St. Augustine in spotlight as top leaders attend US-Spain Council
More of a historic powerhouse than an economic or political one, St. Augustine has a good bit of the world’s attention on all those fronts this week with a royal visit and as host of the U.S.-Spain Council.
With St. Augustine celebrating its 450th year as a European-settled city, King Felipe VI of Spain made the city part of his first official visit as king to the United States.
For the same reason — and to include the king — the honorary chairman of the U.S.-Spain Council, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), made sure the council met in St. Augustine this year.
Even before he was officially made chairman, Kaine said he was working to make sure it would take place in St. Augustine in the year of its milestone anniversary. Kaine said he’s been in discussions with former Mayor Joe Boles and current Mayor Nancy Shaver to make it happen.
“I said, ‘Look my goal is I want to bring the U.S.-Spain Council meeting in 2015 and have it kind of match up with what you’re doing,’” Kaine said, referring to the 450th commemoration. “They just said, ‘Great.’ And the whole town apparatus has worked with us in just a magnificent way. Everybody here has made it easy.”
Kaine stressed the importance of the council’s impact on business and political relations with Spain. It’s important enough for the king to participate — at least in the opening ceremony.
And it’s important enough for some of both countries’ biggest business leaders to participate.
“We have major American companies that do an incredible amount of business in Spain,” Kaine said. “Virtually every major defense contractor ... they have major business in Spain. It’s the 15th-largest economy in the world.
“We meet once a year and we have really substantive topics and really substantive speakers about things we can work on together.”
While the meetings will be today at the World Golf Village Renaissance, the kickoff dinner was Friday at Flagler College.
Kaine and King Felipe addressed the audience, which included Sen. Bill Nelson, Gov. Rick Scott and former Sen. Bob Graham, who is also a former chairman.
The king’s speech and attendance at the dinner was the last major event for him and wife Queen Letizia during their official visit.
King Felipe took the opportunity to talk about St. Augustine’s history and even referred to historian Michael Gannon’s assessment of St. Augustine’s historical importance: “While Jamestown was being founded, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal.”
Mostly, he talked about the cooperation between the Spaniards and the Americans.
“In an increasingly interconnected world, where threats are global, how we address them must also be global,” the king said. “The best guarantee for our security lies in our capacity to cooperate, in our solidarity, in our capacity to forge alliances.”
Both King Felipe and Kaine talked about the Spanish language, something that isn’t always embraced in this country.
Kaine, who speaks fluent Spanish, talked before the dinner about the fact that founders of this country were Spanish speakers.
“We’re living in a Hispanic moment in the United States right now,” he said. “It’s good to remind people it’s not new. St. Augustine tells us it’s not new. To be American is to be Hispanic. A lot of people don’t think about it that way. While we are living in this Hispanic moment, we really feel like the work of the U.S.-Spain Council can build better relationships, better commerce.”
King Felipe spoke at Miami Dade College on Thursday, calling Miami a “fascinating bilingual city.” An Associated Press story mentioned a moment when he spoke of someone who is “no-lingual” and treats their mother tongue like a foreign language.
“All of us, together, could make it possible for these ‘no-linguals’ to not feel deprived of a cultural heritage, since their situation between two languages gives them access to two infinitely rich worlds. Those of Miguel de Cervantes and of William Shakespeare,” he said.
On Friday night, King Felipe again brought up the topic of language.
“The expansion of the Spanish language is another field open to creativity and innovation,” he said. “This is not only because this language is the vehicle for different forms of artistic expression, which are becoming increasingly popular here in the U.S.A., but also because the Internet is undoubtedly the great forum of our times, where communication and information are being reinvented on a daily basis.”
King Felipe, who used Spanish and English in all of his prepared addresses Friday, came back around to the significant history that ties his country to St. Augustine — and by extension, to the United States overall.
“The past can be a point of encounter, because it gives us good reasons to promote a vision of the future like the one we have ahead for our two great nations,” he said.
