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Sun & Slums. Puerto Rico nowadays is an exciting, sunny, scrubbed and cultured place to be. In terrain, it is a blue central mountain range skirted with rustling fields of sugar cane, crisscrossed with winding blacktop roads; the land is dotted with clean villages that still have the Spanish colonial look. The island would fit tidily inside Connecticut. With a population of 2,300,000, Puerto Rico is as crowded as the U.S. would be if all the people in the world were packed into it.
The capital city of San Juan (pop. 400,000) sits on two islands between a bay and a lagoon. Its sights are blue-bricked streets, ancient masonry, white skyscrapers, rain-dappled, flamboyant trees, traffic jams of Fords, Chevies, Opels, Consuls, Taunuses and Vespa scooters. In the old city, hand-printed poems of amor on sale at 25¢ flutter from a clothespin in a dowdy doorway next to a modern furniture store whose neon sign shouts: "Use Nuestro Layaway Plan." But San Juan also has festering El Fanguito and neighboring swampland slums of stilted crackerbox shanties, partly cleared but still the home of 100,000.
Suntanned, swim-suited tourists from New York, who can fly to San Juan for $45, clack in their clogs through the lobbies of the Caribe Hilton and the new San Juan Intercontinental hotels. Twenty miles west of the capital, richer visitors will soon be able to loaf at Laurance Rockefeller's Dorado Beach Hotel, now abuilding, and golf under Pro Ed Dudley at the Robert Trent Jones course. "There is a great atmosphere of construction, vitality, change," says Roger Baldwin, who advises Puerto Rico on civil liberties, "and a great sense of leadership."
Lusty Statesman. Luis Muñoz Marin (TIME Cover, May 2, 1949), who provides the sense of leadership, is a man with a bear's body and the somber visage of a St. Bernard. On the crystal chandelier over his desk nests a pair of birds that fly in and out of the always open door. "He is kind to animals," says his wife Inez, "and even kinder to humans." His salary is $10,000 a year. His wealth, as itemized before the 1956 election, consisted of $562 and a house with 16 years yet to go on its FHA mortgage; when he went to New York recently, he bought his tickets on a fly-now-pay-later basis.
But he has no Spartan scorn for the good life. Last week he returned from a vacation cruise aboard the yacht of a wealthy friend. Was he by any chance accepting a questionable favor? "Only demagogues," snaps Muñoz, "cannot afford to be seen anywhere except drinking bad gin with a man who has no shoes on." He has a mighty temper and lusty tastes. There is only one liquor he is cool toward —much to the distress of the promoters of Puerto Rico's excellent rums. After chain-smoking most of his life, he gave it up nine years ago.
Vice President Nixon says Muñoz is "a man all of us can be immensely proud of." Even Angel Ramos, publisher of San Juan's anti-Muñoz daily El Mundo, says: "I don't think the hemisphere has a greater statesman." In 1956 the Freedom House Award (earlier winners: Eisenhower and Churchill) went to Muñoz.