Osvaldo Santiago > Status Update

The Puerto Rican leadership did not display great vision, either. Their petty squabbles, posturing, strange political alliances, and flitting from one position to the next lessened the essential dignity of their demands. There’s was a just cause, but poorly pleaded. The main parties were able to speak with one voice on occasion, but most of the time they were at each other’s throat‘s.

He thus explained the birth of the Americanization policy: “Like most countries, we were convinced that we had the best form of government ever devised in the world and that our customs and habits were the most advisable… The logical consequence, therefore, was that we felt that we could do no higher and nobler work than to model these other people on ourselves.“

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was the first governor of Puerto Rico who publicized in the United States the intolerable living conditions prevalent in Puerto Rico and strongly attacked the United States colonial policy, of which his own father had been one of the principal architects...He was the first American governor of Puerto Rico who applied himself to learn Spanish until he was able to communicate with the people...

Porto Rico is at once the perfect example of what economic imperialism does for a country and of the attitude of the imperialist towards that country. Ragged, hungry, diseased Porto Rico has just been examined by the President of the United States and has been given his official approval. Its land owned by absentee capital; its people in the depths of deprivation, it has been told to help itself.

The Diffies thus summarized the situation in 1931: the problem of the United States in Porto Rico… Resolves itself into one question: can we govern the island for its best interest? As long as the United States government has the ultimate word in policies the island will be governed for the good of those interests considered “American.”

The poverty of the majority of Puerto Rico’s million and a half people who lacked adequate housing, food, clothing, work, education, and medical services contrasted with that of the flourishing American sugar companies established on the island. In 1899 the sugar cane industry used 15% of the land available for cultivation. In 1930 that percentage had increased to 44%.

The Duffies brought out the bleakness of the economic picture. Unemployment in 1899 had amounted to 17%, 20 years later it was 20%, and in 1926 well before the Depression, it had soared to 30.2%. In the tobacco factories men earned $10 a week, and the women, four. In the sugar industry, salaries fluctuated between $.40 and two dollars a day. The per capita annual income in 1930 was $230.

In a powerful book, Puerto Rico: A Broken pledge, published in 1931, two close observers of the local scene, Bailey W. Diffie and Justine Diffie, pointed out that the United States had failed to fulfill its promise of political and economic betterment for the island.

In such a climate, none of the proposals for reform made by the Alianza, and even those endorsed by the two main parties, could reasonably prosper. The conditions were being laid down for the tragic events of the thirties.

President Calvin Coolidge was firmly against any such reforms. He thought that Puerto Rico was enjoying freedoms for which it was not yet prepared, and that the Treaty of Paris made no promises of any kind to Puerto Rico. He deeply resented, moreover, the charge that Puerto Rico was a colony of the United States, living as it was, according to his lights, under such a liberal government charger as the Jones Act.