PUERTO RICO AND THE UNITED STATES

When it seemed that the Democratic Party presidential primary here would be important, island political leaders were delighted that it would focus the attention of the American people on Puerto Rico. But is this such a good idea?

Take the May 6th front page of the Wall Street Journal. Although readers know that there is more to the WSJ than business news, it was still surprising to see a sports story from Salinas, Puerto Rico about a boxer with the interesting name of McJoe Arroyo. One quickly discovers, however, that there is more to the story.

The reporter, Barry Newman, describes what he calls an “oddity” in Puerto Rico. Everywhere on this island, he writes, the American and Puerto Rican flag fly side by side – except in one place: the Albergue Olympico in Salinas. There the Puerto Rican flag flies alone.

Why? Because in what the story describes as Puerto Rico’s “half-in-half-out status as a Commonwealth of the U.S.,” the island will participate in the Beijing Olympics, as it has since 1948 as an “entity”, that is, the same as an independent nation.

Arroyo, the report declares, has a chance to win the bantamweight medal, joining the other six Puerto Rican boxers that have won medals. Just how “ferocious” is Puerto Rico’s patriotic pride in the Olympics is dramatized by the fact that the only Puerto Rican to win a gold medal was the tennis star, Gigi Fernández. But although she actually won two gold medals, “she doesn’t rate a footnote” in the new Olympic Museum. Why? Because she competed under the U.S. flag.

“We don’t like our people playing on the U.S. team,” the WSJ reporter quotes a pro-independence man attending a basketball game in Caguas. “That is offensive,” someone else says. The greatest moment in island sports, they told the reporter, was when Puerto Rico’s Olympic basketball team beat the U.S. “dream team” in 2004: as great as Roberto Clemente getting his 3,000th hit.

In 1996, the report continues, the International Olympic Committee ruled that from now on only independent nations members of the U.N. can send new teams. So, if Puerto Rico became a state, the IOC would no more accept Puerto Rico than it would the state of Alaska. This obviously is not what pro-statehood leaders want to hear, since many continue to insist that as a state Puerto Rico would retain its Olympic standing.

But the effect of having the American people focus on Puerto Rico, I think, could be deeper than Puerto Rico’s participation in the Olympics, or in the Miss Universe contest where the island has had no less than five winners. It could unveil the very nature of the relation between Puerto Rico and the U.S.

In the past century, island leaders favoring independence or statehood have insisted that the essential nature of the relationship is unjust, abusive, “colonial.” Now the pro-Commonwealth party, after the federal grand jury indictment of Gov. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, is saying pretty much the same: that Puerto Rico is victim of U.S. “political persecution.”

So the question: is the fundamental nature of the relation to the U.S., in fact, abusive?

Lets go back to the WSJ report. It did not mention that while the reporter observed Arroyo training, the government of Puerto Rico was feverishly working to distribute to hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans the $1.282 billion it has received from the U.S. government for economic stimulus. Certainly it would seemed “odd” to readers in the U.S. that Puerto Rico, exempt of federal income taxes, would be receiving this so-called “tax rebate.”

Puerto Rico gets another $13 billion a year from the U.S. government, about half of it grants to the government and individuals. Just one program, food stamps, brings about $1.5 billion a year directly to the recipients. It may also seem odd that every now and then students at the public university, that receive Pell grants from the U.S. government that more than covers their tuition costs, feel motivated to protest the U.S. “abuse” of Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rican leaders that believe that the relationship with the U.S. is in its nature “abusive”, “colonial,” want the American media and the American people to see this island and its people as a “victim” of American power.

But if one believes, as I do, that with all the well-known juridical defects, the relationship is highly beneficial to Puerto Rico, it is important to know exactly what is being communicated to the American people. Not a story of “abuse” but a story of “privilege.”

Why should Puerto Rico have what no state of the union can have -- its own Olympic team under its own flag? Why should an island exempt of federal income taxes get $1.282 billion in “tax rebates?”

The question that I suspect the editors of the Wall Street Journal found in the McJoe Arroyo story of interest to the American people is: if Puerto Ricans so passionately fly only the Puerto Rican flag at its Olympic compound, why will it send no less than 63 delegates to the Democratic convention to select the presidential candidate?

The deeper point in all this is that the more the American people focuses not on the rhetoric, but on the reality of the relationship with Puerto Rico, the more it will ask itself: “Hey, how did the Puerto Ricans get what sure seems to be such a sweet deal for themselves?”