United. The Convention showed itself unanimous. It repudiated the ultimatum of the Yankee State Department. The negotiations came. The omnipotent Yankee invader had to yield in some of its vital pretensions. Such is the force of law before the aggressor himself. The United States assented that Cuba could freely make treaties with all powers. Without that power, independence does not exist. They were inexorable, however, in their pretensions over the Isla de Pinos and in their pretensions to the privilege of intervention. They consented to snatch from Cuba only one naval base: that of Guantánamo. The North Americans believed that with what was snatched from Cuba they could assure the future annexation of the Republic to the United States. Immediately, and with their spirit of a dog of prey, they began to labor to destroy the Independence that they had just recognized. Let us see the process. III The Platt Amendment laid the bases for North American hegemony, political, economic, and military in Cuba. It also assures to the United States free transit to the Gulf of Méjico over whose waters ends the vast basin of the Misisipi, the richest region of North América. And on the contrary, its hegemony in Cuba constitutes a danger for Méjico whose Atlantic commerce must necessarily pass between Yucatán and the Cuban province of Pinar del Río or between la Habana and Cayo Hueso. With its naval base in Guantánamo they dominate all international commerce via the strait between Cuba and Haití toward Central and South América. That those have been the intentions of the United States is proven by the repeated declarations of North American treatise writers about the privilege of intervention that the permanent treaty concedes to them. They allege that the United States, in its capacity as guarantor of the Independence of Cuba, is the only interpreter of the situations that justify an intervention. The consequence of this pretension would impose upon Cuba a North American intervention each time that Yankee interests are seen threatened by Cuba or by other powers. Cuban patriotism, informed by pure juridical doctrine, has rejected these North American arrogances, pointing out with reason that, if there exists a treaty between Cuba and the United States, its interpretation must be bilateral. The contrary doctrine would establish that such a treaty does not exist, but rather North American imposition in Cuba, consigned in the Platt Amendment. It was not enough for North American egoism to enjoy these enormous advantages snatched by force from its Cuban victims. It was necessary to snatch from the hands of the Cubans all the riches of their Homeland so that this would be North American property. Thus the invaders obstructed by all means the consignment of an article in the Cuban Constitution that would prohibit foreigners from possessing real estate in the Republic. In that respect, Cubans and foreigners remained on a plane of equality before the Constitution, but, given the disparity of economic force between Cuba and the United States, it was to be expected that the invaders would overwhelm the natives. In ‘98, the only interest that Washington had in Cuba was reduced to its strategic pretensions and to the acquisition of Cuban goods. To arrive at those ends, the invaders were disposed to impose upon Cuba annexation, from whose calamity the Great Antilla was saved by its legendary patriotism. It was proven once more that the empire is never exercised for sentimental reasons but to satisfy collective material egoisms of the invading nation or of the privileged class that governs its destinies. Under this enormous North American pressure, the most valuable wealth of Cuba has passed into North American hands. The commercial treaty between Cuba and the United States facilitated the process, which concedes a reduction of twenty percent in the tariff rates of both nations on imports proceeding from one to the other. But, as the dominant capital in Cuba was North American, the tariff bonus benefited almost exclusively the interests of the invader and increased his greed to acquire the lands, maritime fronts, communication routes and to dominate Cuban banking. The Cuban has been impoverished rapidly, without distinction of classes. The number of wealthy families of the great Antilla is being reduced violently due to this demolishing invasion. The great North American sugar mills procure to import cheap day laborers to lower the salary of the Cuban worker. The great Antilla finds itself in a desperate economic situation. The development of the sugar industry in the United States and in the nations under its empire like Filipinas and Puerto Rico that are victims of free cabotage, of almost exclusive benefit for North American capital, has developed Yankee capitalist interests in competition with interests of the same nationality in Cuba. We have just witnessed the great tariff struggle that these opposing interests have waged in Washington during the discussion of the bill lately approved, about the tariff. The reciprocity treaty that concedes a reciprocal bonus of twenty percent in tariff rates is still in place. But the tariff rate on sugar not produced under the empire of its flag has been elevated to two dollars per hundredweight. With this protection that the new tariff offers them, the Yankee capitalists within the North American tariff framework, have dealt a rude blow to the capitalists of their same nationality dedicated to the same industry in Cuba. It will be difficult for Cuban sugar to maintain a position of benefits in the North American market, and according to how Yankee continental production increases, stimulated by this highly elevated tariff, and in the nations under North American military occupation like Filipinas and Puerto Rico, the entrance of this Cuban product will necessarily diminish. The rude clash between sides of Yankee egoism has been necessary, so that Cuba can reconquer the liberty to regulate its own economy in regards to the sugar industry. We cannot say the same about tobacco, always necessary in the North American market for its superior quality, of the citrus fruits and of the produce of the vegetable gardens, in demand during the winter in the United States. Always the invading capital will have incentives to continue in its advance, although somewhat cooled with the tariff policy in agricultural products that Washington has just initiated in recently approving the new tariff. The Yankee farmer demands that Chinese walls be established around the empire as high as those that today protect the North American manufacturing industry. The call is strong to Yankee capital so that it abstains from investing money in countries outside of the tariff framework of the United States. And although between Cuba and the invaders the reciprocity treaty continues with a reciprocal bonus of twenty percent in tariff matters, the Yankee Congress can destroy the effects of this legal advantage consigned in the tariff, elevating the tariff rate to such a high quantity, that reduced from it the twenty percent, the amount to be paid by the products of Cuban origin upon entering a North American port, would be so elevated that the merchandise could not compete with that produced within the Yankee tariff frame. The effects of that agrarian policy will without doubt benefit Cuba because it will obligate the nationalization of the currently existing investments. Thus the wise patriotism of that Republic has understood it. Nobody knows, however, the surprises that in economic matters the United States keeps against Cuba due to the privileges that the Platt Amendment concedes to it. The supposed North American protection of our sister Antilla has brought as a consequence the enormous exploitation that overwhelms the Cuban nationality. “Protected” nation, nation assaulted and exploited by the supposed protector. 133 DEFENSE OF THE PROTECTORATE AGAINST THE AGGRESSION OF THE TYRANT 1 The protectorate is an aggression in full peace against a defenseless nation. The independence of a nationality does not depend on its exclusive relations with the power that subjugates it. It is the result of the international equilibrium. When this favors the oppressor, colonialism continues; when the international equilibrium is against the empire, this is obligated to its reconcentration for its own defense, and the retreat of its forces from the colony, leaves this in liberty of action to organize the sovereign and independent State. In this international equilibrium, in regards to the independence of the nationality, the immovable will of the nation subjected to colonialism, to constitute itself in a free, sovereign, and independent state, cost what it may, lives and estates, is decisive. For that reason, every nationality under exotic empire, has to recur to its organization in all orders, in the very presence of the invader, to give it the effective blow when the international situation presents itself as difficult for the oppressor. In a word, the colony cannot cross its arms, without defining itself under the empire itself and without organizing itself, because it would run the risk of passing to being booty of war, from one colonialism to another colonialism. That apothegm has no exception in the history of the constitution of nationalities. The independence recommends, however, imposed by the will of the subjected nation and by the international forces that cooperated to that work, can remain at the mercy of the will of one or more of its presumed allies faced with the prior empire. Such is the case of Cuba after the Spanish-American war. The desire of the United States to annex Cuba was explicit, but, they feared the Cuban determination to make its independence respected by means of a new war, if it were necessary, against the United States. The Yankees also feared the international complications that would have arisen if they had dared to impose annexation by force, as would have been necessary, faced with manifest Cuban hostility to their absorbing pretensions. It was easier for the invaders to recur to the protectorate. They were able to thus save a great part of their material egoisms without obligating the Cubans to a new uprising and without attracting upon themselves a bellicose attack of interested powers. Cuba understood then the struggle for its liberation from that “protection”. It began by destroying the annexationist sentiment within its borders. It is currently employed in the reconstruction of the moral and racial unity of the nationality. Due to the noxious influence of the United States, the first republican government presided over by Estrada Palma, committed the grave error of dividing Cuba into two social classes, blacks and whites. Estrada Palma laid the bases of that social schism when he decreed that all citizens who were not white would be excluded from the Cuban Artillery Corps. We all know the racist division that exists in the United States in the very armed institutions. Here in Puerto Rico there exists a regiment of the North American army from which are excluded all persons who are not white, and there exists an armed guard, badly called National and of Puerto Rico, in which there cannot be any officer who has African blood, although blacks, mulattoes and mestizos are admitted as soldiers and ranks still. This exclusion of certain race from the armed forces, does not obey a clumsy prejudice. It is the pre-conceived plan to maintain the hegemony of one race over another. In the internal order is repeated what happens in the external order: to maintain colonialism, it is required to keep armed the empire that exercises it and disarmed and militarily disorganized the subjected nation; thus in the internal order, so that one race can dominate another, without any right, the dominant race will take possession of the armed institutions, army, police and navy, and from these institutions the race or races condemned to a social, political, economic and cultural life of inferiority will be excluded, dressing some of its members with military uniform only in special bodies that are a minority in the armed institutes and, despite that, in the quality of rank and file soldiers or mere subordinates. It is that of the political apothegm that power is of he who possesses the arms and knows how to wield them to impose himself. The case of Puerto Rico in this order of things we will treat opportunely in our study of contemporary Homeland sociology. Let us return to Cuba. This division in Cuba was completely suicidal. Eighty percent of the Cuban Liberator Army was composed of blacks, mulattoes and mestizos, including in its number its very high command, represented in the immense personality of Antonio Maceo. Only twenty percent could be estimated as white. To exclude from the armed forces of the Republic the men who had constituted it and accustomed to the discipline of arms and to the sacrifice of life itself for the Homeland, was to place beforehand the nation in complete defenselessness, and to create the gravest schism that can be established in a country: the racist schism. We said that with the protectorate the United States laid the bases for annexation, and among them was necessarily found the imposition in Cuba of the social division that exists in the United States. In the sister Antilla, the frightful and barbaric picture prevailing in almost all the United States was reproduced. Cuba had to pass through the shame of a racist war. With the abasement of annexationism in Cuba upon awakening the intellective conscience of the value of nationality, has surged the program of the national social reconstruction that is none other than that of the unification of all Cubans. We had the privilege of being witnesses of the loving fraternization of the two most powerful groups currently of the Cuban intelligentsia: the Club Atenas de la Habana, composed almost in its totality of very cultivated men who are mulattoes, blacks or mestizos, and of the brilliant Grupo Minorista, almost integrated in its totality by white elements. Having posed this grave problem by us frankly in the city of Cienfuegos, on the night of the seventh of December of 1927, in closing the evening in homage to the martyrs of Cuban independence, anniversary of the death of Maceo, and at the invitation of the cultural society Minerva and of the authorities of that very important municipality, we were able to serve, for the love that to the cause of the Independence Homeland that at that moment we represented, of nucleus of the organization that would have to address with valor, wisdom and patriotism, this grave problem that by itself was sufficient to give paralysis to all Cuban national activity. In la Habana we had the unmerited honor of a collective homage in the land of the apostle Martí, to which the most brilliant figures of contemporary Cuban intelligentsia attended, without distinction of race. This perverse policy had led the Cuban governments to prefer foreign elements, whenever these were white and to postpone the basic elements of nationality for the sole fact of carrying African blood in their veins. As neither great nor small Homeland can exist with such a cancer in its entrails, current Cuban nationalism, that necessarily is integral and cannot understand of other thing than national unity, founded in the principles of equality and fraternity of the ethnic elements that integrate it, is already employed in this work of renovation to revive in living flesh, the bonds of love that united in life Martí and Maceo and that still unites them in eternity. 11 Cuba necessarily passed to being belligerent against Germany in the world war. It had to follow the course of its “protector,” the United States. Such is the fate of every protectorate when the empire faces powerful enemies. The consequences of that participation can be fatal for the protectorate if the empire that maintains hegemony over it suffers a defeat. And if victory smiles on the “protector,” the protectorate never extracts anything beneficial for itself from that contest. In the economic, Cuba had to make great sacrifices, greater in proportion to its wealth than those that the United States made. When the North Americans imposed their exorbitant prices upon their same allies to snatch from them the last peseta, they watched that Cuba limited the price of one of the most necessary products, and that constitutes the Cuban economic base, or sugar, to eight dollars per hundredweight. The profit that Cuba could have made if it had been free of the protectorate, would have been fabulous. It must be taken into account, that, while the Yankees solicited for themselves and for the allies that privilege, nothing in compensation was offered to Cuba. The North American merchandise necessary for Cuban consumption arrived at exorbitant prices due to the great international demand that the war produced in the North American market. It is not to be forgotten that European production for export had diminished enormously, leaving many nations of the New World at the mercy of the exigencies of North American commerce in certain merchandise necessary for their consumption. Thus Cuba could not capitalize the value of its production during the bellicose crisis despite the fact that sugar and its other products were indispensable for the belligerents. For its sacrifice in the world war, however, Cuba found its defense against the North American empire. It ratified the treaty of Versalles when it had been repudiated by the Senate of the United States. It entered into the League of Nations faced with North American opposition. The international position of the great Antilla was reinforced. Cuba struck a master blow in the Platt Amendment. Its interpretation could no longer be according to the caprice of the invaders. Our sister Antilla, as member of the League of Nations, can currently move that powerful world institution, by its own right, if the United States pretended to injure its vital interests, beyond what the treaty that governs the relations between the two nations prescribes. Interested the nations that compose the great League in counteracting North American hegemony over Cuba, they have not stinted this the positions that could give it universal prestige. Cuba has corresponded to that confidence naming for its representation in Ginebra and before the Tribunal de La Haya learned men who, complying with the duty imposed, have served the cause of patriotism, whether serving as judges or arbitrators in delicate situations of world life, or presiding over the Assembly itself of the League of Nations. Acquired prestige is widened prestige. Thus Cuba, from the recognition of its greatness granted in Ginebra, passed to being the favorite of its sisters of América so that la Habana would be the seat of the Pan-American congresses. And greater would be currently its ascendancy in the New World if it were not for the errors of yancofilia that until the last hour the present mandatary of the Republic was exhibiting. The acquired position has served Cuba to rescue from the Yankee talons the Isla de Pinos after a long struggle in which it was believed that the great Antilla would lose over that precious Isle the sovereignty to which it had a right. Cuba has continued negotiating commercial treaties with different powers, for its own convenience, without fearing North American interferences. Yankee political opinion, not long ago, felt alarmed before the perspectives of an international sugar consortium presided over by Cuba, that unfortunately has not been able to enter into vigor, due to the negative influence of Dutch interests. When the United States interpreted the postal treaty in a form that injured Cuban interests, the sister Republic did not hesitate to refuse to renew it, unless its legitimate economic interests were taken into consideration to enjoy mercantile reciprocity with the United States. The new arrangement about postal packages has just entered into vigor that permits placing by way of the mail, among other products, cigars, elaborated in Cuba. The influence in the national economy of this new agreement has made itself felt immediately with the confidence reestablished in the affected industries. Upon the United States elevating its tariff lately in the form that we have already analyzed and that takes away from Cuba all the benefit that the reciprocal tariff bonus of twenty percent could report, the great Antilla has initiated the program of the nationalization of its riches. The North American capital itself within its borders, for its own conservation, will have to follow the norms that strengthen the economic and political solidity of the country where they have been formed. The egoism of foreign capital and its imperialist ambitions diminish with the termination of free cabotage. To place native exportation in the same circumstances that the exportation of any other origin in the North American market, obligates Yankee capital, to contribute as has been said to the transformation of the Cuban economy. It is proven once more that to maintain the economic colony, political colonialism is required in any of its forms: whether annexation by force or the protectorate. But when the protectorate returns to the jurisdictions of its political and international rights in fact it ends with the imperial interference in the political order and as a consequence in the economic order. Not in vain, the present Cuban Executive has declared that the Platt Amendment is an old piece of junk. Of course, to arrive at that enviable position international statute is required, that is, to have the recognition of the Free, Sovereign and Independent Republic. NATIONALIZATION OF FOREIGN WEALTH 1 Free cabotage only suits the super-industrialized nation. While that superiority of economic organization lasts, free exchange is advocated. That superiority gives it dominion of the exterior market, that is reduced to the exportation of manufactured products and of a restricted number of super abundant raw materials within the nation. The bulk of the raw materials necessary for factory life, it necessarily imports, that are proceeding from all regions and climates, free of duty. The same is done with food products. The importation is limited to the raw materials and to the food products, and to very rare manufactures that only the most moneyed classes consume. Only that last group of elaborated products that constitute a luxury, are burdened by the tariff. The rest of the importation that forms the great part of foreign products enters into the country free of duty. Of course, this norm is not imposed out of kindness to the foreign products but because the importation of raw materials free of duty suits the same factory interests, because that assures its low cost, which represents substantial gain. And when food products enter freely, the cost of living for the worker is lower and his salary can be reduced considerably without provoking his rebellion, in the form of strikes, or in any other more energetic mode of action against the capital that exploits him. When other nations organize equally in the industrial field, in the same factory specialities, surpassing them in certain important aspects, it obligates the nationality to vary its theory of free exchange. Such is the case of Inglaterra. Super industrialization in comparison with the other nations of the globe, gave it great advantages. Its importation limited to raw materials, to food products, in the conditions that we have pointed out, and to fabricated merchandise of exceptional factory quality, it was able to maintain until recently a great ascendancy in the exterior market with the enormous exportation of factory products and of the super abundant raw material in its territory such as coal, that was replaceable not long ago, in the industry, by hydroelectric power and petroleum. Foreign manufacture has made itself felt immediately in the markets of exterior consumption, diminishing thus the demand of English products. But that is not all, but that, in the same English market, many foreign manufactures have penetrated producing grave competition to the same British specialities. The inevitable result has been the present grave industrial economic crisis because Inglaterra is currently traversing and that obligates it to radical changes in its policy of free exchange. The political and social repercussions of the current crisis has carried to power the Labor Party, without that until now the adequate solutions have been found to get around the difficulties created fundamentally by international factory competition. The United States, due to the partial paralysis of European production, acquired great advantages in certain markets of the exterior. Mistaken North American economists believed that the commercial ascendancy of their country was due to the superiority of its economic organization. Always North American tariffs were very high to protect native industry against external competition. But despite the
high tariff rates, once the European war was over, foreign competition made itself felt within its own tariff borders, and they began to lose the advantages they had in foreign markets. Therein lies the key to the misery in the United States among the workers. More than eight million are currently unemployed. In the city of Nueva York alone, there are more than a million who cannot find work. They are prey to hunger, misery, and disease. The central government, in the face of the manifest impotence of all the municipalities, the states, provinces, has had to intervene making a large outlay, which has proven absolutely insufficient. The middle class, which had risked itself in the stock market games, was ruined by the sudden drop in values. And as happens in every country organized within the plutocratic system, this state of general misery benefits only a small number of interests that have cornered the basic sources of wealth: real estate, communications, maritime fronts, industrial plants, mines, etc. Despite the official declarations that yancofilia propaganda has maintained before the world, the North American worker has always been subject to the exploitation of these great interests, but his natural passivity had kept him tolerating the miserable and appalling life of the “slums,” that is, the urban neighborhoods like those that exist in Nueva York where the human mass is crowded into buildings without electric light and that, due to their disposition, in broad daylight, sunlight only enters the rooms facing the street, and the back of the apartments and the hallways and corridors have to be lit with gas day and night. They do not put in electric lighting because it costs more than gas lighting. In these terrible sanitary conditions, and taking into account the cold climate during the winter, these neighborhoods constitute centers of constant epidemics and all kinds of diseases. Tuberculosis wreaks havoc there. The great interests absolutely refuse to reform the sanitary conditions that cause the death of thousands and thousands annually, and no official power can alter that situation. To appease popular resentments, since almost two-thirds of the population of the city of Nueva York lives in these conditions, North American philanthropy makes the simulations that we all know for the public good, but the same “philanthropists” who exploit that people, take care to ensure that the 140 conditions described do not change. And that policy is maintained, because it is the necessary norm to reduce the working class to impotence in order to impose on it living and salary conditions that make it submissive and docile to the management of the great interests. This is the faithful picture of North American urban life that any traveler can observe who is not dedicated to frivolity but interested in the fundamental studies of collective life. In each North American city there exists a true border of misery. Juxtaposed are the zones of the wealthy and of the unhappy. When you go to Nueva York, cross Fifth Avenue to the east, the seat of opulence, to enter the zone of hunger, disease, crime, and death where more than seventy percent of the population of the great metropolis forcibly lives. The workers’ passivity in the face of this enormous crisis of unemployment produced, as we have said, by international competition and which will be accentuated by the tariff reprisals that other nations are imposing on Estados Unidos in response to its latest tariff, seems to have come to an end. Strong underground currents of social revolution are felt, and the nation that was believed to be so strong materially we see as poor as any other, unable to give bread, or shelter, or work to so many millions of its citizens. The case of England and of Estados Unidos has demonstrated that free trade is not possible without serious prejudice to the national economy and without endangering the social and political structure of the nation itself. If this is the situation that is created for these powers despite the enormity of their natural resources and their financial organization, we would like to know how a person who has meditated a little on these problems can believe for a single moment that free cabotage can benefit a nation subject to foreign empire, completely tied, and without political powers of any nature, subjected to an absolutely irresponsible regime, without it being possible to compare its resources with those of the occupying nation, can survive economically and socially and politically within the insurmountable tariff wall of the occupying empire. Such is the case of Puerto Rico vis-à-vis Estados Unidos. We have demonstrated how free cabotage does is promote the greed of North American capital towards our natural riches and, how a system deliberate and directed by the government of Washington has been displacing the natives in the possession of their goods and substituting them with invading interests. We have also seen that the struggle for political autonomy or for absolute Independence has always had as its basis the economic Independence which is not possible without tariff Independence and the termination of free cabotage. When a nation confronts another, both enjoying their political Independence, the dominant capital in each of them that wishes to penetrate into the other has to nationalize itself where it resides. We have presented the case of Cuba. We will study the economic reality of Estados Unidos that obliges its invading plutocracy to nationalize itself in countries competing with Norte América and how the same North American capitals, watching only over their own interests and caring very little for the well-being of their own fellow citizens, adapt to the policy of rival nations when these have sufficient political power to liquidate them within their borders if they do not constitute themselves as guardians of their own economic, political and social well-being. 11 In 1914, Estados Unidos was still a tributary nation. Great interests had to be paid to foreign capital invested within its borders, especially to French, English, and German nationals. The European war offered the North Americans the opportunity to nationalize the foreign wealth that dominated them. It was not possible for the allies to meet the payments for Yankee merchandise necessary for the fight against the German Empire, and their values quickly passed into North American banking hands. This liquidation ended in the conversion of Estados Unidos from a debtor nation into a creditor nation of all the allied powers for a sum that does not fall below eleven billion dollars. Although it may seem paradoxical, the incommunication of Alemania with the outside world, due to the Allied blockade, defended its external interests, because not being able to make purchases it did not have to make payments, and the liquidation of its foreign interests had to be carried out by violence. This explains the declaration of war by several nations against Alemania, and also the confiscatory law of German assets of the Congress of Estados Unidos that submitted to public auction all German interests within its borders. To determine its amount, it suffices to say that, subjected to such unfavorable conditions, they yielded a total asset of more than two billion dollars, without taking into account the value of its merchant fleet confiscated as a prize of war. At the signing of the armistice, Estados Unidos had become a creditor of all of Europa and in an ascending position, estimated definitively predominant by mistaken economists. From there arose the illusion of continuous North American prosperity. The supposed miracle of high wages and great production. For their own defense, the debtor nations immediately began to reconquer their foreign market by giving battle to North American exports. At the same time, they restricted and continue to restrict the importation of North American products. The nations that were neutral during the war, like España, had to adopt the same tactics as the North American allies converted into economic tributaries of Estados Unidos. The concerted effort by the strongest nations against the brief economic hegemony of Estados Unidos, made itself felt immediately in the North American economy, which has ended in the 142 present painful disaster because the Yankee nation is currently going through it, without it being possible to predict at these hours the possibility of a nearby improvement of its economic tragedy. North American capital, upon reaching its apogee, and upon encountering tariff barriers restrictive of North American importation, placed itself directly within the borders of the competing Estados Unidos, investing large sums of money in industrial plants. In the Senate of Estados Unidos, when currently studying the grave crisis of unemployment in their country, they have realized that this situation depends in considerable part on the expansion of its own capital. It is the North American factories themselves installed in foreign territory protected by nationalist tariffs, which make impossible the entry of North American products into those territories. And the chain is easy to form: decrease in North American exports, closure of factories, workers without employment by the millions, social unrest in the face of misery and hunger, and the fear of revolution. We have already pointed out the ruin of the North American middle class due to stock market speculations. With the descent of values, there has been a national liquidation in Estados Unidos of the weakest capitalists, greatly increasing the proletarian class, and restricting the number of the plutocracy concentrating capital in a form dangerous for social equilibrium. Foreign capitalism has been able to re-enter within North American borders due to that same low. We have read with great interest the new penetration of English capital especially in the oil industry, a significant fact, both from an economic and political-international point of view. This situation would not have been possible to impose on Estados Unidos, if its competitors great and small had not had political independence. When one enjoys full sovereignty and knows how to exercise the powers that this privileged situation grants, foreign capital, if it wants to continue within national borders, has to march in unison with national interests, even if these are in conflict with the nationality of its own origin. Such is the summary of the situation we have just analyzed. Can Puerto Rico nationalize foreign wealth currently? Impossible. We will explain. 143 111 The nation cannot exist without the possession of all its material wealth. Agriculture, industry, commerce, communications, franchises, and every form of wealth has to be in native hands in order to ensure the life of the Homeland. Insurance companies, banking institutions, and every organization dedicated to the mobilization of wealth, it is necessary that they belong to national interests. If to acquire economic independence, within colonialism, it is necessary to impose political independence, by arms, if it were necessary, when the nation enjoys its full sovereignty, to guarantee its existence as an independent state, it has to nationalize its wealth and not allow foreign elements to take possession of it. Modern life, despite international economic relations, has not been able to fundamentally alter this dogma that guarantees the very existence of the nationality. Neither commercial exchange nor the ebb and flow of emigrations have been able to impose a different criterion on the leading statesmen of nations free or subjected to empires. When the nation has a small population and great territorial extension and copious material riches, it is natural that it stimulate foreign immigration. Men or foreign capitalists can come. The possession of real estate, the granting of franchises of any nature, is always conditioned, when it is a foreigner who is concerned, that this one, before receiving such right, either become a native citizen previously, or formulate the declarations of rigor before a competent tribunal that as soon as he meets the residence requirements, he will immediately renounce his citizenship of origin. When these privileges are granted to foreign legal or natural persons, because national interests so demand it, the conditions are always set, that the concession, within a fixed term, forcibly returns to native hands. This attachment to the material interests of the nationality is imposed by the very necessity of the physical existence of