Relations between Cuba and Spain may be headed for choppy waters after Spain’s conservative Popular Party won elections Sunday, although analysts say neither side is primarily interested in picking a mayor fight.

The PP victory ended nearly eight years of rule by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), often criticized as too friendly to Havana’s communist rulers and insensitive to their human rights abuses.

Asked last week about Cuba, Mariano Rajoy, PP leader and Spain’s next prime minister, declared, “I want democracy. I want freedom. I want human rights. Well, not just me. The whole world wants that.”

Yet his party’s campaign platform barely mentioned Cuba or leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and his speeches on the stump focused largely on Spain’s tough economic crisis and its 20 percent jobless rate.

What’s more, bilateral commerce hit more than $1 billion last year and more than 200 Spanish companies have significant investments in the Caribbean island, many of them in the growing tourism sector.

“I would doubt very much that Cuba would become a priority or even an important issue” for Rajoy, said Joaquin Roy, a Spaniard who heads the European Union Center at the University of Miami. “He has many other concerns.”

“I also don’t believe that Raúl (Castro) and his people would have any interest in starting something with the new Spanish government. Raúl also has other important things to do,” added Roy.

Castro is in the midst of a politically risky campaign to overhaul Cuba’s feeble economy by chopping back public spending, allowing more private enterprise and attracting more foreign investments.

Cuba’s government-controlled news media on Monday reported Rajoy’s victory relatively straight-forward, not attacking the PP but noting that the PSOE lost because it wandered away from its socialist principles.

Yet others argue that turbulence in bilateral relations would be inevitable if Rajoy tries to put even slightly stronger pressure on the traditionally thin-skinned Cuban government to improve its human rights record.

“It will not be easy for the Popular Party to carry out a minimally cordial relationship … due to the Castros’ historical predisposition against any government that questions them,” noted the blog Diario de Cuba (Cuban Diary).

One point of conflict could be Castro’s harsh anti-corruption campaign, which already has put several foreign businessmen in jail. A Spanish lawyer who represents several enterprises with offices in Havana said some of his clients are concerned that now they will be singled out for investigations.

Havana human rights activist Elizardo Sánchez said Spain’s policy toward Cuba under the PP must change “because lamentably, the policy designed by the (PSOE) government … failed.”

Under outgoing PSOE Primer Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain persuaded the 27-nation European Union to lift the sanctions imposed on Cuba after it jailed 75 peaceful dissidents in 2003.

But it failed in several attempts to push the EU to lift its “Common Position,” adopted in 1996 to link EU relations with Havana to Cuba’s human rights record.

Zapatero also agreed to receive about 115 political prisoners and hundreds of their relatives, released over the past year by Castro after unprecedented talks with Catholic Cardinal Jaime Ortega, and increased cultural and academic exchanges.

Rajoy’s government should now retain “the positive elements of the people-to-people exchanges,” Diario de Cuba added, and adopt a new “manifest solidarity toward the internal dissidence and respect for exiles.”

Dissident Guillermo Fariñas said he was “very happy” with Rajoy’s victory and hoped Spain would provide more assistance to the Cuban opposition, as it did under Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, a Popular Party member defeated by the PSOE in 2004.

The PSOE government was “an accomplice of the Cuban dictatorship,” Fariñas added by telephone from his home in Cuba.

In Miami, the Cuban American National Foundation said the Spanish embassy in Havana should quickly start allowing Cuban dissidents to use its Internet facilities so they can communicate with the outside world.

Ladies in White leader Berta Soler praised the embassy for its warm treatment of dissidents under Zapatero, but added that she hoped that under Rajoy it would return to the even better levels of the Aznar government.

“That was a government that truly saw and watched over the problems that exist in Cuba,” Soler added, “with the Cubans on the streets, with the opposition groups, with the human rights groups.”