Amb Robert R. Gosende Keynote Speech for the 50th Anniversary of the Fulbright Commission in Spain

(with many thanks to Ambassador Gosende for authorizing the posting of his speech)


Madame Minister, the Hon. Angeles Gonzales-Sinde (and a Fulbright Alumnae)

Sr. Rafael Rodrigo, President of the National Scientific Research Council

Sr. Calrlos Alberdi, Director for Cultural and Scientific Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Sr. Arnold Chacon, Charge d'Affaires, U.S. Embassy, Madrid

Sr. Thomas Genton, Cournselor for Press and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Embassy, Madrid
(and my very dear friend and colleague!)

Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is my great pleasure to be with you this evening. You should know that I owe this distinction to the Comision-Fulbright Executive Director here in Madrid, Maria Jesus Pablos. Maria Jesus and I met some years ago when she first became the Executive Director here and when I was just beginning my service in Washington in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. Part of my responsibility in that position was to work closely with the Fulbright Executive Directors around the world and there was no more effective Executive Director than Maria Jesus. We worked together for some three years then and have enjoyed a great professional relationship ever since. She is perhaps the strongest of all assets here in Madrid insofar as good relations between Spain and the United States are concerned.

Yo naci en Estados Unidos de padres imigrantes. Mi madre imigro a Estados Unidos desde Escocia y mi padre desde Galicia. Mi padre nacio en mil ochocientos noventa y quatro en una aldea llamada Angueira de Castro, en el distrito Rois. Mi padre decidio emigrar cuando mi abuelo y el no se pusieron de acuerdo sobre los estudios de mi padre en el seminario en Santiago. El hable esudiado seis anos en el seminario sin haber recibido la llamade de Dios, pero no lograba convencer a mi abuelo de que no deberia haceerse sacerdote. (I sometimes say that my father emmigrated from Spain because of religious persecution BUT this persecution was at the hands of my grandfather!) Decidio emigrar a Cuba en la vispera del inicio de la primera guerra mundial. Fue a Massachusetts a encontrarse con dos de sus hermanos que ya habla emigrado a Estados Unidos. Mis padres se conocieron y casoron en Springfield, Massachusetts. Yo naci en el mil novecientos treinta y seis.

Mi padre murio relativamente joven y perdimos el contacto con la familia en Espana y este ano he pasado de trener solo un parente de sangre viviendo en Estados Unidos, mi hermano, a tener ahora trece primos hermanos viviendo en Galicia. Es para mi una gran alegria haber descubierto una familia tan carinosa y maravillosa.

I was born in the United States of immigrant parents. My mother emigrated to the U.S. from Scotland and my father from Galicia. He was born in 1894 in an aldea called Angueira de Castro in the district of Rois. My father decided to emigrate from Galicia when he and my grandfather could not come to agreement about my father’s study at the Seminary in Santiago. He studied at the Seminary for six years but really did not hear a calling to the priesthood but he could not convince my grandfather of this. He decided to leave for Cuba just before the outbreak of World War I in 1913. He stayed there for some eight years, establishing a small business, until the financial system in Cuba collapsed in 1920. He then joined two of his brothers, my Uncles Manuel and Jose, who had already emigrated to the U.S. He and my mother met and married in Springfield, Massachusetts. I was born in 1936 and my younger brother in 1939. My father died in 1951 at a relatively early age and contact with our family in Spain was lost at that time only to be reestablished over the past eighteen months. So in these past eighteen months I have gone from having one blood relative in the U.S., my brother, to now having thirteen living first cousins in Galicia. My cup runneth over with this warm and wonderful newly-discovered family!

But perhaps a word or two on my wife and me would be in order. We grew up and were educated in Massachusetts. We began our overseas careers in 1963 when we joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts on a project to establish a senior secondary school for women in the Eastern region of Uganda. John F. Kennedy, a Massachusetts native son, had been elected President of the U.S. in 1960 and in his inaugural address he inspired our generation of young Americans, most especially Mary Beth and me, to,”ask not what your country can do for you but rather what you can do for your country.” We took this very much to heart and we went to teach in Uganda – an idyllic country at that time.

The election of Barack Obama last year harks back to the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy in many ways. We now have a new young President elected with the overwhelming support of young Americans who brings to the Presidency the perspective of a person who spent part of this youth in Indonesia and who has a grandmother who lives on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya. But, most of all, President Obama looks out upon the world and its nations in a spirit of collaboration and partnership.

We were in Uganda well before the corruption and terror that would scourge that land and its people had begun. We stayed there for three wonderful years and then decided that we did not want to go back to the U.S. but rather to join the diplomatic service of our country. We subsequently worked in Tripoli, Libya; Mogadishu, Somalia; Pretoria and Cape Town, South Africa; Warsaw, Poland; then once again in South Africa and Somalia before completing our overseas diplomatic service in Moscow, the capital of the Russian Federation. Our diplomatic service encompassed the whole of the 60’s and the African independence movement through the end of the Cold War and into the post-Cold War era with the emergence of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe into mainstream European political existence.

Our lives as international educators have been full of challenge and opportunity working, sometimes under difficult conditions but all the while with some of the most interesting and competent people on earth. We watched Poland emerge into Western culture once again. We witnessed the monumental transformation from apartheid to democracy in South Africa. We saw Uganda sink into despair under a brutal dictator only to now begin to rise from that darkness. I was President Clinton’s Special Envoy for Somalia at the height of the humanitarian crisis in that country in the early 1990’s. Somalia is now perhaps the most vivid example of how far civilization can fall. The Horn of Africa is at once the world’s most environmentally degraded region while its population grows at among the fastest rates anywhere. Last month Somali pirates commandeered a ship at sea 800 miles from the country’s coastline. Somalia in its present state of complete collapse is a world problem. All of us have interests in maritime safety off its shores and through the Red Sea. When it became known that Somali pirates commandeered a Saudi oil tanker last year, the world market price of oil shot up by $2.00 per gallon overnight.

Finally, at the end of our diplomatic service, between 1995 and 1998, we watched Russia’s emergence from over seventy years of dictatorship.

Throughout my career I have been closely involved with the Fulbright Program. While in Washington that meant working with our Administration and the Congress on support for the program. In other words, working to convince a sometimes skeptical group of elected American officials of the essential vision and necessity for Fulbright. We had a good period during the late 1980’s when the U.S. budget for the program expanded and most recently Congressional interest and support for Fulbright has been on the increase but what is most relevant tonight is that the Government of Spain and Spanish private institutions, especially Spanish banks, have over these past fifty years provided strong support for Spain’s Comision-Fulbright. It is accurate to say that Spain took to heart Senator Fulbright’s vision to a much greater extent than did the United States itself.

And what was that vision? In a debate over the Fulbright budget in the Senate in 1958 the Senator said, “The overriding question before us is whether this nation is prepared to accept the permanent and inescapable responsibilities of having become a major power…..Our national purpose is a process to be advanced…..That process is the defense and expansion of democratic values, the furtherance of which rests ultimately on the wisdom and maturity of judgment, and the moral fiber of a society of free individuals.” But by defending and expanding democratic values Senator Fulbright did not mean the creation of an American empire. On that he said, “The price of empire is America’s soul and that price is too high.”

The Senator had come to such broad vision for the United States as a result of having been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University from 1925-28. He was from Arkansas. He was not an Ivy League college alum but rather a graduate of the University of Arkansas. He said that this experience at Oxford had transformed him. He deeply believed that this kind of transformation needed to be part of the university experience of as many young people as possible. And the numbers who have participated now are truly impressive. These total now in the case of your Comision 7060 scholars: 4240 Spanish and 2420 U.S. Fulbrighters.

These have been over 7000 of Spain and the U.S.´s best and brightest and hardest working people. When Javier Solana traveled to Warsaw in the mid-1990's, the American Ambassador asked him if he was, “by any chance a Fulbrighter” like so many of the new Polish leaders. Mr. Solana answered, “by chance no, I worked like hell for that fellowship.”

And this is most certainly impressive and important for both countries. I work for the State University of New York. We now endeavor to expand our relations with Spanish universities, and as we do so it is of immense value when we discover that our interlocutors are people who have studied in the U.S. and the reverse is true for our Spanish educator colleagues. There is a commonality in our language and understanding.

So Fulbright has taken the lead and laid the groundwork very effectively for those of us who work on academic exchanges between the United States and Spain.

But where does all this leave us now? How is the Fulbright vision relevant for the world in which we find ourselves today? And here I am trying to imagine what the Senator would think about things now. He studied abroad on that Rhodes scholarship as a graduate student completing a Masters Degree at Oxford. The program he established focuses principally on graduate exchanges seeking out the best and the brightest from both Spain and the United States.

But today’s world is very different from the one the Senator left in 1995. Time is now ever-more compressed by our Internet age. Events now tumble into one another with alarming and sometimes terrifying speed and international borders have become virtually irrelevant in today’s world. The movement of people across much of Europe now is virtually unobstructed. And what does this all mean for young people in Spain and the United States? Senator Fulbright, I believe, would now think that the experience that he had as a graduate student needs to be moved vigorously into undergraduate education and that today’s university students need to be sitting in the same classrooms at least for part of their undergraduate experience with students from across the globe. And it would appear that you here in Spain and across Europe agree given the resources that you have devoted to the Erasmus program and its evident success. I venture that the Senator would also think that it is time that we were teaching together – that we should be working quickly to completely internationalize university education.

My father left Spain for Cuba, and then went to the United States. I have always revered my Spanish heritage but I am an American. I speak to you tonight as one. What does all of the change we have seen of late mean for relations between Spain and the United States? And what can this mean for the United States? It is not that I do not care what happens to Spain but rather that I would like you to be aware of and perhaps helpful to the United States through educational and cultural exchange as we try to find our way to a better world together.

Spanish is now spoken by something over 300 hundred million people in the world. Spanish is now the home language of the largest minority of people in my country and that group of people is growing at a faster rate than any other group in the United States.

But are we on our way to becoming a Spanish-speaking country? It does not look as though that will happen. Children of Spanish and Latin American parents in the United States are assimilating rapidly as other immigrant groups have done throughout our history. Is there a chance that we could become a bi-lingual country? Would that make sense for us? Should we, at minimum, be doing a better job at teaching Spanish language and culture in our country? Could improvement and expansion of the educational and cultural relations between Spain and the United States foster such a goal for us? Might this be where The Senator was pointing us by his 20th Century vision? What is our vision for the 21st Century?

I will end with a story that I believe is relevant tonight as we think about vision for educational and cultural exchanges and how important they might be for all of us but in this particular case for my country.

Last year, I was invited to speak to a group of students at the Universidad del las Americas in Puebla, Mexico. The Vice Rector for International Relations, an old friend, warned me that the students were seething over the wall that our country is building along our 1,500-mile border with Mexico. This wall is an outrage. Its cost is beyond belief. It is an insult to our southern neighbor. It is an insult to our country. Some say that if it were to be built with only legal laborers it would take thirty years. So I thought pretty hard about what I would say to the students about the wall and decided that I could only condemn the decision to build it in the first place BUT that changing the attitudes and understandings between people on each side of the Mexican/US border was the responsibility of people on both sides of the border including students at Puebla. We will most certainly tear this wall down but how long will it take for us to wake up to the reality that this is our only choice if we hope to live in peace and prosperity on the North American continent?

And what does this have to do with the relations between Spain and the United States? As you know the U.S. worked tirelessly to assist Europeans to achieve greater unification. We are living in an age when prosperity is the result of greater integration and more permeable borders. Looking at Europe, where national boundaries are porous, we glimpse a path to greater economic and political stability through intense interaction among nations on a continent where one knows one’s neighbors. All of us can remember when it was predicted that the accession of Spain and Portugal into the European Union would spell its demise. And if you examine the reasons set forth the by the naysayers at that time, they were little different from what one hears now about why we need a wall between the United States and Mexico.

So we need your help now with this. These are the kinds of issues we are dealing with in the internationalization of higher education at the Comision-Fulbright and at colleges and universities across the United States and Spain. These are first-order issues in international relations not some minor side-show of diplomacy. Good relations among nations, now more than ever, depend upon how quickly we move vastly increased numbers of our students across our borders so as to prepare them properly to lead our countries and the world in the 21st century.

Gracias por su atencion y por el honor que me han hecho al invitarme a hablar esta noche. Es un momento muy especial para este “fillo de Galicia”!

Thanks for your attention and the great honor you have bestowed on me by inviting me to be your speaker tonight. It is a very special moment for this son of a Galician immigrant!