First Written and Printed: 1958. Sponsored by the CPUSA North Club and the Section Committee of the 1st Congressional District, City of Philadelphia, Eastern Pennsylvania
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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A most brazen manifestation of this rejection of the hand clasp of solidarity with the Latin American nations under the domination of Yankee imperialism was evidenced in connection with the question of Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican national minority. Puerto Rico is the only outright colony of U.S. imperialism in Latin America (the new Constitution and Legislature are not even vested with nominal authority over Puerto Rican affairs). It is held in the most intolerable poverty, which is systematically exiling its sons and daughters to the sweat shops and fields of the mainland.
Puerto Rico is the home of a liberty-loving people with an urban and agricultural proletariat constituting its majority, a people with a heritage of more than a century of struggle for national independence. Its struggle against U.S. imperialism is closely bound up with the historic struggle of all other Latin American countries against Yankee Imperialism.
Puerto Rico is the native land of an oppressed national minority of nearly a million, concentrated in the mainland cities, particularly in New York. The composition of this national minority is 95% proletarian, and is a natural base of support for the national liberation struggles for national independence, as well as an important segment of our working class. It is a militant enemy of chauvinism in all its forms, an especial ally of the oppressed Negro people, and a base of militant participation and support of the trade union movement.
The Puerto Rican Marxist-Leninists in Puerto Rico and in New York have had to contend for years against rejection of the obligation of the C.P.U.S.A. to the cause of Puerto Rican national independence; against deliberate undermining of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory of proletarian hegemony of the national liberation movement; against a bourgeois reformist attitude towards even the militant struggle of Puerto Rican nationalists; against revival of the Browderite illusions about the “progressive” potential of American imperialism; against the opportunist passion for “respectability” in the eyes of the chauvinist-minded labor lieutenants of monopoly capital.
Such a history is reflected in the fact that today the Party among the Puerto Rican national minority on the mainland practically unanimously rejects the national leadership of our Party. This in particular, explains why at the Convention the main leadership declined to support the election[7] to the National Committee of even a single Puerto Rican, causing a Puerto Rican candidate to “lose” by only one-third of a vote. Adding insult to injury, the leadership then excluded all mention of the controversy over this question in the official Convention Proceedings. (They claim the recording machine broke down at that point of the Proceedings, but no effort was made subsequently to ask Comrades Foster, Victor, Olga, and Loman to supply their remarks in written form for inclusion in the printed Proceedings, as was done in a number of other cases of such technical difficulties. One suspects it was a “machine” with chauvinistic instincts!
Let us note in passing, that in spite of the patronizing attitudes on one hand, and the denunciations of “Latin anarchism” on the other, alternately directed at our Puerto Rican comrades; when the history of this period is written, Marxist-Leninists will record the fact that especially prominent among those who rallied for the reclaiming of our entire Party from the spoliation of revisionism, were the proletarian comrades of the Puerto Rican national minority, unwavering advocates of Puerto Rican national independence and veteran fighters for proletarian internationalism. This is an example of true proletarian internationalism by comrades of an oppressed national minority in relation to the Communist Party of the oppressor nation. The Puerto Rican comrades have by their struggles against the revisionist line of the 16th Convention earned the everlasting gratitude of every honest Communist.
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[7] At the subsequent New York State Convention, two Puerto Ricans were put in candidacy against each other to supply the quota of one Puerto Rican for the National Committee.