The representatives of Puerto Rico demanded from the Spanish Monarchy the abolition of slavery, with or without compensation. The Spanish government yielded to that call of our Christian civilization and, to transform the slave into a free man, founded the rural village, in a healthy and fertile place, where his home would enjoy economic and moral independence.
Slavery as a social regime is automatically implanted when the people are deprived of the opportunity to possess in full ownership lands on which to build their home with economic independence, immune, like the patrician’s castle, to all intervention of power.
The Yankee invasion found our nation spread across fertile valleys in villages founded in healthy places, well organized for all public, social, and religious services.
The invader did not want our currency, and forced its exchange for his own with a loss of forty percent for us, offering paper for our gold, which he transferred to his coffers, where it contributes with its value to North American wealth. The paper that was forced upon the nation has today depreciated by nearly fifty percent through the process of rapid decline in North American credit.
The Yankee economy rolls downward, and the government of the United States of North America now struggles for the stabilization of its currency at the depreciated value it currently holds. No one knows, judging by the opinion of the best-known economists of North America, whether stabilization at the current level will be possible, or whether it will be necessary to continue downward until finding a resting point that can sustain the heavy economic burden of that nation.
What has been observed suffices to see how the Yankee intervention has destroyed Puerto Rican liquid capital, placing the nation at the mercy of North American bank usury.
The regime has one virtue, which is that it is openly exploitative; thus we see how the same bank that in New York lends at four percent does so in Puerto Rico at nine. To legitimize this usury, the loan at twelve percent per year is maintained as law.
It is clear that cheap money cannot be obtained for any Puerto Rican enterprise. For industry to exist, it must be based on miserable wages for the worker.
The government of the United States of North America sent a scientific commission to inventory our national wealth and determine what it should reserve for its nationals and what it had to destroy when left in Puerto Rican hands. The demand of the North American market determined the selection. It was limited to the consumption of tobacco and sugar. The intervening power then decided to promote the exclusive production of tobacco and sugar, raised corporations for that purpose, and immediately began the demolition of all other wealth — coffee, food products, fruit trees, forests, etc. — stimulating the spontaneous destruction of agriculture, the century-old national wealth, through its propaganda methods, pushing landowners to plant tobacco in the highlands and sugar in the lowlands, crops that require the total destruction of all other plantings. The Yankee corporation became the only bank of a farmer reduced to complete slavery, because he had been deprived even of the most basic subsistence if credit was denied him.
The refaccionaria corporation also fixed the price of tobacco and sugar, thus ruining its colonists, who became foremen or farmhands on the estates where they had been owners, or career politicians loyal to the same interventionist regime that had ruined them.
To accelerate the process of displacement, the power exempted its interests from taxes and made the native landowner bear the full fiscal burden, and the worker bear the burden of consumption taxes.
It stimulated loans and the public debt to such a point that today the dead fiscal weight on the nation is thirty million dollars annually — the total of insular and municipal expenditures and amortization of the public debt — of which the worker pays twenty million, coin by coin in consumption taxes.
The nation, lacking income to face such a burden, has been liquidating its capital by forced means.
Yankee latifundism has prevailed. Sixty-four thousand landowners, representing no fewer than half a million with their families, have joined the ranks of the proletariat.
Into this contest of workers has entered the woman, by terrible necessity; and with national production systematically reduced to tobacco and sugar, the natural competition for work has been as fierce as the struggle for public posts, driving wages to the lowest in the world.
The refaccionaria corporation gave its colonists incentives to buy the small plots where the economically modest classes lived, lending them money for the maneuver, but the colonist did not see that to acquire the money, he was mortgaging all his goods for a sum it would be impossible to repay, because the enemy regulated the price of tobacco and sugar at his whim.
The native was encouraged to believe he was also a great landowner, only to be beheaded once fattened.
The result has been that more than half of the sugar interests are Yankee-owned outright, or the rest is mortgaged to Yankee banks as well. It is true that some Puerto Ricans go around calling themselves sugar producers, and who for greater irony serve as spokespeople for sugar slavery. Yankees who suffer from stupid arrogance are not confused by appearances, and in the sugar producers’ association they appear in a secondary role.
God grant that independence may be proclaimed before the Puerto Rican agents of the sugar trust lose everything.
The rural villages founded in healthy places on fertile lands have disappeared; the sugar latifundium has swept them away like a fearsome hurricane, driving the population toward urban areas, increasing competition for work and with it unemployment, to the point that we have the highest rate of involuntary unemployment in the world — seventy percent.
With agriculture ruined, we are at the mercy of the Yankee market.
Puerto Rico is a besieged plaza, and its inhabitants are supplied with what its enemies want, at a price and quality of their exclusive convenience.
There is a Department of Agriculture, but it promotes no agriculture.
To justify the cost to the taxpayer of sustaining it to conduct investigations ordered by the sugar interests, it occupies itself preparing the children of those who have no land to cultivate to be good farmhands, in the special schools called Rural Units.
The sugar corporation has closed all the nation’s ports except San Juan and Mayagüez.
MayagĂĽez remains open thanks to the exploitative needle industry.
Ponce, the first port of Puerto Rico before the invasion, is today a heap of ruins.
With the closing of the ports, coastal trade has ended, along with all significant maritime activity.
The nation has neither entrance nor exit.
The sugar corporation ruined commerce. It has warehouses scientifically distributed throughout its colonies. It sells everything. It imports in its own ships. It pays none of the taxes that commerce must bear.
It does not pay in money, so as to oblige the farmhand to buy in its stores. In this way it recovers the money it pays in wages, making a fabulous profit. At the end of the week the farmhand has left, at most, a peseta — the only amount he can spend at a nearby shop. He is immobilized in the batey because he has not the means to make the shortest journey.
The batey is generally an unhealthy place. The agregado must be a perfect slave, docile and obedient to the will of the employer, or he is put on the road, with his wife and children, at any moment. Since the laws do not govern the sugar interests, not even the provisions on the eviction law are respected; the law is violence. The entire government, from the Governor on down, is at the disposal of sugar’s will. The worker has no guarantees of any kind if he lives in the batey. He has almost seven months of winter without any income.
In this industry, the harshest imaginable, the workers earned an average of eighty-five cents a day during the last harvest.
The government signed an agreement with the sugar producers reducing wages. The Central Aguirre itself has confessed this in a leaflet.
The government and the sugar producers are one and the same. The government has made a pact with itself and wants to impose on the workers the conditions that suit the sugar industry. It has mobilized the Police to intimidate the strikers. There are more than two hundred policemen in Guayama. The carts and trains of cane pass guarded by the public force, because the strike is much feared.
The government is a strikebreaker. The strike that was defunct by the will of the officious ex-leaders of the labor movement, today revived, has had immediate success because to encourage the strikebreakers they are paid twenty percent more than what is stipulated in the official agreement.
Nevertheless, the strike is standing in the south and in the east under the direction of the AsociaciĂłn de Trabajadores de Puerto Rico, which is adding to its bosom all the workers of the nation in a saving movement for the proletariat and for the Patria.
What do the strikers ask for? Something very modest. That no one work twelve hours a day anywhere; that it be taken into account that the cost of living has increased, doubling the price of many basic necessities, but the worker, with inexplicable resignation, limits himself to demanding a forty percent increase; that he be paid in money; that the law be obeyed.
When it is said that a worker earns eighty cents, in reality a salary of forty-five cents is fixed when taking into account the decline in the purchasing power of the dollar.
The government wants to impose these enslaving conditions on the workers who represent ninety percent of the population. This is sugar slavery imposed by force. It is up to us to abolish it.
San Juan, January 18, 1934.