Vol. 80/No. 33      September 5, 2016

 

Anger at US colonial rule grows in Puerto Rico

 
The U.S. rulers are getting worried about their rule in Puerto Rico — as its economy is in a free fall, the Zika virus explodes as a social crisis on the island, and people are growing angrier at Puerto Rico’s status as an outright colony of Washington. That comes through in the Aug. 16 New York Times article “Puerto Rico’s Financial Woes Revive Calls for Independence.” The article is based on an interview with long-time independentista and Puerto Rican Nationalist Rafael Cancel Miranda.

Cancel Miranda, now 86 years old, spent a total of 25 ½ years in U.S. jails. The first time was for two years for refusing to register for the draft prior to the Korean War. He got out in 1951. He was arrested again in March 1954 after firing a gun during an armed protest in the U.S. House of Representatives together with Lolita Lebrón, Andrés Figueroa Cordero and Irving Flores.

Today, Cancel Miranda continues to tell the truth about Puerto Rico’s colonial status and — to the consternation of the Times editors — “younger people receive him as a legend.”

Cancel Miranda told the Militant in a phone interview Aug. 22 that every chance he gets he talks about the fight to free Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera, jailed in the U.S. for more than 35 years for his activities in defense of independence for the island.

But the Times article said not a word about López. The U.S. rulers see López as “an enemy for fighting for freedom,” Cancel Miranda said. “But we see him as a Puerto Rican patriot.” A growing coalition of groups on the island and on the mainland is organizing for a large national concert and event demanding freedom for López in front of the White House in Washington Oct. 9.

The United Nations had declared the 1950s a “decade of decolonization” and Puerto Rico was on its list of colonies to be freed. But at U.N. hearings in 1953, U.S. delegates twisted arms and argued that Puerto Rico had became a “free associated state” — a U.S. commonwealth — and succeeded in having the island removed from the list.

“I was there,” Cancel Miranda told the Militant. “It was a total sham in the face of the world.” The armed action was a way of exposing that lie.

“Simón Bolivar said that empires maintain their domination better through deception than through force,” Cancel Miranda said. “A people who are fooled are easy to control. But now people in Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in exile are seeing through the deception.”

And that worries the editors of the Times. “Now it seems that most Puerto Ricans believe the associated free state was a sham,” the article notes.

In the interview Cancel Miranda points to the impact of the worldwide capitalist economic crisis on the people of Puerto Rico, and recent colonial measures taken by Washington, including the imposition of a U.S. fiscal control board in an effort to ensure the Puerto Rican people pay for the island’s $72 billion debt to bondholders and hedge funds.

The Times says the board “will soon hold sway over the island.”

The board has the power to sell Puerto Rican government assets, lay off public workers, overturn any law or regulation that it decides is “inconsistent” with its mission, and impose criminal penalties on anyone who fails to carry out its decisions.

In reality, Cancel Miranda told the Militant, Puerto Rico has been “under the rule of an imperialist board” ever since Washington made Puerto Rico its colony in 1898. What’s different now is that “even they have to admit it.”

The crisis on the island is due to the capitalist economic crisis, Cancel Miranda said, “but also because of colonialism, the rule of Wall Street. We don’t have any powers to resolve our own problems. They control everything.”

“We have always resisted the empire,” Cancel Miranda told the Militant. “But now bigger battles are coming.”  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home