WANTED: A MIRACLE FOR PUERTO RICO
Wanted: A Miracle For Puerto Rico By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD San Juan THIS WAR came very close to Puerto Rico in its early stages, actually seriously imperiling its supplies of food and...
...It is utterly disappointing to find that the newly-constituted Planning Board, which functions also as a budget commission, has set aside only beggarly sums for housing in its new Six-Year Plan and admits that "the field of urban housing is perhaps inadequately provided for...
...Some is here but locked up...
...The death rate per 100,000 of population is 415.5 in diarrhea and enteritis, 266.5 in tuberculosis cases, 107.3 in malaria...
...And here in this "pearl of the Caribbean" 250,000 Americans live as the lowest animals should not...
...The insular business world is, however, bitter against Gov...
...The Government's functions have been extraordinarily extended—how wisely only time will tell...
...Their bodies and souls are at stake...
...Most of all everybody prays for some divine miracle which will give to this tragic island new industries to feed and clothe the starving, to give them self-support, some hope of a decent life to come...
...Yesterday I watched 400 children on the edge of one of these settlements assembling for breakfast at one of the 560 milk stations founded by the public spirit, generosity, aYid devotion of Mrs...
...Yet it provides $25,000,000 for widening old roads and building new ones...
...It will never forgive him for approving the establishment of these Commissions which do constitute a step toward socialization...
...Rexford G. Tugwell, the Governor's wife...
...It is hardly surprising that there is deep unhappi-ness on this island, that there is much talk of cutting loose from the government which 46 years ago in annexing Puerto Rico promised the people the American standards of life and has never approached them...
...The corresponding figures in the continental United States are 14.2, 44.7, and 1.8...
...Nothing but an industrial miracle could alter this condition in a reasonably short time...
...Tugwell as against no previous Governor...
...And they are "perhaps inadequately provided for...
...With that restlessness and desire for better conditions every person with a heart must sympathize...
...At one time unemployment, the ever-present scourge of the island, touched the high-water mark of 300,000—in a total population of 2,000,000...
...no garbage removal, nothing but an occasional water pipe line...
...It is an hour of reorganization and uncertainty if only because of the war and the after-war adjustment to come...
...One Bright Side These are conditions which make many Puerto Ri-cans declare that the day of colonies must end for the United States as for all the other colonizing nations...
...There is no sewerage...
...Justice compels the statement that the lot of the business man is extraordinarily difficult...
...Behind everything else is the question of the political status of the island...
...Fortunately there is a bright side...
...There is progress in the matter of schools and especially junior trade schools—although 200,000 children still never enter a school...
...Wanted: A Miracle For Puerto Rico By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD San Juan THIS WAR came very close to Puerto Rico in its early stages, actually seriously imperiling its supplies of food and necessities such as gasoline, and it brought no war boom with it...
...I am well aware that the Governor is most eager to do all he can...
...There is a stronger social conscience...
...Of this I shall treat in other articles...
...It would be the best possible saving in dollars and lives to put slum removal before all else...
...Just as long as the population increase stands yearly at over 40 to the thousand and the bulk of the workers are so underpaid, the death rates in certain diseases will range far above those in the United States...
...We are at war to raise, the President says, the standards of living of the average man the world" over...
...It will never pardon him for the fact that the sugar companies are being stripped of their 251,000 sugar cane acres under the law—the organic law of the island since--1900 never heretofore enforced—which forbids a corporation's holding more than 500 acres...
...Take the slums in which 50,000 families live under unspeakable conditions...
...Labor is in process of evolution, of finding itself, is restless, and is decreasing its daily production...
...No one is really happy over the present situation...
...Slums Worse Than Ever As long as 300,000 families have a net wealth each of only $341, while 40,000 have only $3,800 apiece in worldly goods and but 10,000 families possess $9,600, or above that figure, there will be many premature deaths, a dire birth-rate, and toil, tears, misery, suffering, starvation in this Caribbean colony of ours...
...And the people starve...
...Some want statehood, some a new type dominion status, some just complete local self-government, and many independence...
...One does not need to go to India to see naked babies with the swollen bellies of the pitifully starved, with eyes blurred by hunger, bodies stunted so that twelve-year-olds look but six, with the saddest of faces...
...Praying For A Miracle There are now a Housing Authority, a Land Authority, a Public Service Commission, a Water Resources Authority, a Planning Board, commissions dealing with transportation and communications, a Development Company and a Development Bank, and still others, and the belief is that these bodies will, or may, do much for the island if they are well directed and pull together...
...There are 250,000 people at least in those slums—the annual population increase is 30,000 persons...
...The difficulty is distributed colonial authority, Washington bureaucracy, and, just now, the matter of priorities and the inability to obtain building materials...
...They are worse than I found them seven years ago...
...They rank almost as do millionaires in the States, with their $720 a year and their dependency allowances, for the average pay of the 143,000 workers in the sugar industry is but $277 a year—the coffee crop laborers get only $185...
...The drafting and voluntary enlistment of about 32,000 men here helped their families no end...
Vol. 8 • April 1944 • No. 15
