Four. Puerto Rico, ‘Belonging to, but not part of’
‘Puerto Rico is facing a seventy billion dollar public debt amid a ten year economic crisis.’
‘The poverty rate is a staggering forty five percent. Last year alone, over eight thousand people left for the mainland United States’
‘Puerto Rico has already shut down more than one hundred and fifty schools in the last few years.’
‘Puerto Rico's debt problem has gotten so dire the power authority cut off a hospital that's behind on its bill. The electric power authority did at least wait until surgeries were done for the day today before pulling the plug.’
Various news reports on Puerto Rico
In this chapter I’ll move west of Cuba to look at the US invasion and occupation of the Islands of Puerto Rico. After one hundred and twenty years of that occupation, how have the three and a half million residents of this tropical paradise ended up on the hook for seventy two billion dollars? To understand that, we have to go back to 1898.
‘Do not make peace until we get Porto Rico.’ That’s what Theodore Rosevelt wrote to his partner in imperial crime, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, as Rosevelt was preparing to personally invade Cuba. ‘Porto Rico is not forgotten and we mean to have it’, Lodge replied.
And have it they did! After occupying Cuba and destroying the Spanish navy, a force of sixteen thousand American soldiers landed on July 25th 1898. The United States took formal possession of the Islands during peace negotiations with Spain later that summer. Unlike Cuba, Puerto Rico had no Congressional protection from annexation, and therefore could become a territory of the U.S. ‘Belonging to, but not a part of,’ is how it was described.
Spain had already granted Puerto Rico a Charter of Autonomy the previous year, so the justification for invading Cuba, aiding a war of independence against brutal occupiers, did not apply. The US invasion came just eight days after the first elected government began to function. In other words; Puerto Rico has enjoyed exactly eight days of independence in the past five hundred years.
The motivations for this conquest were commercial, imperial and geo-strategic.
Commercially, Puerto Rico had wealthy sugar growing lands and later became an offshore tax haven.
Imperialistically, Roosevelt and Lodge most likely wanted them just because they were there.
Geo-strategically, the Islands are the most westerly substantial land mass in the Americas, hence why Columbus bumped into them four hundred years before. They are exactly the Islands you would want to own if you have further imperialistic ambitions in Central and South America. Indeed Puerto Rico was pivotal in future US invasions of the Dominican Republic and Panama.
Puerto Rico’s fortunes went from bad to worse, as one of the most devastating hurricanes in recorded history landed in 1899, killing three and a half thousand people and destroying the entire coffee crop. Incidentally, the word hurricane comes to English via Spanish from the indigenous Arawak people of the Caribbean. The Spanish needed a new word to describe storms of such intensity.
The United States then replaced the Spanish Peso with the US Dollar. In spite of their equal value, the US Government would only exchange each peso for sixty cents—a forty percent currency devaluation. This forced farmers into debt allowing American banks to foreclose and take ownership of their land.
Over the ensuing decades a small number of mostly US owned corporations took over the majority of arable land, with just four corporations owning over fifty percent. By some estimations, Puerto Ricans earned just half of what they had done under the Spanish. To give a sense of the revolving door, Puerto Rico’s first civilian governor, Charles Herbert Allen, went on to become president of the American Sugar Refining Company, one of the major players on the Island.
Puerto Rican’s rejected offers of US citizenship until it was imposed upon them in 1917. I’ll invite you to pause for a minute and consider what else happened in 1917 that might be related to this. Unfortunately, yes, you’ve gotten it right. President Woodrow Wilson imposed citizenship upon the Puerto Ricans in order to conscript them into fighting his war in Europe.
This gives the lie to the idea that the United States abolished slavery in 1865. If you have trouble with this, imagine the Roman Empire marching into a territory and conscripting the people there at gun (or gladio) point to fight in a far off war. Would anyone doubt those people had been taken as slaves?
Puerto Ricans went on to be drafted into World War II and the Korean and Vietnamese wars.
To resist this takeover of the Islands, a nationalist movement spearheaded by Pedro Albizu Campos came about in the 1930s. Through studying at Harvard University, Campos came into contact with the Indian and Irish independence movements. He actually met Éamon de Valera and was consulted over drafting the constitution of the Irish Free State. This, in combination with the racist treatment he received in the military, turned him into an advocate for Puerto Rican independence.
Campos created a series of bonds that were registered on Wall Street. These bonds were an investment in the Republic of Puerto Rico, redeemable from the island’s treasury on the day it became independent. The first bond offering was for two hundred thousand dollars, in increments of ten, fifty and one hundred dollar bonds.
In 1933 Campos led a strike against the railway and power companies, in protest of monopolistic practices. The following year an island wide strike of agricultural workers extracted wage concessions from the sugar syndicates. This was the first time Puerto Ricans experienced victory over the United States—more were to come.
After this, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI employed its illegal CounterIntelligence Program, COINTELPRO, to disrupt the independence movement. Campos began receiving death threats and having shots fired at his home.
A series of massacres and executions took place during the mid 1930s, as well as retaliatory killings of police. This led US Congressman Vito Marcantonio to denounce the American governor Blanton Winship, saying:
‘In his five years as Governor of Puerto Rico, Mr. Blanton Winship destroyed the last vestige of civil rights in Puerto Rico. Patriots were framed in the very executive mansion and railroaded to prison. Men, women, and children were massacred in the streets of the island simply because they dared to express their opinion or attempted to meet in free assemblage.’
In 1936 a Federal Grand Jury submitted an indictment against Albizu Campos and eight other men. They were charged with sedition and other violations of Federal law, proscribing subversive activities and accused of attempting to overthrow the Government of the United States. They were actually acquitted at trial, but the judge did not approve and ordered a retrial where convictions were obtained through a stacked jury. Campos would end up spending twenty five of his remaining twenty nine years behind bars, where he seems to have been tortured in human radiation experiments.
Campos commented on his arrest that:
‘The Americans knew what they were doing—they needed me off this island right away. Six more months in 1936, and we’d have gotten our independence.’
In 1948 the Puerto Rican Senate passed a gag law. This was actually timed to coincide with one of Albizu Campos’ releases from prison. The law made it illegal to own a Puerto Rican flag. They couldn’t be displayed anywhere, not even in a person's own home. It limited speech against the United States government or in favour of Puerto Rican independence, as well as any organising along those lines. The penalty for disobedience was anything up to ten years imprisonment and a ten thousand dollar fine. This is open facism inside a United States territory, aimed at people who had recently been conscripted to fight fascists in Europe.
The 1950s saw substantial uprisings, with gunfights breaking out, police stations being burnt down and even an assassination attempt against President Harry Truman. The United States declared martial law and three thousand Puerto Ricans were arrested.
The last major attempt by the Puerto Rican Nationalists to draw world attention to the colonial situation occurred in 1954. Nationalists attacked the United States Capitol Building, wounding five representatives. It’s surprising we’ve not heard more about this since the ‘insurrection’ of January 6th, 2020, but I suppose it doesn’t fit the narrative now. Puerto Rico became a tax haven for US corporations. The idea, at least on paper, was to attract inward investment with temporary tax breaks. Due to loopholes such as companies being able to change their names, many end up just never paying tax over a period of decades. This transition away from a sugar based economy meant that less Puerto Ricans were needed, and a sterilisation program was pushed that, at its peak, saw one third of women of childbearing age sterilised. A smaller percentage of men were too. This campaign ran on into the 1970s and, whilst some women might have chosen it as a form of contraception after already having children, it is also clear that it was carried out by deceptive and coercive means.
And so we arrive in the present day where Puerto Rico’s poverty rate is double that of the poorest states in the US and the islands are unable to fund their public services.
The small island of Vieques was used as a target range by the US Air Force from the 1940s onwards. Over a trillion pounds of explosives were dropped, with the chemicals they released being the most likely reason Vieques has a thirty percent higher cancer rate than the rest of Puerto Rico. A separatist group in the 1980s actually managed to destroy eleven US fighter planes, causing forty million dollars of damage.
This is one area where the Puerto Rican people did win a victory over their imperial occupiers. After anger was focused by the accidental killing of a local security guard during an exercise, the people led a campaign that forced the bombing to stop. To explain that I’ll quote to Robert Rabin of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques:
‘That death shook everybody into action like no other event had ever done in Vieques and throughout Puerto Rico. Almost immediately we occupied the Navy's bombing range. Over a couple of months thousands of people were in their encampments around the eastern end of Vieques. The Navy couldn't bomb for a year, we controlled that space.
‘Finally, on May 4th 2000, the Navy came and arrested about two hundred and fifty of us and took back their bombing range and started bombing again. Then we began the second phase of civil disobedience to stop the bombing. In that phase over fifteen hundred people were arrested. We had brought in a lot of high profile people; Bobby Kennedy Jnr was arrested with us, Reverend Al Sharpton was arrested with us, Jesse Jackson, Edward Eames Olmos the actor, several congress people, lots of ministers, priests and pastors were arrested with us. The bishops of every church in Puerto Rico, every single one, created the Ecumenical Council for Peace of Vieques. Union groups, student groups, women's groups, environmental groups, cultural groups, singer-songwriters, theatre people, everybody got together.
‘The Puerto Rican diaspora, millions of Puerto Ricans in New York, people jumped into the Yankees stadium in the middle of the game with a flag saying ‘Stop the Bombing’. Finally this got to be the biggest political issue for Puerto Rican and Latino voters in the US. The politicians wanted their votes because it's more money for them and their families and more stuff they could steal, so they eventually were forced to do the right thing. It worked and it worked without firing a single shot. This small community defeated the most powerful military force in the history of humanity.‘ [Full quote linked to in Notes]
Notes
War Against all Puerto Ricans, by Nelson Denis
Fantasy Island, by Ed Morales.
America's Backyard: Puerto Rico (documentary film)
The History of Vieques in 10 Minutes, by Robert Rabin
Puerto Rico and the Legacy of Jim Crow, a lecture by Professor Jose Luis Morin
There is a playlist for the podcast series on both YouTube and Odysee, and it can be found on a variety of platforms from my podcast page
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