The five Nationalists spent more than a quarter of a century in U.S. prisons for their pro-independence actions. Faced with a growing international defense campaign, the U.S. government freed Figueroa Cordero in 1978, and the remaining four in 1979.

In commemoration of this important milestone in the history of the fight for Puerto Rican independence, the Militant is reprinting excerpts from an interview with Rafael Cancel Miranda.

The selection is based on an interview conducted by Rollande Girard and Jacob Perasso in April 1998, and subsequent phone interviews with Militant reporter Martín Koppel, in which Cancel Miranda recounted some of the backround to those dramatic events and the subsequent political work he became involved in while in prison. The interview is published in full in the Pathfinder pamphlet, Puerto Rico: Independence is a Necessity. Copyright © 1998 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
WITH ROLLANDE GIRARD
AND JACOB PERASSO  
Cancel Miranda became involved in Puerto Rico’s independence movement as a youth in the early 1940s in the western city of Mayagüez.

“My father was the president of the Nationalist Party committee in Mayagüez,” he said. “I was brought up among Nationalists. I grew up hearing the name of Pedro Albizu Campos. He and my father were comrades-in-arms and friends, and when he would come to speak in Mayagüez he would stay in our home.” Albizu Campos was the central leader of the Nationalist Party and the Puerto Rican independence movement for several decades.

On March 21, 1937, Cancel Miranda’s father and mother attended a Nationalist Party rally in the city of Ponce that was attacked by the police on orders from Gen. Blanton Winship, the colonial governor. The cops fired on the peaceful gathering, killing twenty-one people and wounding two hundred. “Blanton Winship, an American who had been appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was praised for ‘defending democracy’ by slaughtering our people,” said Cancel Miranda, who at the time was six years old.

“My parents survived the massacre. My mother went there dressed in white and returned dressed in red, covered in the blood of the dead, whose bodies she had to crawl over as the bullets flew overhead.” He would never forget that image….

Following World War II, widespread resistance to Washington’s attempt to impose English as the main language of instruction in Puerto Rico’s schools forced the U.S. government to drop that effort. Cancel Miranda relates that “in high school, when they tried to make us all speak English in class, we organized a student strike in defense of our language, and I along with others was accused of organizing it. They kicked me out of school for a year and barred me from studying in my town. I had to go to San Juan to finish school, even though I had only about two months to go before graduating.”

Washington also had a hard time convincing Puerto Rican youth to join the army of the colonial master that occupied their homeland. During World War II, scores of Puerto Rican youth had been jailed for refusing to serve in the U.S armed forces. During the 1950-53 Korean War, some one hundred thousand youth on the island refused to be drafted. In 1948 Cancel Miranda, then eighteen, was one of those who said no to the U.S. draft.

“One day,” he recounts, “I was walking to school in San Juan with other students, and there was a car with four men sitting at the corner. I saw their faces and knew they weren’t Puerto Ricans. They were four FBI agents. I handed my books to the other students to take them to the place where I was living, because I figured I might not return. They arrested me and charged me with refusing the U.S. draft. Later they arrested another six or eight youths.

“To me it didn’t make sense to be in the same army that invades your country and massacres your people. If you’re going to fight, you should fight them.

“The U.S. court here in Puerto Rico—they call it federal but it’s a foreign court—sentenced me to two years and one day in prison. They put me on a plane along with five or six of us and sent us to the U.S. prison in Tallahassee, Florida.”

Cancel Miranda was in jail in Tallahassee when Washington launched its war of aggression against Korea in 1950. That same year, the Nationalist Party led an armed rebellion in Puerto Rico, which the colonial regime brutally crushed. Thousands were arrested, including Cancel Miranda’s father.

“When I returned from prison in 1951 I got married,” he continues. “But just eleven days later, they wanted to lock me up again for refusing the draft. My wife Carmen and my sister Zoraida told me: don’t let yourself get arrested!

“So I went to Cuba under a different name and lived there for fourteen months. In Havana I landed a job in the construction of the tunnel under the Almendares river. I worked that job several months. Later, the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who was a U.S. puppet, put me in jail and deported me to Puerto Rico.” Batista had come to power through a military coup in March 1952.

A short time later Cancel Miranda moved to Brooklyn, where he joined his wife. There he got involved in the effort to oppose Washington’s attempts to prevent Puerto Rico’s colonial status from being discussed at the United Nations.

“From the end of World War II until 1952, the U.S. government had to report to the United Nations on Puerto Rico,” he explains. “There was a UN committee on territories that were not independent, and Puerto Rico was on that list as a colony. The U.S. government wanted to take Puerto Rico off the list so it wouldn’t have to report and show its warts to the world. In 1953 they took their case to the United Nations, claiming that in 1952 we had by a sovereign, free vote become a ‘commonwealth.’ They claimed we were happy and content.

“I got involved in lobbying at the United Nations. A couple of times my wife went with me to speak to the ambassador of India, a friend of Puerto Rico who fought for our position at the United Nations. But the Yankees won a victory and got Puerto Rico taken off the list of non-sovereign countries. They presented us to the world as satisfied slaves.” Washington even engineered the expulsion of the official observer the Nationalist Party had had at the United Nations since 1945.

In response, Cancel Miranda said, he and three other Nationalists living in New York “decided to carry out a demonstration that would draw the world’s attention to the truth about Puerto Rico, that would tell the world that there were Puerto Ricans who were willing to die for our independence and that the U.S. government was fooling the United Nations and the world—including my people—with this so-called commonwealth.”

The other three were Andrés Figueroa Cordero, Irving Flores, and Lolita Lebrón. At the time, Cancel Miranda, twenty-three years old, was a press operator in a shoe factory in New York. Figueroa Cordero was working in a butcher shop, Flores in a furniture factory, and Lebrón in a garment shop as a sewing machine operator.

The U.S. rulers, Cancel Miranda stated, “had the money and the arms, but we had the moral force. We went to Washington to carry out an armed demonstration —we knew that if we went with signs we weren’t going to get attention. There we fired inside the U.S. Capitol on March 1, 1954.” The shots, fired from the spectators’ gallery, wounded five congressmen.

“They put us on trial in Washington, D.C. They sentenced the three men to seventy-five years and Lolita to fifty years. Then they took us to New York, where we were tried for ‘conspiracy to overthrow the government by force and violence’ and sentenced to six more years. Can you imagine us thinking we could overthrow the U.S. government with little pistols? I wish I could!”

The kind of treatment the Nationalists were routinely subjected to increasingly became public knowledge and fueled the campaign for their release. When Cancel Miranda’s father died in 1977, his supporters campaigned to allow him to attend the funeral. “I was in Puerto Rico for seven hours for my father’s funeral,” he related. “But my people jumped with anger when they learned that at the St. Louis airport, on the way to Puerto Rico, they put me in a dog cage. While waiting for the next plane, they took the dog out and put me in. I had mentioned it casually to people, because I had been in prison for years and it was a normal thing to me, but to them it was unimaginable.”

For years, Cancel Miranda remarked, “I kept thinking up escape plans, because I wasn’t resigned to die in prison of old age. When the campaign for our release began, that’s when I stopped thinking about escaping because the campaign became political work for us.”

The broad and growing worldwide campaign for the release of the Puerto Rican Nationalists was the product of, and part of, the deep political radicalization in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It was fed by the victorious mass struggle by African Americans that brought down the Jim Crow segregation system, by the anti-imperialist audacity of the Cuban revolution, by the deepening opposition to the U.S. rulers’ attempts to crush the Vietnamese national liberation struggle, and by the resurgence of the Puerto Rican independence movement. In Puerto Rico itself, defiance of the draft became so massive despite scores of arrests that the U.S. government eventually decided to drop most prosecutions of resisters on the island.

This social and political upheaval found expression behind prison bars as well. By the late 1960s, there were increasing numbers of prisoners engaged in political activity, and Cancel Miranda joined with them.

The Cuban revolution had a profound impact on him. “As I heard more and more about Cuba,” he noted, “I realized it was not just another military coup like so many others in Latin America, but a true social transformation. I internalized it to the point that the Cuban revolution has become as important to me as the fight for the freedom of my people.”

When the Chicano struggle developed in the United States, “in prison I became involved in that fight, including the defense of Corky Gonzales and the Crusade for Justice,” he said. Gonzales and the Chicano rights organization he led, the Denver Crusade for Justice, were the target of a government frame-up in the early 1970s.

Every September 16, Cancel Miranda would join the Mexican and Chicano prisoners in marking Mexico’s independence day with a work stoppage. “I also got involved in the Black struggle. We did many other things, even producing newspapers like the Chicano prisoners’ paper Aztlán. I also wrote a couple of articles for the Militant.

“In other words, I was never really imprisoned. I never felt defeated. I kept fighting inside prison and always had the hope of getting out—one way or another. When you resign yourself to the idea that you’re not going to get out, that’s when you become a convict. The prison becomes your world. But none of us resigned ourselves.”

“Thanks to thousands of people everywhere who supported us, we won a victory in 1979. We came out of prison standing, not on our knees.”

Under international pressure, President James Carter released Figueroa Cordero in 1978, as he was dying of cancer. The other four were freed in September of the following year.

Some voices in U.S. big-business circles immediately protested the release of the four Nationalists, whom they labeled terrorists. “Two days after our release,” Cancel Miranda recalls, “a newspaper in Chicago asked how it could be that in Puerto Rico thousands of people were waiting for us, holding Puerto Rican flags. And a few days before, in Chicago and New York, thousands of people from the Puerto Rican communities had welcomed us too.

“They could not understand how these people, who had shot up ‘our’ congressmen, could be welcomed as heroes by our people.

“But they were also incapable of understanding the Vietnamese people, how the Vietnamese people were able to fight for their homeland and defeat them.”  
 
 
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