Puerto Rico in the American Century

A History since 1898

César J. Ayala, Rafael Bernabe

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807895535
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

Offering a comprehensive overview of Puerto Rico's history and evolution since the installation of U.S. rule, Cesar Ayala and Rafael Bernabe connect the island's economic, political, cultural, and social past. Puerto Rico in the American Century explores Puerto Ricans in the diaspora as well as the island residents, who experience an unusual and daily conundrum: they consider themselves a distinct people but are part of the American political system; they have U.S. citizenship but are not represented in the U.S. Congress; and they live on land that is neither independent nor part of the United States. Highlighting both well-known and forgotten figures from Puerto Rican history, Ayala and Bernabe discuss a wide range of topics, including literary and cultural debates and social and labor struggles that previous histories have neglected. Although the island's political economy remains dependent on the United States, the authors also discuss Puerto Rico's situation in light of world economies. Ayala and Bernabe argue that the inability of Puerto Rico to shake its colonial legacy reveals the limits of free-market capitalism, a break from which would require a renewal of the long tradition of labor and social activism in Puerto Rico in connection with similar currents in the United States. Puerto Rico in the American Century explores the history of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora as well as the island residents, who experience an unusual and daily conundrum: they consider themselves a distinct people but are part of the American political system; they have U.S. citizenship but are not represented in the U.S. Congress; and they live on an island that is neither independent nor part of the United States. Highlighting both well-known and forgotten figures from Puerto Rican history, Ayala and Bernabe discuss a wide range of topics, including literary and cultural debates and social and labor struggles that previous histories have neglected.
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1
1898—BACKGROUND AND IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES

On May 25,1898, former secretary of the navy and future president Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge urging him not to let the war with Spain end without seizing Puerto Rico for the United States: “I earnestly hope that no truce will be granted and that peace will only be made on consideration of Cuba being independent, Porto Rico ours, and the Philippines taken away from Spain.” In Roosevelt’s nuanced vision, if Cuba was to be independent and the future of the Philippines once taken from Spain was left unspecified, Puerto Rico had been chosen to become “ours.” Others in the McKinley administration shared his perspective. On May 24, 1898, Senator Lodge had assured Roosevelt that “Porto Rico is not forgotten and we mean to have it.”¹ Indeed, already by the 1890s Puerto Rico had been described as key for the protection of a future canal through Central America. In 1891, Secretary of State James Blaine advised President Benjamin Harrison: “There are only three places that are of value enough to be taken, that are not continental. One is Hawaii and the others are Cuba and Porto Rico.”²

The advice of Blaine and Roosevelt was heeded: after bombarding San Juan on May 12, U.S. troops began landing in Puerto Rico on July 25, near the town of Guánica on the southwestern coast of the island. As Blaine had foreseen, the rise of the United States as a global power would not entail the construction of a colonial empire, but it would require the control of strategically located way stations. Puerto Rico was seized as such an outpost in 1898.

The military campaign of 1898 in Puerto Rico lasted nineteen days; the armistice of August 12 put a stop to the conflict while diplomats negotiated the terms of the peace treaty. The Treaty of Paris was eventually signed by U.S. and Spanish representatives on December 10, 1898, and ratified by Congress on April 11, 1899. Five U.S. and seventeen Spanish soldiers died in the course of the war in Puerto Rico. The “splendid little war,” as John Hay—at the time U.S. ambassador in London—famously called it, was indeed a relatively light affair in Puerto Rico.

U.S. troops found little resistance as they advanced through Puerto Rico. There were many indications that the new authorities could count on an initial favorable attitude from almost all sectors of Puerto Rican society. Several manifestos signed by the most prominent political leaders on the island welcomed the representatives of the U.S. republic, which many had long seen as an embodiment of democratic and progressive ideals. Local bands of “scouts” joined regular U.S. forces in the takeover of several towns, while others, organized in cuadrillas (small squadrons), tried to speed up the surrender of Spanish officials.

Captain General Manuel Macias, in charge of Puerto Rico’s defense, cabled the Spanish minister of war on August 2: “The spirit of the country is generally hostile to our cause.” On August 5, referring to recent reforms introduced by Spain, he added: “Not even with autonomy does the majority . . . wish to call itself Spanish preferring American domination.” Whether Puerto Ricans desired U.S. “domination” was an open question, but it was now clear—bitterly so to Macias—that the country had ceased to think of itself as Spanish.³

Some authors would later recast 1898 as a traumatic moment, but this had more to do with their retrospective evaluation of the consequences of the U.S. rule than with the actual events at the time of the U.S. occupation.⁴ All evidence indicates that in 1898, the invasion was seen by most as a positive break with the past.

A New Era: “Bandits,” Women, Labor

The period between the collapse of the demoralized Spanish administration and the firm installation of U.S. authority opened a glimpse into the tensions that had shaped Puerto Rican society before 1898. In the mountainous interior, bands or partidas of rural poor men of diverse backgrounds (day laborers or jornaleros, sharecroppers, outlaws) staged attacks on haciendas and stores, in many cases in retribution for years of abuse at the hands of hacendados, foremen or merchants. The incidents were varied and complex and also included cases of rape and murder. The partidas were most active between August 1898 and February 1899. An informant of U.S. Commissioner Henry K. Carroll, author of a vast report on Puerto Rico, stated in 1899 that “there was a theory that property was going to belong to everybody. That was the opinion held by the country people.”⁵ If such was the hope of some, they were soon disabused of the notion. The outbursts of violence were rapidly quelled through the intervention of U.S. troops.⁶

But the partidas were not the only examples of how the collapse of Spanish rule brought into the open tensions that had until then been largely suppressed. The coming of U.S. rule, for example, led to a clearer separation between church and state as the Catholic Church lost the political and institutional privileges it had enjoyed under Spanish sovereignty. This permitted the legalization of divorce, although still under severe restrictions. Historian Eileen J. Suárez Findlay has shown how couples, and above all women, moved to take advantage of this new freedom that opened the way out of marriages in which many felt more like prisoners than partners.⁷

At the same time, people belonging to diverse currents began to openly promote their views, meeting together and publishing journals that would have been censored before 1898. Freemasons, espiritistas, and freethinkers extolled their anti-Catholic and anticlerical sensibilities. A witness informed Commissioner Carroll: “All men that have studied are freethinkers.” To Carroll’s question “Do you believe in the Scriptures as a revelation?,” the informant responded, “Absolutely not.” “Catholicism,” commented another source, “was a religion by force. It was not permitted not to be a Catholic, and there were a great many people who were Catholics who are now freethinkers; there are ... many Free Masons too.”⁸

The invasion of 1898 also accelerated the rise of a vigorous labor movement. Initial organizing efforts in the shape of artisan associations, mutual-aid organizations, and reading circles emerged in the early 1870s during the period of political liberalism initiated by the revolution of 1868 in Spain. A first series of significant strikes took place in January-February 1895. Besides dockworkers who mobilized in San Juan, Arecibo, Arroyo, and Ponce, there were protests by tailors, masons, woodshop and construction workers, and railroad mechanics in San Juan, by street construction workers in Ponce, and by laborers in some sugar plantations in Ponce, Bayamón, and Añasco. The apparent reason for these simultaneous protests was a sharp increase in the prices of consumer goods. The press at the time described those initiatives as unprecedented: “This is how it starts,” commented La Correspondencia, “such ... is the start of the struggle between labor and capital that causes so much worry in the Old continent.” Caught between two fires, the liberals of La Democracia, while supporting the strikers against the Spanish authorities, also lamented that workers would now discover the power they could muster through united action. One editorial concluded: “May God save Puerto Rico!”⁹ The threats to “Puerto Rico” were thus perceived by these liberals as not only coming from the Spanish authorities but also from within, as the demands of the dispossessed revealed tensions among the inhabitants of the island.

New efforts to organize urban artisans and laborers came soon after with the creation of the journal Ensayo Obrero on May 1,1897, by Spanish-born carpenter Santiago Iglesias and typographers Ramón Romero Rosa and José Ferrer y Ferrer. In July, Iglesias organized the Centro de Estudios Económicos y Sociales. A first mass meeting of workers was convened on March 25,1898. Led by Iglesias, Romero Rosa, Ferrer, and Eduardo Conde, the gathering was dissolved by the police. Iglesias was arrested soon afterward. Following the U.S. invasion, labor activists took immediate advantage of the new situation. A new publication, El Porvenir Social, edited by Romero Rosa, made its appearance, while Puerto Rico’s first labor federation, the Federación Regional de los Trabajadores (FRT), was organized on October 23,1898. This was followed by a strike of typographers in San Juan in November, the first significant labor action under U.S. rule.

This emergence of organized labor as an independent voice was to have a lasting impact on Puerto Rico’s political landscape. The leading role in the early organizing efforts belonged to cigarmakers and typographers, groups who cultivated a strong sense of craft identity and pride in their role as labor’s intellectual vanguard. The impact of the 1899 May Day celebration, organized by the FRT, was strong enough to prompt the U.S. military governor to decree the eight-hour day, a measure that remained unenforced. The FRT soon split over the question of labor’s independence from bourgeois parties. Those insisting that the FRT remain politically independent organized the Federación Libre de Trabajadores (FLT) on June 18, 1899, which rapidly eclipsed its predecessor. The summer of 1900 witnessed new labor battles, which included a call for a general strike of all the skilled trades (bricklayers, painters, carpenters, among others) in San Juan. These efforts met fierce repression. Iglesias and more than sixty labor activists were arrested and charged with diverse violations. Harassment and the possibility of imprisonment led Iglesias and Conde to leave for New York in 1900. In New York, Iglesias came into contact with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), led by Samuel Gompers. By 1901, the FLT affiliated with the AFL.

Meanwhile, the sugar interests—mill owners, cane growers, and all those involved in the sugar trade—perceived the coming of U.S. rule as a step toward the realization of a cherished dream: gaining access to the tariff-protected U.S. sugar market.

Sugar: Dreams of Expansion

Sugar had twice been central to the Puerto Rican economy. The island went through an initial sugar boom in the sixteenth century, which included the growth of a slave-based plantation economy. Nevertheless, while retaining its military significance, the island soon became an economic backwater of the vast Spanish empire. Until 1800, most of the island’s sparse population was made up of subsistence farmers, living beyond the reach of state or church. After the Haitian revolution closed down the world’s largest producer in the early nineteenth century, Puerto Rico and Cuba—further stimulated by trade reforms introduced by Madrid—entered a sugar boom, again characterized by the expansion of slave plantations. As a result, Puerto Rico’s economy was relinked to the world market. Sugar production spread in large parts of the coastal area, while subsistence farmers scurried to the interior where they sought to reproduce their independent mode of production away from the encroaching plantation economy.

Private property had been recognized in Puerto Rico in 1778, a measure that began the differentiation between titled private proprietors and the propertyless. Yet many among the latter retained actual access to unused land. The state responded with attempts to coerce them into wage labor. After 1849, all those lacking property titles were required to either rent land or hire themselves out as day laborers. The latter were forced to carry a workbook (libreta) indicating their place of employment.

After the 1850s, the sugar plantation regime fell into crisis, caused above all by the fall of world market prices as beet sugar producers came into competition with cane sugar from the tropics. Meanwhile, in 1868 an anti-Spanish rebellion was launched in Puerto Rico. The Grito de Lares included the abolition of slavery among its demands, but it was rapidly crushed. Nevertheless, persistent abolitionist agitation—stimulated in part by the defeat of the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War, the continued Cuban War of Independence of 1868-78, and slave resistance in the form of conspiracies, escapes, and individual acts of defiance—led to the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 in the context of political upheaval in Spain. There were around 30,000 slaves in Puerto Rico at the time of abolition. To survive in a highly competitive world market, sugar producers now had to modernize their operations while completing the transition to wage labor. This they were unable to do. The sugar industry entered into deep decline.

Meanwhile, the center of economic life shifted to the mountainous interior, where coffee producers enjoyed a thirty-year period of prosperity beginning in the late 1860s. By 1898, the island’s principal export crop was coffee, and the western mountainous interior had become the site of a considerable accumulation of wealth in the hands of an hacendado class. The rise of the coffee economy dealt a new blow to the subsistence farmer economy as many formerly independent farmers were progressively subordinated to an emerging hacendado class, which was to a considerable extent made up of recently arrived immigrants. It was the tension between this impoverished mass and its exploiters that would later manifest itself in the partidas in 1898.

The expansion of the coffee economy stood behind the rise of the city of Ponce as an export center, vividly depicted in Manuel Zeno Gandia’s 1922 novel El negocio. If San Juan remained the official center and the relay point of Spanish rule and church censorship, the southern city emerged as the site of an increasingly self-conscious criollo culture, liberal, freethinking, avid for more intense material and spiritual contact with the perceived centers of modern culture, such as the United States and Great Britain. By 1899, the two cities were almost equal in size (32,000-33,000 inhabitants each), and, although the contrast should not be overemphasized, according to U.S. Army physician Bailey K. Ashford, many saw Ponce as the site of the “spirit and culture of Puerto Rico” and despised San Juan’s “bureaucratic airs.”¹⁰ It was in Ponce that the most significant early criollo political party, the Partido Autonomista, was launched in 1887. And it was in Ponce that in 1882 the criollo propertied sectors organized an agricultural fair without official support. The feria-exposición was an assertion of its sponsors’ desire for a wider path toward economic modernization, which would include the end of trade monopolies and the promotion of industries. Spanish merchants were widely seen as the main obstacle to such reforms. They were denounced for their usurious lending rates and for selling at inflated and buying at depressed prices, thus squeezing the earnings of large and small producers. In 1899, the mayor of Guayama would complain to Commissioner Carroll that “on the ruins of agriculture there has risen a flourishing community of merchants.” He added, “These merchants are nearly all peninsular Spaniards.”¹¹

The existing economic configuration was to be radically altered by the onset of U.S. rule. Sugar production rapidly expanded to become the dominant economic sector, marked by the presence of U.S. capital and a total orientation to the U.S. market. Coffee suffered the opposite fate. Coffee producers lost their protected markets in Cuba and Spain and had to compete in the U.S. market with the better established Brazilian coffee. Badly hurt by a devastating hurricane in 1899, the coffee industry recovered slowly, then stagnated and went into decline after 1914. But all this was still in the future. At first, coffee growers also hoped that U.S. rule would allow them to supplement their traditional outlets with easier access to the North American market while liberating them from the monopolistic abuses of Spanish merchants.

Liberal Hopes and the Model Republic

Given the hopes expressed by different currents of Puerto Rican society regarding the end of Spanish rule, it is not surprising that the first two political parties organized after 1898—the Partido Federal and the Partido Republicano— coincided in their basic demand regarding Puerto Rico’s relation to the United States. Both parties favored the immediate transformation of Puerto Rico into an organized territory of the United States, in preparation for its eventual admission as a new state.

Both parties were reincarnations of different wings of the pre-1898 autonomist movement, which had gone through several mutations after the founding of the Partido Autonomista in 1887. During the nineteenth century, decisions taken in Madrid had tended to impress a specific dy...