a When I lived in Manhattan, opened a checking account at Citibank on Park Avenue with 32. Without even looking at the passport, the employee wrote automatically the window next to my name, country, Mexico. a Even the Barcelona Olympics, the Americans did not begin to know in small doses that Spain was in Europe, a continent that does not impress them as a whole. Americans spend so much of what happens beyond its borders to the finals League Baseball World Series and call him the winner of the NBA it as world champion. a Therefore, neither bothered me years ago in Seattle, explain that Spain was no South American republic. I worried a little when someone, presumably aware, I said: A-You, of course, were allies of France during World War II. . .

a I was stunned and I managed to reply only: A-Well, no. Spain has not participated in large international disputes. Our specialty is killing us from ourselves why we are dedicated rather to the civil wars. a Before they said my interlocutor, added: "A-" By the way: our last foreign war was precisely against you on account of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. But that one hundred years ago. A-You are kidding me. A-Absolutely not.

And know, for peace of mind that you won that war. a None of us remember such a conflict that, if anything, our great grandparents lived. But there is, in the collective unconscious, the looming loss of the last remaining Spanish colonial imperialism to the then emerging.