BY MARTÍN KOPPEL AND VERÓNICA POSES
The following interview with Rafael Cancel Miranda was conducted in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, on July 1, 1998, by Verónica Poses and Martín Koppel.

Cancel Miranda is one of the best-known leaders of the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. He was one of the five Nationalists who spent more than a quarter century in U.S. prisons for their pro-independence activities.

In 1949, as Washington prepared to go to war against Korea, Cancel Miranda, then 18 years old, was sentenced to two years in prison for his refusal to be drafted into the U.S. army.

In 1954, Cancel Miranda, together with Andrés Figueroa Cordero, Irving Flores, and Lolita Lebrón, carried out an armed protest in the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C., in order to draw international attention to the Puerto Rico's colonial status. The four were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 50 to 75 years. Four years earlier, Oscar Collazo had participated in an armed attack on the Blair House, the temporary residence of President Harry Truman; he was originally sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to life in prison. The five Puerto Rican nationalists became the longest-held political prisoners in the Americas.

Over the following years, a broad international campaign for the release of the five independentista prisoners developed. Under this worldwide pressure, the U.S. government was eventually forced to release them. U.S. president James Carter released Figueroa Cordero in 1978, when he was already dying of cancer. Cancel Miranda and the other three were freed in 1979. On their return home they were welcomed at the San Juan airport by an enthusiastic crowd of 7,000.

Since then Cancel Miranda has continued fighting and speaking out in public around the world for his country's independence and for the release of the Puerto Ricans who today are in U.S. prisons because of their pro-independence activity. Over the past year he has been invited to speak on college campuses by student groups in dozens of cities, both in Puerto Rico and the United States. He has spoken at a number of meetings commemorating 100 years of struggle against imperialism in Puerto Rico and Cuba.

Cancel Miranda will be one of the guests of honor at the July 25 pro-independence rally in Guánica, where, 100 years ago on that date, U.S. troops invaded in order to put Puerto Rico under Washington's colonial boot.

Poses is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Young Socialists. Koppel is the editor of the Spanish- language socialist magazine Perspectiva Mundial. The interview was conducted during the strike by 6,400 telephone workers opposing the sale of the state-owned telephone company, which the administration of Gov. Pedro Rosselló plans to sell to a U.S.-led consortium.

The translation and footnotes are by the Militant.

Cancel Miranda: This strike, as the workers themselves explain, is no longer simply a strike of the telephone workers; it's a strike of the people. It is a struggle against the sale of our country. The national patrimony of our people is being sold.

What's happening with the telephone company is happening with the hospitals. The government is privatizing hospitals, which will create more unemployment. Even the prisons are being privatized. If this continues, they're going to sell off the Electrical Power Authority.

The people are defending their own survival as a people. And it's not the U.S. flag that represents our people. It's not the invaders' flag. It's not Rockefeller's flag. It's the Puerto Rican flag.

So the strikers have taken it up as their symbol. Even children are carrying it on the picket lines, everyone. When people begin to free themselves from ideological and political confusion - from all the cobwebs that have been stuck in our heads to deform our minds - they being to discover themselves.

Poses: At the same time, most workers don't necessarily support the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. How would you explain this?

Cancel Miranda: First of all, in Puerto Rico you can't gauge what workers want or don't want by the outcome of colonial elections. Because here people don't vote for ideological reasons. They vote to resolve immediate problems.

Here the only ones who vote ideologically are the supporters of independence.

There are thousands of people who vote for the PNP [Progressive National Party] who are not voting for statehood, but who think a politician might solve some problems. If the PNP wins, PNP supporters always get thousands of government jobs. If the PPD [Popular Democratic Party] wins, it's the same thing.(1)

But those voting for the PNP or PPD are not necessarily against independence, or for statehood or for commonwealth status.

There's a saying here, that if you scratch a Puerto Rican, you're going to find a nationalist inside. You're going to find in him or her a defender of the flag, a defender of what it means to be Puerto Rican.

Now, there is a small group here - and it's not workers - that genuinely is against independence. It's the bourgeoisie that directly benefits from colonial rule. You'll see them with their big houses and mansions. It is a semi-bourgeoisie, because here there isn't a true bourgeoisie. It's a puppet, intermediary bourgeoisie.

But workers aren't tied to those colonial interests because they don't live that kind of life. They live through their work, their knowledge and skills.

U.S. imperialism controls our country socially, politically, and economically. We are a militarily occupied country - we're saturated by U.S. military bases. Now they want to transfer the U.S. Southern Command here from Panama.

They control the mass media. They control our schools. They indoctrinate us from the time we're children. They tell you who to hate and who not to hate. They can even indoctrinate you to hate yourself.

The first time I was expelled from school, when I was six years old, in 1937, it was because I didn't want to pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag. I refused. From the time you're a child they keep trying to impose on you loyalty to the invaders of your country.

It's a miracle you still see thousands of Puerto Ricans waving the Puerto Rican flag. It's an ideological miracle - if that's possible - given the 100 years of colonialism we've been through under U.S. imperialism.

I wouldn't be surprised to see them carrying the U.S. flag, since from the time you're a child they tell you that Superman and Wonder Woman and Rambo and John Wayne are your heroes. What should be surprising, and what is great about our people, is that we continue to stand on our feet.

Even the most radical among us is somewhat colonized; you can't help it. I was saved by my 28 years in prison - I've been colonized for 28 fewer years than others.

Koppel: How can the majority be won to the perspective of independence?

Cancel Miranda: We have to reach out to the greatest number of our people with the truth and the need for independence. Independence is not simply a nice ideal. It is a necessity.

We have to reach the new generations, so they will continue the struggle until the time comes when different forces in the world come together and strengthen our struggle. We are part of the world, and what happens all over the world affects our country.

The United States uses our young people as cannon fodder in their wars. In the Vietnam War, Puerto Rico had the second-highest casualties proportionally to its population - compared to all the U.S. states - after Hawaii. The same thing happened in the Korean War.

They sent us to kill Dominicans in the Dominican Republic in 1965. When they invaded Panama in 1989, they sent us to kill Panamanians, who are our brothers and sisters.

Before the Gulf War, nobody here knew who Saddam Hussein was. But in one week they got the Puerto Rican people to hate Saddam Hussein, through their control of the media, and then everyone was saying that Saddam was the devil.

I asked on the radio the other day, "What are Puerto Ricans doing in Bosnia?" If Rockefeller wants to send his sons to fight in Bosnia, let him do it. But he's not going to send his sons to Bosnia. He's going to send your sons, the sons of John Doe and Mary Jane.

So young people are affected by this colonial reality.

We have to show workers why independence is in their interests as workers: so they can be the owners of their country and their factories, so they can be the owners of what they produce. So that everything doesn't end up in the coffers of Wall Street. So that it stays here for their development.

We have to explain what annexation would mean. If Puerto Rico were to be made a state, they would treat us exactly like they treat our communities in New York, Connecticut, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

When I got out of prison in 1979, I told my people from the beginning that we're going to end up on reservations like the Indians if we're not an independent country. It's happening. I could take you to housing projects, in nearby Mayaguez, where thousands of Puerto Rican families live, and which have been turned into reservations. They have them fenced in and access is controlled by the police and the National Guard. You have to identify yourself to enter and leave your home. They search your car as if you were in prison.

As Pedro [Albizu Campos](2) said 60 years ago, if we don't free ourselves, we will go from being masters to being serfs, from being owners to being squatters. And right now we Puerto Ricans are squatters in our own country. Others are in charge, not us.

Who controls the Customs in Puerto Rico? The U.S. does. They control our commerce, both foreign and domestic trade. Who controls immigration? The U.S. does. To leave Puerto Rico for another country, we must ask permission from the U.S. State Department. Even this little colonial governor, Rosselló, has to ask their permission.

It is for the same reasons that we Nationalists do not believe in plebiscites, because the U.S. controls the colonial elections. They use elections to cover up our colonial status and pretend there is democracy. But they control everything here, even the military. They are occupying our country militarily. Under these conditions - when you have a gun aimed at your head, and when they control your life socially, politically, and economically - there can be no free vote.

We Nationalists say: first, transfer all powers to the Puerto Rican people. Demilitarize our country. Remove all U.S. military bases and repressive agencies from Puerto Rico, and then we'll decide. Then we can talk.

Our people enjoyed a few months of freedom during the transfer of power between Spain and the United States. In 1897 we won a measure of autonomy, after many years of struggle. We had our own postage stamps, our own Puerto Rican currency, our own parliament, our own Customs. We had control over our own foreign trade; we sold to whomever we wished. When the U.S. showed up in 1898, that came to an end.(3)

This struggle is difficult for a people that has been colonized for so many years, because colonial rule is like alcoholism or worse. As hard as it is to detoxify yourself from alcoholism, it's even harder to detoxify yourself from a colonial mindset, because you have to get rid of so many lies and complexes that they've drilled into your head.

The only defeat is when you give up, or when you believe they're so invulnerable that you can't even look at them, because you think you're going to die from just looking at them. They drum this into your head just like they did to the Indians.

The Spaniards would never let the Indians see their dead, because they wanted to create the myth that they were immortal. The Indians would never see them die and they would say, "We'd better leave them alone. Those people don't die." But then they put some of the Spaniards in a river and they drowned, as the legend goes. That's when the Indians started fighting.(4)

They fill us with myths. How do we shatter these myths? Reality often takes care of that.

Koppel: Could you point to some of the recent experiences of the Puerto Rican people that help shatter those myths?

Cancel Miranda: Right now you're seeing how a myth is being shattered. People have always been fed the myth that we're a docile people. Except when the imperialists use us in their army for their wars. Then we're fighters.

But both of you have been witnessing the fact that this is not a docile people. In face of the reality - the threat of not being able to survive and feed their children and have a home - they've thrown themselves into the struggle. You've seen the strength of our men and women, who are standing up to the police that the regime uses to support itself. This starts undoing the myth that this is a submissive people.

When you believe that they're all-powerful and that we're powerless, you're already on the mat before they even throw a punch at you. But in this strike, the people are becoming aware of their own strength, which is what the colonial powers fear. When a people realize their own strength, they fight.

The people have started to see what the forces of repression are. The mass media can't keep people from seeing this, although the television stations have tried to distort the facts. But they couldn't edit out how the police busted workers' heads - how they grabbed them by their feet and dragged them along the ground as they bled.

It was then that a lot of people who wouldn't have become involved got involved. Because human beings have the capacity to become indignant. When we lose the ability to become outraged over something like that, we have lost our sensibility. And when you lose your sensibility, you're no more than a walking hunk of meat.

The myth about this little colonial governor is also being shattered. Now many are seeing him as he really is. They foster the myth here that those who are in power are know-it-alls, that they're infallible. The Pope stopped claiming to be infallible, but they still use that system here.

There's the myth that you can't do anything. But in Cuba today you see those signs that say, real big, "Sí se puede!" [Yes, we can do it!] We can confront imperialism. In Cuba they've done it.

Koppel: You were pointing out that what happens in Puerto Rico is very much tied to events in the world. Could you say a little about that?

Cancel Miranda: What's happening in Puerto Rico isn't just happening in Puerto Rico. It's part of globalization, of neoliberalism.

When I was in Guatemala seven or eight months ago, the talk of those puppets in Guatemala was the same arguments you hear from Rosselló on privatization. They wanted to privatize the telecommunications system. They said it was necessary in order to compete in the world. In order to compete we're supposed to give up everything!

In Panama, it's the same argument regarding the privatization of the Panama Canal. And in other Latin American countries they use the same reasoning to justify turning over our resources. We're a classic colony, but - with the exception of Cuba - the other countries are semicolonies, usually controlled by the U.S. Embassy, which is where the orders are given. The presidents are like the one in Panama, [Guillermo] Endara, who they proclaimed president on a U.S. military base during the 1989 invasion.

In Venezuela the International Monetary Fund caused people to get killed because it insisted the government raise people's taxes so they could pay the foreign debt, and when protests broke out they were repressed. The same thing happened in the Dominican Republic a few years ago. The IMF is pressuring those countries.

This is going to create greater social imbalances between the few who have a lot and the many who have very little. And sooner or later, what you're seeing today in Puerto Rico is going to happen. Sooner or later people will find a way to fight.

This situation is also going to create discontent among workers in the United States. They're going to attempt to crush workers there too.

Here in Puerto Rico, as in the prisons, we serve as a laboratory: the U.S. imperialists test out here what they will later attempt there. Like when they surround the neighborhoods with the cops and National Guard, who according to them are fighting drugs and crime.

Poses: One of the things you see in the telephone workers strike is the involvement of many students and other youth.

Cancel Miranda: Yes, the sale of the telephone company doesn't just affect the worker. It also affects the worker's children.

At the University of Puerto Rico, they've cut about $40 million from education funding, and students have carried out some protest strikes. They're shifting funds from the public schools to private schools, under the pretext that the funds will go to scholarships to allow students to study at the school of their choice. That is, they're giving more funds to the private schools and taking them away from public schools.

If the telephone company is sold off, more than $200 million in income that the telephone company, as a public corporation, contributed to the Puerto Rican education system, will be gone. And who does that affect - the sons and daughters of Mister So and So, Mister Moneybags? No, the children of John Doe and Mary Jane, who don't have financial resources.

You can explain a thousand different theories, but nothing is more convincing than the brutal reality that you feel and live. And what you saw there is a people who are confronting a reality that there is no longer any escape from. And on Tuesday [July 7] you're going to see thousands and thousands of Puerto Ricans joining the general strike. The students' future lies here.

There is a resurgence of youth that reminds me of my youthful years. I've spoken with a lot of students. Young students with a fighting spirit come visit me here.

I always tell them: Listen to the old folks, but don't follow them! Because old people become very conservative.

And it's not just here. Not long ago I was invited to a university in Champaign, Illinois, to give the keynote address - imagine, they invited someone who had fired shots at U.S. congressmen in Washington. It was the Indo-Afro- Latin student group that invited me.

In less than two and a half months I spoke at seven or eight universities in the United States. And the young people identified with me. It's not me they're welcoming - it's what I represent that they have inside themselves, a reaffirmation of who they are and who they want to be.

Poses: In the United States and also in Puerto Rico there was a successful campaign for your freedom and that of the other Nationalist prisoners. Today, in 1998, there still are Puerto Rican political prisoners in U.S. jails. Could you say something about the campaign that was waged for your release?

Cancel Miranda: The campaign to free the 16 prisoners today is more advanced than the campaign on our behalf was at the time we got out of prison.

But at the time we got out, there existed a balance of power in the world. The socialist forces and the countries of the so-called Third World, on one hand, and the forces of U.S. imperialism on the other. The U.S. government respected the Soviet government militarily, because they had weapons that could mutually destroy each other.

Our defense campaign had even reached the United Nations Committee on Decolonization and the Non-Aligned Countries. The United States was on this "human rights" campaign, with Carter and [U.S. Ambassador to the UN Andrew] Young. And everywhere people would say: "How can you speak of human rights when you've had five Nationalists, who have defended independence for their country, locked up for so many years?" We were like a bone stuck in their throats.

So their human rights thing wasn't working for them as long as we were in prison. This was an advantage for the campaign on our behalf.

Now, internationally, there is no longer a balance between two powers trying to attract other governments to their side; today the United States considers itself a unilateral power. So they're interested not so much in showing other countries of the world that they're democratic, but rather that they're powerful.

Just now there was a great opportunity. Clinton was over there telling China to release the political prisoners in that country. And he blabbers on and on telling Cuba to free the political prisoners that they claim are in Cuba. But Clinton has political prisoners under his very nose, where a signature by him would set them free, and he does nothing.

We weren't freed from prison because suddenly the U.S. government, like St. Paul, saw the light. They freed us from prison because of international pressure.

We were the only prisoners in U.S. penal history who came out of jail setting conditions on the jailers, rather than the jailers imposing conditions on us. Anyone can get out of prison. What counts isn't going to prison or getting out of prison. It's why you go in and how you come out.

They were willing to free us if we accepted conditions. FBI and CIA agents would come visit us at the prison, saying that if we asked for a pardon they would release us the very next day. They even sent that congressman from New York, Robert García, who said that if we signed these papers and swore we would never shoot anymore, and later that we wouldn't get involved in the struggle, they would release us.

But it was a victory. We came out standing on our feet.

That was thanks to the struggle waged by other people, including the Militant, which wrote articles on our behalf.

Today the campaign for the Puerto Rican political prisoners has been taken to international tribunals, to the United Nations, to Nobel Prize laureates who have signed petitions. More than 200,000 signatures from the Puerto Rican people, both here and in the United States, have appealed for their release.

Courts often sentence criminals to three or four years, and if they're from the Ku Klux Klan maybe even less than a year. Why have 18 years passed and these independentistas - people who have never even received a traffic ticket in their lives -why are they still in prison?

The independentistas aren't criminals. They are revolutionaries who are confronting their system. That's why they [the imperialists] view us as their enemies.

Koppel: The revolutionary government of Cuba has campaigned on behalf of the independence of Puerto Rico and the release of the Puerto Rican political prisoners. What is your view of what the Cuban revolution represents?

Cancel Miranda: The hope of us all. As long as Cuba is there, there is hope that we will be able to go through those doors. If Cuba falls, our struggle will take many more years. I'm not referring just to Puerto Rico but to all our peoples. So far, Cuba is the only country that U.S. financial and military interests don't control.

Cuba is also a psychological weapon for our peoples, because they instill these complexes to make us think that without the Yankees we just can't survive. The sun would stop shining. The moon would fall.

Yet Cuba has survived. No only without the Yankees. In spite of the Yankees, and in spite of all confrontations and the U.S. blockade. Without that blockade, Cuba would not have to go through these crises. But it has weathered the crisis and has survived.

For me, Cuba goes much beyond a question of economic survival. It gives you a sense of the dignity of life. Before, when you saw a Latino in the U.S. movies, we were either someone's sidekick, or we were a "Latin Lover" to entertain them. They ridiculed us.

But ever since Fidel [Castro], they learned to respect us. Because Fidel and the Cuban revolutionaries are no one's sidekick. Fidel makes me proud, just like the pride Sandino gives me.(5)

In Cuba today, life is not dictated by appearances as it is here. Here under this system, your worth is measured by how much you carry in your pockets - even if you're a gangster. Your person isn't worth anything. You're worth something if you have a luxury car, a Volvo, a Mercedes- Benz, whatever. Your worth is measured by the car you own, not by how you use it. But even a monkey can drive a Volvo, and it doesn't stop being a monkey.

In Cuba I feel at home. I'm not giving up my country, because I don't abandon my sick mother. But there I can call people compañero. I don't have to call anyone Honorable or Excellency or anything.

Under the system that exists in Cuba, your worth is determined by what you are. And when I talk about the system in Cuba, I'm talking about the socialist system. Your worth is measured by how you share with others. Under this system your worth is measured by what you own, and they keep us at war with each other.

For me, Cuba dignifies people, it humanizes people. This system dehumanizes people. It's dog-eat-dog. That's the philosophy. And they keep teaching you in order to strip you of your human values. They keep instilling money-grubbing values so you will serve them better as a tool and to make you accept degradation and humiliation because they've taken away your values. Only people who have values are capable of feeling indignation and anger.

I was always a nationalist and defender of my country. But I'm a nationalist because I'm a socialist. And I'm a socialist because I'm a nationalist. I believe in socialism for my country because I want the best for my country and for the world.

Don Pedro always said that first you have to have the key to the house, so you can then decide what color to paint it. He said that first we have to fight for independence and be free; then we'll be masters of our country. Then we'll be able to decide what system to have.

But as long as we're not a free country, it's the United States, the financial interests on Wall Street, the military interests in the Pentagon - which are one and the same -that will decide what kind of life we live.

Cuba was able to be socialist because it was already sovereign. It was able to dictate, within its sovereignty, the way of life it would live.

I believe in socialism as much as I believe in independence for my country. I wouldn't want a free country - with all we have sacrificed throughout our history of struggle - so that two or three parasites could take over the lives of our people, could enrich themselves at the expense of our people. I don't want that kind of independence.

Now, as long as the Soviet Union existed, for many people it was almost a cachet to be a socialist - it was almost fashionable. Because there existed a power. Later it turned out that there were a lot of socialists because of the existence of the socialist power, not because they truly believed in socialism.

Many who once could even have told you how many hairs Marx and Engels and Lenin had on their beards, today don't utter a word about socialism. Today some have thrown themselves into what they used to criticize, nationalism, which is the only door they have left to continue to struggle.

Previously, they wouldn't use the portrait of Pedro Albizu Campos, who stood for the affirmation of Puerto Rico. They would use - and I don't criticize them - the portraits of Lenin and the others. But now you don't see portraits of Lenin or Marx or Engels anywhere.

But if you believe in socialism, you believe in it even if you're alone. You don't believe in it because there are 20,000 socialist countries or because there is one socialist country.

So, now that many who used to profess themselves socialists - because of the existence of certain powers, because they could travel to the Soviet Union - no longer do so, now I say I'm a socialist. Now they can't tell me, "He says that because the Soviet power is there." No.

I'm not saying it because there are some socialist powers somewhere. I say it because I believe in socialism, period.

Notes
1. In Puerto Rico there are two colonialist parties. The New Progressive Party (PNP), to which Gov. Pedro Rosselló belongs, advocates statehood, calling for Puerto Rico to become the 51st state of the United States. The Popular Democratic Party (PPD) defends the current "commonwealth" setup.

2. Pedro Albizu Campos was the central leader of the Nationalist Party and the independence movement in Puerto Rico from the 1930s through the 1950s. He spent many years in U.S. prisons for his anti-imperialist activities.

3. In 1897 the Spanish colonial government granted Puerto Rico broad autonomous powers. This concession was a result of the Cuban war for independence, in which the Spanish forces had been militarily defeated. The Cuban Revolutionary Party, which led the struggle in Cuba, had a Puerto Rico Section, and the pro-autonomy liberals in Puerto Rico threatened to ally themselves with the revolutionaries if greater autonomy was not granted. This situation ended a few months later, however, when the Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1898 broke out and Washington invaded Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico.

4. According to legend, at one point the Taíno Indians in Puerto Rico captured a Spanish soldier near the Añasco River. They decided to see if he was really immortal by holding his head underwater in the river. If after a short while he was still alive, they said, then the Spaniards were immortal. But when they lifted up his head again, the Spanish soldier had drowned.

5. Augusto César Sandino led an army of workers and peasants against the U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933.  
 
 
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