First Published: The Call, Vol. 5, No. 7, June 7, 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The June 6 Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City, bringing together half a million Puerto Rican people, is a show of strength and a tribute to the Puerto Rican heritage.
Faced with the recent upsurge in struggle, however, U.S. imperialism has called on its handful of supporters among the Puerto Rican population to try to make the parade a display of support for colonial rule. But no amount of U.S. manipulation can silence the growing demand for Puerto Rican independence.
Independence for Puerto Rico has been the just demand of the Puerto Rican people from the 1823 insurrection at Lares against Spain to the 1950 Jayuya uprising against the U.S.
Since imposing its colonial rule in 1898, under the guise of a “friend,” the U.S. has plundered the island and impoverished the nation’s people. More than 13% of the land has been turned into military bases. Once self-sufficient in agriculture, Puerto Rico must now import 90% of all agricultural goods.
The U.S. has also stripped the Puerto Rican people of their most basic rights, suppressing the Spanish language and Puerto Rico’s national culture, forcibly sterilizing one-third of the women of child-bearing age, and forcing many thousands of Puerto Rican youth to die in imperialism’s Korean and Indochinese wars.
U.S. corporations control about 80% of the island’s industry. Their investments, topping the one-billion mark, bring tremendous superprofits to big U.S. capitalists. But they have brought such severe unemployment and poverty to the island that more than two million Puerto Ricans have been forced to leave their homeland and migrate to the U.S.
In an effort to salvage the crisis-ridden government of U.S. lap-dog Hernandez Colon, the “Compact of Permanent Union” bill has been introduced in the U.S. Congress to break unions, wipe out minimum wage laws and cut welfare, food stamps and other relief benefits.
In recent years, there has been a powerful upsurge in the Puerto Rican workers’ and independence movements: a wave of strikes against U.S. companies, broad protests against police repression and a growing drive for independence.
The Puerto Rican independence struggle has grown strong alongside the third world movement against imperialism and the two superpowers, the U.S. and the USSR.
Today it is the Soviet Union that wears the mask of a friend, as the U.S. did in 1898, in order to add Puerto Rico to its string of satellites and neo-colonies. Those forces within the independence movement who preach reliance on the USSR or who promote illusions about this aggressive superpower, would lead the fight for independence into the arms of the social-imperialists. Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans are not battling the U.S. only to exchange one imperialist yoke for another.
Taking up arms, relying on the masses and guarding against back-door intervention by the USSR, the Puerto Rican people will certainly be able to drive the U.S. imperialists out of Puerto Rico and win genuine independence. Such a blow to imperialism will be a great victory for workers of all nationalities in the U.S.