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PUERTO RICO
Ojeda’s assassination gives fresh
impetus to the independence struggle
BY ROSE ANA DUEÑAS—Special
for Granma International—
CAPITALISM creates its own gravediggers, as Karl
Marx and Frederich Engels explained in the Communist
Manifesto. And the U.S. government, in its latest
attack on the Puerto Rican people’s struggle to free
themselves from U.S. colonial rule, has not only
revealed how alive that struggle is, it has given it
new impetus.
After the FBI assassinated long-time independence
fighter Filiberto Ojeda Ríos on September 23, rage
exploded among Puerto Ricans and others everywhere,
whether or not they identify themselves as
independentistas (pro-independence). Some 300
agents surrounded the 72-year-old’s home in
Hormigueros, Puerto Rico – supposedly to arrest him
for the 1983 robbery of an armored car –, refused
his offer to turn himself in to a well-known
journalist, shot him and left him to bleed to death.
Thousands demonstrated against this murder, both
on the island and in the United States itself, where
more than 1 million Puerto Ricans live. Thousands of
people attended Ojeda’s wake and funeral, and
students and others took down the U.S. flag from
various points around the island in protest.
"Filiberto was a fighter for Puerto Rico in every
way, completely committed to the struggle for
independence by any means necessary, and they wanted
to eliminate that symbol," said Rafael Cancel
Miranda, a Puerto Rican nationalist leader who spent
almost 27 years in Yankee jails for fighting for
independence, and who spoke in an interview with
Granma International. "They think that by doing
so, they can kill the struggle for independence¼
they are trying to terrorize the people, to make
them afraid."
In 1898, the United States invaded and seized
Puerto Rico, a strategically valuable colony – or "commonwealth,"
as it is euphemistically referred to. Just like the
Spanish colonialists before it, U.S. imperialism
extracted most of the island’s wealth, and used its
people as a cheap source of labor, treating them in
a racist, degrading manner. For many years, Puerto
Ricans were forced to speak English and salute the
U.S. flag, and the distorted one-crop sugar economy
obligated many to immigrate to Florida, New York and
elsewhere to survive. Puerto Rican women were
forcibly sterilized and Puerto Rican men were used
as cannon fodder in U.S. wars.
The island was turned into the biggest U.S.
military base in the hemisphere, a launching pad for
U.S. military aggression in the region and beyond,
and after World War II, the smaller island of
Vieques, part of Puerto Rico, became the northern
power’s most important land/sea training grounds.
Live bombs and chemical weapons were tested there,
despite untold damage to inhabitants’ health – like
an extremely high cancer rate– and the environment.
"U.S. imperialism controls our country socially,
politically, and economically. We are a militarily
occupied country - we're saturated by U.S. military
bases. (¼
) They control the mass media. They control our
schools. They indoctrinate us from the time we're
children. They tell you who to hate and who not to
hate. They can even indoctrinate you to hate
yourself," Cancel Miranda noted in a 1998 interview
with The Militant newspaper.
But the Puerto Rican people have always struggled
and resisted. Ojeda was executed by the FBI on
September 23, the anniversary of Grito de Lares, the
revolutionary 1868 uprising against the Spanish
celebrated by Puerto Rican patriots every year.
From the start, the Puerto Rican independence
struggle was linked with Cuba’s, as Cuban national
hero José Martí stated in 1892: "The Cuban
Revolutionary Party is constituted in order to gain
¼ the
total independence of Cuba and to encourage and
assist that of Puerto Rico."
"Because of its culture, its history, its
traditions, and especially because of the express
will of its people, Puerto Rico is a Latin American
and Caribbean country, with its own national
identity, which the Puerto Rican people have known
how to maintain despite the colonizing process they
have been subjected to," noted Rafael Dausá, Cuban
Deputy Permanent Representative to the United
Nations in 1998, speaking before the UN Special
Committee on Decolonization.
Every year, Cuba speaks in favor of Puerto Rico’s
decolonization, and for six consecutive years, the
committee has approved a resolution to that effect,
which is always ignored by the U.S. government, just
as it ignored UN resolutions against South African
apartheid, Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian
people, and its own 44-year-old blockade against
Cuba.
Instead, the U.S. government and its servile
colonial administrators have always repressed the
independence struggle. The FBI framed up and jailed
Nationalist Party founder Albizu Campos in the
1930s, Rafael Cancel Miranda and his comrades in the
1950s, and the Hartford 15 – which Ojeda was accused
of being part of – in the 1980s, among others.
Puerto Rican political prisoners have always been
given the worst treatment, just like that given to
the five Cuban revolutionaries being held in U.S.
prisons today.
Three Puerto Rican freedom fighters – Oscar López
Rivera, Carlos Alberto Torres, and Haydée Beltrán –
are still in U.S. dungeons after 25 years. Two more
– José Pérez González and José Velez Acosta – have
been held since 2003 for their protests against U.S.
military control over Vieques.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, the FBI and CIA spied on
tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans, putting them on
"subversive" lists, and disrupting their
organizations through the infamous Cointelpro
operation. Federal cops were complicit in the 1978
police executions of two young independentistas
at Cerro Maravilla. Just last year the FBI raided
the headquarters of the water workers union in San
Juan in the midst of a hard-fought strike.
Despite the repression, a mass campaign to free
the Puerto Rican political prisoners won a victory
in 1999 when President William Clinton released 11
of the 17 held at the time, and the mass struggle to
get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques finally won in
2003. During these years, the Puerto Rican people
have expressed over and over that they are a nation:
— In 1996, 100,000 people demonstrated in La
Nación en Marcha (The Nation Marching) to protest
against Puerto Rico becoming a U.S. state and
against colonial Governor Pedro Roselló’s
statement that "Puerto Rico is not and has never
been a nation."
— In 1997 and 1998, hundreds of thousands of
Puerto Ricans took to the streets against the
privatization of the telephone company in what
became a general strike, chanting "Puerto Rico is
not for sale!"
— In 2000, more than 85,000 marched to oppose
the U.S. Navy in Vieques, and that same year, some
40,000 turned out for the Grito de Lares
commemoration.
— In 2003, thousands celebrated in the streets
when the U.S. Navy officially ended its presence
in Vieques.
Cancel Miranda explained that the U.S. government
tried to hurt the Puerto Rican independence struggle
by killing Ojeda, who shot back in self-defense as
FBI cops fired more than 100 rounds.
"They thought they could strike fear into the
Puerto Rican people. But they have not been able to
do so for more than 100 years. They have massacred
us ¼ they have
persecuted us, they have jailed us – not by ones and
twos, but by thousands – and they have not been able
to defeat us. We have not been able to remove them
from our national territory, but neither have they
been able to defeat us, and Filiberto has given us a
living example of that," he said.
"They think that by eliminating him, they are
eliminating the struggle, the cause he defended, but
against that, against ideas, there is no possible
weapon." |
