In its final suicidal lunge, Puerto Rico’s independence movement had been all but vanquished. In a March 1952 referendum, the island’s voters were asked to affirm or reject a new constitution, one that would characterize the island as an Estado Libre Asociado (Freely Associated State or, more commonly, Commonwealth) of the United States. The option of independence was not on the ballot, and 81.9 percent of voters approved the new constitution. In November 1953, the United Nations removed Puerto Rico from its list of countries under colonial rule.
As their political fortunes evaporated, the Nationalists had one last card to play. In March 1954, four Nationalists—Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, Irvin Flores, and Lolita Lebrón—attacked the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC. Shouting, ¡Viva Puerto Rico libre! (Long live free Puerto Rico!) and unfurling a Puerto Rican flag, they used automatic pistols to rain bullets on the in-session chamber. Miraculously, no one was killed, though five lawmakers were seriously wounded.109 Pedro Albizu Campos, who had been released conditionally by Muñoz Marín only a few months earlier, was quickly rearrested. In March 1956, Albizu Campos had a stroke and, supporters charged, was denied medical attention for two days.110 He would finally be released from prison in November 1964, a shadow of his former self, and died five months later.
Along with the near-total downfall of Puerto Rico’s radical independence movement came another passing, this one perhaps even sadder—the death of the poet whose verse seemed to embody so many of the island’s struggles, as well as its beauty and pain: Julia de Burgos.
After leaving Cuba in 1942 following the breakup of her relationship with Juan Isidro Jimenes Grullón, de Burgos had moved back to New York City. There, following the trajectory of so many from the island before her, she wrote for a Spanish-language weekly, and also began a relationship with a musician from Vieques named Armando Marín, whom she eventually married. A brief move to the suburbs of Washington, DC, ended in failure, and her FBI file, like those of so many partial to the independence cause before her, continued to grow. When her marriage collapsed she moved back to New York, and as she worked a series of blue-collar jobs, alcoholism and despair gradually overtook her.111 On July 5, 1953, de Burgos was found unconscious on the sidewalk by two policemen in East Harlem and rushed to a hospital. She died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-nine and was buried in the potter’s field on Hart Island in the Bronx. 112 It wasn’t until the following month that her death was discovered by those who knew her and a committee, led by the great educator Margot Arce de Vázquez, was able to raise funds to repatriate her body to the island and give her a proper burial. In one of de Burgos’s last poems, “Farewell from Welfare Island,” she wrote, even as ill health and despondency took hold of her, of refusing to be forgotten:
It has to come from here,
right this instance,
my cry into the world.
After a lifetime of struggle, Julia de Burgos was at peace. In Puerto Rico, the battles would go on.
In the mid-1950s, after more than fifty years of American rule, Puerto Rico was connected more deeply than ever to the United States, and the next two decades would see profound changes across the island.
Agriculture declined sharply after the advent of Operation Bootstrap with its focus on industrialization.113 In 1956, the income generated by manufacturing outstripped that generated by agriculture for the first time.114 Between 1953 and 1963, salaries in manufacturing on the island more than doubled.115 As industrialization led to internal migration, San Juan and other cities saw the growth of shantytowns, such as those along the Caño Martín Peña (Martín Peña Channel), which runs from the Bahía de San Juan in the west to a pair of lagoons—San José and Los Corozos—in the east. The Los Peloteros shantytown was home to nearly seventeen thousand people who lived there despite its lack of a sewage system. More than 421 similar communities existed around the island by 1959.116 Perhaps the most iconic was La Perla, just beneath the walls of Old San Juan along the Caribbean Sea. First settled at the tail end of the nineteenth century on the site of what was then a slaughterhouse, La Perla was initially home to many descendants of former slaves and poor arrivals from the countryside. Over the years, the neighborhood’s distinctive homes—at first mere wooden shacks that were over time replaced by mainly concrete structures painted ebullient colors—became one of the more recognizable images of the island.117 For those in less stark circumstances, preplanned residential developments, similar to what one would find in suburbs in the US mainland, sprouted up around cities like San Juan, Ponce, and Mayagüez. Family income on the island rose from $660 a year in 1940 to $3,818 a year in 1966.118 Between 1940 and 1970, illiteracy would drop from 34 percent to 10.8 percent.119
During the 1950s, though the number of jobs on the island fell by some sixty thousand, the escape valve provided by easy migration to the United States proved enticing, and tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans left the island for better-paying jobs on the mainland, preventing the widespread social unrest that occurred elsewhere in Latin America.120 According to the US census, by 1960 nearly 900,000 people of Puerto Rican descent were living in the United States, with almost 70 percent having been born in Puerto Rico.121
After the events of the 1950s, independence advocates, electorally minded and otherwise, had a hard path to trod. But while Muñoz Marín’s gambit proved successful on many fronts, it was met with a backlash from those Puerto Ricans who were not at all sure if this was the direction they wanted their beloved island to go in.
The Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP) had been founded in October 1946 by the attorney Gilberto Concepción de Gracia and the poet Fernando Milán Suárez. It was a substantial political force, coming in second in the November 1952 legislative elections, just behind Muñoz Marín’s PPD. Gilberto Concepción de Gracia himself became a senator, a post he would hold until 1960. The second half of the 1950s, though, saw the independence movement beset by internal political squabbles. The Partido Socialista, which thirty years earlier was pulling 25 percent of the vote, would collapse and many members would gravitate to the PPD. By 1959, one of the most forceful proponents of independence, Juan Mari Brás, would leave the PIP to form the more militant Movimiento Pro-Independencia (MPI) with Loida Figueroa Mercado. Along with the labor activist and author César Andreu Iglesias, Mari Brás launched the newsweekly Claridad as the voice of the Puerto Rican independence movement that same year.
It would be wrong to conclude that all of the Puerto Rican independence movement’s wounds were self-inflicted, though. With the FBI targeting Puerto Rican independence activists in the United States since the mid-1950s under its Counter Intelligence Program (better known by its portmanteau COINTELPRO), the body’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, instructed agents to procure information “concerning their weaknesses, morals, criminal records, spouses, children, family life, educational qualifications and personal activities” in an effort “to disrupt their activities and compromise their effectiveness.”122 Puerto Rican police dossiers, known as carpetas, did much the same work.123 The carpetas covering the activities of Mari Brás would eventually total nearly twenty thousand pages, the first written in 1947 and the last that is known in 1985. Mari Brás was stalked at meetings and rallies and even at the funeral of his father, and extensive lists were compiled of everyone he interacted with, from independentistas to trade unionists, feminists, environmentalists, and other activists of various kinds. The files represented, the Puerto Rican academic Javier Colón Morera noted, the “bureaucratization of institutional repression.”124
By this point, a not-entirely-flattering image of Puerto Ricans had also taken hold in the minds of some on the mainland, reinforced in part by the 1957 Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story (later made into an Oscar-winning 1961 film), with its refrains, “Always the hurricanes blowing / Always the population growing / And the money owing / And the babies crying / And the bullets flying.”125 In academia, one of the works most responsible for creating this stark image in the public mind was the book La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York, by the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Many Puerto Ricans and even other scholars, however, felt that Lewis’s portrayal was unrealistic in its unrelenting grimness, finding “little of the hopelessness and apathy” among the poor that Lewis had, and noting that “even the poorest families aspire toward a better future for themselves and their children.”126
In November 1961—seven months after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion—President John F. Kennedy held a state dinner for Puerto Rico’s governor Luis Muñoz Marín at the White House, a rare honor during which the Spanish-Puerto Rican cellist Pablo Casals performed. The following month, Kennedy arrived in San Juan and was greeted by Muñoz Marín at the airport, where he also addressed reporters:
It is a great experience to fly many hundreds of miles into the Atlantic Ocean, to come to an island and be greeted in Spanish. To come to an island which has an entirely different tradition and history. Which is made up of people of an entirely different cultural origin than the mainland of the United States, and still be able to feel that I am in my country as I was in Washington this morning.127
The American view of Cuba setting its sights on Puerto Rico and trying to foment unrest there was not as far-fetched as it may now sound. As early as 1950, while still a young law student, Fidel Castro had been publishing articles calling for Puerto Rican independence, and one of the first friends he made during his 1955 to 1956 exile from Cuba in Mexico City was Albizu Campos’s wife, Laura Meneses, at which time her husband was still in prison.128 By this point, though, after the mass arrests, firing squads, and exile that followed Cuba’s 1959 revolution and Castro’s subsequent self-reveal as dictator and a Marxist-Leninist, many Puerto Ricans took a rather more circumspect view of the independentistas and their radical visions. As the anthropologist Helen Icken Safa would write, much of the underclass on the island feared “that if Puerto Rico becomes independent, it will experience bloodshed and revolution such as have occurred in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.”129
In 1964, after more than three decades of nonstop political battle and four terms as governor, Muñoz Marín announced at the PPD’s 1964 convention that he would not seek another term, telling attendees:
You must continue to have confidence in yourselves. Only then will I know I have created a people of determination, with strength and with spirit. . . . I am not your strength. You are your own source of strength. Forward, forward. I am with you and I remain a part of you.130
Muñoz Marín’s relations with his designated successor, Roberto Sánchez Vilella, who won the governorship on the PPD ticket the following year, were often frosty. A July 1967 referendum on the status of the island gave voters the choice between remaining a commonwealth, statehood, or independence, with 60.4 percent opting for the commonwealth option. Differing opinions on the approach to the referendum led pro-statehood forces to fracture and inspired the creation of the Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), which vowed to push for Puerto Rico’s status as the fifty-first state.
Sánchez Vilella’s administration was hobbled not only by frequent clashes with Muñoz Marín, but also by a complicated personal life that led him to divorce his first wife and remarry just before the 1968 gubernatorial election, which his political opponents used to incite the island’s not-insubstantial number of conservative Catholic voters against him. In 1968, amid the political wrangling, in a move that would have significant future impact, the US Congress capped federal funding for Medicaid on the island in a way that was still envisioned to cover 50 percent of the island’s expenses. However, as healthcare costs rose in the coming decades, the federal contribution would shrink to less than 18 percent of Medicaid expenses—while states, with their need assessed by per-person income, would have had their Medicare costs covered at a rate of 83 percent.131
By the late 1960s, the ossifying of PPD rule dovetailed with the current mood of worldwide revolutionary social and political movements. After the 1967 plebiscite, the PPD lost the governor’s election for the first time in 1968. The office went to Luis A. Ferré, a Ponce industrialist and candidate of the pro-statehood PNP, which he had helped found only the previous year. Born in Puerto Rico to a family with Cuban and French roots, Ferré had studied at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the New England Conservatory of Music (he was a skilled classical pianist), and during his years on the mainland said he became enamored with “the American way of democracy,” a form that was conspicuously still lacking on the island of his birth.132
Perhaps every bit as impactful as Ferré’s election, however, was the fact that after nearly two decades of relative calm, political divisions on the island, again largely revolving around the question of independence, spiraled into what became known as the guerra chiquita (little war), which pitted radical independentistas against the state, both local and national, and its security forces. At the center of the violence was a former salsa musician from the eastern coastal town of Naguabo, whose time in Fidel Castro’s Cuba had instilled a belief that nonviolent struggles were useless and that any political pressure to divest Puerto Rico from its colonial relationship with the United States must be accompanied by a kind of armed propaganda of military action.133 His name was Filiberto Ojeda Ríos.
In many ways, up until that point, the life of Ojeda Ríos had been an intermingling of strains familiar to the stories of many Puerto Ricans, though his precocious intelligence—he enrolled at the Universidad de Puerto Rico at fifteen—set him apart. For much of the 1950s, he drifted back and forth between the island and New York, where, as a multi-instrumentalist, he worked with various musical groups. He moved to Cuba in 1961, only two years after Fidel Castro had seized power, and there developed close links with the Dirección General de Inteligencia, the main state intelligence agency of the Cuban government. Upon his return to Puerto Rico, many in US law enforcement believed he was working as a Cuban spy.134 In 1967, he formed his first armed group, the Movimiento Independentista Revolucionario Armado (MIRA), which had little impact before being crushed by the police. Ojeda Ríos would eventually move back to New York, where he set about organizing a group that would have a far greater—and more deadly—impact.135 While Ojeda Ríos was shifting the focus of his armed propaganda campaign to the mainland, the independence movement on the island was going through its own transformation.
In 1971, the MPI of Juan Mari Brás became the Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño (PSP), continuing in the hard-left vein and drawing inspiration from the example of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, after which the MPI was founded.136 The previous year, Rubén Berríos, an attorney from Aibonito, had taken over the leadership of the more conventionally social-democratic PIP. Both parties would fare very poorly in the 1976 elections, and in successive elections thereafter. Berríos, however, would be elected to the Senate on three separate occasions.
As it happened, though, what are widely regarded as the first shots of the guerra chiquita were not fired by committed independentistas but by the Puerto Rican police. In March 1970, Antonia Martínez Lagares, a twenty-one-year-old student at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, was shot and killed by police trying to break up a protest against the presence of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) on campus. While yelling from a balcony at a policeman she saw beating a student, Martínez was shot in the head. No one was ever prosecuted for the crime.137
In 1970, 160 bombs or incendiary devices were found around the island.138 Though the left-wing terrorism of the independentistas would garner far more media coverage, placing bombs would remain a favored modus operandi of Puerto Rico’s right wing throughout the 1970s.139 The car of the PSP’s Mari Brás was bombed by right wingers in January 1969, and in an attempt to further factionalize the movement, the FBI sent not one but two letters to Puerto Rican media claiming to be from independence groups acting against “communists.”140 The offices of Claridad were bombed on average once a year for five years.141 The noted political analyst Juan Manuel García Passalacqua characterized the situation as one where, “losing ground very rapidly, pro-independence groups are getting desperate. Noticing that, anti-independence forces are getting trigger happy.”142
A large flashpoint of hostility, one that cut across political ideologies, was the US military presence on the coastal island of Vieques, a presence that had existed since 1941 and included the use of a live firing range. The US government claimed that the range was safe despite its proximity to populated and sensitive environmental areas, but military personnel who traversed the firing range there would sometimes start bleeding from the nose and vomiting and were subject to terrible headaches.
According to some former soldiers who served on the island—who later experienced severe health crises themselves—the US Army used napalm, depleted uranium, and Agent Orange on the island, the latter of which was used as a defoliant in the Vietnam War and which has conclusively been proven to have a link to cancer and other illnesses.143 If you lived on Vieques, you were eight times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than someone living anywhere else in Puerto Rico, and you were seven times more likely to die of diabetes. Although it was not widely known until years later, the cancer rate for residents of Vieques was also higher than it was for residents living anywhere else in the commonwealth.144
During a May 19, 1979, demonstration in Vieques, more than one hundred demonstrators—including priests, pastors, and attorneys—waded ashore onto the island’s beach and were arrested by naval policemen. Several were sentenced to prison terms ranging from thirty days to six months.145
Among those arrested that day was Ángel Rodríguez Cristóbal, a thirty-three-year-old member of the small Liga Socialista Puertorriqueña. Six months later, he was found dead in his prison cell at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida. Prison officials claimed he had committed suicide by hanging, but few, if any, in the independence movement believed this when photos of the body showed a three-inch gash from the Rodríguez Cristóbal’s right eyebrow to his cheek. At his funeral in the mountain town of Ciales, Liga Socialista’s founder, Juan Antonio Corretjer, warned that “the sounds and odors of gunpowder will prevail until the Navy has been driven from Vieques and the US from Puerto Rico.”146
In 1972, Ferré lost his reelection bid, and the PPD was back in power once more in the person of Rafael Hernández Colón, a US-educated attorney and university lecturer who had served as president of Puerto Rico’s Senate since 1968. Many had thought that Ferré would cruise to reelection and the result, with Ferré losing to Hernández Colón by nearly one hundred thousand votes, was considered a stunning upset.147 The pro-statehood movement would grow from the mid-1970s onward, with the PPD and PNP mimicking the two-party duopoly on the mainland United States.
The first half of the 1970s would mark difficult economic times for the island. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, as a global economic downturn was also sharply felt on the island, a series of often-violent labor clashes occurred, some of them linked to a new, more radical labor movement, the Movimiento Obrero Unido (MOU).148 In January 1973, President Richard Nixon initiated a year-long freeze on federally funded housing projects, which hit the island’s construction industry particularly hard and coincided with the overbuilding of luxury high-rise condominiums which then sat vacant.149 By mid-decade, a Puerto Rican government committee recommended a limit on government spending and pay increases, restricting wages and increasing tax revenue by raising land and real property taxes and taxes on durable consumer and luxury goods. The Hernández Colón administration quickly froze government wages thereafter.150 By March 1976, Puerto Rico’s official unemployment rate was 19.2 percent, but many thought the true rate was closer to 30 percent.151 An incident in June 1976, where Hernández Colón had to scale a fence, cutting his hand in the process, and run through mud in order to be on time to greet President Gerald Ford at San Juan’s airport (his limousine had a flat tire and got stuck in traffic), only to hear Ford deliver bland anti-Cuban platitudes, seemed for some to symbolize the island’s servile relationship with the United States.152
Though it never posed any serious military threat to security forces on the island, even as Ford spoke the guerra chiquita churned on, and it now reached deep into the American mainland.
In the United States, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos helped to found the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN). The FALN, composed to a large degree of diaspora Puerto Ricans who had grown up in the United States, including Vietnam War veteran Oscar López Rivera, was an altogether more muscular—and deadly—outfit than MIRA had been.153 It announced its existence with a December 1974 booby trap in an East Harlem basement that cost Puerto Rican NYPD officer Angel Poggi his right eye and sent nails into his neck. (Poggi survived, but was confined to desk duty thereafter.)154
On January 11, 1975, a bomb exploded at a restaurant frequented by Puerto Rican nationalists in Mayagüez, a block from where a PSP rally was underway, killing two and injuring eleven.155 Two weeks later, a bomb tore through Fraunces Tavern, a Revolutionary War-era bar in Manhattan’s financial district, killing four and injuring forty. In a phone call to the Associated Press, a caller claiming to be a member of the FALN took responsibility for the blast. A note in a nearby phonebooth, also purporting to be from the FALN, said that the group took “full responsibility for the especially detonated [sic] bomb that exploded today at Fraunces Tavern, with reactionary corporate executives inside” and said that the attack was in retaliation for the “CIA ordered bomb” in Mayagüez.156
Speaking to the US Senate Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act in July 1975, one “Francisco Martinez,” a “consultant and researcher for several private interests in Puerto Rico industrial companies in the field of labor relations,” who “for reasons of personal security” testified “under an assumed name,” told the senators that Juan Mari Brás’s PSP was “not only a subversive organization, but an active instrument of a foreign government [i.e. Cuba] dedicated to the destruction of democratic principles on which the government of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is based. . . . The Party’s relations with Cuba are so close that it has a permanent delegation and offices in Havana.”157 The following month, Fidel Castro held a “Puerto Rican Solidarity Conference” in Havana.158
In January 1977, the PNP again returned to La Fortaleza; this time in the person of Carlos Romero Barceló, who had served as San Juan’s mayor for nearly a decade previously. One of the PNP’s most fervent evangelists for what he viewed as the benefits of further deepening the relationship with the United States, he had authored a pamphlet titled La estadidad es para los pobres (Statehood is for the Poor), whose title more or less summed up his argument. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Romero Barceló argued that the island’s commonwealth status was a “myth” and that “statehood for Puerto Rico would constitute a boon for the nation, as well as for the island” and would enable “political equality within a framework which will permit our island and our nation to prosper together.”159 In the election that brought Romero Barceló to office, the independence vote had improved—the PIP president Rubén Berríos received 83,037 votes, a gain of thirteen thousand over the PIP’s 1972 candidate—but was still paltry by comparison. Romero Barceló received 703,968 votes.160
Because of its one-sided dependent relationship with the mainland, Puerto Rico had remained in a kind of economic purgatory, never falling into the depths of want experienced by many other Latin American nations, yet never achieving the affluence and diversified economy of the rest of the United States. In his 1976 novel La Guaracha del Macho Camacho (Macho Camacho’s Beat), it was no mistake that the Puerto Rican author Luis Rafael Sánchez used one of San Juan’s apocalyptic traffic jams as a metaphor for an island stuck in place, unable to go backward or forward.
But despite its struggles, at home and on the mainland, Puerto Rico’s luminous culture continued to flourish. Drawing from a mélange of influences that included the island’s Afro-descended bomba music as well as the stylings of such figures as the singer Daniel Santos, the Cuban-American musician Machito, and the New York-born timbale player Tito Puente, the salsa genre exploded onto the Latin music scene by the 1960s. It was helped in no small part by the advent of Fania Records, a label founded in 1964 by Dominican band leader Johnny Pacheco and Italian-American music promoter Jerry Masucci. By the early 1970s, the label’s “super group,” the Fania All-Stars, was playing sold-out shows in New York City’s Yankee Stadium, while the imprint also brought work by such pivotal acts as the Nuyorican trombonist Willie Colón and the Ponce-born singer Héctor Lavoe to a wide audience. Other groups like the salsa “orchestra” El Gran Combo recorded for other labels, also promoting the genre. Another singer, Ismael Rivera, had a career as a beloved exponent of the genre, singing socially conscious salsa tracks such as “Las Caras Lindas” (The Beautiful Faces), which celebrated blackness with lines like Las caras lindas de mi gente negra / son un desfile de melaza en flor (The beautiful faces of my black people / they are a parade of molasses in bloom), and the song “La Perla,” which praised the often-stigmatized residents of the impoverished neighborhood that fronted the Caribbean beneath Old San Juan as “noble citizens” who “earn their bread with sweat” and whose “youth dream of tomorrow.”
In New York City, the Nuyorican experience synthesized into a gripping new genre of poetry as purveyed by authors such as Miguel Algarín, Pedro Pietri, Sandra María Esteves, and Jesús Papoleto Meléndez. Eventually centered around what became known as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on East 6th Street in the East Village (in 1980 they would move to a larger building on East 3rd Street), in many ways the foundation for this flowering had been laid by those who came before, such as Julia de Burgos and the playwright René Marqués, whose most famous work, La Carreta, had its premiere in Manhattan in 1954. It was an aesthetic that was simultaneously informed by a freewheeling Beat Generation–style sensibility, wedded to New York, and vibrantly Puerto Rican, and was perhaps best summed up in a poem by the doomed Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero:
I don’t wanna be buried in Puerto Rico
I don’t wanna rest in long island cemetery
I wanna be near the stabbing shooting
gambling fighting & unnatural dying
& new birth crying
So please when I die . . .
don’t take me far away
keep me near by
take my ashes and scatter them thru out
the Lower East Side . . . 161
From somewhere, one would like to think, Julia de Burgos looked down and smiled.
But the island itself continued to smolder.
On July 4, 1978, two independence supporters, Pablo Marcano García and Nydia Esther Cuevas, kidnapped Chilean consul Ramón González Ruíz and another man, holding them hostage in a bank as US independence festivities went on blocks away. The pair demanded the release of Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, and Irvin Flores Rodríguez, all imprisoned since the 1954 attack on the US House of Representatives, and Oscar Collazo, in prison since the 1950 attempt to kill President Harry Truman. They finally surrendered to police after a seventeen-hour standoff, with Cuevas, upon being asked her age, replying, “I am as old as Lolita has been in prison.”162 (She was twenty-four.)
A series of articles in El Nuevo Día had quoted unnamed police sources and warned about upcoming independista violence for the summer of 1978,163 and an incident that occurred that same month gave some indication of the lengths to which la uniformada, as the island’s police were often called, were willing to go to confront what they viewed as a terrorist threat.
Carlos Enrique Soto Arriví was the son of Pedro Juan Soto, a well-known and respected author and university professor, and had grown up partially in Spain and France while his parents pursued doctoral degrees. Arnaldo Darío Rosado Torres was the studious, troubled son of an army veteran father, with whom he had stayed behind on the island when his mother and little brother moved to Brooklyn, not wanting to leave the elder Rosado “all alone.”164 Alejandro González Malavé was a Puerto Rican policeman who had begun infiltrating independence organizations while still in high school and had become a full-fledged undercover agent in March 1977.165 Soto Arriví and Rosado Torres were members of a tiny would-be revolutionary group calling itself the Movimiento Revolucionario Armado, into whose midst González Malavé infiltrated, bringing its total membership to five. Among the group’s “actions” were the theft of walkie-talkies and the firing of a shot, which hit no one, at the Universidad de Puerto Rico security offices.166
On July 25, 1978—the eightieth anniversary of the US invasion—the trio decided to make a statement by disabling a pair of radio transmitters on Cerro Maravilla, the island’s fourth-highest peak, which rose to a height of some 3,953 feet as it vaulted out of the cordillera central on the border between Ponce and Jayuya. They carjacked a Ponce cab driver as Gonzales Malavé drove them into a trap. According to the account of the kidnapped driver, sixty-five-year-old Julio Ortiz Molina, Soto Arriví and Rosado Torres were executed by police and then Ortiz Molina was beaten to guarantee his silence. Gonzalez Malavé was wounded by shrapnel splintering off the car.167 An April 1980 Department of Justice investigation concluded there was “no evidence that contradicted the police officers’ official statements,”168 but during a second round of investigations, Miguel Cartagena Flores, a detective in the Intelligence Division of the Puerto Rico Police Department, told investigators that Rosado Torres and Soto Arriví had been shot while “on their knees” and that Ángel Pérez Casillas, then commander of the intelligence division, had told officers that “these terrorists should not come down alive.”169 A decade after the killings on Cerro Maravilla, Pérez Casillas would be acquitted of the deaths while another policeman, Raphael Moreno, would be found guilty of second-degree murder. (Pérez Casillas and Moreno had been convicted of perjuring themselves before a Puerto Rican senate committee five years earlier).170 Eventually, ten officers would be convicted for their roles in the killings and subsequent cover-up, with two also convicted of second-degree murder.171
González Malavé never spent a day in prison. Two months after he had been acquitted, he pulled into the driveway of his home in Bayamón. From two different directions a team of assassins approached him and executed him with three shotgun blasts, slightly injuring his mother in the process. A few hours later, the Organización de Voluntarios por la Revolución Puertorriqueña (OVRP) called the media to claim responsibility for the murder and announce that they would hunt down and kill “one by one” all the policemen involved in the Cerro Maravilla operation.172
On the twenty-eighth anniversary of the Jayuya Uprising (October 30, 1978), a communiqué was released by a group calling itself the Ejército Popular Boricua (EPB); it would later become known as Los Macheteros (The Machete Wielders). Formed two years earlier by Filiberto Ojeda Ríos and Juan Enrique Segarra-Palmer out of the ashes of the FALN, the group’s missive, consciously or not, appeared to allude to the great gulf between its revolutionary fervor and the majority of the island’s citizens, who had not rushed to align themselves with the EPB’s cause. Beginning with a more or less pro forma vow to “make war against the invading Yankee and their representatives,” the press release went on to threaten that the group was “willing to take this fight to the final consequences” and “would also judge and execute those who by their attitudes put at stake the security and development of the liberation struggle of our people.”173
As if to prove these were not idle threats, on the morning of December 3, 1979, just before 7:00 a.m., gunmen leapt from a van and attacked a bus full of Navy personnel heading to the US Naval Base at Sabana Seca, killing two sailors and injuring ten, all of whom were unarmed. It was the first fatal attack on US military personnel on the island since 1970.174 Along with the OVRP and the Fuerzas Armadas de Resistencia Popular (FARP), Los Macheteros claimed responsibility for the Sabana Seca attack, mentioning what it charged was the “murder” of Vieques protester Ángel Rodríguez Cristóbal and the Cerro Maravilla killings, and warning that “the blood of Puerto Rican martyrs and patriots will be mingled with the blood of the imperialists [and] the armed forces of the Yankee occupation will be the target of patriotic fire.”175 Despite the violence, Romero Barceló was reelected in 1980, defeating the PPD’s Rafael Hernández Colón in a razor-thin vote whose recount dragged on for months and led to surreal scenes of Santeria sacrifices of chickens and invocations amid clouds of incense outside the building where the paper ballots were being counted.176
When Romero Barceló returned to office, the island was facing increasing economic pressure. Less than two years later, the US Congress would eliminate Puerto Rico’s access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), more commonly referred to as “food stamps,” in favor of what it dubbed the Nutrition Assistance Program for Puerto Rico. Known on the island as the Programa de Asistencia Nutricional, or colloquially as cupones (coupons), this block grant gave the island’s government more flexibility but reduced the federal contribution.177 Around the same time, J. Peter Grace, the head of a presidential panel called the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, which recommended cuts in government operating costs, described SNAP as “basically a Puerto Rican program.”178
On January 13, 1981, Los Macheteros blew up eight A-7 Corsair and F-104 Starfighter jets at Muñiz Air National Guard Base near the end of the main runway at San Juan’s international airport. No one was injured, but damage was estimated at $45 million.179 Following the attack, Los Macheteros released a communiqué claiming responsibility for the operation, which was named Pitirre II after a Puerto Rican songbird. Mentioning the murders of trade union leader Juan Rafael Caballero and Adolfina Villanueva Osorio, as well as the Cerro Maravilla killings, the group assailed the “colonial governor” Romero Barceló, who they said “progressively becomes more repressive and dictatorial against broad sectors of our people.” The group reiterated what it said was its intention “to build a free, independent and neutral homeland without military service in a murderous foreign army and without Yankee military bases that expose our people to nuclear extermination.”180
In November 1980, a squatter community, largely made up of those unemployed or underemployed and unable to pay rent, had sprung up near Canóvanas, east of San Juan. The community called itself Villa Sin Miedo (Town without Fear), and over the next two years, around 250 families would settle there.181 The squatters were marginalized and harassed by the government and the police, and one of the few groups that did act, albeit violently, in their defense was Los Macheteros, who in November 1981 placed a bomb that knocked out electricity to twenty thousand customers in wealthy areas of San Juan to protest the refusal by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) to supply the village with power.182 By May 1982, the government had had enough and brutally evicted the community, burning their homes and clothing in a violent conflagration in which a policeman was killed (authorities said they had seized a machine gun, five pistols, and a dagger in the raid).
Around two hundred Villa San Miedo residents occupied the lobby of the capitol building in San Juan, wailing to anyone who would listen that if they left they would “have nothing.”183 Los Macheteros responded to the eviction by placing several bombs in the luxurious Marbella del Caribe Oeste condominium, apparently under the mistaken impression that Secretary of Housing Jorge Pierluisi lived there. Two of the bombs went off, destroying a transformer and a trash depot, but there were no injuries.184
In September 1983, Los Macheteros made the headlines yet again when Víctor Gerena, a twenty-five-year-old who had thus far led a notably undistinguished life, tied up two employees at gunpoint and then robbed $7.2 million from the Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford, Connecticut, on the group’s behalf, the largest cash robbery in US history up to that that time.185 Gerena fled south to Mexico City, where a forged set of Argentine identity papers and a passport were hand-delivered to him by no less a personage than José Antonio Arbesú, who would go on to serve as the chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, DC, from 1989 to 1992. Gerena then boarded a commercial flight to Havana, with over $2 million from the robbery flying with him in a Cuban diplomatic pouch.186 Los Macheteros subsequently released a statement claiming responsibility for the robbery and said they had been planning it for nearly two years.187 Ojeda Ríos would be arrested in August 1985 along with eleven other people in connection with the theft. Ojeda Ríos’s indictment said he had been told by a representative of the Castro dictatorship that part of the money “remained in the custody and care of the Cuban government.”188 During his arrest in the northern coastal town of Luquillo—undertaken by twenty-four FBI agents supported by snipers and a helicopter—Ojeda Ríos shot at least forty rounds from an Uzi and a pistol at agents, wounding one before a sniper shot the gun out of his hand and he was taken into custody.189 Four years later, in August 1989, Ojeda Ríos successfully defended himself against charges linked to the shooting, with a federal jury in San Juan acquitting him, apparently convinced by his claim that the law enforcement officials arrived at his home to “assassinate” him.190
Amid such upheaval, the PPD’s Hernández Colón defeated Romero Barceló in the November 1984 elections and returned to office the following year. Hernández Colón pushed for the island to retain its commonwealth status in relation to the United States, arguing that the island’s economic development program, which had raised its per capita income from $342 in 1950 to $5,574 in 1989 (still less than half that of Mississippi, the poorest state at the time), “could not continue” if the island was granted statehood. He said this was due to the fact that as a commonwealth, “no federal taxes are levied on the island” and there were tax incentives encouraging manufacturing under commonwealth arrangements. In the New York Times, he wrote that “statehood would destroy our economic achievements and the possibilities of commonwealth, a noble experiment in flexible political relationships for people with different cultures.”191
The impact of the decline of the sugar industry and shuttering of the oil refineries on living standards was brought tragically home in the early morning hours of October 7, 1985, when the impoverished hillside barrio of Mameyes outside of Ponce, where many were out of work, collapsed in a landslide after days of driving rain. At least fifty people died and some two hundred homes were destroyed.192 By 1990, an astonishing nearly 25 percent of Puerto Rico’s workforce would be employed by the island’s government.193
On September 23, 1990—the 122nd anniversary of el Grito de Lares—Filiberto Ojeda Ríos cut off the electronic monitoring ankle bracelet he was obligated to wear while awaiting trial for his involvement in the September 1983 Wells Fargo robbery, and became a fugitive.194
109 “No One Expected Attack on Congress in 1954,” Associated Press, February 29, 2004.
110 Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans, 234–238.
111 Molly Crabapple, “The Fatal Conscience.”
112 Vanessa Perez, “Celebrating 99 years of Julia de Burgos,” Huffington Post, May 4, 2013, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/julia-de-burgos_b_2703750.
113 Safa, The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico, 21.
114 Ayala and Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century, 190.
115 Ibid., 181.
116 Safa, The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico, 1–11.
117 Michael Deibert, “San Juan’s Iconic La Perla Neighborhood Defies Trump,” Daily Beast, September 17, 2018.
118 Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, Puerto Rican Americans: The Meaning of Migration to the Mainland (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971): 48.
119 Safa, The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico, 1.
120 Ayala and Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century, 184.
121 Fitzpatrick, Puerto Rican Americans, 10.
122 Navarro, “New Light on Old FBI Fight.”
123 Ibid.
124 José Javier Colón Morera, “Las carpetas de Juan Mari Brás” (Presentation, La Conferencia de la Celebración del Nacimiento de Juan Mari Brás, December 2, 2013).
125 Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, “America,” West Side Story, 1957.
126 Safa, The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico, 33.
127 “President John F. Kennedy’s Remarks at Isla Verde Int. Airport, San Juan,” https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2w0xxv, accessed September 21, 2018.
128 Tad Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait (New York: Perennial, 1986): 195–333.
129 Safa, The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico, 100.
130 Omang, “Luis Muñoz Marín, 4-Term Governor of Puerto Rico, Dies.”
131 Michelle Samuels, “Puerto Rico Shows Harm of Medicaid Caps,” Boston University School of Public Health, November 21, 2017, http://www.bu.edu/sph/2017/11/21/puerto-rico-shows-harm-of-medicaid-caps/.
132 Ian James, “Former Puerto Rican Gov Luis Ferré Dies,” Associated Press, October 21, 2003.
133 Edmund H. Mahoney, “Revolutionary to the End,” Hartford Courant, November 20, 2005, https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2005-11-20-0511200623-story.html.
134 Edmund H. Mahoney, “The Untold Tale of Victor Gerena,” Hartford Courant, November 7, 1999, https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-1999-11-07-9911060427-story.html.
135 Ana Nadal Quiros, “Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, el ‘Che Guevara’ de Puerto Rico,” El Mundo, September 27, 2005, https://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2005/09/27/obituarios/1127801993.html.
136 Héctor Meléndez, “El Partido Socialista en los años 70,” 80 grados, July 15, 2016.
137 Gloria Ruiz Kuilan, “Hoy se Cumplen 45 años del Asesinato de Antonia Martínez Lagares,” El Nuevo Día, March 4, 2015.
138 Nelson, Murder Under Two Flags, 103.
139 Nelson, Murder Under Two Flags, 105–106.
140 Ibid,, 116.
141 Ibid., 118.
142 Ibid., 10.
143 Abbie Boudreau and Scott Bronstein, “Island residents sue U.S., saying military made them sick,” CNN Special Investigations Unit, February 1, 2010.
144 Valeria Pelet, “Puerto Rico’s Invisible Health Crisis,” The Atlantic, September 3, 2016.
145 “Puerto Ricans Vow to Avenge Death in US Prison,” New York Times, November 18, 1979.
146 “Puerto Ricans Vow to Avenge Death,” New York Times.
147 Tom Wicker, “Coming Home Election,” New York Times, February 11, 1973.
148 Ayala and Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century, 232–233.
149 John Van Hyning, “Confronting an Island’s Ills,” Washington Post, January 2, 1977.
150 Leonard Silk, “Puerto Rico Swallows Its Bitter Economic Medicine,” New York Times, July 18, 1976.
151 Ibid.
152 Ibid.
153 Quiros, “Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, el ‘Che Guevara’ de Puerto Rico.”
154 Rose Davis and Larry McShane, “Ex-cop who lost eye in NYC FALN blast slams pick of Oscar Lopez Rivera as Puerto Rican Day Parade honoree,” New York Daily News, May 27, 2017, https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/lopez-rivera-no-hero-ex-cop-lost-eye-nyc-faln-blast-article-1.3201191.
155 “Puerto Rico Bomb Kills 2, Injures 11,” New York Times, January 13, 1975.
156 Mara Bovsun, “FALN Bomb Kills 4 at Fraunces Tavern, Where George Washington Said Farewell to Troops,” New York Daily News, January 21, 2012, https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/faln-bomb-kills-4-fraunces-tavern-article-1.1008711.
157 “Terroristic Activity: The Cuban Connection in Puerto Rico,” http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/terrorism/cuban-connection-pr-1.htm, accessed June 2019.
158 Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait, 641.
159 Carlos Romero Barceló, “Puerto Rico, U.S.A: The Case for Statehood,” Foreign Affairs 59, no. 1 (Fall 1980): 60–81.
160 Van Hyning, “Confronting an Island’s Ills.”
161 Miguel Piñero, El Bodega Sold Dreams (Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1985): 8.
162 “Consul’s Abductors Give Up in San Juan,” New York Times, July 5, 1978.
163 Nelson, Murder Under Two Flags, 146–147.
164 Nelson, Murder Under Two Flags, 139–40.
165 Ibid., 133–36.
166 Ibid., 148–49.
167 Ibid., 162–166.
168 Ibid., 197.
169 “Puerto Ricans Were Kneeling When Killed by Police, Officer Says,” New York Times, November 30, 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/30/us/puerto-ricans-were-kneeling-when-killed-by-police-officer-says.html.
170 Manuel Suarez, “Ex-Police Official Acquitted in Two Puerto Rico Killings,” New York Times, March 18, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/18/us/ex-police-official-acquitted-in-two-puerto-rico-killings.html.
171 Mireya Navarro, “Puerto Rico Gripped by Its Watergate,” New York Times, January 30, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/30/us/puerto-rico-gripped-by-its-watergate.html.
172 “Police Agent in Puerto Rico Deaths is Assassinated,” New York Times, May 1, 1986, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/01/us/police-agent-in-puerto-rico-deaths-is-assassinated.html.
173 Ejército Popular Boricua, “Mensaje al pueblo,” October 30, 1978.
174 Clyde Haberman, “Terrorists in Puerto Rico Ambush Navy Bus, Killing 2 and Injuring 10,” New York Times, December 4, 1979, https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/04/archives/terrorists-in-puerto-rico-ambush-navy-bus-killing-2-and-injuring-10.html.
175 Ejército Popular Boricua, “Acción contra la Base Naval de Inteligencia,” December 3, 1979.
176 Mayra Montero, “Magic and Realism,” New York Times, November 30, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/opinion/magic-and-realism.html.
177 US Congress, Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, HR 3982, 97th Cong., introduced in House June 19, 1981, https://www.congress.gov/bill/97th-congress/house-bill/3982/summary/00.
178 Joseph B. Treaster, “Head of Reagan panel apologizes to Puerto Ricans,” New York Times, May 29, 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/29/us/head-of-reagan-panel-apologizes-to-puerto-ricans.html.
179 Harold Lidin, “Terrorists in Puerto Rico Destroy Guard Jets,” Washington Post, January 13, 1981.
180 Ejército Popular Boricua, “Operativo militar Pitirre II,” January 13, 1981.
181 Robert B. Potter and Dennis Conway, eds., Self-Help Housing, the Poor, and the State in the Caribbean (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997): 25.
182 Jo Thomas, “Puerto Rico Terrorist Group Takes Responsibility for Blackout,” New York Times, November 29, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/29/us/puerto-rico-terrorist-group-takes-responsibility-for-blackout.html.
183 “Squatters Occupy Capitol,” UPI, May 19, 1982, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/05/19/Squatters-occupy-Capitol/7823003990687/.
184 Armando André, “Terrorismo en Puerto Rico: 1979–1982,” La Crónica Gráfica, 1987.
185 For the definitive account of the robbery, see Ronald Fernandez, Los Macheteros: The Wells Fargo Robbery and the Violent Struggle for Puerto Rican Independence (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987).
186 Mahoney, “The Untold Tale of Victor Gerena.”
187 Armando André, “Terrorismo en Puerto Rico: Los Macheteros se Delatan Unos a Otros,” La Crónica Gráfica, 1987.
188 “12 ‘Terrorists’ Held in Heist of $7 Million,” United Press International, August 30, 1985.
189 André, “Terrorismo en Puerto Rico.”
190 “Florida Arrests 2,100 in Crack Roundup,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1989.
191 Rafael Hernandez Colon, “Statehood for Puerto Ricans,” New York Times, February 26, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/26/opinion/statehood-for-puerto-ricans.html.
192 Ferdinand Quinones and Karl G. Johnson, The Floods of May 17–18, 1985 and October 6–7, 1985 in Puerto Rico, United States Geological Survey, (San Juan, PR: US Department of the Interior, 1987).
193 Ayala and Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century, 292.
194 Stephen Smith, “Puerto Rican Fugitive Killed,” Associated Press, September 24, 2005.