These two works cover different subjects and time periods. Taken together, however, they reveal many contours of Puerto Rican history over the last two centuries. Fernando Picó’s collected essays look at nineteenth-century people “on the edge of power”: small farmers, shopkeepers, hacienda owners, free workers, and slaves, rather than the traditional politicos. Sherrie Baver, with incisive case studies, focuses on people at the center of twentieth-century power. She shows how the industrial policy they have created since World War II has made the island’s economy increasingly dependent.
To readers unfamiliar with Pico’s professional journey into his island’s past, his introduction offers interesting revelations. His quest has produced such works as Libertad y servidumbre en Puerto Rico del siglo XIX (1979, 1982), Amargo café (1981), and 1898: La guerra después de la guerra (1987). These studies look at the mountain people of Puerto Rico’s coffee culture, the grandparents and parents of this century’s leaders.
Some of Picó’s essays offer new perspectives on traditional themes in Puerto Rican historiography. His comparative farm labor study of Utuado and Camuy, for example, contrasts the social origins of workers in the coffee and sugar regions. In neither locale did the libreta de jornaleros regulate the labor supply. Land tenure changes and market incentives provided workers; not political decree, as earlier studies have suggested. Other essays break new ground. One compares the sentences of convicted slaves in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Another surveys female tobacco workers and their families in Utuado. Still another illustrates anti-Spanish violence in 1898. The last includes a tragicomic episode involving a Catalan merchant’s account books; a mob “found” the volumes under a bed and proceeded to bum the pages that recorded 40,000 pesos of local debt. Debtors in coffee country, according to Picó, saw account books as a symbol of Spanish domination and tried to destroy them, along with the old regime.
In contrast to these nineteenth-century cases, Baver’s studies describe twentieth-century power brokers whose success, she explains, has led to Puerto Rico’s failure. Baver’s disillusionment is similar to that of the economic historians James L. Dietz, Emilio Pantojas-García, and Richard Weisskoff. All find grave structural flaws in the island’s economic model. According to Baver, Puerto Rico’s leaders had the opportunity to build a diversified economy when they created the Office of Statistics, the Planning Board, and the Government Development Bank in 1942. Instead, they built a dependent economy, not because diversification was unattainable, but because they chose another agenda.
In case studies of the oil refining industry, the Section 936 Federal Tax Code exemption, and the Caribbean Basin Initiative, Baver shows how leaders shifted their objectives. They began with a labor-intensive, “industrialization by invitation” model, but decided to move to capital-intensive industry in the 1950s, successfully lobbying Washington for special privileges and exemptions. Wages rose, but so did unemployment and migration. Conversely, agriculture and labor-intensive industry declined. Even worse, adds Baver, the health of the Puerto Rican economy increasingly depended on playing politics with Washington.
Baver is pessimistic about a return to the autonomy of the 1940s. Instead, she recommends that Puerto Rican and U.S. officials establish mechanisms for planning economic growth. She warns other governments attracted to the Puerto Rican model, “state capacity cannot be seen as enhanced by offshore assembly or maquiladora industrialization” (p. 125). She recommends outside investment only if it has local economic linkages. Interestingly enough, Baver does not prescribe the International Monetary Fund remedies typical of Latin America in the 1990s.
Picó and Baver both show Puerto Ricans shaping their future in a larger context. Picó explores coffee culture during the decline of an old empire; Baver explores industrialization during the rise of a new one. Both offer perceptive studies of the opportunities and limits of power.
