The grand Fiesta Nacional parade in sunny Madrid!

MADRID, Spain – Who says that "Filipino Time" means we Pinoys always come late? This Pinoy – Saluyot from up north, really – made it on time to the big Fiesta Nacional (October 12) celebration in Madrid. I hopped on the KLM flight from NAIA-1 to Schipol Airport in the Netherlands on Tuesday night. Winging through the night, racing with the dawn, our Boeing-777 got to Amsterdam at 4:30 on a wet, dark morning.

The flight to Madrid took off at seven a.m. We landed at the Barajas International Airport two hours and 40 minutes later, about 9:40 a.m. Friendly immigration officers barely checked my passport, the Customs (Douanes) never even gave a cursory glance at my luggage cart – and outside was our hermano, Jose "Pepe" Rodriguez with an umbrella (the weather forecasters had decreed a week of rain), but it was blue and sunny outside.

Without ceremony, we took a taxicab which cost less than 25 euros from Barajas to my hotel on the Plaza de las Cortes in central Madrid.

We passed by the huge Atocha Station which on March 10 last year had been the scene of horrible carnage, when that equally sunny Thursday morning knapsack bombs laid by Islamic terrorists had shredded four trains in central Atocha itself, in nearby El Pozo and the Santa Eugenia track. Those 11 blast killed 199 commuters in the initial explosions of Goma 2 explosives. Another two died later in hospital, among the 1,300 injured, bringing the final toll to 201. I had arrived, by coincidence, the night before and, since the blasts occurred not far from my hotel, we dashed over to the carnage of Zona Cero. Ambulances piling up, dead and body parts all over. Stunned and universal grief.

Now Atocha is peaceful, even its graceful interior garden restored.

Nothing, however, erased the memory of that dreadful day. The atrocity and clumsy Partido Popular attempts at cover-up probably caused the fall of the government party in the elections which followed the next Sunday, bringing the underdog PSOE Socialists to power. The new Socialist President, cum Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero promptly recalled 1,300 Spanish peacekeeping troops his predecessor Jose Ma. Aznar had sent to Iraq to join the Bush & Blair "Coalition of the Willing" in toppling Saddam Hussein and bringing "democracy" to Baghdad – an attempt now being discomfited by daily terrorist bombings in which more fellow Muslims are slain than enemy infidels.

But that’s war. It’s hell.

As for the Muslim terrorists, which the Zapatero government has perforce been tracking down, they were far from appeased by the troop recall. They planned more bombings which, this time, were effectively frustrated. Spain remains on the alert.

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Last Wednesday morning, however, it was a glorious day for the National Fiesta, which used to be called in true Castillian hauteur the Dia de la Raza (Day of the Race) until the name became politically incorrect. This year, Madrid attempted to sound even less chauvinistic. Instead of proclaiming it just a Dia Nacional, it dubbed the celebration the Dia IberoAmericano – commemorating the links between Madre España and its former Empire in South America, an Hispanic bond which can never be eradicated. To punctuate this idea, 125 officers and men from 18 Latin American nations proudly bearing their flags participated in the parade (only Cuba declined to join).

I wonder why our Filipinas hadn’t been invited to join the ejercitos from the former Spanish colonies, but I suppose we’re considered something of a colony of Hollywood, and, I hope not, a possibly satrapy of China. Perish the thought. For better or worse, we Filipinos have drank too deeply from the Spanish Well. More than our patronyms, that nectar has been imbibed so thoroughly that, deny it though some might, it is part and parcel of our national soul.

This is why I rushed to Spain, perhaps, to demonstrate this solidarity. It is why I’m happy I got here on National Day. Our Spanish "connection" is our strength, not our weakness. No Indio could have been bravo without such spiritual underpinnings.

Even our great men who hungered and fought for freedom from Spanish colonial tyranny and the tyranny of the Friar monopoly loved Spain and things Spanish, heroes like Jose Rizal, Juan and Antonio Luna, M.H. Del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, even Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Aguinaldo. Bonifacio, which we try to dub a great Plebeian, read most of his books in Spanish, even those tracts of the French revolution and the novels of Alexandre Dumas which inspired him. As for the rest, their Spanish classical educations imparted to them the understanding of life and love which propelled them to greatness.

A journey to Spain is voyage into our past. Everything is reminiscent. Everything is familiar. Their churros, Chocolate like those we sampled yesterday in the Chocolateria San Gines just off Plaza Mayor; their cigars, their gestures and their emotions, at times over-impulsive and irrational, are akin to our own. The place names roll off the tongue with the familiarity of our own appellations of our hometowns and barrios.

Yesterday we strolled by the Hotel Ingles four blocks from my hotel on Echagaray Street, a narrow but charming lane in which you’ll find a commemorative plaque in the lobby. Rizal didn’t sleep here, but here he spent a lot of time, chatting, giving talks. The hotel plaque recalls that in its lobby Rizal had delivered his memorable speech on June 25, 1884, launching the Propaganda Movement, also praising the works of Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo.

Down the same street stands the pub, Los Gabrieles where Rizal and his friends used to while away the hours over coffee, also the Valdepeñas wines of La Mancha, the smooth Anis, and those still incomparable Riojas wines.

Madrid, truly, is a city of our heart. We may have "lost" our Spanish, but not our Spanish spirit. Even in our most grievous faults.

There is a grandeur to Spain which mingles with Spain’s other self: indolence, hedonism and lack of discipline to characterize what we call Hispanic. How else could such a tiny nation have burst out of the mists of history and wrest from so many continents one of the greatest empires the world has seen, an adventure so vast that little Spain and even tinier Portugal had to call on the Pope to demarcate which half of the world should belong to the Spaniards and which half to the Portuguese. (Portuguese Macau now belongs to China and makes even more money as a gambling paradise).

Where has the empire gone? Its banners are in the dust, but it lives on eternally in the hearts of hundreds of millions – including ours.

Madre España! So mighty was the pride engendered by our Spanish "mother" that, in time, like our Latin American brothers, we were capable of rejecting the womb which nursed us – to go forth into the world on our own, defiant, sometimes discouraged and disappointed, but deep down, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance Don Quijote and his perplexed squire Sancho Panza, ready to go on tilting with windmills and conquering armies of sheep.

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Spain is today one of the most dynamic and prosperous countries of the European Union, no longer the spurned Iberia "where Africa begins."

However, North Africans and Africans, mostly Muslim, continue to press for entry through Spain’s porous borders by land and sea. Last weekend, about 30,000 African "immigrants" were poised to launch their bid to enter Europe via Spanish territory (from Algeria, through Morocco). And there are only 10,000 policemen between them and their threatening surge into Ceuta and Melilia.

Spain is ever conscious of incursion from Africa. In the year 711 C.E. (A.D.), some ten thousand Muslim invaders from North Africa succeeded in mounting a surprising conquest of 5 million in the Iberian peninsula. They implanted the first, and last, Islamic state on mainland Europe.

Spain was thus divided for almost eight centuries between the Muslim south in Andalus and the Christian north.

Finally, pushing relentlessly south, the Christian kingdoms overwhelmed the final Moorish kingdom of Granada. True enough, a very high civilization had been fostered and brought to an admirable peak by the Iberian Muslims – science flourished, universities sprouted, the economy and cultural life flowered.

The capital of the Emirate, Cordoba (where the great Mosque is now a Church) boasted a 400,000 book library containing more volumes than all Christian Europe combined.

In the end, though, Christian forces prevailed.

The tide is pressing northward once more. Spain, once again, stands firm at the frontier.

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What’s there to say? The jets flew overhead last Wednesday – squadrons of Mirage fighters, Phantoms, Boeing Stratofortress bombers, buzzing helicopters, demonstrated Spain’s aerial preparedness.

Tank units, mobile rocket launchers, armored battalions trundled by. Then came the snappy marches – Infantry, Marines, Sky troops, white shirted mountain brigades – and, most applauded of all, La Legion (the Spanish foreign legion) whose slogan is "Los novios de la Muerte." (The Lovers of Death).

Viva España!