The following statement was presented by Róger Calero on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party to the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization, which held hearings June 10 in New York on the colonial status of Puerto Rico. Calero was among the 28 people from a range of organizations who testified at the hearings.

Distinguished Chairman and honored committee members:

I join with others here to demand the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. military from Vieques and the release of all those who have been jailed for protesting the U.S. Navy’s use of that Puerto Rican island for bombing practice and war exercises. Washington’s continued military activity there, in arrogant defiance of the will of the Puerto Rican people, puts a spotlight on the fact that Puerto Rico is a U.S. colony.

Independence is in the interests not only of the Puerto Rican people but of the vast majority of people in the United States. A successful struggle for the freedom of Puerto Rico will deal powerful blows to our common exploiters and oppressors--the tiny class of billionaire families that rules the United States. It will show that it is possible to stand up to the world’s mightiest and most brutal imperialist power and break free of its domination. As long as Puerto Rico is under the U.S. colonial boot, Washington and Wall Street will be strengthened and the fighting capacity and solidarity of working people in the United States will be sapped.

For more than a century the U.S. rulers have maintained Puerto Rico as their colony, a reality they have unsuccessfully tried to cover up. Millions rightly view this Latin American nation as among the few remaining countries held in direct subjugation by one of the great imperialist powers.

Today, however, far from withdrawing from Vieques and relinquishing its hold on Puerto Rico, Washington is expanding the number of its military garrisons around the world, imposing them on countries where the government is virtually powerless and a foreign administration has the final word.

From Bosnia to Kosova, and from Afghanistan to the war they seek to unleash on Iraq, the U.S. rulers are more and more turning to use their military might to try to impose their interests and salvage the declining world imperialist order. The establishment of a U.S.-dominated protectorate in Afghanistan exposes the fact that Washington’s "war on terrorism" is simply a cover for waging a war on other nations and peoples, as well as on working people in the United States--a course that began well before September 11.

Washington’s actions in the world will only drag larger numbers of workers and farmers in uniform into more military assaults against their class brothers and sisters around the globe and increasingly make the United States a death trap for all who live here as the imperialist rulers sink their hated tentacles into one country after another.  
 
Assault on workers’ rights
This war is an extension of the assault against workers and farmers in the United States. The U.S. government is taking steps to militarize the country, seeking to get us to accept the presence of troops at U.S. airports, train stations, bridges, tunnels, and elsewhere. The creation of a domestic military command structure in the United States, which began under the Clinton administration, is part of the preparations by the U.S. rulers for the broader working-class resistance that they know is coming.

The roundup and detention since September of hundreds of immigrants from the Middle East and Asia is part of the employers’ assault on workers’ rights. So is the indefinite detention of more than 300 men kidnapped from various countries--with no charges against them and under barbaric conditions--in a concentration camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, which is territory occupied against the will of the Cuban people.

Similarly, the probes to loosen the restrictions on the powers of the FBI and other political police agencies, and to expand their use of informers, wiretapping, and disruption operations, will be used to target unions, Black rights organizations, farm protest groups, and others who resist the employers or oppose U.S. government policies.

Puerto Rican independence fighters, unionists, and others have waged their own battles against these repressive methods. For decades they too have been smeared as "terrorists" to justify U.S. government harassment and repression against them.

Today, there are still five Puerto Rican political prisoners locked up in Washington’s dungeons--Oscar López, Haydée Beltrán, Juan Segarra Palmer, José Solís, and Carlos Alberto Torres. They are behind bars because of their ideas and actions on behalf of Puerto Rico’s independence. Some have been jailed for more than 20 years, making them among the longest-held political prisoners in the world. We join in the demand for the immediate release of these Puerto Rican patriots. We also celebrate the recent victory won with the release of Antonio Camacho Negrón, an independentista who spent more than a decade in U.S. prisons on frame-up charges.

Washington has also framed up five Cuban revolutionaries, who are now serving sentences ranging from 15 years to life in jail. What was their "crime"? Obtaining information for Cuba on the counterrevolutionary groups that operate on U.S. territory--with the knowledge and complicity of the U.S. government--and have a record of violent attacks on Cuba.  
 
Rulers meet resistance
But the drive by the U.S. employers and their government against the wages, working conditions, and rights of workers and farmers is running into resistance. Meat packers in Omaha, Nebraska, scored an important victory just a few weeks ago when they voted decisively to be represented by a union at ConAgra. Coal miners in Pennsylvania, after a seven-year battle against a company antiunion drive, forced the coal bosses to sign a national contract. And here in New York there has been a series of working-class protests, from the 20,000 teachers and students who rallied last week against city cutbacks, to the laundry workers in the Bronx who struck for five months and won the right to a union.

These working-class struggles in the United States draw inspiration from the workers, fishermen, and youth in Puerto Rico who are fighting to remove the U.S. Navy from Vieques, and who refuse to subordinate this struggle to the war drive that the imperialist rulers are carrying out under the banner of "fighting terrorism."

The 2.7 million Puerto Ricans who live in the United States represent a significant component of the working class in this country and are part of this resistance. They are subjected to systematic discrimination and second-class status, as are Blacks, Chicanos, and other oppressed nationalities here. The U.S. colonial rule of Puerto Rico reinforces racist prejudice and every reactionary force in the United States.

Mr. Chairman,

Since Washington invaded Puerto Rico more than a century ago, it has used that Caribbean nation--including Vieques--as a base to prepare and launch military aggression around the world, from Grenada to Cuba to the Mideast. Thousands of U.S. soldiers are currently stationed in military bases throughout Puerto Rico, which is the site for major components of the U.S. Southern Command. The militarization of Puerto Rico reinforces the U.S. government’s moves to accelerate its military intervention and construction of bases in Colombia, Ecuador, and other South American countries.

Furthermore, Puerto Rican youth have been used as cannon fodder in every imperialist war, from World War I to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and now Afghanistan.

For Puerto Rico, U.S. colonial rule has meant high levels of unemployment, low wages, and the plunder of its wealth and natural resources. That is the future that U.S. colonial rule offers the people of Puerto Rico.

At the same time, the U.S. rulers--who survive and prosper only by sucking wealth from the toil and resources of peoples around the globe--have the arrogance to tell the Puerto Rican people that they cannot survive on their own, that independence will only bring them ruin, that they are destined to remain subordinate to imperialism.

But the socialist road taken by the workers and farmers of Cuba shatters that myth. The Cuban Revolution proves that it is possible to fight and win genuine independence from U.S. domination. The U.S. rulers have never forgiven the Cuban people for having the audacity to make their nation the first free territory of the Americas four decades ago and to provide an example to working people everywhere. Cuba has consistently championed Puerto Rico’s fight for independence. A free Puerto Rico would be able to count on the selfless, unconditional solidarity of revolutionary Cuba.

The condemnation by this committee of Washington’s colonial rule of Puerto Rico will serve the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people of the United States and those fighting everywhere for the right to self-determination and the future of humanity.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of this committee, for the opportunity to present these views before you today.
 
 
Related articles:
Anticolonial fighters champion Puerto Rico independence  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home