P.R.’s folly: We have no real political power
Published on Tuesday, May 11th 1999 on The San Juan StarThe single, salient, most outstanding trait –quality?– of us Puerto Ricans is our ability to lead apparently normal lives while refusing to accept the most devastating realities that govern our existence. We have lost all ability to recognize the true facts of life. We refuse to admit the reality of the truly relevant causes of our now and our here. To us, perception is reality. Misconception is truth. Deceit is decent political strategy. Political correctness overrides intellectual honesty. Emotion rules over reason, no questions asked. It's not what we think. It's what we feel. Whim is political power. Manipulation of the masses is hailed as civic duty. Wow! Puerto Rico has what Puerto Rico deserves.
Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, and a United States Territory. We can scream "Yankee go home" until we are blue in the face. But Yankee ain't about to budge. We can wish the Navy out of Roosevelt Roads and wish the Navy out of Vieques, but it will not go beyond mere wishing. Fidel Castro has not been able to wish the Navy out of Guantanamo either. The United States needs Roosevelt Roads, the largest U. S. Navy installation in the whole nation, and the Navy needs Vieques to flex its war muscles. Nowhere else in the U. S. can the Navy play games with carriers, with submarines, with land troops invading beaches, and with air support aloft doing its thing. There are no harbors deeper than 50 feet anywhere along the east coast of the U.S. or the Gulf of Mexico. That's why there were plans for a supertanker port on Mona Island a generation ago, remember? Fifty feet is not enough draft for an Ohio Class submarine to submerge without striking bottom and leaving its sail out of the water.
Are there large expanses of terrain along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States? Of course there are! But there is also a continental shelf, in places hundreds of miles wide, where it is too shallow to play with subs and ships and carriers near a beach being invaded. Simple as that.
In the book "Commander in Chief", by Eric Larrabie, the author quotes Marine General Holland M. Smith as saying, "If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,…the Japanese bases of the Pacific were captured on the beaches of the Caribbean, where the problems involved were worked out in Marine maneuvers." He goes on. "Many who joined in the trial runs were later to be part of the real thing. In 1939, Fleet Exercise XX was held off Culebra, with battleship Mississippi…and carriers Lexington and Enterprise. The President (Franklin D. Roosevelt) came, aboard cruiser Houston, to watch."
The rest is history. Some Puerto Ricans, of my generation, at least, are proud of their contribution to the free world. Yes, some people died. Then and now.
Now we are arguing about the significance of the Fifth Column plebiscite victory in December of last year before the U.S. Congress, while at the same time our leaders are writing letters to the President on behalf of Puerto Rico to get the Navy out of Vieques. Puerto Rico who? What can the governor of a colonial territory really negotiate with the President of the metropolis? How many votes does a colonial-territorial Resident Commissioner really have in Congress? We are going to sue? Go back and see the movie "The Mouse that Roared."
Troops, we really have no political power. We are a colony and a territory, and the Fifth Column status quo was the most poisoned pablum that has ever been thrust down our politically manipulated throats. Now the whole world knows, via satellite television, that the intellectual owners of the Fifth Column still have not been able to grasp the significance of their political deceit. Neither have they been able to define nor categorize the smoke and mirrors that portrays the so-called Commonwealth Status, or Free Associated State. As far as Puerto Rico's political status is concerned, the Popular Democratic Party still does not know what it stands for! And the New Progressive Party has no real political clout in Washington. Puerto Rico is still both a territory and colony, remember? That's why a Puerto Rican mother who is in prison in California will not be allowed to talk to her children in Puerto Rico on Mother's Day. Puerto Rico is foreign territory!
We are a complacent bunch. Like couch potatoes. We want our bellies full and our boat not rocked. Don't sweat the heady intellectual political status stuff. Go with the ride. Remain a colony! Remain a territory! Institutionalize the Fifth Column. Don't worry. FEMA will still be there to dole out checks after the next hurricane..