Vol. 79/No. 30      August 24, 2015

“U.S. bondholders bought up Puerto Rico’s bonds, seeking to make a killing,” Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Philadelphia, told parishioners at a church in the Puerto Rican community there last month. “Now, when the colonial government says the spiraling debt is unpayable, they try to make workers on the island bear the burden. We oppose this assault on the working class and support the fight for independence for Puerto Rico.”

“Independence is not simply a nice ideal. It is a necessity,” long-time independence fighter Rafael Cancel Miranda explains. The current crisis and assault on Puerto Rican toilers is awakening more people to see that.

Puerto Rico is a U.S. colony. It is a nation that can’t make its own laws, decide its own foreign relations or control its own economic affairs. Under U.S. rule most small farmers have lost their land to U.S. monopolies, food self-sufficiency was destroyed, unemployment skyrocketed and many Puerto Ricans, unable to subsist on the island, have left for the U.S., an increasing trend in the last decade.

“Winning the fight for Puerto Rico’s independence is in the interests of the vast majority of people in the United States,” said Martín Koppel, speaking for the SWP, which has championed that struggle since the party’s founding eight decades ago, at the United Nations hearings on Puerto Rico last year. “We have common interests and a common enemy — the U.S. government and the propertied ruling class it defends.”

Cuban toilers removed the imperialist boot from their necks in 1959 and set an example for working people around the world when they overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship, transforming themselves through the struggle as they began to build a socialist society run by workers and farmers and based on relations of human solidarity and internationalism.

Workers in the U.S. should see the struggle for independence for Puerto Rico as our fight. A labor party based on the unions that joins labor and social resistance would back the fight for independence for Puerto Rico and freedom for Oscar López as we build a movement that emulates the Cuban Revolution and fights to end the dictatorship of capital — in the U.S., in Puerto Rico and around the world.
 
 
Related articles:
Puerto Rico’s unpayable debt is product of US colonial rule
 
 
 
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