Cold War Puerto Rico : Anti-Communism in Washington's Caribbean Colony

A gripping history of FBI surveillance, political repression, and the fight for Puerto Rican independence In the 1940s, with the construction of a naval base and a bombing range, Puerto Rico became a major geo-political military outpost for the United States.For a power claiming global leadership in a decolonizing world, however, the archipelago’s colonial condition underscored the dissonance between American democratic rhetoric and its imperial reality.The solution was a deal that, in 1952, gave Puerto Rico a degree of self-government without changing its legal status as an “unincorporated” US territory.The US then publicly claimed Puerto Rico was now more autonomous while using repressive tactics such as FBI surveillance, arrests, destabilization, and other methods developed in Washington to silence activists and political parties pushing for full independence. In Cold War Puerto Rico, Steve Howell examines how J.Edgar Hoover and the FBI targeted Puerto Rican communists as part of an