Spanish-born journalist, Federico Ribes Tovar’s bilingual biography (two separate works) offers readers detail, chronology, anecdote, and opinion on Albizu Campos’ life, beliefs, and political style. The biography’s strengths and weaknesses notwithstanding, this study is timely and long overdue. As an individual whose character and actions shaped and directed the twentieth century Puerto Rican independence movement, Albizu Campos demands careful consideration. Yet the literature on Campos in English is limited and misleading; and that which exists in Spanish has generally been highly partisan and polemical. As such, it is of questionable value in making serious scholarly judgments about Albizu Campos.
Accurate assessments of Albizu Campos are especially critical today. The inconsistencies and contradictions of the United States’ anachronistic political domination of Puerto Rico have become more obvious. Puerto Rican soldiers are reluctant participants in the Viet Nam war. Puerto Rican citizens have no vote in United States presidential elections. Puerto Rico has no judiciary of its own. And Puerto Rican politics increasingly continue to reflect the nationalist flow of events in the Caribbean and Latin America in general. Accordingly, the thought and achievement of Albizu Campos have again become central to understanding the present moral and ideological force of the Puerto Rican independence movement.
Unhappily this study, like many pioneer efforts is uneven and flawed. Some of the book’s defects are specifically related to Tovar’s literary style; and others are general to his historiographical bias. That is to say, he has chosen the obvious generalization to careful subjectivity, value-loaded adjectives to sober reflection. Tovar prefers the easy phrase to substance, the insight, real or imagined, into the motives and aspirations of this historical figure, instead of thoughtful archival research:
Since he inherited his mother’s dark skin, he was personally exposed, in his youth, to the effects of American discrimination, and the deep scars that humiliation burned into his spirit were indelible . . .
Author Tovar has confused political efficacy with historical scholarship. That is, scholarship should enrich and illuminate, amplify and generalize; whereas political documents usually have limited and immediate aims. The immediate purpose of this book is to eulogize not analyze, ennoble, rather than scrutinize Albizu Campos and the independence movement. While Tovar is overindulgent in his characterization of Campos, the man and the political figure, he tiptoes away from serious comment on the consequences and origins of the political thought of Campos.
He was one of the greatest and most heroic champions of the nationalist ideal in a world tending toward massive concentrations of population; he stands beside the gigantic figures of Gandhi, De Valera, Senghor and Jomo Kenyatta . . .
While Tovar appropriately selected for major emphasis in his book the middle period of Albizu Campos’ life—that period when the Harvard educated lawyer-politician put together an activist national movement and a hemispheric rationale for Puerto Rican independence—he fails to define Campos’ political thought and activities. Instead he offers the reader phrases and polemic taken out of context: “The motherland’s right to independence is not open to discussion. And if it is discussed, it will be with bullets.” No serious attempt is made to trace the intellectual and personal antecedents of this and similar statements. For instance, although the author speaks of violence, nationalist uprisings, and confrontation, Tovar never tells the reader what Campos’ position is on the use of terror, assassination, and violence as political tactic.
Finally, although Albizu Campos: Puerto Rican Revolutionary does add to our limited knowledge of Campos and does offer the reader valuable primary sources, unhappily the author has not been able to present his material in such a way that the reader can approach Campos as a mortal. A pity—Albizu Campos is an authentic Puerto Rican hero in whom ordinary men could and can trace the patterns of their lives. He is not and was not a miracle working political saint.
