"God's Pamphleteer"

At Cidra, high in the mountains of central Puerto Rico, Luis Munoz Marin was taking it easy. The island's first elected governor had shut himself off from the well-wishers who had turned his town house into a public place. Only for leathery jibaros (farmers) like Eustachio Perez Guzman was the door still open. Eustachio had vowed that if victory came to the Popular Democratic Party, he would go and kneel before Don Luis. To finance the journey, he had sold two of his six chickens, set out from his remote western hamlet of Isabela.

"Well," said worldly Don Luis to Eustachio when he heard his story, "if you must kneel, there is nothing to stop me from kneeling too." A cousin of Munoz urged him to pay Eustachio for the two chickens he had sold. Said Don Luis: "When a man gives you his soul, do you give him change?"

Life on the Dole. Twenty-five years ago, as a young poet in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, Munoz had described himself as "God's pamphleteer, [going] with the mobs of hungry men & women towards the great awakening." His relation with his island's straw-hatted jibaros is still pitched to that emotional key, but in eight years as President of the Insular Senate and chief of the ruling Popular Democrats he has also learned some sober facts of Puerto Rican life.

Politician Munoz tells his jibaros that the island's troubles are a problem in multiplication. Since 1899, Puerto Rico's population (now 2,200,000) has more than doubled. At present rates, it will rise another 36% by 1965. The island's sugar-based economy gives it an increasingly unfavorable trade balance with the U.S. (last year's: $140 million). U.S. expenditures for relief and public works have made Puerto Rico a vast and continuing WPA project.

During his eight years in power, Munoz has built the world's largest tax-financed project of individual houses (TIME, Aug. 23), started an $11 million hospital program, raised the percentage of the island's children in school from 49 to 58. But his chief tool for improvement is the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Co. Under the driving management of 38-year-old, Barcelona-born Teodoro ("Teddy") Moscoso Jr., PRIDC is plugging the island's advantages in openhanded tax concessions, cheap (as low as 15-c--an-hour minimum) labor, and plentiful, government-owned electric power. Moscoso's salesmanship has already brought 42 new industries--ranging from rayon to radios--from the mainland. Since 1940, while the population has risen 12%, production has been upped 30%. New inquiries from mainland industries are pouring in.

Labor on the Move. Munoz hopes that PRIDC's program will make some 300,000 new industrial jobs by 1960. He also hopes to double the number of Puerto Ricans (5,000 in 1948) who go to the U.S. as migratory farm workers. Even that will not eliminate Puerto Rico's chronic labor surplus. For that, Munoz has only one remedy: orderly but large-scale emigration. One movement he wants to discourage at all costs is the sort of undirected emigration that last year added 28,000 unwanted Puerto Ricans to the slums of Manhattan, Chicago, Gary and Lorain, Ohio.

Can Munoz' program bring economic health to his hungry, tattered island? Says Politician Munoz: "What the hell, we've got to try it." Says Munoz the poet: "We shall raise two crops: first, personal liberty; second, beans. I am going to put my shoulder to this job."

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