Puerto Rico: Colonialism Revisited

Because Puerto Rico is not systematically consulted on issues central to its development and because this situation has become so obvious to all island officials during the last decade, elites across the entire Puerto Rican political spectrum felt pressured to come out of the colonial closet, tentatively in August 1977 and forthrightly in 1978.3 Every summer since, spokespersons from all political parties have gone before the UN Decolonization Committee to protest the status quo in Puerto Rico. Before 1977, only Puerto Rican Independentistas (who win only a small percentage in island elections), Cuba, and the Soviet Union had labeled Puerto Rico\u27s status as colonial, a situation that allowed the United States to dismiss charges of imperialism as either insignificant or Eastern bloc propaganda. Furthermore, Washington continued to maintain that any change in Puerto Rico\u27s status was a domestic issue. As this position has become more diplomatically costly at the UN and Puerto Rico has been increasingly perceived as economically costly by many U.S. policymakers, circumstances have ripened for the U.S. government to rethink its ties with the island. The four books reviewed here were written to urge official Washington to develop a coherent policy on on its colonial possession