1
THE PEOPLE CREATE THE NATION
Despite its hardship-ridden history, its laborious and tough process of integration, its consistent efforts for expression, the people of Puerto Rico never failed itself. Whenever the need to take a step forward has called upon its strength, it has responded favorably, and the step has been taken or been attempted. If at times it has halted, if occasionally it has taken false steps, it is not to blame. The responsibility lays on those who have not obeyed the true will of the Puerto Ricans. If we examine our history, we will learn that our people have been repeatedly deceived and betrayed.
The assertion of some intellectuals and political leaders that the Puerto Ricans have betrayed their own independence and its justice is a lie. The country’s history shows that, on the contrary, when called upon for historical change, the decision has always been to respond in favor. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the leadership. The history of Puerto Rico’s steps backward is the history of its leaders. There is no history of treason on the part of the people of Puerto Rico. Historically, the people have moved forward in spite of the leaders, and they have been dead stopped by them.
It is not necessary to point out the exceptions. If there had not been any, we would not be a nation. And after the revolutionary act that took place at Lares,
2 no one can deny the existence of the Puerto Rican nation. What happened in Lares itself supports our thesis. At that time, it was not the teacher, the initiator, the encourager, the counselor, the enlightened, nor the paramount leader that failed. It was the general leadership who failed, by turning their backs on a people who had decided to be free, by impeding Betances’
3 return to Puerto Rican soil, and not supporting the efforts to gain liberty. Contrary to what is generally believed, rebellions like the one at Lares have taken place many times in our history.
It is, therefore, necessary and urgent that the people of Puerto Rico think seriously about Lares, because it is the cornerstone of our foundation, the soul of our history, our life and immortality, and the life giving element to the course of our history. It is our only alternative for redemption and triumph. And it is in such a way that Puerto Ricans can do good for themselves, only to the extent that they address the issue and act through a deep and clear understanding of the fact that the Nation moves ahead in time. What inspired Nineteenth century nationalism is not a sufficient trigger to produce a Lares without defeat, nor its organizational forms enough to attain the independence of Puerto Rico.
I have mentioned the inspiration and the ways of organizing. I am not referring to the ideals of nationhood. Today, the ideals of the Puerto Rican people are basically the same as the ones conceived before the nation’s birth at Lares. The process that followed has served to assess them and to refine them, and, above all, to intensify them. Not having the sovereign power to organize on the basis of those ideals, it suffers oppression and despotism, but has developed the resistance to strengthen them.
This reference to the ideals of our nationhood is unavoidable, and it is necessary to focus on our basic problem. These ideals contain the word that shakes us to the roots of our beings: Independence. If nationhood had no ideals, there would not have been an impulse towards independence; there would not have been a nation. As an object of history, independence is the capacity to realize our ideals. If we want independence, that wish does no more than synthesize into one single political formula our wish to see our ideals come true as a human group, and as a nation. This means that we want to manage, in our own way, all of the magnificent and glorious complexities that make up our spiritual and material heritage. The world may be within us, but we belong to ourselves.
If we understand, thus, our independence, then we can explain why Puerto Rico is not free. Many explanations and many factors come into play. Moreover, the basis of our colonialism is found when we examine the actions of our people as creators of their ideals, the relentless loyalty with which they have kept the faith, and the criminal deformation of those ideals perpetrated by the majority of their leaders, if not their open and unarguable treason. The Puerto Ricans have been forced to stop, recover energies and move onward, in spite of most of its leadership. When the ideals have been adulterated, it has been worse, because through deception, they became an illusion of those ideals, forcing them to take false steps, and move blindly in the terrible darkness of disorientation.
This work will examine that process during the last century and a half of our history in order to prove that, if Puerto Rico did not become free from Spain during the last century, it was not for lack of the necessary forces to expel Spanish domination from its territory. And that if it has not become independent from the United States in the present century it is not that it lacks the necessary will to end United States domination, but because, all along, two different and conflicting tendencies have been operating within the country. One, if it succeeds will redeem the Country; the other will be its doom. The first is mother of all Good the second is harbinger of our downfall.
They are the Revolutionary and the Reformist tendencies. The first is born from within our nationhood’s soul; the second has been imported and is used as opium for our spirit. The first has given birth to our history, the second has frustrated the revolutionary process of the Nineteenth Century and sustained the abject Yankee occupation of our island. Puerto Rico has been close to achieving its ideals, to satisfying its needs, to winning independence every time that the revolutionary process has been strong. And has moved away from achieving its ideals, from satisfying its needs, and from independence, every time that reformism is strong. The Reformist Tendency, aided and abetted by two imperial powers, has served both* well. And therein lies the dramatic contradiction of our lives: in the terrible reality that each apparent reformist victory, which has gained credibility among the people, has been really a revolutionary victory, weakened by the reformists on behalf of the empire.
Reformism or revolution: that is the final decision to be made by the Puerto Rican people. We all know that there is no choice in the final decision. That it will be the triumph of Revolution over Reform. Our Revolution will defeat the foreign enemy as soon as it takes hold of the minds of our people. What keeps our nation chained to colonialism is imperialism’s best weapon against us: reformism within. The way to defeat imperialism is to strengthen the revolutionary forces, to weaken reformism until it is useless, by neither practicing it nor imitating it. Reformism cannot be fought nor weakened by following its path, by voting in the colonial elections, by serving in its armed forces. The way to strengthen Revolution is by joining it, by helping to unite and consolidate its strengths into one force, oriented and combative outside of the Imperialist-Colonialist government, through non–cooperation, electoral boycott, refusal to pay taxes and serve in the United States armed forces; and the direct organization of the people’s forces, into creating the Constituent Assembly.
The crisis of nationhood is created by imperialism to stimulate reformism. Revolution is the moving force originating from the people. The Puerto Rican Nation was born of revolution. Thanks to the revolutionary current, sometimes covert and at others overtly manifested, the Nation has survived the invasion by the United States.
In this book we will examine the historical facts that confirm our thesis.
In all countries of this planet, at all times, a more or less lengthy process creates conditions that lead to revolution. There is no such thing as an imported revolution. The statement: “All peoples will make their own revolution, if they want to; and if they do not want it, there will not be a revolution,” is also true. All peoples reach the point where they want revolution. And when they do, they make it. Revolution is thus the culmination of a historic process. The revolutionary tendency in Puerto Rico, for the same reason, will show, with its growth, the progression of that process.
Puerto Rico was, as all American nations, formed under imperial rule. The American nations differ from the European ones in that while those of Europe were formed from the groupings of feudal states, the counties of the Americas spawned from the break in the continuity of their pre-Columbian history caused by the Discovery and Conquest, under the imperial rules of Spain, France, England and Portugal.
We have said that after the Lares Uprising, to deny the existence of a Puerto Rican nation is idiocy. Our nation had its beginnings long before Lares. The conquerors’ exploitation of the mines through the work of the indigenous peoples; the Indo-Spanish war that ended at Yagüecas, the importation of Black slaves, the parceling of the land into lands protected by the Spanish Crown; the settling in Puerto Rico of poor Spaniards, the mixing of the races; all produced immediate differences of interests and psychological reactions that undoubtedly became factors for national differentiation. That was the beginning of our nationhood.
Three centuries witnessed the alchemy that produced the Nation, until the symptoms of formation began in an unmistakable manner. They were...