Viva España

I'm still readjusting to being home after two weeks in Spain, and since today is Columbus Day and I started the week with a nod to Indigenous Peoples' Day, Snapback Saturday kicks off with a couple of holiday photos.

The statue of Christopher Columbus in Barcelona points not to the New World, but to Africa. That's the direction of the harbor there; to point toward the Americas, he'd have to point across the whole Iberian peninsula.

Columbus's tomb is in Seville Cathedral, majestically held above everyone's heads by this quartet of giant kings. The thing is, there's hardly any Christopher Columbus in there — just a few ounces of his remains.

Columbus died in the Spanish city of Valladolid in 1506 and was buried there until his son Diego decided to have his daddy moved to Seville. Fifty years after Christopher Columbus originally landed somewhere in the Bahamas, someone decided to dig him up again and ship him off to the Cathedral of Santa Maria la Menor in Santo Domingo in what is now the Dominican Republic.

There he rested until the French took over Hispaniola in 1795, whereupon his remains got to spend the next century in Cuba. He was sent packing yet again when the U.S. wrested Cuba from Spanish control in the Spanish-American War, and has been in that ornate tomb in Seville ever since.

Unless he's still in the Dominican Republic. Somebody found a box of bones in a box inscribed "El ilustre y excelente hombre, Don Colón, Almirante del Mar del Océano," which appeared to be a reference to Christopher Columbus; so they built a Columbus Lighthouse tomb for him there. Of course, Diego Columbus was also Almirante del Mar del Océano, so maybe that's a box of Junior's bones.

But this is supposed to be a blog about editorial cartoons, so I've got this one to share with you. The Casa Natal de Picasso in Málaga has a book open to this cartoon in a display case. "The Fat and the Skinny," appearing in El Pais de la Olla ("Land of the Saucepan") isn't a work by Picasso or of his father, whose paintings outnumber those of his more famous son in this museum. The cartoon dates from 1882 or '83 and satirizes the insensitivity of Málaga politicians to the plight of the poor.

This magazine cover, however, features a Pablo Picasso sketch on the cover of a Paris magazine among the master's artifacts.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: I have seldom had an excuse to draw editorial cartoons about Spanish politics. The above cartoon from 2008 mocks Queen Sofía for announcing her opposition to marriage equality. Queen Consort since the 2014 abdication of her husband, King Juan Carlos I, her opinion of marriage equality carries even less weight today than it did then.

The Spanish government legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, becoming only the third country in the world to do so (after Netherlands and Belgium). The cause was one of the very first priorities of the Socialist Party government of Prime Minister José Ruíz Rodríguez Zapatero, elected the previous year, and earned the support of 66% of the Spanish electorate over vociferous opposition from the Vatican.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., marriage equality was the law of the land only in Massachusetts, whereas thirteen other states had passed referenda to amend their constitutions to define marriage as an exclusively different-sex privilege.

When I took a college class in Spanish history, the overarching theme was that violent resistance to progress has always won out since the days of Ferdinand and Isabella. Granted, I took that course a few short years after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but the prospect of Spain taking the lead in marriage equality is truly a stunning development in historical context.

Spain's Constitutional Court upheld marriage equality in 2012, which has remained unchallenged ever since.