The War Against All Puerto Ricans Book Review

Nelson A. Denis
Nation Books ($17.99)

by Spencer Dew

The first then-chosen democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico, Nelson A. Denis tells us in this necessary volume, smoked opium and was doubly controlled by the drug. The pipe dulled his spirit and the U.S. government blackmailed him with show of his addiction. Denis could brand more of this valence: the oppressed wallowing in the transitory pleasures of oppression, compliant under the boot of the colonizer, complicit in helping to crush those of his fellows who attempt to resist. However Denis'south volume is a work of history—essential history, to be certain—and he refrains from speculation near possible paths forward, even though this is the question demanded past each page of this relate of horror: How can Puerto Rico be gratis?

Puerto Ricans are chosen American citizens, just the term is inaccurate. Puerto Ricans are denied the full legal protections of Constitutional subjects. They tin can vote in American presidential elections but if they abandon the island and move to the U.S., yet they can exist (and have been, in massive numbers) drafted into the U.S. war machine. It is difficult not to meet the production of troops equally i of the primary rationales behind the American colony of Puerto Rico, along with its strategic location and, perhaps most importantly today, its part as a captive consumer base of operations.

The island is not patrolled by occupation forces; rather, colonial control here is primarily economical. The island has more Wal-Mart outlets per mile than any other place on earth. Any production that enters or leaves Puerto Rico is required by U.S. police to be carried on U.S. ships. Major marine freight companies thus unload and reload shipments to Puerto Rico in Jacksonville, Florida (a boon for America, in terms of jobs; an actress expense for our colonial subjects on the island). The price of sure bolt (automobiles, sure, but also produce) are higher than in the U.S., as is the cost of living, though the per-capita income on the isle is less than half that of the poorest U.South. state. The island's government, barred by law from filing for Chapter nine bankruptcy, faces a debt crisis totaling $72 billion.

It is to this situation that Denis's book speaks, and it is because of this situation that the volume proves so difficult to review. The response inspired by State of war Confronting All Puerto Ricans is visceral: rage, guilt, despair, fear. It is hard to believe in the ideals of American democracy, the transformative promise of American law, when learning the details of a history of American conquest and oppression. American governments, American officials, and American laws, afterward all, banned the use of Spanish in Puerto Rican public schools, made it a felony even to own a Puerto Rican flag, and responded with violence to peaceful protests—not simply car-gunning "American citizens" in Ponce simply using Air Force planes to flop "American citizens" in two towns. Denis'south title is not a hyperbole; it is a quotation, a description of policy. He tells a story of American political and business organisation leaders intent on owning the island, setting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to subjugate the Puerto Rican people through blackmail and terror (over 100,000 Puerto Ricans were subjects of carpetas, or hole-and-corner files), and using the legal system to smash organized dissent with the arrest of thousands of nationalists. This history is largely unknown inside usa, and in those cases when its contours are familiar, the dominant gloss of the perpetrators, that this was all merely an "incident betwixt Puerto Ricans" prevails.

In truth, the Puerto Rican Revolution of 1950, the master focus of Denis's book, was a weep for international attending, a plea for recognition and justice. Wildly asymmetrical, including an bump-off attempt on President Truman and a three-hour gunfight between a lone barber and dozens of police and U.S. National Guardsmen, the endeavour failed and continues to neglect. Equally a case in betoken, the Kirkus Review coverage of this book calls it a "relentless relate of a despicable office of past American foreign policy," as if the oppression of the Puerto Rican people were behind us and Denis'south book were not an indictment of ongoing American policy. Indeed, this book is particularly urgent now. If this electoral season (for president, in the US; for governor, on the island) is to offering anything more than than a competition of pop entreatment and private funding, this book must play a part—this is a history of which all candidates should exist informed and a present question to which they all must respond.

Which returns usa, once more, to the problem of a path forward, and the difficulty of writing this review. Is Puerto Rico's situation not, similar that of an opium addict, intractable? Visiting the island, I was shocked past the predominance of American retailers and fast food franchises. As PR-ane cuts s through the island and rises into the mountains, the billboards ascent higher. The project of U.S. colonialism cannot be divorced from the project of U.South. corporate capitalism, and it is this drug—for it surely is a drug—that Puerto Ricans are happily consuming even every bit their island falls apart. American politicians, with American legislation, could take steps to relieve the island's firsthand financial crisis and should, indeed, pave the way for a costless nation of Puerto Rico. Only it volition be an audacious task for Puerto Ricans to proceeds for themselves something resembling true liberty, addicted equally they are to an American economic model sufficiently crippling on its own, even liberated from the callous restrictions and penalties of the Jones Human activity. While at that place is ample reason to exist securely pessimistic about the isle's time to come, I also have to experience that the revolution Puerto Rico needs would offering a model for the world and that history has put Puerto Rico in the unenviable but privileged situation of confronting, years earlier the United states will have to, the utterly subversive force of late stage capitalism. The island may simply stumble frontward, into infrastructure plummet, increasing segregation by course, walled foreign enclaves, and the eventual transformation into a narco-state. Or Puerto Rico could offering a model for the globe, drawing on the aforementioned values and models of community the nationalists in this book celebrated and embodied.

I am likewise wary to end on an optimistic note, but Denis, whether due to editorial pressures or just out of a sense that some catharsis was needed afterwards so much recounting of insurmountable oppression, highlights the heroic side of the lost revolution. He gives u.s. a Pedro Albizu Campos ready for canonization, insisting that the island is not for auction and later saying that "According to the Yankees owning i person makes y'all a scoundrel, but owning a nation makes yous a colonial distributor." He reminds us of General Smedley Butler, author of State of war is a Dissonance and "I Was a Gangster for Commercialism"—works well worthy of reprinting and rereading. And he gives united states of america folio after page of play-by-play with that aforementioned barber, Vidal Santiago Diaz, who engages the government in an operatic one-homo shootout, with Albizu Campos speeches blaring from a radio and Santiago Diaz himself singing politically tweaked versions of "traditional Christmas aguinaldo," each verse punctuated with a pistol shot.

If the reader can close this volume placated by some imagined solidarity with a futile concluding stand confronting an enslaving political and economic hegemony, then Denis will have failed. Canonizing these nationalists, like canonizing anyone, is a trap. In my hometown, Chicago—the distance of which from the isle, as Puerto Rican nationalists in that urban center are quick to notation, allows for a certain liberty of political imagination—at that place is a mural of Albizu Campos crucified. He is virtually to be pierced through the side by that kickoff "democratically elected" governor of the isle, the opium aficionado. This paradigm—liberty browbeaten and bound, the deathblow to be delivered by complicity and stoned indifference—seems a far more than apt epitome to carry away from this book. This volume, after all, is not amusement; it is an indictment and a telephone call to action.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Bound 2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016

singletonsherep55.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.raintaxi.com/war-against-all-puerto-ricans-revolution-and-terror-in-americas-colony/