The intention is visible throughout the information. Patriotic impatience sometimes pretends to see what exists in many things. And the patriotic impatience of some has wanted to see in the alleged designation of another Committee for the study of Puerto Rico’s political status by Mr. Truman, the imminence of our final liberation from colonialism.
With 22 years of militancy for national independence; with the long apprenticeship of many sleepless nights studying national liberation movements and imperialism; with humble modesty I warn my compatriots: no one should sow and no one should place hopes in tyranny. And of tyrannical nature is all foreign intervention.
If one detects the course of imperialist aggressiveness of the Truman Administration; if one analyzes the human composition of the Committee that will “study” the status; if one remembers that, for the United States the case of Puerto Rico is not a question of formula but of recognition, and this real and concrete fact is compared with the alchemy of formulas and the perpetual recipe book that comes out of Washington’s tongue every time it deals with our case, we will reach the logical conclusion that it is about evading the harmonic solution of the grave conflict existing between our nation and the Yankee nation, either by liquidating Puerto Rican resistance in a wait long enough for its length to cover the time that Yankee imperialism needs to try to impose its aspired world domination; or until its desire for world domination creates a war situation in which they feel authorized to pretend, as they did in the First World War, as they have just done in the Second, that Puerto Ricans “accept” postponing their struggle for the conquest of national sovereignty, for the good of their war effort.
To all the Impatient for the “resolution of status,” to all the refined Impatient of patriotism, may they accept, patriotically, this truth: the independence of the homeland is at the same distance as national unity to conquer it.
With the news of the alleged appointment of a new committee in Washington to once again dissolve in the vacuum of history our people’s desire for liberation, national unity acquires new validity and becomes an obligatory theme of meditation and concern for every patriot.
National Unity
In the course of past years two theories of national unity have paraded before the judgment of our people. The first, arising in the mind and encouraged in the breast of the most sincere patriotism, conceives national unity as the climax of the nation’s spontaneity, forgetful of all intermediate questions, and projected as a flow toward independence within a single party, under a single guiding theory, under a single leader, under the glorious shelter of the national flag. We believe that within that inflexible norm of conduct we cannot forge national unity.
The other theory of Puerto Rican unity is a falsehood, a conspiracy, a malicious confusion of what unity is. These theorists of unity shamefully confuse national unity, which is something whose realization has set precedent, which is something completely feasible, practicable, with unanimity of collective criteria, which is a utopia in a society divided into classes. It was, however, with this theoretical falsification that Puerto Rican collaborationists of all colonial parties put at the disposal of imperialism the necessary power so that Puerto Rican opportunities in the war would end up in the limbo of colonial idiocy. This theory must be condemned and destroyed for the good of the homeland. The amalgamation of all colonial parties stored in the Legislature, packed in commissions in Washington each one sustaining a different criterion, can only result in the indefinite postponement of the recognition of our sovereignty. Each appearance of that “team” before members of the Yankee government in Washington will serve only as evidence of a colonial madhouse that authorizes imperialism to repeat its already known response: agree on what you want.
Although this other has not come to the surface of printed letter nor public debates, in the clique environment another theory, also nefarious, of national unity, has been manifesting: that of making a unified independence movement, ignoring, disregarding, or despising, those “radical nationalists,” those “radical communists.” Although between the “radicalism” of the nationalists, and the “radicalism” of the communists there is a whole mountain of ideas (my party, the Communist Party, is national in its form and socialist in its content), that attitude toward both groups is an index of political cowardice, of class opportunism founded on the fact that communists and nationalists, in the present stage of the Puerto Rican struggle, are the shock troops of independence, the vanguard of struggle for Independence, the purest and most selfless components, the best proven in the street, in debate, in national resistance; and rejecting their active collaboration in the unified independence movement, is rejecting all that; it is a crime of lese-patrie.
The approach to the problem is different, very different. The approach to the problem should be: National unity is the consortium of all Puerto Rican independentists, who accept political struggle as a means of strategic agglutination of the forces that the nation has available, to wrest from United States imperialism the recognition of a Republic of Puerto Rico, whose constitution is founded, democratically, on the double theory of individual rights that encouraged the birth of other American nations, and on the body of collective, social rights, that the democratic nations of America have been adding to their constitutions, in the form of statutory law, in the course of recent years.
The Theory of the Plebiscite
The deformation of our nation by Imperialism has produced a series of false postulations regarding the so-called “permanent status” of the country. Still today some men manage to be followed by a small sector of Puerto Rican opinion based on fighting to convert Puerto Rico into a “state” of the United States. It is necessary, at the beginning, in vindication of the men of the people, of those affiliated with the party of that program, to point out the following fact: none of the “ideologues” of “statehood” has ever explained to the mass of their party the true scope of the so-called “statehood.” No leader of statehood has informed the masses of their party that the annexation of Puerto Rico to the United States as a “state” entails the total renunciation of all the essences of Puerto Rican nationality, the historical eclipse of our people, the disappearance of our personality within the Yankee people. They have never told their followers that “statehood” is pure and simple assimilationism. On the contrary, all have painted before the people a Puerto Rican “state” whose equal neither exists, nor can exist, in the United States: a “state” founded on the exegesis of a false interpretation of Yankee constitutional truth, and within which Puerto Rico would conserve all its historical personality, according to them.
The truth is that Puerto Rico will never be a “state” of the United States, not because the Yankees despise us, or don’t feel like it, or because Puerto Rico doesn’t have economic power, which it does have, to support the responsibilities that “statehood” would impose on it, but because the United States is not a federation of states, but a federal republic in which only one state exists, the federal state, which forms a whole of which the forty-eight provinces are part, which have been called “states,” but which they are not. What the so-called Puerto Rican “statehooders” aspire to is to de-Puerto Ricanize Puerto Rico to the point where it stops being Puerto Rican and becomes Yankee, into matter easily assimilable within the Yankee national whole, so that Puerto Ricanness decays and degenerates and disappears, so that as ferment of the corruption of the Puerto Rican people another sector of Yankees emerges. The truth is that Puerto Rico will never be a “state” of the United States, not only because of that impossibility with which Yankee constitutional nature confronts it, but also, and above all, because the force of our nationality will always resist, victoriously, that attempt at de-Puerto Ricanization, at denationalization. The idea is simply repulsive to the Puerto Rican people.
Maliciously navigating through our past, another group of colony exploiters has resurrected the old autonomist program of 1887; they have put new buttons on Don Román’s coat, and have presented themselves with it in public to deceive the unwary. This group of autonomists is among the smallest that exists in Puerto Rico as a political factor, and arithmetically considered, has no importance. But it is a factor in the sense that it gives grounds to further degrade the plebiscitary approach and make it even more risky for the homeland. There is, moreover, to observe that “autonomism” is increasingly becoming the program of Creole capitalists most surrendered to imperialism. These are rapidly abandoning the deteriorated ship of “statehood” and each day in greater number try to “dignify” their position under the cloak of “autonomism.”
The “neo-autonomists” start knowingly from a falsehood: from the possible autonomic relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. But, for such a relationship to exist it would also be necessary to completely change the Government of the United States, it would be necessary a monarchical counter-revolution in the United States that would shatter the present Yankee constitution, or impose on the people of the United States a new constitution, with a royal house, and a King at the head. Then an autonomic relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico could be established.
Why?
Well because autonomy is a traditionally monarchical doctrine. In the modern world, its origin is found in a Royal Decree of Philip II, of Spain, recognizing the autonomy of Belgium, then under the imperial dominion of Spain. This idea, in its full development, we contemplate today in the British “commonwealth,” in the British Empire under the Windsors. The autonomic relationship between nations presupposes a multinational state, that is, a state in which various nations come together for a common juridical life. Such was the case between Spain and Belgium, under Philip II; such was the case of Austria and Hungary under the Habsburgs. Such the case of the British Empire.
But the United States is not a monarchy: it is a republic. The United States is not a multinational state. It is a federal state. And that reality prohibits any possibility of an autonomic relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico.
The United States is a nation. Puerto Rico is another nation. There is no other possibility of international relations between both nations than these: either that of free, independent, sovereign nations, or that of one of them being a colony of the other.
There is, of course, another way to establish a multinational state in the United States, not looking backward, in the monarchical manner, but in the progressive manner, in the revolutionary manner: establishing socialism. But then one would not have to think that Puerto Rico would belong to the Yankee communist multinational state. By that time our homeland would be comfortably where it belongs and would belong: in the Antilles, in the Antillean soviet.
Summarizing; that, under the present Yankee constitutional system there is no possibility for autonomy. Under this system the autonomists have no other way out than to collaborate with the liberating forces to achieve recognition of independence. Once independence is recognized, once the Republic is established, the autonomists, if they have the strength to do it, could limit Puerto Rican sovereignty, surrendering part of it to the Yankees through treaties: a kind of omnipotent Platt Amendment. That is what their possibilities are reduced to: stop being colonists to become saboteurs of the Republic.
The different disguises of the autonomists do not include only the autonomists of classic name: to these also belong those of the “theory of indices” and that of “localist government” of Luis Muñoz Marín and company.
The “independentist” with “economic guarantees” is also, despite himself, another “autonomist.” Only that his position is not only false, but ridiculous. The “independentist” with “economic guarantees” is a member of the Popular Democratic Party. He is a just, reasonable man, concerned about the things of his country. There is not, there cannot be, in him —the council of founders prohibits it!— any bombast. He has to be a common man. He is called, —generally—Posthumous. He is “son of his father and his mother; that is… “who has managed “to have from the cradle what everyone has: father and mother.”
“All these rather precise and curious details we have from a very good source, as well as what we shall later relate about this character, who, given his name, seemed destined to live after death.”
“But let us not get ahead of ourselves; and if death took Posthumous, let us bring him back to this world, if only because it suits our narrative.”
“Resuming our tale, we shall say that he died for the first time. Let us see how this accident could be verified in such a way that something remained for another occasion.”
“Posthumous was young, and he would surely have ceased to be so had he lived more years; but let it be understood that we speak only of the aging of the body; for as regards the spirit, that of our hero was destined to remain forever a child, as we shall see further on. He was one of those beings who dream while awake, and who seem asleep in the very easy matter of being led astray in the toils and malice of this world. His plans were not for this stage; one could say that, destined for another globe, he had come to this one by mistake. It frequently happened to him that, wanting to make dramas, he only made interludes, in which, at best, he revealed his peculiar character; a true absurdity for this worldly stage, to the laughter of the audience, who proclaimed his insufficiency in matters of playing any character other than his own… Had he become a deputy, he would have been left without his share; had he set up as a public writer, he would have had the poor judgment of always writing the truth; had he become a minister, his desires for good would have turned the armchair — which for others lasts flowering months — into thorns for a single day. Posthumous dreamed of the Golden Age, as if this were not a fruit foreign to the winter season in which he lived.”
“He had, then, his eyes on the infinite, on the void.”
“This, as regards his spirit; as for his physique, Posthumous was quite handsome and charming: dressing with natural elegance, though somewhat carelessly, as befitted a dreamer of imaginary worlds. More than once he had to be pulled from ditches or wells, where he had fallen from looking at the sky: a true observer of the ethereal region.”
Such was Posthumous. And I have yielded directly to Tapia his complete description. But two terrible things happened to Posthumous: first, he died; second, he was resurrected in the body of his enemy.
Thus was the “independentist” of the Popular Democratic Party, and from the utopian dream in which he lived, dreaming of “revolutionizing” the colonial economy, “decolonizing” it, and on that basis, setting course toward independence, he finds that one day, a terrible yellow fever of “it’s not in issue” throws him into the common grave of colonialism, and, as if that were not enough, he resurrects electorally in the body of his enemy: the bureaucrat for whom the homeland is an office, the flag a check, and the anthem the anesthetizing tinkle of thirty pieces of silver.
But let us not say that the average “independentist” who still lives in the body of his enemy, the PPD, lives content, that he has become a degenerate incapable of patriotic feeling: no. He goes through hell; he sweats the blanket with moist sufficiency of an infant: he is a man who despairs upon finding his patriotic spirit, pure, proud, animating the body of his enemy, functioning within him, lending him soul, warmth, life.
That is the nature of the tragedy lived by the man of patriotic spirit, within a colonial party, in this case, the PPD; this is his tragedy: that in the unofficial alliance of all the element of Creole collaboration with the subjugating imperialism, it falls to the “independentist,” cornered within the body of his enemy, to lend him the essential agglutinant, to give him the necessary “prestige” for his political life. Without his collaboration, the soft skeleton of all that monstrous body of colonial disorientation — the plebiscitary theory — would collapse. It is the “independentist” within that body, the true responsible for the postponement of independence, the needle with which the malicious entangle the canvas of their treason.
But we cannot ignore, neither his existence, nor his good intention. That “independentist,” within the Popular Democratic Party, we should not treat as an enemy, but as a mistaken person who must be won for national unity. There are those who will break away toward other parties, in healthy search of better environment, but there are those who will remain within the body of the enemy. Let us transform his role, from animator, from prestiging the operative retreat within the plebiscitary theory, into bold paratroop of patriotism landed in the entrails of the monster! Let us win him so that he gives the great battle of forcing, in a convention of his party, that it return to the good path that can save it, patriotically and politically!
The plebiscite puts at the service of the enemies of independence all the repressive power of the government; all the degenerative capacity of interventionist gold: all the propaganda resources, with which it counts and whose power is not within reach of the defenders of independence. The plebiscite is the resurrection on equal footing with independence of all the political ideas that the people in their majority have already rejected. The plebiscite is the resurrection of the crossroads of disorientation. The plebiscite is the malicious revival of all colonial passions in maximum overflow. The plebiscite is the antechamber of civil war. The plebiscite deserves the frank and energetic condemnation of the Puerto Rican people.
The Forging of National Unity
When I reach this point in my notes, the radio announces to me the constitution of a new pro-independence party [PIP]. That fact brings to four the national parties. The whispered possible incorporation of independence to the Liberal Party program, would convert them to five. If the Socialist Party returns to its anchor of salvation, and converts itself again into a genuine class party, and, acting logically within the ideology of the working class scientifically heads that program with the independence of Puerto Rico as its immediate objective, there would be six.
It is chimerical to think that three of the four independence parties that already exist, or five of those that may exist, would dissolve to pour themselves into a single party. But it is correct to think that face to face with the common destiny that unites us all in the homeland, we raise the common denominator of independence for a conjunction of forces capable of putting an end to colonialism.
If that initial illusion is overcome and we unite under the common denominator of independence, we could then think about how to mobilize these strategic forces to launch them tactically to the attack. There are two possible ways to do it. 1.— Participation in elections. 2.— Abstention.
Both tactics have already been tested without happy success. But neither of the two has failed.
Participation in elections has been tested by three political parties of independence, without achieving it: the Unionist Party, the Nationalist and the Liberal. For all three, the electoral test was a success, as parties. The causes of the deterioration of the Unionist and Liberal cannot be found in independence militancy, but in the abandonment of it. The analysis of why the Unionist Party abandoned the flag of independence deserves an entire essay. Here only its foundation can be pointed out: the Yankee invasion, reinforced by the impact that the imperialist intensification produced by the First World War had on Puerto Rico, “denationalized” the Puerto Rican bourgeoisie, concluding by destroying their class party, the Unionist Party. The Liberal Party was a petit-bourgeois, mesocratic party, pierced by the characteristic vacillation of its class: the subconscious dictating to them correctly that their genuine interest is with those below, but their personal desires inclining them to ally with those above: the bourgeoisie already denationalized and allied with imperialism. The Nationalist Party is a genuinely patriotic and genuinely nationalist party, but it found itself without a national bourgeoisie to which to give political direction, and from which to receive the necessary support to win elections and proclaim the Republic. But, contrary to the Unionist and Liberal Parties, it did not betray independence. It sought new forms of struggle. The Assembly of Caguas in 1935 discarded electoral struggle deciding on abstention.
Participation in elections can, however, produce the conquest of independence. For this to happen, it has to be done based on an electoral alliance of all independence parties, with all allied parties committing to gather their elected candidates in Constituent Assembly of the Republic the day after winning the elections. The commitment should also be sustained that any of the elected candidates who wavers before the Constituent automatically remains destituted, and the superior organism of their party empowered to name a substitute.
And this places us face to face with another illusion that is necessary to tear from the national mentality: the illusion that independence is going to be obtained brought on a silver platter; the a thousand times nefarious illusion that imperialism is going to yield without struggle. A brief review of national independence movements throughout history, contradicts that assertion: a lesser or greater degree of violence, always preceded, and will precede among us, the conquest of national sovereignty. The violence, of course, will be sought and produced by the Government of the United States. It remains in the hands of our leadership to confront that problem with wisdom and courage.
But, once that other illusion is discarded, the unknown of the Constituent is cleared. If we manage to reach the moment of the Constituent, then the Constituent has already left violence and danger behind. The only danger that the Constituent has to avoid is that imperialism tries to reopen the case to discussion. The remedy is firmness: request from the United States the recognition of the Republic and also request it from all the nations of the earth. All discussion about sovereignty, is finished.
The conditions for that electoral alliance toward the constituent are in process, and their maturation can be precipitated.
The conditions for that alliance to operate on an abstentionist tactic, do not exist at present, but could be created. In fact, the tendency toward electoral abstention is notable in the last three electoral censuses, and is quite deep among the independence element. But it is, in large part, a defeatist withdrawal. This does not mean, however, that the concrete conditions for a victorious withdrawal exist in the present. Withdrawal by itself would not solve the problem. Only a withdrawal complemented by a solid movement of electoral boycott, civil disobedience and general political strike, could result victorious. The Constituent could then meet based on direct delegations from the organs of national struggle of the people.
And here comes a capital point, decisive, of national unity.
The deformation of our nation by imperialism has produced a division of the Puerto Rican people that can be decomposed thus in round numbers: five percent of very rich rich people, lost to patriotic interests; 20 percent of middle class, half ruined, half bureaucratic; and 75 percent of workers and field workers, poor peasants.
Without the decisive contribution of the working class, no national unity is possible. The unity of the working class is essential to the struggle for independence, and it is essential that this unity be realized under the direction of a revolutionary leadership. Elections or withdrawal: “that factor is the decisive factor.”
Pro-independence national unity is the alliance of workers, peasants, and the middle class, on a socially and economically progressive program.