Distinguished Chairman and honored committee members:

The bombing of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, which the U.S. military resumed just days ago, is a bald imperialist outrage against an oppressed people. It deserves worldwide condemnation. The U.S. government's persistence in these brutal actions, in defiance of the will of the majority of the people of Puerto Rico, reveals one fact above all: Puerto Rico remains a U.S. colony.

The latest expression of Washington's colonial arrogance is the U.S. government's promise to end the bombing practices on Vieques--two years from now! But the U.S. colonial masters have not experienced an epiphany, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. To the contrary, this still unfulfilled "concession" comes only as a result of the refusal of tens of thousands of workers, fishermen, students, and others in Puerto Rico to give up their struggle--a struggle that has won support among increasing numbers of working people in the United States and around the world.

Members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists will join with many others in New York in demonstrating to demand that the U.S. Navy get out of Vieques now! Drop the charges against all those arrested for protesting on Navy-occupied land!

For workers and farmers in the United States, supporting independence for Puerto Rico is not only a matter of elementary solidarity. A successful struggle for the independence of Puerto Rico is necessary if the vast majority of the people of the United States are to successfully confront their own oppression and exploitation.  
 
A common enemy: Washington
Working people in the United States and the people of Puerto Rico have a common enemy--the small handful of billionaire families who rule the United States and who benefit from the exploitation of Puerto Rico's labor, land, and natural resources. As long as Puerto Rico remains under the U.S. colonial boot, the fighting capacity and solidarity of working people in this country will be debilitated.

As long as any worker or working farmer thinks of the U.S. government as "we" or "ours," all of us will be weakened in our struggles. Our efforts to reach out for anti-imperialist and proletarian solidarity will be obstructed.

The U.S. rulers are pushing to brutally speed up production, stretch out working hours, undermine health and safety on the job, slash social benefits, and attack union rights. They are tightening the bondage of working farmers to the banks and to giant agribusinesses from whom farmers must buy and to whom they must sell. These assaults have led a growing number of working people in city and countryside to resist the offensive against our wages, our land, and our social and political rights.

Just two weeks ago, 5,000 workers--many of them involved in struggles of their own--marched in Columbia, South Carolina, to demand the government drop the frame-up of five longshore workers facing felony "rioting" and "conspiracy" charges for the "crime" of taking part in a protest last year by hundreds of dockworkers against company union-busting that was violently assaulted by 600 cops.  
 
Emerging working-class resistance
This emerging resistance takes many forms. In Colorado uranium miners and their families are demanding U.S. government compensation for poisoning and deaths caused by the mine bosses' profit drive. Working people in Cincinnati, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and other cities are protesting racist killings by the police. In the Upper Midwest, from Minnesota to Nebraska, meat packers have held job actions to protest the inhuman speed of the production line and demand union recognition. Immigrant workers in California have marched to oppose government attempts both there and nationwide to require a Social Security number for anyone obtaining a drivers license--a government move that, if successful, will open the way to the imposition on all U.S. working people of a national identification card in defiance of the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights.

Mr. Chairman,

Some 2.7 million Puerto Ricans live in the United States, making up a productive and weighty component of the working people in this country--including of those who took part in two labor rallies in this very city yesterday, as transit workers defended health benefits and telephone workers protested union busting by Verizon.

Puerto Rican workers here are subjected to systematic racist discrimination, as are Blacks, Chicanos, and other oppressed nationalities. Colonial rule in Puerto Rico reinforces every reactionary force in the United States: from attacks on affirmative action, to anti-immigrant terror by la migra and right-wing groups, to antiunion assaults and campaigns.

Washington's colonial domination of Puerto Rico gives the U.S. government a freer hand to restrict the rights of working people and others fighting for their livelihoods and social justice. Today six patriots--Antonio Camacho, Oscar López, Haydée Beltrán, Juan Segarra Palmer, José Solís, and Carlos Alberto Torres--remain in U.S. prisons because of their activity in support of Puerto Rico's independence. Some have already been jailed for more than 20 years, making them among the longest-held political prisoners in the world.

As the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists demanded of William Clinton yesterday, we today demand of U.S. president George Bush: "Release them now!"

The attacks on democratic rights in Puerto Rico--from FBI spying against tens of thousands of unionists, independence supporters, and others, to the denial of bail to anti-Navy protesters appealing their sentences--will be used increasingly in the United States as workers and farmers resist the employers' efforts to drive down our wages and social gains and to restrict our capacity to organize and resist.

For decades the U.S. government has tarred the struggles of independentistas, calling them "terrorists" and railroading freedom fighters to jail. Similarly, in the so-called embassy bombing case here in New York, Washington is waving the banner of the fight against "terrorism" to try to establish a precedent for kidnapping citizens from African nations to be tried in the United States. At the same time, the U.S. rulers are stepping up use of the death penalty as a weapon of terror aimed at working people.

Since Washington invaded Puerto Rico more than a century ago, it has used that Latin American nation--including the Puerto Rican island of Vieques--as a base for launching military aggression around the world, from Panama to Cuba, to the Middle East. The use of U.S. military facilities in Puerto Rico in the name of fighting "drug trafficking" reinforces Washington's growing semisecret military intervention and construction of bases under the same pretext in Colombia, Ecuador, the Netherlands Antilles, and elsewhere in South America and the Caribbean.

Puerto Rican youth have been dragooned as cannon fodder into all of U.S. imperialism's wars, from the first and second interimperialist world slaughters, to Korea, to Vietnam, to Iraq, to the Balkans. The resistance by Puerto Rican youth to Washington's imperial conscription has set an example for young people in this country.

Last month, working people in this region got a taste of what the people of Puerto Rico have been subjected to for decades. On May 9 more than 100 U.S. Army special operations soldiers from Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, carried out a simulated assault near a residential neighborhood in East Brunswick, New Jersey. These war training exercises go hand in hand with the establishment, for the first time, of a de facto U.S. military "homeland" command right here in the United States, which will be aimed against working people in this country.

A successful struggle to win independence for Puerto Rico will deal a powerful blow to our common enemy. It will show it's possible to stand up to the most brutal capitalist class in the world and break its dominion. Right now this is being shown especially by the fishermen, workers, students, and others standing up to Washington in the fight to evict the Navy from Vieques.  
 
Example of revolutionary Cuba
Mr. Chairman,

The people of Puerto Rico and working people in the United States are often told by our common oppressors in Washington that it's futile to struggle, that we cannot survive without our masters, that independence will only spell ruin. But the example of revolutionary Cuba demolishes that self-serving myth.

The socialist road taken by the workers and farmers of Cuba is the only one that has proven capable of leading to genuine independence and sovereignty. In face of four decades of a relentless U.S. campaign to punish them for the audacity of becoming the first free territory of the Americas, Cuba's working people have not only resisted--they have emerged stronger.

A recent reflection of this strength was seen in a mass rally a few weeks ago by 100,000 people in Havana in solidarity with the Puerto Rican people and their fight to demand "U.S. Navy out of Vieques." This rally highlighted Cuba's consistent course of championing Puerto Rico's desire for independence.

Another expression of Cuba's selfless solidarity is the fact that today the Cuban government is offering free medical schooling to working-class youth from the United States--including young people from the Bronx, home to a significant Puerto Rican population. Revolutionary Cuba continues to point the road forward for Puerto Rico as well as for working people in the United States and worldwide.

The condemnation by this committee of Washington's colonial rule of Puerto Rico will serve the interests of the vast majority of the people of the United States and those fighting throughout the world for national self-determination and for the future of humanity.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of this committee, for the opportunity to present these views before you today.
 
 
Related article:
UN committee backs right to independence  
 
 
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