BY NAOMI CRAINE AND RON RICHARDS
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - On May 12, 1898, the residents of this city awoke to a fleet of 11 U.S. warships preparing to bombard the city.

When the shelling was over three hours later, six Puerto Ricans - four civilians and two soldiers - were dead and another 50 people had been wounded.

On May 12, 1998, 1,000 people marched through Old San Juan to mark the 100-year anniversary of this act of Yankee aggression and the fight for self-determination in Puerto Rico.

The "March of Silence and Reflection" was headed by 100 youth carrying Puerto Rican flags.

It began at the Plaza Colón and ended with a rally at the Plaza del Quinto Centenario, where independence leader Juan Mari Bras addressed the crowd. All of the buildings surrounding the Plaza de Quinto Centenario had been damaged during the U.S. naval bombardment, which marked the first major fighting of the Spanish-American war in Puerto Rico.

The attacking fleet included three U.S. battleships - the New York, Iowa, and Indiana. After the attack, the commanding officer of the U.S. fleet, Admiral William Sampson, defended the decision to shell the city without prior warning. Writing in Century Magazine, Sampson argued, "Even if modern war practices demand previous advice to noncombatants, this refers only to undefended cities, and not where said defenses are situated so that they cannot be attacked without hurting the population."

Cuba and Puerto Rico were the only remaining Spanish colonies in the Americas when the rising imperialist power in Washington declared war on its Spanish rival in 1898.

Thirty years earlier revolutionaries in both countries had staged coordinated revolts against Spanish colonial rule. These revolts were called Grito de Yara in Cuba and Grito de Lares in Puerto Rico. Grito de Yara touched off the first Cuban war of independence. The second Cuban war of independence began in 1895.

The U.S. intervention came about just as the Cuban people were near a revolutionary victory against Spain. Although the anticolonial forces were weaker in Puerto Rico than Cuba, the news from Cuba was closely followed in Puerto Rico as everyone assumed that the two colonies would have the same fate. Puerto Rican revolutionaries in the United States joined the Cuban Revolutionary Party founded by José Martí, which had as its first principle the struggle for "absolute independence for Cuba" and support to the independence fight in Puerto Rico.

Washington went to war to steal the colonies of Spain and assert itself as a global power for the first time. As a result of its victory over Spain, the United States received four island archipelagos; Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam. A fifth group of islands, Hawaii, was annexed at the same time.

On July 25, 1898, the U.S. invaded Puerto Rico with a landing of 12,000 soldiers in Guánica. The anniversary of that invasion will be marked with protests both in Puerto Rico and in the United States.

Ron Richards is a member of the American Federation of Government Employees in San Juan.  
 
 
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