Trying to Moke It Without Miracles

Puerto Rico came to the U.S. as a prize of the Spanish-American War, and no colonial concubine ever passed to a new master with so meager a trousseau; the island was virtually devoid of natural resources and could barely feed itself. Only after World War II did Puerto Rico move from wretched poverty to the highest living standard in Latin America. It also achieved considerable autonomy under a unique political status called commonwealth by mainlanders and Estado Libre Asociado (Free Associated State) by islanders.

Now the boom is over, and Puerto Rico's future is clouded.

Soaring population and the first real depression in the island's modern history have compounded the social stresses of breakneck industrialization. Pro-independence leftists are attempting to exploit the turmoil both on the island and abroad. TIME Correspondent Laurence I. Barrett visited Puerto Rico to learn how its people and politicians are coping. His report:

In the barrio called Mosquitos on the south coast, there is little movement or noise on the dirt streets under a baking midday sun. The sugar season has just begun, so the men lucky enough to have jobs are swinging machetes in the canefields or working in the Aguirre sugar mill. Toddlers amble about shoeless and bottomless, a black hog wanders out of an alley to confront a tethered goat, and idle teen-age boys chat quietly in small groups. Most of the tiny houses are made of scrap metal and salvage lumber. People have two dreams: to own a concrete house and to win big in the lottery.

Manny Santel is doubtless the luckiest man in Mosquitos. A skilled worker and union leader at the Aguirre mill, he won a $17,000 lottery. So he had a new house built and paid for Senora Santel's sterilization after only five children. But he is an exception, a relatively sophisticated returnee from New York (those who come back are called Neoricans, a term touched with envy and resentment). "My brother," he says, "has 21 kids. Nobody around here pays much attention to the birth control program. The women don't like the pills. They are simple people, and they are afraid."

The teen-agers cannot find work. High school? "It is a long ride to the next town, where there is a high school," Santel explains, "and a lot of them just don't go." Some of them get into trouble. Even in this sleepy hamlet, far from sinful San Juan, police recently staged a drug raid, arresting eight suspects and confiscating some narcotics. "But it is not bad here," Santel says. "It is a better time than before because of the food stamps. People can eat a lot of meat now and they own their little houses."

THE ECONOMY: TOO MANY HEADS

And oldtimers remember how things were in the '30s, when cane cutters worked from dawn to dusk for a dollar a day. That was before Luis Munoz Marin began organizing the peasants, teaching them the magic of the ballot. Later, as the island's first elected Governor (1949-64), Munoz launched Operation Bootstrap to in dustrialize what had been a weak agrarian economy. U.S. industry was lured by low wages, freedom from federal taxes and long-term forgive ness of local taxes. While the commonwealth's development agency, Fomento, catered to capitalists, successive administrations adopted a host of New Deal-style programs that made Puerto Rico the closest thing to a government-managed society in the U.S. system.

But Bootstrap had built-in dangers. While processing products for export, Puerto Rico became highly dependent on imports of all kinds (the trade deficit was $1.8 billion in fiscal 1975). Heavy external borrowing was necessary to keep development momentum going. Then, as wages rose and exemptions from local taxes expired, some labor-intensive plants fled to poorer Caribbean countries and to Asia. Hourly wages in manufacturing have recently been averaging $2.59 in Puerto Rico, compared with 700 in the Dominican Republic and $4.89 in the continental U.S. Partly be cause both legislated and negotiated fringe benefits are steep--a typical government employee gets three months of vacation, holidays and sick leave--productivity sagged and the cost of doing business soared.

Migration to the States provided one safety valve for many years. From 1950 to 1970, the exodus amounted to 615,000 people. That trend began reversing itself in 1971. In the following four years, migration to Puerto Rico from the main land added 143,000 heads to a society that was running out of hats. In addition, il legal aliens have been filtering in from poorer Latin lands. Density is 920 people per sq. mi., among the world's highest. A runaway birth rate (more than 50% higher than in the continental U.S.) helped push the island's population past 3.1 mil lion last fall. The annual population in crease is almost 2.6%. Only the federal food stamp program has prevented dire want; 70% of the island's families now receive precious cupones. Federal spending of all kinds has been increasing rapidly in Puerto Rico, from $922 million in fiscal 1973 to $1.47 billion in 1975 and an anticipated $2 billion in 1976--this in an economy with a G.N.P. of little more than $7 billion.

The little island's load of problems reached crisis proportions with the onset of the Arab oil embargo and the mainland recession in 1974. Wholly reliant on foreign oil for both its large petrochemical processing industry and consumer uses, Puerto Rico was hit even harder than the American Continent.

Puerto Ricans feel that the depression is now bottoming out.

Plant closings have diminished to the normal attrition rate, and new enterprises are beginning to pick up. Still, the official unemployment rate is 19.9%, almost three points higher than a year ago. Much worse, actual unemployment, counting in all those who are in part-time or seasonal jobs or too discouraged to seek work, is estimated at more than 35%. If the official figure is to go down to 12% by 1980, says Governor Rafael Hernandez Colon, Puerto Rico will need 42,000 new jobs a year.

HERNANDEZ: AUSTERITY AND OPTIONS

To attract new employers, Hernandez has lately started stressing productivity. In his annual message to the legislature last month, he demanded that wage raises be limited to the amount of productivity increases and hinted that legislated fringe benefits would be reduced. "The progress of some," he declared, "cannot be at the cost of others' misery." Sounding like California's Jerry Brown, Hernandez declared that sac rifice rather than new miracles is on tomorrow's agenda. He said that his own government "overspends, is highly inefficient, unresponsive to the calls and needs of the people and is all but impossible to control and direct." He promised a thorough over haul of both the bureaucracy and the island's weak education system.

Hernandez has been pushing land reform. The government has been buying underutilized acreage and selling it in small parcels on easy terms to landless peasant families. To promote the program, Hernandez occasionally pays visits to the farm towns, during which they festoon themselves as if for a saint's day. The lean, handsome Governor draws lots to match each young family with its new farm. "It is economic necessity and has great social value as well," Hernandez says. "We must give the people options."

The Governor wants the people to stay with the commonwealth option as the best means of maintaining their identity while pursuing development. The present arrangement, overwhelmingly approved by the voters in every election since it was adopted in 1952, will probably be changed somewhat this year. A joint commission headed by Munoz and former Kentucky Senator Marlow Cook and strongly sup ported by the Hernandez government, has proposed a new compact, which is now be ing discussed in Congress. The island would be explicitly recognized as a sovereign entity voluntarily choosing union with the U.S. Puerto Ricans would remain U.S. citizens but, unless they live on the mainland, still could not vote for fed eral offices. Most important, Puerto Rico would gain full autonomy in specific areas, perhaps including the setting of minimum wages, environmental controls and tariffs, and regulating immigration. It would be able to import some goods without paying duties.

But those Puerto Ricans who want U.S. statehood argue that the compact is a cosmetic means of perpetuating the island's present dependency and strengthening the Hernandez regime. Mean while, those who want full independence say that it is merely an other disguise for colonialism. The new compact will go to a referendum--if Congress acts by midsummer, then the vote will be later this year--and it is expected to pass overwhelmingly.

A referendum would further enliven what is already a contentious election campaign. In November, Puerto Ricans will elect a Governor, a legislature and municipal officials. For the first time the Communists, organized as the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, will run candidates.

The islanders are passionate in their politics, and voting turn outs of more than 80% are common. Across one roadway in the mountains stretches a billowing summons to a rally for Hernandez's Popular Democrats; the symbol is a red silhouette of a peasant wearing the traditional farmer's straw hat, la pava. Outside a hovel flaps the ensign of the other major party, the New Progressives, a blue palm tree on a white background.

ROMERO: STATEHOOD SOME DAY

Hernandez's chief challenger for Governor is San Juan May or Carlos Romero Barcelo, who heads the Nuevoprogresistas. The rivals have a few things in common. Both are young: Hernandez is 39 and Romero 43. Both come from prominent political families. Like most of the island's elite, both went to university in the States, Romero at Yale and Hernandez at Johns Hop kins. Each got a law degree at the University of Puerto Rico. Otherwise their personalities contrast.

Hernandez is relatively reserved.

Even when trudging in jeans and boots through the stench of a hill farmer's chicken coop, he conveys a sense of delicacy. Romero, good-looking in a husky, florid way, is a flesh presser in the Lyndon Johnson manner. He marches on a citizen, fixing him with large, intense eyes and a paralyzing grip. He cannot pass a garbage truck without leaning into the cab for a quick hello.

Romero's Nuevoprogresistas grew out of the old Statehood Republican Party, which was once linked to the G.O.P. as formally as the Populares still are to the mainland Democrats, but Romero and former Governor Luis Ferre broke that official connection. While the Nuevoprogresistas are still strongest among the middle and upper classes, the mainland tags of liberal and conservative do not hang neatly in the island's politics.

Calling for Puerto Rico's eventual entry into the Union as the 51st state, Romero argues that the biggest beneficiaries would be the poor. The new federal tax burden would fall mostly on the affluent, he says, while the lower classes would benefit from increases in federal social programs. To those who object to statehood because of the income tax, he answers: "We should be willing to take up the burden little by little until everyone in Puerto Rico who is able to pay tax bears the same burden as any U.S. citizen."

This philosophy appeals at least to a sizable minority of Puerto Ricans who fear the radicalism of the independentistas and crave the security resulting from the American connection. When a mill worker explains his New Progressive palma flag by saying it is mas Americano, he does not mean that he wants his children to stop speaking Spanish, the official language. Rather he wants to be able to count on his cupones now and his Social Security check later. Says a pharmacist in Gurabo: "I was in the Army and I know America. We feel threatened by Cuba. Our best chance for security and stability is statehood."

THE RADICALS: BOMBS AND BOMBAST

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 Ruben 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.

will eventually be settled by armed force. Editor Ramon Arbona of the Communist newspaper Claridad says that his party does not have to train fighters because "the U.S. Army has done that for us." Most veterans, however, have more peaceful ideas.

Nelson Ortiz, 23, just finished a three-year volunteer hitch in the Army--infantry, heavy weapons--and was heading home to see his family in the western town of Afiasco. His plans? "I'm going back to college, going to study sociology." Independence?

"That would be a big crisis. Look at those other little countries that became independent, all the troubles they have."

Ordinary people convey a sense of confidence that things will work out eventually, that they still have opportunities to grow. Ortiz has uncles in Chicago, parents in Anasco, friends in San Juan. "Maybe some day it will be Chicago for me," he says.

"Why not?" Rafael Cruz, 39, has a steady job as a bus driver in New Jersey but he is looking for a small business in San Juan.

After 25 years in the States, he and his wife have simply decided that "it is time to go back." The continental connection gives people like Nelson Ortiz and Rafael Cruz--as well as Rafael Hernandez and Carlos Romero--time and choices.

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