Ramon Emeterio Betances, a collaborator of José Martí, who, as an old man, represented the Cuban Revolutionary Party in the Parisian Cuban community, is credited with a desperate exclamation after the uprising of February 24, 1895 in Cuba: “What are Puerto Ricans doing, not rebelling!”
He was the instigator of an uprising in Lares, Puerto Rico, on September 23, 1868, which although defeated, preceded by several days that of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes at his Demajagua mill. Betances knew what independence meant for both his people and for Cuba. The political organization founded by Martí was called the Cuban and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Party, with the right that their conduct and thought gave them. The Party’s founding precepts were formulated by Cubans and Puerto Ricans to achieve “the absolute independence of the island of Cuba, and encourage and assist that of Puerto Rico.”
Martí and Betances acted and thought driven by the awareness that the time had come to accomplish their objective, despite the powerful obstacles. Pro-annexationism, embracing imperialist pretensions, was among the greatest challenges on the road to independence, which fed from the outside, strengthened internal forces opposing patriotic unity.
Autonomist propaganda was another danger, and it awakened the same complicity in some sectors of Puerto Ricans as it did in Cuba, but was overcome here by an independence fever nurtured by experience and the frustrated impetus of the Ten Years' War and subsequent attempted insurrections.
Annexation and autonomy, which are often intertwined, served those who, the day before his death, Marti called a “curial species,” “content only with a master, Yankee or Spanish, who maintain them, or believe them, reward their vocation as Celestines, their position as quasi-men, disdainful of the country’s fighting masses, the mestiza masses, capable and moving, the intelligent, creative masses of blacks and whites.”
And Betances knew what such interests would mean for Puerto Rico, as well.
That is why he was anguished that his people let the moment pass when they should have been on war footing, alongside Cuba. An uprising would not be enough to uproot U.S. domination, but a powerful, united barrier against them, yes, would be.
The experience gained during the U.S. intervention of 1898 and its subsequent results corroborated this. Awaiting Cuba, with its heroic liberation army standing strong, was submission to a neocolonial experiment, the "colonization system" that Marti saw, which the United States was preparing to rehearse - while Puerto Rico was simply subjugated as a colony.
Profoundly antipatriotic, annexationism continued to be promoted within both peoples, in different ways, but with the same nature. And here’s a lesson that should serve those who still harbor annexationist illusions in Puerto Rico or in Cuba: Annexation is doomed to failure, not only because both peoples have forces that honor and continue to defend the ideal of independence, but also because the empire – the racist empire - is not interested in annexing peoples it considers inferior.
If they had been interested, the U.S. would have done everything possible to annex Puerto Rico - perhaps without exerting much effort, given the privileges of a powerful metropolis. But the island has been kept under a humiliating, powerful colonial regime, which has used, and uses, the people in terrible experiments highly harmful to their health. All political spaces are co-opted and the people deprived of any natural resource or infrastructure that could support sovereignty, beyond a few maneuvers such as so-called sports sovereignty.
Agriculture has been replaced by other productive sectors, such as the pharmaceutical industry and market, and all this determines that a huge portion of the Puerto Rican population resides in the United States. Along with other problems, this reality raises questions about what independence would mean for families traveling between the two countries, if they needed a visa that the imperial passport now makes unnecessary.
The propaganda is deplorable and painful, asserting that the Puerto Rican people do not want independence, when they have been stripped of everything that could serve as a means to see themselves enjoying the right. But the desire for independence has been expressed in important ways, through the population’s cultural idiosyncrasies and identity, the soul of a people, that no power has been able to deprive of its flag, or impose the use of English and the abandonment of Spanish. Such an expression of resistance is worth even more in a world in which globalization co-founded by U.S. imperialism causes so much alienation, even in clearly anti-capitalist environments.
The Puerto Rican independence movement is often discounted, labeled a minority, when historically, around the world, the most resolute and radical revolutionary positions - among them anti-colonialism and independence – are assumed by a vanguard. Is must be remembered that all revolutionary thought has its most advanced and consequent defense resting on the shoulders of a vanguard that, by definition, is a minority? This is a reality, although in certain circumstances, especially in the midst of struggle and after the triumph of a popular revolution, there are strong connections between the vanguard and the masses, of great productivity.
Oppression in general, and that of imperialism in particular, engender emancipatory thinking, and the mole of history can pop up where least expected. The impact of the internal debt, imposed on Puerto Rico for the benefit of its oppressors, could not go unnoticed by the people who suffer its consequences. And the same is true of the helplessness in which they found themselves in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
Can a majority of Puerto Ricans disregard the crude attitude shown them by a government that, given its status as a metropolis, an imperial power to which Puerto Rico is subjugated, had the obligation to support it given the extent of damage – still unaddressed – caused by a storm that went from natural to social and political? Far from helping them as he should have, Trump belittled the tragedy and humiliated Puerto Ricans by throwing paper towels at them.
In this context, the corruption of the regime that manages the impoverishment of Puerto Rico is explained, and the racist and homophobic attitudes of a colonial official representing the empire were revealed.
Could all this happen without the Puerto Rican people protesting?
Not only could it not happen, but has led to an unprecedented mobilization in Puerto Rico. The movement is heterogeneous, yes, and not all those participating have radical perspectives. Nor is the governor’s crassness the most important thing. He cannot compete in this regard with the Caesar whose "authority" he obeys; his comments pale in comparison to those uttered by Trump.
All of that is true, but it is also true that the impetus shown by Puerto Rican dignity in the face of such events could be just the beginning, and it should not be ruled out that it reaches a stage that the imperialist master could not have imagined. Hence the brutal repression of peaceful protests, and the belated resignation of the governor. Would the empire take such a risk to save a pawn who will easily replaced with another of his kind - a lackey able to avoid using expressions such as those that got this one in trouble, or a more skilled individual who will make sure they are not recorded.
If the governor's initial refusal to resign could be seen as an undemocratic position – his own decision or ordered by his bosses - to give an image of strength and humiliate the people, now the announcement of his resignation could be a ploy to gain time. The Puerto Rican people must know that the official is not leaving because he wants to, but because he is the scapegoat.
And this people also has the right, as the recent protests show, to appropriate Martí’s words regarding the Cuban independence movement: “The people’s stages are not counted as periods of unsuccessful submission, but by instants of rebellion.” It could be that the dignified response for which Betances pleaded has begun.
