HAVANA: Latin Americans are lining up in droves these days at Spain’s consular offices around the region as they seek citizenship under a new Spanish law that makes close to a million of them eligible.
Even Cuban President Fidel Castro meets the criteria for gaining Spanish citizenship. Although Latin America’s most famous leftist is unlikely to apply, many of his people are hoping to use their ancestry to gain the coveted European passport.
Cuban descendants of Spanish immigrants are not the only ones dusting off the birth certificates and baptism records of their parents and grandparents to lay claim to this new right.
Thousands of people have been lining up in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela and other countries, a reflection of the hard times the region is going through.
Spain’s nationality law was amended effective from January 9 to allow people of all ages to become citizens if one of their parents was a Spaniard born in Spain, when before only those under 20 could apply.
The grandchildren of Spaniards born in Spain also will have the opportunity to become citizens, but they must first obtain visas to live in Spain for a year.
Spanish officials have estimated that close to one million people would be eligible to apply, although they do not expect all of them to do so.
Castro, at 76, would have no problem under the new law gaining citizenship. The Cuban leader’s father left Ancara, in the Spanish province of Lugo, at the end of the 19th century to seek his fortune on the Caribbean island, a colony of Spain for hundreds of years.
ESCAPE FROM NATIONS IN TURMOIL: Like Castro’s father, millions of Spaniards at the end of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century crossed the Atlantic in search of a better life in Spain’s former American colonies.
“This new law was born out of the recognition of Spanish immigration to Latin America” said a Spanish consul official, asking that his name not be used.
Some commentators have also suggested the law is intended to improve the chances that future immigrants to Spain, which has experienced an influx from north Africa, share its language and culture.
It could also help address the wrongs suffered by Spaniards forced into exile by the dictator General Francisco Franco, who ruled the country from 1936 until 1975.
Many Spanish immigrants went to prosperous Argentina in the first half of 20th century. Now an estimated 400,000 of their offspring and grandchildren, spurred by the crisis there, could cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction.
More than 50 per cent of Argentina’s 36 million inhabitants live in poverty and the unemployment rate is 17.8 per cent.
The Spanish government estimates that in addition to the 400,000 potential candidates in Argentina, there are 100,000 in Mexico, the majority relatives of exiles from the Spanish civil war of the late 1930s. An estimated 100,000 Venezuelans are also eligible, along with 80,000 in Brazil, a similar number in Cuba, 60,000 in Chile and 50,000 in Uruguay.
Long queues have formed at Spain’s embassy in Havana, a busy place even before this year. To leave the Caribbean island, Cuban citizens must seek the government’s permission.
The Cuban government has made no comment on the programme.—Reuters