War Against All Puerto Ricans Quotes

“According to the Yankees owning one person makes you a scoundrel, but owning a nation makes you a colonial benefactor.”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“For decades the doctors in Barceloneta sterilized Puerto Rican women without their knowledge or consent. Even if told about la operación (the operation), the women were not informed that it was irreversible and permanent. Over 20,000 women were sterilized in this one town.4 This scenario was repeated throughout Puerto Rico until—at its high point—one-third of the women on the island had been sterilized and Puerto Rico had the highest incidence of female sterilization in the world.5 This campaign of sterilization stemmed from a growing concern in the United States about “inferior races” and the declining “purity” of Anglo-Saxon bloodlines.”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“Then a strange thing happened. A US Senator named Millard Tydings finally introduced a bill that would give Puerto Ricans their independence. Every politician on the island supported it—except Luis. Throughout the 1940s, he repeatedly opposed the Tydings independence bill. He even traveled to Washington in 1943 and 1945 to lobby against it, saying that Puerto Rico “was not ready for self-government.”54”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“Separated from everyone, in the fifteenth dungeon, was a small man with fiery brown eyes and wet towels wrapped around his head. For several days his legs had been black, and his gums were bleeding. Fifty-nine years old and exhausted beyond measure, he paced silently up and down, always the same five steps, back and forth. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . an interminable shuffle between the wall and door of his cell. He had no work, no books, nothing to write on. And so he walked. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . His dungeon was next door to La Fortaleza, the governor’s mansion in Old San Juan, less than two hundred feet away. The governor had been his friend and had even voted for him for the Puerto Rican legislature in 1932. This didn’t help much now. The governor had ordered his arrest. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Life had turned him into a pendulum; it had all been mathematically worked out. This shuttle back and forth in his cell comprised his entire universe. He had no other choice. His transformation into a living corpse suited his captors perfectly. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Fourteen hours of walking: to master this art of endless movement, he’d learned to keep his head down, hands behind his back, stepping neither too fast nor too slow, every stride the same length. He’d also learned to chew tobacco and smear the nicotined saliva on his face and neck to keep the mosquitoes away. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . The heat was so stifling, he needed to take off his clothes, but he couldn’t. He wrapped even more towels around his head and looked up as the guard’s shadow hit the wall. He felt like an animal in a pit, watched by the hunter who had just ensnared him. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Far away, he could hear the ocean breaking on the rocks of San Juan’s harbor and the screams of demented inmates as they cried and howled in the quarantine gallery. A tropical rain splashed the iron roof nearly every day. The dungeons dripped with a stifling humidity that saturated everything, and mosquitoes invaded during every rainfall. Green mold crept along the cracks of his cell, and scarab beetles marched single file, along the mold lines, and into his bathroom bucket. The murderer started screaming. The lunatic in dungeon seven had flung his own feces over the ceiling rail. It landed in dungeon five and frightened the Puerto Rico Upland gecko. The murderer, of course, was threatening to kill the lunatic. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . The man started walking again. It was his only world. The grass had grown thick over the grave of his youth. He was no longer a human being, no longer a man. Prison had entered him, and he had become the prison. He fought this feeling every day. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . He was a lawyer, journalist, chemical engineer, and president of the Nationalist Party. He was the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard College and Harvard Law School and spoke six languages. He had served as a first lieutenant in World War I and led a company of two hundred men. He had served as president of the Cosmopolitan Club at Harvard and helped Éamon de Valera draft the constitution of the Free State of Ireland.5 One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . He would spend twenty-five years in prison—many of them in this dungeon, in the belly of La Princesa. He walked back and forth for decades, with wet towels wrapped around his head. The guards all laughed, declared him insane, and called him El Rey de las Toallas. The King of the Towels. His name was Pedro Albizu Campos.”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“It seemed that owning one man made you a scoundrel, but owning an entire nation made you a colonial benefactor.”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“On February 22, 1899, the New York Times ran an article headlined “Americanizing Puerto Rico,” describing Puerto Ricans as “uneducated, simple-minded and harmless people who are only interested in wine, women, music and dancing.”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, “One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence, at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“American hurricane relief was strange. The United States sent no money. Instead, the following year, it outlawed all Puerto Rican currency and declared the island’s peso, with a global value equal to the US dollar, to be worth only sixty American cents.7 Every Puerto Rican lost 40 percent of his or her savings overnight.8 Then, in 1901, a colonial land tax known as the Hollander Bill forced many small farmers to mortgage their lands with US banks.9”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“When he spoke about US banks owning Puerto Ricans’ land, the US Navy controlling their borders, the US Congress writing their laws, and US companies paying them starvation wages in the sugar cane fields, everyone knew what he was talking about.”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“When an entire island is laughing at its colonial governor, it is safe to say that he has outlived his usefulness. It is impossible to subjugate people who are laughing at you.54”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“The national perception was clear: Puerto Ricans were ignorant, uncivilized, morally bankrupt, and utterly incapable of self-rule. The US would protect them, tame their savagery, manage their property, and deliver them from four hundred years of solitude.”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“Eugenio María de Hostos, the great Puerto Rican educator, summed it up as follows: “How sad and overwhelming and shameful it is to see [Puerto Rico] go from owner to owner without ever having been her own master, and to see her pass from sovereignty to sovereignty without ever ruling herself.”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“On April 30, 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Reily, a former assistant postmaster in Kansas City, governor of Puerto Rico as a political payoff. Reily took his oath of office in Kansas City, then attended to “personal business” for another two and a half months before finally showing up for work on July 30.24 By that time, he had already announced to the island press that (1) he was “the boss now,” (2) the island must become a US state, (3) any Puerto Rican who opposed statehood was a professional agitator, (4) there were thousands of abandoned children in Puerto Rico, and (5) the governorship of Puerto Rico was “the best appointment that President Harding could award” because its salary and “perquisites” would total $54,000 a year.25 Just a few hours after disembarking, the assistant postmaster marched into San Juan’s Municipal Theater and uncorked one of the most reviled inaugural speeches in Puerto Rican history. He announced that there was “no room on this island for any flag other than the Stars and Stripes. So long as Old Glory waves over the United States, it will continue to wave over Puerto Rico.” He then pledged to fire anyone who lacked “Americanism.” He promised to make “English, the language of Washington, Lincoln and Harding, the primary one in Puerto Rican schools”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“Puerto Rican flags were illegal on the island from 1948 until 1957. Even”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“Educators like Paulo Freire, as well as sociologists and historians, have studied this “civilizing” dynamic in colonial relationships: “In the case of a colony—which by its very nature is the object of exploitation by the political power—the purpose of every colonial administration is and has always been to overcome, by all possible means, the resistance of the subjugated power. To accomplish this goal requires the active control by those in power of the cultural and educational systems.”5”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“He was a lawyer, journalist, chemical engineer, and president of the Nationalist Party. He was the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard College and Harvard Law School and spoke six languages. He had served as a first lieutenant in World War I and led a company of two hundred men. He had served as president of the Cosmopolitan Club at Harvard and helped Éamon de Valera draft the constitution of the Free State of Ireland.5 One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . He would spend twenty-five years in prison—many of them in this dungeon, in the belly of La Princesa. He walked back and forth for decades, with wet towels wrapped around his head. The guards all laughed, declared him insane, and called him El Rey de las Toallas. The King of the Towels. His name was Pedro Albizu Campos.”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“He joined because he was trapped like a caged animal. He joined because a man who gets up at 4 a.m. every morning, climbs a mountain in rain or fog or killing heat, and sweats all day with mosquitoes in his mouth does not need an empire telling him how to live, which flag to wave, what language to speak, and what heroes to worship.”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“As the first civilian governor of Puerto Rico, Charles Herbert Allen used his governorship to acquire an international sugar empire and a controlling interest in the entire Puerto Rican economy. No one stopped him. Why should they? It’s only Chinatown.”
― Nelson Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“Finally, strong evidence indicates that after being condemned to life imprisonment, Albizu was irradiated until a stroke paralyzed half of his body and left him unable to speak. His only crime was to remind the American republic of its own founding principles: that every man is created equal and that government requires the consent of the governed.”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“The answer may be much simpler. It starts with an honest self-appraisal. It acknowledges the eviction of an entire people—literally and systematically—from their own land. It recognizes that predatory economics is a raging parasite that will destroy its host. It sees that Puerto Rico is a harbinger of cultural and political consequences that are imminent, global, and unavoidable. Too many people have been converted into debtors, renters, consumers, gullible voters, abused taxpayers, ill-paid laborers, and passive audiences, all for the benefit of a privileged few. The notion of floating an American way of life at the expense of the entire planet is no longer sustainable—particularly when that life consists of little more than Black Fridays, widescreen TVs, Internet chat rooms, comic book films, and corporate and political fraud. A positive future for Puerto Rico and other comparable republics will require less greed and more humility.”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“The life, torture, and death of Albizu Campos were the direct, nearly inevitable result of American foreign policy and an ongoing flaw in the American character. The broken body of Albizu throws a spotlight on the fault lines that run through our national psyche. These fault lines had long been apparent.”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“It was impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure; it would have no vitality; it would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“He walked through life with a revolution inside his head, a vision of man and woman, an island left in peace, a Garden of Eden without the cancer. But the vision was dying in a holocaust of strange science. It was burning in a man-made inferno.”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“He had no property, no position, no future, nothing except the few cubic centimeters inside his skull—but the cancer and its operatives wanted that too. If they couldn’t own it, they would destroy it with surgical precision and scientific savagery.”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“They approached Albizu with a Geiger counter that registered four to nine clicks per minute upon entering his room and fourteen clicks when close to the man himself. When they placed the probe near Albizu’s body, the needle jumped wildly, and the entire apparatus broke.”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“Vidal, a hero today, would be gone tomorrow. He was doomed to die a cipher in some vast statistical operation; the coroner would count his teeth, and the family might save some hair, but otherwise his death would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked. He knew that Vidal existed—a man of substance, flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and a strong mind—but he was still invisible to El Norte because they refused to see him. They saw only his surroundings, or themselves, or figments of their own imagination; anything and everything except Vidal.”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“As the following sequence of events makes clear, this one-page report turned the political leader of Puerto Rico into a US sock puppet.”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“A los pueblos los representan aquellos que los afirman, no quienes los niegan”.”
― Nelson A. Denis, Guerra contra todos los puertorriqueños: Revolución y terror en la colonia americana

“Hutton and the ESC advocated the elimination of ‘mental deficients,’ and of races other than ‘intelligent Anglo-Saxons.’”7 In 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled that the state of Virginia could sterilize those it thought unfit, particularly when the mother was “feeble-minded” and “promiscuous.”8 Ten years later, US Public Law 136 legalized all sterilization in Puerto Rico, even for “non-medical” reasons.9 In 1928, President Calvin Coolidge himself wrote, “We found the people of Porto Rico poor and distressed, without hope for the future, ignorant, poverty-stricken and diseased, not knowing what constitutes a free and democratic government.”10”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony

“Julio ate rice and beans, salted cod, and plantains”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony