Little Help from Spanish Capitalists and Tourists

While relationships with capitalist Western European countries would contribute to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, in Cuba’s case these relationships went on to facilitate regime survival during the immediate post-Soviet crisis. The Cuban regime’s future seemed uncertain in the decade between the collapse of the USSR in 1991, ending billions of rubles a year in direct and indirect subsidies to the island’s economy, and the beginning of the presidency of Hugo Chávez Frías in another petrostate, Venezuela, in 1999, which would inaugurate Caracas’ period as chief patron and ‘sugar daddy’ to Havana. Shorn of both subsidies and its main security guarantor against the United States, unable to keep the lights on for more than a few hours a day, and increasingly unable to consistently feed its population, the country faced its most profound crisis since 1959. Many, unsurprisingly, predicted the regime’s imminent collapse, along the lines of what had happened in Poland, Hungary, and, of course, German Democratic Republic. And yet, Castro survived the crisis, not just thanks to different domestic factors (e.g. socialism never arrived ‘imposed by Soviet tanks’ as in Europe), but also in part thanks to capitalism, and more specifically Spain.

With the end of Soviet subsidies for its sugar sector, the Cuban government pivoted from exporting goods to a service-based economy, centered on tourism. This pivot required capital, technical and managerial expertise, and, of course, tourists themselves. Spain provided all three, with companies like the Meliá Hotel chain eagerly jumping into the breach in order to open locations like the Meliá Cohiba in the heart of the Cuban capital as early as 1994. Although Spanish tourists had as a rule far shallower pockets than Americans, British, or German tourists, they were cumulatively important to helping these new private-public ventures between the Cuban state and Spanish private sector viable. This was also doubtless facilitated by the enduring ties between both countries, not just across history and family legacies but also in the purely practical sense that Cubans already spoke Spanish, making tourism and exchanges easier. This Spanish tourist trade was already slowly reviving in the 1970s and 1980s, with the Cuban Tourism Institute cultivating contacts with Spanish tourism agencies and technical exchanges with Spanish government tourism institutions long before the Cold War ended, but would only really take off in the 1990s. Thus, the paradox of Hispano-Cuban relationsis not that they continued despite their ideological differences during the Franco era, but that capitalist Spain would eventually help Communist Cuba survive the end of the Cold War.

Will Cuba Turn to Chinese or Western Capitalism?

Today Cuba faces a crisis as bad as or worse than that of the 1990s. The extended blackouts are back, now with the added issue that the country’s power stations having lost 25 percent of their maximum generation capacity in the past half decade due to obsolescence. During this same period, between 20 and 25 percent of the island’s population has left; an astounding figure for a country not at war or experiencing a famine. Not only has the country’s tourism sector failed to recover its pre-pandemic numbers, but its anemic recovery is now in full reverse, with the number of visitors decreasing by double digit percentage points compared to last year’s tourism season.

Fidel Castro is dead and buried and his younger brother, Raúl Castro, is likely to follow him sometime in the upcoming years, removing key authoritative political figures from the Cuban stage. In their place President Miguel Díaz-Canel is set to finish his current mandate in 2028 and is term-limited from ever running again, while also having no clear successor. The Cuban government also recently announced that foreign businesses with bank accounts on the island would have their access to deposited funds restricted indefinitely, which suggests that the funds were already spent by the state, which will discourage future investment.

Perhaps capitalism will sweep in, once again, to inadvertently save Communist Cuba from itself, whether through a recovery of foreign tourism or Chinese investment in the island’s moribund economy. Or, perhaps, enough is different this time that we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the 1959 project itself. Whatever the case, the story of Cuban Communism now, just like Cold War Communism in the past century, is inexorably tied up in the history of Western Capitalism; it always has been.

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Andrés Pertierra from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a PhD fellow at the IEG from September 2025 to June 2026. In his dissertation project he studies the Cuban-Spanish relations from 1975 to 1999 as a lens through which to understand the Cuban regime’s durability.

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Header image: Portraits of Francesco Franco (left) and Fidel Castro (right), Wikimedia Commons, Franco: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RETRATO_DEL_GRAL._FRANCISCO_FRANCO_BAHAMONDE_(adjusted_levels).jpg, Castro: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fidel_Castro_(c._1959)_(3x4_cropped).jpg.

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Appendix

1. While the gist of this story is well known, the details come from the personal blog of the EFE correspondent, Francisco Rubiales, “Cuba: el día que murió Franco,” Blog, Voto en Blanco, October 1, 2007, https://www.votoenblanco.com/Cuba-el-dia-que-murio-Franco_a1495.html. ↩︎
2. Fraga y Fidel: sin embargo, Documentary, directed by Manuel Fernández Valdés (Bambú Producciones, 2012), 1h 38m. ↩︎
3. Haruko Hosoda, Castro and Franco: The Backstage of Cold War Diplomacy, Routledge Studies in Modern History (Routledge, 2019), 12, 36. ↩︎
4. José Luis Orella, “The Ostpolitik of Francoist Spain,” European Studies Quarterly 46, no. 4 (2017): 98–117, https://doi.org/10.31338/1641-2478pe.4.17.5. ↩︎
5. Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev, New Studies in European History (Cambridge University Press, 2014). ↩︎
6. Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (Modern Library, 2009). ↩︎

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