From Yuca to High Tech

Caribbean Business 25th anniversary special editionTo mark its 25th anniversary in 2000, the Puerto Rico newsweekly Caribbean Business hired me to produce a different kind of history of the past thousand years, focusing on the economy of the island and how people earned a living over the centuries. While certainly not a comprehensive history, the resulting 30,000-word publication, which I wrote entirely, provides snapshots of Puerto Rico's development at selected moments in time.

1900

A rough start with the U.S.

The Puerto Rico that the United States took over at the turn of the century was unlike any other territory it had previously absorbed.

It was not a sparsely populated expanse that could be overwhelmed by new settlers. It was, at the same time, both densely populated for the era and yet mostly rural.

By 1900, the island's population had grown to nearly one million people, but only 21.4 percent lived in urban areas.

Only 554 schools existed around the island, and just 25,644 students were enrolled in 1898. Some 80 percent of the population was illiterate.

There were 166 miles of roads on the island, mostly poor, and a railroad line to circle most of the island along the coast had been begun but not yet completed. Life expectancy was 35 years.

When Gen. Nelson Miles made his flowery speech to Puerto Ricans promising them the "blessings of enlightened civilization," many people were hopeful. Only scattered resistance had met Miles' forces, and people from various walks of life had reason to expect they might be better off under U.S. rule.

Wealthy landowners could imagine benefiting from greater political and economic freedom. Many intellectuals saw the United States as an advocate of democracy and progress. Cane cutters, tobacco workers and dock hands hoped U.S. labor laws might offer them some protection and improve their lot.

But the first years of U.S. control soon led to widespread disillusionment. Instead of more freedom, military rule over the island set Puerto Rico back years, stripping away the autonomy it had just won from Spain.

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Before the war, international events had come together to give Puerto Rico its first taste of self-rule.

When José Martí launched the Cuban Revolution in 1895, he also promised to foment revolution in Puerto Rico. Independence from Spain was his goal for both islands.

A group of Puerto Rican separatists met in 1895 at the Chimney Corner Hall in New York and organized a revolutionary organization. The flag still used today was sewn by Minas Besosa, the daughter of Manuel Besosa, and presented to the group by Juan M. Torreforte, a survivor of the Grito de Lares uprising of 1868.

While separatists were in exile, the autonomists in Puerto Rico did not fare much better in the last two decades of Spanish rule. They were periodically attacked by the conservative party and the governors appointed by Spain, plagued by internal divisions, and some, such as Ramón Baldorioty de Castro, spent time in the prison cells of El Morro.

Dr. Ashford's anemia commission

Along with the hundreds of soldiers who landed at Guánica on July 25, 1898, was a young doctor named Bailey K. Ashford, who would soon play an important role in the public health of Puerto Rico, and also improve the economy along the way.

Fascinated by the island, Ashford fell in love with a local woman, María López Nussa, and stayed on longer than most of the Americans who arrived in the early years. One of his first daunting health tasks was treating the victims of the devastating San Ciriaco hurricane in 1899.

But early on, Ashford turned his attention to a more premanent health problem that plagued Puerto Ricans: anemia. Foreign observers had referred to the people of the countryside as unhealthy and lacking in energy. Some blamed a laziness that they said was part of the culture, while others blamed the diet.

Ashford felt sure there was a medical cause, and he went searching for it. After months of testing samples from patients he treated after the hurricane, he looked through a microscope at a feces sample and spotted something strange. It was a parasite! That was the cause, Ashford was immediately convinced.

It was not surprising, in retrospect. Sanitary conditions were poor in the countryside and everyone went barefoot. That was a perfect way to pick up parasites.

It took a few years for Ashford to convince the government to take concerted action. In 1904, he convinced the governor to form the Anemia Commission and grant $5,000 to treat patients. In the countryside, thousands of people streamed into makeshift hospitals for treatments to kill the parasites inside them.

The Anemia Commission's work was not only a successful campaign from a medical standpoint, but it also changed life in rural Puerto Rico. Thousands of people did not die prematurely and many thousands more were able to work and provide for their families, boosting the economy at a hard-stricken time when it needed it most.

When revolution erupted in Cuba, the autonomists tried to take advantage of the situation. They figured they could use Spain's worries about revolutionary feelings in its colonies to win concessions. A change of leadership in Spain, following the assassination of the prime minister, provided the last missing piece of the puzzle for the autonomists.

A group of autonomists, including Luis Muñoz Rivera, had traveled to Spain and made a pact with the Liberal Fusionist Party, and now that its leader was running the government, new laws were drawn up quickly.

Puerto Rico was to get a government consisting of a governor-general appointed by the king, an elected bicameral parliament and, in Madrid, 16 deputies and three senators to represent it in the Spanish parliament.

At last, Puerto Rico was being given some authority to run its own affairs. It could legislate on all local matters and regulate banks and the monetary system and even set taxes, within limits. All while being granted far greater representation in Madrid. In some aspects, the autonomy laws rushed through in 1897 gave Puerto Rico powers it still does not have today.

But it was all to become a moot exercise. Implementation of the new government was delayed by the Spanish-American War until July 17, 1898. Eight days later, U.S. troops landed at Guánica and Spain's concessions quickly became meaningless.

Puerto Rico's brief experiment with autonomy barely lasted a week, and soon Muñoz Rivera would be traveling to a different foreign capital to try to achieve the same old goals.

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From the beginning, the United States dismissed the idea of giving Puerto Ricans more autonomy. The attitude of most U.S. appointees sent to govern the colony was one of colonial tutelage summed up by Secretary of War Elihu Root in 1899, when his department still governed Puerto Rico: "They would inevitably fail without a course of tuition under a strong and guiding hand."

The United States went on a building spree, adding roads and schools and making other improvements. The number of schools rose to 733 by the end of 1901, though 90 percent of elementary school age children still did not attend. Improvements came to health care, communications and other areas of the economy, as well.

But the strict military rule of the first two years of U.S. occupation, combined with a historic natural disaster, would take a lasting toll in other areas.

Puerto Rican farmers lost their export markets because they could no longer send goods to Cuba and Spain at friendly tariff rates. For example, prior to the war, tobacco sent to Cuba was taxed at a rate of 15 to 20 cents a pound. Afterwards, the tariff was increased to $5 a pound. The loss of these markets was not offset by access to U.S. markets because the United States treated Puerto Rico as a foreign country until the passage of the Foraker Act of 1900.

Puerto Rico's top export, coffee, entered a precipitous decline. Tariffs killed the market for Puerto Rican coffee in Spain and Cuba, and in the United States, island-grown beans were more expensive than imports from Brazil.

As if loss of markets and punitive tariffs were not enough punishment, Hurricane San Ciriaco struck in August of 1899.

San Ciriaco killed more than 3,000 people, destroyed 80 percent of the coffee crop and, even more devastating, killed up to 60 percent of the coffee plants. It takes four to six years for a coffee plant to begin producing, and farmers who were already struggling couldn't survive that long without a crop.

In 1897, coffee accounted for 59.7 percent of the value of exports from Puerto Rico. In 1901, it was just 19.5 percent, and it would never again be the island's primary export. Entire coffee plantations were abandoned and former farmers were pressed into the overflowing ranks of the landless wage workers. Some became part of the first wave of Puerto Rican emigration, seeking work as field hands in Hawaii, Cuba and elsewhere.

Conditions for rural agricultural workers were bleak. The lucky ones found work cutting cane for 50 cents a day during the harvest, but of course that left them unemployed the rest of the year. Work on the coffee farms paid less.

Men who once owned a small plot of land, where they grew their own food and maybe a little coffee to sell, now found themselves landless and uprooted, forced to move from one large plantation to another looking for work, often in debt to the hacienda store for the simple supplies they needed to buy for their families.

Not even the Foraker Act, which phased out some of the higher tariffs of the military regime, could lead the island into recovery. And the law, which created a civilian government with a U.S.-appointed governor, imposed some restrictions of its own, like the requirement that trade be done using more costly U.S. ships.

U.S. companies quickly began buying up sugar-producing land. Credit had already been tight in Puerto Rico, preventing most farmers from getting loans. Now, U.S. banks came into the local economy but mostlly lent to qualified property owners, which usually meant U.S. companies with collateral. The Foraker Act limited ownership by one corporation to 500 acres of farm land, but it was one of the most ignored and unenforced laws in all of Puerto Rico for four decades.

The U.S. era, begun in hope, quickly turned to disillusionment in the first years of the century as Puerto Ricans found that instead of greater prosperity, the change brought more absentee land ownership; instead of greater democracy, it brought less autonomy.

As Luis Muñoz Rivera said in 1904: "In 1901, only a few of us distrusted the United States. Today, we are all beginning to realize that we have been deceived."