Charismatic Nationalist : Free Spirit of Puerto Rico Politics

Ruben Berrios Martinez, president of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, was conducting a Sunday afternoon car tour of the island he has been trying to liberate for 21 years. The destination was Lares, a small town deep into the mountainous interior, cradle of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement. Berrios loves to take visitors there, for symbolic reasons if nothing else.

Not far outside San Juan, he spied a young man selling not only deep-fried fish at his roadside concession, but also, prominently displayed in a rack alongside, Puerto Rican flags--red, white and blue, with a single large white star.

“Look, look! See! “ Berrios squealed, thrashing about in his seat, excited as a child, poking at his visitor with one hand, pointing with the other. “ Hee! Is that man an independentista or not ?” he demanded. “And, be assured--he will sell every single flag by sunset! Hee! Do they do that in Nebraska or California?”

Victory Salute Given

Farther along, on the freeway, a young father in an old Toyota filled with small children glanced over, recognized Berrios, grinned, waved, then, in a second thought, quickly rolled down his window and thrust out his arm, fist clenched in a victory salute. He held the gesture until his car disappeared in traffic.

This brought Berrios to the verge of tears. “Ah, yes, it is this way everywhere; the people love me; they respect me,” he said in a thickened voice, waving back. “We (the Independence Party) are the conscience of the Puerto Rican people; that is why I must keep on. Ha! I can go anywhere, into the worst ghetto and I do not need a bodyguard like the others because anyone who would hurt me--the people would kill him!” He wiped his eyes and swallowed hard.

It’s easy to see why Berrios, 49, is widely regarded as one of the most colorful, charismatic politicians in Latin America. He gives new definition to about 50 adjectives, among them passionate, romantic, melodramatic, theatrical, charming, smart, entertaining and vain.

Pursuit of Independence

Not to mention committed, driven and utterly tireless in pursuit of his lifelong vision, which is to throw the United States off this island it has owned and operated for 91 years. “Viva Puerto Rico libre,” murmurs Berrios. It makes him smile every time he says it.

But now, along comes President George Bush, an avowed statehooder, calling for the first referendum in Puerto Rico in 22 years to determine whether Puerto Ricans--U.S. citizens since 1917 and denizens of the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico since 1952--want to become the 51st star on the U.S. flag.

Nothing could have focused outside attention on Berrios faster. Never mind that his little party gets only about 6% of the vote. Because here, in an electorate so passionately divided between the two mainstream parties--one for retaining the commonwealth status, the other for statehood--that races are sometimes decided by less than 50 votes, 6% carries an inordinate amount of clout. Without Berrios’ cooperation, the question of Puerto Rico’s political status cannot be resolved to anybody’s full satisfaction.

And he is already threatening a PIP boycott of the proposed referendum as a sham, unless the United States does an about-face and offers what he calls “fair terms for all three positions--not just the one it prefers.”

At the same time, he is delighted that the U.S. legislators now arriving in Puerto Rico to discuss preliminaries for the referendum are giving the PIP as much attention as the other two parties.

‘The U.S. Has a Problem’

“Finally, for the first time ever, the U.S. is sitting down to negotiate with the independentistas,” Berrios says. “By doing that, they are at least admitting that the U.S. has a problem here! It is a great triumph for us.”

Berrios, son of a wealthy coffee plantation owner, was educated at Georgetown, Yale Law School and Oxford, and when he wants to be, he is the urbane, coolly dignified attorney--a Social Democrat, sometimes law professor, fond of quoting English poetry, Milton and Shakespeare in particular.

But, mostly, he is the living, blazing epitome of the contagiously enthusiastic Latino, a dapper, wavy-haired, blue-eyed blond in a loose-tailed white tropical shirt, quick to laugh, easy to weep and forever ready to erupt into breast-clutching, hair-tearing oratory.

His favorite expressions are “ Ha “ (denoting sarcasm, frustration, contempt), “ Hee “ (sarcasm, glee), and “ Fantastico. “ These are punctuated, sometimes to comic effect, by a voice that constantly cracks like a boy’s on high notes, by an infectious giggle and by pale, deep-set eyes, by far his most distinctive physical feature, which seem upon the verge of flying right off his face whenever he’s excited, which is most of the time.

And, just thinking about the Republic of Puerto Rico sets him in motion. It would be a far cry from what he sees about him now.

“Ha! Of course the people don’t vote for me--not yet--because they are afraid!” Berrios bristles, at his sarcastic best, smacking his head in disgust. “Puerto Rico has become the classical welfare state. People have been conditioned to believe that they will starve without the U.S. and that Ruben will take away their food stamps. Besides that, they might have to work ! Nobody works here! So it is a miracle that we get even this many votes!”

It is Berrios’ central premise that the United States has stripped Puerto Ricans of dignity, pride and incentive and turned them into a nation, essentially, of lazy welfare parasites--governed by an even fatter, happier ruling elite--who would rather feed off the American taxpayer’s dollar than work. “We have become the spiritual South Bronx of the Caribbean,” he hisses. “Ha, this whole island now has a ghetto mentality.”

Berrios is further convinced that the United States has a cynical interest in keeping things just this way--which is why he looks upon the proposed referendum with a jaded eye. It has long been his complaint that the United States is so determined to maintain the commonwealth arrangement that it stacks the deck economically against his party and the statehooders too--so that Puerto Ricans, dependent upon the United States since 1898, cannot make a choice unfettered by economic fears.

“Americans are always saying: ‘Why don’t these Puerto Ricans make up their minds?’ Ha! Because they can’t , is why!” he howls, pounding the car seat. “The decision is not ours--it never has been, not since the Americans invaded.”

It’s obvious to Berrios why the United States favors the commonwealth--dozens of U.S. businesses operate here tax-free, and the island is a U.S. military stronghold. (The Grenada invasion was staged from the same U.S. naval base where victims of the battleship Iowa explosion were taken early Thursday.)

And the idea of Puerto Rico becoming a state only makes Berrios explode in bitter mirth.

“Statehood for Puerto Rico is a joke ! Even the statehooders know it, in their hearts, no matter what Reagan and Bush say, the U.S. doesn’t want us! Ha ! You think Washington wants 3 million . . . who don’t even speak English, who don’t do the fox trot but the rumba--in their Congress with seven votes? Ha! The black boy suddenly wants to come into the house? To share the inheritance with the white sons? Impossible!”

(A student in the United States during the ‘60s who still counts Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X among his greatest heroes, Berrios has a boundless supply of colorful anti-American insults, most of them assailing the United States as racist and paternalistic; he loves the slave-master analogy best of all.)

“But,” he says, almost as an afterthought, eyes gleaming, “if the U.S. would promise Puerto Ricans that they would not starve, that you would not just cut us loose, but help us to get on our feet, then,” he purrs, “we would see, if the Independence Party got 6% of the vote or 96% . In their hearts, every Puerto Rican is an independentista.”

And, in fact, the ballot box hardly seems to reflect Berrios’ real standing among his countrymen. As anyone who has spent even 10 minutes on the streets with him can attest, he may be the most popular politician in Puerto Rico, just as he says.

It’s more like traveling with a movie star than a candidate who just got wiped out at the polls. Wherever he goes, across the parking lot to his car, into a San Juan shopping mall, into a rural cafe, people swarm to him--men, women, children, well-dressed professionals to ghetto dwellers--wanting to shake his hand, ask after the wife and son, slap him on the back. And everybody calls him Ruben.

And his popularity is not only among Puerto Ricans. For some time, Berrios has been busy expanding his forum from the narrow corridor between San Juan and Washington to the entire Latin American world, where a whole new generation of relatively young, decidedly nationalist leaders--characterized by such men as Presidents Alan Garcia of Peru and Rodrigo Borja Cevallos of Ecuador--are less inclined to politely accept the U.S. premise that what happens in Puerto Rico is not a Latin American matter at all, but strictly a U.S. “domestic affair.”

They are men who share Berrios’ views; some were among his personal friends years before they came to power, and today he happily counts at least half a dozen of them as allies, at least in spirit. Not only do they invite Cuban President Fidel Castro to their inaugurations, they invite Berrios too. When he travels about Latin America, he is wined and dined in government palaces from Lima to Caracas, accorded fullest respect not only by such long-term U.S. antagonists as Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, but also by such traditional U.S. allies as Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez.

In fact, the PIP hopes to persuade Perez to co-sponsor, along with Cuba, this year’s United Nations’ resolution calling for the redefinition of Puerto Rico from “self-governing territory” to “colony.” (By now, it has become an almost annual U.N. ritual for Cuba, the sometimes sole Latin friend of the Puerto Rican independence movement for 30 years, to introduce the U.N. resolution, and for the United States to denounce it as more of Castro’s meddling.)

Berrios’ lineup of Latin American friends is one reason he appears convinced that he can eventually win.

“Of course!” he said. “Our strategy is to bring international pressure to bear on the United States as never before--and to have the sympathies of so many fine Latin American leaders, men the U.S. cannot dismiss so easily as Castro, who do not believe that the old-fashioned colonial policies of the U.S. have a place in this new world-- Ha! Definitely! It is something fantastico! “ Berrios slapped his chest in joy.

And the second part of his plan to win is to recruit you, the ordinary American taxpayer, to his cause--although, he chortles: “It is, of course, first necessary to teach most Americans where Puerto Rico is --that we are not all yet in New York City, mugging the old ladies . . . .”

With that kind of combined pressure on Congress, how can Washington refuse to set its Puerto Rican colony free?

He paused, rolling his eyes heavenward. He forgot, dealing with the average American is like handling a sheltered hothouse flower. Dear Lord, give him the British any day.

“At least they admitted that they had colonies, but, you Americans! Argh! How you choke to say even the word,” he groaned.

“Yes! Call it whatever you want--a commonwealth, a colony by consent, an industrial perfume colony--but Puerto Rico is a colony!” He was shouting now, voice cracking on every other word. “The U.S. government tries to hide its shame, so people don’t accuse it of what it is--colonists in this world without colonies--you, among the world’s greatest independentistas yourselves! Aii! It is not bearable !” He fell back into his car seat, overcome.

For about 3 seconds. When it comes to sheer verbal energy, Berrios makes Jesse Jackson look downright tired.

His serenity wasn’t much improved when his visitor casually remarked, watching the passing towns go by, that Puerto Rico appeared to be in pretty good shape.

Busy shopping centers, terrific freeways, new cars, clean towns, Burger Kings and TV antennaes everyplace. Slums worse in Chicago; no homeless littering the sidewalks as in downtown Los Angeles; dietary deficiencies more evident on any street in Beverly Hills.

He practically leaped over the seat.

“ Aaii , but of course!” he spat, banging his head. “Televisions! And, be assured, they are color televisions too. Half the population of Puerto Rico is living off U.S. assistance, food coupons-- except ,” he digressed, voice slinking into another of his deep-throated purrs, “they don’t even receive the actual food coupons here, you know that ? Instead the government makes it easier , they send Puerto Ricans the actual checks, so they can go out and buy whatever they want! Puerto Ricans buy cars with food coupons!” Nothing makes Ruben Berrios’ eyes spin like the subject of food coupons.

Now, hanging halfway over the car seat, he was infusing new life into cold statistics, as only a man with an overriding mission can do.

He knows the economic facts by heart, all accurate and designed to inflame you. Among them:

It cost the United States about $5 billion to maintain Puerto Rico last year; about $960 million of that was for food stamps, with about 60% of the population eligible. Official unemployment is set at 14%, but, Berrios stresses, the more relevant figure is that only 42% of the able-bodied are hunting work. “That means that more than half those who could work don’t even look for jobs!”

Meantime, thanks to an economic revitalization program aimed at luring U.S. industry to Puerto Rico shortly after it became a commonwealth, about 200 major U.S. industries now flourish here, with revenues last year of about $2 billion--tax exempt. Puerto Ricans pay no federal taxes either.

“Ha! Fantastico, eh? Big business gets rich; the Pentagon does whatever the hell it wants here, but the U.S. government collects no revenues from anybody here, so it’s the guy in South Dakota and Texas who must pay for the food coupons, which buy the votes of the Puerto Ricans, so that the present system can keep on.”

Berrios threw up his hands, sounding amazed himself that such a web of special interests could be so tightly wound about one tiny island, 100 by 35 miles square.

Temporarily, his spirit failed him. He gazed balefully out the window for a few minutes, brooding, unsoothed by the continuing, spectacular mountain scenery. A splendid red-feathered bird flew across the road to land in a vivid ravine overflowing with purple and pink wildflowers, but Berrios only glared at it.

To say that Berrios has a problem on his hands might be understating the case.

For one thing, with an average per-capita income now of about $5,000, the Puerto Rican standard of living is about half that of Mississippi, the poorest U.S. state, but still nearly double that of any other Latin American country.

But, perhaps even more important than current comfort levels, most Puerto Ricans still either personally remember or have heard tales of the horrors that were, before the island became a commonwealth.

For the first half of the century, Puerto Rico--a U.S. spoil of the Spanish-American War of 1898--rivaled even Haiti as one of the most impoverished islands in the Caribbean. It was a nation of pathetic beggars--U.S. citizens or not--who swarmed to America by the thousands in search of work.

Then, in 1952, came the Commonwealth, engineered by the late Luis Munoz Marin, Puerto Rico’s first elected governor and still revered today as the man who saved the nation from starvation.

Munoz also founded the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party (PDP). The pro-statehood New Progressive Party (NPP) didn’t begin to flourish until years later, when Puerto Ricans had the leisure to advance their aims beyond mere survival.

Differences Between Parties

Today, the essential differences between the two parties are these:

The PDP can’t see any reason to fiddle with a good situation. Why trade away Puerto Rico’s tax exempt status, simply for U.S. voting privileges? Meantime, citizens here are free to migrate to the United States at will--and do: About 2.5 million Puerto Ricans live in the United States--about 75,000 of them in the Los Angeles area.

The statehooders, by comparison, burn to become first-class U.S. citizens in every respect. As former San Juan Mayor Balthasar Corrada del Rio, last fall’s losing NPP gubernatorial candidate, put it: “I am ashamed to be a second-class citizen who cannot even vote for the President, and I also think we should pay our fair share of taxes like every other U.S. citizen.”

Economic concerns have seldom been the motivating force behind Puerto Rican nationalism--and the independentistas have always been here, starting with the Indians, ever since the Spaniards arrived in 1493.

Mostly, they have been ordinary Puerto Ricans, more interested in votes than in sensational congressional shootings, assassination attempts (on Harry S. Truman), sabotaging U.S. facilities or robbing banks--although such small underground bands of radicals (the Macheteros; Guerrilla Forces for Liberation, or FALN, etc.) naturally get all the world’s attention.

Of whatever ilk, however, nationalists have never been regarded lightly by the authorities here. Puerto Rican history is studded with bloodcurdling episodes of murder and massacre, including one stunning case in 1978 in which police coldbloodedly set up, then executed two young nationalist activists on a lonely mountainside. Last year, in an ongoing legal controversy sparked by the PIP, a so-called government enemies list of potential subversives, dating back at least 40 years, was disclosed--allegedly containing the names of more than 70,000 Puerto Ricans with nationalist sympathies.

Berrios’ own police file was “big, very thick,” he laughs, loving it. He couldn’t have devised a better sympathy campaign in his wildest dreams, because, in truth, nobody is less militant than Berrios--he even sounds awkward when he swears.

In fact, Berrios sometimes seems slightly embarrassed that in a country where prominent nationalist leaders have sometimes been imprisoned for years, he has spent almost no time in the actual trenches of the revolution.

Unlike his hero, nationalist party founder Pedro Albizu Campos, for instance, who spent 18 of his 73 years in federal prisons, Berrios has only three months’ jail time to his credit--that for seriously annoying the U.S. Navy in 1971 by leading a protest march onto their firing range on the small Puerto Rican island of Culebra.

But he does his best to make the most of it. “Well, as it turned out, I was in no danger; they weren’t even firing that day,” he shrugs. “Of course, we didn’t know that. Hee , I mean, the point was, we (a band of about 30) were, well, you know--willing to, eh . . . . “ He stops just short of saying, “willing to die.” A man of timing, Berrios seldom oversteps.

It was that incident that propelled Berrios, not long home from his Oxford graduate studies, into the Puerto Rican public eye. He was handily elected to his first state Senate term the next year--and his flock has been growing, however modestly, ever since, fanning the fires of Puerto Rican political passions ever higher.

And, even by Latin American standards, Puerto Ricans are legendary for the frenzy of their elections. There is practically no such thing here as an apathetic citizen on election day--voter turnout is 85%.

Any 10-year-old kid on the streets can give you a fairly good explanation of his preferred position on Puerto Rico’s political status. So will the hotel clerk, the taxi driver, the bank teller, even winos nodding on the beaches.

“Of course I’m for statehood,” snapped Estrella Maggio, a lively, middle-aged widow and owner of a tourist resort in the west coast mountains, looking halfway insulted at the question. “I’m an American , for God’s sake! I think like an American; I lived in America for 20 years; I married an American, and I should be an American! As it is,” she sighed, throwing up her hands in disgust, “Puerto Ricans are nothing! Literally nothing .”

“Besides, just look what the commonwealth system has done to this country,” she fumed, glancing down the hillside at her property--all in a state of disrepair. Maggio, widowed only recently, needs janitors, maids, painters, gardeners; she has a $265,000 mortgage on her back. “But I can’t find anybody around here who will work! The people here fish all day and play the guitar all night and sleep. They have a wonderful life--on welfare!”

As for Berrios? She smiled almost gently. “It’s ridiculous, what the independentistas dream of. There is no way Puerto Rico could survive alone. We have no natural resources.”

Commonwealthers are typified by everyone from Jose Alberto Moralez, the polished, Harvard-educated president of Sacred Heart University in San Juan, to Marita Melendez, 36, a swollen single mother of five with exhausted circles under her eyes who lives in a $24-per-month public housing project awash in beer cans and political graffiti.

‘We Need the U.S.’

“I am an autonomist,” says Moralez, “because I want to maintain our separate identity. I don’t care about congressional votes or who’s in the White House. At the same time, I think we must face the fact that we need the U.S, we couldn’t make it on our own.”

And, of Berrios? “I agree with Berrios that, uh, perhaps we do take our federal benefits too much for granted, that, yes, we should do more for ourselves,” said Moralez, (whose student body is almost completely financed by federal grants). “But, I think the leadership of the (PIP) is characterized by a mentality of the rich who yearn for the Spanish glory of the past . . . . Ruben’s charisma is good for applause, but it’s not very constructive.”

“Since I was a little girl, I was in that party, for the commonwealth,” shrugged Melendez, blushing, embarrassed at the attention of a stranger. “All I know is, it’s the best party for me. I got a good place to live,” she explained, glancing with pride about her small living room, filled with plastic flowers, prints of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, console color TV blaring, a plastic foam ice chest of beer on the floor.

She frowned, searching in her broken English for the words to say something fine about (PDP) Gov. Rafael Hernandez Colon, whose big red-and-white political poster from last November was still plastered across her front door, now half ragged from the rain. “I get $194 a month in federal assistance,” she finally said. “The governor, he helps me.”

And Berrios? Her eyes narrowed, suddenly alive with new intensity. “Agh,” she grimaced, “He is a blanquito (an unfavorable term, roughly denoting any white posturing as something else); he don’t care about us, only that he is a big man.”

It’s not easy at times, despite Berrios’ enthusiasm and contagious persuasions, to figure out just how he expects to overcome all this.

But, then, there he is again, thrashing about in the car seat, laughing, witty, funny, the picture of well-informed certainty. Berrios’ basic rationale is elegant in its simplicity. Independence will come because “there is nothing the commonwealth can do that the republic can’t do better.”

The only prior condition is that, even in Berrios’ free Republic of Puerto Rico, the United States must continue to help.

‘You Owe It to Us’

“You should also pay reparations for 91 years of colonialism. But of course! You owe it to us. Ha! You have robbed us of our soul; now you must pay to help restore it.”

He thinks about $3.5 billion a year for perhaps 15 years will do it.

And, with that kind of money, the sky’s the limit, he blissfully observed. Puerto Rico “could become another Singapore, a Switzerland, the Taiwan of the Caribbean, a banking center, trade . . . and I am not stingy,” he smiled, “I will agree that the U.S. has created a wonderful infrastructure here. Hee! Which is why no nation on Earth is more ready than Puerto Rico to become independent!”

Obviously, although the PIP belongs to the Socialist International, Berrios is no flaming anti-capitalist. “Ah, socialism is the politics of the heart, of course,” he grins, shrugging. “But a socialist in Puerto Rico must be realistic --and we need American businesses here. Ha! We will kiss them to stay.”

As the car wound through the mountains, Berrios rested himself, looking a little amused at the usual tourist surprise that Puerto Rico is so much more than the land of sandy beaches, glittering casinos and frosty pina coladas the travel brochures show.

The interior is a geographic wonderland of misty mountain peaks, rain forests, waterfalls and vast, breathtaking valleys caught in magic lavender shadows and golden sunlight--giant flowers of the sort Californians so carefully pamper (impatiens, for one) growing wild everywhere. In the tape deck, Berrios, no slouch as a tour guide, had inserted melancholy Latin love songs, mostly violins.

Then, beyond a steep mountain curve, there suddenly below, spilling down a lush, steep hillside, lay the picturesque, pastel little town of Lares.

And Berrios became another man altogether, this one less interested in his own agenda than in making sure an American stranger fully understood the glory of the events that had once occurred in this valley, on a September night so long ago, in 1868, when a little band of rebels made the first organized, armed attempt to overthrow Puerto Rico’s colonial masters.

Movement’s Original Martyrs

It was a doomed little uprising, crushed by the Spaniards within 24 hours--but the original martyrs of the modern Puerto Rican nationalist movement were born, their leader, Ramon Betances, still its patron saint.

Even today Puerto Ricans come here to scatter flowers. Not just nationalists either, but commonwealthers and statehooders too. The romance of nationalism shoots through the population like a current of electricity.

And nobody is more in love with romance, none more enchanted than Berrios with the rich, bloody, dramatic course of nationalist history--not to mention his own inevitable place in it, probably a fairly substantial mention too, especially if he turns out to be the last independentista leader before statehood.

He peered at the lovely landscape with the wonder of a boy at a Saturday afternoon matinee--the movie was Captain Blood; he was Errol Flynn.

Just to think of it! The grandeur, the majesty, the heroism, the unspeakable purity of purpose of these martyrs--how the fire must have burned in their hearts, how icy must have been the determination in their eyes as they marched on the might of the Spanish empire.

“Ah! It is unbearable! “ he exploded, nearly rocking the car with all the bouncing around in his seat. “What happened here, it was something fantastico! Hee! “

WILL IT BE THE 51st STATE?

Puerto Rico has been a U.S. possession since the Spanish-American War at the end of the last century. Now President Bush is calling for a referendum to determine whether the 3 million inhabitants of the island--U.S. citizens since 1917 and members of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico since 1952--favor statehood. The two largest political parties are divided on the issue and the third, the Puerto Rican Independence Party under Ruben Berrios, clings to the dream of a free Puerto Rico.