!Viva Vieques!

More than eighty years ago, Puerto Rican poet and political leader Jose de Diego, wrote, "Puerto Ricans do not know how to say no." And yet, he pointed out, "the no of the oppressed has been the word, the genesis, of the liberation of peoples." De Diego warned: "We must learn to say no."

Today, the people of Puerto Rico say no; the people of Vieques say no; the Puerto Rican community in the U.S. says no. We say no to the Navy, no to the bombing of Vieques. The admirals and apologists of the Navy say they cannot find anywhere else in the world to play their war games. Still we say no. They say they will use dummy bombs. Still we say no. They promise a referendum some day. Still we say no. The word no is the same in English and Spanish. Since translation is not the problem, we must assume they cannot hear us. So we must say it louder: No.

Vieques is an offshore island municipality of Puerto Rico. It is controlled, like the rest of Puerto Rico, by the United States. More than 9,300 people live in Vieques. Yet, since 1941, the U.S. Navy has occupied two-thirds of this inhabited island for war games and live-ammunition target practice. According to journalist Juan Gonzalez: "Practice at the range goes on for as many as 200 days a year. Combat planes bomb and strafe the island. Destroyers bomb it from the sea.... Maneuvers have included, on occasion, practice with depleted uranium shells, napalm, and cluster bombs."

University of Puerto Rico Professor of Geography Jose Sequinot Barbosa observes that "the eastern third of the island constitutes a region with more craters per kilometer than the moon." The coral reef and, with it, the fishing industry have been splintered. Seventy-two percent of the population lives below the poverty line, with 40 to 50 percent unemployment. Ominously, the cancer rate in Vieques is 27 percent higher than the rest of this Caribbean colony, according to a 1998 study by the Puerto Rico Department of Public Health.

Opposition to the Navy was galvanized in April 1999 when David Sanes Rodriguez, a civilian security guard, was killed and four others wounded by a stray bombardment. Hundreds of nonviolent protesters occupied the target range and pitched camps there: fishermen, teachers, priests and nuns, independentista activists. For more than a year, the protesters said no with their bodies, and the most powerful military in the world was stumped. Colonized people do not say no. They are conditioned to say yes. But these colonized people declared their right to self-determination by occupying their own territory and refusing to leave.

Meanwhile, Puerto Rican Governor Pedro Rossello demonstrated his inability to distinguish between yes and no. In the beginning, the rightwing, pro-statehood governor blustered that no more bombs would fall on Vieques. "At first, we were so proud," said Vieques citizen Ramades Cabral Trinidad. "Then Clinton asked him to bend over and pull down his pants." The bare-bottomed governor reversed himself in January, agreeing to a "compromise."

The Navy promised to fire only inert munitions, to use the range ninety days a year, to provide $40 million in economic aid, and to hold a referendum by January 2002 on whether it could stay on indefinitely and use live munitions or whether it would have to leave by May 2003. The deal was loudly jeered. After almost sixty years of imperial arrogance, the Navy had no more credibility in Vieques. The economic aid offer was akin to an abusive spouse opening the checkbook in exchange for the right to continue the beatings.

Finally, in May, more than 200 protesters were arrested, the range was seized by the military, Navy Skyhawks dropped dummy bombs, and the U.S.S. Stump resumed the shelling of the island. Carlos Zenon, president of the Vieques Fishermen's Association, reported that two of his sons were among the handful of protesters still hiding in the "live impact area." He warned, "There are hundreds of depleted uranium shells and hundreds of unexploded live bombs that could explode upon impact by the inert bombs."

In the week preceding the arrests, pro-Navy commentators sprouted everywhere in the media. We heard the mantra that Vieques was essential to the Navy and to national security, even though, as Manuel Mirabal of the National Puerto Rican Coalition pointed out, "They haven't been able to use Vieques for more than a year, and yet the Navy managed to conduct the training it needed." However, precious few commentators across the political spectrum in this country identified the real problem illuminated by the crisis in Vieques.

That problem is colonialism. Puerto Rico is a political anachronism, a throwback to the days of gunboat diplomacy and the handlebar mustache. In 1898, U.S. troops landed in Puerto Rico and seized the island as a prize of the Spanish-American War; 102 years later, the gunboats landed again in Vieques. Colonialism is inherently anti-democratic. In Puerto Rico, the people cannot vote for President of the United States, but they can be drafted to fight and die in U.S. wars, a tradition that began when U.S. citizenship was imposed in 1917. The island is represented in Congress only by a nonvoting Resident Commissioner, yet virtually all significant aspects of Puerto Rican political life are controlled by Congress.

The U.S. presence in Puerto Rico is continually justified as an economic benefit. Yet the per capita income is less than half that of Mississippi. For that matter, eleven Caribbean countries have a higher per capita income than Puerto Rico, exploding the assumption that Puerto Rico is better off as a colony, a captive market for U.S. goods, and a cheap labor force for U.S. corporations.

Independence for Puerto Rico is a prerequisite for democracy and self-determination, not an end but a beginning. Puerto Rico is the oldest colony in the world: four centuries under Spain and a century under the United States. In 500 years, Puerto Ricans have not determined their own destiny for five minutes.

One would think that the liberation of Puerto Rico would be a natural issue for the left in this country to embrace. One would be wrong.

Vieques has received some belated attention from the left, after six decades of bombardment. The Reverend Jesse Jackson has been a welcome presence. However, in the United States, the composition of the movement in solidarity with Vieques is overwhelmingly Puerto Rican. The independence movement in Puerto Rico has been clamoring about Vieques for many years, yet has been virtually ignored until now. The question of independence is still ignored.

Juan Gonzalez noted that some progressive leaders in the United States "have quietly longed for Puerto Rico's complete annexation. Those leaders believe that the two Senators and seven Representatives a Puerto Rican state would send to Congress could have a far-reaching impact on the balance of power in Washington in favor of the Democratic Party.... Furthermore, they reason, Puerto Rican statehood would make the continued denial of statehood to the District of Columbia almost impossible." But statehood for Puerto Rico could have disastrous consequences, ranging from the deterioration of the language and culture to the repression of dissidents and further consolidation of power by the elite.

Perhaps the left in the U.S. has internalized the mythology that Puerto Ricans do not desire or deserve self-government; somewhere beneath lurks the assumption of inferiority.

Perhaps the U.S. left is as ignorant as ever about Puerto Rico's history, particularly the battle for independence from the United States. Most leftists have never heard of Pedro Albizu Campos, the leader of the independence movement who spent almost three decades in prison, or the poets Juan Antonio Corretjer and Clemente Soto Velez, imprisoned with Albizu, or the Ponce Massacre of 1937, where police fired on a Nationalist Party march, killing twenty-one people and wounding nearly 200.

Or perhaps the cause of Puerto Rican independence is not romantic enough to suit certain North American leftists. To paraphrase the writer Earl Shorris, it's like having dinner with the janitor. There are no peasant armies in the hills, no coffee beans at the cafe on the corner. There is only the mundane ugliness of poverty, and the colonialism that spawned it. Colonialism in Puerto Rico is an ethical dilemma which the left refuses to see in ethical terms, a crime for which even progressives share responsibility as long as they deny that crime.

So what can the left do about Puerto Rico? Vieques is a good place to start. Last fall, an ad hoc group of progressives in Amherst, Massachusetts--myself included successfully sponsored a resolution on Vieques at the town meeting. The resolution called for an end to the war games in Vieques and the withdrawal of the Navy from the island, with decontamination, reparations, and the return of Vieques to Puerto Rican jurisdiction. The resolution also implored our Congressional representatives to take action on Vieques. Congressman John Olver, Democrat of Massachusetts, has cosponsored legislation (H.R. 2890) that would give control of Vieques back to Puerto Rico and would require the U.S. government to dean up the toxic material the Navy has strewn about. Olver says that more communities across the country must do what Amherst has done to pressure Congress into ending the siege of Vieques. In Massachusetts alone, Cambridge, Springfield, and Lawrence have passed their own resolutions.

Federal tax dollars go directly to the military budget, and thus to support the Navy presence in Vieques. We share a responsibility to the people of Vieques to protest the injustice our dollars make possible. Keep in mind, too, that Puerto Rico lacks a voting representative in Congress. Given the absence of democratic representation for the people of Puerto Rico, the people of the United States must speak for them.

We Puerto Ricans must keep saying no. And by saying no, we say yes. As Eduardo Galeano has written, "By saying no to the devastating empire of greed, whose center lies in North America, we are saying yes to another possible America.... In saying no to a peace without dignity, we are saying yes to the sacred right of rebellion against injustice."

Martin Espada is a poet and professor at the University of Massachusetts--Amherst. His latest books of poems is called "A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen" (W.W. Norton, 2000)