Video of original speech
We cannot conceive of this date without thinking of the prayer that came with Christopher Columbus, without thinking of the Hail Mary that came with Christopher Columbus, without thinking of the Our Father that came with Christopher Columbus, without thinking of the Rosary. The Rosary that our grandparents bequeathed to us and that our mothers taught us to pray and that our wives and our daughters repeat with us to symbolize the eternity of a race, the eternity of all that is noble in the human spirit, in the supreme yearning to live all the purity and all the perfection of the Almighty.
We open the world on October 12, to the exchange of all the yearnings of the spirit, of love and wisdom and beauty.
Four centuries have been fought in all the misunderstanding of man, between the misunderstanding that every human being carries among himself, between the contradiction with which he is born, that is, between the struggle of evil and good in the individual and the struggle of evil and good in societies and the struggle of evil and good in the concert of nations. Four centuries of blood.
Man does not yet seem to have entered perfectly into the great significance of October 12.
Man still does not know what is meant by the banner that entered the New World and is symbolized in the great coat of arms of Puerto Rico.
It is the banner of St. John the Baptist; it is the banner of St. John the Baptist!
It is the banner of the Meek Lamb, the banner of humility, it is the banner that symbolizes the Nazarene Christ, resting on the wisdom of the Holy Scriptures.
For me, our coat of arms, of all the coats of arms on earth, symbolizes October 12. And it has in it all the lesson, all the inspiration we derive both from the past and the inspiration we need to survive the whole of the future.
He is St. John the Baptist, the forerunner of the Christ. And his banner is the banner that comes to us as a nationality. It is the banner with which we stand on the planet as the planet reaches its unity. And it is the banner in which when humanity enters toward the moon, it is the banner that is hoisted and that rises above our skies.
Here is still the painful picture of the struggle of evil and good. Many nations are still in that terrible struggle in Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America.
The whole of humanity is still shaken by the struggle of evil and good. Evil and good have no borders!
And we, on this day of Nazarene justice, have to say that evil has no borders, that it is neither of race nor of nationality, but that evil is rooted in human nature and that it must be uprooted wherever it appears, because in us the being is fractured at the weakest point.
The body is sick if the little finger is sick. The body cannot be powerful if the foot is failing.
And there can be no good on earth as long as there is a wicked people on the face of it.
And we have to stand up with that banner of the salvation of the world, in the face of all the evil that comes to us from within and from without. The evil that comes from within and the evil that comes from without. We have to close ranks to stop and drown in the deep seas that serve as protection to the holy land that Providence gave us to stop the advance of every horde of barbarism that wants to land on our shores.
This is a sacred day of invocation of eternal values for humanity. And we must here, on this holy day, remember that this discovery was not for any selfish purpose, but for the great uprising of all mankind.
And the one who decreed the Day of the Race, Don HipĂłlito Yrigoyen, said this about Argentina. He said that Argentina was for all the men of the earth. Others said America for the Americans. No, he said Argentina, America, Argentina for all the men of the earth.
We have a rich and big and beautiful territory. We have a treasure that God bequeathed to us and we can share its greatness and beauty with all the beings of the earth. We have to stop in our bosom all bastard selfishness. We have to stop in our bosom that desire to speculate with the foreigner who comes to our shores. We have to stop in our bosom an evil that is growing.
And it is that evil that today is called tourism. The evil of tourism, which they want to present it as a great industry. The evil of bringing - making of our homeland the mouth of all the vices and all the vileness, of all the men and women who were not born in Puerto Rico. And to make of Puerto Ricans a group of beggars holding out their hand for a vicious foreigner to throw a peso into the hand of the wretch.
No, in good time let us invite to our homeland all healthy humanity, all the wise men, all the artists, all the thinkers, all those who believe in the world, all the humble who want to work for the good of our homeland and for the fact that they are strangers, give them free hospitality, our generous and noble hospitality. Do not set high prices for them. I beg you not to smoke in front of me, it does me terrible harm. Offer them, if the prices are high, make special prices for those who come here in good faith.
Lower prices, reasonable prices. Let us not look like a bunch of swindlers.
The swindlers have not written history, nothing but a history of vileness. Let us leave the swindlers to the Yankees, to the foreign despots, to the pirates who want to corrupt our nationality. Let all the humble, noble and holy of the world come here to enjoy our hospitality freely, without cost, in the spirit of Christianity that has formed our nationality. But let us stop and drown in the sea all the vices that come to us from outside.
All that selfishness, all that instinct of robbery, all that instinct of dishonor, all that lack of modesty and shame that comes from the northern United States. Let us rise above all our own vices. We are neither immortal nor divine. And we have that here in Ponce, here where the enemy sowed all his corruption, I can say it with authority because I was raised here. And I do not deny the truth that here we have to fight for the purification.
There are thousands and thousands here this afternoon, perhaps the largest crowd that has gathered for many years in Ponce, to whom I have the honor to address this afternoon. And with what is present, not only the emancipation of Puerto Rico can be achieved, but the emancipation of the planet, if we have here the spirit of courage and sacrifice. We have here, my dear brothers, to go to the restitution of the values that brought us into existence as great peoples and make us the standard bearers of all humanity.
It was not in vain that Sebastian Elcano sailed around the world. He was the first to sail the world. It was not in vain that all those feats that followed Christopher Columbus, the opening of the Atlantic, the opening of the Pacific, the opening of Oceania, the opening of the poles. When men and women were astonished waiting for the letters, the travel chronicles that those voyages seemed fantastic, I believe they were fantastic, of the greatness, of the epics, of those men and women who did not respect any of the limitations of the sea, nor any of the limitations that man had believed that made him a prisoner on the land.
And that spirit must be rebuilt, purified, purified and sanctified so that we can once again become the standard bearers to lead the whole of humanity, which today needs our banner, the spirit of nobility, chivalry, integrity, honesty, nobility and humanity that characterizes us.
It is written in all contemporary thinkers that humanity is sick. And those who feel the strongest are those who feel the sickest.
The Yankees, with all their gold, the Yankees, with their atomic bomb, feel themselves trembling. They feel themselves trembling.
They don’t know that the whole floor is trembling at their feet. They feel an abyss. They feel slow in space. They feel that the atomic bomb is the symbol of their disappearance. Why?
Because they have been gradually wanting to be clever, wanting to play the double game, to speak in words of human greatness and to execute in deeds the vileness conceivable by all men. They have run out of words, because their vileness in fact has destroyed all their books and has destroyed for them the very meaning of the Bible, the very meaning of the Holy Scriptures, that the Bible in their hands is a block of cement falling on the earth to destroy it.
They feel themselves trembling, as we would feel ourselves trembling and as we should feel ourselves trembling when we have a power in our hand. Everyone who has a power in his hand must invoke a supreme secret humility. Pride is the downfall of men, of the individual, of a society, of a nation and of the whole of humanity. We must invoke that secret humility and ask the Almighty to make us worthy of the mission He has placed us on earth, that we will serve to the letter of courage and sacrifice.
I have said several times that the fall of an individual, that he is going to fall is the moment when he collapses, when he rests only on his material wealth or his physical power. It is not physical power or material wealth that sustains us on earth. It is that Nazarene humility, that Nazarene humility, that Nazarene humility that gives us the privilege of receiving the grace of the spirit, of feeling, even with the mind, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon us.
The collapse of empires. There is Germany, there is Japan, there is Japan. The collapse of empires is when their directors, believing that their cannons, believing that their atomic bombs, believing that their material force, that their gold is the power on earth. No.
Gold, gold was always in the earth, gold never left the earth, gold has always stayed. All the wealth of the oil, the uranium, the radium, all that is in the earth and will remain in the earth, and there will be no man to take it elsewhere, because the earth is the earth’s, because even its bones will return to the earth. Let the property come to us, let the property come to us, what for?
For as long as we have a way, a method of enjoying earthly goods. But that is not a personal matter.
Private property can only be conceived as a means of distribution of collective property. That the goods of the earth belong to the humble, that the goods of the earth belong to all the beings of the world and that all the beings of the world are our brothers in the flesh and in the spirit. A new society in the world cannot be conceived without this spirit, without this detachment and without this liberation from the doctrine of force.
If we believe only in brute force, we could not rise up against brute force. If Albizu Campos believed in brute force, he would not raise a flag against the despotism of the United States.
There are many brutes on the planet. There are the large serpents, there are the quadrupeds, there are the birds of prey, they are all brutes. There are those who think they are men, they are beasts. No, there is something greater in man and it is the strength of his spirit. And it is the reflection of the divinity in him, with the understanding of the universe in which God has placed him. We want to raise a nationality of our own.
We have to inspire it on those classical principles. When the spirit is liberated, the body is liberated. So we will be then, we have to be first and great in the spirit so that the body will be noble, beautiful and holy. But not the other way around. There can be neither beauty, nor holiness, nor greatness in a body of a brute.
The European peoples have given the terrible lesson to the world, and it has not respected the 12th of October. The Europeans, who had the privilege to see organized in their bosom all Christianity, to have after Christ a St. Francis of Assisi, to have among them as, one could say, as a great mystic said, the resurrection again in St. Francis of Assisi. It has not respected Christianity.
And they took up the cross, what for? What did they take up the cross for? To have a dagger to plunge into the hearts of the oppressed peoples of the earth.
The peoples of Europe are going through the greatest crisis in their history. Generation after generation of Europe set about educating their children in despotism over unarmed peoples, over defenseless peoples. They set about educating their wise men, their most illustrious scholars, their jurists, their artists and even their clergymen and even their clergy. So that they can impose, what? the Gospel? No! piracy, robbery, murder.
To make of the cross a sword or to make of the cross a rapier to strike at the heart of the defenseless women and children of Africa, America and Asia. And now today they are reaping the fruit of their four centuries of history. Today the Europeans have lost their brains. All their cynicism, all their cunning, all the sharpness of all their thinkers is falling on Europe today like a shattering thunderbolt. And we are at the crossroads of the liquidation of European barbarism.
The descendants of Europe who have imitated its vices, the spirit of piracy, the spirit of deceit, the spirit of selfishness, of those who have fallen into the madness of the worship of gold, in Our America were the Yankees. I do not mean to say that we are immune to this disease. We have to be very aware of our own limitations.
There is slavery in Puerto Rico, because here are the crazy people who want to lie down on a pillow of bills, and who think about that pillow, and that pillow, and that pillow. And in filling the pillow with more bills and more bills. And that is a disease like rheumatism. To lie down on the mattress of money, they have no time even for a caress for their wife, nor for their children. The children bother him, the wife bothers him, everything bothers him. There comes a time when his stomach bothers him.
He can’t even digest and that pile of gold serves only as a lapidary. It is a tombstone that falls on his grave and nobody allows it to be made of gold. It is made of stone. Not even in the grave can he take his gold. We are not immune. Here we have those madmen, we have those idiots, those imbeciles of the golden calf cult. Slaves, they touch his tail, they kiss his snout, and so on.
But the Yankees are the American people. It is the American people where the cult of European gold has reached its apogee. And an Israelite sage, a Jewish sage, used to say to me: Look, Don Pedro, if I believed in reincarnation, he would say, the tribes of Judah were twelve. And history tells of eleven, but one is missing. And I believe that she was reincarnated in the United States. That is why our people, we ponceños, when we were children, could talk about the war of independence of the United States.
With what emotion they taught us the greatness of their liberators! With what emotion they taught us the greatness of their emancipators! But we saw that Ponce was disappearing.
Misery, misery, misery, misery, misery!
And all that preached greatness did not translate into any good, neither material nor spiritual for us.
To hear a good Yankee preach is moving, as to hear any good being preach is moving. It does not matter your nationality. But the sleaze, the Yankee’s sleaziness, the malice to come here preaching to see what’s in the underground. It’s like a gongoli who walks down always to see what’s underneath. Like a congre who goes into the sea to see what is at the bottom of the sea. And when he comes out, he opens his mouth smiling with the Bible in his hand.
Those people, those people wiped out the Indian race with blood and fire. At this moment in which I speak, on this October 12 in which I speak, the Indian race in the United States lives in concentration camps, without rights of any kind, under a precarious despotism of the Congress of the United States.
The only time the Yankee flag exists for the American Indian is when there is a war in the United States.
For the Indian, in the United States, at this time, lives in concentration camps. It was said that Hitler invented concentration camps. No.
The invention of concentration camps, an institution of the United States, has been established for many years. Now, when the United States has a war, the Indian mother has to give her son to the Yankee to go and kill him in Germany, Africa or Japan. That’s what Indians are always good for.
A very similar situation to the Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans should not be born, Puerto Ricans should not exist. There are too many Puerto Ricans in the world. Yes, but when they put the pin on the Yankees: “Aha, we need Puerto Ricans, throw the backpack on them so they can go kill themselves for their mistakes”.
They wiped out the indigenous blood. I am always asked by the wise in good faith that in the United States, why in the north of the United States, in Canada, in the French part of Canada, there is a great nation in which there is Indian blood and European blood, in that has been suppressed that of Indian blood and European blood, or American blood, or European blood, or Indian blood, or black blood and white blood, because there is only one blood, the human and divine blood of man? Why?
Why is it that south of the Rio Grande the same phenomenon occurs? Why is it that Mexico, out of a population of 22 million inhabitants, at least 20 million are descendants of our elders, the Indians who populated the Americas? Ah, it is because the whole spirit of Europe arrived in the United States in the fullness of its barbarism.
The contemporary age, my friends, is not the age of the atomic bomb, no. The contemporary age is the age of the scientific barbarian. We conceived barbarism as a state of ignorance of the human mind. It was always a mistake.
Barbarism is not a state of ignorance of mind. Barbarism is a state of vileness of the spirit of man. And the Europeans organized their vileness, their piracy, their robbery, their collective murder of all mankind.
And the Yankees, their successors, and the Australians, their successors, and the South Africans, their successors, are the ones who want to impose that spirit on the world today.
And the great spokesman of Anglo-Saxon barbarism…. You have read lately the English press, in the press here in Puerto Rico, which reflects only the movements of the thought of the despots who govern us. Lately that English spokesman has said that the only thing that saves the Yankees and saves the English at this moment we are talking about is the atomic bomb. That if they did not have the atomic bomb in their hands, they would have to commit suicide.
Today, that is what the great spokesman of the Anglo-American world says. Albizu Campos does not say it.
And the fact is that the English and their community of British nations and the Yankees, their brothers, have reached the moral bankruptcy of their spirit, and the only thing they have left is the fear of the eternal sanction that is advancing upon them, that is advancing upon their consciences, that they are the ones who feel weak. They feel weak, not because there is a great Muscovite power on earth, no! It is because they carry in their hearts the black cloud of their rapine, the black fire that will bring hatred, rancor, destruction and death to every people whom they want to exploit.
[They put] the Hispanic peoples, the Latin peoples of the world, in a dilemma, but most especially the Catholic nations of the earth, to choose between the Russians and the Yankees. Of course, Puerto Ricans will only find it very ridiculous. There will be a Puerto Rican out there, that poor little guy, because he has a head of cement or blood of molasses or nerves of rum or a brain of sugar, who is thinking that way. Honestly, I don’t think so, because despite being made of molasses, rum and sugar, he has children, he has his children and he loves his children. And even if they give him the millions of the world, none of them would painlessly give the blood of their loves to Yankee despotism to be sacrificed in Germany or Russia.
We are direct heirs of the only civilization the world has ever known. We are direct heirs of an apostolate that is synthesized in the heraldry of our great shield, of an apostolate that humanity has to grasp and fold itself to it in order to rise above its own shadow and erect itself in the great apostles and the great apostles of the new human emancipation.
And may October 12 be a new discovery, that is, the discovery, the birth of all greatness and nobility of all men and women of the earth. Today, the work of Bolivar, the work of all our apostles, the work of silence, of prayer. The work of silence and prayer of all our anonymous mothers. The work of silence and prayer of all the humble. I have said that greatness will always be the realization of anonymity, of the unknown. The history of the world is written by those who have not been known. The great ones are known when they go out like a comet in space, shining the same day in full sun.
That is why we must cling in love and veneration to the barefoot, to the defenseless child, to the physical woman. She is our mother and we must adore her and defend her against all the despotisms of the earth. We must feel her in our hearts. We have to banish from our environment that barbaric picture of a physical woman.
Still in her physical helpless state, clinging to her children to give the breath of her spirit. And for a community to go through it, as I have seen in San Juan, situational indifference. That the press has to clamor for someone to pick up that child or those children.
Oh, I come from the time when it was not allowed then to have an orphan without a father and without a mother. I come from the time when every boy and every girl born in this city and in Puerto Rico had as many fathers and as many loving mothers as there were adult women and men in the country. And when an orphan entered a home it was seen as a blessing that he or she entered a home, because it was said that the orphan carries in him or her the grace of the Holy Spirit, because the orphan provokes the grace of the Holy Spirit. Let us invite the orphan into our homes. Let us put him in the lap of the same bed of the cohabitation for our salvation, not the orphan’s, because with the orphan, holiness enters the home.
The Yankees preach a lot, but everything is based on a calculation. The sacred scriptures have found in them the rarest interpreters. Interpreters to make the sermon of the mount, the sermon of the mount, the golden calf. Today the wave of the vileness of the spirit has returned, it has returned hard. It comes to them from the Australians, it comes to them from the South Africans, it comes to them from Yanquiland.
And the Europeans find this great crossroads in their history and they do not want to remember the Christ, they do not want to remember a Francis of Assisi, they do not want to remember their crimes. They want to continue deceiving humanity.
And I have been consulted by many eminent Catholics about what is my humble opinion of the historical moment. And I tell them: the historical moment, the historical moment is the moment of our own conscience.
If we are the executioners of our brothers, if we see in a Puerto Rican or in any human being only a beast to exploit him, to deceive him, to steal from him, to vilify him, to kick him, to raise over us a sickle and that sickle will not be curved, it will be the long and narrow sickle of death, because we have committed the suicide of our own spirit.
Do you want salvation? Salvation is in being just with our own flesh. Charity begins at home, because we will not save anyone if we have not saved ourselves either. We must begin by saving ourselves against our own vileness.
Evil does not come from outside, evil comes from within. And if we do not tear out from our hearts all those limitations, no cannon is going to save us, no atomic bomb is going to save us. We are going to disappear like those cannons and with the atomic bomb.
What that will do is to increase the terror of our own spirit, to make us more cowering and more clinging to the prey of our greed and our selfishness.
Do we want to survive in the world? Be just.
Do we want to be the apostles of humanity? The Sermon on the Mount, all is written and all is lived.
We have the inspiration of the most beautiful women on earth. We have the inspiration of the spirits, of the most perfect manes of the world. We have the inspiration of all the saints. And we have to rise up with that inspiration.
There has to be the devotion of our homes. We have to rebuild our society here.
Here the Yankee is disseminating and preaching the elimination of our nationality, saying why do you live in Puerto Rico, why are you here? The Yankee has the insolence to ask every Puerto Rican: Why were you born? And he has his politicians here who tell us: And why were you born here? And one asks the politician: And why the hell are you here? Who sent you here?
I knew that-I wish I knew who your parents were. I don’t know them.
And they tell us that home does not exist, that marriage does not exist, that there is nothing holy, that everything is a matter of yams and yautĂas.
And we see that the oaths, the oaths that a man or a woman takes, are already invalid beforehand.
And the sacramental idea is in a vacuum and must be restored. The sacramental idea must be restored.
If we cannot restore the sacrament in its fullness in us, restore the idea of the sacrament in us. That when we give the pledged word, it may be made of glory for all.
And that we must love a woman when she is invalid. To love those who are healthy, strong and beautiful, who are coveted by all aspirants to beauty, is no great virtue.
To love a woman who is helpless, sick, to love one who can give nothing of her body, if not all of it flows from her spirit.
And when there is that love of the spirit is that we are really great. To love a healthy, beautiful man, an apollo, wise, talented and powerful, is good.
But it is greater to love him when he is inert, already relaxed in a bed. And this vow has to be lived in supreme adversity.
It is the moment of the test. And that wave of divorces in Puerto Rico is the wave of the lack of word, of the lack of devotion, of the lack of the spirit of mutual sacrifice, of the lack of the sacramental idea in life, of the lack of the greatness and glory of human beings on earth, of the vision that we have not come here only to spend a moment of boredom or pleasure, but to travel the universe triumphant in eternal glory.
They want to talk to you about democracy.
If we did not know Puerto Rican politicians well, we would be fooled. But unfortunately, much of humanity does not want to - does not know what the word democracy means on the lips of the Puerto Rican politicians or the Yankee despots who send them to talk about democracy.
They want to talk to us about civil liberties, they want to talk to us about political rights, but no, while they are talking about those rights for Holland, for Great Britain and for the United States, the Africans vilified, kicked, massacred, the Asians vilified, kicked, massacred. With what right?
I say to my countrymen and to all Hispanic Americans that the time has come for us to take up the banner of the world, and it is the same banner. It is the banner of justice, it is the banner of nobility, it is the banner of not classifying men as beasts because of their color or the length of their hair, the wave of their hair.
No.
It is the banner that says that man is his supreme dignity and must be respected on whatever plane he finds himself. And that humanity breaks at the weakest point and that humanity will never rise to the height of its glory if there is only one slave people in the world.
The Spanish will never remember Puerto Rico. True, we have gone through the shame of seeing Puerto Ricans born here, who have gone to a Yankee court to swear that because they were Yankee citizens they would kill the nationalists.
It is true that we have gone through the shame of seeing Spaniards born in Spain who have gone to a Yankee court to swear, to swear, to deny their Spanish lineage.
It is true that we have seen here, at the so-called University of Rio Piedras, professors, so-called Hispanic-American professors, denying their nationality, their lineage and their culture, and sanctioning the mistreatment and kicking of the noble and great student body.
It is true that in that same center we have seen Spaniards, people born in Spain, who have drunk the pristine sources of our culture and who for a miserable salary, in spite of being banished from their homeland, come here to act as slavers, as foremen, to direct and muzzle the noble and great youth of Puerto Rico.
We have seen all vileness in our blood.
Pus is not blood. Pus is not blood. Excreta is not the spirit of man.
They are elements, exudations of the biological process of the body, but it is not the spirit of man nor his mind. And let no one be confused with that excreta and with that pus, but here we must always remember the spirit.
The spirit of a Christopher Columbus, the spirit of the Pinzon, the spirit of Sebastian Elcano, the spirit of Magellan, the spirit of Blas de Lezo, the spirit of Javier de las Indias, the spirit of all the greats of the history of Bolivar and of all the greats who have done so in the history of the world. We have our lineage.
We have our lineage as a nationality.
We do not have to invoke anyone’s apostolate.
Here we have the incarnated greatness of a Betances. Here we have the incarnated greatness of a Hostos. Here we have the incarnated greatness of an Arizmendi. Here we have the incarnated greatness of a De Diego. Here we have the sublime heroism of an Antongiorgi, of a Rosado, of a Beauchamp.
And great they will be, and great will be the women of the world, but here we have a Mariana Bracetti. Here we have a Candita de Ponce. Here we have women and men who can take up the flag of Puerto Rico under machine gun fire and raise it high as Christ raised it.
That is why, when I hear these wimps who go around talking about how the Colony is going to continue here and that they are the great cocorocos of sugar cane, sugar and rum, it must be a great pity. They are anachronistic, they belong to four centuries of slavery. Freedom will overwhelm them and freedom will imprison them against their will. Everything must be confronted with them. If you do not love it, you have to commit suicide because freedom will kill you.
Ingratitude does not belong to the free, ingratitude does not belong to the courageous. And if there must be hell for a reason, it is because there are ungrateful men and women on earth.
There is the Indian delegation, presided over effectively at that time by Prince Singh, staunch defenders of Puerto Rico’s right to be free. I want us to remember our brothers, those who defend us. There is the delegation from Egypt that stood up to defend our right to be heard. Why should Puerto Rico not be heard?
And the Yankees, the enslavers, the enslaving French, the enslaving English and all their enslaving satellites, no, no, the Commission has no authority to do that. Hear well, the Yankees saying that the oppressed of the world have no authority to be heard even before the International Tribunal of Humanity. From that spectacle, what difference does it make if in Puerto Rico they send an admiral with three gag laws to muzzle every one of the popular people of Puerto Rico? What difference does it make?
The poor little people are scared to death. He who does not have a good conscience must be scared to death. It seems to me that it is no honor for anyone to have to be foreman over his brothers. As a democracy, as a personal title.
But we are going to insist in the whole world with our cause in Puerto Rico. But we have to do something in Puerto Rico.
Why do they tell Albizu Campos, they offer him in Mexico a home, property, position, everything, in Santo Domingo, in Cuba, in all parts of the world so that he can go there? So that he can rest. For me to rest. I am very grateful to my friends in all our Americas for offering hospitality to my children and to [Masaya?], my saintly wife.
I want from this tribune to everyone who hears me, that he who had a look and respect for my wife in exile and for my children in exile, there his camp has sworn that he will never lower his guard in the defense of the freedom of my love. And here is my duty.
I was born here and I am of the flesh of each of you.
I am of the spirit of each of you.
And if I am empatriated and vilified, I would never be at the same time, if I were to expatriate myself voluntarily, fleeing from the henchmen, fleeing from the wimps, fleeing from the atomic bomb, fleeing from the despotism of the United States.
Here, my friends, is a struggle. A struggle.
On the chessboard, it is not just the Yankees and Puerto Ricans. On the chessboard is the entire hemisphere of America.
On the board, the colonial powers, led by the United States in favor of slavery in the world and the non-colonial powers that want the emancipation of man and nationalities.
And here, this is the nerve point of the world at this present time.
And the world is amazed and all delegations are amazed at the attitude of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico.
How is it that these people receive imprisonment, banishment, massacres, torture, destroying their businesses, liquidating their interests by force, prostitution, corruption, bribery, terrorism? Nothing.
Puerto Rico stands erect in the greatness of its lineage, in the cross of San Juan Bautista, in the greatness of a race that wields its banners to make humanity the [?]
But we have to affirm that here.
We have to govern this country here and our government has to impose itself the moment a foreign despot wants to impose himself. If there is a despotism here that wants to raise a flag, we have to lower its flag by force of arms.
We do not have to go to the polls for the enemy to have the insolence to count us one by one and tell us: So many slaves, so many children. No, do not go through that humiliation.
When the enemy raises his finger to point at us, let us point with a bullet at his head for his insolence.
Here, the electoral struggle was invented by the enemy. Why? Because it suited him to enslave us.
The ballot box, the ballot box, the ballot box is the coffin. The ballot box is the coffin. The urn is the coffin in which to bury the nation of Puerto Rico.
And they tell us those ominous words that the dead bury their dead.
That is to say, that Puerto Ricans, on the holiest day of the Church, on the holiest day of our hearts, which is the day of all the dead, the day in which we all kneel to pray with the memory of our parents, of our grandparents, of our elders who are in the glory of the eternal Father. On the Day of the Supreme Recollection of the Fatherland, on that day let us also desecrate it by burying ourselves alive in an electoral struggle that destroys us and takes us to the sepulcher of slavery.
Everything has been profaned here. The city of Ponce has been profaned on Palm Sunday.
It was profaned by the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was profaned by the Government of the United States, representatives of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was desecrated by General Blanton Winship, commanded by the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and they massacred here on March 21, 1937, on Palm Sunday, the holiest Sunday of the Church and the kindest Sunday of the Church. What difference does it make if they also desecrate the day of all the dead? The day of the souls in which we raise our spirits on high and say that the mother and father who gave birth to us have not died because they were noble and holy. And the almighty God has to have them welcomed to his holy eternal glory.
Here must be the direct action that will make us respect the Yankees.
Do you want to solve the problem of slavery, the problem of national emancipation?
Why wait for the enemy to count us as so many beasts of his cattle on his farm and tell us so many black cows, so many tight bulls, so many horses, so many dirty dogs. So many mangy cats. No, do not humiliate yourselves.
This is your homeland. Ponce is yours. This land is yours. These buildings are yours. Everything here is yours. Here the Yankees have no right to anything, absolutely nothing.
And with their presence and with their shadow, it is a challenge to our courage. They are challenging us with their presence. And this insolence must be stopped.
Freedom is a goddess, a glorious goddess, and she demands from us, like every beautiful and holy woman, life itself to be an offering of her greatness.
Here the Constituent Convention of the Republic is going to meet. The Nationalist Party has been organizing this spirit so that the patriotic personality may be affirmed.
It is no secret. And we have no secret for the Yankees. We tell the Yankees that they have a duty and that is to get out of Puerto Rico.
To me, the Yankees have put behind me all their police, their detectives. The poor guys have him out there in the rain, bitten by mosquitoes, constantly raining on him. It’s going to give him up - he’s going to die a cripple there. I feel sorry for him.
But the Yankees are wasting their time with that and so are the wimps in Puerto Rico. Albizu Campos is going to stay in Puerto Rico.
And for us, all the acts of the U.S. government, including their colonial elections, are of no importance. They are of no importance, because the Yankees have no authority in Puerto Rico, nor do the U.S. Minions have any authority in Puerto Rico.
The authority of Puerto Rico is in the exclusive hands of Puerto Ricans who defend the independence of Puerto Rico with the courage and sacrifice that is needed.
I trust that no one in Puerto Rico, on the Day of the Dead, will reach into the dead box of the urn of slavery in their homeland and desecrate the memory of their parents and grandparents.
Stay in your homes and in this moment of silence and rebellion swear to take up arms if necessary to throw from our soil any despot who wants to exercise [Âż?]
I want to tell you: here comes this afternoon, or has come this afternoon, Cardinal Spellman. Cardinal Spellman, who is the highest hierarch of Yankee Catholicism, has arrived here. I cannot overlook the presence of the Yankee flag to the right of the main entrance of the cathedral where we were all baptized and confirmed. The presence of the U.S. flag in our Catholic churches is sacrilegious. Why?
Wait a minute. Why?
Because the flag of the United States represents neither Catholicism nor Christianity, but it represents vileness and piracy and murder.
I tell you here, hear well. Here a university has been erected or wants to be erected with the name of Santa Maria.
Santa Maria, what a sweet name. Sweetest name that our mothers put on our lips. Holy Mary, Hail Mary. Holy Mary.
Hail Mary! Protect us from these pirates!
The Yankees, who are not Catholic, because the Yankee government is not Catholic. It is an anti-Catholic, anti-Christian government.
It has discovered something very important: that it can use the Yankee Catholics to trick us Latin Catholics.
And I want to be fair.
And I say to him here, which is this holy tribune surrounded by the flags of the entire Hispanic world, which is eminently Catholic and which brought Catholicism to the United States.
I tell Cardinal Spellman to meditate well on the scope of his mission in Puerto Rico and not to come here to play the role of the Redemptorists in Puerto Rico, who have done everything less than redeem Puerto Rico, but to dispossess the clergy of Puerto Rico of their parish.
Let him not come here.
I trust that Cardinal Spellman, on this evening, will tell those who have gathered there to a banquet at a hundred dollars a plate. He will tell them that the first thing that must be respected in Puerto Rico is the Hispanic language, the language with which the world was enlightened in its gaze and its greatness.
And that the University of Santa Maria should not, if it does not cease to be a sacrilegious institution, make communiqués or income statements in English, even if English is the language of Cardinal Spellman.
I appeal to the Catholicism of Cardinal Spellman, because it is his duty as a Catholic, apostolic and Roman, to give a lesson here of his apostolate and of the principality he represents in the sacred college that the Catholic conscience of Puerto Rico, the Hispanic conscience of Puerto Rico, the freedom and independence of Puerto Rico be respected!