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href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-dream-of-puerto-rican-independence-and-the-story-of-heriberto-marin">https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-dream-of-puerto-rican-independence-and-the-story-of-heriberto-marin</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">The Dream of Puerto Rican Independence,
and the Story of Heriberto Marín</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">By Jon Lee Anderson -
December 27, 2017<br>
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<p data-reactid="153">When <span
data-page="page_1" data-reactid="155"></span>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.</p>
<p data-reactid="157">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 <em data-reactid="159">Times</em>,
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.</p>
<p data-reactid="162">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.</p>
<p data-reactid="164">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, <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-many-puerto-ricans-will-leave-home-after-hurricane-maria"
class="ArticleBody__link___1FS03"
data-reactid="166">Pedro J.
López</a>,
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?”</p>
<p data-reactid="169">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.”</p>
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<div
class="SectionBreak__sectionBreak___1ppA7"
data-reactid="171">
<p data-reactid="172">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
wings<span data-page="page_2"
data-reactid="174"></span> of 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.</p>
<p data-reactid="176">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.</p>
<p data-reactid="178">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 <em
data-reactid="180">Los Cadetes de la
República</em>, 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.</p>
<div data-cne-interlude=""
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<h3 id="cne-interlude-title"
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Black Athlete in America</h3>
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<p data-reactid="183">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 <em data-reactid="185">La Ley de
la Mordaza</em>, 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.</p>
<p data-reactid="188">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 <em data-reactid="190">nacionalistas</em>
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.</p>
<p data-reactid="193">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.</p>
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<div
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data-reactid="195">
<p data-reactid="196">One of Albizu
Campos’s soldiers is still alive. His
name is Heriberto
Marín, and he was a proud <em
data-reactid="198">Cadete de la
República</em>, just shy of<span
data-page="page_3" data-reactid="201"></span>
his
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.</p>
<p data-reactid="203">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.”</p>
<p data-reactid="205">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.’ ”</p>
<p data-reactid="207">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.</p>
<p data-reactid="209">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.</p>
<p data-reactid="211">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 <em
data-reactid="213">nacionalista</em>.
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.</p>
<p data-reactid="216">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.</p>
<p data-reactid="218">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.<span
data-page="page_final"
data-reactid="220"></span> 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.</p>
<p data-reactid="222">“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.”</p>
<p data-reactid="224">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.</p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
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San Francisco, CA 94110
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