UNOFFICIAL TRANSLATION
The Independence of Puerto Rico 
by Fernando Martín García 
¨The colonial history of Puerto Rico has been a prolonged and vain attempt to avoid the inevitable, its Independence¨.  – Rubén Berríos Martínez


Introduction:
		THE CENTURY-OLD FIGHT for the independence of Puerto Rico and for the defense and development of Puerto Rican nationality constitutes one of the most tenacious and collectively 
	courageous processes in the history of Latin America. 

		The will of the Puerto Rican nation for self-governance and to affirm its unquestionable Latin American cultural personality has had an infinity of manifestations throughout time, 
	product of the diverse forms that have taken the dominance of the incumbent empire of the time, first being Spain and now the United States of America. However, no manifestation of this will 
	has been more persistent nor more transcendental than the constant demands of the Puerto Rican independentists for an end to our colonial condition and to give way for a regime of complete sovereignty. 
		The fight for freedom and independence has been – particularly during the occupation by the United States of America that started in the Cuban-Hispanic War of 1898 – the highest and most 
	complete expression of this unbreakable calling for national affirmation. 

		In order to accurately appraise this liberatory saga, and in order to understand why it has still not achieved its culmination, it is necessary to keep in mind the enormous adversities 
	with which the Puerto Rican nation has had to confront, and the grotesquely disproportionate forces that have always existed between the fight for decolonization and freedom and the interests that 
	have promoted and sustained colonialism in Puerto Rico. 

		The correct evaluation of these determining factors of Puerto Rican history will permit us comprehend why Puerto Rico is today the last colony of importance that remains in the world. 
	Likewise, we will be able to identify the new and unprecedented circumstances of the current historical period that will finally make way for our national independence and our complete spiritual, 
	political, and economic integration to the great Latin American homeland that has recently been rediscovering its own continental identity. 


Bolívar´s Unfinished Agenda:

		AFTER THE EMANCIPATORY STRUGGLES that at the start of the 19th century defeated the Spanish Empire in Central and South America and Mexico, Spain clung like never before to its remaining colonies 
	in Cuba and Puerto Rico, whose geographic isolation with respect to the continent and its immense concentration of military power had impeded that the liberatory movements reached them successfully, even 
	considering the fact that 180 years ago Simón Bolívar the Liberator included in his original agenda for the Anfictionic Congress of Panama in 1826 the proposal for an expeditionary force to liberate Puerto Rico. 
	The continued presence of Spain in both Antilles was considered thus a national imperative of that empire.

		The growing economic importance of Cuba, and the ties that the sugar industry had with the most influential figures of the Spanish political elite, generated a hardening of the repressive, anti-independence 
	policies that predominated the 19th century, including even the fleeting lapses of liberal reform that sputtered in the peninsula. Although because of her lesser amount of population and economic development 
	Puerto Rico was not the primary target of that policy, the obsession that Spain had with the absolute control of Cuba painstakingly manifested itself in Puerto Rico.

		The massive influx of immigrants and capital, not only from the peninsula but also from the fleeing Spanish and monarchist creoles that fled the wars of independence in the continent, decisively contributed 
	into strengthening the colonial regimes in both Antilles and into creating even more difficult conditions for the development of pro-independence thought. 

		Nevertheless, nothing could stop the inevitable: the gradual, but progressive formation – both in Cuba and Puerto Rico – of a proper national conscience on the basis of the multiple geographic, ethnic, social, 
	and economic factors that made Puerto Rico, not Spain, the mother country. 

		The political manifestation of this new national conscience that was sharpened throughout the second half of the 19th century was the growing inconformity of Puerto Ricans with the Spanish colonial 
	regime. This inconformity was itself expressed in the demands for varying degrees of self-governance that spanned everything from timid administrative reform to radical and intransigent independence. 

		The existence of this last sector was left dramatized in a town in the mountains of Puerto Rico when on the 23rd of September of 1868 the ¨Grito de Lares¨ was produced. There, it was proclaimed 
	with equal heroism and tragedy the fleeting Republic of Puerto Rico barely a few days before the ¨Grito de Yara¨, an event that led to the Ten Years´ War in Cuba, the first war of independence in that country. 
	The patriotic feat in Lares, led from exile by the Father of the Puerto Rican Motherland, don Ramón Emeterio Betances, was the womb and crucible of Puerto Rican nationhood and established the basis for its future 
	social and economic revindications. 

		If there is anything that exemplifies the very different circumstances that unfolded in a rich and developed Cuba and a poor and isolated Puerto Rico of the times was that the fire for freedom 	
	could not be squashed in Cuba, while in Puerto Rico her revolutionaries indeed were, the revolutionary movement was disarticulated and demobilized by a fierce and encompassing repression.
		
	Faced with such realities, the independence movement was left hobbled and disorganized throughout the rest of the 19th century. The political activity for change was reduced, at least in the public sphere, 
	to a reformist program that the insular autonomic government supported that aspired for equal rights with Spaniards from the peninsula, and the full participation of Puerto Ricans in the Spanish courts. This, 
	however, did not impede pro-independence Puerto Ricans of such stature like don Ramón Emeterio Betances and don Eugenio María de Hostos would continue from exile conspiring and fighting, not only for the independence 
	of Puerto Rico, but also for the independence of Cuba. They proclaimed and promoted to all and sundry the necessity to forge a Confederation of the Antilles, idea that was after picked up by the apostle José Martí in 
	the fight to unify our Caribbean peoples in the necessity of confronting the project of the United States of America of converting the Caribbean into its lake.

		Since then, Puerto Rican independentism has always been defined by anti-imperialism and solidarity with the peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America facing the policies and hegemonic pretenses of the United States 
	in our America.