Puerto Ricans have gone from protests and lawsuits to physical action armed with hammers and mallets. The Planning Board had given one developer until March 1st to demolish what it had illegally built on public beach land, but failed to enforce its order, so on March 4th hundreds of protesters began smashing it themselves. On beaches around the island, similar struggles are underway.
What does this struggle over the “commons”, or public lands, have to do with working people’s response to the assault on their living conditions and the degradation of the quality of their lives? And how does this relate to the class struggle at present? We need to answer these questions for the continental United States and its imperialist territorial extensions.
The leading edge of the class struggle in Puerto Rico today is people’s fight for the public beaches and coastlines, a crucial part of the commons. It pits the people, overwhelmingly workers, against private property interests. This public space is threatened by outside and local investors—lawyers, doctors, engineers, other professionals, RB&B entrepreneurs—looking to buy and speculate with property and real estate. In the process, they assault nature and the homes and livelihoods of the local people, who have been the stewards of the waters, coastlines, and land since the time of the indigenous Taíno people, before Columbus.
POISONING THE COMMONS
In Rincón, on the Northwest coast, private interests have already damaged coastal terrains, cut down vegetation vital to the ecosystem, and poured toxic cement on beaches and mangroves sea turtles depend on to lay their eggs. All this to put up a condominium and now, illegally, add a pool carved out of the Rincón public beach. This threat has ignited fierce local resistance. They attack the commons in league with corrupt politicians, banks, businesses, the courts, and so-called law enforcement—the usual cabal of capitalist predators and enforcers. The new structures, built with toxic materials, are damaged and washed or blown away by hurricanes, while traditional dwellings, built with ancestral knowledge to withstand storms, remain standing.
The same scenario is being played out in other coastal, fishing communities. Well-off outsiders, whether Puerto Rican or rapacious Mainlanders, are illegally constructing modern cement houses, susceptible to hurricanes, on public lands and claiming the land as their own. People living in Aguadilla, Salinas, Escambrón, Isla Verde, Luquillo, La Parguera, and Bahía de Jobos (on the West, North, and South coasts) are facing the same menace. But they’ve had enough and, as in Rincón, are fighting the usurpation of their commons. Dozens of more fights are brewing. All of Puerto Rico’s 300 plus beaches are public domain threatened by private takeover.
The battle for the beaches is today’s manifestation of an old fight between the masses of laborers and the tiny clique of owners and their bought-off cronies. Its historical roots go back to the seeds of capitalist relations in Puerto Rico, starting with the tearing away of the land, the laborer’s means of life, from the peasant. This process began in the last quarter of the 1700s, consolidated with the incorporation of the island into world commerce (under Spanish and, later, U.S. rule) beginning in the 1840’s, and was accelerated by U.S. capital at the end of the 19th century.
For three centuries, the land and waters had been in the hands of laboring people. The Spanish authorities had basically confined themselves to fortified San Juan. Run-away African and African-descended slaves, Taínos, and Spanish and other European sailors, soldiers, and common folk escaping authority, took refuge in the difficult-to-access mountainous interior. There, they lived independent lives off the rich soil, engaging in contraband trade with foreign ships on the coast, bartering sugar, rum, ginger, cattle, meat, hides, tobacco, and cocoa for wine, clothes, salt, spirits, and fabrics. The Spanish saw the fabulous riches being made by the French with the sugar trade in neighboring Haiti (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic)—off the backs of slaves. In the 19th century, they decided to turn Puerto Rico, then primarily of strategic value as gateway to the Caribbean and the hemisphere, into a profitable, commodity-producing colony for primarily sugar, but also coffee and tobacco.
The process of expropriating the jíbaro (peasant) had two immediate goals: seizure of the land and control of a much-needed labor force. The fight for the land, first waged between Spaniard and Taíno, was again taken up. The expropriation took decades and also involved development of the productive forces and the rise of a creole bourgeoisie of mixed European and African descent. They would eventually come into conflict with the Spanish colonial regime hindering their rise. By the late 1840’s, conditions were set to steal the land from the people in earnest, beginning with a work pass law (1849) obliging those without property deeds (most people in the country) to work for the creole landowners.
DISPOSSESSSION AND RESISTANCE
The process was put on overdrive with the takeover of the island by U.S. imperialism in 1898 (here called “the Spanish-American War”, but for Cuba and the Philippines called Wars of Independence). Under the new power, the peasants lost their final, tenuous hold on the land and old way of life—eroding for decades—and came fully under the crass, oppressive, exploitative regime of wage labor. They became colonized proletarians and, almost immediately, migrant laborer and immigrant in the Mainland.
Throughout these turbulent, nearly two centuries of dispossession and loss of freedom, there has been resistance. It took many forms, from individual acts of escape, sabotage, or “vandalism” to collective action, including slave revolts, conspiracies against the Spanish regime, and the armed uprisings of the Grito de Lares (the Cry of Lares) in 1868 and the Cuban wars of independence from Spain in the latter 19th century, with some 2,000 Puerto Rican patriots taking up arms alongside the Cuban rebels.
The patriotic struggle eventually surged again against the new American imperialists, with ebbs and flows reflecting advances and setbacks in the people’s ability to meet their needs and to organize. Meanwhile, as in the Mainland which controls the Puerto Rican economy, recent history has been shaped by technological advances and the replacement of workers by the new technologies. There, even more so than here, the “safety net”, social services, and the vital infrastructure of schools, hospitals, etc. have been largely dismantled.
The Puerto Rican people’s struggle against the theft of their beaches is the current flashpoint in the broader fight against the privatization of services and the sources of life, a confrontation of almighty private property pitting the “haves” against the “have-nots”. It is a fight of the people we must support, which can help raise class consciousness, making the people’s fight for the commons even more significant. Seeing this battle as part of the struggle of a class being dispossessed of its public property on both the island and the mainland helps clarify the need to end the rule of private property in both places.
Published on September 21, 2023
This article originated in Rally!
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