First Published: The Call, Vol. 6, No. 22, June 6, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Draft Program of the Communist Party (M-L) stresses the importance of the Puerto Rican national question to the U.S. revolution. It shows how the fight for Puerto Rican independence, as well as “the struggle for full democratic rights and regional autonomy for the Puerto Rican national minority” is a “component part of the fight for proletarian revolution.”
The portion of the Draft Program that addresses the Puerto Rican people’s struggle is part of a general section on the national question in the U.S. The entire section shows that only with the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism can national oppression and discrimination be ended.
The Program also stresses several other Marxist-Leninist principles on the national question and concrete tasks for our revolution. It points out the need to fight for Puerto Rican independence as part of our Party’s policy of ending all U.S. colonial holdings. Within the U.S., it also calls for regional autonomy for all oppressed nationalities in their areas of concentration, equality of languages and cultures, and special work to train minority cadres, ensuring the multi-national composition of the Party.
This Program is a complete break with the chauvinism of the revisionist Communist Party U.S.A. and all the other opportunists on the Puerto Rican question. To understand better the fight against revisionism on this important question, it is necessary to examine the history and conditions of the Puerto Rican people, some 40% of whom live as a national minority in the U.S. today.
Puerto Ricans are the descendants of Spanish settlers, native Taino Indians, and African slaves brought to the Caribbean island to work the sugar and tobacco plantations. The Spanish conquerors all but wiped out the native population despite the valiant struggle of the Indians to keep the island which they called “Boriquen,” free. Three centuries of common experience and common struggle welded the Puerto Rican people into a nation that fiercely fought for .its independence from Spanish colonial control.
The people had independence seized from their grasp in 1898. Spain had already been defeated when the U.S. occupied the island and imposed its own military government. Puerto Rico thus became one of the first victims of U.S. imperialism’s worldwide expansion.
Forced off the land as a result of U.S. colonial rule to become a vast pool of cheap labor, faced with extreme poverty and oppression, Puerto Ricans began to leave their homeland. The cause of this forced migration lay in the imperialist system itself. As Lenin wrote:
“In the higher stages of capitalism, a process of dispersion of nations set in, a process whereby a whole number of groups separate off from the nations, going off in search of a livelihood.” This was clearly the case of Puerto Ricans.
Once settled in the U.S., surrounded by peoples of another nation and also various other nationalities, the Puerto Ricans became a national minority – still part of the Puerto Rican nation but a minority nationality inside the borders of the U.S.
The national oppression of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. has led to immense suffering and impoverishment. As the Program points out, Puerto Ricans “have been discriminated against in housing, education, health care and victimized by the highest unemployment rate.”
Recent government studies indicate that over 70% of the Puerto Ricans here use Spanish as their main language, that they are denied bilingual education. This has contributed to the fact that the school drop-out rate is highest among Puerto Ricans and the income for the majority of Puerto Ricans falls below the poverty level. Those able to find jobs work in the lowest paying service and industrial positions – in hotels, in restaurants and in the thousands of small sweat shops through-out the U.S.
Puerto Rican people have a long and militant history of fighting back against this oppression. They have stood firmly alongside workers and other oppressed nationalities in the struggle against U.S. imperialism. Thousands of Puerto Ricans were front-line fighters in the CPUSA in its revolutionary period. Puerto Ricans have been leading organizers in many union drives, especially among maritime, garment and service workers and have consistently fought racism and discrimination.
In all these struggles, Puerto Ricans have helped forge the alliance and merge of the working class and national movements in this country so crucial for our revolution.
As the Program emphasizes, “Our Party resolutely mobilizes the whole working class to take up the day-to-day struggle against national oppression. It is in taking up this struggle that an ironclad unity among the workers of all nationalities is built.”
Inseparable from the fight against the oppression of the Puerto Rican national minority is the fight for the independence of Puerto Rico itself. “No nation can be free,” wrote Karl Marx. “if it oppresses other nations.” As long as the U.S. continues to rob Puerto Rico of its wealth and murder“ its people through police violence, forced sterilization and hunger, the workers and oppressed nationalities in this country will remain in chains.
As a colony, Puerto Rico has been used by the imperialists as a haven for runaway shops and a source of cheap labor and natural resources. U.S. corporations have driven down wages by forcing U.S. workers to compete with the super-exploited labor of Puerto Ricans on the island. In addition, with the huge super-profits gained from the plunder of Puerto Rico and other colonies, the imperialists have bought off a small upper section of the working class to serve as their agents in the workers’ ranks.
These labor misleaders have promoted chauvinism to divide the working class in the U.S., attacked the democratic rights of Puerto Rican workers and systematically excluded them from unions. Serving U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico, these labor lieutenants strive to colonize the labor movement, chaining the workers to so-called “international” unions, thus keeping them under the thumb of U.S. big business.
The Puerto Rican independence movement is a direct ally of the U.S. workers’ struggle. It is an important part of the third world movement, which constitutes the main fighting force against imperialism today. Every blow struck for independence in Puerto Rico and throughout the third world is a blow that weakens the U.S. imperialist class.
With both the U.S. and the USSR preparing for war, the Program shows that “Puerto Rico is a hotbed for super-power contention, as the Soviet social-imperialists step up their efforts to gain a foothold“ on the island.”
Using Cuba to gain influence within the independence movement itself, the USSR is bent on penetrating and destroying this anti-imperialist struggle. They try to pose as the “best friend” of the national liberation movement in order to smash its revolutionary potential and turn it into a reserve of social-imperialism.
Serving the interests of social-imperialism here in the U.S. is the revisionist CPUSA. When this Party was taken over by the revisionists, its work among Puerto Ricans as well as among all oppressed nationalities was liquidated. Chauvinist attacks were mounted against genuine patriots on the island. The Gus Hall leadership of the CPUSA labelled the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party “fascist“ and turned the Communist Party of Puerto Rico into a puppet organization.
The revisionists abandoned completely the fight for independence. At the same time, the Party dropped all its Spanish language publications, It dismantled its apparatus in Puerto Rican communities like EI Barrio (Spanish Harlem) in New York, where there had been thousands of cadres. EI Barrio had been nicknamed “Little Moscow” in the ’30s, but more than 90% of the membership left in the ’50s.
With the growing Puerto Rican upsurge today, the revisionists have become more active. Their aim is to gain leadership of the struggle and destroy its revolutionary character. They have forcefully denounced whatever revolutionary potential that has emerged in the Puerto Rican movement, like the Young Lords Party in the late ’60s. At the same time, they promote reformists like Congressman Hernan Badillo and the “Nuevo Jibaro” Club of the Democratic Party in the Lower East Side of New York.
Following this reformist line, the Communist Party sums up in their 1975 program that the path to Puerto Rican liberation is the “electoral and economic struggle.”
To gain access to the national movement, the revisionists have used the centrist Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP). Both the Communist Party and the PSP have labored long hours to restrict the Puerto Rican people’s struggles to reformism. They jointly rewrote the once anti-imperialist program of the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee, so that its “solidarity” with Puerto Rican independence now consists of support for Soviet schemes internationally and lobbying for the Dellums Bill in the U.S. Congress.
The PSP also has its own form of petty-bourgeois nationalism that it pushes to separate Puerto Ricans from the rest of the working class. They deny the existence of a Puerto Rican national minority, claiming that the future of all Puerto Ricans rests solely with the struggle on the island. With this logic, they maintain that Puerto Ricans in the U.S. are not part of the multi-national working class and should not be part of a single multi-national communist party. The results of this line are both narrow nationalism and a belittling of the struggle for democratic rights being fought by Puerto Ricans in the U.S.
The Program of the CP(M-L) stands in clear opposition to the revisionism and opportunism of the CPUSA and the PSP. It provides a scientific understanding of Puerto Rican oppression as well as class solidarity in support of the revolutionary struggles of the Puerto Rican people both in their homeland and in the U.S.