Albizu Campos places a floral offering before the tomb of one of the heroes of the Grito de Lares.
Albizu Campos together with Lcdo. Obdulio Bauzá, the Reverend Father Martínez Girau and the Mayor, José Auretio Bernal.
In the City Hall.
THE NATIONALIST MEETING HELD IN MAYAGUEZ
DECLARATIONS OF THE HEAD OF THE PARTY, MR. ALBIZU CAMPOS
When Mr. Albizu Campos was announced, the band performed “La Borinqueña” and a long ovation occurred. Such was the anxiety manifested in all to hear the word of the illustrious leader of Nationalism. He analyzed the system by which the ruling regime carries out the demolition of Puerto Rican society with the fomenting of deep divisions; first: The promotion of women’s work in competition with men to lower the cost of labor and bring about the schism of families, making women rivals of men in the economic field and thus unlinking the home. He said that in itself the independence of women was laudable if it were stimulated in good faith, but not if, as in the current circumstances, it is imposed as a means to demoralize a society. He explained how the United States and England are the only countries in which militant feminism exists as a safeguard for the rights of women who are thrown into economic activity. Already in Puerto Rico there are many families where women are the ones who provide for the sustenance of the home, an inversion of roles that is a certain indication of the definitive ruin of a people. Second Division in financial matters, which exists in the United States but which has been deepened here by the misnamed Socialist Party. In the United States a small group or ruling class exploits almost the entire country; there is not there a society or a nation in the correct sense of the word but a large conglomerate that suffers the oppression of the meager oligarchic class which is not concerned with either the fate or much less the common aggrandizement of the mass of the country. In Puerto Rico, on the contrary, there was a homogeneity among all the components and a great social sense interested in reciprocal help for the perpetuity and conservation of the Nation, that is, a deep-rooted and unanimous feeling of Homeland. Consequently, juxtaposing in a class struggle the man who owns nothing against the one who has two pesetas was
imposing a strange element of discord that was superfluous in our midst. Third: The division fomented between the white and African race that is evidenced by comparing the systems used by the invader in Cuba and Puerto Rico respectively at the end of the Spanish-American War. In our country, where there was a majority of whites, they imposed the class of color as leader with the triumph of the Republican Party, whose leader was Dr. Barbosa. In Cuba, where the element of color predominated, they raised a political leadership of individuals of European race in the shadow of power and discharged the liberating army composed mostly of men of color. Fourth: To the above is added the division in the spiritual terrain tending to counteract the indubitable hegemony of Catholicism through the elevation to power of individuals of all Protestant sects, and although Nationalism extends its arms to the proselytes of all creeds, it cannot fail to point out the historical fact and the intention and political significance that the stimulus given to forces contrary to the religious unity of the country embodies in itself.
By way of prologue and epilogue, he elaborated in brilliant considerations on all the political and economic problems of Puerto Rico. He referred, for example, to the exchange of currency, demonstrating how ab initio the property had been devalued by forty percent through the change of the peso for the dollar at a rate of sixty percent when in reality both currencies had equal purchasing power. This collective and rapid depreciation of property, united to the San Ciriaco cyclone, opened the door to the large estates in the hands of foreigners, a plague so voracious that not even Muñoz Rivera’s effort to create a front against the native landowner managed to contain it, because the latter, as soon as he prospered somewhat, was also entangled in the horrible jaws of financial combinations.
He then attacked the large corporations as the cause of the general decline and even the ruin of the treasury; the organization of public health, expressing his opinion that “the increase in diseases in the last three decades is due in large part to the poor quality of the articles offered for consumption, especially canned foods”; public instruction, committed to educating hungry children whom it would be better to physically sustain with the luxurious budget destined to the branch; and finally to the industrialization projects of the country, impossible in a colony without tariff protection.
Mr. Albizu Campos concluded his medullar and eloquent dissertation, exuberant in a multitude of resounding data said with amazing precision and opportunity and difficult to reconstruct, exciting the Mayagüezanos to coldly investigate the capital problems of their Homeland, so that the healthy reaction that would vindicate for the Sultana del Oeste its hallmark of honor and its place of honor that it always occupied in the past at the forefront of our civilizing and liberating struggles, would operate within them. Thunderous applause and displays of general approval externalized the feelings of the public who listened with deep attention for more than two hours to the only political leader who dismembers before the people, turning the tribune into a chair, the most intricate national problems to fundamentally study the roots of our prostration.
LA CONFERENCIA DE ALBIZU CAMPOS EN LA UNIVERSIDAD ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION IN PUERTO RICO. THESIS THAT HE DEVELOPED
The conference of Mr. Albizu Campos, given on Monday, March 30 under the auspices of the “Cultural Society” of the College of Law on the pulsating theme of Public Instruction in Puerto Rico, was an act of great cultural significance and lasting spiritual resonances among the thousands of listeners who heard him at the University or by radio on the island.
The large hall was materially occupied by a very select audience; so great was the public that people had to group in the corridors or be located in the windows of the premises.
After brief words introduced by the student José C. Aponte, President of the “Cultural Society”, the speaker advanced to the proscenium while the audience burst into a clamorous ovation that lasted for several minutes. On the face of the speaker could be seen the emotional effect of those so warm and spontaneous applause.
“I who have faced hostile audiences so many times,” began Mr. Albizu Campos, “can say that this greeting so generous and spontaneous is to move the most seasoned man.
“With instruction, as the young Aponte has said, a people is raised or buried; everything depends on the orientation that is imprinted on the educational system. Education is the direct way the State has to educate its citizens, but in Puerto Rico the State does not exist because it is intervened by the military occupation of the United States.
“Education in the religious state is inspired by the religious principles that inform that country, education in the monarchies is inspired by the monarchical principles, and education in the republics is inspired by the republican principles. The conservation of past values is conditioned by the perspective of posterity. In Puerto Rico education is not inspired by any defined principle nor does it have a determined orientation because the State, which is the determining and guiding factor of the educational system, does not exist.”
The speaker then analyzed education during the Spanish domination. Education at that time was Catholic and monarchical, because such were the religion and the regime in force in Spain, although there were in the country prominent personalities who were of anti-Catholic and republican ideology. That education was inspired by the Greco-Latin sources transmuted by the genius of Spain; therefore we are direct heirs of the only culture that exists in the West. Our revolutionaries aspired to constitute a republican state with a heterodox education, but “in my opinion in this particular they were mistaken because every nationality must be founded on the religious spirit that animates its inhabitants.”
The partisans of republican ideas in Puerto Rico and in Spain to combat the regime and the education in force in the Mother Homeland presented the United States as the model nation where the institutions had reached their legal perfection. That false concept disoriented the opinion of our directors and gave the United States a personality that it did not have, to the extreme that the invasion of its troops was received as a blessing for our nationality. The invasion ignored the State and the personality that Puerto Rico already had in the year 1898.”
The first thing the government of the United States did was to seize the educational system, because “education is the easiest instrument to destroy a people”, and it turned the Commissioner of Instruction, who is a mandatory of the Department of War, into “arbitrator of the cultural destinies of this people”. “The current Commissioner of Instruction has omnimodous powers to make the courses of studies and determine what is to be taught to children. In France instruction is regulated by legislation to that effect.”
“The education in force in Puerto Rico”, said the speaker, “is informed by a materialist criterion, is divorced from the Greco-Latin sources and above all educates our youth for submission to an empire and to abide by what that empire does in our Homeland”.
The speaker harshly attacked bilingual education stating that it caused “a waste of mental energies and a lack of knowledge of their own language and of the invading language. No one can penetrate into the idiomatic secret of a foreign language until they know their vernacular language thoroughly”.
The speaker then entered into a detailed analysis of North American education setting forth the following thesis: in the United States there is an education for the ruling class and another education for the class that is to be dominated.
Education for the ruling class is imparted as is de rigueur in the vernacular language of the nation, is informed by a religious criterion and the strictest moral disciplines are imposed on the student. The teaching of the Greco-Latin sources is rigorous: Latin and Greek begin to be taught from the fifth grade. There is a separation of the sexes in these schools destined to educate the future directors of the nation. “They intensify classical studies because they know that if they disassociate themselves from the original sources of Western culture they run the risk of reverting to barbarism in a few generations”.
Referring to the bisexual school, the speaker pronounced himself refractory to it, stating that its establishment obeyed economic and not pedagogical reasons. He said that although women and men can come to know the superior notions of wisdom and scientific knowledge, they needed a different methodology that was in consonance with the specific mentality of each one. There are subjects that women assimilate more easily and there are other subjects that men assimilate more easily; therefore the separation of the sexes and the differentiation of methods is rigorous. Most of the current texts are written by men for masculine mentalities and it is necessary that the texts for the female sex be written by women who know how to provoke the desired reaction in the female mentality. “In addition, women should be educated in the isolation of their sex, divorced from any unhealthy suggestion that could disturb their mentality”. This pedagogical theory sustained by Mr. Albizu Campos was the most brilliant and original of his learned conference. In this type of education for the class that will govern the national destinies, an intense patriotism is sown in the spirit of the student and the criterion that their people is the superior of the planet is instilled in them. Teaching is transmitted entirely by male professors.
Education for the masses destined for exploitation “is the knick-knack of culture”. The bisexual school is used for economy, teaching is disassociated from the classical Greco-Latin sources to keep the people in ignorance and its purpose is to create micro-specialization or a cheap pseudo-intellectual professionalism insensitive to all those values foreign to their profession.
“This knick-knack education is the one that has been implemented in Puerto Rico. Why haven’t the partisans of submission imported the higher education that exists there on the continent for the ruling classes?
The speaker alluded directly to some statements of the Commissioner of Education, Dr. Padín, before the “Union Church” of this capital. Dr. Padín admits that the educational system does not know where it is going, that in it politics is put before pedagogy and that it is the Congress of the United States that is authorized to determine the orientation to follow. Dr. Padín delegates the orientation of a people in the invading power and in that he is wrong. That initiative is exclusively the patrimony of the Puerto Rican nation which is called to determine what its political and cultural destiny should be. And I want to repeat here to save my historical responsibility that a magisterium, a cloister and a regime that inculcates submission to children is rotten”.
“Some time ago I was talking with a pedagogue from this University and I asked him his opinion on the educational problem of Puerto Rico. He told me that the pedagogues had no formed opinion on this problem and that as for bilingual teaching it would be necessary to experiment for some years more. And I reply: who gives anyone the right to experiment with the spiritual life of a people?
“A people can resist the physical dispossession of its lands because the land is not destroyed and these pass intact to posterity, but a people cannot resist the moral dispossession perpetrated through the school without being reduced to a herd of slaves who deny even their own personality.
“If this educational system continues, we will end up in ignorance, which is the worst madhouse to which a people can be condemned”.
The speaker underlined the absence of civics in the school where on the contrary “the child learns to love a Homeland that is not his and to deny his origins”. “According to the ‘History of Puerto Rico’ that is taught in the schools, civilization began in 1898 when the American troops arrived”.
The speaker then referred to the University and stated that its directors had an immense privilege and it was to make that teaching institution the true University of Puerto Rico, where teaching was carried out in the vernacular language and classical studies were implemented.
He formulated bitter criticisms against the College of Laws in the sense that jurisprudence was taught based on the opinions of the judges of the United States and not based on our codes, which are the crystallization of a long experience and wisdom. “The United States is sixteen centuries behind us in legal matters”, affirmed the speaker, and made an extensive analysis on this topic to prove his thesis with North American authorities.
He also recommended that the professors should be hired by opposition, as the students had recommended in a memorial presented to the new Rector.
He refuted the thesis that education is democratic in Puerto Rico because those on whom the contributory burden of the country falls cannot send their children to school.
The speaker closed his conference addressing the religious institutions of the country, “I accuse the religious institutions of the country of folding their arms before the serious crisis that overwhelms the Homeland and for not establishing schools that neutralize the demolishing work of the current educational system,” he said.
Mr. Albizu Campos received clamorous ovations in the course of his conference. The act ended at about eleven o’clock at night within the greatest enthusiasm.
Manuel Rivera Matos
MANIFESTO THAT THE NATIONAL BOARD OF THE NATIONALIST PARTY ADDRESSES TO THE PEOPLE OF PUERTO RICO TO THE MARGIN OF THE POLITICAL MOMENT
In the face of the national emancipatory movement, there is in the country the governmental group that has been lending all its cooperation to the ruling military regime to undermine the foundations of the Homeland.
That governmental group is divided into enemy factions among themselves who acrimoniously dispute the public positions that the invader puts at their disposal to be instruments of the imperial policy that intends to annihilate the people of Puerto Rico.
The governmental factions are called Unionist, Socialist, Pure and Aliancista. They unite among themselves and then separate to embrace their opponents according to the calculations that their respective directors formulate in their purpose of assault on the budget.
A shameful spectacle that has placed them in the renunciation of all collective right that has been within their reach and their policy has been of deliberate cooperation with all the purposes of Washington to definitively concentrate all the powers in the imperial military mandatory, Mr. Colonel Roosevelt.
The regime, of course, has always been absolute, irresponsible, as is its military nature. However, the comedy of a legislature and municipal bodies electable by the people has been maintained.
There is no legislative power in Puerto Rico. This truth can be verified by any student of the military regulation with which it is intended to govern the country, called Organic Act, imposed on our nationality by the Congress of the United States.
In that regulation it is expressly provided that the imperial legislature will have the power of initiative to create, destroy or reform municipalities. But as the legislative will can only be a reflection of the executive will of the occupying chief, that is, the governor, since by means of his veto no other desire can be made than his, such power, in reality, is conferred on the executive chief.
However, it was necessary to maintain the appearances of military democracy and the governor wanted the process of municipal centralization, carried out systematically by his predecessors by the executive route or by legislative cooperation, to end definitively through the legislature, which would put in his hands the entire municipal administration of the country, thus intending to deliver a coup de grace to the most vital unit of the nationality that is the municipality. That was necessary to finish disintegrating the country. Of course, the greater administrative competence, the salvation of municipal life and for greater irony, the very principles of democracy have not been saved from that invocation, have been invoked for these purposes of absorption and exploitation.
Every imperial power carries out its outrages always invoking the principles of justice. The United States has a reputation for sheltering its most nefarious purposes with the sweet words of equality, fraternity, freedom, democracy, etc.
These North American pretensions remind us of the dairies that poison children and that are called “La Pureza”, “La Garantía del Niño”, “La Esperanza”, etc.
The country that has not wanted to be aware of this harsh reality has just been shaken by the plain declaration of the head of the military occupation, Mr. Colonel Roosevelt. By vetoing the electoral law, he confesses that it is good at its core, but it does not deserve executive sanction because the indications that he made in writing to the gentlemen of the legislature have not been incorporated into its provisions.
Then there is no legislature. If it is a prior requirement to consult the executive will to convert it into law and without a project approved by the legislature it is not to deserve sanction because those imperial indications have not been followed, it is a bloody mockery of an entire country to maintain a capitol, to hold legislative sessions, to occupy the constant public attention with the discussions of the “legislators” and to cynically waste the funds of a people plundered by this regime of absorption.
The gentlemen of the legislature have had a brilliant opportunity to make a patriotic rectification of their conduct of servitude and cooperation with the North American regime. If what Mr. Colonel has declared is true, and that is absolutely true, they should have immediately announced their withdrawal from the “legislature” since they were not willing to perform another act of greater patriotism and greater dignity.
The country has to thank Mr. Colonel chief of the occupying power for this brutal frankness, because submissive spirits require the kick of despotism for their renewal. As the great Toussaint l’Ouverture said: “slaves are freed only under the cruelty of the whip”.
The high question of principle that extracts that veto has not even been touched by any of the factions of the governmental group, not by the Unionists, Socialists, Aliancistas, not even by the Puros, who were the ones who had the greatest interest in the approval of the electoral law.
The president of the Puros has limited himself to making a sad recount of the cooperation that he and his party have offered to the invading regime in its imperial policy in Puerto Rico, and the contempt that they have always deserved for that cooperation from the power that has devastated our country.
The Unionist faction was filled with jubilation with what it estimated as a victory because its rivals in the official positions had stumbled upon an obstacle. The allies, at this moment, of the Puros, Aliancistas and Socialists, have limited themselves to manifesting the displeasure that is felt in their ranks for that executive disposition.
It has not occurred to any of those gentlemen of the legislature to raise the fundamental question of whether or not there is a legislative power in Puerto Rico.
We are not surprised by their conduct. Almost all of them know that there is no such legislative power, but they are voluntary cooperators of the system and maintain the imperial comedy that is to end with the country and with themselves, if the policy of spines dorsales bent or broken by the North American will does not end definitively in the short term.
The jubilation of the Unionist faction ceased with the signing of a bill by “commission” for San Juan, which ends with the electoral right in the capital. Nor was the general municipal law approved to “reform” the administration of the municipalities, that is, to end with all vestige of municipal power, to their liking.
The factions contrary to Unionism have shown their public satisfaction for the approval of these laws.
We knew that these laws would have to be approved in any way to increase the personal direct power of the military chief, Mr. Colonel Roosevelt, which satisfies the administration of Washington and the idiosyncrasy of its mandatory in Puerto Rico.
It is already public knowledge, by own executive declaration, that the budget booty of the capital will be divided “equitably” among the gentlemen of the legislature that constitute the governmental factions Unionist, Socialist, Aliancista and Pure. Mr. Colonel is to do us another good by presenting in the administration of San Juan these factions that seem antagonistic but that in reality constitute the political unity defender of the North American regime.
Prepare the country to contemplate a commission that governs the municipality of San Juan, of Puros, Unionists, Socialists and Aliancistas.
If by the veto to the electoral law and by the explicit declarations of Mr. Colonel Roosevelt it was verified that there is no legislative power, by the approval of the law by commission of San Juan it has been demonstrated that there is no electoral right. That of mobilizing every four years the public opinion, to the entire electorate, and spending a large sum of money in elections, serves only to maintain another farce that suffrage exists in Puerto Rico.
Suffrage exists where there is a regime of freedom that depends on a regime of right, that is, of a regime responsible to the governed and emanating from their will.
But to say that there is suffrage where the vote can serve exclusively to establish the will of the regime or to secure it, is to be victim to a lack of juridical sense and to the ignorance of the prevailing political reality. The Partido Nacionalista will test whether or not suffrage exists in Puerto Rico and will put the regime to the definitive test when it decrees the Constituent Convention of the República upon obtaining the vote of the majorities. The suppression of the municipalities and the abolition of suffrage complement the governmental attack against native economic interests.
It is known to all that the present regime has as its definitive orientation the elimination of the native landowner, industrialist, merchant, and financier to supplant them with invaders. The success of this policy has led the country to the present ruin. There remain, however, some Puerto Rican landowners in the interior of the country in possession of coffee wealth. They had to be eliminated. Wherever there is a Puerto Rican with his own lands there will be a bastion of resistance against the invasion.
The policy against them began as all imperial measures begin, under the guise of helping them. The first help was the implantation of the Banco Federal Agricola. We said to the country when this institution was installed that, under the pretext of providing long-term credit to our farmers, it would keep all the immovable wealth of the interior of the country, as soon as these farmers suffered an economic setback, whether due to a depression in the value of the product of the land or due to one of those cyclones that periodically lash us. As soon as San Felipe appeared, the bank began the routine process of displacement, execution of farm after execution of farm, sales in public auction for cash. But, no Puerto Rican can have funds to attend a sale in public auction. It is the North American interests that can buy for cash. The operation is facilitated for them by means of the banks that monopolize our economies.
There are already North Americans experts in the production of coffee. A possible production of one million quintals per year is calculated. It is known that any quantity can influence the depression of the coffee market in Estados Unidos due to Brazilian overproduction which demoralizes the market despite Brazil’s efforts to fix prices. Our coffee production must therefore go into North American hands. Thus our last landowners will be finished, and the Brazilian market can be attacked. The proletarian army will be reinforced by more than half a million souls. All this, of course, within an economic rehabilitation plan. To attack us it is always necessary to simulate our protection.
The Banco Federal exists only for purposes of penetration. A mortgage bank is needed when there is an agrarian crisis to protect the landowner in his title when bankruptcy threatens him, but, here is a mortgage credit bank that maintains relations with the farmer while he can pay interest and executes the farm as soon as the first difficulty arises. However, the pressure from the bank is not enough. This institution is a governmental agency. The government must lend it all its immediate cooperation. It is necessary to intensify the displacement of the Puerto Ricans. Any nucleus of them with their own lands constitutes a danger to the regime. They can serve as support for the Patria’s vindications. They must be exterminated.
The government had committed itself to alleviating the fiscal burden that weighed on them. A law was approved in that sense. Señor Coronel Roosevelt, of course, denied his approval. How is the military governor going to approve anything that could benefit a Puerto Rican landowner, when his approval would only serve to obstruct the penetration policy that he is obliged to implement?
Señor Coronel smiles when he speaks of economic rehabilitation. He tells the country to think only of that and forget politics. With that guideline he has subtracted public confidence in the same partisan factions that make up the government party. Those who have a few pesetas have been convinced by Señor Coronel that they must divorce themselves from any political movement. Thus he has crushed those groups that dispute the budget and has demolished the economic bodies.
If there had been sincerity in economic rehabilitation, nothing easier to realize. It would suffice that the government of military occupation not allow bank usury in Puerto Rico and that it force the establishment of the same credit conditions that exist in Nueva York. There the discount rate is two and a half percent in the Banco de Reserva Federal, and the banks attached to that federal system put money at the disposal of their clients at four or four and a half percent at most. But the current interest rate in the banks of Puerto Rico is ten percent with personal guarantees of absolute solvency; and when it comes to a mortgage loan the rate rises to twelve percent, and in general it is higher than twelve percent due to the onerous conditions that are imposed on mortgage debtors, indirectly so as not to invalidate the obligation.
Furthermore, the savings of our people deposited in the banks go to the disposition of a foreign power. They are in the power of the National City Bank, of the Royal Bank and of the Banco Nova Escotia, which repair at interests enemies of the country. The military government, as at all times, lends its most decisive cooperation to that banking plan and deposits the bulk of public funds in those banks. Of the first administrative acts of Señor Coronel Roosevelt we can cite the deposit he made of the funds of the people of Puerto Rico in the National City Bank. Two thirds of those funds went to the disposal of this octopus. To speak of the industrialization of a country in those circumstances is to coldly mock its ingenuity. The industrialization of a country depends exclusively on money at an interest rate that does not exceed five percent. The preferred shares of an industrial company do not accrue