Puerto Rico’s Financial Woes Revive Calls for Independence

 In March 1954, Rafael Cancel Miranda smuggled a gun into the United States Capitol and, with three other Puerto Rican nationalists, opened fire from the visitors’ gallery. Five members of Congress were wounded.

The attackers, three men and one woman, were swiftly arrested and tried. Mr. Cancel Miranda, then 23, received the longest sentence, 85 years. He served 25 years before his sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter.

Today, Mr. Cancel Miranda is the last surviving attacker. He lives with his wife, Angie, on a quiet lane of bungalows in a part of San Juan where the streets take their names from stars and constellations. His eyesight is failing, but he still turns out for the occasional independence event, where younger people receive him as a legend.

His ancient enmities are now fresher than ever because of the island’s catastrophic $72 billion debt, which has placed Puerto Rico into what amounts to federal receivership. A seven-member panel appointed by Congress and President Obama will soon hold sway over the island and its finances, which collapsed after years of long-term borrowing to cover rising short-term costs. To longtime nationalists like Mr. Cancel Miranda, it is yet more proof that colonialism is alive and well here.

This helps Mr. Cancel Miranda explain something odd that happened this summer. In June, the governor of Puerto Rico, Alejandro J. García Padilla, traveled to New York City and told a special committee of the United Nations that despite all appearances, Puerto Rico was still a colony of the United States. He sought the United Nations’ help in achieving self-determination for the island, which is a commonwealth of the United States.

“Puerto Rico is hungry and thirsty for justice,” Mr. García Padilla said.

The special committee has called on Washington to “allow the Puerto Rican people fully to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination and independence.”

To understand why Mr. García Padilla’s remarks were so unusual, it helps to know that his Popular Democratic Party claims to have already freed Puerto Rico from the colonial yoke. The island’s independence is a signature issue: The party takes credit for negotiating a unique status for Puerto Rico — that of an “associated free state” — which is said to provide the best of both worlds, statehood and independence, without forcing Puerto Rico to choose.

The party says it achieved that in 1954, and that Puerto Rico has been an “associated free state” since.

Photo

Police officers detained three of four Puerto Rican nationalists who opened fire on the United States Capitol in 1954. The authorities arrested Lolita Lebron, left, Mr. Cancel Miranda and Andres Figueroa Cordero.CreditAssociated Press

“It’s a lie!” Mr. Cancel Miranda said in a recent interview. “We never controlled our own country.”

Unusual events this year have brought many Puerto Ricans to much the same conclusion. In January, in a double jeopardy case, the United States Supreme Court held that Puerto Rico had no independent prosecutorial authority — just the authority bestowed on it by the United States Congress.

Few on the mainland may have paid attention, but in Puerto Rico, the decision prompted the Popular Democratic Party’s president, David Bernier, a candidate for governor, to call for “an urgent review of the structure of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States.”

The party that invented the “associated free state” was now questioning it.

Next, Mr. Obama’s administration invoked the territories clause of the Constitution as it pushed for a law allowing Puerto Rico to restructure its big debt. The clause gives Congress the power to enact “all needful rules and regulations” for United States territories, and its use sent a strong signal to Puerto Rico that the island had no power to carry out its own law.

When Congress passed the debt-restructuring law in June, it placed Puerto Rico’s financial affairs under federal oversight, handled by a seven-member board. This was widely seen as proof that “associated free state” was a meaningless term.

“Seven unelected people are going to be controlling our lives,” said María de Lourdes Santiago, a senator from the Puerto Rican Independence Party who, like Mr. Bernier, is running for governor. “It’s a dictatorship.”

She said the debt crisis had set profound changes in motion and she hoped Puerto Rico could finally “have a legitimate process of decolonization.”

A White House spokeswoman, Brandi S. Hoffine, said it was clear that “the people of Puerto Rico want the issue of status to be resolved,” and referred to the recommendations of a presidential task force for how that might happen. “The president remains committed to the principle of self-determination for the people of Puerto Rico,” she said.

In an interview at his home, Mr. Cancel Miranda said the previous decolonization — the one carried out by the Popular Democrats — had been a sham, and had provoked the attack on Congress. He played grainy black-and-white video footage of himself as a young man, refusing to apologize for the shooting during questioning. Then he filled in some details.

The United Nations had declared the 1950s a “decade of decolonization,” he said, and Puerto Rico was put on a list of colonies to be freed.

But, he said, Washington had merely appeared to go along with the proceedings — its main preoccupation was the Cold War. It wanted to remove Puerto Rico from the list of colonies, but not give it full autonomy, Mr. Cancel Miranda said, which might have meant losing the island’s ports, airfields and other strategic assets.

Historians say United States officials helped to draft Puerto Rico’s first Constitution, adding a provision — now in dispute — that general-obligation bonds be paid before everything else if money was tight. Washington also poured money into infrastructure on the island and offered tax breaks to American companies that came to Puerto Rico and created jobs.

For better or worse, those programs won over some elected island officials who had previously favored independence. They devised the term “associated free state,” which was said to mean that Puerto Rico was a sovereign coequal of the United States, pursuing common interests by mutual agreement. The term in Spanish, “estado libre asociado,” is used in Puerto Rico’s Constitution. (The English-language version calls Puerto Rico a commonwealth.)

In 1953, a United Nations special committee held hearings on whether Puerto Rico’s name could be removed from the list of colonies. Mr. Cancel Miranda said he was there, listening as American delegates testified that Puerto Rico now had free elections, a Constitution and other essentials of self-government. Other witnesses, however, said it was all window-dressing.

When the committee reconvened and voted, Mr. Cancel Miranda said, Washington’s view prevailed.

“That’s when the nationalists said, ‘We have to send a message,’” Mr. Cancel Miranda said. “That was the reason for the attack on Congress.”

Their message was silenced for decades by long prison sentences. Over the years, memories of the attack faded on the mainland. And in Puerto Rico, the ballot replaced armed insurgency. The Independence Party is respected but has not earned many votes — though its popularity is growing, Ms. Santiago said.

Now, it seems that most Puerto Ricans believe the associated free state was a sham, even if it is not clear what they will do about it.

“You saw what I said in 1954: ‘I’m not sorry,’” Mr. Cancel Miranda said. “And 62 years later, I’m still not sorry.”

Puerto Rico’s Financial Woes Revive Calls for Independence