Ben Norton speaks with Andrés González Berdecía, a senatorial candidate from the Puerto Rican Independence Party, about the November 3 election and referendum, US colonialism, the unelected neoliberal junta that controls Puerto Rico’s economy, the similarities between Republican and Democratic administrations, and why he wants his nation to be independent.

thegrayzone.com

Puerto Rico is not large enough to stand alone. We must govern it wisely and well, primarily in the interest of its own people.

–Theodore Roosevelt

Puerto Rico is dying.

Let those words sink in.

Three and a half million people are without power, water, fuel, food, and support. This isn’t some uninhabited atoll. This is where I grew up. This is where my family lives. This is my home.

And my home is dying.

I have been desperately trying to come up with the right words to express what I feel and what I think for the better part of a day. My social media has as of late provided me with a space to write my remarks, observations, and more often than not, rants about the situation on Puerto Rico. I shared my anxieties when hours, then days passed without a word from my family. I cried in silent sobs at the pictures that slowly started to come out of the island. Despair began to unite the large Puerto Rican diaspora as we comforted each other, and waited as the absolute silence became more and more unbearable.

“Have you heard from…”

“Does anyone have any information about my hometown…”

“My mom, she’s not well, I can’t reach her…”

“I can’t find my partner…”

It was only last Friday when I had proof of life from my family in my hometown of Arecibo. And it was on Sunday that I was finally able to speak to them over the phone. Speak… more like share moments of absolute joy and tears of happiness. Of feeling born again. And with that memory fresh in my mind, I sat down to write.

Nothing came except tears. I’m crying as I write this.

How can one put into words how it feels to be completely powerless as the world I’ve always known slowly turns into Hell for those that I love the most? How can one fully express in words that could convey, in any way, the overwhelming sense of constant pain, of horrible uncertainty, the fear of loss, and the fury over what is, in the end, an unnatural disaster? And how can I live with myself for not being there?

How can I explain to people that Puerto Rico, my home, my island, my heart and soul, is dying?

The fear of death is an eternal companion in these situations. So as my country slowly agonizes, would it be appropriate for me to write a eulogy for its seemingly inevitable death? Perhaps some choice words as a send-off to the oldest colony in the world?  As Donald Trump, the biggest psychopath to occupy the Oval Office so far, finally relents to growing public pressure and announces that federal funds will be made available in full to Puerto Rico, and as more aid slowly makes its way to the island, could I dare hope for a stay of its execution? Or is this just another delay in its pre-ordained death-by-empire?

President Trump’s message to Puerto Rico was clear: pay up and drop dead. The island is expected to pay its imaginary debt for the dubious “privilege” of being an imperial colony in the way it’s always done so: in blood. Wall Street’s interests have priority over securing the very survival of nearly four million people. God forbid that millionaire Wall Street bondholders suffer the horror of payment forfeiture over a minor inconvenience like Hurricane María, only the worst storm in eighty years!

The president initially denied full federal assistance to the island and refused to suspend the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, or Jones Act, that has for nearly a century strangled commerce to and from Puerto Rico. Because of this stubbornness an obviously colonial World War One-vintage piece of legal protectionism continues to choke the island as its inhabitants are left to fend for themselves. Colonialism is a self-perpetuating state of exception that thrives on crises precisely because the beneficiaries are always the colonizers and their local flunkies who maintain and benefit from the illusion of “self-governance.”

While Homeland Security steadfastly holds on to its refusal to wave the Jones Act, Herr Trump was later forced by public pressure to amend his remarks on aid, and the USNS Comfort hospital ship is now scheduled to arrive on the island in three to five days (as will our bloviating commander-in-chief himself at some point) any help received from the American imperial mainland now carries with it a stigma, a sense of being a discarded, second-hand lifeline. This is extremely revealing. It’s been over a week since Hurricane María cut a path of destruction in Puerto Rico nearly beyond the scope of living memory, a week that passed before Trump made any remarks at all. It was a week filled by hysterics over kneeling, Russia and North Korea, a week of forgetting that Puerto Rico even existed.

American colonialism is not just confined to its territories or its Native American population. A successful empire can choose to either exalt itself to its population, thereby becoming an object of national pride, or hide itself by dulling that population’s senses and intelligence, negating that it has an empire in the first place. The United States pursued the second path. Successfully, I might add. Puerto Rico’s imperial masters also relied on their own profoundly ignorant population on the mainland that, fueled by the systemic racism on which the United States is built on, and a blinding allegiance to patriotism, considered Puerto Ricans to be just another group of Hispanic vermin. To this day nearly half of Americans do not even know that Puerto Ricans are “fellow citizens”, at least in name. And make no mistake. The white supremacist regime that attacks NFL players and Black Lives Matter activists for having the nerve to protest is the same regime that established the fiscal control board, the biggest killer in Hurricane María’s wake. These things are directly related, and the fiscal control board’s austerity measures ensured that it has blood on its hands.

The United States has perfected its colonialism on the island of Puerto Rico to such a degree that when it decided to take away the island’s limited self-rule, the vaunted “commonwealth”, and instead installed a fiscal control board, it did so with the applause of many islanders. Many Puerto Ricans, conditioned by school, church, political party, and kin to accept their inferiority to the gringo as natural law, felt unfit to govern themselves. We so desired to be our masters that we welcomed punishment for engineered transgressions tailor-made by vulture capitalists in the metropole and on the island itself.

And then came María. The other killer phenomenon to approximate María’s devastation and raw power was Hurricane San Felipe II, in 1928. Yet María’s devastation attacked an island that, in many ways, was in worse shape than the relatively pre-industrial Puerto Rico of the 1920’s. Hurricane San Felipe was nature’s killer. Hurricane María, however, has only exposed colonialism’s murderous true self. There is nothing natural about this killer.

María found the perfect target: an island whose infrastructure was crippled by decades of colonial neglect, the product of an idled and corrupt political class that blindly follows orders from Wall Street and Washington. These quisling parasites, like the island’s cravenly telegenic current governor Ricardo Rosselló, coasted to power on the artificiality of petty political partisanship fostered by the main political parties on the people for decades in order to divide and lord over a population lulled by consumerism, Christian conservatism, and Cold War-era paranoia.

Now that same political apparatus has fallen apart. Long lines await supplies and fuel that are not being delivered. Two deaths were reported at an ICU when its generator failed, drained bone-dry as its diesel fuel never arrived. Governor Rosselló has been busy with a nonstop photo op tour since the hurricane passed. His Facebook page and Twitter account are filled with photos of his smiling face. But it is all smoke and mirrors. More and more mayors are voicing their rage at the lack of supplies. Whole shipments of supplies and fuel await distribution.

The situation has laid bare the reality that there was never a plan put into place. It has also revealed that FEMA has utterly failed in its role. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, acting in every way much more responsibly than our delusional governor, has denounced that FEMA has done the impossible to tie up any aid effort with red tape, asking for interminable memos and paralyzing aid distribution. It is quite telling that at one point in an interview journalist David Begnaud, who’s done a commendable job covering Puerto Rico, briefly mistakenly calls Mayor Yulín “governor”. Deep down, though, I’m sure that when he caught his slip and corrected himself he wished that his momentary lapse would have indeed been fact.

This official paralysis and complete disregard for reality often leaves first responders and National Guardsmen mobilized to help with distribution literally empty-handed. And this crass stupidity is not limited to help on the national level. Cuba has offered help in the form of doctors and a brigade of electrical workers to help shore up and rebuild the island’s ravaged infrastructure. Cuba! Yet cruelly, but predictably, the American government denied them entry on political grounds.

FEMA’s (in)actions border on being criminally negligent, even going as far as kicking roughly 400 refugees out of the San Juan Convention Center in order to conveniently take it over as their center of operations alongside the Puerto Rican central government. Federal and local agencies have become shining examples of feckless inaction, fetid bureaucracy, and unfettered bullshit. In typical Trumpist fashion, FEMA’s response has been to accuse the media of biased reporting, but the true bias is self-evident.

Puerto Rico is dying, yes. It is a victim of the stupidity of its political class and the racist vindictiveness of its colonial masters. Colonialism will always be a humanitarian crisis.

But Puerto Rico isn’t dead yet.

In fact, something seems to be happening. The lack of governmental aid, the realization that American aid is essentially a fantasy, the uncalled-for curfew that’s tailor made to pacify anxious shareholders stateside and not help the citizenry, and the need to rediscover communal bonds of mutual aid have done something to Puerto Ricans. I confess to standing in awe of the newly found resilience, the furious indignation turned into action, and the unbreakable bonds of basic humanity that have returned with a vengeance. And with it comes a growing sense of indignation, of anger towards our colonial masters. Anger, blessed anger, the engine of political and social change par excellence.

Puerto Rico is dying, but if it survives this and rises once again, it may do so inoculated from the diseased colonial mentality that has crushed its collective spirit for so long. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth thinking about now more than ever. This national tragedy has made Boricuas remember that they can, in fact, do things on their own together. That the often-remarked bravery of Puerto Ricans that many feared lost by colonialism’s savage indoctrination (I confess to being amongst those that felt this way) was always there. That fury and indignation lead to freedom. Like many fellow Puerto Ricans that live in exile, we have come forward to join that life-and-death struggle for our homeland, and we do so together, always loyal.

As the white imperialist invader revels in his pettiness and apathy it becomes clear that the Puerto Rican people must resist and fight back in the best way possible: by surviving and thriving together. Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll rid Puerto Rico of the American flag’s stagnating shadow over our island and reduce it to a simple funerary shroud wrapped around the corpse of American colonialism, breaking away from that dying empire once and for all.

counterpunch.org

In 1917, Puerto Rico became a US territory and American citizenship was conferred on its residents. Last year, 97 percent of Puerto Ricans voted for US statehood. Puerto Rico’s Republican Party-affiliated Governor, Ricardo Rossello, pushed for Puerto Rican statehood, only to be treated by Trump as the equivalent to a leader of a Third World banana republic.

Trump and his administration seem to believe that the 3.4 million citizens of Puerto Rico are not American citizens or have some second-class citizenship status. Trump also said that Puerto Rico’s financial rape by Wall Street was somehow responsible for its post-hurricane destruction. Trump said Puerto Rico’s “old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated. Much of the island was destroyed, with billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with.”

Trump indicated that Puerto Rico was some sort of Third World beggar nation that had to pay its debts to Wall Street before being considered for hurricane relief assistance. Trump is also in arrears of $32.7 million in unpaid taxes to the government of Puerto Rico after the bankruptcy of Trump’s Coco Beach Golf Club, which Trump renamed the Trump International Golf Club Puerto Rico. In previous statements, Trump appeared to hold all Puerto Ricans responsible for the island’s financial collapse and his own gold club bankruptcy on the island.

With Trump showing the back of his hand to Puerto Rico in a dire time of need, many of the 97 percent of puertorriqueños who supported independence in the referendum are having second thoughts about statehood. The Department of Homeland Security refused to grant Puerto Rico a waiver to the Jones Act, which requires ships entering Puerto Rico from other US ports to be under the US flag. The Trump administration was more than willing to waive the law in the cases of hurricane relief for Texas and Florida, but not so for Puerto Rico. While Puerto Ricans grew more desperate without fresh water, food, and medicines, ships flying other flags were unable to deliver relief supplies to the stricken island from other American ports.

Most Puerto Ricans are unaware that their neo-colonialist “commonwealth” status as a US territory was cooked up by the Central Intelligence Agency to ensure that Puerto Rico remained a US military base for Cold War operations directed against Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, British Guiana/Guyana, Venezuela, Panama, Guatemala, and other countries in the Western Hemisphere.

National Security Council documents from 1970, classified CONFIDENTIAL-EYES ONLY, describe how two attorneys from the influential Washington law firm of Covington and Burling met with NSC official Viron Vaky on July 10, 1970, to discuss the issue of the island of Culebra, an island 17-miles east of Puerto Rico that was used by the US Navy as a weapons testing range. The Covington and Burling lawyers – Richard Copaken and Tom Jones – were representing the residents of Culebra who wanted the Navy to cease using their island for target practice. The attorneys believed that National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon's counselor, Bryce Harlow, has hidden agendas for upholding the Navy's right to continue using Culebra as a weapons range. What the attorneys told Vaky reached right into the heart of Puerto Rico's quasi-colonialist regime.

Copaken told Vaky that the situation in Puerto Rico had to be viewed in a historical context. He said that Puerto Rico's first Commonwealth Governor, Luis Munoz Marin, who helped destroy the Puerto Rican pro-independence Nationalist Party, developed the "commonwealth" contrivance so that Puerto Rico would serve the long-term interests of the United States.

The classified memorandum of Copaken's comments state that Munoz Marin's "principal lieutenants during his 15 odd years as governor were Roberto Sanchez and (fnu) [first name unknown] Negron [Senator Luis Negron Lopez of Munoz Marin's Popular Democratic Party]. Sanchez [who succeeded Munoz Marin in 1965 as the second Commonwealth governor] spent most of his time in Washington in liaison with the USG [US government]. Over time Sanchez became a close friend of Abe Fortas, who was the Commonwealth's attorney here." Fortas was a long-time political crony of Lyndon Johnson. Fortas was nominated by Johnson to the US Supreme Court where he served from 1965 to 1969. Fortas resigned in disgrace amid an ethics investigation.

Copaken described Sanchez and Fortas as CIA operatives committed to keep Puerto Rico as a stable US military and intelligence base. Copaken's revelations continued: "During the Dominican crisis [of 1965] CIA operated out of Puerto Rico and used Fortas' link with Sanchez to get Munoz Marin's acquiescence. The CIA agent in Puerto Rico was a Sacha Boldman or Goldman. This was the same agent who had channeled CIA assistance to a school in Costa Rica for Latin American political leaders."

The Covington and Burling attorney continued in his expose of Puerto Rican-CIA links:

"Sanchez became governor in 1964. Personal scandal – divorce and re-marriage to his secretary with whom he had been having an open affair – affected his candidacy for reelection. Negron became a rival candidate and Munoz Marin advocated unity of the party behind Negron. However, Sanchez insisted on being a candidate, and both he and Negron became candidates for the 1968 election, thus splitting their party.

“At this point, Sanchez obtained USG support through Fortas, CIA/AID/Navy aid was given to his campaign. There were disruptive actions directed against Negron. According to the theory, Negron's essential conservatism would have wrecked the Commonwealth and created severe problems; hence USG support for Sanchez.

“When, however, it became evident that Sanchez could not defeat Negron, support was switched to Ferre [Luis Ferre of the New Progressive Party – affiliate of the US Republican Party] as the lesser of two evils. CIA/FBI and particularly US Navy support was given to Ferre, and he won. This gave the Navy a hold over Ferre."

It has been the Commonwealth status that has led Puerto Rico into bankruptcy and made it vulnerable to the Wall Street vulture funds that prey on financially distressed countries, particularly those in Latin America. A federal government-appointed financial control board has enacted socially-crippling austerity measures for the island. Following a US Supreme Court ruling that limited Puerto Rico's autonomy, the island has little room to avoid severe budget cuts and "fire sale" disposal of commonwealth assets. And the sale of public lands in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands is what has criminal syndicates like the Trump and Kushner organizations chomping at the bit.

The appeals of the people of Culebra against the Navy's bombing of their island fell on deaf ears in San Juan and Washington as the NSC memo further details:

"Ferre, according to Copaken, contributed heavily to President Nixon's campaign and is on close personal terms with him. Given this fact, plus the Navy's hold, the Navy believes it will have its way on Culebra. The result is a surface duplicity, while they work out a deal underneath.

“Ferre's family leases the only drydock facilities in San Juan from the US Navy; he has copper interests on the island. By cooperating with the US Navy he obtained USG support in a host of similar matters, or vice versa; his cooperation with the US Navy may have been secured by trading for things he wanted from the USG in other things.

“Copagen [sic] alleged that there is close cooperation with the 'White House' certainly at the political level. Bryce Harlow went to Puerto Rico for July 4th celebrations, but one of the things he went down for was Culebra (precisely what Harlow was to do about Culebra, Copaken refused to say."

In the memo, Vaky says he told the attorneys he never heard about "the sinister picture they were painting" about Puerto Rico. Vaky also stated the NSC "had no operational responsibility in the matter."

Vaky passed the Culebra memo to Kissinger in a July 13, 1970, cover memo classified CONFIDENTIAL-EYES ONLY. Kissinger scribbled a note on the cover memo, which stated that the Covington and Burling lawyers believed that Harlow was "involved" in the Culebra matter.

Copaken later wrote a book about the Culebra incident, titled: "Target Culebra: How 743 Islanders Took on the Entire US Navy and Won: An Insider's Account." The book was published in January 2009. Unfortunately, Copaken was never able to conduct a book tour to describe for audiences the US government's control over Puerto Rico; he died from pancreatic cancer on December 8, 2008, a few weeks before the book was published.

For Washington, Puerto Rico has never been taken seriously. Its days as a major US military and intelligence “aircraft carrier” in the Caribbean are long over. Washington, via a long line of pathetic “quislings” who have served as governors of the territory, would rather Puerto Rico be seen and not heard, especially when it comes to treating the islanders as full and equal US citizens. The recent hurricanes that have hit the Caribbean have taught all the colonial vestiges in the region that they would be better off as independent states responsible for their own well-being and recovery than be treated as insignificant colonial pawns.

Long a domain of rich and famous part-time residents and offshore shell corporations, the permanent residents of the islands of the northeast Leeward Islands are merely looked upon as tourism employees and clerical staff for offshore banks and law offices catering to money launderers and tax evaders. When these victims of Irma cried out for basics – water, food, and medicines, they were initially ignored by neo-colonial offices in Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC.

What is being practiced by the neo-colonialist governments of France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States is a form of disaster politics. The governing authorities appeared to largely ignore the initial recovery needs of Irma-affected islands as a way of punishing them for earlier calls for increased autonomy and, in a few cases, independence.

Residents of Barbuda, part of the nation of Antigua and Barbuda, where a Governor-General representing Queen Elizabeth is head of state; the French-ruled St. Martin and the island’s Dutch half of St. Maarten; British Virgin Islands (BVI); French-ruled St. Barts; the British colony of Anguilla, the British territory of Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI); and the US-ruled St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John ran low on food, water, fuel, and medicines after Irma struck the island with intense fury. The colonial powers overseeing these island territories are all governed by pro-corporate conservative governments that were initially sanguine about rushing in disaster relief assistance and supplies. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Theresa May, and US President Donald Trump waited for days after Irma struck before sending military planes and ships to the islands. Many island leaders feel the assistance was too little and too late. They are correct.

The colonialist powers were anxious to rush in public security forces to affected islands but the food, water, and other supplies came later. The security forces rushed in to protect the part-time homes of billionaires was a hat-tip by the governments in London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Washington to the billionaires who support them politically. The welfare of the full-time and poor residents, who were among the most adversely affected by Irma, was assigned a much-lower priority by the corporate vipers, vampires, and vultures controlling the French, British, Dutch, and American governments.

Residents of St. Martin/St. Maarten were forced to scavenge partially-destroyed food ships for anything in the way of sustenance and nutrition, including bottled water, crackers, candy, and rotting fruit. The corporate media called the scavengers “looters.” In situations where white tourists collected water and food under similar circumstances, they were called “scavengers.”

The Cuban government, which has prioritized disaster relief as a matter of national policy and is an international model for disaster recovery, quickly rushed in food, water, and other supplies to its hurricane-ravaged northern coast, including the city of Matanzas and isles such as Cayo Romano and Cayo Coco in the Camaguey archipelago.

Over 1000 residents of 62-square mile Barbuda, most of whom were evacuated to Antigua, are worried about unscrupulous billionaire developers moving on to their island to lay claim to their properties for tourist complexes. Land ownership has been prohibited on the island, a law that has led to some calls for Barbuda to break away from its larger neighbor, Antigua, and opt for independence.

Antigua Prime Minister Gaston Browne announced that to prevent attempts by foreign interests to seize properties on Barbuda, the government will provide a crown grant of one dollar for Barbudians to obtain legal ownership over their current land parcels. The resale of the properties can only occur with the agreement of the Barbuda Council, the local governing authority on the island. However, Browne has also negotiated a deal with the Wahhabist-dominated United Arab Emirates for it to install an 800-megawatt solar power facility and a modern medical clinic on Barbuda. Such deals with either Emiratis or Saudis usually come with significant strings attached, including opening non-Muslim countries like Barbuda to Wahhabist religious infiltration of education systems and religious institutions.

St. Martin — both the French and Dutch parts — the Dutch-ruled islands of Saba and St. Eustatius, Anguilla, TCI, BVI, the US Virgin Islands, and the Turks and Caicos have all demanded, to varying degrees, more autonomy from their colonial masters. Saba and St. Eustatius, without the consent of their residents, were turned into "public entities" of the Netherlands after the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles in 2011. Rather than receiving more autonomy, these colonial territories were relegated to the status of municipalities of the Netherlands. The same situation exists in French St. Martin. Dutch St. Maarten is an "autonomous country" governed by the Dutch King, another neo-colonialist contrivance. On September 5, 2017, just before Irma struck the Dutch Caribbean islands, leaders of St. Eustatius and Bonaire, the latter unaffected by the hurricane, complained to the Dutch parliament that attempts by the Dutch to totally annex their islands "violated their self-determination and human rights."

While British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, a Trump-like dolt of a political leader, was slow in responding to assistance requests from BVI, TCI, and Anguilla, most local leaders stood fast. BVI Premier Orlando Smith said, "We are a proud nation" and would bounce back from massive devastation of its islands and capital of Road Town on Tortola. London neo-colonialists do not see territories like BVI as "nations," but merely extra-territorial conveniences for offshore shell corporations and tax evaders.

TCI's Grand Turk, Salt Cay, South and Middle Caicos were also devastated by Irma. TCI Premier Sharlene Cartwright-Robinson, who, unlike some of her predecessors who demanded independence for TCI, is a compliant puppet of the British government and its appointed governor, was criticized for being too lackadaisical in the wake of Irma. In fact, she was forced to visit Grand Turk and the TCI capital of Cockburn Town on a Cayman Islands police helicopter. A local TCI pastor on Providenciales, clearly annoyed at the slow response of the British governor and TCI premier, told Caribbean News Now, "A British warship that will only come here for a photo shoot? We have lost a day already. Let us not waste any more time."

Officials of Anguilla, which has a rich history of unsuccessfully declaring independence from Britain, called the response of May and Johnson to the plight of Anguilla "disgraceful." Josephine Connor, a former government adviser to the Chief Minister of Anguilla, told SkyNews, "We in the territories feel like third-class citizens because I'd rather wager that if there were something coming like that, of the same magnitude, to the mainland U.K., I suspect that there would be far more attention being paid." It was estimated the HMS Ocean, on deployment in the Mediterranean, would take up to 14 days to reach Anguilla. Anguilla Chief Minister Victor Banks expressed concern over the lack of financial aid from Britain for the island to rebuild from its massive devastation.

Similarly, officials in virtually bankrupted Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands lashed out at initial inattention to Irma's destruction on their islands from the Trump administration. Residents of St. John, St. Thomas, St. Croix, Culebra, and Vieques, stunned by the ferocity of Irma, were then faced with rampant thirst and hunger due to the lack of fresh water and food. Many islanders felt abandoned by the United States. The Marriott Corporation, which chartered a ship to evacuate its hotel guests from St. Thomas after the hurricane, refused to evacuate to Puerto Rico non-guest children and elderly residents even though plenty of empty space was available on the vessel.

The neo-colonial powers will be sure to exact a terrible price from their Caribbean colonies for the meager amount of assistance they are receiving. The first victim will be any notion of autonomy or self-determination previously enjoyed by the islanders. The first rebuilding will of be the luxurious hotel and yacht club compounds of the filthy rich. The native islanders will be lucky to catch a few crumbs of assistance.

The Barack Obama administration has done little to alter the general Caribbean view of the United States as a patronizing bully that sees the Caribbean as a region to invest heavily for the benefit of U.S. travel and hotel businesses while at the same time encroaching on Caribbean sovereignty by claiming the region is menaced by drug dealers and terrorists.

The United States, rather than embrace its own Caribbean cultures in the Florida Keys and New Orleans and its surrounding bayou country, has adopted a policy of treating the Caribbean as a «soft underbelly» of the United States where the only things that matter are a constant military presence and an assurance that the nations of the region follow the United States foreign policy lines and maintain the financial status quo that permits wealthy American businessmen like Mitt Romney to hide their assets from the U.S. tax man…

The decades-long embargo of Cuba, the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic and the 1989 invasion of Panama, the covert 1980s CIA war against Nicaragua, the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the 2009 coup in Honduras, and constant U.S. interference in the affairs of the nations of the region, particularly Haiti, all serve as reminders of why it’s past time for the United States to disengage from the Caribbean if it cannot learn to respect Caribbean culture and live with it. 

The United States turned Guantanamo Bay into a place that will be forever known as an American gulag in the Caribbean where torture was and may still be the rule rather than the exception. 

The United States is a malignant influence in what should be the most tranquil region of the world. Caribbean culture is marked by its care-free life style and not the anal-retentive bullying culture of the United States. Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, St. Croix, Vieques, Culebra, Andros Island, Aruba, Curacao, Guantanamo Bay, and even the Caribbean Florida Keys should see an evacuation of U.S. military and security elements. It’s way past time for the Caribbean to free of the North American oppressors and that includes Caribbean islands from Key Largo to the Leeward Islands where U.S. cancerous tumors known as FBI field offices and naval and coast guard facilities are reminders of the general harm that the United States has brought and continues to bring to a region that should be a zone of peace and tranquility.

The United States seeks to exercise control over the Caribbean through the Organization of American States (OAS), headquartered across the street from the White House in Washington, DC, and through the military jurisdiction of the U.S. Southern Command based in Miami. However, Caribbean nations understand that the United States does not have their best interests in mind through contrivances like the OAS and, instead, are joining up with alternative organizations run by and for the peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America, for example, the Union of South American States (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CECAM).

The United States’ treatment of its Cajun and Creole Caribbean populations of southern Louisiana – witnessed with the total disregard of these groups in hurricane Katrina and in the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon ecocide — and the 1982 imposition of an interior U.S. border checkpoint north of Key Largo where U.S. citizens and visitors from the Keys were required to prove their citizenship before passing into southern Florida, shows a complete lack of respect for Caribbean peoples by Washington. The 1982 Keys incident led to the proclamation of the Conch Republic by residents of the Keys who believed that if they were to be treated like foreigners, they would become foreigners. Some Key West residents are descendants of white Europeans and Africans who moved to the island from Abaco island in the Bahamas, which makes Key West a Caribbean island with an indigenous population. 

Similarly, the native populations of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico are Caribbean peoples and should be free of the colonial masters who rule them from Washington and Miami. The United States has sat by idly and watched its NATO allies, Britain, France, and the Netherlands, re-impose colonialism on the Caribbean territories of the Turks and Caicos, Anguilla, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Curacao, Sint Maarten, and Bonaire, among others.

Britain abolished the elected government of the Turks and Caicos and imposed direct rule from London. Last May, it was discovered that the Intelligence Service Curaçao (VDC) was routinely wiretapping Curacao government officials and private citizens, including Prime Minister Gerrit Schotte. VDC is an adjunct of the Netherlands signals intelligence agency, the Nationale SIGINT Organisatie (NSO), which, in turn, provides its communications surveillance «catch» to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). After Schotte discovered he and others were being wiretapped by the VDC and NSO, he and his government were dismissed by the Dutch-appointed governor. The pro-Dutch Justice Minister of Sint Maarten, Roland Duncan, ordered the telecommunications firm United Telecommunication Services (UTS) not to disclose any information about wiretapping operations on Sint Marten to a Curacao parliamentary inquiry into the illegal surveillance. The Curaco inquiry was led by Curaçao Parliament Chairman Ivar Asjes. The wiretapping in the Dutch colonies was colonialism at its worst and colonialism with an obvious American surveillance stench about it. 

The United States has been quietly urging the governments of the Caribbean to increase their wiretapping operations, even though such a move would violate constitutional guarantees of privacy. There has been fierce opposition to such increased surveillance in Antighua and Barbuda and St. Kitts and Nevis. The situation in Colombia, where the government of President Alvaro Uribe conducted a massive illegal surveillance operation – with more than a wink and a nod from Washington – serves as an example of Washington’s long-range plans for the Caribbean – to turn the entire region into an expanded Guantanamo Bay , an Orwellian «paradise.» The Caribbean, from Key West and the Bahamas to Barbados and the San Andres islands, occupied by Colombia, should reject all proposal from Washington that would change the character and very essence of the Caribbean.

Recently re-elected President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has signaled his desire to help move Caribbean and Latin American nations further away from the United States, its NATO lackeys, and Israel. Israeli and American diplomats have traveled widely throughout the Caribbean and warned the small island states against recognizing Palestine or supporting its initiatives in the United Nations. The small states, which are reliant on tourism, were told of the consequences of their support for Palestine: they could say goodbye to Jewish tourists and visits from Jewish-owned cruise ships. Caribbean governments are well-versed on the extortionist tactics of the dastardly duo of Washington and Tel Aviv.

The Caribbean must undergo a renaissance and transform itself into a region free of the contrivances brewed up in the policy cauldrons in Washington. A paradise on earth deserves total freedom from American neo-colonialism whether it comes in the form of the military, law enforcement, democracy training, spies, or American trash culture and genetically-modified harmful food products.

Puerto Rico is the country were U.S. curators meet with representatives of the Venezuelan opposition. Puerto Rican «friends of Chavez» got a glimpse of one of such encounters in La Concha hotel in January, 2009. It was organized by U.S. diplomatic envoy to Venezuela John Caulfield whose records of jobs in conflict zones leaves little doubt that the gentleman must be on the CIA payroll.

Monitoring the atmosphere across the Puerto Rican society along with the allegedly extremist groups, and spotting the epicenters of brewing discontent are, for the most part, the tasks handled by the FBI. The FBI operatives started working in Puerto Rico in 1935. At the time, they screened the country for Comintern agents and the nationalist group led by Albizu Campos – for radicals, while also helping the regime suppress popular protests. The 1937 Ponce massacre which occurred when the police fired on a completely peaceful march, killing 20 and wounding over 100, is remembered in Puerto Rico as the bloodiest episode in the country's history.

The FBI archive portraying the U.S. offensives against resistance groups and Puerto Rico in 1930-1970 – a total of over 120,000 pages – was partially published by the Puerto Rican studies Center of Hunter College of the City University of New York. The materials gave scholars an unprecedented insight into the FBI activities. An instruction penned by Edgar Hoover urged the U.S. Government agents to cultivate sources of information about leaders and activists of Puerto Rican resistance groups and about their lifestyles and habits, obviously as a form of preparation for preemptive strikes. Anyhow, resistance to the Empire's colonial dictate never dried up in Puerto Rico as hundreds of people sacrificed their lives to make it a free country. In 1950s, Puerto Rican patriots launched raids against the governor's residence in San Juan, Harry Truman's residence in Washington, and the U.S. House of Representatives. The FBI struck back, arrested leaders of Puerto Rican nationalists and leftist groups, sent its local partners to hunt down their relatives, and organized attacks against the «extremists’» headquarters. 

Puerto Ricans managed to bounce considerable concessions out of the U.S.: at the moment, they have self-governance, some kind of constitution, and – in a fairly diluted form – the representative, executive, and judicial authorities. Still, the supreme authority in Puerto Rico is exercised by the U.S. Congress, meaning that «the associate state» is being run from Washington. Public protests forced the U.S. to formally close 13 military bases in Puerto Rico and to stop using the Vieques Island military facilities, though the truth is that the infrastructures are properly maintained and would take virtually no time to revitalize. 

The declassification of the above materials prompted debates over the current state of the U.S. intelligence community's operations against the Puerto Rican proponents of independence. The inescapable conclusion seems to be that nothing in the sphere changed since the Cold War, the epoch when practically any steps could be justified by simply citing the Soviet peril. The detention of Puerto Rican Nationalist Party president Francisco Torres at an airport in Panama, with the police agents saying at the moment of the arrest that they acted on instructions from the FBI representative in the country, highlighted the proportions of the problem. Torres was allowed to continue with his trip when the blunt demonstration of the FBI might was over. Another detention followed upon his return to Puerto Rico. This time, he was frisked and his credit cards and photos of relatives were copied, though no official warrant of any kind was shown. Quite a few leftist and nationalist activists report similar humiliations, but their right-wing opponents should have no illusions – information about them is also being carefully collected for future use.

In Washington, the hopes of the Puerto Rican nationally oriented forces for a reunion with other Latin American nations are seen as a risk to the U.S. interests in the region. There is no shortage of forecasts that an independent Puerto Rico would drift towards Cuba and Venezuela, the two populist camp champions persistently voicing calls to erase the current colonial status of the country. Moreover, the no longer short-leashed Puerto Rico might actually join ALBA, considering that several Caribbean island countries – Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines – are already there. In December, 2011, a cohort of Puerto Rican parties – El Partido Nacionalista, El Frente Socialista, El Movimiento Independentista Nacional Hostosiano – asked CELAC for assistance in the region’s efforts to shake off the residues of colonialism and called for stronger backing Puerto Rico in its more than a century-long struggled against the Empire. The U.S. was described in the corresponding joint statement as a colonial power responsible for the present-day situation. On the other hand, Puerto Ricans are fully aware that they and nobody else can bring about serious change.

Expressions of public support for Puerto Rico's aspirations are a permanent background of the political live throughout Latin America. The XI ALBA forum which convened last February passed a declaration on the independence of Puerto Rico. The document was read by H. Chavez who stressed that Puerto Ricans are a unique Latin American and Caribbean nation with its own history, whose sovereignty was stolen by the U.S. with the help of the colonial system a century ago. The Venezuelan leader said the Puerto Rican push for independence must be upheld by the entire Latin America with all of its collective bodies, the CELAC in the first place. The declaration also carried the demand that the U.S. release all political prisoners jailed over their struggle for the independence of Puerto Rico.

Manifestations broadcasting solidarity with Puerto Rico reached such proportions in Latin America that U.S. President B. Obama paid a visit to San Juan on June 14, 2011 as a countermeasure. Notably, this was the first time a U.S. leader traveled to Puerto Rico over the past 50 years. On the surface, the tour was styled as a part of Obama’s fund-raising campaign, but the agenda centered around Washington’s support for the annexionists dreaming to see Puerto Rico incorporated into the U.S. was thinly veiled. The Puerto Rican governor Luis Fortuno, a neoliberal elected to the post from the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico, is open about his eagerness to convert the country into 51st U.S. State. 

Washington is obviously unprepared to greenlight the plan, the rationale being that appreciable benefits can be ripped given the status quo. At the moment, investments in Puerto Rico yield decent returns, while integrating it as a state would take giant financial infusions with the aim of driving the local socioeconomic standards up to the average U.S. level. 

Loud protests accompanied Obama’s stay in Puerto Rica. Altogether, they combined into a kind of a street referendum in which Puerto Ricans made it absolutely clear which avenue towards self-determination – independence or merger into the U.S. – attracts them. The Puerto Rican media, in the meantime, are selling the unraveling crisis as a pretext to convince the audiences that Washington's help is the only cure and an independent Puerto Rico would in no time sink to the level of Haiti.

Governor Fortuno is simply denying his own country a future. These days, rampant unemployment leaves masses of young people with no option but to john criminal groups and to do the drug business. Currently, around 10,000 students have no money to pay tuition fees and are about to drop out of universities. Many of the educated young who see no prospects for employment become political activists. It should also be taken into account that quite a few young Puerto Ricans had served in the U.S. Army. It is common for the young to feel that only independence can open up to them a tolerable range of opportunities, and, by all means, H. Chavez tops the popularity ratings among the population group.

The April, 2012 appointment of Hector Pesquera to the post of Puerto Rican police chief promises a tide of political repression in the country. Fortuno made the decision after consultations of Washington, and Pesquera is known to have been an FBI special agent in Miami who was in touch with Cuban immigrant groups, was involved in the assassination of Los Macheteros popular army commander Filliberto Orjeda Rios and in the plot to kill Danilo Andersen, the Venezuelan persecutor that investigated the April, 2002 coup attempt. Pesquera was instrumental in the arrest of five Cuban spies sent to the U.S. to identify terrorists en route to Cuba. The Puerto Rican patriots suspect that Pesquera’s career jump is a prologue to a new round of repressions against pro-independence movements and suggest immediately forming a maximally inclusive popular front for self-defense.

No matter what, Puerto Ricans are natural optimists. Roberto Torres Collazo wrote in the wake of Obama's visits to Puerto Rico that the tour was a minor event to the majority of the country's population: «80% of Puerto Ricans speak Spanish only and most of them prefer their own music and food to the U.S. pop-culture and McDonald’s. From birth, we are spontaneous, simple, and fun people, like most of our Latin American peers. Our customs and traditions place us much closer to the Latin and Central America than to North America».