To his opponents he always was a dinosaur from the Franco regime. He was a keen follower of Carl Schmitt's ideas, and granted the German political theorist honorary membership to the Institute of Political Studies in 1962, in a ceremony where he praised him as a "revered master". Fraga identified himself with the figure of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in 1976 for the first time; this idea of identification between Cánovas and Fraga was reinforced by historiographical trends close to Fraga in the 1980s in order to commend his figure. Despite their political differences, he developed a close friendship with Fidel Castro, himself of Galician descent, who met with Fraga in Galicia during a visit to Spain in 1992.