Chapter 1 — The Colonial Saga: History, Culture, and Power

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence. -Christopher Hitchens

Since 1898, Puerto Ricans have been subjugated by the forces of capitalism and imperialism. Of course, we are not unique in this respect, as the tentacles of capitalism have spread across the planet; and imperialism has wreaked havoc globally as well, even in nominally sovereign countries. It is no less true that Puerto Rico is a space where these two phenomena of modernity meet in a particular way.

Many have emphasized the strategic and military role that the United States assigned from the outset to Puerto Rico. However, few people seem to have it clear that the convergence of the United States of America and Puerto Rico has been at the service of capitalism’s insatiable thirst for expansion, with its eagerness to control new sources of profit and the consequent accumulation of capital; to then exploit more sources of profit, and so on ad infinitum. That context is needed to understand the U.S. imperial regime and its history of domination over Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans.

In the modern era, imperialism has been at the service of capitalism: Imperialism is the type of domination of some peoples over others, in order to achieve the economic expansion of capitalism, to increase the wealth of the businessmen and bankers who already play a leading role in the economic scene of the imperial countries. To achieve this goal, the U.S. and the European imperial powers resorted to violence, for imperialism has encountered –had to encounter– resistance from those it sought to dominate, exploit, or cast aside. In Puerto Rico, violence has taken different forms, including state terrorism, with the participation of the colonial state, the most recent version of which is known as the “Commonwealth” (Estado Libre Asociado, or E.L.A.). Chapter 5 discusses the Cerro Maravilla affair, an example of this type of terrorism.

To begin understanding, a brief exposition of key aspects of the history and culture of Puerto Rico, “the oldest colony in the world,” is also required. [1] This chapter begins that exposition, some aspects of which are elaborated upon or emphasized in chapters 3 to 7, to the extent necessary to support the corresponding arguments. [2]

By 1898, apart from the differences in size, and in economic and military might, the United States and Puerto Rico were differentiated by the fact that the former ceased to be a colony in 1783, when it won a war of independence; while Puerto Rico was still a colony of Spain. In addition to a capitalist economy, the well-known oligarchic class, and a political class at its service, the American nation was also characterized –and still is– by long-standing tensions between racist and exclusionary ideas about civic membership, and its liberal-democratic creed. Puerto Rico –the subordinate nation– showed, and still displays, complexities and contradictions, characterized by ambivalence about its worth, and little or no interest in governing itself.

To understand social and political processes, one must also reckon with the influence of “culture.” Insofar as it is transmitted and reproduced through generations, culture determines human behaviors that transcend the most intimate spaces, contributing to shape the collective realm (“society”) in the social, economic, and political dimensions.

In this chapter I provide a synthesis of the long colonial night under two empires, with greater emphasis on the current stage under U.S. domination. I divide the chapter’s overview of the colonial regime under the United States into two areas: the political and the economic.

Puerto Rico under Spain

Puerto Rico is a Caribbean and Latin American country politically, economically, ideologically, and juridically subordinated to the United States. For nearly 400 years, it was a colony of the Spanish Empire. Therefore, a synthesis of that period is needed, which I argue has the importance of producing a culture, a collective way of being, that paved the way for the U.S. empire’s subjugation of Puerto Ricans with very little effort; and for that domination to last more than 125 years, and counting.

In the 15th century, events and developments took place in Europe that led to the first expedition of Christopher Columbus, in 1492. The original goal of Columbus’ voyages was to establish a new route for trading with Asia. Once the Europeans were faced with the reality that they had arrived on a continent previously unknown to them, the plan changed. Beginning in the 16th century, the Caribbean region was the first arena of the competition among emerging European nations for expansion, wealth, and power.

The riches to be extracted from America would be hoarded by national monarchies and by “enterprising” men. To do this, the Europeans used the exploitation of other human beings, both the natives of the conquered lands and the Africans they acquired, as if they were chattel, to enslave them. In the beginning, mining and agriculture would be the main means of exploiting human beings and new lands, and of obtaining wealth for a few. Human trajectory and practices have not changed that much. Hoarders have exploited other human beings ever since the invention of agriculture made surpluses possible. Whether that is inevitable is a subject of debate.

We have been told that the indigenous Taíno people called Puerto Rico Borikén. Those inhabitants mostly succumbed to the viruses, guns, horses, and dogs of war of Spanish soldiers and settlers. The cruelty displayed by the conquistadors in the Caribbean and in the rest of what we know today as Latin America has been documented since the time of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, in the first half of the 16th century. New peoples often emerge from deplorable episodes.

In Puerto Rico, the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were characterized by a sparse population, which reflected the little economic importance that the Spanish crown gave to the island. In those three centuries, the population of Puerto Rico had to depend on itself, because the constant they received from the authorities during that period was helplessness. [3] I explore the effects of that abandonment on the mindsets –on the culture– of Puerto Ricans in chapters 6 and 7.

Until the end of the 18th century, the Puerto Rico population amounted to less than 200,000. A series of monarchical decrees offered incentives that induced Europeans to emigrate to the colony. Others who later arrived included those fleeing South America in the early 19th century, when Spanish rule collapsed in the wake of the continental wars of independence. In the mid-19th century, other reforms and incentives spurred new migrations and economic activity, while unleashing processes that resulted in the exploitation of workers and small landowners, creating deep resentments.

In the crucial 19th century, a professional and propertied elite emerged in Puerto Rican colonial society that would make itself felt for the rest of the century. This sector organized and directed the first political parties, in an environment that included a repressive apparatus commanded by the military governors of the time, appointed by the Spanish monarchs. Some members of that elite led the first insurrection against Spain at the mountainous town of Lares, in 1868, declaring the Republic of Puerto Rico.

After the failed Grito de Lares, repression was directed not only against the “separatists”, but also against those who advocated reforms, in the form of self-government or “autonomy”, without separation from Spain. It was “during the last three decades of the 19th century” that “the reformist-autonomist tradition” emerged and began to develop. [4]

A third faction, the conservatives, preferred the permanence of the colonial status quo, with the Spanish monarchy as its unifying element. The party’s original program, dated March 23, 1871, included among its objectives “a well-organized university, from which ungrateful enemies of Spain will not emerge as they did from Havana.” [5] The same document stated that the “enemies of our nationality and prosperity” were those who would “tear the protective flag of Spain from the last pieces that still remain in Spanish America; of these two islands that still reflect, in spite of Yara’s crime, that the sap that made Mexico, Venezuela and Peru opulent, tranquil and happy circulates through them.”[6]

In this program of the conservatives there is a way of seeing and acting that reaches to the present day, according to which loyalty to the metropolitan regime is extolled as a virtue; and all Latin American people are backward and unhappy for not being, like us, part of the United States –back then, for having separated from Spain. [7] These attitudes are just one example of the continuities of ideas and worldviews of us Puerto Ricans, which I elaborate on in the final two chapters.

Puerto Rico, USA

When the Spanish-American War broke out, Puerto Rico had a population of almost one million. Underdevelopment was evident, despite the economic and social advances that had occurred in the 19th century. There was still no university, and public primary and secondary education was very limited, which explains the high levels of illiteracy. If this picture did not contribute to the paternalistic and contemptuous attitudes of the new empire, it did facilitate the rationalization of those attitudes.

Mercedes López-Baralt states that the rupture, or “trauma” of 1898 “caused a split of loyalties that we still suffer in Puerto Rico.” [8] That division would have given way to what she calls “the conflicting nation.” [9] In his chronicle of the U.S. invasion of Fajardo, López-Baralt’s great-grandfather bemoaned a more immediate split, the one that occurred within his family, also a product of the disparate reactions to the presence of the new hegemon.

“I also witnessed,” wrote Dr. Esteban López Giménez, “the enthusiasm of some (who would have cheered the Zulus) sons of Fajardo, who cheered the Yankees, the Americans of the continent, without knowing them and without knowing whether they would treat us better or worse than those who left us.” [10] We still feel that apprehension, wondering if those who govern us will treat us well. That is the definition of the absence of freedom: limiting ourselves to the hope that those who rule will be benign. But that is the fate of slaves, not of human beings with any substantial degree of freedom.

Another physician from the coastal town of Fajardo, Santiago Veve Calzada, embodied that attitude that López Giménez regretted: Veve went so far as boarding a boat to approach the U.S. warship that was close to the coast, in order to urge the crew to invade Fajardo and take control of the town –which they attempted before being driven out by forces loyal to Spain. [11] Veve became a member of the Republican Party led by José C. Barbosa (1857–1921), and was elected in 1900 to the House of Delegates, legislative body created by the U.S. Congress through the Foraker Law of that year.

It is significant, as it seemed to Dr. López Giménez, that many placed their hopes for progress and a better life in a nation they did not know, and whose true intentions of capitalist domination and exploitation they ignored –and have continued to ignore or minimize for more than a century now. The reasons for this are many and difficult to decipher. It would be necessary to start by identifying the factors yielded by the road travelled during the 19th century: a considerable portion of Puerto Ricans of that time saw Spain as synonymous of oppression; and they deemed as exploiters other inhabitants of the archipelago, especially the landowning class, and merchants and moneylenders. [12]

Doctors López Giménez and Veve Calzada represent two disparate reactions to the U.S. presence in Puerto Rico. The attitude of Dr. López Giménez, a minority to this day, is one of caution and apprehension in the face of the presence and intentions of imperial power. It has been validated by more than a century of colonialism and exploitation at the hands of Americans. Veve Calzada’s attitude is still present, not only in those who are “pro-statehood”, but also in those supporters of “commonwealth status”, who insist on the “permanent union” and the “two citizenships”. What is the meaning of this divergence of attitudes that occurs at the very moment of the invasion? What is its origin? What does it mean that Veve and so many others have been willing to unconditionally subordinate themselves to the American empire? In Chapter 7 I explore these and other questions.

The armistice of August 4, 1898, dictated that Puerto Rico would be “ceded” to the fledgling U.S. empire, the same way that a possession of property is transferred. The Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898, stated in Article 9 that “Congress shall determine the civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United States.” Those who drafted that sentence had a broad conception of the power of Congress to govern “territories” and, above all, their inhabitants. Of course, that broad interpretation prevailed, given the imperialist vocation of the United States. Those who did not prevail included judges and other actors, who argued that the power of Congress and the U.S. government in general did not go so far, claiming that the U.S. Constitution did not authorize the possession of colonies, much less indefinitely.

Welcoming and blessing imperialism, the U.S. judiciary held that the Treaty of Paris gave Congress “plenary power” (exclusive power) over Puerto Rico, which also arose from the so-called Territorial Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which states: “The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.”[13]

In Downes v. Bidwell, [14] the U.S. Supreme Court held that “owning” colonies and denying political rights to their inhabitants, governing them without their formal or electoral consent, does not offend the U.S. Constitution. Puerto Rico, the Court held, “belongs to, but is not part of, the United States.” The new possession is “an unincorporated territory” to be governed as Congress, which exercises exclusive power over the Island and its inhabitants, sees it fit. Thus it was that, with no shame at all, the United States embraced its identity as an imperial republic, in the service of pursuing more wealth for its elites. Of course, that would require military might, countless wars and invasions, installing or supporting murderous dictators; and the hyper-extended global presence that we see to this very day.

In addition, the Court added, in explicitly racist language, that Puerto Ricans are members of an “alien race,” which renders them incapable of both governing themselves and participating in the U.S. political process. [15] To this day, those “principles” are still part of U.S. constitutional law; they are notions that have held firm, even after 1917, when Congress declared Puerto Ricans “citizens of the United States.” In 2016, when “liberal” Justice Kagan held, on behalf of the majority of the Court, that Puerto Rico has never ceased to be under the sovereignty of Congress, she implicitly validated the racist rationale that lies behind the subordination –the unfreedom– of Puerto Ricans. [16] The entirety of the federal courts’ jurisprudence on Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans, and their place in the U.S. empire is vitiated by the original transgression: imperialism and the racist insular cases.

This is how the policy of perpetual domination was justified. Self-government requires characteristics and attributes that are not found in “inferior races,” “mongrels,” or “aliens.” According to this view, convenient as it is for the dominant power, Puerto Ricans are not suitable for self-government, nor for more powers than Congress sees fit to concede or deny, nor for the mere “formal equality” (never substantive or substantial) of statehood.

Colonial Stasis

After more than 125 years, the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States has changed very little. Its colonial essence remains. In 1900, Congress established a governmental structure with an autocratic executive branch, headed by a governor appointed by the U.S. President. Known as the Foraker Act, that legislation was much less democratic than the 1897 Autonomic Charter, under which the Spanish government granted Puerto Rico broader powers of government than it has even today.

The Foraker Act established that all “federal laws” that are not “locally inapplicable” will be enforced in Puerto Rico. That provision survives today in the Federal Relations Act of 1950, whose provisions in turn are derived from the Jones Act of 1917.

Through another unilateral decision by the empire, the Jones Act, which replaced the Foraker Act, declared Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens. U.S. politicians and bureaucrats of the time made it clear that the purpose of such action was to strengthen colonial control over Puerto Rico, and thus ensure keeping Puerto Rico indefinitely as a U.S. possession. The “American citizenship” gambit has worked, making it easier for most Puerto Ricans to feel part of a nation that has wielded global power for more than a century.

Indeed, by 1910, some U.S. bureaucrats and legislators expressed the conviction that making Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens would be a welcome development on the island, and that it would have the effect of consolidating U.S. dominance over Puerto Rico. [17] The notion was expressed that the discontent on the island would diminish with American citizenship, and that the agitation of the small pro-independence sector would lose considerable strength.[18] Woodrow Wilson was in favor of making Puerto Ricans citizens, while expressing that not having done so yet was the only source of Puerto Rican dissatisfaction. He also said that such development had to be dissociated from any idea of admitting Puerto Rico as a state. [19] The U.S. Supreme Court gave its imprimatur to that policy in Balzac v. Porto Rico[20], through an opinion by then former President Taft, acting as Chief Justice.

Cabranes calls the 1917 “collective naturalization of Puerto Ricans” a “watershed moment in U.S. colonial history and quite probably the turning point in Puerto Rico’s political development.”[21] Gatell expressed himself in similar terms: “No event in Puerto Rican history has been more important in shaping the course of the island’s development than the grant of collective United States citizenship in the Jones Act of 1917.” [22] Rivera Ramos asserts that U.S. citizenship “has become a crucial element in the reproduction of American hegemony among the Puerto Rican population.”[23] Meanwhile, in 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the aforementioned case of Balzac, the last of the Insular Cases, culminating with the notion that Puerto Ricans’ U.S. citizenship did not change their status of colonial subjects. [24]

Still deprived of political rights, this “statutory” citizenship is “second-class”. On the other hand, although migrating to the United States allows people to exercise the right to vote, this has never translated into substantive equality. In the United States of America, Puerto Ricans have always been part of “the others,” with our value hidden from the eyes of ordinary Americans and their politicians by a cloud of ignorance, prejudice, bewilderment, condescension, and contempt. It is not unusual for the exploited and ignored to be despised as well. [25]

Puerto Ricans did not elect their governor until 1948, and they had no say in the details of their “local” government structure until 1952. In 1950, Congress passed Law 600, which “authorized” Puerto Ricans to convene a convention in order to draft a “constitution.” That Act 600 kept in place the provisions of the Jones Act of 1917 which contain much of the details of American domination, under the name of the Federal Relations Act.

As I elaborate in Chapter 3, the “constitution of the commonwealth of Puerto Rico” is not a “Constitution,” with capital letter, because it was not the sovereign act of a people. No sovereign people would need permission from another entity to give itself constitutional rule. As the supremacy of the Constitution and laws of the United States remained unscathed, the sovereignty of its government remained as the basis of its rule over us; and a “constitutional regime” is characterized by the supremacy of its constitution, which is the opposite of its subordination to the fundamental or statutory norms of another polity.

Beginning in 1953, Puerto Rican and federal courts invented or repeated a notion (doctrine would be too generous a term) which stated that Puerto Ricans “consented” to U.S. domination. That is to say, that they accepted being governed without any hint of formal democracy, through an alleged generic acquiescence to any and all federal laws and executive actions, present and future, that were approved or enforced. That was supposedly the price we paid for the “privilege” of finally enjoying a supposedly significant degree of “local self-government.” I explore the monstrosity of the concept of “generic consent” in Chapter 4.

After World War II, the U.S. government said that it was committed to decolonization processes. At the same time, it implemented the cunning trick of allowing Puerto Ricans in 1950 to vote in referendums for or against Act 600, and for the constitution that went into effect in 1952. The electoral gambit, the “will of the Puerto Rican people,” was thereafter used to conceal colonial domination, or at least to legitimize it.

The hitherto colonial impasse has been perpetuated in part by the existence in Puerto Rico of two partisan factions that, despite the futility of their respective chimeras of statehood and autonomy, have monopolized the discourse since 1900. For more than a century, U.S. rulers have made clear their disinterest in making Puerto Rico a state or allowing it to exercise governmental powers broader than those of the states. Despite this, those two factions have yet to react to more than 125 years of consistent U.S. policy of perpetual colonial subordination; have yet to wake up and smell the coffee.

The Devastation of Puerto Rico

On August 8, 1899, a Category 4 hurricane made landfall in Puerto Rico. In the Catholic calendar, it was the feast day of St. Cyriacus. The estimated death toll was 3,369 human beings. Material losses amounted to $20 million, as Hurricane San Ciriaco destroyed the coffee crop and the rest of the agriculture. Out of a population of one million, approximately 250,000 people found themselves without food or shelter, while electrical, telephone and telegraph services were interrupted for considerable time.

Seven months later, on March 8, 1900, the U.S. Senate was debating whether Puerto Ricans should reimburse the aid sent by the U.S. government. The notion struck Sen. Edmund Pettus, D-Ala., as deplorable, who characterized it as “illegal and hardly decent.” [26] Puerto Ricans would pay for everything, and much more. Twelve decades later, our bill has become higher –over $100 billion– a debt that did not benefit us, but which we are supposed to pay with what is left of our livelihoods and with the disappearance of hope for a worthwhile future. Little changes under the imperial-capitalist sun.

Bostonian Aristocrats, Sugar, and Exploitation

Before July 25, 1898, the date of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico, U.S. capitalists and politicians were already counting on its annexation as a colony, and on using it for business expansion and speculation. Among them were Boston bankers, who began arriving on the island shortly after the signing of the armistice on August 4, 1898. One of them, John Dandridge Henry Luce, was a close friend and brother-in-law of then Massachusetts junior senator, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge.

On July 15, ten days before the invasion, J.D.H. Luce wrote to Lodge: “As an imperialist, you may not be surprised that I wish to be in the front row of colonial expansion! In short, I am very anxious to go to Porto Rico [sic].” [27] In fact, in correspondence from May 1898, Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt (then Secretary of the Navy) agree that one of the goals of the war was to wrest Puerto Rico from Spain. “Porto Rico [sic] is not forgotten and we mean to have it,” Lodge wrote to Roosevelt on May 24, 1898.[28]

Luce and his associates wanted to get the Secretary of the Treasury to make them the exclusive custodians of the U.S. military government’s money in Puerto Rico. Lodge agreed to help him get his newly created bank appointed as the fiscal agent of the military government. After President McKinley himself interceded, those deposits were made in the bank of Luce and his associates. In 1899, they bought the vast Aguirre Sugar Mill in Salinas, Puerto Rico.

Frank Dillingham, a New York lawyer, also acquired land in Puerto Rico, which allowed him to make a fortune in the sugar industry. [29] Dillingham and other investors incorporated the Porto Rico Sugar Company in New Jersey, through which they acquired and operated Puerto Rico’s largest sugar mill, Central Guánica. Another New York group owned the Fajardo Sugar Company. [30]

In the context of the 1909 dispute over the budget between the American governor and the elected Puerto Rican House of Delegates, congressman Atterson Rucker, from Colorado, was aware of Puerto Rico’s role in American capitalist expansion, stating: “the question in its acute form is whether this Congress will allow the government we have established there, and by which so many Americans with their capital have found permanent footing, to be subverted.” [31]

It is telling that these capitalists wanted to make money in the sugar industry. For the field workers, sugar harvesting is one of the most degrading and brutal activities, relying for centuries on slave labor. The misery of Puerto Rican sugar workers was even the subject of an investigation by the U.S. government’s Department of Labor, led by a Joseph Marcus. [32] Neither the strikes during the 1910s, nor the denunciations of Santiago Iglesias or the Marcus investigation had the effect of improving the living and working conditions of tens of thousands of Puerto Rican parents and their families. [33]

That capitalist and exploitative adventure began a practice, which survives to this day, of using the Island and its inhabitants to make money and eventually running away with most of the loot. Puerto Rico has been a source of cheap land and labor, a tax haven with capable and disciplined engineers, technicians, and administrative workers at the service of U.S. corporations and their profits.

After 1898, the Puerto Rican economy and institutions were reorganized to satisfy U.S. capitalist and strategic interests. Lodge’s [34] brother-in-law was one of the first businessmen who, to this day, go to the island to make money, pay little or no taxes, pay lower wages than they would have to pay elsewhere, and fail to reinvest their profits in Puerto Rico. It has always been a looting affair.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the destruction of any possibility of indigenous economic development produced an impoverished army of agricultural workers, from whom the sugar companies would obtain the emaciated hands and malnourished stomachs that would work the land, in exchange for miserable wages. It was a system of exploitation, already implemented in the plantations of the southern United States after 1865, which for decades kept a significant portion of African Americans in a state of quasi-slavery, without education or political rights.

During the first forty years of U.S. rule, Puerto Ricans were as poor, and as or more exploited, than they were under Spanish colonialism. The fascinating thing is that this was not enough to develop any meaningful resentment of U.S. exploitation; much less a strong desire for independence. All that was happening at the same time that the Puerto Rican partisan leadership showed itself to be pusillanimous, short-sighted, deceitful and selfish. There are other factors –political, historical, material, and cultural– which are dissected and analyzed in the last two chapters in order to explain the duration to this day of the American imperial regime.

After World War II, a project of industrialization by invitation was established, which focused on cheap labor and preferential tax treatment. That model, which began to decline in the 1960s to eventually collapse in or around 2006, was always doomed to fail, as it could not generate economic development. Indeed, the very structure of the incentives and the type of capitalists that it attracted –with no commitment at all to Puerto Rico– had the consequence of industries leaving as soon as the tax exemption expired. [35]

At the same time, Muñoz Marín’s PDP (in power from 1941 to 1968) consolidated the colonial regime through gestures that superficially seemed democratic (popular referenda that led to convening a so-called “constitutional convention” and to the “approval” of a “constitution”); while establishing the aforementioned industrialization agenda that relied on attracting U.S. capital and industries. At the same time, it persecuted and stigmatized the opposition; institutionalized mass emigration to accelerate the reduction of the inconvenient high unemployment; abandoned agriculture; killed the possibility of developing mass transportation, to the delight of American auto makers, turning the urban areas into hellish realms tyrannized by automobiles; despite legislation on urban planning, it handed over the construction of urban spaces to capitalist developers; praised the U.S. wars and highlighted the heroism of spilling Puerto Rican blood in Korea, Vietnam, and all the post-war conflicts in which the United States has fought. These conflicts have always been conceived and executed mostly for the benefit of the capitalist interests of those who do not invest in Puerto Rico or who, if they invest here, have no commitment to the island, which explains their continued mobility.

As in every place and time, here the organs of political power act as it is to be expected, by ensuring that their actions and pronouncements contribute to maintaining the existing relations of subordination and exploitation; seeking to keep as intact as possible the status quo. Both the branches of the U.S. government and those of the “local” government of Puerto Rico contribute by their actions and omissions to maintaining the existing order. There is room for the notion that the inhabitants of Puerto Rico also contributed to this, with our eminently conservative attitudes of complacency and apathy; and that these are the same attitudes that explain our inability to address so many other issues that undermine our hope that we will improve the quality of life in the Puerto Rican archipelago.

The Current Stage of Perennial Exploitation

Since 1969, the two factions of pro-statehood and pro-commonwealth politicians alternated in the control of the government of Puerto Rico, while giving free rein to their greed and perfidy, their disdain for their fellow Puerto Ricans, and their mismanagement. Their unarticulated goal has been to enrich themselves and their allies. The latest incarnation of looters includes financial vultures, courtesy of Wall Street. For those Puerto Ricans who yearn for profound change, the challenges ahead are formidable.

Industrial investment was gradually replaced by toxic financial products, led by Puerto Rico’s subprime mortgages and municipal bonds. The latter had an attractive triple tax exemption. Deprived of the means for economic development, Puerto Rico became the island’s main employer, which fell into the trap of indebtedness to sustain that role, and that of engine and support of economic activity. There is no doubt that its financial and operational collapse was accelerated or worsened by bad practices, many of them neoliberal in nature; as well as the corruption of a partisan elite that has for decades displayed a monstrous contempt for Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans.

The members of the Fiscal Control Board are part of that ruthless clique. It is not surprising, nor is it a coincidence, that this Board has been plagued by conflicts of interest. For illustration, two of its original members had participated, as bankers in private banking and at the helm of the Government Development Bank, in the purchase and sale of the aforementioned bonds.

Wall Street and Puerto Rico’s bankers bought more bonds for their clients than the Puerto Rican government could afford –remember the attractive triple tax exemption. Ed Morales describes one of the common consequences of such financial straits: “When the speculative bubble in the financial sector burst in the form of a default on Puerto Rico’s bonds, austerity was instituted to provide a remedy for investors.” [36]

Austerity, the medicine prescribed by the Fiscal Board that Congress created and installed, has had the predictable effect of further depressing an economy that was already in a precarious situation. Coupled with the absence of economic development plans, the disaster is daunting. That response by the Board, or “Junta”, is another instance of using, in the words of George Monbiot, “crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatize remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens.” [37]

The storm that caused the present debacle began to gather many decades ago. The Fiscal Board has been prescribing the worst of pills, in what could be the final blow to the hope of a viable Puerto Rico. Hurricane María, on September 20, 2017, was one of many causes of Puerto Rico’s devastation. As in 1899, the U.S. response to the ravages wreaked by María was to withhold aid from the archipelago. [38] Puerto Ricans are again footing the bill.

In 1900, the U.S. government legislated tariffs on Puerto Rican goods, resulting in the population of the time paying more than enough for the meager aid they received after San Ciriaco. At the same time, Boston bankers came here to enrich themselves. The austerity imposed today, and the welcoming of the John Paulsons of this world to increase their already enormous and mostly useless wealth, is another instance of history repeating itself, with a vengeance.

Discourses articulated from power

Puerto Rican culture was formed in a colonial context, when the dominant power was the Spanish monarchy. That was also the case of the Cuban and Dominican cultures, to limit ourselves to the Caribbean. Historical circumstances determined the particularities of this culture of ours, which has features that reinforced the capacity of the imperial power to maintain its domination. Beginning in 1898, those cultural traits served to facilitate the same process, now with the United States as the dominant power. That is to say, a colonial regime does not produce identical cultures, nor identical reactions in the dominated peoples. Cuba and the Dominican Republic became independent. This suggests that the historical processes that took place in these countries forged cultures distinguishable from ours, particularly when it comes to political nationalism.

Our Puerto Rican culture is also present in public narratives about where our best interests lie. In Puerto Rico, discourses have been constantly repeated, articulated most visibly by Puerto Rican political leaders and by the U.S. and Puerto Rican judicial forums. Those discourses, whose purpose has been contributing to the perpetuation of the regime that has prevailed in Puerto Rico for more than 125 years, have been disseminated and reproduced for many decades in the media; in educational and religious institutions; and through less formal but effective interactions in other social contexts, including family, neighborhoods, and workplaces.[39]

The leaders who have dominated partisanship in Puerto Rico have been defining themselves for more than a century on the basis of their status preference (statehood or continuation of colonial rule). Throughout that time, they have kept articulating a recycled rhetoric that seeks to perpetuate the notion that the issue of the political relationship with the United States is fundamental –the essential issue to be discussed and solved. What is fascinating and grotesque is that this party elite has managed to maintain the illusion that the so-called “status problem” is its priority, while failing to implement strategies to solve it or consider what are the social and economic conditions that must exist to advance the solution to the problem of Puerto Rico’s “colonial condition” or “democratic deficit”.

It seems to me that it is necessary to consider the existence of a praxis of inertia, and how it contributes to keeping the regime intact. Since politics is action and transformations are achieved through action, in Puerto Rico we have practiced a kind of anti-politics. Chapter 6 explores this anti-politics and its consequences.

On the other hand, when studying the phenomenon of power in nations that claim to be democratic, we need to resort to constitutional theory. However, this is one of the subjects that goes unaddressed in Puerto Rico, even in law schools and judicial decisions. This should not surprise us, because in any social and political regime, there are issues on which silence is encouraged, leading to their total distortion. It is necessary to study the discourses, but it is equally essential to detect, denounce and counteract the silences. Chapter 3 discusses some of the foundational ideas of constitutional theory, while observing that Puerto Rico has never seen the implementation of constitutionalism. Hence, democracy and freedom are absent in the regime under which we live.

In this particular colonial regime, it has even been considered “subversive” to question whether the regime coincides with democratic principles; especially since it has been possible to constantly repeat, from all quarters, the notion –presumably not subject to doubt– that in Puerto Rico we live in “a democracy.” That is one of the “truths” that has been constructed mostly from the structures of political power. In the consolidation of this dogma, the “local government” or “colonial state” of Puerto Rico has had a leading, although not exclusive, role. Constitutional theory is left unarticulated and sidestepped, precisely because the principles of constitutionalism shatter the notion that we live under a democratic regime.

Of course, the democratic exercise of power presupposes a degree of legitimacy, embedded in concepts such as popular sovereignty; periodic and free elections; respect for civil rights; among others. But the ultimate source of legitimacy, the acquiescence of the population, takes place in Puerto Rico, where the notion that we are a “democratic country” and that we are fortunate to be part of the United States of America, the most powerful and “most democratic” nation on the planet, is accepted without further reflection.

In colonialism, the domination of one nation over another, history shows that this control is exercised by the hegemonic country for its own benefit and that of the interests that its government shelters; and, only incidentally, for the benefit of the dominated. It has been said that, to the extent that colonialism is inherently in the interests of the dominators, not those of the dominated nation, the former seek to obtain the “consent” of the dominated. That is why, in this context, it has been argued that an effective exercise of power presupposes the creation and consolidation in the inhabitants of the colony of the notion that the imperial domination benefits them. I examine these notions in Chapter 7, which are embedded in the concept of “hegemony” or “power as domination.”

Although Puerto Rico is not governed with democratic legitimacy, everything indicates that we are governed with our tacit assent, to the extent that Puerto Ricans accept the existing regime without major objections, and do nothing or very little to change or transform it. We seem to limit ourselves to merely accommodating to the circumstances, to “struggle” (bregar) as best we can, to find and implement individual responses to the difficulties that we share with most Puerto Ricans. Some authors have pointed to the factors that, in their view, make such social consent to the colonial regime possible. I add to that discussion in chapters 6 and 7.

It is plausible that such social consent to be governed without political or “democratic” consent –without the formal consent offered by political-electoral participation– is largely the product of the conviction that this best serves our interests. It is consent to be governed without consent, if such a paradox is comprehensible (see Chapter 4). If this is correct, it is to be expected that, once we cease to perceive that the colonial regime advances or preserves our interests, that social consent will vanish.

It is worth asking how this perception was created and consolidated, as well as analyzing the obstacles faced by those who have articulated arguments that refute it. [40] Other questions arise: Why those who have argued and continue to argue that colonialism is not good for Puerto Rico have lacked the ability to persuade? Does the answer to that question also answer why those who sought to perpetuate the regime have succeeded?

Everything indicates that the versions imposed by those who hold political power acquire preeminence over the alternative versions of that opposition mostly expelled from power. The majority of the population gives more credibility to the versions that are articulated from the seats of political power, which in Puerto Rico is evident, given the enormous dependence we have on the government as the country’s main employer and source of a myriad of social and financial assistance programs.

Ideas, culture and optimism

In Puerto Rico, the U.S. colonial regime has endured, at the same time as the essence of our culture has not changed. We have to face the fact that the colony is an effect as well as a cause. Being a colony is also an effect of our culture (forged, it is true, in a colonial context), in which fears, divisions, paralysis, fantasy, apathy, and the rationalizations to our aversion to sovereignty prevail.

Humans are conditioned by a myriad of factors, forces, events, contingencies and realities. In addition to the circumstances under which life has been given and is sustained, we are conditioned by what we ourselves create. [41] This includes, of course, the social, cultural, and political realities that arise from our activity, our thinking, our ideas, and the interactions that take place between ourselves. This reality invites us to reflect on the need for compassion towards all that is human, especially in the face of our shortcomings and vices.

Arendt articulated it this way:

In addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which, their human origin and their variability notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. This is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. [42]

Culture, as sprung from the socioeconomic regime under which we live, is one of the most powerful determinants. A human culture is composed primarily of ideas, which cause those who adopt them to behave in certain ways that they share with other members of their social group. This, in turn, produces a sense of community, of sharing traits or characteristics even with those whom you will never meet personally. This is to say that the notion that one belongs to or is part of a community, with a defined culture differentiated from others, is based on the perception that such a community exists. That’s the kind of community we know as a “nation” or a “people.” [43]

Ideas are nothing more than information, which is stored in our brains. As a result, they affect and even determine human behavior. We are influenced and shaped by ideas. Most of the ideas that define the world’s cultures, even those that are not explicit, are passed down from person to person, analogous to the transmission of genes. [44]

How are the ideas and practices that make up what we call a culture transmitted? Their propagation doesn’t have to be verbal. Often it isn’t. Imagine a five-year-old child in some town or city in the United States, walking hand in hand with his mother. She walks with the tranquility that comes from familiarity with places and people. The boy has made the journey dozens of times, which predisposes him to the woman’s body language, including the relaxed hand that grabs his hand.

Let us add that, suddenly, the mother’s hand tenses at the same time as she squeezes the child’s hand tightly, as she exhales her startle and stops in her tracks. The cause of the discomfort is the presence of a dark-skinned man walking towards them. Once the man continues on his way in the opposite direction to theirs, the woman sighs with relief. The infant had never felt before the tension and cold sweat of his mother’s pale hand, which relaxes again when the “strange” man is out of sight.

With this account, I intend to emphasize that “racial” prejudice, the product of centuries-old ideas that classify human beings on the basis of the category of “race,” is transmitted even without speaking; and that the same is true for other ideas, practices, and worldviews, including our pessimistic, passive, and resigned stance to the political and social circumstances under which we have lived. The transmission mechanisms of what we call “culture” are difficult to detect, which makes them all the more formidable.

As the example of the mother and child illustrates, this transmission is autonomous, automatic, daily, omnipresent, and difficult to detect with the radar of public or private institutions –often ill-conceived, whether or not they are interested in some kind of social engineering. The use of government institutions to carry out social engineering has met with formidable resistance from the culture in which they purport to operate. [45]

Events are important determinants of historical and cultural development, while ideas are the means through which humans assign meaning to events, as well as to values, aspirations, and a sense of community belonging. So, in principle, it is possible to identify in the past the core of cultural notions, prejudices and practices in each community, even hundreds of years ago and in different geographical origins.

In cultures plagued by taboos or fatalism, and in which critical thinking and innovation do not emerge, there are no practices or criteria to distinguish good ideas from bad, true ideas from false ones. This means that the evolution of these cultures is slow and that they are unable to innovate or solve problems, which requires an optimistic attitude, free of taboos, which rests on the awareness of the usefulness and necessity of the constant creation of knowledge.

So human cultures are the product of what has happened before each of us was born. Such a reality means that we are vessels, and propagators, of the culture in which we grew up and were shaped, while history and culture determine each other in complex ways. That is why the knowledge of history is of paramount importance, because history lives in each and every one of us; it’s part of us; it determines a lot of who we are and how we act. To know ourselves as social, cultural, and individual beings, we need to become familiar with the historical events and cultural forces that shaped the generations that preceded us, and our own. Every generation transmits values and ideas, and the origins and development of ideas and values are contingent on planned and unplanned events; on the wanted, and unintended, consequences of human action and of happenstance.

Puerto Rican culture, that is, “our collective way of being”, was forged in Spanish times, so that by 1898 it had already crystallized –with its lights and shadows. As essayist, playwright and novelist Luis Rafael Sánchez put it, “when the Americans arrived, the coffee was already brewed.” Instead of being optimistic, our culture is characterized by a peculiar fatalism and lack of action, particularly when it comes to that abstraction we call “the people of Puerto Rico” or “the Puerto Rican nation.” Those characteristics of ours, and others, have contributed to the longevity of U.S. domination. Chapters 6 and 7 explore how the traits of our culture, forged before the United States wrested Spain’s last colonies, facilitated U.S. domination and made possible its considerable longevity. An intriguing explanation arises therein: The fundamental reason for our aversion to sovereignty is that the circumstances in which our culture was forged failed to produce in us the type of emotional response that steered other peoples toward political nationalism.

[1] José Trías Monge, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World (1997).

[2] Chapter 2 contains a synthesis of the main outlines of American history and culture. In chapters 3 and 4 I explore, among other topics, the role that law has played in U.S. domination of Puerto Ricans. Chapter 5 elaborates on the murders, and cover-up, at Cerro Maravilla as an example of the state terrorism that has been deployed against those fighting for Puerto Rico’s sovereignty. In chapters 6 and 7, I seek to find explanations for the longevity of U.S. domination.

[3] See Luis Mattei Filardi, En las tinieblas del colonialismo: “Cien metros” de historia puertorriqueña 39–44 (3rd rev. ed. 2017).

[4] José Juan Rodríguez Vázquez, El sueño que no cesa: La nación deseada en el debate intelectual y político puertorriqueño 157 (2004).

[5] Reece B. Bothwell González, 1 Puerto Rico: Cien años de lucha política 89 (1979).

[6] Bothwell González, at 90.

[7] Trías Monge said: “It was thought that freedom had lost America, and Cuba and Puerto Rico were subjected, with fleeting intervals, to a regime of continuous repression. The repression … left… its imprint on Puerto Rican attitudes toward authority. In this way, different types of Puerto Ricans are created: the resigned and docile Puerto Rican, the obsequious, the beggar, the accommodating, the faithful executor of the whim of the ruler of the day, the timid requester of small changes, and, on the other hand, the Puerto Rican who firmly claims his rights, the rebellious Puerto Rican and the violent Puerto Rican.” 1 José Trías Monge, Historia constitucional de Puerto Rico 6 (1980).

[8] Mercedes López-Baralt, El Insularismo Dialogado, in Sobre ínsulas extrañas: El clásico de Pedreira anotado por Tomás Blanco 24 (Mercedes López-Baralt, ed. 2001).

[9] Id. She also uses the phrase “the conflictive feature of our national identity.” López-Baralt, at 33. Cf. Ayala & Bernabe, infra note 12, at 15, who are aware of authors, like López-Baralt, who have characterized 1898 as a traumatic event, but argue that this has had “more to do with their retrospective evaluation of the consequences of U.S. rule than with the actual events at the time of the U.S. occupation. All evidence indicates that in 1898, the invasion was seen by most as a positive break with the past.”

[10] López-Baralt, at 28.

[11] López-Baralt, supra note 8, at 28–31. From Spain’s point of view, doctor Veve committed treason. From my point of view, his gesture lacks honor and merit, since he aspired to continue to be dominated, this time by another empire hitherto unknown –and still unknown today to most assimilationists and enthusiasts of a “permanent union” between Puerto Rico and the United States.

[12] See, e.g., César J. Ayala & Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History Since 1898 19 (2007).

[13] U.S. Const. Art. IV, Sec. 3, Cl. 2.

[14] 182 U.S. 244, 282 (1901).

[15] Downes, 182 U.S., at 286–287. Thornburgh points out that the idea that Puerto Ricans are an “alien race” was decisive in the Supreme Court’s reasoning that produced the imperialist doctrine formulated in Downes, and in subsequent decisions. Dick Thornburgh, Puerto Rico’s Future: A Time to Decide 47 (2007).

[16] See Commonwealth of Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle, №15–108, 579 U.S. ___ (2016). In Sanchez Valle, the issue to be decided was whether Puerto Rico has the prerogative that allows states to criminally prosecute an individual who has already been prosecuted for the same actions in the federal forum. According to the court, states and the federal government can prosecute a person for the same acts, as an exception to the constitutional prohibition of double jeopardy. This is due to a doctrine of the same court, according to which the “sovereignty” of state governments is independent of, or has a different origin from, the sovereignty of the federal government. (The “sovereignty” of the states is another among many fictions). Such an exception does not apply in the case of Puerto Rico, Justice Kagan held, since sovereignty over Puerto Rico is held by the U.S. government, and the same “sovereign” does not have the power to consecutively accuse a person for the same criminal acts.

[17] See Pedro A. Cabán, Constructing a colonial people: Puerto Rico and the United States 198–199 (1999).

[18] Cabán, at 199.

[19] Id. See too Ronald Fernandez, The Disenchanted Island: Puerto Rico and the United States in the Twentieth Century 62 (1992).

[20] 258 U.S. 298 (1922). In Balzac, the court found that the mass “naturalization” of 1917 –which made Puerto Ricans “citizens of the United States”– did not change the “unincorporated territory” status the court assigned to Puerto Rico in the first decade of the 20th century.

[21] José A. Cabranes, Citizenship and the American Empire: Notes on the Legislative History of the United States Citizenship of Puerto Ricans, 127 Pa. L. Rev. 391, 396 (1978).

[22] Frank Otto Gatell, The Art of the Possible: Luis Muñoz Rivera and the Puerto Rican Jones Bill, 17 The Americas 1 (1960).

[23] Efrén Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico 145 (2001).

[24] See note 20, supra.

[25] A Puerto Rican intellectual, academic, author, and professor at Princeton University for more than three decades, wrote: “In the institutionalized knowledge in U.S. universities, Puerto Rico’s place is very uncertain. Since it is neither ‘Latin American’ nor ‘North American’, it ends up being erased. Many see in it neither a historical subject nor ends. Puerto Rican history is a story that doesn’t count, and therefore it is not told. It is neither before nor after, it is outside, without complexity, without internal heterogeneities, without political and affective tensions. It is the pure non-being.” Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, La memoria rota 79 (1993) (translation mine).

[26] Fernandez, supra note 19, at 1.

[27] Muriel McAvoy-Weissman, Brotherly Letters: The Correspondence of Henry Cabot Lodge and J.D.H. Luce 1898–1913, pág. 99, found in https://revistas.upr.edu/index.php/hs/article/download/4054/3515.

[28] Ayala & Bernabe, supra note 12, at 14.

[29] Fernandez, supra note 19, at 74.

[30] Id.

[31] Congressional Record, House, 61st Congress, 1st session June 7, 1909 2923; quoted in Fernandez, supra note 19, at 57.

[32] Id.

[33] Fernandez, at 73–77.

[34] Cabán, supra note 16, at 2–3; James Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico 127–131 (1989; 2nd ed. 2018); Ed Morales, Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico 36–37 (2019). For a detailed study of the development and consolidation of the U.S. Sugar Trust and its impact on Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, including the transformations in the societies of those Caribbean countries that took place to serve the U.S. sugar industry, see César J. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom (2009).

[35] For a penetrating and documented assessment of Operation Bootstrap, see Fernandez, supra note 19, at 165–172.

[36] Morales, supra note 34, at 72.

[37] George Monbiot, Neoliberalism –The Ideology at the Root of all our Problems, The Guardian, April 15, 2016 (traducción mía).

[38] Michael Deibert, When the Sky Fell: Hurricane Maria and the United States in Puerto Rico (2019).

[39] See Alvin Toffler, Powershift 18 (1991): “[When it comes to power], knowledge and communication systems are not antiseptic or power-neutral. Virtually every “fact” used in business, political life, and everyday human relations is derived from other “facts” or assumptions that have been shaped, deliberately or not, by the preexisting power structure. Every “fact” thus has a power-history and what might be called a power-future –an impact, large or small, on the future distribution of power.”

[40] See Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View 10 (2nd ed. 2005), who explores, if ordinary domination hurts the interests of subordinate groups, why do subordinates comply? Why don’t they rebel consistently, or at least resist all the time? Lukes studied the dimension of power that achieves acceptance of the established order (the power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things). Lukes, at 11. Everything indicates that, even in non-colonial contexts, socialization processes achieve to a large extent the acceptance and reproduction of political ideologies, religious dogmas and a whole set of cultural and social notions and practices, which few of us question as absurd, pernicious, optional or in need of improvement.

[41] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 9 (1958; 1998).

[42] Arendt, supra note 40, at 9.

[43] See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Rev. Ed. 2006).

[44] See David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World 369–97 (2011); Simon Deakin, Evolution for Our Time: A Theory of Legal Memetics, 55 Current Legal Problems 2 (2002); Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (1999); Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 192 (1976).

[45] By way of illustration, going to court to attempt racial desegregation of U.S. public schools has run up against the stability of the cultures of communities that have been segregated for more than a hundred years, contributing to the near-total failure of those attempts. See, e.g., Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell, 498 U.S. 237 (1991).