[News] The Dream of Puerto Rican Independence, and the Story of Heriberto Marín

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-dream-of-puerto-rican-independence-and-the-story-of-heriberto-marin 



  The Dream of Puerto Rican Independence, and the Story of Heriberto Marín

By Jon Lee Anderson - December 27, 2017
------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, on September 20th, it 
smashed into the island with withering winds of up to a hundred and 
fifty-five miles per hour. The storm destroyed the island’s electric 
power grid, wiped out eighty per cent of its agricultural crops, and 
knocked out ninety-five per cent of its cell networks, along with 
eighty-five per cent of its aboveground telephone and Internet cables. 
Roads, bridges, and a major dam were damaged, homes were flooded and 
destroyed, and thousands of people were made homeless. The economic 
damage to the island was colossal, estimated to be in the range of a 
hundred billion dollars. Very quickly, it was clear that Maria was the 
worst natural disaster in Puerto Rico’s history. Three months later, 
Puerto Ricans are still picking up the pieces. Thirty per cent of the 
island remains without power. And the catastrophe only compounded the 
problems of a bankruptcy and unemployment crisis that has dragged on for 
several years. As soon as they could after the storm, large numbers of 
Puerto Ricans—convinced that the situation will not improve—began 
packing up and leaving for new lives on the U.S. mainland. As many as 
two hundred thousand people out of the island’s population of 3.3 
million have left so far, an exodus that shows little sign of abating.

In spite of the scale of the disaster, Puerto Rico’s authorities have 
touted the storm’s extremely low death toll; as of last week, the 
official count of the dead was sixty-four. President Trump picked up on 
this fact early on, and used it simultaneously to defend his 
Administration’s response to Maria and to minimize the storm’s 
importance as an issue of concern for the rest of the country. During a 
brief visit to the island, on October 3rd, Trump compared Maria’s death 
toll to Hurricane Katrina’s. “Sixteen versus literally thousands of 
people,” he said. “You can be very proud.” During that same trip, Trump 
infamously tossed paper-towel rolls to Puerto Ricans at a 
hurricane-relief shelter as if he were giving away souvenir T-shirts at 
a basketball game. Earlier this month, after several 
organizations—including Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative 
Journalism, the /Times/, and CNN—independently published findings 
concluding that actually as many as a thousand and sixty-two people had 
died in the storm, Ricardo Rosselló, Puerto Rico’s governor, announced 
that an investigation would be undertaken to establish the true figure.

A few days after Trump’s visit, I spent a week in Puerto Rico. The 
devastation was obvious. And everywhere, the sensitive subject of the 
island’s relationship to the mainland as an “unincorporated U.S. 
territory” was being discussed. Trump’s paper-towel-throwing appearance 
had struck a nerve, and was a subject of intense media coverage. For 
Puerto Ricans, the episode was a reminder, on top of Trump’s 
foot-dragging and generally dismissive response to the disaster, that 
they were second-class citizens.

In Utuado, a rural community in the epicenter of the island and the site 
of some of Maria’s worst ravages, I spoke with a local man, Pedro J. 
López 
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-many-puerto-ricans-will-leave-home-after-hurricane-maria>, 
who had lost his home in a mudslide caused by the hurricane. He was busy 
trying to put his family’s life back together—he had two daughters and a 
diabetic wife—and he made it plain that he was doing so with pride, and 
was not waiting for any handouts. But he also told me that he had heard 
about Trump’s visit, and he wondered aloud whether the American 
President expected Puerto Ricans to use those paper towels to wipe “our 
asses or our tears?”

Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States is an unequal one, and 
it has over the years brought about many humiliations for Puerto 
Ricans—who are U.S. citizens but who cannot vote for President if they 
live on the island, and have limited represenation in Congress. Yet in 
modern times, most American Presidents have taken pains to be respectful 
of the island and its status. Not so with Trump. San Juan’s outspoken 
mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, who repeatedly tangled with the President on 
Twitter and through the media in the immediate aftermath of the storm, 
told me that he was “a man with a big mouth” who “lacked empathy.” But 
she hoped that the political fallout from Hurricane Maria would provide 
an opportunity to finally redefine Puerto Rico’s relationship with the 
United States, which, she said, “needs to be dignified. It has to change.”

Puerto Rico was claimed for Spain five hundred years ago, and its first 
governor was Juan Ponce de León. Beginning in the nineteenth century, 
the island’s residents began jostling for greater freedoms. Inspired by 
the liberal reforms espoused by the French Revolution and by Simón 
Bolívar’s battles for independence around the hemisphere, a Puerto Rican 
nationalist movement was born. Beginning in 1868, these nationalists 
launched a series of revolts that were abortive but persistent enough to 
convince Spain’s government, in early 1898, to grant the island a 
measure of autonomy. Yet just a few months later, following the brief 
but decisive Spanish-American War, the island was claimed as booty by 
the United States. Something similar happened in neighboring Cuba, where 
local patriots had fought the Spaniards at great human cost for most of 
the preceding four decades, only to be similarly “freed” by the 
Americans, who promptly put them under military rule. The two islands, 
which the Puerto Rican poet Lola Rodríguez del Tió famously called “two 
wingsof the same bird,” were Spain’s last colonies in the Americas, and 
in the course of one summer, both fell under U.S. control. In 1902, Cuba 
was granted its independence in exchange for, among other concessions, 
tolerating the U.S. naval base at Guantámano Bay. Puerto Rico’s day 
never came.

In 1914, Puerto Rico’s nominal Congress—operating under U.S. 
jurisdiction—unanimously voted for Puerto Rico’s independence, but the 
gesture was ignored. Instead, in 1917, citizenship was imposed on Puerto 
Ricans, and the island was given an American governor appointed by 
Washington. The move polarized the Puerto Rican political scene, 
splitting its parties into those that sought independence, those that 
sought statehood, and those that sought a better deal with the mainland. 
(More or less the same splits persist among Puerto Ricans today: a 
little over half of Puerto Ricans now support full U.S. statehood; about 
a quarter like the status quo—Puerto Rico as an “associated sovereign 
country,” as defined in its formal agreement with the U.S.; only about 
fifteen per cent wish for greater autonomy or outright independence.) 
American sugar interests increasingly began to dominate the Puerto Rican 
economy. Puerto Rico’s ports, utilities, and railroads were also 
American-owned. In the nineteen-thirties, after security forces 
repeatedly used lethal violence to quell demonstrations by Puerto Rican 
nationalists, some opted for armed struggle, and they launched a 
campaign of assassinations and other violent attacks against government 
officials and security forces.

The leader of the independence movement, Pedro Albizu Campos, was a 
Harvard Law graduate, a polymath, and a gifted public speaker. He 
adopted the goal of Puerto Rican independence as his life’s purpose 
under the slogan, “the homeland is valor and sacrifice.” As the leader 
of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, he organized a militarily trained 
youth wing called /Los Cadetes de la República/, with the idea that 
these young “soldiers” would eventually lead the armed struggle for the 
country’s independence. In 1936, after two cadets assassinated a 
notorious police official and were in turn caught and executed, Albizu 
Campos and several cohorts were arrested and found guilty of sedition. 
Albizu Campos spent most of the next decade in U.S. prisons. He was 
freed and returned to Puerto Rico in 1947, just before the island’s 
first-ever free gubernatorial elections were held.


      The Black Athlete in America

The politician who won them, Luis Muñoz Marín, was Albizu Campos’s total 
opposite. He not only opposed Puerto Rico’s independence but was also a 
driving force behind a move to keep the island within the American orbit 
as an “unincorporated U.S. territory.” Seen as a pro-U.S. bulwark 
against the rise of Communism in the hemisphere, Muñoz Marín became a 
darling of successive American Administrations. During the first nine 
years of the sixteen he would spend in power, Muñoz Marín benefitted 
from /La Ley de la Mordaza/, or the Gag Law, which allowed him to jail 
anyone who publicly espoused pro-independence beliefs. Huge numbers of 
Puerto Ricans were placed under long-term surveillance by secret police, 
and thousands were arrested for their political beliefs. The Puerto 
Rican flag was outlawed.

On October 27, 1950, after being alerted to preëmptive police raids 
being carried out against his followers, Albizu Campos summoned his 
followers to arms. His small band of nationalists retrieved secretly 
cached weapons and rose up to seize towns and attack police stations and 
other targets. In Jayuya, a small town at the mountainous center of the 
island, the /nacionalistas/ seized the police station after a 
shootout—one policeman died—and also burned down the town’s U.S. post 
office. The local rebel leader, a woman named Blanca Canales, raised 
Puerto Rico’s flag in the town square and declared a “free republic of 
Puerto Rico.” In nearby Utuado—one of the townships most heavily damaged 
by Hurricane Maria—at least nine nationalists were killed, five of them 
summarily executed after surrendering to authorities. Muñoz Marín 
secured both towns after ordering them to be pounded by field artillery 
and strafed from the air. In Old San Juan, four more rebels were killed 
in an abortive attack on the governor’s residence, La Fortaleza.

On the island, the rebellion was over by the night of October 31st. But 
the plot wasn’t finished. On the morning of November 1st, in Washington 
D.C., two Puerto Rican nationalists approached Blair House, where 
President Harry Truman was staying temporarily during renovations to the 
White House across the street, and opened fire on the security men 
guarding the building. Their plan was to enter Blair House and kill 
Truman, if they could. They never got inside the building. Instead, in 
the shootout, one of the Puerto Ricans died, and so did a Secret Service 
agent. Truman himself was unhurt. Albizu Campos, who was arrested along 
with several dozen of his followers, was sentenced to eighty years in 
prison. Two years later, Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated U.S. 
territory, or “commonwealth,” was voted on and overwhelmingly approved 
by Congress. In 1954, in an effort to keep the cause of Puerto Rican 
independence visible, four more of Albizu Campos’s followers entered the 
U.S. Capitol and opened fire on congressmen there, wounding five of them 
before being overwhelmed by police. Albizu Campos, who had received a 
pardon a few months earlier, was immediately rearrested and spent 
another decade in prison before his death, in April, 1965.

One of Albizu Campos’s soldiers is still alive. His name is Heriberto 
Marín, and he was a proud /Cadete de la República/, just shy ofhis 
twenty-first birthday when he participated in the Jayuya uprising. A 
trim, mustachioed man with white hair, Marín is now eighty-nine but 
appears a decade younger. He lives in a tidy second-floor apartment 
overlooking San Juan’s colonial-era Spanish arsenal and the harbor. On 
the day that I visited him, in October, a red-white-and-blue Puerto 
Rican flag was hanging from his balcony, and a U.S. naval ship making a 
port call was visible in the distance. The apartment was decorated with 
nationalist memorabilia. A black-and-white photograph of Pedro Albizu 
Campos hung on a wall in the living room.

When I asked him about the 1950 uprising, Marín gave a polite smile. “It 
was the era of decolonization, the spirit of the times,” he began. “It 
was David against Goliath. Dr. Albizu Campos told us we might die, but 
that we might also succeed.” Their plan had not merely been to fight the 
police in Jayuya, he explained, but to seize the police’s guns and then 
make their way to nearby Utuado, where they were to meet up with other 
rebel units and make a final stand. Albizu Campo had expected the U.S. 
military to become directly involved, and once they did, “we would have 
let the world know about Puerto Rico.”

Marín (who is of no relation to Luis Muñoz Marín) had special words of 
praise for Blanca Canales, the leader of the Jayuya uprising. Canales 
had been a member of a local landowner family, yet she’d taken the risk 
of hiding the rebels’ weapons in her home. “Women have always played a 
special role in the independence struggle for Puerto Rico,” he said. 
“Dr. Albizu Campos had a saying: ‘When men’s trousers fall down, the 
women will raise the flag aloft.’ ”

Marín was born in Jayuya, to a family of poor tenant farmers who worked 
for the Canaleses. The Maríns had been given a patch of land to farm, 
and his mother cooked for the Canaleses. As Marín told it, the Canaleses 
were different from other landowners. “In return for our piece of land, 
we were supposed to give some of our harvest to the Canaleses, but they 
never asked us for anything,” he said. The Canaleses were also 
nationalists. As a boy in 1937, he had been in their home and witnessed 
members of the family weeping after the news of an infamous police 
massacre of nationalists in the city of Ponce. The episode affected him 
deeply. “By the age of fourteen, I was a nationalist,” he said.

During the 1950 uprising, Marín told me, he had had the “immense honor” 
of helping Blanca Canales raise the Puerto Rican flag in Jayuya’s town 
square. When the fighting was over, he was sentenced to a hundred and 
fifty-four years in prison. He was sent first to La Princesa, an ancient 
prison in Old San Juan. He waved out the window, to the nearby buildings 
of the old town, and explained that the old jail had been shut down and 
eventually remodelled. “They turned it into a palace to erase the memory 
of all the crimes that had been committed there,” he said. “It’s now the 
Puerto Rican tourism office.” After his time in La Princesa, he’d been 
sent on to another prison known as El Oso Blanco, the White Bear, where 
Albizu Campos was also held. Marín lamented that it, too, was no longer 
in existence, having been torn down in spite of a campaign by himself 
and other former prisoners to preserve it for posterity. “There is no 
historical consciousness here,” he said.

Marin spent eight years in Oso Blanco in a six-by-nine-foot cell. A year 
and a half was spent in total isolation. The rest of the time he shared 
the cell with a fellow /nacionalista/. His memories were not all 
aggrieved ones. He spoke highly of the prison’s medical director, who 
was a Spanish Republican exile, said to be related to the late Spanish 
poet Federico García Lorca. Marín credited the director for acts of 
kindness toward Albizu Campos, whom authorities had consigned, as a kind 
of punishment, to Oso Blanco’s tuberculosis ward. Marín choked up, 
recalling how he had once been allowed a brief visit with Albizu Campos, 
and found him bedridden and ill, and how they had hugged one another and 
wept. It was the last time he ever saw him.

Marín got up and walked over to a side table where there was a 
black-and-white photograph of a young woman. He brought it back and held 
it on his lap. It was his late wife, Cándida. She had died three years 
ago. They had met as teen-agers in high school. She had shared his 
passion for Puerto Rican independence, and they had fallen in love. Then 
had come the uprising and his long incarceration. After he got out, 
freed in an amnesty, Marín spotted her at a social occasion. “My heart 
did a tsunami,” he said. “I asked her if she was married. She said, ‘How 
could I, since I was waiting for you?’ ” Marín smiled at the memory of 
the moment. They were married fifty-four years, and had four children 
together.

Marín told me that he was convinced his sacrifice and those of the other 
Puerto Ricans killed or imprisoned in the name of independence had been 
worth it. He still regarded himself as a socialist, he said, and as a 
revolutionary.He unapologetically defended the attacks on Blair House 
and the Capitol as having been very important for “the future 
generations” of Puerto Ricans, as well. “Puerto Ricans are proud of 
those who authored those events,” he added, reciting the names of each 
of the attackers, one by one. “At a time when the United States thought 
no one could attack its territory, it was attacked by the nationalists, 
and the entire world was made aware that there was a problem in Puerto 
Rico.” Marín told me about to trip to Cuba he had taken in recent years. 
He was hugely admiring of what its revolutionary government had 
achieved. “I loved it,” he said. “I was deeply impressed to see how a 
poor and persecuted country could fend for itself so heroically.” His 
second visit, in 2015, he explained, had been at Cuba’s invitation, as a 
special guest for an official commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary 
of Albizu Campos’s death.

“In Cuba they are poor, but that doesn’t mean they are without dignity,” 
Marín said. “We Puerto Ricans are also a heroic people, because we 
resisted Spain for five hundred years, and now we have resisted the 
United States for a hundred and nineteen years. We are like trees that 
not even a hurricane has been able to uproot, because our roots grow so 
deeply. Our leaves may be torn off, but they will grow again. These are 
the fruits of what we have sown.”

Marín made little mention of Hurricane Maria during our conversation. 
Like all of his neighbors, Marín had no electricity, but he seemed 
unconcerned about it, and as the afternoon light faded, we sat in a 
gathering gloom that he seemed to ignore. His apartment’s windows were 
equipped with strong storm shutters, which had kept out the rain and 
wind, and so he had been otherwise unaffected. He expressed sympathy for 
the residents of Jayuya, his home town, and of neighboring Utuado, which 
I had visited, but he seemed to regard the storm as a lesser calamity 
than Puerto Rico’s lack of independence. I asked Marín if he believed 
the independence struggle would continue after his death. He smiled, and 
exclaimed, “Yes, of course.” One day, he said, Puerto Rico would be free.


-- 
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