For example, the banana lands are in the hands of the Guánica, the Aguirre, the Fajardo, and some small native centrals, and in order to transfer them to the owners of marginal lands suppressed for sugarcane cultivation, it will be necessary to proceed with forced expropriation, and for this, legislation is required which will be a reality if the President of the United States so desires it in his day and in his hour.
The worker, as always, is used as a decoy to gain a favorable opinion.
The only thing that can save the worker from capitalist exploitation is the implementation of a respectable minimum wage and fewer hours of work by virtue of a law, but the United States is a nation so backward in matters of social legislation that a law of that nature is unconstitutional. The only thing that can save the Yankee worker from capitalist exploitation is revolution or an amendment to the current constitution of the United States.
Another idea that is at the mercy of the President of the United States is the source of money for the development of any plan. According to the Costigan-Jones law, the Yankee President can do whatever he wants with the money from the tax on sugar processing.
Nothing is more illusory than submitting to the will of a foreign leader nothing less than the rehabilitation of an entire nation.
The Yankee rehabilitation plan is only a continuation of the system of displacement implemented by their regime upon establishing itself in Puerto Rico. Native colonists will be denied refaction by the centrals and by the banks, and they will die. The life of the native centrals depends exclusively on the credit granted to them by the banks, and these will strictly comply with the orders they receive from the government of Washington in the sense of eliminating them one by one.
Let us remember what Mr. Roosevelt said: “the economic rehabilitation of Puerto Rico depends on the economic rehabilitation of the United States,” according to him that means that the economic rehabilitation of the United States must be attended to first, and when that is achieved, one can imagine by appreciating the following facts: that there are more than ten million unemployed men in the United States; that there are more than forty million indigent people living on public charity; that the deficit of the North American treasury this year alone amounts to the respectable sum of four billion dollars and is increasing; that the public debt amounts to twenty-seven billion dollars and no one knows how it will be paid; that the public power cannot contain the growing social revolution and is resorting to martial law throughout its territory to dominate the labor rebellion that wants to break the chains of misery.
Let us not be fools. If Mr. Roosevelt and the Congress of the United States have not been able to put their house in order; if all representative Yankee men feel that the institutions of their country are faltering, threatened today with ruin by a conflagration that is believed inevitable, how is it possible to expect anything good from such sources and how are they going to take care of our problems?
Puerto Rico will solve its problems with its own political independence by virtue of which our country will have dominion over its customs, and thus will be able to promote its own industry and acquire markets abroad for its products in fair reciprocity.
Currently, by virtue of the present regime, our merchandise is treated as Yankee products and not admissible in foreign markets, except under strong restrictions imposed in retaliation for the high tariffs prevailing in North America.
To worsen the situation, the Yankee rehabilitation plan imposed on Puerto Rico deprives us of the American market; and our products that the Yankees need, they pay for at the price they please, and in view of their commercial monopoly of our market, they sell to us at the price that seems to them.
We believe that the hour has arrived for all Puerto Rican interests to unite in a single bundle to the nationalism of Puerto Rico so that they can save their own existence, even if they have no patriotism.