The President of the Liberal Party, Mr. Barceló, has just departed for the United States of North America to undergo a surgical procedure. He is accompanied by the sincere wishes for his health formulated by all his countrymen. No Puerto Rican has the right to become ill or to die. The nation is eternal and must always watch over the health and strength of its children as its supreme good.
It is regrettable that the natural leader of liberalism goes to seek health in enemy territory, where no prominent Puerto Rican found it. We harbor the hope that in this case the fateful chain will be broken.
This trip by Don Antonio is of particular public interest due to his political statements that, “to save his historical responsibility,” he gave to the press on the threshold of a Yankee operating room, defining himself as in favor of the independence of his homeland, free from “foreign interventions.” If the patriotic yearning, in the great national fraternity that we form, above all disparity of opinion, is the vigorous and happy life of all our brothers, it is imperative to recognize that, when it comes to whoever raises a voice of patriot, hope must be accompanied by a prayer.
The Nation awaits the return of Don Antonio so that he may make the effort to extract his party from the colonial politics in which it has been submerged, making an apology for the tyranny of the Yankee president, Mr. Roosevelt, and fostering the politics of mendicancy that the North American empire intends to generalize in Puerto Rico, to demoralize the entire Nation.
To those significant words of Don Antonio, the president of the Republican Union, Mr. Martínez Nadal, replies with some statements that must be rejected as an offense to national dignity and to the greatness of the Ibero-American nationalities.
Mr. Martínez Nadal reaffirms his annexationist criterion, and we must remind him that the men who have dared to defend the annexation of their homeland to the enemies who have held their sovereignty, have done so protected by the cannons of the foreign tyrant, but they have never dared to apologize for their own acts. Annexation, which is the annulment of the personality of a nation, is not defensible on any ground. The annulment of the individual personality is never justified because human dignity is dynamited, without which no good on earth can be rationally postulated. A fortiori, when it comes to the personality of a nation, there will be those who want to traffic with it, but, if he has some mental solvency, he will refrain from giving explanations so as not to commit a blunder that condemns his own decorum.
Annexation and independence are antithetical. Annexation may be a business for certain people, but as a business in the end, no one justifies it nor sacrifices for it.
Independence requires, as every supreme good, the sacrifice of all that is most wise, noble, and pure in nationality.
Mr. Martínez Nadal affirms “that independence would ruin us economically, in addition to destroying our collective and individual freedom.” These statements imply that we currently enjoy economic well-being and collective and individual freedom.
We did not think such a conclusion possible in the most backward mind in Puerto Rico. We are kneading with tears of blood the mass banishment in our own homeland, due to the brutal hoarding of our lands and all our wealth that the Yankees have made, protected by their tyrannical military intervention. Death, misery, and the most fearsome diseases, such as tuberculosis, stand guard, lurking at the entrance of each Puerto Rican home.
Economic independence is not acquired if there are no markets. The enemy has closed theirs to us. The other powers have done the same by considering our merchandise as of Yankee origin.
The reconquest of that national good is political independence, by virtue of which Puerto Rico will be able to contract from power to
power and thus offer its own market and obtain entry for its products abroad.
The property currently in Puerto Rican hands is worthless, because what it produces has no market in the same neighborhood where it is located, due to the prevailing Yankee commercial monopoly, which allows North American commerce to throw upon us the surplus merchandise, no matter the quality, at the price it wishes to impose.
The foreign tyranny costs the country annually, in contributions alone, sixty-two million dollars.
Hence that dreadful picture of beggars. The so-called Rehabilitator is the elevation of mendicancy to the level of the only government policy.
Where is the collective freedom? Mr. Martínez Nadal, president of a coalition that won by a majority in the country in the last elections, and that dominates the municipalities and the island chambers. What has he been able to do to comply with his electorate? Nothing.
The legislature is a myth; the absolute veto of the tyrant, the president of the United States, weighs on it. Do not forget Martínez Nadal the fate of the coalition electoral law.
Neither the Congress nor the President of the United States pays attention to those government parties. They subject their directors to the will of subordinate executives. There are those shameful delegations, liberals and coalitionists, begging Mr. Gruening, the head of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, for an audience and consideration. We do not know how Martínez Nadal can feel satisfied in the face of such shameful foreign tyranny. Apparently, in Guaynabo, all mental faculties are recovered, except political judgment.
In the face of such foreign despotism, all the government parties dissolve, because they are useless. It is simply impossible that they can fulfill the most modest part of their program. That is why the Unionist Party dissolved, then the Alliance, and the Coalition is following the same fate, and will disappear like those that intend to replace it under the same regime.
Individual freedom in the United States? Upon reading the statements of Martínez Nadal, Mr. Gruening, the head of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, of the government
Yankee. Gruening who knows that individual freedom does not exist in his homeland, where the noblest men have had to found a League of Civil Liberties, to advocate for constitutional reforms that make the Yankee a free citizen in his own homeland. Where 23 men control seventy-five percent of the North American wealth and the rest have to submit as slaves to their will. As for the worker, it suffices to remember that the constitution does not allow the approval of a minimum wage law or that fixes the hours of work. The worker is a beast; either he submits, or they murder him with machine guns and bombs, as has just happened in the textile strike. The Yankee government itself confesses that it was necessary to kill more than five hundred defenseless workers.
Individual freedom in the United States? More than twelve million blacks, born in that country, will be able to answer Mr. Martínez Nadal to such a nonsense. Blacks have no vote, nor is their property or their life respected. There are the delights of lynching, supported by the criminal indifference of the North American government.
Marriages between people of different races are null and constitute a public crime. That savagery is a Yankee institution.
Individual freedom in the United States? Ask Lindbergh, who had to think about seeking asylum in France, where it would not occur to anyone to kill his newborn children. Investigate the result of the two thousand kidnappings that took place in the same year that Lindbergh’s firstborn was murdered. That is the annual average of kidnappings in Yankeeland. They steal the rich’s daughters to get money from them; and the poor’s daughters are stolen when they are pretty, to force them into prostitution.
Individual freedom in the United States? Where for every ten murders, nine go unpunished. Where there are entire regions where teaching the theory of evolution constitutes a public crime. Come on, friend, let’s be more responsible for what we say. You cannot aspire to lead a people and be ignorant of the causes of the evils that plague them.
It is imperative that the political leadership study the North American constitution, its application, and Yankee institutions. Then we will be able to free ourselves from the cloud of ignorance that has pretended to govern this country.
It is not necessary to answer Mr. Martínez Nadal what he says about the glorious nations of our stock. Apparently, nothing of their history or their institutions he knows.
Annexation is political irresponsibility. The annexationists have no responsibility to save; history simply condemns them to disappear as a just recompense for their attack against the national personality.
PEDRO ALBIZU CAMPOS