A comedy show in Spain recently featured the ghost of General Francisco Franco berating Fidel Castro of Cuba for taking early retirement.

“You are a shame to your profession,” Franco railed. “Real dictators don’t retire, they hang on till the bitter end. If I had retired, think of all the things that would have been left undone – all those death sentences that would not have been executed.”

Thirty-two years after Franco’s death, the man who ruled Spain for 40 years is today an object of mirth, rather than fear or admiration. A generation of Spaniards has grown up without him. But the old dictator still has a habit of popping up unexpectedly. “Franco fix cost Sir Cliff the Euro,” blared The Sun, a British tabloid, in a headline this week. “Sir Cliff Richard was cheated out of success in the Eurovision song contest in 1968 after Spanish fascist dictator Franco rigged the vote,” it explained.

According to a documentary aired in Spain, Franco sent television producers and music companies across Europe to buy support for Massiel’s “La, la, la”, Spain’s 1968 Eurovision entry, which beat Mr Richard’s “Congratulations” by just one vote. “Franco’s regime was desperate to improve its image abroad,” Montse Fernández, the programme’s director, says. “If you review the newscasts of the period, you see how the regime transformed Massiel into a national heroine. The fiestas in her honour were excessive for a song contest award.”

Ms Fernández’s documentary – a look at Spain in 1968 – had more surprises. She suggests that Spain, in the twilight years of Franco’s dictatorship, was already rebelling against his rule. Like the cobblestone-throwing youths in Paris, Spanish university students staged protests from Barcelona to Santiago de Compostela – and were brutally repressed.

In a country where in 1968 condoms were banned, homosexuality a criminal offence and women required the authorisation of their father or husband to open a bank account, today’s Spain would make Franco turn in his grave. Condoms come in lots of flavours, gays can marry and women – nine of them – are a majority in José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero Socialist cabinet.

But it would be a mistake to infer that Franco’s long rule left no after effects. The dictator may be the butt of jokes, but his legacy is still the object of fierce controversy. Mr Zapatero caused a brouhaha last year with a law that paid homage to Franco’s victims and the 1936-39 civil war dead. Mr Zapatero, who is 47, was a teenager when Franco died. He therefore feels no qualms about digging up the past. The generation of his parents, however, would rather let bygones be bygones.

Even though Sir Cliff, at 67, is of the latter generation, he is not so willing to let the past rest. Aware of his own mixed – and much mocked – musical legacy, he told the British media: “I’d be quite happy to be able to say I won Eurovision ’68. It’s an impressive date in the calendar these days.”

The writer is the FT’s Madrid bureau chief