Overview

A gripping history of FBI surveillance, political repression, and the fight for Puerto Rican independence In the 1940s, with the construction of a naval base and a bombing range, Puerto Rico became a major geo-political military outpost for the United States. For a power claiming global leadership in a decolonizing world, however, the archipelago’s colonial condition underscored the dissonance between American democratic rhetoric and its imperial reality. The solution was a deal that, in 1952, gave Puerto Rico a degree of self-government without changing its legal status as an “unincorporated” US territory. The US then publicly claimed Puerto Rico was now more autonomous while using repressive tactics such as FBI surveillance, arrests, destabilization, and other methods developed in Washington to silence activists and political parties pushing for full independence. In Cold War Puerto Rico, Steve Howell examines how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI targeted Puerto Rican communists as part of an offensive against pro-independence parties and activists generally. Howell’s US-born father, who fell afoul of Hoover for producing radical cartoons while working in San Juan in the 1940s, remained on the FBI’s watch list long after exiling himself in Britain. His close friends, the Puerto Rican author Cesar Andreu Iglesias and Jane Speed de Andreu, were meanwhile arrested and imprisoned three times during the 1950s. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, including interviews and FBI files, Howell tells their stories along with those of other activists who battled indictment in 1954 under the Smith Act, challenged the jurisdiction of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Juan in 1959, and revived the Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1960s, despite the FBI deploying the covert tactics of COINTELPRO against them. Puerto Rico is virtually invisible in histories of what is generally called McCarthyism, yet anti-communist repression was in many ways more intense there than in the mainland US. Now, with Puerto Rico’s future currently hanging in the balance, Howell’s compelling history demonstrates why we need to understand the long enforcement of its colonial status.

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9781625349491

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Reviews

""Howell does an excellent job uncovering the FBI's transnational networks that enabled it to harass Puerto Rican radicals, follow their compatriots abroad, and work with other intelligence and legislative agencies to circumscribe individual freedoms and rights ostensibly in the name of national security and democracy.""--Denise M. Lynn, author of Women March for Peace: Black Radical Women's Anti-Korean War Activism ""Howell narrates the history of solidarity between a network of Puerto Rican and U.S. communists who faced repression from the developing US imperialist state during the early years of the Cold War. An engaging and important historical contribution.""--Sandy Plácido, Rutgers-Newark

Author Information

Steve Howell is an Anglo-American journalist, author, and former communications consultant. He has appeared as a political commentator on the BBC, ITV, Sky News, and various podcasts, and has contributed opinion pieces to publications such as The Nation, Big Issue, and The Guardian. His books include Game Changer: Eight Weeks That Transformed British Politics, which was a Guardian best book of the year.

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