Decolonization Models for America’s Last Colony: Puerto Rico by Angel Collado-Schwarz (review)

One of the favorite sports in Puerto Rico is to debate the political status of the island. Should it become the United States’ 51st state? Should it become independent? Or should it remain as it is, a commonwealth possession of the United States? The author of this book argues that it should become independent. He uses four major points to make his argument.

First, he says the United States government does not want to absorb Puerto Rico as a new state and he offers both recent and distant historical evidence in support of this statement. He lists a number of times that various Presidents and members of Congress have stated that Puerto Rico is a possession but not a part of the United States. This reduces it to quasi-colonial status, rather than full membership as a state.

Second, he argues that Puerto Ricans do not want to assimilate into the so-called American mainstream. Instead, they prefer to maintain their own culture, including their language, religion, festivals, and other historical accoutrements. They may be acculturated, but not assimilated.

Third, the lack of sovereignty hinders the ability of the island to establish favorable trade relations with other countries because its trade policy is established by the federal government to the benefit of the United States and not necessarily that of Puerto Rico. The cabotage laws are a good example of this. They require all ocean vessels traveling within the waters controlled by the U.S. to be owned and operated by U.S. corporations. This means that Puerto Rican businesses cannot use cheaper foreign-owned shipping when importing and exporting items from and to the U.S. mainland. Also, this hinders the development of the international port that recently has been expanded on the island’s southern coast in Ponce, because it means goods shipped through this port to the mainland must be off-loaded to more expensive U.S.-owned ships for the rest of the trip to the mainland.

Fourth, he argues that Puerto Rico has become overly dependent upon federal government transfers (e. g. food stamps and Medicare) and laws that were created as special tax incentives for factories locating on the island (e. g. Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Tax Code which was discontinued in 1996). Today, about one-third of all Puerto Ricans living on the island use Food Stamps provided by the U.S. government. This dependency inhibits a progressive work ethic, and does not provide an incentive for Puerto Ricans to control their own futures.

Collado-Schwarz is the founder and Chairman of the Fundación Voz del Centro (Central Voice Foundation), a newspaper columnist for the El Nuevo Día, and producer and host of a radio program called La Voz del Centro (Center Voice). His book is an interesting mixture of his personal opinions, interviews with people who have appeared as guests on his talk show, copies of articles written by him that appeared in El Nuevo Día, and short chapters on six other small countries that might serve in one way or another as models for Puerto Rican development.

I found the second part of the book, the one containing short descriptions of six other small countries, to be the most interesting part of this work. Collado-Schwarz picks Singapore, Slovenia, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, and Estonia as models for comparison to Puerto Rico. Although it used to be thought by economic development experts that successful sovereign states had to be large enough to benefit from at least some of the economies of large scale populations, he argues this is no longer the prevailing opinion. He points to his selected six countries as evidence in support of this idea. These countries have populations ranging from about one million in Estonia to eight million in Israel. In other words, these populations...