Hardly a “floating island of garbage,” Puerto Rico remains a colony, treated like trash by the US. Read this ledger of the cost and crimes of the US colonial project.
We were not surprised when white trash Trump fanboy Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” especially given Trump’s prior reference to Haiti, Puerto Rico’s Caribbean neighbor, as a “shit hole country.” That said, Republicans, be they politicians or comedians or some grotesque spawn of both, have no monopoly on the racist characterization of Puerto Rico. And when it comes to policy, Puerto’s Rico’s third-class, colonial treatment by the US has always been of a bipartisan nature. Ever since the US hijacked Puerto Rican’s independence struggle against Spain and forcefully incorporated it as a US territory, it has continuously preempted Puerto Rican’s independence struggle against the US, no matter which side of the corporate-controlled duopoly held power.
Officially, Puerto Rico is a “free associated territory;” effectively, Puerto Rico is a colony. As a colony it has served as a dumping ground for US products and a testing ground for US munitions; a source for cheap labor and a factory for expendable soldiers; a laboratory of experimentation with birth control and biological weapons; and a sleazy pleasure field for mainland sexual conquest. Most recently Puerto Rico’s power grid has been co-opted for bitcoin extraction while US crypto-boys have dreamed of buying up every square inch of real estate, depopulating the archipelago, and building an Aryan free-market fantasy island in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. Did we mention that much of Puerto Rico’s debt, at one point amounting to $70 billion dollars, is held by Wall Street? When Puerto Rico was on the verge of bankruptcy, the US signed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, or PROMESA. PROMESA created an oversight board that effectively took over fiscal control of the archipelago and ensured the parasites of high finance were paid, dissolving whatever still existed of Puerto Rico’s sovereignty. That occurred, by the way, under Obama.
Still, sovereignty and self-determination remain in the hearts of many Puerto Ricans, despite the toll taken by long-term economic crisis, high unemployment and massive immigration, the battering of by Hurricane Maria in 2017, and the deliberate debilitations of US colonialism. Though of course, it is precisely US colonialism that is the source of Puerto Rico’s crises—and, as Pedro Albizu Campos reminds us – it is US colonialism that has provided the spark of Puerto Rican nationalism.
Albizu Campos was a leading figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement in the first half of the twentieth century. An Afro-Puerto Rican born in Ponce in 1893, he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1921 and joined the Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico, the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico, in 1924, serving as its president and spokesperson from 1930 until his death in 1965. Albizu Campos spent twenty-six of those years incarcerated, his anti-imperialist, nationalist activities deemed by the US as seditious conspiracy. He claimed that he was the subject of human radiation experiments while in prison.
On September 23, 1950, Albizu Campos delivered a speech in the mountainous western municipality of Lares. Albizu Campos’ speech occurred on the anniversary, in the same location, of el Grito de Lares, or the “Cry of Lares,” an 1868 uprising against Spanish colonialism led by nationalist leader and intellectual Ramón Emeterio Betances and the Comité Revolucionario de Puerto Rico (the Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico).
Albizu Campos’s speech was not merely a fiery denunciation of US colonialism in Puerto Rico, although it was certainly that: it was also a meticulously-rendered ledger of the cost and crimes of the US colonial project. Echoing and invoking the cry of 1868, Albizu Campos’ speech led to another uprising, this time against the US and Puerto Rico’s recent neocolonial designation as a "Free Associated State" (Estado Libre Asociado).
Even though the Nationalist Uprising of 1950, as it was called, was mercilessly crushed by the US, Albizu Campos’ anti-imperialist demand for self-determination resonates today. Hardly a “floating island of garbage,” Puerto Rico remains a colony, treated like trash by the US. Pedro Albizu Campos’ 1950 speech at Lares is reproduced below.
Everybody is Quiet But the Nationalist Party
Pedro Albizu Campos
Mr. President of the Lares Municipal Council, ladies and gentlemen. It is not easy to give a speech when we have our mother lying in bed and an assassin waiting to take her life. Such is the present situation of our country, of our Puerto Rico; the assassin is the power of the United States of North America. One cannot give a speech while the newborn of our country are dying of hunger, while the adolescents of our homeland are being poisoned with the worst virus, slavery. While the adults of our homeland must leave Lares (their hometown) in fear and don’t even have exit to foreign countries different from the enemy power that binds us. They must go to the United States to be slaves of the economic powers, of the tyrants of our country, they are the slaves who go to Michigan out of need, to be scorned and outraged and kicked. One cannot give a speech easily while this tyrant has the power to tear the sons right out of the hears of Puerto Rican mothers to send to Korea, into hell to be killed, to be the murders of innocent Koreans, to die covering in front for the yanqui enemies of our country, to return insane to their own people….it is not easy. Our blood boils and patience beats at our hearts and tells me that patience must end, must disappear, and that the day of Lares must be the day of Lares, that is, the day of the Puerto Rican Revolution.
This year is the one-hundredth anniversary of the creation of the Cuban flag, and in the speech of our illustrious secretary-general made in homage to the flag of Cuba, he compared it and called it the womb of our own flag, for this centennial of the Cuban flag is also the centennial of the Puerto Rican flag in the sense of origin. We have called here those who want the union of our brothers, of our Latin American brothers, and very specially of the Cubans, of the Dominicans, of the Antilleans, for they all love the independence of Puerto Rico as their very own, because as long as Puerto Rico is not free those nations feel mutilated. The Cuban standard was raised by Narciso López, General Valero de Bernabé, of Fajardo, who maintained close relations with Iznaga, one of Narciso López’s expeditionaries. Valero was then, I understand, the chief General Staff in the Venezuelan army – our blood has always been on a level with the supreme height of dignity. We repeat our salute to all the heroes and martyrs of the great Cuban nation, we salute on this day especially the youth studying in the University of Havana, the University that has been a principal source of inspiration for the eternal struggle for freedom. It is the only center for higher studies in the world inspired by the sacrifices of the innocent.
Today we come up to a reality of our country, in that the enemy, the United States of America, feels defeated by our rights in the decision of the American Commission of Dependent Territories: their recognition of Puerto Rico as a nation intervened by the power of the United States. The U.S. did not dare to attend an inter-American conference for the first time in the history of America. Why/ The U.S. had a right to sit there and always has a right to a place in the American Commission of Dependent Territories. Why didn’t it attend?Because there, by their own right, Puerto Rican entities would be present. This is the work of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico, which in Bogotá achieved direct participation for all entities interested in the situation of military intervention by the United States in Puerto Rico, and the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico went their with the flag of Puerto Rican independence, not to claim the possibly of recognition within the positive right, the natural right we can demand at any moment, but to claim recognition because within international rights Puerto Rico was a sovereign nation on the date on which the Treaty of Paris was drawn up, and Spain could neither give away Puerto Rio nor could the U.S. annex it, nor the entire would disown it. The sovereignty is irrevocable, and when the United States, through its cannons, forced the Spanish plenipotentiaries to sign the so-called cession of Puerto Rico, it was committing just a typical North American stickup. And this coaction against the Spanish had no part of the Spanish-American War, was never a belligerent against the United States or anyone else, and here the yanquis have been at war fifty-two years against the Puerto Rican nation, and have never acquired the right of anything in Puerto Rico, not is there any legal government in Puerto Rico, and this is uncontestable, one would have to knock to pieces all the international rights of the world, all the political rights of the world, to validate the invasion of the U.S. in Puerto Rico and the present military occupation of our national territory. And the yanquis can’t sit down at a table with jurists and ask those jurists to tell them that United States military intervention in Puerto Rico has validity, and that is why they did not dare attend the conference in Havana, they intimidated the whole of it, they sabotaged it so it would not meet, they browbeat governments not to attend, they intimidated the whole hemisphere and everything failed. The Commission met and resolved that Puerto Rico should have the opportunity to enter the society of the world’s free peoples.
They know they have responsibilities before the world, before all the Latin American nations and all the nations of the world, because before the United Nations Puerto Rico has direct recognition. The Nationalist Party, which disowns th empower of the United States in every terrain, got within the Constitutional Charter of the United Nations as an official observer with diplomatic status, to make the voice of Puerto Rico heard and to tell the whole world that the United States, as a nation, is a violator of the constitution of the UN, that these pretend defenders of freedom of every nation of the world except Puerto Rico are mere bandits in the current history of mankind. And that each time they present a report there – because they are under an obligation to render an annual report on the intervention of their administration in Puerto Rico – we also answer to all nations that this report is void and null, is plagued with lies, with perverse and cynical omissions from people dedicated to the most abject slavery and piracy for the demolition of a whole nation with the viruses of tuberculosis, cancer, hunger, of every plague known to mankind, to destroy it, and those who survive this policy of starvation become the cattle the United States needs to pick the crops in Michigan. These are the cattle the U.S. needs to be shipped as cannon fodder to Korea or to any other part of hell existing on this earth. They are looking, my friends, for a legislative base to tell the world in the face of the accusation by the Nationalist Party, by the Puerto Rican Liberation Movement, that we Puerto Ricans have consented, that if there ever was any nullity in their intervention in Puerto Rico, this lack of validity is no longer in effect because Puerto Ricans have ceased to be Puerto Ricans, and, after fifty-two years of yanqui occupation, well, we are no longer Puerto Ricans, we are yanqui citizens. And as yangui citizens we bow, you understand, to the intervention, to the occupation by the United States and we give up not only our right to be Puerto Ricans but also our right to be yanguis because it says that in law, which they want to force upon this country “through the eyes” that Puerto Rico cannot aspire to become a province of the United States, a badly called state, not that, because in the Senate of the United States, although they claim to represent brown and black peoples, no black can enter nor anyone suspect of having a black grandfather. That’s very exclusive, it’s called the most exclusive club on earth, they call themselves that. Those are the great democrats. No, today in this Senate it can no longer be an independent nation either, no, Puerto Rico is content to be a possession of the United States. A thing the U.S. can dispose of at its will; they can dispose of the women, the lives, the properties, all of Puerto Rico. The women to be WACs, the sons to be yanqui soldiers, they can expropriate our lands, they can decree that all of Puerto Rico become a United States forest reserve park, they can decree that all Puerto Rican monuments are yanqui monuments, yanqui property administered by yanquis and above all that, we are yanquis because they say we are yanquis.
The so-called law for allowing Puerto Rico to draw up a constitution begins with an amendment to the existing U.S. law through which they pretend to rule Puerto Rico. The Jones Law is a law of the U.S. Congress, it has been amended by the present law, which is authorized to submit Puerto Rican voters whether they want to assemble later on to draw up a constitution in which they will say they are yanquis, and the present law says clearly that they can meet in any constituency, but upon meeting they cannot say they are Puerto Ricans, they must say they are yanquis. The citizenship law is not amended but rather the imposition of U.S. citizenship continues over every Puerto Rican. Listen carefully, it is true that in Massachusetts, Florida, that’s within the existing Jones Law, and there is what is called citizenship of Puerto Rico, but that is a citizenship within the important citizenship, it’s a provincial citizenship: the international citizenship is the yanqui citizenship – meaning the citizen of New York is a citizen of New York for the purpose of voting in New York, but the citizen of New York is above all a citizen of the United States, and that disposition of the existing Jones Law remains intact.
This is to say that all the constituents can gather here, yet they cannot say they reject United States citizenship. You will say – well, Don Pedro, and why is that important? A great deal, when they come to seize your son to go kill in Korea, to be a murderer in Korea, what they apply to him is the U.S. citizenship. Listen to what they apply to someone they consider a citizen of the U.S. The first thing they ask is are you a citizen of the United States? Oh yes? Yes, well throw the pack on, to Korea, to Korea, boy where all American citizens go, and fly. If you are half blind, tubercular, lame, however, no, you still serve to cover some hole, to duck behind the bullets of the Koreans. And I say this because the mobilization in Puerto Rico for Korea has taken 8,000 men, and it is a vile act of the U.S. government to pretend to mobilize by force the Puerto Rican nation so that it can pick up a front for the U.S. in Korea. The U.S. had in Korea the same proportion of men that we have – they have 150 million inhabitants, we have 2, so they have seventy-five times the number of inhabitants that e have, so it would mean they should have 4 to 5 million men in Korea, as they really scarcely have 80 thousand men.
Ask yourself if this is not a shameless act of the United States. Why? Because they feel obligated to intervene in Korea with all their weapons, let them mobilize themselves. Let them go fight for their interests, instead of taking advantage of Puerto Rico’s defenselessness to make it go to defend the sordidness and the iniquity of their policy before the world, that is shamelessness. Well, the law that forces all of us here to go to elections, that law is dominated by the Jones Law. The Jones Law is not derogated, no sir. The Jones law remains intact regarding the sovereignty of the U.S. in Puerto Rico, that is, in regard to the mobilization of his personal property and the mobilization of his person at the will of the U.S. Congress, in which we have no representation, nor do we want any. When a Puerto Rican goes to register [at selective service offices], when he’s called for inscription, you’ll say to me, we have to vote in protest – no, no, all those registration and elections are a big trick. If registrations were good for Puerto Rico, the yanquis would have have inscriptions and elections here, nor would we ever have them. Registrations in Puerto Rico and elections are the trap to make Puerto Ricans keep turning the millstone. Yes, so-and-so goes up today and wears out four years, maybe eight years, steals a little and this and that – out he goes, discredited, just another scoundrel in the history of Puerto Rico, but he will be able, in the Puerta de Tierra legislature, to approve a law for greater taxation, that’s find, lots of taxation. If you are going to sell codfish cakes, you need a license, there’s a health inspector with a pistol in his belt, so this fried codfish is fried but uneatable, it poisons the population, etc. – you pay for the license and the codfish is all right, and if you grease the palm of the health inspector then the codfish is delicious. Taxation from every side.
The Jones Law remains intact as regards jurisdiction in Puerto Rico; in Puerto Rico there is only one primary jurisdiction of the only power here, that is, the strength of the government of the United States. The so-called insular government is only a corporation organized by the Congress of the United States, it didn’t intervene in making the Jones law or any yanqui law. The resident commissioner over there is resident but he’s not commissioned; the poor fellow is just squatting there, he can’t vote on anything affecting Puerto Rico. Now poor Fernós wasn’t able to vote on the law he himself brought up and that he claims is his; what a rascal, he couldn’t vote. I can’t explain where those people keep their faces, saying, “this law is mine, we Populares have put it through,” when they couldn’t even vote on it. For the resident commissioner to speak in the U.S. House of Representatives, he needs the unanimous consent of the House (chamber); any fool over there says “sit down, shut up” and he has to sit down, poor fellow. My friends, these “gentlemen” have lost sense of honor, for here there is but one jurisdiction and that is the jurisdiction of the United States government. That government of the U.S. has organized, with the purpose of deceit, a corporation it calls “the people of Puerto Rico;” this corporation has judges, prosecutors, policemen, soldiers, even an air force. You pay taxes to maintain an education system in which the Puerto Rican is no longer Puerto Rican, to tear the Puerto Rican heart out. I have just read the magazine edited by the Commissioner of Education of Puerto Rico, and I have seen the dates to be celebrated in September. Well, in the month of September, the date September 23 doesn’t appear. Tell me, gentlemen, if it’s not an act of banditry on the part of Villaronga and all his department of education, if this limitless audacity doesn’t cry out for the hangman’s ropes.
Well, then, this little government’s legislature – jails, many jails, there’s no money to bring a loaf of bread to Lares, but for a jail in Lares there will be money. So, lots of money for jails in Lares and all Puerto Rico – for schools, yes, because they are to destroy the heart and mind of the Puerto Rican, denaturalize him, prostitute him, corrupt him – for that there will be money. There’s money to have the Health Department in Puerto Rico inject the youth of Puerto Rico with any disease that the U.S. government desires, to kill them on a long-term basis, there’s yes, money for that – but to kill hunger in Lares, Jayuya, Utuado, in Comerío, in the whole nation there’s not a penny because hunger is the policy of the United States. The yanqui believes that when a human being is deprived of his loaf of bread, he will surrender and humiliate himself to be kicked by anyone. He will turn on his mother, his wife, his own dignity, so as not to suffer hunger. That’s the policy of the United States.
Well, that little legislature now has an elected governor and he signs those laws, those laws which can be annulled by the Congress of the United States; he doesn’t dare do anything without consulting his masters, he’s conscious of that, poor devil, he has a twinge of conscience yet and he knows he is playing the role of a puppet of the U.S. because nothing is altered. What laws, what constitution can this nation draw up? There will be two constitutions, the Jones Law and the so-called insular government, the corporation the United States has created. This federal jurisdiction is the only one that exists. There it’s divided into insular and federal jurisdiction. We have federal zones. Each time the navy wants a house, it comes here and expropriates it. It’s interested in that Roman Catholic Church, so let’s expropriate it. They need a dance hall for the U.S. officer corps, so it shall be done when they resolve it. They respect nothing. He who does not respect the truck does not respect his own mother.
Well, then, there was a hope held by certain lackeys that when both federal and insular zones were determined, if a crime took place in the insular zone, it would be judged by the so-called insular tribunals – no, it isn’t like that. The armed forces of the United States have a privilege here. They can’t be tried by any judicial authority, not even the co-called Federal Court of the United States. A U.S. Marine can kill anyone in the streets of San Juan or by the Federal Court, no, he has to be tried by a U.S. Navy court-martial…and why this privilege? Because killers need immunity. When one hires somebody else to kill, the first thing is to guarantee to him that he won’t lose his skin, in any case. Well, are the armed forces here to defend Puerto Ricans? To kill Puerto Ricans!! That’s the only government here, the rest are scoundrels, and all that crowd of bootlickers say that this is a democracy – the yanquis laugh at them. How wretched, how disgraceful they are. The slaves of their nation dedicated to hunting down their own children, justifying the outrage of their women, the expropriations of their homes, of their monuments, the destruction of their history, and the eventual destruction of their whole future. All this remains intact in the Constitution, this remains intact in the Jones Law. That remains the law, federal contributions here will remain the law, the Federal Court remains functioning in full vigor. There is little change in the so-called Supreme Court of Puerto Rico, a court in Puerta de Tierra that calls itself part of Puerto Rico and is not because it is imposed by the U.S. and is not supreme because there is a source of appeal from its decisions to a tribunal called the Boston District Court. It sounds like an electric switchboard system, doesn’t it?.... All this remains intact. Here anyone who wishes to buy a piece of meat in the Dominican Republic, that passes through the government intervention. If you want a bottle of perfume from France, there’s a U.S. customs, if you want to send a postcard to Havana – there’s the U.S. mail. Here the mail administrator is not called mail administrator because he’s not Puerto Rican – he’s called Mr. Postmaster, and if it’s a woman, Mrs. Postmaster. If you touch a wheel of that mail truck, you get dumped into the Atlantic, the gallows of the Atlantic, but that’s not all, that’s not all. The Federal Court also runs the Boston Circuit Court, and the Boston court short-circuits back to the Federal Court – this judicial tyranny comes from above and spreads itself out to confuse us, to club us down. There’s even more: each secretary, each administrator in the U.S. government has direct jurisdiction over Puerto Rico. The Secretary of Commerce has an office in San Juan to determine if you are importing from the U.S. If you set out to do business with Argentina and you look through the customs laws of the United States for permission to bring in something from Argentina, the Secretary of Commerce will be there to ask how you can buy something from Argentina when it’s available in the U.S., this to prevent you from buying in Argentina. The Secretary of Justice, or Attorney General, is by direct jurisdiction the man in charge of all the courts here, except, here this well, the courts-martial. Notice the military nature of the Puerto Rican government; the U.S. Attorney General can determine who is going to be federal judge here, or insular judge there, or attorney general of the insular government here, but he can’t influence anything about a court-martial, by law of the government of the United States.
Customs have their own inspectors, their own policemen. In this way the U.S. maintains here its police state. It makes me laugh when the yanquis talk about a police state in other governments. There’s no police state like the yanqui system. Each department of the U.S. government has its own police force, and each one of these policemen can arrest every policeman in Puerto Rico and every Puerto Rican citizen who is not a policeman, and every judge in Puerto Rico, and every prosecutor, and each government. Tell me, then, if it's not an act of shamelessness to claim that international relationships are still intact in Puerto Rico. The Jones Law remains intact, you will say, and what the devil is going to change with this so-called Puerto Rico Superior Tribunal to be named by the Puerto Rican Executive, that’s all; all the laws that the so-called insular government passes will be subject to reversal by the Congress of the United States. Like right now, that is still what will be in order, a big pact, a big agreement. The agreement, my friends, the agreement that when you give me a cent you take two. The Law of the Funnel, the agreement that Puerto Ricans accept that political slavery of the United States, that’s the agreement, the only agreement there will be and that is why you are busy with some new inscriptions, some new elections, a tremendous movement. Well, everyone who inscribes himself first has to say that he’s an American citizen. The reason why the Nationalist Party opposes the inscription (of any Puerto Ricans) is because they cease being Puerto Ricans. The PIP [Puerto Rican Independence Party/Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño] members tell me it’s a trick, that they can fool the yanquis, that they’ll inscribe, they’ll vote, and when the elections get to Puerta de Tierra they are going to stand up to the United States. Well, the fools are the PUP members; the yanquis are very well directed, they know what they are doing, the PIP members are not that wise, with all the cleverness they have, which I recognize, to fool these superbandits. They can’t fool the United States.
Today PIP members are caught in the trap of the century, their sons mobilized for the draft – the PIP members quiet, the Populares quiet, the Statehooders quiet, everybody is quiet but the Nationalist Party. Puberty Rico is an atomic base, no one dares talk about it, but there’s more: An eminent yanqui doctor, Dr. Filbert, has said that Puerto Rico is sitting on top of a powder barrel – Albizu Campus doesn’t say that, Dr. Filbert says that – brought here by the insular government. Well, I’m going to tell you a secret, a secret that’s been shouted out loud: The U.S. has turned Puerto Rico into an atomic base and the United States has in Puerto Rico under the direct administration of the U.S. army a vast camp of experimentation for germ warfare, for bacteriological warfare. One of these laboratories is behind the capitol, looking out to the sea; this laboratory is experimenting with all the contagious diseases on earth. They’re experimenting in that laboratory with a disease that is endemic in the highlands of the Rocky Mountains in the U.S., which is a terrible fever.
Why bring the viruses, the microbes of this disease to experiment here in Puerto Rico? Oh, it’s because it can spread and if it spreads here, what’s the difference – they’re Puerto Ricans. Didn’t they kill a few thousands in Korea? After the next atomic war there might be one left – what’s the difference?
This laboratory is in the main entrance artery to San Juan, there they have the cages with the animals that read “infected animals” – horses, cattle, rabbits, rats, etc., and any froth from this animal can fall to earth and this dust fly off and anyone passing in a bus can absorb it and pass it on to the rest of the Puerto Ricans. The legislature, has it said anything about this? No, no, no. They are willing even to burn their whole country so that they can enjoy their privileges. You might say no, this is a great historical investigation. My friends, anything under the direct control of an army, no army is a charitable institution, armies are established to kill, and this is in the charge of the U.S. Army. The medical corps of the U.S. Army, called the yanqui hospital service, has not dared to take charge of this experimentation in Puerto Rico. Well, I invite the defenders of the yanqui flag in Puerto Rico to study this continuation of infection flying over their country. But there’s more, the constitution is written, it’s all written, because the master does not trust the slaves, no. The slave, always apart, apart, knows when there’s sunshine, he disappears in the sun, when there are shadows he disappears in the shadows, the master never trusts the slave. The master trusts an enemy who is free, because this enemy of his, if free, tells him face to face: “Listen, you go so far, you come to an agreement with me to go only so far, we both respect that frontier.” And he signs a treaty with a free man and respects it because that man is free, but a slave gives his signature and it’s worthless. This constitution they're going to drive the Puerto Ricans to draw up in 1952 is already written. Why? Because if they’re slaves it’s not the constitution of a free country. Constituents draw up a constitution, approve it, promulgate it, it’s the Supreme Law – no, not that this is going to be approved first by the President of the United States. The President has to say that it’s good, has to determine, has to approve, and if the President approves it, then the Congress. Why? All this anxiety over an illusory thing? A thing that is to draw a blind over despotism in the United States? Well, then, all this has to be defied, only as the men of Lares defied despotism, with revolution.
Pedro Albizu Campos, “Everybody is Quiet But the Nationalist Party, Pedro Albizu Campos,” (The historic speech of September 23, 1950, commemorating the rising at Lares), from Habla Albizu Campos: Albizu Campos Speaks (Paredon Records, 1971).