Puerto Rico - A Case-Study of Change in An Underdeveloped Area PDF

Southern Political Science Association
Puerto Rico: A Case-Study of Change in an Underdeveloped Area Author(s): Gordon K. Lewis Source: The Journal of Politics, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Nov., 1955), pp. 614-650 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2126617 . Accessed: 09/10/2013 15:59
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PUERTO RICO: A CASE-STUDY OF CHANGE IN AN UNDERDEVELOPED AREA

K. LEWIS GopDON The University of Puerto Rico no American ever heard of Puerto Rico unless a friend got a job down there. Today that remark could not be repeated with any justice. In half-a-dozen ways the island has become a laboratory in the development of technologically backward areas. Culturally, it has acclaimed itself as a meeting-groundbetween the twin cultures of Latin America and the American democracy. Politically, it has become an experiment in American constitutional development, a testing-ground of the American claim to be exempt from the laws of imperialism. For the half-century of its American occupation its notoriety has been born of melodramatic journalistic reports exploiting the "romance of the tropics," exacerbated by the barrier of vast distance. With today's New York-San Juan airflight of six hours that barrier has been lifted, while the Puerto Rican immigration into New York Harlem has dramatized the island-problem for Americans. Few regions of the non-Communist world have witnessed so rapid a growth in so brief a period. To live in Puerto Rican society for any length of time is to feel the dynamics of a vast social-cultural change which can have been equalled in the earlier insular history only by the changes brought about after 1493 by the Spanish conquistadoresas they are described in the monumental Historia of the cleric Fray Inigo Abbad. It is easy, of course, to exaggerate the significance of all this. For neither in governmentalregime nor in ethnic structure can Puerto Rico claim to be unique. The cultural heritage of Spain is far more evident in Mexico or Peru. The Spanish Council of the Indies regarded the island, as the British view Singapore, as primarily a fortress of empire rather than as a territory to be civilized, so that the Hispanic influence has been more a thing of language and social custom than of culture in any classical sense. Hence Mexico City is far more a representative exchange-martof the two cultures than is San Juan. A small society of only two million people, the island is hardly of significance in its experience for the teeming masses of
M
R. DOOLEY ONCE OBSERVED that
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Africa or Asia. There are no forces of religious fanaticism like the Moslem Brotherhood, no powerful student organizations capable of serious political rioting as in Cairo or Bagdad, no tradition of a politically-minded army officer class as in the Latin-American republics. To urge, therefore, that the island may be reliably viewed as a microcosm of the development of backward areas is to miss how much of its composition is tool unique to be fully representative. In his classic essay on Liberty and Despotism in Spanish America, Cecil Jane has shown how much of the notorious instability of Latin-American political life is traceable to an unresolved conflict between a passion for liberty and a passion for order. That conflict, however, has rarely been central to the Puerto Rican experience. On the whole, the Puerto Rican is a platient, even docile individual. He rejects the appeal to violence; the Nationalist revolt of 1950 becomes for him an amusing episode in romantic revolution and the Washington episode of 1954 a grotesque outrage. The issue of the political status of the island has never captured the imagination of the Puerto Rican agricultural laborer. Puerto Rico is engaged in one of what Professor Knowles has termed the silent social revolutions, but it is doubtful if much of the content of the revolution has a universal importance. Yet it is true to say that the recent advances of the Puerto Rican community are at once exciting and significant. They symbolize in a tiny way the adjustment of America to other cultures. They symbolize, too, the impact of America upon other cultures. The average Puerto Rican is a proud American who looks to New York rather than Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro as the Promised Land. Even the insular intelligentsia, concentrated largely in the University (itself, significantly enough, founded only under the American regime), speak in terms of the traditional American liberalism; and there is little, if anything, in the political philosophy of the insular political parties that is pre-American. Even the old Socialist Party was for statehood within the Union. Much of the Latin-American educated mind thinks of the United States as an alliance of technical genius and cultural illiteracy, but it is suggestive that that prejudice is found not so much in the Puerto Rican intelligentsia as in the Spanish and Latin-Americanscholastic refugees who conceive of America in terms of Ortega y Gasset rather than of Santayana. Equally suggestively, there has been no effort,
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as in the case of the French in Canada or of the Boers in South Africa, by the Puerto Ricans to insulate themselves jealously against the dominant cultural influence of the occupying power. An American can enter into the stream of native Puerto Rican life in a way denied to the English Canadian in Montreal or the Englishman in Madras. Spain did little either to elevate the Puerto Rican masses in 1898 there was some 93 per cent illiteracy in the total population - or to bring the intelligentsia to her side. (The Autonomous Charter of 1897, finally yielding in part to the native liberal forces what they had been demanding since at least the Lares revolt of 1868, came too late to do any real good.) On the other hand, and against all this, American occupation and control have left a very real colonial psychology in the Puerto Rican people. There is a militant self-defensiveness, a resentment of condescension, a proud assertion of puertorriquenismo. These traits explain a number of phenomena: the search in politics for a constitutional status which will yield the dignity of separate insular identity as it also preserves the privileges of American citizenship, the effort to discover a special native "character"and personality, the emergence of a cultural nationalism seeking to preserve the "purity" of the home language against the vulgarities of American idiom. Accordingly, in educated Puerto Rico at least, there is a noticeable schizophrenia, al-thoughit is nothing like the tragic conflict of loyalties Mr. Masters has portrayed in his pieces of AngloIndian fiction, where, after all, cultural and psychological pull between East and West is far more deeply felt than that between the American and Latin-American variations of a common Western tradition. The sort of personal corruption described in Stevenson's Polynesian stories is rare in the foreigner'slife in Puerto Rico. The pull is there, nonetheless, and will become stronger as the process of industrialization leads to the further erosion of the older culture forms. In this sense Puerto Rico, for all of its special conditions, becomes an example of what happens when new worlds are brought in to redressthe balance of the old. I The year 1898 is the 1776 of Puerto Rican history. Despite the comic-opera aspects of General Miles' insular campaign, the Amer-
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ican seizure marked the beginning of a new stage in Puerto Rican life. For some four centuries life had practically stood still; men still had to travel around the island by boat because of a primitive road system. The dynamics of the American spirit were rapidly felt. That spirit, moreover, was directed toward Puerto Rico at the height of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny in Americanlife: men like Senator Beveridge saw in Puerto Rico and the Philippines the chance to apply the new sense of American nationalism; writers like Josiah Strong and Admiral Mahan preached the divine mission of extending the "benefits" of "civilization" to conquered peoples. The subsequent material transformationin Puerto Rico has been remarkable. The percentage of literacy of persons over ten has increased from 23 per cent in 1899 to 76 per cent in 1948. During the same period, the number of public school pupils has increased from 27,000 to more than 437,000. Imports from the American market have risen from a mere 12 million dollars' worth in 1898 to some 192 millions in 1948. The transport system has improved immeasurably, especially with the construction of modern highways by the armed services. Industrialization has meant a serious reorganization of the insular economy; in this period the percentage of the island labor force engaged in domestic and personal services declined from 20.5 per cent to 9.8 per cent; those engaged in manufacturing and mechanical industries increased from 8.4 per cent to 23.7 per cent, both figures graphically illustrating the movement from a semi-feudal to a capitalist economy. Because public health programs have reduced to tiny proportions once widespread diseases like enteritis and malaria, the average life-expectancy of Puerto Ricans has increased from 38.5 years in 1919 to 55.5 years in 1946. The transport revolution stemming from modem aerodynamics has also had a unique significance for Puerto Rico, since it has made possible mass migration to the continent - an annual average of nearly 40,000 emigrants since 1944 - with all that it implies: the rapid acceptance of American values, the remittal of monies back home, the erosion of habit which travel almost unconsciously effects. Here is the last episode, as it were, in American colonization; the sight of continental airline ticket offices in remote little Puerto Rican towns is an odd illustration of the impact of the outer world upon the insular imagination. Granted the shortcoming of the
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American regime (the effort to supplant Spanish by English as the language of school instruction was a pitiable miscalculation of American idealism), not even the champions of independence will deny the vast benefits the regime has biroughtto the Puerto Rican people. For the conditions of life in 1898 added up to a damning indictment of Spanish colonial enterprise. After four centuries of rule the island at that time had no real banks, no effective circulation of money, only two or three roads, and a bare twenty kilometres of railroad tracks; and the total amount of money spent on public education, some 20,000 dollars, was just equal to, the personal salary of the Spanish Governor.' That today the insular Government spends some 35 per cent of its annual budget on education is only one fact underliningthe quality of the transformation that has taken place with the historic transference of sovereignty. It is not surprising that since 1898 there has been no demand by any native political party for a return to Spain. Madrid left her culture behind. But she did not leave behind, as did France in Alsace-Lorraine,a tradition of sentimental loyalty nor, as did England in India, a legacy of administrative efficiency upon which her successors could build. From the first, consequently, Puerto Ricans embracedthe American connection with an eagernessalmost pathetic in its earnestness. Some of this change, of course, has been the outcome of American effort undertaken with American funds. Federal agencies worked wonders during the New Deal period, and Mr. Tugwell's Tke Stricken Land is a monument to the memory of their work. One has only to talk with "old hands" who came soon after 1898 to realize how much Puerto Rico owes to the numerous Americans who, as teachers, judges, and administrators, and social-service workers, did much to establish new standards of public welfare and service. Since 1940, however, with the beginning of the Popular Party regime, the work has been increasingly sponsored and conducted by Puerto Ricans trained in that earlier period. Since 1940, too, the program of public policy, instead of being, as it had been before that date, a series of makeshift arrangements leaving untouched the basic problems, has become a complex of planned ef'Rafael Maria de Labra, Puerto Rico en 1885 (Madrid, 1885), p. 78. Quotedin Antonio S. Pedreira,El Aiio Terribledel 87 (San Juan: Biblioteca de AutoresPuertorriquenos, 1948), pp. 30-31.
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fort in a number of fields - emigration, education, agricultural reform, public works, industrialization. An enormous enthusiasm has characterized the undertaking. In the realm of public works, electric power facilities have been greatly expanded; with the Lajas Valley project, in particular, the old dream of great engineers like Antonio Luchetti of bringing water and power to the semi-arid south coast of the island will soon become a reality. Separate governmental authorities have been set up for the development of sewerage, transportation, and communications; within the last decade, much of the metropolitan road system of San Juan has been transformed. An ambitious slum-clearance and public-housing program has begun to attack the evil slumdom of tropical shack-towns like El Fanguito; and to go through the immense San Jose housing development is to be made aware of what an active government can do to rectify the social damage created by the gouging landlord and the cheap jerry-builder. In the realm of larger social reform many of the changes, as ex-GovernorTugwell's book makes evident, were borrowed from the armory of the New Deal. A minimum wage board and an insular labor relations board have been set up. A social security scheme has been started: in the years between 1948 and 1952, by means of pensions, the Commonwealth Government increased its transfer payments, compensation payments, and insurance benefit payments by some 75 per cent. New medical centers have been established; preventable diseases have declined, although much has yet to be done to ensure the Puerto Rican people,an adequate diet; electric power and drinking water have been carried to numerous rural communities- achievements, as the Ecuadorian delegate to the UN General Assembly remarked in the debate of 1953 on Puerto Rico, which many Latin American countries would be happy to be able to boast about. In rural Puerto Rico, moreover, the Land Act of 1941 sought for the first time to alleviate the evils of excessive concentration of land ownership engendered by the growth of latifundia in the sugar and coffee areas by the compulsory acquisition of land and its redistribution as proportionalbenefit farms and owner-operated family farms; so that whereas in 1940 some 51 corporations, mostly American, held one third of the best land, by 1947 some 36 per cent of that land had been re-
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distributed into smaller holdings.2 Nor has that redistribution meant any neglect of the technical necessity of large-scale operations in the sugar industry. Puerto Ricans, justifiably angered by a system of corporate absenteeism operated by New York and Boston financiers who expected to be protected from public crossexamination by public officials and to be allowed to negotiate in the back rooms of the banks,3 did not let their anger blind them to the technical dangers inherent in small-scale ownership and operation. In an economy still overwhelminglyagrarian, it is of interest to note the observation of an "old hand" of 1904 that perhaps the most significant change since 1900 has been the social elevation of the agricultural laborer. Finally, the industrialization program has sought at once to diversify an economy dangerously dependent upon a monocrop culture and to discover a solution to the grim imbalance of resources and population common to all under-developed areas. Hence it has established 300 or more factories since 1940 and a potential industrial employment of over 20,000 persons; its aim is to attain an average income of $2000 per family by 1960. The combined activities of the Popular administration since 1940 have meant an increase of total national income some four times larger than that of 1940, and per capita net income has more than doubled within the -same period. All in all, it is a remarkable achievement. Not the least index of its popularity is the fact that none of the rival political parties has attacked Governor Munoz Marin on the essential outlines of his innovations. No one can read the literature of the nineteen-thirties on the Puerto Rican problem and compare it with the invigorating climate of ambition and hope prevailing today without an acute awareness of the magnitude of the change that has been fashioned. Some features of this change present special interest. To begin with, the high quality of the new governing class of administrators thrown up by this little New Deal exhibits in a remarkable way the elements of the ideal public servant: competence, incorruptibility, a readiness to embrace innovation, rapid adaptation to the unexpected, and a real enthusiasm for perfection. They combine
2Teodoro Moscoso, Ciclo de Conferencias. Administracionde Fomento Economico del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (San Juan, 1954), mimeo. 'Puerto Rican Public Papers of R. G. Tugwell (San Juan: Governmentof Puerto Rico Printing Division, 1945), pp. 337-338.
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a healthy respect for American technical skill with a fierce passion for Puerto Rico and an eager impatience to improve its living standards. In part, they are the outcome of the foresight of former Governor Tugwell and his associates in encouraging young Puerto Ricans to go up to the best American universities; young leaders like Ramon Colon Torres, Rafael Pico, and Teodoro Moscoso are all American graduates. They are, too, a surprisingly young set of men; the average age of the seven state secretaries and thirty-seven or so agency heads in the Government as a whole is forty-six. These men have the push, the sense of direction, the passion to get things done which every civil-service machine must have if it is to be a positive rather than a negative organization. Such is the case whatever the field of their activity: the promotion of the tourist industry, adult education in the rural areas, experimental work in the rum industry, a diversified agricultural program, the reorganization of the insular marketing system, the creation de novo of an adequate statistical survey of national resources. Furthermore,the leaders have been helped by the peculiarities of the Puerto Rican machinery of government where the legislative branch has always been a weak element with a membership which tends, overwhelmingly, to be recruited from local political "bosses," wealthy pa;trones, and labor leaders who know little of the sophisticated complexity of modern government. University graduates tend to move into administration rather than into legislative politics. Most of the important legislation emanates from the Office of the Governor and from the executive departments. The administrators have come from the outside rather than from legislative-political sources, with the consequence that they are administrative technicians whose authority, backed by the immense prestige of the Governor, is sufficient to make them the main stars of the program. It is true that local political influence is often powerful enough to enable a local mayor, for example, to influence the regional distribution of a new factory. But that influence is offset by the fact that the Government party, like all the insular parties, is so highly centralized and effectively disciplined that any serious revolt against its program is almost impossible. The fact that only recently, when a legislative member of the party could be refused permission by the Governor to abstain from voting on a Government bill, he felt comrpelled to resign his legislative seat is an interesting index of the
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un-American character of insular party organization. In the same fashion, the Governor controls a party with a heavy legislative majority; of a total of ninety-six senators and representatives, there are seventy Popular members. Accordingly, despite an intensely active political atmosphere, the Puerto Rican experiment has bieen dominated by the planner to a degree that would be quite impossible in the American democracy. The system has obvious weaknesses, of course; at the moment there is no apparent candidate to step into the Governor's shoes as a gifted master of the "great game of politics." Even so, it has been of enormous advantage for the planners to have been able to work with a machinery of government wherein a legislative-executive unity imposed by a coimmon and strong party membershiphas offset the crippling effects of the separation of powers doctrine. It would not be too much to say that no underdeveloped area undertaking any serious rehabilitation could afford the dangerousluxury of that doctrine. For the Popular program has been a planned program. In 1940, it would have been easy for a reform movement to have attended merely to surface social reforms or even to have exploited the pathetic sterility of anti-Americanprejudice. But from the beginning the Popular leadership recognized that the necessary foundation of any worthwhile change lay in the secret of enlarged productivity. Hence the Governor's dictum that "Justice can distribute, what there is, but it cannot distribute what has not been produced." In terms of machinery, it has meant the establishment olf agencies like the Central Planning Board. In terms of purpose, it has meant a conscious emphasis upon the ideal of public service to the islandhome. Puerto Rican nationalism has a peculiarly poetic quality which seems capable of evoking quite extraordinary sacrifice of private self. Whereas in Washington since the New Deal's decline there has been a serious drift away frojmpublic service, the life of the public servant in San Juan is still attractive enough to, recruit the best talent, even to the point of robbing the University of some of its teachers. In part, of course, other reasons are present: private industry cannot yet offer the financial rewards of government appointment; and the latter, in turn, has a much higher social prestige than that of the American public service. Furthermorelife in San Juan offers the emoluments of urban gentility, always at a high premium in a changing "backward'" area. In any case, the sense of
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public service is impressive. Consider, for instance, planners like Teodoro Moscoso, who learned a social conscience in earlier work in the Ponce Housing Authority, and the dynamic vigor of the West Indian hurricane who is Antonio Colorado; figures like the young Dean Muinoz-Amatoof the College of Social Sciences and Chancellor Benitez of the University; above all, the figure of the Governor himself. He has all of the ckarisma of personality capable of moving the average Puerto Rican (who is Latin enough in psychology to respond to the tradition of personalismo in politics) to an affectionate loyalty, and a democratic sense, acquired in a long continental residence, capable of resisting the temptations of caudillismo. He aptly fits Bagehot's remark that "A constitutional statesman must sympathize in the ideas of the many." In the present climate of American politics, it is doubtful if a politician who was once a socialist and still retains deep sympathy for the social aspirations of labor (he could remind the American Federation of Labor convention of 1954 that he started his piolitical career oiver thirty years before under the leadership of the old socialist Santiago Iglesias, the father of the Puerto Rican labor movement) could become a state governor; and that he has been a poet in his time would be an even more damning handicapi. It is furthermore doubtful that an American state administrationcould undertake the bold program of ptlanning he has undertaken-and survive the ordeal. Certain cultural and psychological traits olf Puerto Rican character concededly encourage public policies of such quasi-collectivist overtones. The native radical literature is full of a sad regret for the passivity of the individual Puerto Rican, for the fact that colonialism has produced, in Geigel Polanco's phrase, a multitude deep in ignorance rather than a people alerted to its rights.4 The passivity enables a central government to set up a large planning bureaucracy without the opposition which such a move would breed in American state politics. Again, the absence of any strong tradition of local self-government,neglected both by Spain and America, encourages the localities to look to the insular capital for innovations. Finally, the opposition parties have been too much obsessed with the sterile debate on political status to make themselves effective critics of the Popular program. It is symptomatic that the
'Vicente Geigel Polanco, El Despertar de un Pueblo (San Juan: Biblioteca de Autores Puertorriqueiios 1942), p. 33.
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most critical battle on this score has been offered the Government by an American construction firm over differences concerning taxexemption and building subsidies. Yet the final worth of the whole program is the worth of the leadership that conceived it and carried it through despite the opposition, at the beginning, of the banks, the press, the Chamber of Commerce, the sugar interests. If the figure of Muinoz dominates the island's politics, it is not because the gubernatorial office is more akin to the Presidency than to a state governorship but because no other leader has yet emerged to match his stature. He has been the main architect of the changes since 1940. Just as the names of Luis Mun-ozRivera and Jose Celso Barbosa are linked with the transition of Puerto Rico from Spanish to American dependency, so will the name of Munoz be linked with the transition of the island from a backward agrarian society to an agricultural-industrialsociety coming to terms with modern technology. II Yet the Populares have only started a revolution. They have by no means completed it. The final impact of the forces they have unleashed upon Puerto Rican morals and manners cannot yet be fully foreseen. Machine technology engineers cultural change unlike any other factor, save perhaps war. It is not surprising, therefore, that much of the contemporaryPuerto Rican debate should be preoccupied with this cultural change and all that it implies. Just fifty years have passed since the most famous of all Puerto Rican leaders wrote that the social problem is without doubit more important than all other problems in Puerto Rico.5 The statement is even more pregnant with truth today as the changes wrought by Americanization and industrialization work their will. Indeed, this issue may well come to replace the older issues of status; for whereas the latter has been, historically, the darling of the intelligentsia, the issue of social change, by its very nature, goes deep into the daily experience of the ordinary man. The report of his experience will reflect the influence more and more. To begin with, we must note the limits of the Popular achievement. Despite the early social radicalism of the Popular leaders
'Luis Mufioz Rivera, Obras Completas (Madrid: Editorial Puerto Rico, 1920), Vol. III, p. 82.
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their work, especially since 1946, has been essentially conservative in its fundamentals. Few will deny the boldness of a program including the purchase of corporation sugar lands, the dissolution of company villages, the end of forecloisures,all of them reforms that account for the continued support the Government enjoys from the cane-workers. Yet the reforms have been nurtured within the framework of a social philosophy taking for granted the perpetuation of a welfare-capitalism along American lines. The earlier program of governmental ownership and administration of industrial enterprises has been replaced by the current system of encouragement of private capital investment, ostensibly for reasons of managerial incapacity. Yet in the long run, such incapacity is only a matter of training; and the other reasons advanced certainly do not sound very persuasive.6 It is far more likely that nationalizationwas abandoned in order to gain the "confidence"of continental investors suspicious of anything smacking of socialism. Nationalization, in fact, was never really given a proper change to prove itself. The government-owned "proportional-profitfarms," especially in the sugar areas, have been run by a managerial class of mayordomos lacking any socially constructive idealogy, suspicious of worker-participation in management, unexcited by technical experimentation. The insular culture-study undertaken by Dr. Julian Steward and his associates found that the social atmosphere of the farms was not really different from that of the American-ownedsugar plantations on the south coast and that any new attitudes concerning workerparticipation in management and policy-making were conspicuously absent.7 In turn, the whole industrialization program has been orientated towards a careful cultivation of mainland capital, with a judicious tenderness for its prejudices. As described by Mr. Moscoso, the promotional activities for enticing businessmen to the island, however necessary, reveal an almost desperate anxiety to assure them that Puerto Rico is a "respectable"economy; and the continuous entertainment of such a clientele in the luxurious atmosphere of the Caribe-Hilton hotel is bound, for all of the social consciousness of the government leadership, to predispose them to listen
8Moscoso,op. cit., III, 9-11. 7RobertA. Mannersand Julian H. Steward, "The CulturalStudy of ContemporarySocieties: Puerto Rico," The AmericanJournal of Sociology, LIX, No. 2 (September,1953), 123-130.
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more readily to the voice of foreign capital than to, that of native labor.8 The consequent conservatism of temper can bie seen in a number of ways: first, in the failure to draw the insular labor forces into any sort of real participation in the economic and industrial program (to give them, in the Economic Development Administration, for example, any adequate consultative or representational function); second, in the move in public policy away from the very real effort of the early years to attack the social question to the safer preoccupationsof constitution-makingalong orthodox American lines; third, in the shifting elements of the social composition of the Partido Popular Democratico... (If the Government has lost some support from labor since 1946, it has gained new support among the commercial middle class, whose new wealth stems from the enormous federal expenditures of the war period and who see in the slogans of political independence a threat to the continuation of those expenditures and to their own economic welfare. During the dock strikes of 1954, there were not critics wanting who insisted that the intervention of the Governmentwas undertaken in the interests of American shipping companies quite capable of conceding the wage-increases demanded by the maritime unions.)9 Finally, the conservative temper can be seen in the effort to adjust to the more conservative views reigning in Washington since 1952, for Puerto Rico is in many ways still governed by Congressionalcommittees the memberships of which are recruited on principles that have nothing to do with either interest in or knowledg* of the Puerto Rican problem. To the degree, indeed, that the insular officialdom is reluctant to sever the informal political relationships with Washington fashioned during the Tugwell governorship, there will continue to be a psychological atmosphere in which very little will b!edone that might displease the prejudices of the federal capital. After all, dependence upon a dominant foreign power is not merely a matter of formal po-liticalsubordination. It can be equally a matter of half-conscious adjustments to a balance of power whose springs are secret and rarely publicly acknowledged. If Disraeli was right to say that the key to India was in London, it is not altogether untrue to say, despite the enormous volume of sales-talk that has
8Moscoso, op. cit., V, 3-8. 9El Mundo (San Juan, Puerto Rico), July 26, 1954.
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come out of San Juan since 1952, that the key to Puerto Rico is still in Washington. The Government party has invested deeply in the industrialization program. Yet it is no discredit to the courage and hop,e that have gone into its launching to emphasize its essentially fragile character. The industries already established have been basically secondary in type, with a heavy concentration upon the textile, cement, clothing, and assembly fields. The Government, perforce competing here with the southern mainland states, has had to accept what comes, with the result that the industries attracted have come from those already stabilized or indeed declining. Even more dangerous, these industries have come in response to long-range taxexemptions and low wages in the insular task-force. Certainly the tax-exemptionscannot remain permanently without serious injustices emerging in the field of public finance; as for the low wages, clearly they are dependent upon the readiness of labor to accept an inelastic level of reward. The debate over insular acceptance of the federal minimum wage-law dramatizes the difficulties. It is even openly admitted that low wages, in combination with a large labor force, constitute the most important factor in the appeal to the mainland investor.10 Furthermore, it is admitted that the early project of nationalization was given up, among other reasons, because such enterprises, by paying higher wages than private concerns, would produce a dangerous increase in the insular wagestructure.11 So long as this view prevails, it will place a heavy premium upon a docile working-class prepared to accept the growth of marginalindustries paying low wage-levels. All this, of course, is not to deny the very real increase in working-class living standards since 1940. Rather, it is to, question the justice of the emerging pattern of distribution of shares in the national income between the various groups of the economy. Proportionately speaking, the larger share of the new wealth is going to the new growing professional-managerialmiddle class, together with the profits flowing to absentee ownership still in the sugar industry. If unchecked, such a process might well produce in Puerto Rico an industrial revolution based, as in Japan and India in recent decades, upon low wage-standards for workers and the enrichment
'?Moscoso, op. cit., I, 11. "Ibid., III, 9-10.
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of a small manufacturing class. It is of note, here, that the taxstructure of the economy favors the upper-income group. Despite the fact that between 1940 and 1953 the insular net income rose from 228 million dollars to some 960 million dollars, taxes paid to the insular Government and local municipalities remained at the low figure of 13 per cent of that total, compared to a figure of 23 per cent in the United States and 31 per cent in Great Britain.32 Tax exemption is not a deserved concession to the capital investor. If he is an American, tax-exemption encourageshim to leave the social costs of enterprise to be looked after by the local government.If he is a Puerto Rican, his notorious conservatismin risk-enterpriseentitles him to no privilege at all. The Maccoby and Fielder study of local upper-income habits reveals that people in that category prefer the unproductive habits of expanding their own small businesses or investing in land or real estate or encouraging the widespread weakness of consumer-indebtedness,rather than engaging in more adventuresome enterprise.13 So long as the regime can rely upon mainland capital and savings for continued investment, this failure to tap the home capital-saving resources may present no dangers. Yet it could have serious consequences in the event of economic trouble on the mainland. There is much to be said for a bolder government-investmentprogram, financed in part by a more progressive tax policy, to build up defense-mechanismsagainst such contingencies. But that awaits, in turn, a radicalism not yet evident in the officialdom. It is quite possible, indeed, that growing industrialization may slowly transform the elements of the local political scene. By commencing that program, the Populares have given birth to a volume of great expectations on the part of the masses which may well become at some time a serious challenge to their leadership. A generation ago, Munoz could start his new movement by a lengthy campaign among the poor of the rural highlands. Today, with mechanization slowly depopulating the land and industry drawing the agregados to the expanding coastal cities, a new party, if it springs from anywhere, will almost certainly spring from the urban masses. And there is room, and need, for such a party. Puerto Rican
`Ibid., II, 12-13. "3Eleanor E. Maccoby and Frances Fielder, Saving among Upper-income Families in Puerto Rico (San Juan: University of Puerto Rico Press, 1953), pp. 70-72.
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dynasties like the Ferres, the Roigs, and the Serralles still dominate much of the insular economy. Despite the lyrical assertions of glib observers like Mr. Stuart Chase to the effect that the Puerto Rican experiment is a "new dimension" of social effort between all island groups - labor, capital, government- it is, rather, an alliance of government and business with labor remaining a minor and weak third element. To take only a single example, note the weakness of labor representation in the insular legislature. The total membership of the bicameral body is ninety-six. Of those, thirty-two are lawyers, seventeen are farmers, twenty-eight are from the business and professional classes, six are teachers, three are journalists, one is a student, and one is a cab-driver. Of the eight trade-union leaders, most are the type of small labor "boss" of a local or regional "machine." Clearly labor has far to go before it can speak with its own genuine voice in the national counsels. It may not wish to raise that voice so long as the flow of economic benefits continues without interruption. But once the flow declines, or once an awareness of social inequality is felt, the existing political parties will have to satisfy new demands or, if they fail, see new rival movements emerge. Of the Populares, it must be said that although the leader's personal sympiathieswith the masses is unimpeachable, a long tenure in office has converted toio many of its top-ranking members into rather smug bureaucrats exercising a benevolent paternalism over the people (the people, in turn, being regarded,as, for example, the "movies" of the San Juan Community Division project illustrate, as "good" and "simple" individuals to be guided into the paths of communal democracy by their "educated" leaders). The attitude is almost inescapable in an underdeveloped area, and especially in an area where the Spanish tradition of personal authority in social and economic relationshipshas left its mark upon the communalpsychology. Even so, ithere is a distinct feeling that the self-righteousness of the Populares is becoming a little unbearable and that too many of them have become overly comfortable in authority. The Independentistas, on the other hand, are handicapped by a variegated which makes it difficult to fashion a program acceptable membtership to all. As a party they rely chiefly upon the urban middle class, carrying effectively, first, in the large cities and, secondly, in highland communities like San Sebastian, Cidra, and Quebridillas,where
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small independent farm operators are still prevalent. The party leadership, however, is composed too narrowly of profesores, abogados, and doctores who, as a class, lean towards legalistic talk about status rather than to the social question. The Estadistas, of course, make statehood their central preoccupation. They are strong in socially conservative cities like Ponce; and that the island's leading industrialist, Luis Ferre, is an important leader indicates that they are unlikely to embrace radical social change. Finally, the old Socialist Party is now not much more than a remnant in mourning for its lost leader, Santiago Iglesias. Unless any of these groups moves to the left, the Puerto Rican peasant and worker may well construct a new movement within the next decade or so. For there is a certain logic about industrialization in "backward" areas encouraging that possibility. It sets loose, first, a powerful stream of new and impfatientconsumer-demand, sustained further, in Puerto Rico, by the intimacy with the American capitalism. For despite the fact that Puerto Ricans are, ethnically, a Caribbean folk, it is to Americanizationthat they passionately turn. It is only necessary to read the startling figures of their recent consumption-expenditures, especially in fields like household goods, automobiles, medical expenses, and clothing, to realize the enormous magnitude of those consumer expectations.14 In the second place, industrialization, by its concentration of rootless masses into urban centers, generates conditions of incipient social and political explosion, conditions modified for Puerto Rico only by an unlimited entry into the stateside cities. Clearly, the main task of any Governmentin San Juan in the next generation will be to construct a solid foundation of capital productivity capable of holding up the superstructureof rising consumer demands. To be so capable, it will have to be something more than its present self, a local job-making technique dangerously dependent upon matters such as tax-exemption and large wage-differentials in favor of Puerto Rican investment that can only be transitory weapons. The pattern of insular politics will undoubtedly develop around the answers provided to that problem. It would be unfair, of course, not to recognize the very realJ dilemma confronting the insular leadership on this issue. As Pro"Gross Product of Puerto Rico, 1947-1953 (San Juan: Bureau of Economics and Statistics, Puerto Rico Planning Board, 1954), Table III, Consumption Expenditures.
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fessor Nurkse has shown in his Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries, the primary requisite of successful industrialization in underdeveloped areas is the presence of largescale capital for ready investment. For Puerto Rico, naturally, the search for American capital has provided in its turn an assurance of ready, even high, profits to the investor. That assurance, however, severely limits the freedom of the regime to undertake a welfare policy founded, among other things, upon progressive taxation. To adopt a bold welfare policy, it is felt, would be to risk the withdrawal of foreign capital, and it is obvious that the Popular Government has decided not to take that risk. The implications of the decision are far-reaching; as one administratorhas implied, if there is a choice finally to be made between a welfare policy and a development policy, the latter will prevail.'5 The end-result could be nothing less than a new style of colonialism, less crude than the old, but a reality nonetheless; for it would mean that public policy would be shaped to meet the prejudices of mainland capital. So long as the American connection remains, and so long as the resources of insular capitalization are insufficient, there can be no, ready way out of the dilemma. Yet two general considerations may be emphasized here. First: programs like the Colombo Plan point to methods of technical aid and capital investment whereby the world's poorer countries may receive help from the richer ones in such a way that, public authorities being made responsible for administratioln,the influence of the private foreign capitalist may be somewhat curbed. Second: the Puerto Rican future in the long run will have to be related tol her natural economic environment in the Caribbean-Middle American states system as a whole, instead of being considered within the exclusive frameworkof the Americancommercial system. In that way, less emphasis might be placed upon a forced industrialization with its mercantilist overtones than upon the Puerto Rican contribution, as an economy, to the larger Caribbean and Latin-American area. Clearly enough, these are long-term considerations. The first dep,ends in large part upon the readiness of the United States to lend her immense capital wealth to genuine international assistance pro1"Teodoro Moscoso, "Industrial Development in Puerto Rico," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 285 (January, 1953), p. 67.
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grams. Here the outlook is not encouraging, for the original purposes of the Point Four programhave become absorbed into a global military-assistance program: instead of being a democratic, peopleto-people experiment in mutual aid, it has become overwhelmingly, as Indo-China, German rearmament,the American-Spanishaccord, and the artificial extension of the NATO system all show, a weapon employed to sustain an American strategic imperialism.16 The second consideration, likewise, awaits the day when the organized rehabilitation of the Southern-Americanhemispheric economy takes place within a frameworkof regional planning and in the real interests of the Latin masses. That would mean, frankly, a socialist framework, for only in such a way could the continental economic change escape remaining something controlled by absentee corporations, army cliques, oil adventurers,and grasping politicos. In such a framework, perhaps, resides the ultimate goal of the Puerto Rican economy. It might seem utopian to anticipate the Industrial Revolution in Latin America. Yet the next half-century is sure to witness that change, as much in the South American continent tomorrow as in the Asian continent today. It will be the task of Puerto Rican statesmanship within the same period to think within the large terms of such things to come. III The impact of modern industry upon rural communities,whether it be aluminum in Canada or copper in Central Africa or factories in Puerto Rico, raises fascinating problems. In Puerto Rico, of course, that impact has been only a small part of the longer and larger influence of the American culture dating back to 1898, so that it becomes difficult to separate one from the other. Both have worked, be it so, to subject the local parallelogram of custom and manner and belief to stresses and strains noticeable at every turn. What Pedreira has termed the "tropical laissez-faire" of the insular society has been challenged by the galvanizing push, the social dynamics, the passion for technology of the American competitive spirit. The political relationship between the United States and the
16Thetransformationof the Point Four programafter 1952 is catalogued in a series of articles by Paul P. Kennedyin The New York Times, Sept. 24, 25, and 26, 1953.
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island may be, as the Populares assert, one of compact between equals. Culturally, however, it has been and remains one of American penetration: of the zealous imposition by the conquering power of its own standards and of a Puerto Rican response at once receptive and hostile, eager to embrace the material consequences of the change, yet bitter and resentful about much of the moral-cultural upheaval worked inexorably by the advent of machine-technology. The changes have affected all aspects of life. Professor Hansen's volume, Transformation, although impossibly adulatory in tone, is a good enough record of the impact of these changes, which go far to make the island a cross-cultural laboratory of no mean significance. In all directions a rich variety of evidence faces the cultural anthropologist. Developing mechanization in the sugar industry has congregated landless farm-workers into the slums of Ponce, Arecibo, and San Juan. The social costs of such migration are incalculable: it means slums, family dislocation (although crimes of physical assault, apart from those of sexual jealousy natural in a society of male chauvinism, are very rare and when they occur are "front-page news"), and prostitution, the latter organized along social class lines, the high-class girl modelling herself along conceivably American lines, her lower-class counterpart still retaining much of the colorful spontaneity of her rural proletarian background. Yet the passion for the city is quite understandable. For the proletarian the country means poverty, the city a bright release from its tyranny. If the consequent overurbanizationis to be controlled, it will demand a planned policy of industrial location and agricultural rehabilitation, the first running counter, be it noted, to the preference of American managers and their families for the urban ambiente. For the insular working class, as for all classes, the national game is baseball. Their hero is a star player like Ruben Gomez; and the foreign visitors who excite them are not dignitaries like Mayor Wagner or ex-President Betancourt of Venezuela but Willie Mays on a winter tour with the team of the Santurce Cangrejeros. As agricultural workers, many work as fruitpickers in the States and thereby reinforce their American predilections (I have met them as far west as Lansing, Michigan, so that the insular Government can hardly succeed in persuading many of them to emigrate to uncivilized frontier sections in Costa Rica or
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Venezuela. Perry Como is as well-known to them as Bobby Capo. They see American "movies," although language difficulties here make the exotically romantic Mexican and Spanish products their main fare. Many of them prefer to be "artful dodgers," loterry-ticket vendors, or individualist cab-drivers rather than to accept the discipline of the factory-system. Hence Puerto Rico has few of a skilled working-class with middle-class standards, but industrial advance and technical education are certain to fill that gap, in time. Industrialization has also produced a growing middle class, most of them of moderate income and desperately eager to parade their new social aspirations. They model their lives on the standards of their American counterparts. They read the popular American magazines, copy institutions like the Elks and Rotary clubs, buy automobiles and television sets; and if they have not yet developed the middle-browhabit of the book-of-the-monthclubs, it is because they still retain an active fiesta tradition to consume their leisure time. Their class-consciousnessis markedly acute, for many of them have left a lower social background they are eager to forget. As many of them, too, have gone through the University as a mechanism of social promotion, the utilitarian tone of that institution, despite much Latin rhetoric about educational idealism, is even more pronouncedthan in the Americancollege. Finally, Puerto Rico has an upper middle class of well-to-do elements, jealous of their cultura hispanica and not particularly receptive to American penetration. Yet even in this class penetration is noticeable. Their children attend the more socially exclusive American private schools. The social pages of El Mundo are full of their activities. Their younger set constitute the membershipof the university fraternities and sororities, although thosieare still far from the vulgar magnificence of the American variety. Their campus queen elections, for instance, are a dreadful disappointment after those of UCLA and Ohio State. It is even permissible for one of their number to enter the Miss Universe contest of San Diego. If the old criollista racial pride survives, it survives in this context. It is not in their social circles so much as in those of Government politics that entry will be made for Negro leaders like Ramos Antonini. Their spending habits have become somewhat "democratized"; a Puerto Rican wealthy man who in the last century would have established a family library today is more likely to buy a baseball team or, as with Cobian, a string of movie-theaters.
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It is true, of course, that in sexual mores the old modesty-pattern of Latin-Americanlife, itself the outcome of the subjection of women in Hispanic society, holds out strongly against American liberalism. The career woman emerges but slowly, and the bachelor girl is practically unknown. Much of the nice ritual of an older courtship pattern remains. To attend a "movie" unescorted, to dance with a man other than one's husband, to entertain an abstract idea - these still, for many Puerto Rican wives, are acts tantamount to marital infidelity. Even the habit of European travel seems to do little to break down the cult of pre-marital virginity inculcated by a bleak Catholic puritanism; here, Puerto Ricans are almost English in their ability to travel abroad without suffering the indignities of mental enlargement. Although divorce is now acceptable, the divorced woman still suffers such a real social penalty that not infrequently she moves to New York in search of a more tolerant climate of opinion. Even so, the University is effectively coeducational; the mayor of San Juan is a famous feminine figure; the social custom of the chaperone is in rapliddecline; and it is not unknown for a middle-class girl to engage in the outrageously radical practice of smoking in public. Specialist studies on these facets of Puerto Rican culture are numerous, as the publications of the University Social Sciences Research Center make evident. It is more exciting, however, to get away from the quaint prejudice of moral neutrality oin the part of the social scientists and to relate the data to the debate about the ultimate implications of the acculturation process. The initial response of Puerto Ricans after 1898 was to welcome the American rcgime because it brought with it, so it was believed, a practical sense of democracy that had been known only to a few informed persons, and even then merely as abstract truths unrelated to daily experience.17 The result was a pathetically earnest pursuit of Americanization. Americanism for Puerto Ricans, it was urged, meant transplanting American institutions to Puerto Rico and cultivating in Puerto Ricans the tradition of Washington and Lincoln, Marshall, and Lougfellow.'s But that urging invoked the literary theory rather than the pungent reality of American civilization.
"Juan B. Soto, Causas y Consecuencias(San Juan, 1922), p. 248. "8Emiliodel Toro y Cuebas, Patria (San Juan: Biblioteca de Autores Puertorriquefios, 1950), pp. 133-134.
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Seeing the reality in practice, the later generation has begun to qualify the earlier enthusiasm. It has resented the American arrogance towards the past, the drive towards assimilation so central to the American dream. (It took nearly fifty years to abolish the compulsory use of English as a teaching instrument in the local schools, but the result, on one side, is a distressing insufficiency in the sophisticated use of Spanish and on the other, a deep psychological resistance against English.) The present generation also resents an American life-style in which the gifts of organization, industry, perseverance, and technique flourish, but where, in de Tocqueville's term, the love of the beautiful is sacrificed to the cultivation of the useful. By 1930, educated Puerto Ricans, men like Jose Padin and Antonio Pedreira, were beginning to question this cultural imperialism, to seek a definition of Puerto Rican "character" and "tradition," and ways of preserving them against complete erosion. More latterly, the debate has centered around the issue of "Westernization" versus puertorriquenismoand certainly will become more wide-spread as industrialization sharpens the outlines of change. Certain aspects of the controversy merit particular attention. It has been charged that the champions of the native culture are schizophrenic intellectuals seeking to evoke a local past that cannot be recovered, a past where the poor, although hungry, always respected their social betters.19 Undoubtedly, the charge is exaggerated and might be a libel on the Puerto Rican intelligentsia as a class.20 Yet such a tone of social reaction has certainly been present in some form of the literature, particularly in Pedreira's Insularismo, for instance, the most complete statement of the cul*tural-nationalistposition. Starting off with an almost racialist thesis of insular history, Pedreira laments the decline of the fermentacion patriotica under the American suzerainty. He does not deny the material achievements of the regime but insists that they have helped to engineer the moral degradation of the native society. In an almost Burkian phrase, he says that the proper dimension of culture is one not of length or breadth, but of depth.21 By such a
"9Thomas Hayes, El Mundo,December14, 1954. 20AntonioJ. Colorado, El Imparcial (San Juan, Puerto Rico, December 19, 1954). "Antonio S. Pedreira, Insularismo: Ensayos de InterpretacionPuertor1942), p. 99. requetia (San Juan: Biblioteca de Autores Puertorriquenios
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criterion, alien rule has sapped the sources of Puerto Rican collective action. There are more schools and offices, but also more crimes, more suicides, more personal dishonesty. American influence has centralized social life and destroyed, save in towns like Ponce, the older tradition of local recreation. Under the fierce onslaught of the American tempo, the arts of dance and conversation decline. The springs of public service dry up; now the country has no figures of public men to carry on the great tradition of the Puerto Rican patriots. Above all, the "sordid utilitarianism" of the American way has worked a pitiable intellectual vulgarization. Demnocracy means the sovereignty of the mediocre man and the decline of the intelligentsia. It rewards the inept and punishes the wise. It even vulgarizes politics; for to be a politician yesterday was a patriotic duty; today it is a mere profession. Yet all this, Pedreira concludes, is merely a historical moment of transition in the insular life. The of the unique task, in that moment, is to undertake a "reaffirmation" from the even values separating Puerto Rico from the United States, Spanish of the musical score rich the in for rest of Latin America; note.22 special tradition, Puerto Rico sustains her own The complaint holds much of real merit. Yet, in the last resort, it is a pathetic complaint, since it looks back to an imaginary past and describes an unreal present. Pedreira is committing the mistake, common to all Platonically conservative thought, of making a priori assumptions about democracy and of then seeking to force the facts into the straitjacket of the assumptions. He thereby mistakes the degradation of the democratic dogma for the dogma itself. For what has shaped Puerto Rico since 1898 is not the pure democratic spirit but, quite a different thing, the capitalist democratic spirit of America. The "sordid utilitarianism" he dislikes is not the fruit of democracy but of the American acquisitive society. In reality, his is the protest of a cultured mind against the acquisitive ethic and, even more, against the social rule of the masses which liberalism, as a creed, has always distrusted. In a suggestive sentence, he writes that if Ortega y Gasset had been a Puerto Rican, he would have written Tke Revolt of the Masses twenty-five years earlier.23 The remark reveals how too many Puerto Rican minds have been seduced by that too-famous book to embrace a social theory that converts any mass political movement into the road to
22Ibid., p. 200. ""Ibid.,p. 104.
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the totalitarian society; nor is it clear how the adulation of the Puerto Rican "people" is to be reconciled with that attitude. Nor are the remedies P'edreiraoffers at all based upon a sense of the realities. Puerto Rican "reaffirmation"is to be a "reaffirmation" of traditional insular activities like dancing, horse-riding, acting, speaking the native forms of Splanish. Yet it would be difficult to identify any of them as an expression of the local "collective personality," and some of them are of a leisure-class character not readily available to the masses. Nor are too many of the phenomena of the contemporary scene uniquely Puerto Rican. The native danzas are cultivated by the upper class only; native crafts have largely been replaced by the mass-productionsales of the new department stores; and all the really popular songs and dancesthe bolero, the mambo, the merengue- originate from the outer Latin-Americanworld. Moreover, it is difficult to see by what precise methods these "native" phenomena are to! be protected against change and decay, especially when Pedreira himself admits that the spirit of change is not so much the result of American rule as it is of the very nature of the whole twentieth century. Similar difficulties reside in the arguments of contemporary publicists, clearly influenced by Pedreira, that Puerto Rico must reassert her own tradition against the spirit of occidentalismo exciusivista. One notes the growth of an official effort to "protect" the "culture" of the native farmer and peasant. One notes at the same time, however, a half-recognition of the utopianism of the effort, that mere law cannot protect custom; a realization also that when practically every small community in the island-society contains a World War Two veteran or people who have family contacts with New York, the worker-type of the old picturesque tradition of the Patria Chica no longer really exists; that the development of industrialization encourages the depreciation of the countryside and of its social types; that "reaffirmation" in many ways is a reactionary affectation of the intelligentsia. Nor is that sort of cultivated nostalgia without its own dangers. When a local music critic is attacked because he neglects to note the work of native composers; or it is argued that the University press should publish a Puerto Rican novelist like Zeno Gandia because it has already published Dostoevski; or the classical theory of higher education is undermined by insisting that the social function of the university is to reflect, as a creature of the state, the "culture" of the Puerto Rican "people," one begins to
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wonder whether "reaffirmation," despite all disavowal, might not become a narrow and antiquarian cultural nationalism, and particularly when much of the argument is conducted by its champions with bad taste and ill-feeling against its opponents.24 For it would be tragic if the dogma of "reaffirmation"were to lead into sterile pathways for Puerto Rico. Too much of this dogma is the growth of -a colonial psychology. Too much of it is expressed in vague and empty rhetoric. In a more general way, a book like Jose Coll Cuchi's Pensamientos, is a good example of the defects of that style in Puerto Rican letters. Too much of the book takes for granted the doubtful thesis of national personality. Having admitted this weakness, however, one may readily feel the justice of mu.ch of the argument. Puerto Rican attributes have been built up in a colonial atmosphere, where the mass-media have portrayed to the native population a culture which is not their own. Progress has been identified with metropolitan life, biackwardness with the native rural tradition; so that what Professor Frankel has termed the "silent disease" of colonial mass-uprootednesshas been allowed to take place without plan or purpose.25 The American ignorance of and contempt for the Latin-American world has been taken over so uncritically by the Puerto Rican intellectual that it is utterly right to complain that so far the latter has not produced a first-class history of Puerto Rico.26 Because the Puerto Rican child has been taught American rather than local history, American leader-figures are better known to him than the great men of his own culture; yet culturally mature Puerto Ricans are justifiably proud of their nineteenth century tradition in fields like poetry, music, science, and politics. Such a tragic depreciation oif the in individnative culture leads to a correspondingself-depreciation: uals. The pathology of Mr. Forster's A Passage to India destroys talent and intelligence that could have been placed to more creative use. Bitterness, inferiority, chauvinism become the elements of too many lives; the life of a gifted spirit like Albizu Campos is a tragic monument to these elements in Puerto Rico politics. The
24Antonio J. Colorado, "Puerto Rico y la Cultura Occidental," El Imparcial, October 31, 1954; "La Autonomia Universitaria," El Imparcial, January 23, 1955; also issues of January 4 and January 5, 1955; and Miguel Melendez Munoz, "La Cultura del Jibaro," El Imparcial, January 23, 1955. 2"S. Herbert Frankel, The Economic Impact on Under-developed Societies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. 177. 26Antonio J. Colorado, El Imparcial, October 31, 1954.
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inevitable virus of anti-Americanism described in Mr. Brown's Dynamite on Our Doorstep is fed in turn by too many American types: the Southerner with his race-prejudice, the small businessman eager for profit, the "arty-crafty" set idealizing the native life, the Army wife dominating the servant girls. If Puerto Ricans seem to exaggerate their importance - if Jose Ferrer, makes a, "movie" or Judge Romany amuses an American party convention or Miss Rita Moreno has trouble with the Los Angeles police, it becomes "front-page newss"in the island newspapers the reaction is an understandable one after a fifty-year period during which Puerto Rican values and views have had little chance to be heard. No one will condone the paranoic quality of the Nationalist Party; yet the utter selflessness that a psychopathic nationalism can exact from its devotees has a sacrificial character few of us are ready to give to the causes we claim to serve. Puerto Ricans are a proud and sensitive people. The United States bears a terrible responsibility for driving those qualities only too often into channels of hostility and inferiority. The blame may easily be exaggerated. Despite all its shortcomings, the American imperialism has been far more benevolent than that of Britain in India or that of France in North Africa. Blame there is, nevertheless; and it should be remembered when the defects of the Puerto Rican patriot are cited by his critics. One final point remains on this issue. However the status issue is resolved, the American impact is bound to continue. The real question concerns not so much the impact as the quality of the impact. It is distressing, consequently, that the worst rather than the best components of the American way of life tend to be exported by Americans and copied by Puerto Ricans. The insular middle class has taken over the American habits of conspicuous consumptionthe large automobile, the luxury house, the expensive television set, and the masses, too, embrace a scheme of social values in which material possessions become identified with moral worth. The American "movies" portray the Hollywood of such romance that the moving picture has replaced religion as the opiate of the people. The Puerto Rican working-class home is likely to be filled with the cheap vulgarity of popular Catholic art, the middle-class home with equal vulgarity of gaudy bric-a-brac. The jukebox lends louder expression to the naturally loud Puerto Rican. Puerto Ricans are natural conformists, and American pressure is certain to encourage
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this trait, already evident in the acceptance of those American theories of education so deadly to the growth of genuine individuality. Furthermore, Puerto Ricans feel a contempt for manual labor and a snobbish adulation of the "white-collar"job characteristic of all developing "backward" countries; an American social ethic in which manual labor is respectable only if it is part of a hobby will not discourage those prejudices. There is a public religion of the machine, continually being reinforced by the American worship of "know-how," with all its unsatisfying artistic results. Nor are these traits excusable by the argument that our "masssociety" makes such debased standards inevitable. Unfortunately, these standards are largely the outcome of the greed and bad taste of our amusement executives who, as Mr. Seldes has shown in his The Great Audience, have used their ownership of mass-communications for the most vulgar of purposes. Nor can it be argued that a democratic government can do nothing about this degradation of the democratic dogma. In his study of Radio, Television and Society, Mr. Seipmann has revealed how much of the failure of government regulation in the United States has been due, not to any inherent necessity of failure, but to the unwillingness of timid administrators to challenge in any real way the dismal standards set by the radio and television sponsors. Our fashionable theories of "mass-society" fail to see that the habits they deplore are the result, not of democracy, but of capitalist democracy. In "backward" areas, moreover, the power of government is not inhibited, as it is in the United States, by the social respectability of private enterprise engendered by the "folklore of capitalism." Government in Puerto Rico has at once a great responsibility and a great opportunity in this field. It can do much, as the University already does much in its cultural activities, to present the best of the American culture to its people. It can do it, moreover, by cultivating an already existing resistance on the part of the Puerto Rican psychology against a complete acceptance of the ethics of a business society. For it is of interest to note that in their hero-worship Puerto Ricans tend to acclaim an operatic star like Graciela Rivera or an actor like Jose Ferrer or a musician like Sanroma rather than their business leaders. It is a healthy and civilized preference. If Puerto Rican leadership accepts this responsibility, it may perhaps manage to give some concreteness to its
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present claim that the island-society is a bridge between the two seminal cultures of the American hemisphere. IV From the very beginning the heart of the Puerto Rican political debate has been the question of political status. Every issue of the national experience has been bedevilled by its ramifications. The political parties have grown up, primarily, around its discussions. It has consumed energy and ability to the neglect of the more pressing social and economic questions. It is true, of course, that the Popular party has announced the end of colonial status with the passage of the 1952 Constitution; it is also true that the United States Governmenthas been able to obitainUnited Nations approval for the claim that, with the passage of that constitution, Puerto Rico has been removed from the category of non-self-governing peoples. Those interpretations, however, are challenged by both opposition parties and by Puerto Rican patriotism. Like love, it is too fierce a thing to be satisfied with the nice subtleties of legal definition. Even if the issue be dead, it refuses to lie down. To begin with, there can bie little doubt about the difficulties that go with the twin ideals of statehood and independence. Either would mean economic sacrifices of no mean proportions. Independence would mean the lapse of the present massive federal expenditures in the island, the loss of federal excise taxes and of grants-in-aid to public works projects. That the federal government gives out to -Puerto Ricans some three times the total payments disbursed by the insular Government in old age benefits, veterans' pensions, and civilian pensions is evidence of the large volume of personal vested interests tied up with continued connection with the metropolitan country.27 Even more important: withdrawal from the protection of the American tariff-market would truly play havoc with the insular sugar industry, whose uneconomic production-costs are now insulated from the competitive challenge of Cuban and southern United States sugar by tariff pro,tection. Clearly, independence would require an economic policy of greater technical efficiency at home and a search for non-Americanmarkets abroad. Neither requirement would be impossible of attainment,
of Puerto Rico (San Juan: The 27TheNet Income of the Commonwealth
Economic Development Administration, March, 1953), Table 9.
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but there is little to show at the moment that either could be reached rapidly enough to offset the immediate disadvantages of separation from the mainland economy. Statehood would be a less precarious venture, but it would mean the loss of vital revenues as well as a new heavy burden of federal income-tax payment for Puerto-Rican citizens, both of which would seriously hamper the insular government in its spending policies. Added to these considerationsare others of an equally stubborn nature. There is the ineluctable fact that, concerning statehood, the federal Congress has never been ready at any time to bring the island into the Union. The opinion of Governor Yager before the Holuse Committee on Insular Affairs in 1916 that Puerto Ricans were a "tropical" people lacking the "stamina" and "initiative" to adjust to conditions of American life28 has always been a sufficiently widespread animus in Congressional and public opinion to discourage statehood sentiment. The dismal story of Hawaiian and Alaskan claims for statehood shows that unless a territory can muster powerful pressure in Washington its ambitions will be destroyed on the rocks of Congressional conservatism and economic vested interests; and Puerto Rican Harlem has a long way to go before it builds up, like the Irish and the Italians, before them, a powerful political "machine." Independence, on the other hand, is in many ways a charming anachronismof political idealism that has failed to accommodate itself to the conditions of the age. It proposes the ideal of sovereignty at a time when, in any real sense, sovereignty belongs only to the great powers. Formal independence, however ready Washington might be to grant it, would be a spurious and unreal thing. It would not diminish tlie American real as distinct from formal power. The episodes of Guatemala and British Guiana are proof enough that no small power, formally free or not, can conduct policies distasteful to the dominant power-forces of its geographic area. All in all, Independentista mentality works in an atmosphere of fantasy. It is ridiculous to speak of the San Juan regime as if it were the Trujillo regime in Santo Domingo or the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. It is equally ridiculous to talk in terms of American "oppression." No fair observerer could agree that the Puerto Rican moral climate has not improved since 1898; certainly,
28A Civil Governmentfor Porto Rico, Hearings before the Committee on Insular Affairs, House of Representatives, 64th Cong., first sess. on HR 8501 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1916), pp. 33-34.
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there is little evidence in today's insular life of the general paralysis of spirit described by patriots like Hostos and Baldorioty as characteristic of the Spanish period.29 Nor can the Independent nostalgia for a free Spanish tradition go without some comment, for it is ironic that the libertarian ideology they embrace owes little to Spain and far more to the principles of 1789, as they were restated by the Puerto Rican liberals of the nineteenth century like Belvis and Betances and Acosta. Yet, when all this has been said, the nostalgia has the power still to make the Independentistas the largest opposition party. The task of its leadership is to try to accommodate its ideal to the conditions of a new age. Until they accomplish that task, their ideal will remain, in ex-Governor Tugwell's phrase, a cruel and delusive one. What all this means is that Puerto Rico confronts a condition and not a theory. Insular political leadership has tended ever since 1900 to overestimate Congressionalreadiness to innovate. The history of Congressional policy, on the contrary, has been one of inertia implemented by the third-rate politicians American Presidents have tended to appoint as Puerto Rican Governors: the Mont Reilly governorshipunder the Harding regime was perhaps only the worst of many. Congress from the start acted on the prejudices of Senator Beveridge's remark that to give self-rule to Puerto Rico and the Philippines would be like giving a typewriter to an Eskimo and telling him to publish one of the great dailies of the world. As a result of this prejudice, Congress took some nineteen years to give Puerto Rico an elective Senate and some forty-nine years to give it an elective governorship. It is the special genius of Governor MuinozMarin to have recognized the implications of the record. If there is little Puerto Rican enthusiasm for independence and little federal enthusiasm for statehood, some middle ground has to be discovered that meets the approbation of both sides. That middle ground is the concept of commonwealth status promulgated by the new Constitution of 1952, Puerto Rico being conceived as a selfgoverning state in contractual association with the United States, enjoying the economic and defense advantages stemming from a common American citizenship without at the same time being colonially subject to an authority she does not willingly and by con29Citedin Lidio Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico (Siglo XIX). Universidadde Puerto Tumo I: 1808-1868(San Juan: Editorial Universitaria, Rico, 1952), p. 666.
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Rico: A
645
stitutional process accept. This, it is urged, is the answer, final in its substantive elements, to the eternal vexation of the status question. Despite a reassuring empiricism about the attitude, grave doubts still lurk in the mind of the skeptical observer. It is perhaps natural that the architects of the "solution" should acclaim their doctrine of "association" as a new invention in American constitutional practice. It looks, frankly, more like a necessity that has been converted into a virtue. Nor is it easy to accept the thesis that commonwealth status is a terminus towards which Puerto Ricans have been moving during fifty years of a preparatoryperiod in the school of democratic training;30 for that thesis is to impose a purposive pattern upon an experience that in reality has been full of confusion and bitterness on the Puerto Rican side and neglect and ignorance on the American. For all of the ingenious arguments in defense of the new status, there are all too many aspects of it that are but dimly illuminated. It is doubtful whether the thesis of compact basic to the official viewpoint is as valid as its proponents assume. As the Indian delegate in the United Nations discussion on Puerto Rico pointed out, there can be a genuine compact between two countries only on a basis of equality, and Puerto Rico was by no means free of external pressure when the compact of 1952 was ratified. Under any form characterized by such pressure, an association of states is not a grant of real sovereignty but rather a method of camouflaging the relics of a colonial past.3' Mrs. Memon further objected to the loose manner in which terms like "commonwealth"and "federation"have been used by San Juan and Washington. For "commonwealth," in its traditional English meaning, refers to the organized relationship of the member-statesof the British Commonwealth of Nations, whereas Puerto Rico still lacks too many of the insignia of sovereignty to be compared with Australia or India. The objection is well taken. Critics of the idea of Dominion status like Dr. Barbosa long ago pointed out the enormous pretension of imagining that Puerto Rico could be compared with the economic and demographicstrength of countries like
80Antonio Fernos-Isern, "El Plebiscito es Fiambre . . .," El Imparcial, Janu-
ary 9, 1955. GeneralAssembly,8th Session,APV.459.27 31UnitedNations Organization, November,1953,pp. 93-94.
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Canada or Australia;32 the observation is still pertinent. One need not accept the implications of evil motive attributed to, the Government leadership by its opposition critics to accept much of the interpretation advanced by those critics of the official view of the insular political status. Puerto Rico remains in too many ways still the ward of the United States. Its economy is subject to commercial treaties and tariff legislation passed unilaterally by the Congress, which still exercises the right to control the sugar industry by means of a pro;ductionquota system Puerto Rican growers must accept. Sea and air transportationand coastal services are operated by American monopolies; the jurisdiction of federal agencies extends over many areas of policy; and the exclusive reliance upon the American market inhibits Puerto Rico in cultivating export markets in the global economy. Professor Mosk has shown in his The Industrial Revolution in Mexico how the top-heavy- reliance of the LatinAmerican agricultural economies upon the North American market has entailed a dangerous economic dependency that could have dangerous results. Puerto Rico is even more dangerously depiendent upon the health of that market. If it is urged that, on balance, Puerto Rico probably gains from these arrangements, the answer is that, even if that be so, they remain arrangements shaped by a dominant power rather than by a collaborating partner. Legally, legal procedure is set by the federal power; decisions of the local Supreme Court can be set aside by the American courts; and, apart from internal revenue laws, federal legislation of general application applies to the island despite the fact that the Puerto Rican people have no means of helping to shape such legislation apart from the weak device of a voteless Resident Commissioner in Washington. Politically, San Juan has no!control over vital realms of policy like defense and foreign relations. Her citizens are subject to militaryservice laws which they do not help to enact. It is still a matter of doubt as to whether Congress has relinquished its power to amend the local Constitution without the consent of the insular Government. As the Czechoslovakian delegate in the same General Assembly debate pointed out, it is impossible to assert that Puerto Rico exercises the rights inherent in political, economic, social, and cul32PilarBarbosa de Rosario. La Obra de Jose Celso Barbosa. Vol. IV. Orientandoal Pueblo (San Juan), p. 91.
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tural autonomy identified by the United Nations as factors necessary to a definition of full self-government.33 Those rights are indispensable to the nature of the British Commonwealth relationship. Unlike the Dominions in their relationship with Westminster, Puerto Rico would find it almost impossible to develop a foreign or a defense policy hostile or even merely neutral towards the American national interest. Nor is it enough to refer to the strategic protection that Puerto Rico thereby enjoys; Carribeanrepublics like Cuba and Haiti proceed quite well without that protection and, what is more, for all practical purposes the United States would never permit a serious strategic threat to develop toward the island, free or dependent. Few will deny the very real constitutional advances made since 1947. At the same time it is clear that since the prior consent of Congressremains necessary to any change in the insular status and since, further, the contractual arrangements of 1952 do not prevail over the laws of Congress but remain subject to them, the claim that the insular dependency upon the American power has disappeared or has even been substantially modified is an exercise in imaginative interpretation rather than a reflection of the realities. Nor is this to mistake "freedom"for a small country like Puerto Rico with a splendid independenceavailable only to the big powers. It is to insist, rather, that Puerto Rico is not so much a "new state" as a society still subordinate in law and in fact to the American sovereign. A very natural pride in the gains made has become an exaggeration about their implications. That the Popular leaders are already requesting larger freedom from Washington is a tacit admission of that truth. When, indeed, a Government spokesman demands that Puerto Rico should be permitted its own currency system, its own mails and immigrationcontrols, and its own separate diplomatic representation abroad and in the United Nations agencies, he is in effect both confessing to the felt inadequacies of the present relationships and indulging in a dangerous optimism about Congressional readiness to make such concessions. For such concessions, if made, would amount to a separatist program. It is absurd to speak of a common citizenship and at the same time seek to restrict the relationships that flow from citizenship: the criticism comes from a conservative source.34
33United Nations Organization, op. cit., A/C . 4/SR. November 7, 1953, p. 12. 34El Mundo, July 19, 1954.
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Finally, note should be taken of the recent opinion of the federal court in San Juan to the effect that Puerto Rico cannot lay claim to a dual citizenship within the American connection. The opinion strikes at the heart of the concept of "mutual association," since it denies that Puerto Rico is a sovereignty capable of conferring citizenship upon its subjects and converts local citizenship into what one critic has termed a mere "tourist bag." The opinion is all the more dramatic because it exhibits the full power that the, federal judiciary exercises over Puerto Rico; nor is it the first time, as the early Insular cases and Balzac v. People of Puerto Rico show, in which the federal courts have destroyed exaggerated hopes about the nature of Congressional legislation. This status issue, indeed, has not been solved but merely postponed. There is as much uncertainty about the constitutional definition of Puerto Rico as there ever has been. The most that can be said with certitude is that in one way or another all the local political parties feel keenly the defects of their present state, for they have the delicate sensibilities of all people shaped by colonialism. They would echo the sentence of Luis Mu-noz Rivera that Puerto Rico, a martyr of a Caesar, would perish in the circus; but it would perish without saluting Caesar. Nevertheless, they have a long way to go before the wonderful pride of that sentence mirrors the objective reality of their collective life. V The heart of a society in the last instance is the quality of the moral and emotional experience it offers to its members. Much of Puerto Rican life, it is true, is crude, unreflective, unsophisticated. The national vigor is a vigor of action rather than thought. Politics only too frequently is a matter of vicious gossip and personal rivalry rather than a competition of principles. A very real philistinism pervades much of the life of arts and letters. Too lavish is the admiration of things American, too great the readiness to turn aside from Latin America and the Latin-American heritage. Too much of what passes for "democracy" is bureaucratized command over ordinary people; too much of what is invoked as "honor" is an escape-mechanismfor those who resent the American scheme of things even as they embrace its consequences. Because they still
1955]
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Rico: A
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lack any real self-confidence, Puerto Ricans either affect an exaggerated Americanismor retreat into a sterile antipathy to the American way. The neo-fascist overtones of the Nationalist Party in its heyday in the nineteen-thirties reveal how the feeling may be channelled into violently anti-democratic patterns, into pathetic dead ends like Albizu's wild dream of a black Republic that would drive the Americans into the sea. "We are uncertain of ourselves," one of the characters of Mr. Brown's Dynamite on Our Doorstep remarks; "so we cling to the memory of past grandeur. We are still unassimilated and think of ourselves as Spaniards or Negroes, as grandees or jibaros, masters or rebellious slaves. Few of us have been able to put the threads of our culture together and see the possibility of bright new designs." Yet, as Burke observed, every people must have some compensation for its slavery. For all its imperfections, Puerto Rico is the most democratic society of the non-British Caribbean and, Uruguay perhaps excepted, of all Latin America. There is a pride and a massive exhilaration about its life that our older societies seem in some way to have lost. The Caribbean climate induces in the European visitor the delighted enchantment Kingsley infused into his Westward Ho. The island itself has about it a wonderful beauty that has made the amateur poet a common figure in its social life; sea and mountain, town and countryside meet together in a quite beautiful compactness. Its small inland townis have a genuine variety that contrasts happily with the uniformity of the towns of the great American mid-west sub-culture. Puerto Ricans, as a people, have a natural charm and a great deal of simple dignity. The absence of any really deeply-felt racial antagonisms makes for a social ease among its ethnic groups quite absent in the United States. Religion, as with most Latin Catholics, is a matter of culture rather than of belief. The very tinyness of the island creates a prevalent sense of intimate community that possesses a genuine charm. To live in it for any time is to realize in solme fashion what Pericles meant by the eulogy of his Athens and to understand the passion for his Geneva that tortured Rousseau throug;houtall his lonely wanderings. The island has a strong sense of the past; San Juan was an old city of nearly a hundred years when Jamestown was founded. It is pleasant to live in a society where the sense of community is somewhat less obviously bogus than it is in modern
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middle-class Suburbia; where even in office and factory the religion of productivity does not destroy a real instinct for relaxation Americans simply do not have; where the means of life, so blatantly prodigal in America, have not become transformed by the poison of competitive acquisition into the purposes of life. Nor is it unimportant for the aficionado of sexual enterprise that the Puerto Rican woman, at her best, is of a quite astonishing beauty. The Englishwoman, only too frequently, is not much more than an apology for sex, her American counterpart, like Henry James's figure of Daisy Miller, a spoiled and calculating opportunist. The claim for equality of the sexes in our Anglo-Americanworld has become too much confused with a claim for identity. Hence the genuine masculinity and femininity in the Latin-American societies seems almost to add a new dimension to the pursuit of happiness. Puerto Rico, altogether, may not be the Promised Land: but it could be the threshold, offering, as it were, a Pisgah-view of that final delight.

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PUERTO RICO: A CASE-STUDY OF CHANGE IN AN UNDERDEVELOPED AREA

R. DOOLEY ONCE OBSERVED that

CASE STUDY OF CHANGE

THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS

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CHANGE PUERTORico: A CASE STUDY OiV-

CASE STUDY OF CHANGE

ary 9, 1955. GeneralAssembly,8th Session,APV.459.27 31UnitedNations Organization, November,1953,pp. 93-94.

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CASE STUDY OF CHANGE

THE JOURNAL OF' POLITICS

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