Puerto Rico in the sun

JEFFERSON CHASE

I saw a woman dancing on the road to Mayaguez. She was quite alone, and on her way to San Juan. We came around the turn of the road, hurrying to get to Isabela in time for lunch and a discussion of a deserving irrigation project, and there we saw her. She was just dancing for her own pleasure and stopped only to let the automobile load of earnest Nordics pass. Later in the day, we came to a little country school near Aguadilla, where the girls had just come out to play. There was one girl of about fourteen, quite pretty, running, laughing, playing with the rest, and she must have been about eight months gone with child. This was our first concrete introduction to the Puerto Rican heresy against the North American dogma.

We passed through tropical forests, places fairly spouting with fertility—trees we had never heard of—cannon-ball trees, sapodillas, things which exploded their seed-pods with the crack of a pistol, shooting the contents fifty feet away, trees with strange names, tree-ferns, tulip-trees, woman's tongues. We were told of wood so fertile that when it was planted as fenceposts, the posts sprouted into growing trees again. We were also told that the birth-rate in Puerto Rico was very, very high and saw no reason to doubt it. We did not see what we could do about it, given the example of nature, which seemed bent on demonstrating that there is nothing so important and nothing so unimportant as life.

This was a sort of treason, for we were down there, of course, to do something about the poor, starving Puerto Ricans. It was all rather baffling. We met men in rags who looked us full in the face, with more than a touch of what would have been insolence had it not included pride and self-respect. We examined slums in the mangrove swamps at San Juan, consisting of make-shift kennels which would not have been regarded as good enough for dogs in the North, and found them swarming with chubby children, laughing women, and at night the tinkle of music rang out over the malarial tidal flats.

We went through huge sugar centrals and saw the cane on its way from the fields in ox-carts until it was bagged as brown sugar fresh from the centrifuges. We saw ragged jibaros tending these machines and dutifully read the statistics on the export of sugar and the prevailing wagescales. And we saw men, women and children unrebukedly snatching the freshly-cut cane from the trucks and chewing it. It was, we were informed, both nourishing and good for the teeth.

So we went to the mountains, to the coffee fincas devastated by the hurricanes and the money-lenders. We saw the peasants with the high cheek bones and small feet of the aboriginal Borenquen Indians. They did not look abject and they certainly were not obsequious. Instead, they somehow conveyed an air of protest against our presence. Yet when we stopped at a village to ask directions from an old man who had been twice ruined by successive hurricanes, he bade us welcome and boasted that he was the father of twenty-eight children.

One blue-gold night we stood in the hills above Mayaguez and looked down the steepwalled valley at the cane-fields burning. I think that it was at that moment that the heresy really attacked our party. At any rate, instead of returning to an official banquet at the Governor's Palace—the Fortaleza—in San Juan, we went on to the old sulphur baths at Coamo Springs and drank Daiquiri cocktails. There didn't seem to be anything dramatic you could do about people who were perfectly happy to be what they were: people who knew how to get out of life a great deal more than we did.

It was rather humiliating. We came from the United States, the land of panaceas, and we had behind us heaps of potential dollars wrung from our own poor, joyless millions, for relief, for C.W.A., for A.A.A. We studied proposals for the erection of sanitary comfort-stations, for purifying water-supplies, for reforestation, for model housing projects, for (oh! magic word) rehabilitation.

And we faced the people of Puerto Rico who did not want furnaces, kitchens, fixed abodes, shoes, or underwear; people who paid little or no rent-for their tiny shacks; people who picked up their fun and their food where they found it; people who did not wish to be—and who courteously but unmistakably indicated that they had not the slightest desire to be—as we were. We had come down expecting—subconsciously —to find second-rate North Americans who would be touchingly grateful to us and instead we found first-rate Latin Americans, with a civilization which antedated and worked better than our own. We found people who did not wish to be shuffled around but simply to be let alone with their rice and beans, their little tin-roofed huts, their music, their dignity, and their babies. And they had little use for us.

The Puritan Lady Bountiful had bumped head first into the gargantuan and unorganized boifnty of the tropics and come off a poor second. Neither the "icy statistical Christ" of organized charity nor the set smile of the social worker could offer much more than the meanest jibaro could pick up with a minimum of sustained effort. It was quite illuminating as to what happens to human nature and social planning in the presence of abundance. It was, in fact, rather pleasant to think that people can live happily without being "corrupted" by plenty. And it was distinctly puzzling to us to find ourselves scouring Puerto Rico in pursuit of human misery, when we could find so much of it in the poor quarters at home. We had seen more acute human misery in crossing the Jersey Flats on a Pullman than we found in all Puerto Rico.

And so the heresy took its final and most virulent form. Why not—in addition to sending missions to rehabilitate economically the Puerto Ricans and other natives of the Caribbean—have them send missions to rehabilitate us morally? While we are draining the tropics of malaria and keeping bubonic plague and hookworm under control, might it not be a good idea to have the tropics show us that it is possible to be happy and dignified with no money, to have a large and flourishing family on three dollars a week, to sing and make love in the moonlight, and to carry some of the climate in our hearts? Instead of our trying to "Americanize" the poor, inoffensive, unsanitary Caribbean, why not have the Caribbean humanize us? show us that it is possible for black, white and mulatto to live side by side without lynchings? show us that a man can be wise, respected and even highly educated without reference to his bank-account? In other words, why not let them teach us the art of living?

This, of course, is treason, yet it makes sound sense. The miracle of a tropical Paradise at our door-step has been ignored while our gentry have gone tooting off to Europe to enjoy life a la carte instead of on the half-shell, while our intellectuals have scoured Russia for ideas on how to achieve the political basis for a civilization based on abundance. Rum and romance have been ours for the taking, and we have got all tangled up in social planning and consumer economics and all the bright earnestness of social uplift (New Style).

For after all, mass folk-dancing and proletarian eurhythmies are one thing and a woman dancing for her own amusement on the road to Mayaguez is another. I think that I would rather see that woman and that enceinte little school-girl near Aguadilla than all the cultural planning in the Soviet Union. For the Puerto Rican heresy is to prefer human life and its abundance to standards of living and financial solvency, to prefer babies to Buicks, the Virgin to the Dynamo. And I think that they are right and that we are wrong to tamper with the affirmation of fertility in the face of fate.