Development
The socialist movement in Puerto Rico grew in the 1960s and 1970s despite police repression and terrorist activities from right-wing exiled Cubans and pro-Statehood Puerto Ricans. The movement included a diversity of groups, ranging from socialist Christians to clandestine armed organizations. The PSP was prominent within this movement.
The MPI and PSP launched campaigns against US military bases on the island, including campaigns against bombing drills by the US Navy on Vieques and Culebra, and against environmental destruction. After campaigning for some years, the MPI-PSP managed to put a halt to plans of the island's government and private US companies to dig large copper mines in the zone of the Utuado, Lares and Adjuntas municipalities, in the mountainous interior of Puerto Rico. It was said the mines would have produced permanent damage to the environment and agriculture; in 1972 the government dropped the plans.
By 1974 the PSP and other groups could stop a government plan to build a "super-port" of long depth in the island's northwest Aguadilla coast, intended to serve oil tankers and other big international ships; the plan was denounced as ecologically devastating and favouring large foreign capitalist firms. The MPI-PSP also demanded freedom for Puerto Rican Nationalist political prisoners incarcerated in the US for armed actions in Washington, DC, in 1950 and 1954 denouncing US colonial rule in Puerto Rico. In the United Nations it repeatedly denounced US colonialism in Puerto Rico.
The MPI and PSP continued the tradition set in the 1930s by Nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos of holding a massive rally commemorating the 1868 anticolonial uprising against Spanish rule at the small mountain town of Lares each 23 September. Puerto Rico had been a Spanish colonial possession from 1493 to 1898, when it was taken by the US after the Spanish-American War.
"La alternativa socialista", the 1974 political thesis of the PSP, maintained that a workers' power was necessary to provoke a crisis of the colonial system in Puerto Rico; independence would emerge from this crisis. The party realized that a patient political work of the party among the working class at mass and educational levels would be necessary for this, as well as armed resistance. Alternative social and political structures of power would also have to be created parallel to the colonial and capitalist structures of power. Independence would be a result of the revolutionary organization of the people: it did not have to wait for some decision from the American government allowing it. The document maintained that the Puerto Rican people had a right to independence; to take back its social and natural resources; to socialize the means of production, and to use all forms of struggle available to achieve these ends. The growth and strength of a workers' party with a collective leadership, accute theory, mass influence, and a policy of alliances with other social groups was indispensable for this strategy. The party had to be constructed with both practical flexibility and ideological unity, and would become the vanguard of the working people only by the people recognizing it as such, not by self-designation.
The PSP also established an armed institute devoted to train cadres and militants in the skills of armed struggle, security, self-defense, and military strategy. This effort continued, and coexisted with, similar attempts made by other radical Puerto Rican pro-independence organizations since the 1960s both on the island and the US mainland.
Read more about this topic: Puerto Rican Socialist Party
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