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He works a twelve-hour day and works his assistants just as hard; when he began his vacation cruise, four of them tottered off to see doctors. And the evenings at La Fortaleza are likely to be busier than the days. "You're invited to dinner," recalls Adolf A. Berle Jr., longtime (1938-44) Assistant Secretary of State. "Presently a couple of people heave in—top government officials, somebody whom you eventually recognize to be Pablo Casals,* maybe a poet or so, and some exile who is ignored in the U.S. but is about to become President of Venezuela, for example. Oh. philosophy in the fortress flies to high heaven. It's splendid!"
"Get Puerto Rico." Under Spain, Puerto Rico was a peaceable colony, untouched by the early 19th century revolts that freed South and Central America. On Feb. 9, 1898, just nine days before Munoz was born (a few blocks from La Fortaleza), Spain's Governor inaugurated a forward-looking constitutional government of semi-autonomy under the Spanish crown, devised by Muñoz' statesman-father, Luis Muñoz Rivera. But Theodore Roosevelt, on his way to fight in nearby Cuba, advised his congressional supporters to "prevent any talk of peace until we get Puerto Rico." Five months after Muñoz was born, U.S. General Nelson A. Miles landed, took the island in 17 days, and promised to "bestow upon you the immunities and blessings of our liberal Government." Congress thereupon set up a government that denied Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship and made all local laws subject to congressional repeal.
Muñoz Rivera soon moved his family to New York, and later to Washington, where he became Puerto Rico's Resident Commissioner in 1910, persuaded Congress to give islanders U.S. citizenship. Son Luis studied law at Georgetown University, quit the classroom for a period of writing poetry, newspaper correspondence, magazine articles (for H. L. Mencken's Smart Set and American Mercury, among others). He read widely (Shaw, Ibsen, Chesterton, Conrad) and joined the Socialist Party, a group that in Puerto Rico was mostly composed of cigarmakers. Thus formed, he returned in 1926 to Puerto Rico to live.
By then, a few big U.S. companies had converted Puerto Rico into a sugar barony whose 100,000 cane cutters, paid 10¢ an hour, gladly sold their votes for $2 to elect company lawyers to the island legislature. Unemployment ran to a third of the working force. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the old Rough Rider's son. named Puerto Rico's Governor in 1929, found ''babies who were little skeletons." schoolchildren "trying to spur their brains to action when their little bodies were underfed." Luis Munoz Marin turned for a while into a fiery supporter of independence for Puerto Rico. He stormed at the U.S. as an "opulent kleptomaniac" that "niched life-giving pennies from the pockets of a pauper." He termed Puerto Rico a "factory worked by peons, fought over by lawyers, bossed by absent industrialists and clerked by politicians."
3¢ a Dozen. But he changed his mind. Recently, standing in a long hallway at La Fortaleza with a cocktail in his hand,