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Cuba and Puerto Rico

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Quite the irony in the Caribbean:

Two Caribbean islands are at a crossroads in their relationship with the US. One is plagued by corruption and debt, and dotted with crumbling homes, abandoned by families for the imperial power nearby. The other is Cuba.

Who won the cold war again?

Within 24 hours on Sunday, Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, announced that the American territory would default on nearly $370m of debt, after years of failure to put the island’s finances – or its relationship with the US – in order. The next morning a cruise ship full of tourists set sail for Havana, bringing American dreams, dollars and capitalist sense into Cuba’s future. Once seen as parallel case studies in cold war politics, the islands have seemingly switched roles.

For half a century, the US dominated Puerto Rico and Cuba after wrenching them away from Spain, but by the 1950s the islands parted ways. Cubans threw off a US-backed dictator, found new patrons in the Soviet Union and embraced communism. What nationalist fervor Puerto Rico had was quashed, and the colony stayed bound to US-controlled capitalism as a “free associated state”.

“When the cold war was going on they were like showcases for the world to see which system actually works,” said Harry Franqui-Rivera, a researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. “A successful Cuba made the United States look bad and if Puerto Rico failed it would make the United States look worse.”

While Cuba-U.S. relations are finally thawing, Puerto Rico finds itself under the control of Wall Street capitalists holding debt. Those debt holders are trying to Shock Doctrine the island.

Then Congress let corporate tax breaks expire, and Puerto Rico’s economy ground to a halt, dependent on aid, restricted in trade, and increasingly unable to enforce its own laws. Last year its governor called the island’s $70bn debt “unpayable”, and the supreme court and Congress will consider whether to give San Juan bankruptcy powers it lacks. The island also faces crises in education and healthcare, and suffered the first US death linked to the Zika virus last week.

But the clamor on the mainland is against emergency aid, and only a few voices for it. Pulitzer-winning playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda has called for help, while a group calling itself the Center for Individual Freedom has aligned itself with Wall Street firms holding the island’s debt, and spent about $200,000 on ads urging Congress not to give the island bankruptcy powers.

“Their economy is so much under the gun of history and US and foreign investor control,” said Lillian Guerra, a historian at the University of Florida, “that there’s no solution there on the island alone.

“The US government, to the degree it has any interest in Puerto Rico, is interested in keeping it as stable as possible because 10% of the landmass is military bases.”

The last sentence gets to the fundamental problem. The U.S. government must have an interest in Puerto Rico because the island is part of the United States. But policymakers pay almost no attention to it and it languishes as a colony without the rights of a state or of an independent nation. Already struggling with poverty, taxes on the poor have been raised in order to try and pay off these debts. Meanwhile, with Puerto Ricans having U.S. citizenship, they are fleeing to the mainland as fast as they can.

I know that in Puerto Rico, opinion differs as to what should happen to the island in the long-term, but it certainly seems to me that statehood is the just position to take. I certainly understand why independence would be appealing, but the economic conditions post-independence would probably be even worse than they are now. And the current situation seems increasingly untenable.

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