Trump’s failure to respond with alacrity or enthusiasm to Puerto Rico rescue efforts is not new. Past U.S. presidents have also failed the island. Let’s explore some of that history.
A fascinating piece of history that certainly is not taught in U.S. classrooms was the enraged open letter to President Truman penned by William Z. Foster, who was a labor leader, socialist, and communist.
THE CRIME OF El Fanguito: An Open Letter to President Truman (full text)
Mr. President:
El Fanguito, as you may know, is located in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It is the worst of the several huge slums festering in the body of the Puerto Rican capital, and it is perhaps the most terrible destitution area in the whole western world. El Fanguito, meaning in English, “The Mudhole,” is the very symbol of human misery, exploitation and despair. It is also, no less, the symbol of American colonial domination over Puerto Rico.
Mr. President, I am addressing this letter to you because, as President of the United States, you exercise an almost dictatorial control over Puerto Rico, which is a colony of the United States. You have the power to veto whatever legislation you please of the Insular Legislature, even though it is passed by unanimous action. With your great powers you can also heavily influence the Legislature to pass such laws as you may desire. Moreover, you have control over the expenditure of huge funds in Puerto Rico and can go far toward shaping the economic life of that island. You are, therefore, largely responsible for the continuance, if not the origin, of such slums as El Fanguito.
El Fanguito, together with the other local slums of San Juan, embrace an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 people. This is equal to about one-half of the total population of the capital city itself. These terrifying slums are primarily of American making. The worst of them, the social cancer, El Fanguito, has, with malignant vitality, been rapidly spreading its deadly poison far and wide during the past 15 years. These vast slums are the inevitable result of the ruthless exploitation of Puerto Rico by the American sugar trust, aided by reactionary Washington politicians.
He goes on to chide Truman’s indifference:
When you were in San Juan a few weeks back, Mr. President, the route to your comfortable hotel in the mountains took you right past one edge of El Fanguito. But you made no personal investigation of the frightful conditions prevailing there. No doubt your yes-men told you that conditions in El Fanguito had been much exaggerated by observers and that, anyway, everything possible was being done to remedy the situation. So you passed on, and in your public speech you cynically told the Puerto Rican people that “Too often we had our attention directed towards Puerto Rico’s problems.” You also poured forth slick flatteries about the freedom, progress, and prosperity of the Puerto Rican people under American colonial rule. Small wonder, then, that your reception in San Juan was so frigid and that the people gave you such a cold shoulder.
He condemns robbery by the sugar barons:
When the United States took over Puerto Rico from the Spanish in 1898 there were 60,000 land owners, but now there are less than 5,000. The big American sugar corporations have grabbed the land and are exploiting the people from their offices in New York. Unemployment in Puerto Rico, in the cities and on the land, reaches very high levels, ranging from 40 per cent to 75 per cent in the various categories of workers. This huge jobless rate is because of the one-crop sugar-system.’ and because of the anti-industrialization policies that American exploiters have fastened upon the island.
Wages in Puerto Rico, Mr. President, under American pressure average only about one-third as high as they do in New York. But living necessities cost fully as much m Puerto Rico as in the United States, while everything of a luxury or semi-luxury character costs very much more. The Puerto Rican workers “solve” their high cost of living problems by subsisting chiefly on rice, beans, and dried codfish, by living in horrible slum shacks built of waste lumber and sheet iron, by denying themselves and their families proper education, relaxation, and medical attention, and by dying 10 to 15 years before their time. It is these underpaid workers of land and factory, a constant prey to devastating unemployment, who, in the main, fill to overflowing the monstrous slums of El Fanguito.
His description of the conditions in El Fanguito is chilling:
The whole place is an indescribable litter of garbage, tin cans, and other refuse. From it there exudes an all-pervading, sickening stench. But worst of all is the periodic flooding of the place by the filth-laden tide. To escape this disgusting deluge most of the shacks have been set up a foot or two above the ground, but many not so raised are repeatedly flooded by the unspeakable mess. Crazy foot bridges lead from one hovel to another.
Children, mostly naked, with no toys and with no place to play, wade about in the filthy water. At one place we visited, a big city sewer belched its foul contents into an open canal, whence the stinking flood was from time to time swept back into the squatters’ village by the rising tide. As we gazed upon this shocking sight two little naked girls about three years old, waded waist deep in the filthy water pouring from the sewer’s mouth. The unfortunate children are growing up mostly untaught and illiterate, along with their other miseries and dangers.
He speaks against the hypocrisy of American “democracy.”
American reactionaries make much of the fact that the Puerto Ricans, after long struggle, were grudgingly granted American citizenship (in 1917) and the right to elect their own Governor (in 1947). But the plain reality is that, hedged about as they are by a colonial type of legal restrictions, the Puerto Rican people now have less political freedom than they had under the Spanish charter of 1897, instituted one year before the American occupation. Our American Declaration of Independence might well have been written to express the complaints and aspirations of Puerto Rico, except that the grievances of the Puerto Rican people are more numerous, more deep-cutting, and more devastating than were those of the- American colonists against King George III.
In defense of Wall Street’s war plans of imperialist domination of the world, American reactionaries-tongue in cheek – are expressing very great concern about establishing democracy and prosperity in Greece, Korea, the Balkans, China and many other countries. Why not, then, grant this democracy and prosperity to Puerto Rico, right at our own front doorstep? The Voice of America radio is blaring forth to the world about the glories of American capitalism. I suggest, therefore, Mr. President, that the story of Puerto ‘Rico be added to its program.
Years later, the shanty towns of San Juan became the dissertation work of anthropologist Helen Icken Safa, which was published as The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico: A study in development and inequality.
This is a study of the shantytown of 'Los Peloteros' (a pseudonym) located in the San Juan metropolitan area of Puerto Rico. Safa first studied 'Los Peloteros' in 1959-1960 and there are data on the physical description of the shantytown, methods of earning a living, family and kinship, and community solidarity and extra-community relations of that period. During the 1960s the community was demolished under an urban renewal program, and the people relocated. Safa returned in 1969 and conducted a follow-up study on the consequences of relocation. Safa found that a considerable amount of change had taken place, not only in improved housing, but also in attitudes toward urbanization, politics, and inter-generational relationships. The work concludes with a discussion entitled 'Development, Inequality, and Proletarian Consciousness in Puerto Rico', examining Puerto Rican economic structure, views on poverty, migration as a means of siphoning off discontent, colonialism and economic development, and means of enhancing class consciousness among the Puerto Rican people.
When in grad school, this book was one of my academic introductions to Puerto Rico’s urban poverty. The other book, whose “culture of poverty” theory is debated to this day, was anthropologist Oscar Lewis’ La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty--San Juan and New York. Set in fictitious “La Esmerelda,” the ethnography actually takes place in La Perla.
By the time I was in grad school, I was already familiar with areas of San Juan where tourists were unwelcome. As a member of the Young Lords Party Central Committee, I flew to Puerto Rico with Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman and Gloria Gonzales in 1970, where we met with leaders of the Puerto Rican left and Independence movements and were taken on a tour. We requested to go into La Perla and the young leftist driving us, an upper-class student leader, blanched, clearly frightened because of its reputation as the home to crime and drugs. We insisted, so he drove us down the steep access road, and when we got down there we leaped out of the car. He rolled up the windows and locked the door. Residents came out, curious, especially about Yoruba’s and my afro-hairdos. We told them who we were, and several young men had heard of “Los Young Lords de Nueva York.” We were hugged and invited into people’s homes, and given coffee and cañita. The “danger” of La Perla was no different from our hoods in East Harlem and the South Bronx.
Years later I would return to Puerto Rico as part of an HIV/AIDS intervention study, which was conducted in poor urban areas similar to La Perla, in housing projects and barrios like La Colectora, which had high rates of injection drug use. I’ll be writing about health challenges for Puerto Rico in a future piece.
The powers that be would love to remove the residents of La Perla, since it is prime seafront real estate. Fusion/Univision’s Jorge Ramos visited the area and produced an in-depth report:
According to news reports, Hurricane Maria has devastated La Perla.
For decades, tourists visiting Puerto Rico had avoided San Juan’s La Perla neighborhood, long reputed to be a hotbed of crime and drugs. In recent years, residents of the low-income neighborhood had worked hard to change its image — and they got a huge boost when Puerto Rican artists Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee chose to film the music video for their hit song “Despacito” there in 2016. In the video, the camera pans over brightly colored homes stacked closely together alongside the rocky beach, walls tagged with vibrant graffiti, and streets filled with people dancing. Since its release, La Perla has become a popular tourist destination. But when Hurricane Maria swept across the island on Wednesday, it dealt the area a heavy blow. Many of the brilliantly-colored buildings have been torn apart, leaving only hints of what once was — a bright yellow wall, jumbled in a mess of debris; deep red and royal blue foundations standing amid downed power lines and clusters of wooden beams.
I’ve been following news of La Perla on Twitter and was elated to see chef José Andrés delivering food and musician Luis Fonsi raising funds.
This is the view most tourists remember of El Condado and its beaches.
My Condado memories from the early 1970s are of Puerto Rican leftist college students protesting to gain access to the beaches in a “beaches for the people” movement. They succeeded in getting access laws passed, but there are still problems, which are monitored here. In recent years the Playas P'al Pueblo (Beaches for the People) movement has been protesting and pushing back against hotel encroachment.
In late June of this year, an infamous Puerto Rican activist known as “Tito Kayak” climbed to the top of a flagpole on the north side of the the island’s capitol building. In trademark style, Kayak removed the American flag that stood tall over Old San Juan’s Plaza de la Democracia, and unfurled a white sheet scrawled with the text “beaches belong to the people” in its place.
Inside the capitol, at that very instant, the Puerto Rican congress was discussing the passage of Project #2853: a bill that if signed into law would open the door to the privatization of Puerto Rico’s waterfronts. Authored by Ángel Matos of the pro-commonwealth Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), Project #2853 was viewed by environmental activists as the culmination of an ongoing process of privatization that had been chipping away at Puerto Rico’s constitutionally-protected public waterfront. And with Project #2853, the battle for the future of the island’s beaches finally came to a head.
If you examine the history of Condado, you will see some familiar names of U. S. elites
Condado began its process of urbanization in 1908 by two American industrialists, Hernan and Sosthenes, also known as the Behn Brothers. The quarter became a typical streetcar suburb to the traditional urban center of Old San Juan. Its growth and development was mostly shaped by a transportation influenced suburbanization developed on a grid plan.
The neighborhood experienced an economic boom in the first decades of the 20th century when some of the wealthiest families built their homes in the area. The Vanderbilts built a summer home in 1919 which today has been converted into the luxurious Condado Vanderbilt Hotel. The Behn Brothers also built their home in Condado and to their memory, Dos Hermanos Bridge (or "Two Brothers Bridge" in English) is named in their honor as founders of Puerto Rico Telephone and the new electric tramway line that linked the county to Old San Juan.
The 1950s-60s era saw another boom in Condado, with the rapid industrialization of Puerto Rico, this flamboyant locale was becoming a popular tourist destination. Large hotels like the Caribe Hilton Hotel and La Concha Resort were built as part of a government sponsorship program under the Operation Bootstrap brand.
Future stories will cover statehood, independence vs. status quo, health issues, HIV and harm reduction, Puerto Rican foods, crafts and music, religion and spirituality, the Puerto Rican diaspora, and more.
And don’t forget to support Puerto Rico. It is going to be a long, slow, recovery.
Pa’lante
