This time the strikers had been encouraged by what they mistook to be federal support. The American Federation of Labor had sent down as investigating delegates two men of forceful Irish wit who were naturally appalled to find their new fellow-citizens living under conditions unequalled even among their ancestral peat-bogs. What they did not recognize was that all over Latin-America, even where land is virtually unlimited and there are no corporations to “exploit” the populace, the masses live in much the same thatched-hut degradation. Their familiarity, with the Porto Rican environment was as negative as their knowledge of the Spanish language; they made the almost universal American mistake of thinking that what is true of the United States is equally so of all other countries, and their straight-forward national temperament made them, no match for the wily, intricate machinations of native politicians.
Porto Rico had not been so lively since the Americans ousted the Spaniards. I had an opportunity of hearing both sides of the case, for with the privilege of the mere observer I was equally welcome—whatever the degree may have been—in the touring car of the delegates and at the dinner-tables of the sugar managers.
“These simple fellows from the States,” said the latter, “think they can solve the problem of over-population by giving $2.50 a day to all laborers, good or bad, weak or strong. The result would be to drive the best workmen out of the country, and leave us, our stock-holders, and the consumers, victims of the poorest. Like the labor union movement everywhere, it would give the advantage to the weakling, the scamper, the time-killer. We have men in our fields who earn $3.50 a day, and who will tell you they do not know why on earth they are striking. Men who can cut six tons of cane a day on piece-work will not cut one ton at day wages. Then there are men so full of the hookworm that they haven’t the strength to earn one dollar a day. We centrals insist on keeping the ajuste system that has always prevailed in Porto Rico—the letting of work by contract to self-appointed gang leaders; and we will not sign a minimum wage scale because there is no responsible person to see that the terms are carried out on the laborer’s side. We refuse to deal with the strikers’ committees because we cannot listen to a lot of bakers and barbers from the towns who do not know sugarcane from swamp reeds. There is nothing but politics back of it all any way. This is a presidential year; that explains the sudden interest of politicians in the poor down-trodden laboring class. Our men earn at least $1.75 a day—and they seldom work in the fields after two in the afternoon. Besides that we give every employee a twenty per cent. bonus, a house to live in if he chooses, free medical attention, half-time when they are sick, and the privilege of buying their supplies in our company stores at cost. Cuba pays higher wages, but the companies get most of it back through their stores. We run ours at a loss; I can prove it to you by our books; and we give much to charity. Hungry indeed! Do you know that our biggest sales to our laborers are costly perfumes? They may starve their children, but they can always feed fresh eggs to their fighting-cocks. There is hardly a man of them that is not keeping two or three women. If we paid our men twice what we do, the only result would be that they would lay off every other day. Let them strike! We can always get hillmen from the interior or men from Aguadilla who are only too glad to work for even less than we are paying now.”
I found Santiago Iglesias literally up to his ears in work at the headquarters of the Socialist-Labor party, a few doors from the governor’s palace. About him swarmed several of the foxy-faced individuals he had himself privately deplored as assistants. A powerful man in the prime of life, of pure Spanish blood, the radical Porto Rican senator was quite ready to recapitulate once more his view of the situation. If he was “playing politics”—and what elective government official is not every time he opens his mouth or turns over in bed?—he gave at least the impression of being genuinely distressed at the condition of Porto Rico’s poverty-bred masses. We had conversed for some time in Spanish before he surprised me by breaking forth into a vigorous English, amusing for its curious errors of pronunciation. The minimum wage demanded, for instance, which recurred in almost every sentence, always emerged from his lips with the second f transformed into an s. That is the chief trouble with Santiago, according to his opponents—his methods are “too fisty.”
“There has been a vast improvement in personal liberty in Porto Rico under American rule,” he began. “But the island has been surrendered to Wall Street, to the heartless corporations that always profit most by American expansion. Moreover, American rule has forced upon us American prices—it always does—without giving our people the corresponding income. Formerly all our wealth went to Spain. Now it goes to the States, but with this difference,—under Spanish rule wages were low but the employers were paternal; they thought occasionally about their peons. At least the workers got enough to eat. The corporations that have taken their place are utterly impersonal; the workmen who sweat in the sun for them are no more to the far away stock-holders than the canes that pass between the rollers of their sugar-mills. When they get these magnificent returns on their investment do the Americans who hold stocks and bonds in our great centrals ever ask themselves how the men who are actually earning them are getting on? No, they sit tight in their comfortable church pews giving thanks to the Lord with a freer conscience than ever did the Spanish conquistadores, for they are too far away ever to see the sufferings of their peons.
“The sugar companies can produce sugar at a hundred dollars a ton; they are getting two hundred and forty. The common stock of the four big ones, paid from fifty-six to seventy dollars last year on every hundred dollars invested, not to mention a lot of extra dividends, and their profits for this zafra will be far higher. The island is being pumped dry of its resources and nothing is being put back into it. In the States not twenty per cent. of the national income goes out of the country; the rest goes back into reproduction. In Porto Rico seventy per cent. goes to foreigners, and of the thirty left wealthy Porto Ricans spend a large amount abroad. We do not want our land all used to enrich non-resident stock-holders; we need it to feed our own people. There is not corn-meal and beans enough now to go round, because the big sugar centrals hold all the fertile soil. They have bought all the land about them, even the foot-hills, so that the people cannot plant anything, but must work for the companies. Stock-holders are entitled to a fair profit on the capital actually invested—actually, I say—and something for the risk taken—which certainly is not great. But the Porto Ricans, the men, and women, and the scrawny children who do the actual work in the broiling tropical sun should get the rest of it, in wages. We should tax non-resident sugar companies ten per cent. of their income for the improvement of Porto Rico; we should borrow several millions in the States and give our poor people land to cultivate, and pay the loan back out of that tax. But what can we do? The politicians, the high officials are all interested in sugar. They and the corporations form the invisible government; they are the law, the police, the rulers, the patriots. Patriots! The instant the Porto Rican income-tax was set at half that in the States the corporations made Porto Rico their legal residence. When the federal government would not stand for the trick and forced them to pay the balance they cried unto high Heaven. Porto Rican law forbids any company or individual to own more than five hundred acres. They get around the law by trickery, by dividing the holdings among the members of the same family, by making fake divisions of company stock. The Secretary of War and other federal officials come down here to ‘investigate.’ They motor across our beautiful mountains, have two or three banquets in the homes of the rich or the central managers, and the newspapers in the States shout ‘Great Prosperity in Porto Rico!’ I tell you it is the criminal lack of equity, the same old blindness of the landed classes the world over and in all ages that is driving Porto Rico into the camp of the violent radicals.
“You admire our fine roads. All visitors do. You do not realize that they were built because the corporations needed them. And did we pay for them by taxing the corporations? We did not. We paid for them by government bonds—that is, we charged them up to the children of the peons. You have probably found that we have inadequate school facilities. The corporations, the invisible government, do not want the masses educated, because then they would not have left any easily manipulated laboring class. Nor do I take much stock in this over-population idea. At least I should like to see the half million untilled acres turned over to the people before I will believe emigration is necessary. Sixty per cent. of Porto Rico is uncultivated, yet eighty per cent. of the population goes to bed hungry every night in the year. Then there is this cry of hookworm. Do not let the Rockefeller Foundation, a direct descendant of the capitalists, tell you lies about ‘anemia.’ The anemia of Porto Rico comes from no worm, but from the fact that the people are always hungry. It is the sordid miserliness of corporations, bent on keeping our peons reduced to the level of serfs, in order that they may always have a cheap supply of labor, that is the fundamental cause of the misery of Porto Rico, of the naked, barefoot, hungry, schoolless, homeless desolation of the working classes.”
The calm and neutral observer, neither underfed nor blessed with the task of clipping sugar-stock coupons, detects a certain amount of froth on the statements of both parties to the controversy in Porto Rico. But he cannot but wonder why the sweat-stained laborers in the corn-fields should be seen wearily tramping homeward to a one-room thatched hovel to share a few boiled roots with a slattern woman and a swarm of thin-shanked children while the Americans who direct them from the armchair comfort of fan-cooled offices stroll toward capacious bungalows, pausing on the way for a game of tennis in the company compound, and sit down to a faultless dinner amid all that appeals to the aesthetic senses. Least of all can he reconcile the vision of other Americans, whose only part in the production of sugar is the collecting of dividends, rolling about the island in luxurious touring cars, with the sight of the toil-worn, ragged workers whose uncouth appearance arouses the haughty travelers to snorts of scorn or falsetto shrieks of “how picturesque.”
The problem in Porto Rico, as the reader has long since suspected, is the antithesis of that in Santo Domingo. In the latter island the difficulty is to get laborers enough to develop the country; in the former it is to find labor enough to occupy the swarming population. Barely three-fourths of a million people are scattered through the broad insular wilderness to the westward; the census of 1920 shows little Porto Rico crowded with 1,263,474 inhabitants, that is nearly four hundred persons to the square mile. There are several reasons for this discrepancy; for one thing Santo Domingo has been fighting itself for generations, while Porto Rico has never had a revolution. The obvious solution of the problem has two serious drawbacks. The Dominicans do not welcome immigration; they wish to keep their country to themselves. The Porto Rican is inordinately fond of his birthplace. Send him to the most distant part of the world and he is sure sooner or later to come back to his beloved Borinquen. Emigration from the island can reach even moderate success only when entire families are sent. The letters of Porto Rican soldiers no nearer the front than Florida or Panama were filled with wails of homesickness that would have been pitiful had they not been tinged with what to the unemotional Anglo-Saxon was a suggestion of the ludicrous.