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Independence has been an emotional cause for more than a century. In Puerto Rico's universities, among older intellectuals and even within a faction of the ruling party, various shades of independentista sentiment persist. Alfonso Valdes Jr., a prosperous businessman and former Chamber of Commerce president, sighs and says: "Independence is very close to my heart. It is a romantic idea and deep down, emotionally, most Puerto Ricans feel sympathy for it. But it is impractical for as long as we can see. It just would not work." Adds Alex Maldonado, editor of the pro-Commonwealth El Mundo: "It is very difficult to be in the arts today without identifying your self with independence."
Yet the voters have consistently gone the other way. The independentistas boycotted the last plebiscite on status, in 1967; the voters then divided 60.4% for commonwealth, 39% for state hood and .6% for independence. In the 1972 general election, the Puerto Rican Independence Party (P.I.P.) got just 4.37%.
The two main independence factions are redoubling their efforts because of the island's troubles; they are getting considerable noisy support from Cuba and are trying to stir up sympathy in the United Nations. P.I.P. is led by Senator Rubén Berrios, 36, an urbane academic, educated at Yale and Oxford, who calls himself a Social Democrat. While P.I.P. occasionally practices civil disobedience—last year it unsuccessfully tried to organize a tax boycott—the party avoids violence. Berrios wants to create an independent republic and socialize major industry.
But he claims he would keep close economic ties with the U.S.
and a parliamentary system of government.
The Puerto Rican Socialist Party's chief is Juan Mari Bras, 48, an avowed Communist who announced his gubernatorial candidacy last week. He takes Castro's Cuba as his model and gets both rhetorical and material help from Havana. Mari Bras formed alliances with several unions, though most of organized labor remains antiCommunist. Some radicals are now in the leadership of unions representing firemen and telephone and power-plant workers. A number of strikes in 1974 and early 1975 grew violent, and industrial sabotage became a nagging problem. So did random explosions at the Puerto Rican offices of mainland-based enterprises.
Mari Bras called this kind of violence "valid" because it was aimed directly at "colonialist interests." But he drew the line at the terrorist attacks carried out by the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberation National (F.A.L.N.), the mysterious splinter group whose bomb killed four people in Manhattan a year ago.
Despite the island's difficulties, the independentistas are still meeting a lot of sales resistance. Down in Mosquitos, Manny San-tel and his neighbors grimace and shake their heads at the mention of Mari Bras. In Ponce, a long cement workers' strike was settled when an anti-Communist union won an election.
In this atmosphere, it is hard to take seriously Mari Bras' prediction that the issue of Puerto Rico's relations with the U.S.