The Next Island Over

Right—the point could be made: who am I to talk? After all, as a citizen of the United States, do I have the right to talk about anybody else’s mess of an immigration policy? Do we really do better?

In this case, yes. Because the supreme court of the Dominican Republic has just directed the authorities to examine birth certificates all the way back to 1929—and I seriously want to know how they chose that year—in order to find out who is of Haitian descent. Why? Because children born in the Dominican Republic of Haitian parents will no longer be considered citizens.

Both Dominican Republic and Haiti share the same island—Hispaniola—but it sort of stops there. There’s the language difference—the Haitians speak Creole, Dominicans speak Spanish. There’s the cultural difference—the Haitians had the only successful slave revolt in the Western Hemisphere, and are proud of their black heritage. The Dominicans?

Time to confess—I had thought they roughly followed our own history: Spanish up until the time of the Spanish-American War, and then independent. But no—they have a history that very much defines the animosity between them. Because seven years after the slave revolt of 1801, a group of people from Dominican Republic attempted to take over Haiti for the Spanish. In fact, the tables turned, and it was Haiti who, in 1822, took over the entire island. And when the Dominican Republic finally achieved independence in 1844, it was from Haiti, not Spain.

Then came the massacre. Haitians had been crossing the border for years, and worked in the sugar cane fields—which is a job you don’t want to have: it’s blazingly hot, and cane has spines that can cause serious injury. So the Dominicans had been happy to have someone else do the work. So what was the problem? For mostly political reasons, a scapegoat had to be found. And the Haitians, it was said, were taking jobs.

Sound familiar?

Right—so Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of Dominican Republic, decided in 1937 to send the boys over to the border and ask every dark skinned guy to say the word perejil (parsley). Easy for Spanish speakers—not so easy for Creole tongues. And the price for a badly spoken r? Well, the boys had machetes. Was it 10,000 or 25,000? We’ll never know.

The whole question of race is super charged in the Dominican Republic, so much so that Trujillo used to wear white makeup. And as a student once told me, to be rich and white in Santo Domingo is to live with absolute freedom to do as you like. Yes, you can get away with murder.

Or get away with denying about 200,000 people citizenship, which is what the supreme court decided to do. And that’s no mean thing—well, mean in the sense of small—because without citizenship, kids can’t go to school, people can’t work. So what’s the alternative? Go to Haiti, where they don’t speak the language, and where there’s no work?

I once argued that I believed in cities but not nations. Why? Well, consider this comment from an article in The Guardian:

“I am Anglo-American and my wife is Haitian. We have a daughter of five whose biological father was Haitian (died in earthquake in 2010), but whose registered father is a Dominican of Haitian descent. She has a Dominican passport, though whether she will now lose it, I don't know. I don't think the DR government is efficient enough to investigate everyone of Haitian descent to revoke their citizenship, carry out DNA testing, etc.

Our younger daughter was born in the DR and thus became a stateless person at birth. I was able to get a UK birth certificate for her and perhaps one day she will come to the UK. Thus I have a family in which four different nationalities are represented: Myself British and US, my wife Haitian, my daughter British, and my stepdaughter Dominican.”

Well, I hope that daughter manages to stay in the Dominican Republic, because if she gets sent to Haiti? According to one source, she has a 10% chance of becoming a slave.

The Caribbean is a strange region—an archipelago of islands very close and yet very far from each other. We typically know little of each other and care less. But here’s what P J Patterson, former Prime Minister of Jamaica, said:

No one can be hoodwinked as to the reason and the purpose for this kind of discriminatory legislation. Within the region we have an obligation to speak and we cannot allow such inequities to go without our strongest condemnations.”

Sadly, our “strongest condemnations” may not be enough….

The Governor Hears the Door Slam

Right—I usually back away from this topic, which is not a hot potato but a burning and radioactive one instead.

If you’re a gringo, the word  “status” has no particular meaning for you. If you’re Puerto Rican, you tense—here it comes, the old but undiminished in its ferocity debate on whether Puerto Rico should be a state, independent, or continue as it is.

And what is that, you ask?

Depends on whom you ask. In Spanish, our status is something called Estado Libre Asociado, which puzzled me the first time I saw it, those decades ago.

“How can something be free and yet a state and yet associated,” I asked Mr. Fernández, those many years ago.

Little did I know…

“IT’S A LIE, IT’S A TRICK, IT’S A BASE AND FOUL CANARD….”

Hint—remove trajectables (it’s a word in Spanish, computer!) at the onset of any discussion of status.

Advocates of our current status have developed a capacity to smoke screen unparalleled by any other group of fanatics. We are a nation, goes the theory, a sovereign nation in “association” with the United States. We therefore hold US passports, receive federal benefits, pay no taxes, and don’t vote for president. In fact, Puerto Rico is one of the few places—the US Virgin Islands is another—in the world where an American citizen cannot vote for president, and has no voting representation in Congress. And for those of you who gnashed their teeth through the eight long years of George W. Bush, trust me—you would have been spared them had Puerto Rico been allowed to vote….

We got to be citizens back in 1917, with the passage of the Jones Act. And how convenient that was, because there was a little war going on—the first of the World Wars—and Puerto Ricans died, and have subsequently died in every other war, in disproportionate numbers.

 Which is what made me believe, fifteen years back, that our current status is heart-stoppingly simple, as well as cynical. Here’s the deal—the rich and empowered Puerto Ricans receive federal dollars in turn for the blood and lives of their poorer brothers.

Predictably, there are those who aren’t satisfied with that. So periodically we have plebiscites—usually when there is a statehood governor. And our last plebiscite, in November 2012, was a double decker—first we were asked if we were satisfied with our current territorial status; then we were asked to choose between statehood, independence, or a sovereign nation in association with the United States.

Also predictably, the Popular Democratic Party—which champions our current status—frothed at the mouth at the mention of the word “territorial.” The party has been trying for years to deny that we are an unincorporated territory. Instead, they hope to “improve” our current status, presumably by getting full parity of money with the states, not paying taxes, but being fully represented in Congress. The last time anyone expressed this idea to a puzzled congress, one congressman noted that if that idea were feasible, he’d have to go home and recommend that his constituents pursue the same option. And so last Wednesday the Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing, and the governor ran up to Washington to advocate for “enhanced” commonwealth.

He had a pretty rotten time of it.

Here’s what the chairman, Ron Wyden, had to say at the start of the session:

The “New Commonwealth” option continues to be advocated as a viable option by some. It is not.

Persistence in supporting this option after it has been rejected as inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution by the U.S. Justice Department, by the bipartisan leadership of this Committee, by the House, and by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations undermines resolution of Puerto Rico’s status question.

Well, ABC news reports that the governor was “frustrated” with the event. Here’s a sample of what he said:

In a meeting with reporters after the hearing he said he favors an "enhanced" commonwealth status that would give Puerto Rico "maximum autonomy" while cementing a permanent relationship with the United States. He'd like Congress and Puerto Rico to agree on which federal laws should apply to Puerto Rico and which should not. He would oppose laws that would be "harmful" to the island's development, he said, but didn't go into further detail.

Wyden, apparently, didn’t buy in. Here’s more of the opening statement:

Puerto Rico must either exercise full self-government as a sovereign nation, or achieve equality among the States of the Union.

The current relationship undermines the United States’ moral standing in the world. For a nation founded on the principles of democracy and the consent of the governed, how much longer can America allow a condition to persist in which nearly four million U.S. citizens do not have a vote in the government that makes the national laws which affect their daily lives? That is the question.

At last—a congressman got it….

The Archbishop Sighs Relief

Readers, you can now stop worrying. The archbishop of San Juan, Roberto González Nieves, is off the hook. Subject to a 19-month long apostolic visit—and one imagines the small talk and social chitchat wearies after 19 months—he came up clean.

Or so the Vatican Insider says; the site quotes González Nieves saying this:

Exonerado de toda culpa. El Vaticano confirmó que el arzobispo de San Juan de Puerto Rico, Roberto González Nieves, no es rebelde y que las denuncias en su contra nunca tuvieron fundamento. Lo confirmó él mismo, hace unos días durante una conferencia de prensa en su país. Ahora sus seguidores piden que se limpie su nombre.

Rough translation: Exonerated of all guilt. The Vatican confirmed that the archbishop of San Juan de Puerto Rico, Roberto González Nieves, is no rebel and that the denunciations against him never had a base. He himself confirmed it, some days ago during a press conference in his country. Now, his followers request that his name be cleared.

You may remember the case. The archbishop, born in New Jersey but raised in San Juan, arrived on the island after serving in New York, Boston, and Corpus Christi. He soon ruffled feathers of the statehood flock by more or less openly being an independentista. He spearheaded efforts to get the navy out of Vieques—OK, we were all pretty much on that page—and brokered a deal when the government shut down in 2006.

Then, he got it into his head to create the Altar de la Patria.

“What actually is “patria?” I asked Mr. Fernández, those many years ago before I was sufficiently politicized.

He gave me an explanation that made no sense. So I asked my friend Tony, who gave me the story. Loosely, it runs like this: there was a politician who was ostensibly for the commonwealth, our current status. But he referred constantly to the “patria,” which became a code word to indicate independence. So if you want to talk about independence without talking about independence, you talk about the patria.

See?

Actually, González Nieves threw a bit more salt into the wound by setting up, as well, what he called, “Capilla del Santísimo Cristo de toda la nación puertorriqueña.” This is guaranteed to set statehood mouths frothing, since it translates into “The Chapel of the most holy Christ of all the Puerto Rican nation.”

The opposition pushed back, charging that the archbishop was inserting politics into the church. And certainly the last governor—rumored to have ties to Opus Dei, and very much pro-statehood—was no particular fan of the archbishop.

Hence the apostolic visit, which, according to González Nieves, found nothing. But there were four charges:

1.     Sheltering pederast priests

2.     Supporting a bill that would allow roommates of either sex health benefits

3.     Selling a parish school without authorization

4.     Creating the famous Alta de la Patria

Things got a little hot for the archbishop, but he’s a fighter. On May 8 of this year, he organized 100 religious groups to come and see him celebrate mass, on the anniversary of his entering the priesthood. He passed the word to send letters to the Vatican, and then came out and said, “please, please, don’t send letters to the Vatican. I beg your prayers instead.”

Smart, hunh?

Then a letter got leaked, in which the archbishop expressed his horror at the gravity of the charges against him, and the hurt that the strong suggestion that he should resign caused him. Never, he said, would he resign. The charges against him were lies and defamations.

Unafraid of pushing any more buttons, González Nieves then decided to get a great Puerto Rican patriot, who had died in Spain and had been buried in Cádiz, back home and re-interrate him, presumably, in the Capilla del Santísimo Cristo de toda la nación puertorriqueña. There, his remains would rest in heavenly harmony with those of his great friend, the first Puerto Rican bishop.

“Ridiculous,” said Mr. Fernández, “The guy was buried in a mass grave during an outbreak of yellow fever. Of course they don’t have DNA evidence—how could they? Nah—they scooped up some bones, conjured up a lab result, and shipped it off to Puerto Rico, probably laughing their heads off. You know the Spanish.”

Right—so the remains of somebody arrived on the island, and were greeted with great Caribbean formality and enthusiasm. Now the question—what to do with them?

Well, they lay around in the State Department for a while, and then, González Nieves announced that he had received authorization from the Vatican to place the remains in the capilla. This they did, on 10 June, in an elaborate celebration, marked by the very finest vestments, incense, altar boys, and the 100-strong Mita choir, singing nationalistically or perhaps just patriotically.

González Nieves announced it all several days before; The First Hour, or Primera Hora, published it all in an article titled “I Survived the Storm” or He sobrevivido a la tormenta. He said:

“Le pido a Dios la fuerza de perdonar porque no es fácil”, aseguró en una rueda de prensa en referencia a quienes lo acusaron en Roma.

“La visita apostólica entra ya a su fase final. Yo creo que puedo decir que el visitador apostólico no encontró que yo hubiera protegido a sacerdotes pedófilos y además hay un informe de la Congregación de Doctrina y Fe que indica que he tratado esos casos con los debidos protocolos”, expresó.

“I ask God for the strength to forgive because it’s not easy,” he stated in a press conference referring to those who accused him in Rome.

“The apostolic visit is now entering its final stage. I believe I can now say that the apostolic visitor didn’t find that I had protected pederast priests and that I had as well a report from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith that indicated that I have treated the cases with the correct protocols,” he said.

Note carefully that phrase, “the apostolic visit is entering its final stage.” To me, that means it’s still going on, and the jury’s still out. The Vatican, as far as I can see, has not made an announcement on the matter.

Think the archbishop is bluffing?

Colonies—Coming and Going

Readers of this blog may have noted the absence of a new post yesterday.

Sorry—I, and most of the rest of the island, was feeling a bit the worse for wear.

No, no fight. Just the second most-ardent passion on the island.

Politics?

Yup—politics. We do ‘em with a flare, I’m happy to say. Starting with the caravanas, that snake around the island towns, blaring jingles loud enough to tumble the coconuts (seriously, that’s the name—tumbacocos,—really the speaker that dwarfs an Austin Mini….). Like so many things, it’s very colorful, unless, of course, you have anything you need to do.

Like call your boss, announce “this is where I am” and hold your phone up.

Boss will get it, of course, and hold his phone up.

You’ll commiserate, and agree to meet for lunch.

Well, this election was special, since it offered yet another chance to weigh in on the ever-pressing question of the political status of Puerto Rico.

I’ve written about the status issue before. In my first decade on the island, it was fiercely discussed. Now?

Gone underground.

Nor can I tell you why. It may be that Puerto Rico is so beset with other problems—one thinks of the 1000 murders a year (twice that of New York City) or the unemployment rate of 15%—that no one can bear to deal with another one. And, it’s true, nothing sets off the fire eater (that comefuego down here) than a brisk trot through the status issue.

Or even a stroll, which is how one of the most colorful characters did it. Long, dirty hair, baggy pants, a sign with myriad messages, and most importantly…

…a megaphone!

Look guys, I’m no one to talk—having a voice that can blow a semi from the highway—but a Puerto Rican with a megaphone is serious system overdesign…

So there he’d be, loping down the sidewalk, with his megaphone and…

…a message!

¡La colonia se va! The colony is going!

This confident pronouncement made two thirds of the political spectrum beam—if spectra can beam…

Unfortunately, it was the diametrically opposing spectra.

Both the people favoring independence and the people rooting for statehood (order by alphabet, please note!) agree on one—and only one—thing.

What we got now is a colony.

No, no—cries the middle, those defending the Free Associated State!

It’s a little like the trinity—one of those absurdities where a great deal of verbiage and intellectual energy has been spent uselessly and pointlessly.

But there are those who will fight anyone challenging the contention that Truman and Muñoz Marín sat down representing sovereign entities and negotiated a deal. One that can be…

…improved!

Rather, enhanced!

This notion is perhaps better expressed in lyrical Spanish instead of cold English.

“You mean, you don’t want to pay taxes, but want the vote, but don’t want to fight in the army, and want full parity in ALL federal programs without any of the responsibilities?”

Or words to that effect. Clearly, a gringo singularly lacking in imagination.

Well, the senator, or representative, or whoever he was, finally said, yeah! Great idea! And he was gonna go back home to Nebraska and get everybody on board with it!

For Nebraska, not Puerto Rico.

Well, it was therefore refreshing to hear—at last—a Free Associated Statehooder freely admitting it! And no less than through his very own megaphone!

Yup, so molested (molesto) was he that he bought a megaphone, and was booming out the counter-news.

¡La colonia se queda!

Was I hearing that right?

“Yup,” said Mr. Fernández, nodding his head in wonder.

The colony is staying!

Thus, for several weeks, we had megaphoned ideological discourse. Neighborhood response?

Less than pleased!

Which may be why Germán, that day, finally settled it for good. And he’s a guy of some weight.

Which may be why the colonia se va guy did nothing as Germán snatched the megaphone from his hands, slammed it on the sidewalk, and stomped it to death.

Never did find out what happened to the colonia se queda’s megaphone….