Distinguished Chairman and Honored Committee Members:
Others have testified here to abundant facts demonstrating that Puerto Rico is a U.S. colony, and describing the brutal consequences of this colonial subjugation for the Puerto Rican people.
As several Puerto Rican patriots have eloquently explained today, independence from U.S. rule is a necessity for the people of Puerto Rico if they are to freely determine their own course. I would like to add that Puerto Rico's independence is also a necessity to advance the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people of the United States.
Colonialism divides us
Working people in the United States not only have absolutely
no interest in the continued colonial domination of Puerto
Rico, its elimination would substantially strengthen our
ability to unite ourselves in defense of our common interests.
A century ago the rising imperialist interests within the
United States orchestrated the conquest of the Puerto Rican
people. Ever since then, that act by the U.S. rulers - and its
consequences - have only weakened and divided us. Jim Crow
racist segregation was imposed in the South as part of the same
political dynamic in those years, dealing historic blows to
workers and farmers in the United States, blows whose
consequences they feel to this day.
Only the handful of superrich, property-owning families whose interests are represented by the U.S. government benefit from this colonial rule. They exploit the labor and resources of that nation, and use Puerto Rico's subjugation as an example to intimidate those fighting for freedom and human dignity throughout the world. Independence will deal a blow to our common enemy -the world's last empire, whose tentacles extend around the globe.
That is why, Mr. Chairman, on behalf of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, I would like to speak here today to the damaging effects that U.S. colonial rule of Puerto Rico has on working people in this country, who like our brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico, live not by exploiting others, but by our own sweat and blood.
Ever since U.S. troops invaded and occupied Puerto Rico 100 years ago, the U.S. government has sought to hide its true relation to that Caribbean nation. They call Puerto Rico a "commonwealth" rather than a colony. They periodically organize fraudulent plebiscites, in order to sow confusion not only among the people of Puerto Rico, but also among working people and oppressed nationalities in the United States. They hope to prevent us from understanding that Washington is an imperial power whose armed forces remain stationed in Puerto Rico, and that Puerto Rico is the largest remaining colony in the world.
Puerto Ricans in the U.S.
Given the conditions U.S. domination has created in Puerto
Rico - where the average income is less than half that of
Mississippi, the poorest state in the union - four of every ten
Puerto Ricans have been forced to emigrate to the United States
in search of work and a wage they and their families can live
on. Puerto Ricans are an important component of the working
class in this country.
Today a new generation of Puerto Ricans is making its voice heard in the United States. On July 25, I had the honor of marching with some of them at a demonstration here in New York that, along with marches in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, demanded an end to U.S. colonial rule. Tens of thousands marched for those same demands in Guánica, Puerto Rico, that same day.
The U.S. colonial domination of Puerto Rico reinforces racism, national chauvinism, anti-immigrant prejudice, and other divisions among working people in the United States that undermine the labor movement and serve the interests of the employers. Colonialism feeds every reactionary force in U.S. society - from those who promote "English-only" measures and want to end bilingual and bicultural education, to those who attack affirmative action and other hard-fought gains of working people. As someone involved in the Chicano struggle for many years, I can testify to that reality.
Police spying, victimization
Colonial rule of Puerto Rico provides the U.S. government
with a bottomless well of rationalizations to erode the
democratic rights of working people in the United States. The
massive FBI spying and harassment of Puerto Rican independence
advocates, unionists, and other fighters for Puerto Rican
rights, has been well-documented over the past quarter century.
The cops and courts have intimidated, imprisoned, and in some
cases organized the outright murder of Puerto Rican political
activists - giving a green light to the operations of political
police agencies against labor and other social protest
movements in the United States.
Grand juries, including two currently convened in Chicago, are used as courts of inquisition to frame up pro-independence activists and to try to smear the Puerto Rican independence movement as terrorists in the eyes of public opinion. These grand juries set an example for similar star-chamber actions against other opponents of U.S. government policies.
Mr. Chairman:
Others have eloquently testified to the injustice of the draconian sentences imposed on the fifteen Puerto Rican political prisoners held in U.S. jails - and the hypocrisy of the U.S. rulers who pretend to speak for human rights and political freedoms in other lands. These courageous and unbroken fighters, among the longest-held political prisoners in the world, are in jail for one crime and one crime only: their determination to end the colonial subjugation of their home land. Working people in the United States have a vital stake in joining the effort to win their freedom. And we did so, once again, this past July 25, demanding that U.S. President William Clinton free them - immediately and unconditionally.
Imperialist foreign policy
The colonial domination of Puerto Rico has been a keystone
of U.S. foreign policy since the island was seized from Spain
in the first war of the imperialist epoch. It serves as a
reminder, above all to the peoples of Central America, the
Caribbean, and South America, of the true character of U.S.
interests throughout the hemisphere.
The U.S. government has covered Puerto Rico with military bases and has used it as a launching pad for military assaults on other nations, from Cuba to the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Panama. Puerto Rican youth, like working-class youth in the United States, have been forced to served as cannon fodder in U.S. wars of aggression, from both world wars to Korea and Vietnam. Today, in the interests of U.S. imperialism, they are deployed throughout Latin America, the Mideast, the Balkans, the Korean peninsula, and other flashpoints of class struggle around the globe. Every aspect of this foreign policy is alien to the interests of working people in the United States.
Mr. Chairman:
The growing crisis of the world capitalist system is driving greater and greater numbers of workers in the United States to resist the employers' assaults on their wages and social gains - from the U.S. telephone strikers today to the General Motors auto workers and the farm workers in California's strawberry fields.
These same conditions are spurring renewed working-class struggles in Puerto Rico as well. The recent telephone workers strike and the general strike by half a million workers to oppose the sell-off to Yankee interests of the state-owned phone company are harbingers of struggles to come. They confirm the power of Puerto Rican working people when organized and the capacity of the working class to demonstrate the way forward in the fight for Puerto Rico's national sovereignty.
An example for U.S. workers
As an airline worker whose union faces a major fight in the
months ahead to win an acceptable contract - after nearly a
decade of having our wages and working
conditions driven down - I can say that the example of the
Puerto Rican telephone workers' battle inspired many of my co-
workers and has given us greater confidence in our own ability
to unite and stand up for our rights.
For workers and farmers in the United States, Puerto Rico's freedom is not simply a matter of solidarity, as important as that is. As long as Washington denies Puerto Rico its sovereignty and independence, labor in the United States will be hobbled in our struggles for social justice. Our own political consciousness, human solidarity, and fighting capacity will be sapped.
That is why this year we celebrate 100 years of resistance to colonial and imperialist rule, not only in Puerto Rico but in its sister nation of Cuba. The Cuban people freed themselves from U.S. domination with their 1959 revolution. Since then - despite 40 years of a relentless, brutal campaign by the U.S. government to punish them for the audacity of making that island the first free territory of the Americas - the Cuban people have shown what can be achieved when an oppressed people win true independence and become the masters of their destiny.
Cuba has consistently championed Puerto Rico's fight for national independence and set an example of dignity and selfless, internationalist solidarity. The socialist course freely chosen and steadfastly defended by the Cuban people has proven the only possible road to achieve genuine independence. Cuba shows the way forward for working people worldwide.
For these reasons, distinguished Chairman, the condemnation by this committee of colonial rule over Puerto Rico, despite Washington's objections, will be a boost to all those everywhere fighting for the right to self-determination. An end to U.S. colonial subjugation of Puerto Rico will advance the interests not only of the people of that nation, but of the vast majority of those who live and toil in the United States. The future of all humanity will be served.
I would like to thank you, Mr. Chairman, and the members of this committee, for the opportunity to express these views before you here today.