COLUMN ONE : ’92 Shines Spotlight on Spain : Olympics and Expo promise to be great shows. But government scandals, a sluggish economy and concern about the future cast a long shadow.

Virgilio Zapatero smiles an author’s smile of pride and conviction.

“It’s the greatest show on Earth,” he says softly.

Zapatero is the government minister coordinating the most elaborate fiesta in Spanish history. This is Spain’s year: Espana ‘92, nickname for a national dream.

Celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage west, Spain is hosting a nationwide, world-involving, multibillion-dollar advertisement-for-myself highlighted by a world’s fair in Seville, the Summer Olympics in Barcelona and culture by the carload in Madrid.

Espana ’92 amounts to a gigantic coming-out party for a nation that has belatedly vaulted barriers of mind and mountains to become a full-fledged partner with the rest of Western Europe after centuries of introspection.

“This is our calling card for the end of the century,” Zapatero said.

It should be a great parade. But some rain may fall.

On the eve of the party, there is consternation as well as exhilaration, distraction and criticism mixed in the fresh concrete. Political, economic and security concerns figure in. Many Spaniards seem more preoccupied with tomorrow’s challenges than with yesterday’s glory or today’s jubilee.

“It is a time for old memories and new demands. We will look backward and forward at the same time in ‘92,” said Luis Fajardo, a Socialist who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee in Spain’s Chamber of Deputies.

One major cloud on the Espana ’92 horizon is a series of scandals that have sapped popular confidence in the government of Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez as it makes ready to welcome the world.

A nominal Socialist who has stoked Spain’s boom with unabashed free-marketeering, Gonzalez has been in power 10 years and must call new elections by 1993. Although the opposition can muster no challenger to match his charisma, Gonzalez, who turned 51 this month, has lost his squeaky-clean image--and perhaps some of his drive.

Opposition political parties and Spanish newspapers attack the venality, thievery and influence-peddling of some of Gonzalez’s ministers. They complain about his frequent absences from Parliament and ask if domestic affairs have begun to bore him: Gonzalez has made 108 official visits abroad but only 30 within Spain.

Critics such as the conservative newspaper ABC lament “the enormous gaps between expectations aroused and performance achieved.” Amid widespread disenchantment with his leadership, Gonzalez dresses for the ball aware that its result will bulk large in Spain’s political future.

After a decade of breakneck modernization, the Spanish economy is sluggish this fiesta year. Growth estimates of about 2.5% are about half boom level. Public services lag far below European standards, and high prices bite at Spanish consumers and workers.

Strikes dot the jubilee landscape: Madrid was without city bus service for nearly all of February, and on some snowy days subway workers struck as well.

Many business people focus less on ’92 fun than on how much fizz Spain will have for its ’93 appointment with a frontier-free Europe. Inflation is about 6% despite tight money and high interest. Unemployment, estimated at 15%--the European Community’s highest--should rise along with the loss of thousands of coal-mining and steel-making jobs in northern Spain next year, when EC rules require an end to government subsidies to flagging industries.

“The really important thing about this year is the one that follows. Transition to a fully open market could be trouble economically. There are many areas in which we are not competitive,” said Pedro Ruiz Nicoli, an advertising agency owner, reflecting the concerns of his clients.

Security bulks large in Spain’s three-ring circus: Seville, Barcelona, Madrid. Basque terrorists threaten to crash the party. They pose a small threat to the celebrations themselves but a potential black eye to Spain’s international image. “The sites will be safe, but we may not be able to stop them planting a bomb in some village 40 kilometers away,” said Augustin Valladolid, spokesman for the Interior (Police) Ministry.

Basque grievances, like Spain’s urge to celebrate this year, are deeply rooted. Indeed, in context, what underlies all the Espana ’92 pizazz is history.

“A 500th anniversary is either a historic moment or it is nothing,” said Miguel Herrero Rodriguez de Minon, a leader of the conservative opposition to Gonzalez.

There is history as history--and history as pretext.

For Spain, 1492 was a year that shaped all those that followed. Columbus opened the door to a New World that would include a vast Spanish America. Even if Columbus the explorer was also Columbus the exploiter, he remains a proud symbol for most Spaniards.

“I think we can celebrate the anniversary without falling into either triumphalism or masochism,” commentator Fernando Savater said.

At home in 1492, Spanish armies finally ousted the Moors after a seven-century occupation, confirming Spain’s future as a Western, Roman Catholic country. That same year, the nation expelled the Jews at the behest of the Inquisition, a cruelty for which Spanish King Juan Carlos I will tacitly apologize as part of Espana ’92 in a speech to Jewish leaders.

The king is a ceremonial figure, but he was decisive in quelling an abortive coup attempt against a shallow-rooted democracy in 1981. Today, in fact, amid the give-and-take of a vigorous democracy, it is sometimes easy to forget that until only yesterday--as history is measured--a dictator named Franco ruled an isolated and backward Spain.

Post-Franco Spain came late and poor, but fast and earnest, to the European Community in 1986. Today, 70% of its trade is with the Community, where it is the fifth-largest economy after Germany, France, Britain and Italy.

“Spain has long been known by cliches: vino , toros ,” Zapatero said. “They are not wrong, but there is also more. We have changed--become a modern country--in ways not always easily seen from afar.”

Spaniards’ income is now 78% of the Community’s average wage, up 5% in as many years. The cheap, drowsing-in-the-sun Spain is history.

As Espana ’92 visitors will learn to their dismay, one of the economic problems today is the over-valued peseta: In 1984, a dollar bought 190 pesetas; today, it buys around 100 pesetas, and they don’t travel far. A construction boom is ending, but the asking price for one nice-enough-but-no-palace townhouse half an hour from Madrid is still $375,000.

Spanish newspapers claim with a mixture of horror and nationalistic pride that good restaurants charge more in Madrid than in Tokyo. Lunch still drags on into evening, and nobody thinks of dinner before 10 p.m., but there is more stress today than there was in an earlier Spain, when most things were put off until manana . There has been an alarming increase in the incidence of heart disease.

Francisco Franco, the strait-laced old generalissimo, has been gone 17 years, but in terms of political legacy he might never have existed. In that fact beats the spiritual heart of Espana ’92.

“Democracy is as well established in Spain by now as in any other European country. There is no alternative to it and no doubt of its future,” Herrero said.

Among the elements of Espana ‘92, the Summer Olympics in Barcelona will rivet Americans most. But the world’s fair, or Universal Exposition, in Seville counts most to Spanish organizers.

In Spanish eyes, the two sweaty weeks starting July 25 in Catalonia pale before the 165 days, starting April 20, of an Expo involving 110 nations in Andalusia that planners hope will draw millions. Among them: the presidents of all the world’s Spanish-speaking nations for a July summit presided over by King Juan Carlos.

For those who prefer more subtle spectaculars, Madrid features art and music as Europe’s cultural capital this year. Nearly everything else that happens, bike races to chess championships to bullfights, will also echo the Espana ’92 theme.

At one level, Expo is already a success. The Spanish government has pumped about $10 billion into Andalusia to get ready for it. Most of it comes in the form of infrastructural improvements--airports, highways, trains, bridges, telecommunications--for the Spanish south, the least developed part of the country and the one from which Felipe Gonzalez hails.

Expo itself, featuring exhibits from 110 countries and 63 specially built pavilions, is a spectacular that is also a spectacular gamble. Official estimates are that 18 million visitors will come for a show running until Oct. 12, Columbus Day.

Zapatero, for one, says he will be satisfied with 15 million visitors, enough for Expo to break even. In deference to the crowds and the heat--Seville summer temperatures often exceed 100 degrees--the show will be open 19 hours a day, until 4 in the morning. Night may be the best time to visit.

There is sharp criticism of what one editorial writer denounced as the “Pharaonic public works” associated with Expo. A new bullet train between Madrid and Seville cost $4 billion. The government says it is the proud first leg of a state-of-the-art system that will eventually link Spain with the rest of Europe. Critics call it a white elephant and say the money would have been better spent upgrading the rest of the largely antiquated national rail network.

When fire destroyed one of the landmark Expo pavilions last month as it was nearing completion, not everybody was sympathetic.

“The Expo show window reflects the true Spain,” thundered editor Pedro J. Ramirez in the newspaper El Mundo. “It is a Spain in which a building that cost hundreds of millions of pesetas is destroyed before it can be inaugurated. It is the same Spain that has the greatest number of construction accidents in all of Europe, the one that inaugurates an Olympic Stadium with holes in the roof . . . the one that sees new freeways full of imperfections . . . the one that speculates with public monies or wastes it. . . .”

Espana ’92 is probably this country’s greatest national undertaking since the expulsion of the Moors. Whether the message of Spain’s new world is played to international applause remains to be seen. For the moment, at least, amid hammering hard hats and pummeling critics, Espana ’92 bobs uneasily in a trough between audacity and opening-night butterflies.