Thread by @doctorow

#PuertoRico is back in the news.

Sorta.

That Other America breaches the US media consciousness every couple of years. The Bad President put it in the news by his horrific, racist failure to respond to Hurricane Maria:

washingtonpost.com/politics/it-to… 1/

And the Good President put Puerto Rico in the news by sidelining its elected government because they had the temerity to stiff his buddies on Wall Street, just like GW Bush did to Flint when they crossed the same line:

washingtonpost.com/business/econo… 2/

The finance bros that Obama put in charge of the island turned it into an offshore Flint, starving its utilities in order to extract more debt payments to the finance sector. 3/

The ensuing neglect meant that when Maria hit, the power infrastructure collapsed, leaving the US citizens of Puerto Rico without electricity for *three months*.

nytimes.com/2017/12/29/us/… 4/

Donald Trump couldn't have murdered thousands of Puerto Ricans and immiserated millions more without Barack Obama's help. 5/

But that's unfair to both Trump and Obama: they were merely carrying on a centuries-long tradition stretching back to Teddy Roosevelt, a bedrock American heritage of racism, neglect, enslavement, torture, and extraction (so. much. extraction.). 6/

Puerto Rico is back in the news. The island territory - where US citizens don't vote for the president nor send a voting rep to Congress - is planning a binding referendum on whether to become a US state, or whether to secede from the USA altogether.

theguardian.com/world/2022/jul… 7/

As it happens, I just became a US citizen. As a Californian, I am (nominally) protected by the US Constitution, and in a couple months I will get to vote for my Congressional rep. 8/

...Unlike millions of Puerto Ricans, who have been citizens for generations, but who are not entitled to equal protection under the law - as the Supreme Court just affirmed:

supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf… 9/

Days after I took my citizenship oath, I joined my family for a two-week holiday on Puerto Rico. I arrived with jumbled impressions of the island's history, gleaned from the odd article, radio documentary and news article. 10/

By the time we left, I had a much more coherent understand of the centuries of systematic, ghastly fuckery that these United States of America had visited upon its "commonwealth" and what the stakes are for the referendum. 11/

We started in Old San Juan, where we got oriented via Andy Rivera's architectural tour, which introduced us to the 500 year history of the city and its colonial masters:

airbnb.com/experiences/17… 12/

On the tour, I noticed the Librería Laberinto, a bookstore, and made a point of visiting it later that day:

librerialaberintopr.com 13/

That's where I found Nelson A Denis's incredible history of the island, *War Against All Puerto Ricans*, a brilliant, funny, enraging and masterful history of the Puerto Rican revolution of 1950, and its leader, the remarkable Pedro Albizu Campos:

waragainstallpuertoricans.com/the-book/ 14/

Denis is a Cuban/Puerto-Rican-American raised in New York City, whose Cuban-born father was kidnapped and deported to Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the FBI indiscriminately shattered families on orders from Bobby Kennedy:

nelsondenis.wordpress.com/home/ 15/

Denis went on to go to Harvard, where, in 1977, he published a landmark work of historical scholarship in the *Harvard Political Review*, "The Curious Constitution of Puerto Rico." 16/

From Harvard, Denis continued on to Yale, where he took a law degree - and continued his voracious study of the Puerto Rican revolution and its aftermath. 17/

He conducted years of research - hundreds of FOIAs, thousands of hours of interviews with the architects, partisans and eyewitnesses - he published his masterpiece. 18/

Denis weaves together the disparate narratives of all the actors in this tragicomedy to present a truth that is far, far stranger than fiction. 19/

For generations, Puerto Rico was a classic imperial periphery, the place where eminent families sent their failsons for a second chance. 20/

The most rapacious corporations in American - along with the US military - established operations in PR and staffed them with a clown cavalcade of idiots and sadists, who, by dint of birth, were put in a position of power over the people of Puerto Rico. 21/

Each of these men came to Puerto Rico to seek their fortune, and, by and large, they found it - extracted it, rather, from the sweat and blood of Puerto Ricans. They committed gaffes, scams and atrocities and then went back to the mainland, where they were celebrated. 22/

Take Dr Cornelius Rhoads, an eminent physician whose tenure as an island hospital administrator was cut short when his maid discovered a letter he'd written to a mainland colleague in which he railed against Puerto Ricans in a vicious, racist tirade. 23/

...And then gloated about having murdered several of his Puerto Rican patients as part of a genocidal campaign to rid the island of its islanders:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius…

Despite having admitted to a string of racially motivated murders, Rhoads was celebrated on his return. 24/

He became an army doctor, developed chemical weapons, and went on to appear on the cover of *Time* magazine as a great hero.

In some ways, it's not surprising that Rhoads would be lionized for murdering Puerto Ricans. 25/

After all, a legion of white doctors participated in the forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women from the 1930s to the 1970s, ultimately sterlizing a third of the island's women:

panoramas.pitt.edu/health-and-soc… 26/

I'd heard of Rhoads, but not of the many other failsons whom Denis chronicles - the governor who arrived with a plan to remake it as an animal training center where nightingales would learn to sing "The Stars and Stripes Forever" for sale to patriotic Texans at $50 a pop. 27/

I also didn't know about the army - literal and figurative - of FBI agents who employed a vast network of informants to produce detailed, paranoid dossiers on the people of the island. 28/

More importantly, I didn't know about the Puerto Ricans who are the true heroes of this tale, like Albizu, orphaned as a small boy following his mother's suicide, who raised himself, became a prodigy, attended Harvard, and excelled at everything he did. 29/

Albizu - brilliant, driven, committed - refused offers to clerk for the Supreme Court or work for large American corporations, and instead returned to Puerto Rico to work as a poor peoples' lawyer. 30/

He went on to lead the revolutionary independence movement, and was tortured to death by America in return. 31/

Albizu is just one of the many larger-than-life, tragic heroes of Denis's tale: there's Juan Emilio Viguié, a self-taught virtuoso filmmaker who left the island to work as the embedded documentarian for Pancho Villa's army and returned home. 32/

There, he became the Zapruder of the Ponce massacre, a grisly atrocity whose architects - more failsons from the mainland - were never held to account for. 33/

There's also Vidal Santiago Díaz - a barber turned gunrunner, who supplied the independence movement with arms and a secret meeting place, all under the nose of the FBI, who eventually helped the island police kidnap him and subject him to barbaric torture. 34/

On his release, Díaz returned to his barbershop, recovered his cached weapons, and held off thirty armed men singlehandedly from within the shop, for hours, as the nation listened in to live, play-by-play radio reporting. 35/

Eventually, they gassed Díaz, entered his shop, and shot him in the head. They dragged him into the street for the news-crews to photograph, but he surprised them by reviving and denouncing the police. 36/

He was taken to a cell to die, but not before he recounted his side of the storied, fabled battle. 37/

These are the protagonists of Denis's narrative, with the failsons serving as foils, villains, and color - like Waller Booth, a spy with the OSS (forerunner to the CIA) who came to the island to spy on nationalists. 38/

He set up an after-hours club themed after his favorite movie, *Casablanca*, which he screened on repeat in a private room in the club. 39/

Nationalists would sit and watch the movie every night, in the manner of Rocky Horror, and shout witty lines at the screen: "We'll always have the FBI!" and "Round up the usual Nationalists!" 40/

Denis builds this one character or event at a time, retelling the tale from different angles, weaving in the perspectives of his people, using them to illuminate different aspects of the degradation and pillaging of Puerto Rico and the indomitable spirit of its people. 41/

It is in this fashion, for example, that Denis dissects - and demolishes - the 1917 law that Congress passed in the name of Puerto Rican self-determination, but which really only served to make Puerto Ricans subject to the draft. 42/

So it goes, in Denis's history: an American conglomerate or politician comes up with a new and depraved way to profit from the islanders, and they resist - against all odds, in the face of violent repression. 43/

The revolution itself - which included an attempt on Truman's life - plays out with the drama of a war movie. 44/

Apart from their Puerto Ricanness, the protagonists of this story would make great American folkloric heroes, Horatio Algers who came from humble beginnings, succeeded through thrift, tireless striving and indomitable will. 45/

They're people who devoted themselves to justice, and stood up to bullies - and paid with their lives for a righteous cause.

But because the bullies they stood up to were operating as agents of America, they are forgotten. Not even reviled - erased. 46/

On the American mainland, the Puerto Rican revolution isn't even a footnote. Indeed, Puerto Rico itself is often forgotten by America, despite the many sons and daughters of the island who have fought for its military. 47/

Remember Maria, when Trump and his supporters spoke of Puerto Ricans as foreigners whose "country" was insufficiently grateful for "American charity?" 48/

But this history is not forgotten in Puerto Rico. How could it be? After all, the disappearances and torture - which included mad science experiments in which political prisoners were irradiated until they perished - did not take place in some distant past. 49/

As Denis's end-notes demonstrate, many of the people who witnessed these extraordinary events are still alive, and Denis's work is based on corroborated eyewitness testimony, backed by FOIAed documents. 50/

Denis's book was indispensable as we traveled around this beautiful, marvelous island, because it is also a *small* island. 51/

Every place we visited had a cameo in the book: the movie theater we took the kids to see Thor at was in a town that once housed a nightmare gulag where Nationalists were electrocuted, starved and shot. 52/

By superimposing the crimes of empire over the landscape, we were able to get some context for the flags, the graffiti, and the news about the looming referendum. 53/

One day in a taxi, the driver talked to us about the referendum: I mentioned that I had just become a US citizen and for my sake, I would like Puerto Rico to become a state and gain two senators, but for their sake, it seemed that independence would be a better deal. 54/

She agreed vigorously, speaking of the crypto-bros and pharma companies who descended on the island to turn it into a kind of hyper-Delaware, an onshore-offshore regulation and tax haven, just as the sugar-barons and other mainlander failsons had done for more than a century. 55/

Visiting Puerto Rico was the perfect commemoration of my US citizenship - a chance to eat some of America's best food, listen to some of its greatest music, see its most beautiful national forest, meet some of its friendliest people, see some of its most beautiful art. 56/

...And learn of some of its most vicious crimes. Puerto Rico is the only place where the US military bombed US citizens, but, of course, the US military has bombed many, many places.

The contradictory currents that pull at America are all in sharp relief on the island. 57/

It has served as a lab for so many of America's worst ideas, and also as a proving ground for the resistance to those ideas.

So much has happened since 2015 when this book was published - and so much of what has happened is an echo of what went before. 58/

Denis's ability to describe the bravery and spirit of those who fight for independence, self-determination and dignity rivals greats like Howard Zinn. 59/

Combine that skill with Denis's personal connection to the material - and the access it gave him to the buried histories of America's sins - and you get a high-speed masterclass on the choice facing Puerto Ricans today. 60/

ETA - If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/bor…