UNITED NATIONS — Tens of thousands across Puerto Rico have been without running water for weeks on end, on top of years of frequent electrical blackouts, Damara González told the United Nations decolonization hearing on the status of Puerto Rico June 22.
“People are unable to adequately bathe, prepare meals and store medicine,” she said, speaking for Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora. The immediate cause of this crisis is deteriorating infrastructure and government inaction, but the “root cause is U.S. colonial rule.”
González was one of some 60 speakers at the annual hearing. The overwhelming majority called for independence for Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony since 1898, when Washington wrested control from Spain. Today the U.S. rulers claim the island is a self-governing “commonwealth,” but testimony at the hearing showed otherwise.
“Even though Puerto Rico has its own legal system, it remains under the authority of the U.S. Congress, which imposes laws and policies without the democratic consent of the Puerto Rican people,” said Vivian Godineaux, of the Puerto Rican Bar Association.
10 years of U.S.-imposed junta
Conditions have worsened in the 10 years since President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress imposed the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board, forcing the people of Puerto Rico to sacrifice to pay billions of dollars in debt to U.S. bondholders. The unelected board has veto power over all financial decisions of the island’s government.
The junta, as the board is commonly called, has “closed schools, reduced services, and accelerated migration from the island,” Jason Cruz, president of New York-based Victory in Puerto Rico, testified. “Our homeland is increasingly being treated as a commodity rather than a nation with a people, a culture and a right to determine its own future.”
Speaking for the National Network on Cuba, Miledys Guzmán pointed to the catastrophic closing of medical facilities across the island. “Puerto Rico’s public health crisis cannot be separated from its colonial condition,” she said.
These conditions are even worse in Vieques, a small Puerto Rican island where mass protests forced the closure of the U.S. naval bombing range in 2003. Six decades of U.S. bombings left much of the island’s waters and soil contaminated with uranium, lead and arsenic. Vieques has higher cancer rates than anywhere else in Puerto Rico.
“Our demand has always been clear — land return, demilitarization, development and decontamination,” Alexandra Connelly from Vieques Lives Matter said.
Many speakers denounced Washington’s recent reactivation of its military bases in Puerto Rico, using them to carry out its deadly military attack on Venezuela Jan. 3 and now to threaten the people of Cuba.
“We are being used as a platform for military operations and strategies assaulting the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean,” said Iván Elías Rodríguez, for the National Hostosiano Independence Movement.
Washington has sent “military personnel and combat planes to Puerto Rico,” said Lydael Vega Otero from the Professional Social Workers Guild of Puerto Rico, violating “the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people” and opening the door to “military incursion on Cuban soil.”
“The U.S. is simply using our land and our people to carry out their endless wars,” said Davina Resto from the New York-New Jersey Diaspora Pa’lante Committee.
“Our people have the right to freely decide our destiny and to live without our territory being used for military ends against our will,” said Sonia Santiago from Mothers Against War.
A handful of speakers called for Puerto Rico to become a U.S. state. But in the latest plebiscite “only 33% of the total population voted” for statehood, noted Coco Pérez from Juventud Unida por La Independencia (Youth United for Independence). And even “these numbers do not accurately represent our people, let alone the millions of Puerto Ricans who have been forced to be a part of the diaspora.”
Opponents of independence claim “Puerto Rico could not survive economically as a sovereign nation,” said Walter Alomar from the Organization for Culture of Hispanic Origin.
Despite having fertile land, Puerto Rico today has to import roughly 85% of its food, he said. The U.S. has created “a global manufacturing center” and a sought-after tourist destination there, but working people aren’t the beneficiaries. “The issue is whether the Puerto Rican people will finally be allowed to exercise their internationally recognized right to self-determination.”
Workers in U.S., Puerto Rico face the same enemy
“Workers in the United States are fighting against the same conditions” that face working people in Puerto Rico, said Paul Mailhot, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of New York. He called for “U.S. military out of Puerto Rico and all of the Caribbean! U.S. hands off Cuba!
“The fight for the independence of Puerto Rico, the struggles of U.S. working people and defense of Cuban sovereignty are more closely tied than ever. Neither in Puerto Rico, nor in the United States, can workers rely on the parties of the bosses,” he said. “We have to build revolutionary parties that will fight for workers power.”
The U.N. committee adopted a resolution introduced by the government of Cuba calling for independence for Puerto Rico. Cuban Ambassador Ernesto Soberón Guzmán noted that Washington’s refusal to work with the decolonization committee shows its “imperialist pretentions.”
“The worsening economic blockade, including the energy siege, collective punishment, and systematic public threats of military aggression against our country,” he said, “expose and reveal the historic criminal and blatant objectives of the U.S. government to restore neocolonial domination over the Cuban nation.”
The adoption of the resolution demanding the “inalienable right of the people of Puerto Rico to self-determination and independence is particularly significant in the current context,” Soberón said. “We reiterate to the people of Puerto Rico that they will always be able to count on Cuba and our firm solidarity with their legitimate cause.”