The purpose of this book is to provide “a positive vision of Puerto Rican history and the task of struggling for independence that history has assigned to us as Puerto Ricans” (p. 9). In his Marxist analysis of the Island’s history the author’s main thesis is that from a raw material of Indian, slave, and jibaro (country-folk) the history of Puerto Rico has been a struggle against oppression that follows a straight line from the Indian rebellions, the Negro conspiracies, and the “Lares revolution” of 1868, to the Socialist Party of the early 20th century, the Nationalist movement in the 1930s and the modern independence movement whose “links . . . are with the masses: the workers and campesinos who make up the multitude of wage earners exploited by colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism” (p. 113). Of special interest is his rejection of the “literature of docility” which he sees as “a colonialist’s construct based on a determinist concept” (p. 45).
Needless to say that there is much to disagree with in this short essay. There are several inaccuracies throughout the text; some minor, some not so minor. In the end, despite the author’s appraisal of the prospects of the cause of independence, he has failed to answer what should be the most obvious question: if indeed the history of Puerto Rico is the continuous struggle against colonialism and imperialism, how can one explain the inability of the independence cause to become a mass movement, and the lack of support for it among the workers and campesinos whose interests it is supposed to embody?
