[50]

The idea of "independence" is hence an unconscious act of self-degradation of the Puerto Rican peoples, akin in this respect to the popularity of "local control" among self-hating U.S. ghetto blacks. "Local control" of what? "Of our poverty, our slums, our degradation!" What is the ironic mythos of "self-help" prevalent in the U.S. black ghettoes since the 1950's? It is noting but the looting of one black neighbor — of clothing, TV sets, and so forth — to sell this loot to another, neighbor, sometimes in the same neighborhood within almost the very hour it was stolen: "self- help," "local control." The essential, unconscious notion involved: "We are so inferior that we can achieve a sense of equality only by separating ourselves from our superiors." It is the profound, colonialism-induced poverty, ignorance, lack of culture, and so forth, of the oppressed Puerto Rican which induces him to believe that he would be equal only if cut off from all direct comparison ("competition") with the higher-ranking species of man. By playing up to this belief in independence — this belief in inherent inferiority of the Puerto Ricans — this self- degrading mythos of "independence," the PSPer, notably expresses his petit-bourgeois comprador's belief in the innate superiority of, Coca-Cola.

In this connection, it is most useful to compare the pervasive preoccupation with "Spanish culture" among Latin-Americans to the attitudes among democratic and socialist revolutionary Germans over a century ago. The revolutionary Germans, typified by Kant, Hegel, Marx, seized upon the more advanced culture of their immediate oppressors (Napoleon's French, the English), and made a gigantic advance in capitalist culture over the heads of those from whom they appropriated such things. By contrast, the Latin-American petit-bourgeois (e.g., from the comprador classes), seizes upon that which is most bathetically backward in the world; he claims his right to the rubbish of the world — as that which, alone, he considers peculiarly fit for the inferior Latin peoples. This "cultural relativist" seeks in Indian relics, in the misery of the mestizos, in the pathetic possessions of the backward, ignorant and oppressed, that which is peculiarly suited to the perpetuation of a culture of inferiority, of oppression.

The "Glories of Spain"?! Peron's friend, Francisco Franco, perhaps? That wretched, debased crew of present-day Spanish upper classes and bureaucrats who typify and subsist on the most backward culture of Western Europe, who could not "compete" in a world in which peasants and workers were not so miserably oppressed and debased as they are in Spain today!? The Spain of the Conquistadores? Bankrupt Spain of the sixteenth century, ignorant, priest- ridden, horse- ridden, almost bestial baboons of Conquistadores, raping, illiterate butchers? All to pay the debts of Charles V to Italian, German and Low Countries usurers? The Spain of the Inquisition?

Cervantes and other products of the Moorish-Latin heritages? Yes. Even the minor composer, Soler — yes. Goya? Absolutely! These are world-historical figures who rose above parched, miserable, hungry, priest-ridden, bull-baiting Spain with its Burgundian-Hapsburg bestialities.

These achievements of the great Spaniards are not what fascinate the Latin-American comprador.

Rather, he is fascinated by the wretched Spain, the cheap, inferior Spain, the only Western European culture (barring the wretched Portuguese) which is miserable enough to be within the price of the Yanqui's Latin slaves ... unless one considers also the most degraded existentialist, structuralist offal of decaying Parisian "culture," which can be had for no price by anyone sufficiently lacking in respect for himself. The fascination with Spanish culture is primarily a preoccupation with the world of the Spanish-language ghetto, it is the self-image of the Latin comprador as an inferior person in the world.

Pathetic Lorca, imbecilic Neruda. The gifted Cortazar self-degraded into composing Parisian buffoonery. Marquez's genius slipping into pathetic existentialism. What is wanted is a true revolutionary spirit in Latin culture, which self-situates the best spokesmen of an oppressed people in the proper role of world-historical figures, leading not merely the "inferior" people of the vast Spanish-speaking ghetto of the world, but participating as equals in the remaking of the entire world. The world wants Latin Goethes, Hegels, Heines, and Marxes.

Of such human aspirations, such revolutionary aspirations, the petit-bourgeois comprador mentalities of the PSP leadership have absolutely no sensibility. Hence, their contempt for the human potentialities of the Puerto Rican people, and — not incidentally — the Macho's deep contempt for himself, in the pathetic cult of Puerto Rican "independence."

Like everything else about the PSP, even the comprador pose of its leading strata is a pitiful parody of the Latin-American Left political farce in general.

In the major Spanish sectors of Latin America, the comprador families who rule the country for the Yanqui send their sons to the university. At the university, the sons and cousins of the leading families begin their roles as future Yanqui's satraps by political assortment. One son assumes the traditional political pose of "cornprador orthodox politics" — caballero conservativism, — another becomes a future colonel, another becomes the fiery democrat, another becomes a populist publicist, another, or perhaps a cousin, becomes the family's "official Marxist-Leninist" firebrand. These sundry roles are, naturally, reviewed with suitable courtesies at all family gatherings. It is all a family affair — from extreme Right to extreme Left — every department of political life duly put under the supervision of some member of the comprador family. A guerrilla nephew may take a conservative uncle hostage: "Excuse me, uncle; this is merely political." The uncle may, in turn, politically shoot the Leftist nephew and then weigh the delicacy of appearing at the family wake; or, the nephew may, after ending his term of temporary service to the family in the Left, be pensioned off as minister of education to his uncle's Popular Democratic government.

In certain poorer, rural-mentality-ridden sections of the U.S., it was once fashionable for young plebian ladies to join sororities based on the local public high school, in pitiable emulation of the university sororities to which their parents could ill afford to send them. On the same principle, the PSP leading strata attempt to pitifully emulate the comprador traditions of the political life of Venezuela, Colombia, etc. What contemptible little charades of a show of respect for the prestige of the other leader! What a picaresque charade! Poor, plebian, faceless PSPers attempting to play at the courtly manners of the comprador "aristocracy" of more auspicious Latin regions. One is astonished that the PSP's Claridad does n )t write of Don Juan Man Bras! Thus, the PSP of poor Puerto Rico parodies the comprador farce of other Latin regions.

CLARIDAD Attacks Casals

If one searches his knowledge for the name of a contemporary Spanish artist of present- day world-historical importance, the obvious choice he could unquestionably defend would be that of Pablo Casals. Casals was the world's great instrumentalist of the cello for several decades of this century, generally now more reknowned more for his more significant musicianship. He was the guiding spirit of the world's greatest musical event of the past quarter-century, the Perpignan "Casals Festival." He unquestionably ranks high both as a leading Spanish humanist and among the greatest figures of the Spanish artistic heritage, certainly the outstanding contemporary world-historical figure in Spanish art. Otherwise, up to his recent death he was the only notable person of genuine world-historical importance living in his adopted home of Puerto Rico.

It happens that with a good taste rarely exhibited among the dilettantes of the Puerto Rican comprador caste, Casals was the honored figure of a New York City "Fiesta Puerto Rico." The pathetic, contemptible reaction of the PSP's Claridad weekly to Casals' participation in this concert is most revealing.

The weekly's June 24, 1973 editorial denounced the festival's inclusion of Casals as "Cultural Aggression," denouncing in particular, "twenty-five thousand dollars stolen from the workers of Puerto Rico to sponsor a program which was not representative of what is our culture."

The editorial continues, characterizing the concert in the following terms:

... clearly another attempt to force us into "another cultural bag." The implication was clear: that part of the program which was termed "folkioric" was seen as being inferior; it was the classical part of the program which "saved" the event. But we no longer believe such fairy tales. As Puerto Ricans, but especially as revolutionaries struggling for a new society, a socialist society, we understand the importance and necessity of all peoples developing their cultures.

Our anger is not directed at the classical music of Europe, but at the attempt of the imperialists to force it upon us, and imply that our music is inferior to it ... It is the culmination of this genocidal process which will convert all Puerto Ricans, whether here or in Puerto Rico, into a national minority ...

What degrading, pathetic philistinism! "European" music? What of the Spanish language, which is also European? What of mathematics, textile manufacturing methods, modern types of vegetables and meat, the automobile, the airplane, etc., which are also pre sumably the efforts of the "imperialists" to impose a "culture" upon the native islanders?

Or, in a similar vein, is it "cultural aggression" upon Puerto Ricans that gringo "Rock" and "folk" fads are spreading through the island today; is the growing popularity of Mexican Macho ballads in the island to be construed as an example of Mexican "cultural aggression"? The following three examples of Mexican popular song lyrics are exemplary of the genre now sweeping the island.

I.

Nada importa hailer la muerte

en Ia reja de una ingrata,

o llevar en la conciencia

otra culpa por matar.

En los Altos es de machos

respetar la valentía

y su ley son unos ojos

que enamoran al mirar.

Tienen fama sus caballos

que los charros jinetean,

y sus chinas son luceros

de belleza sin igual.

Por sus besos van sus hombres

sin temor a la pelea,

entre sangre de sarapes

y cortadas de puñal.

II.

...

y los machos de Jalisco

afamados por entrones

por eso traen pantalones.

Vengo en busca de una ingrata

de una joven presumida

que se fue con mi querer,

traigo ganas de encontrarla

pa'ensenarle que de un hombre

no se burla una mujer.

Se me vino de repente

dando pie pa'que la gente

murmurara porque sì,

porque a ver hoy que la encuentre

y quedemos frente a frente

que me va a decir a mi.

III.

!Ay Jalisco, Jalisco

tus hombres son machos,

y son cumplidores

valientes y ariscos

y sostenedores,

no admiten rivales ...

en cosas de amores.

!Ay Jalisco no te rajes!

...

Yo fui uno de aquellos

"dorados" de Villa

de los que no tienen

amor a Ia vida,

de los que a la guerra

llevamos nuestra hembra,

de los que morimos

amando y cantando,

yo soy de ese bando.*

* [footnote]

"I.

It doesn't matter to find death

at the gate of an ingrate,

or to carry on one's conscience

the guilt of another killing.

—

In Los Altos all machos

respect bravery,

and its law is a pair of eyes

whose look is bewitching.

—

Famous are its horses

that the charros ride,

and its women are stars

of unequalled beauty.

—

For their kisses,

their men go

without fear into a fight,

amidst blood of sarapes

and dagger wounds.

II.

...

and the machos of Jalisco

famed for getting everything,

that's why they wear pants.

—

I come in search of an ingrate

of a conceited young girl

who left with my love,

I want to find her

to show her that a woman

never mocks a man.

—

She came to me suddenly

giving people a reason

to whisper,

we'll see today when I find her

and we meet face to face

what she tries to tell me.

III.

Ay, Jalisco, Jalisco

your men are machos,

and they always come through

brave and tough

and sturdy,

they don't admit rivals ...

in matters of courting women.

Ay Jalisco, don't back down!

...

—

I was one of those

"Golden ones" of Villa,

those who have

no love of life,

those who take

their females to war,

those who die

living and singing,

I'm one of that gang.

Source: Aramoni, Aniceto, Psicoanalisis de Ia dinamica de un pueblo (Mexico, tierra de hombres), Second Edition, Mexico: B. Costa-Amic, 1965

The two cited examples of popular "folk culture" from Mexico illustrate not only what is so readily assimilable as Puerto Rican "folk culture," but in that way we have illustrated two other points of general importance here. Firstly, considering the psychopathological content of these songs — and therefore the self-degradation of the persons to whom these songs appeal — we are illustrating the point that most so-called "folk art" of this sort is principally significant as clinical evidence of the self-debasement of an oppressed people. However, secondly, sometimes the very articulation of psychopathology in such "cultural" forms does attain to the status of art.

Some development of this latter point is relevant to the PSP attack on Casals.

In the case of the psychological portraits of the older Goya, the material displayed by the artist is nothing but the content of his own mind. Goya's chimerical figures are not sheer concoctions, not strictly fictions; they are what any qualified psychoanalyst would recognize as psychological truth, accurate representations of the horrible images one finds in the process of deeper probing of unconscious processes. Hence, in the case of these portraits (or, similarly, the psychologically important bull-fight sketches of Goya), or in the similar psychological revelations of Hieronymous Bosch, we have artistic works which are great art exactly because they exemplify the artist (and, implicitly, the audience) gaining self-conscious wilful control over those hideous forces through which his society oppresses him, bestializes him internally.

Is the psychopathological behavior of the street- corner Macho therefore also "artistic" on such grounds? On the contrary, his performance, and the exemplary celebration of that self- degradation in Mexican ballads, is an act of strengthening and perpetuating the degradation expressed by this behavior. Art focuses on psychological truth, and hence often enough on portraying the hideousness within man, but to the effect of liberating man from that hideousness. Great art often "gets out" the representation of the hideousness within man to the either explicit or at least implicit end of enabling man to master, to conquer that self- degradation through self- consciousness.

The essential feature of great art is that it is a product of more or less direct and self- conscious recall and application of the special kind of emotion to which we refer in the concluding summary of this present article. It is the application of the emotion otherwise identified with creative mentation or with "oceanic" impulses of "non-erotic loving" to the effect of liberating the individual from the sort of banality of feeling expressed typically in vulgar "folk culture."

However, this is not to brush aside all of what is sometimes termed "folk art." Most of the great musicians of the past. Beethoven notably included, have seized upon so-called "folk songs" and other elements of popular music (dance-forms) as a point of departure for artistic production. In such instances, they do essentially what Goya did in his psychological portraits; they abstract, so to speak, from these "popular forms" of experience for the purpose of revealing a truth otherwise concealed behind the ordinary experience.

Sometimes, a naive, uncelebrated person, thus termed a "folk artist" because he lacks formal credentials in fine art, applies the same essential personal, less-developed gifts to some of his productions, lacking only the depth of training required to express the accomplishment in better than a clumsy fashion. Yet, despite the predominant banality of, for example, the resulting folk-song he produces, there is an offsetting element of "genius" in his work which enables it to serve an artistic purpose in the exertions of a gifted performer.

Hence, since there is only one set of standards for judging all art, the question of what should have been represented as the achievements of "Puerto Rican culture" at the New York "Fiesta" is a concrete issue. Is there, today, some outstanding Puerto Rican com poser whose work was ignored (i.e., suppressed)? Was there some particular song, etc., some group of musical works from Puerto Rican sources which was of equal merit to that featured in the Casals segment of the "Fiesta" program? If not, then all that could have been offered in decency was the best possible interpretative performance of great "European classical music" by the most gifted residents of Puerto Rico aided by their friends from all parts of the world.

Unless there is some work of unusual artistic merit buried in Puerto Rican popular musical entertainments, then the really oppressive feature of the "Fiesta" was the inclusion of the actually inferior "folkloric" trash. To hold up the pathetic "folkloric" works of Puerto Rico as exemplary of the human qualities of the Puerto Rican people is the most contemptible sort of imperialist patronizing. A comparison can be obtained from the tasteless wealthy dilettante father who arranges a major exhibition for the productions of an ungifted daughter who "paints" without a semblance of creative talent.

There can be no doubt that the editors of Claridad do express exactly such patronizing contempt for the Puerto Rican people. The attempt to contrast the "classical music of Europe" to a "native culture" of pathetic Macho ballads, etc., already says several things of decisive importance respecting those editors. Firstly, in terming the greatest music of the modern world "European" in this sense, they are insisting that Puerto Ricans are so inferior in mental and emotional potential that they are not a part of world culture, and could not possibly rise to such levels as to master Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. When Claridad writes of the need of all peoples to develop their own native culture from the standpoint of the apotheosis of "native" trash such as the Mexican Macho songs we cited, it is the editors who are expressing the dominant philosophical world-outlook of the most reactionary imperialists.

Just as drunken capitalists used to go "slumming" in the U.S. black ghetto, and as white racists thus de. veloped the myth that black people are "naturally good at" jazz, and have "soul" (i.e., have emotions, not intellectual competence), the post-war imperialists developed the reactionary fad in anthropology called "cultural relativism." "Cultural relativism" is the groundless, racist theory that each people is genetically predisposed toward a certain kind of culture, that different national groups and races are merely different species of talking cattle, and therefore do not require the same quality of nutrition, housing, education, and rights as the wealthiest capitalist families. ("The happy-go-lucky slaves must be left to enjoy their own quaint customs.")

It is the editors of Claridad who insist that Puerto Ricans are intellectually and emotionally inferior people. Claridad insists that a world-historical genius in music, Casals, could be understood only by wealthy, well-educated "Europeans." Puerto Ricans, Claridad insists, are not capable of any higher intellectual and emotional level of "culture" than psychopathological ballads and quaint dances.

[Goya picture]

[54]

Notably, the "revolutionaries" of Claridad make no protest against the invasion of Puerto Rican cultural life by "Rock music," a form of pseudo-music which celebrates and exacerbates the bestialization of intellect and emotion.

When the editors write that they are not attacking "classical music, "they are lying. It is precisely "classical music" — and all other serious forms of art and intellectual life — to which the obviously philistine, sexually-impotent moral cretins of the weekly are most violently opposed.

CLARIDAD On "Tango"

The exact form of the philistinism behind the PSP attack on Casals is revealed by a lengthy review of "Last Tango In Paris" appearing under the by-line of Carmen Vazquez Arce in the July 15, 1973 issue. (Notably, Claridad does not balk at the efforts of Arce to commit the "cultural aggression" of imposing Parisite existentialism upon the weekly's Puerto Rican readers.) Arce seizes upon everything in the film which expresses the most degraded form of bourgeois, bestial sexual relations and holds this up as a purgative "revolutionary" attack on bourgeois morality.

Existentialism, the point of view of the film, is both a professed "philosophy" and a psychopathology. The difference between the literary argument and the disease is located in the fact that many leading existentialists (notably Jean-Paul Sartre) are not entirely consistent exponents of the psychopathology which is otherwise the axiomatic kernel of their world-outlook in the writing; in writing, certain existentialists such as Sartre are "afflicted" by intellectual gifts and social conscience contrary to their otherwise prevailing mental illness, thus introducing into literary existentialism contradicting elements which preclude a simple equivalence between the philosophizing and a consistent exposition of the essential world-outlook expressed in the philosopher's axiomatic assumption.

There is nothing strained in any respect in our terming existentialism as a disease ("French disease"?). There is the development of R.D. Laing's cult out of Sartre's existentialist psychology and the parallels to this in the advocacy of insanity by such structuralists as Foucault and Althusser, as well as the advocacy of insanity (although in milder terms) in Sartre's psychological writings themselves. (A "structuralist" is an existentialist suffering from an overdose of grammar.)*

To make short of the point at hand in respect to the "Tango" review, in cultures in which the alienation of the individual is most extreme (France, Italy, Latin America, etc.), the sense of unreality of the self-conscious self is especially acute. For example, the case of the Macho, who is fanatically determined to conceal his "inner self" from all external access. As a result, the infantilism rampant in the culture is relatively more extreme in the form of a preoccupation with the individual sensual experience per se. The "strong feelings" of rage, fear, elation of object- possession, characteristic of the alienated (emotionally blocked) individual are perceived by the victim as purely-individual feelings demanding individual (heteronomic) sensual expression per se.

Correspondingly, just as in the Macho's "extracurricular" sexual relations there is absolutely nothing personal respecting the woman being used at the moment, the ideal of the existentialist lover is to "have" a woman without an exchange of names, to engage in a purely animal sensual relationship with the woman — without either of them knowing who the other is or incurring any other sense of a continuing social relationship — a "purely sensual" relationship, or, otherwise, a purely bestial sexual relationship a la D.H. Lawrence.

The bestialized person such as Carmen Vazquez Arce, imagines that because the existentialist sexual relationship is nominally "dirty" and "immoral" by bourgeois standards, that such a degraded form of sexual relationships is therefore somehow anti-capitalist and hence "revolutionary." Arce overlooks the fact that "dirty" and "immoral" prostitution is already an honored bourgeois institution, especially In Latin American culture. (The Latin father introduces his son to a prostitute — a sort of Latin "bar mitzvah." Later, the son, reared to sex in relationships to prostitutes, rapes his bride on their wedding night, a bride whose entire sexual education was probably at the hands of nuns. The Latin father is seldom offended by his son's "whoring around"; the Latin is offended only by treating a "madonna" as whore. Typically, in cultures — e.g., Spanish, Italian — in which this "noble" existentialist tradition of chastity prevails, the male feels most secure in "whoring around" with a woman from another language- group, etc.)** Is prostitution, the self-subsisting form of existentialist sex, therefore a "revolutionary" institution? We may judge that Arce speaks authoritatively for the editors of Claridad in holding up sexual impotence and sexual degradation as the official political policy of the weekly.

* [footnote] The case of R.D. Laing will be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of The Campaigner. Laing has been selected for this, rather than Focault and Aithusser, on grounds that Laing's version of existentialist psychology involves the hysterical perversion of actual clinical insights, and hence his version of existentialist insanity- mongering has a connection to investigation of psychopathological life entirely lacking in such outright quacks as Foucault and Althusser.

** [footnote] This is most visible in the U.S.A., where the "good Italian" cazziste limit their "whoring around" to non-Italian girls, e.g., Irish girls, and the Irish, Polish, etc., "Machos" reciprocate in kind.

In short, there is an obvious direct connection between Arce's professed sexual self- degradation tion and the weekly's countercultural hostility to "classical music" and great Spanish artistic achievements. Claridad's policy, on culture as well as politics generally, is that Puerto Ricans are an inferior people, who should never be subjected to important tasks of intellectual or emotional life.

Island Politics

The cases of the El Mundo newspaper strike and the general strikes adequately identify the total impotence of the PSP in its island politics. Unlike the now-defunct Puerto Rican Socialist Party of the 1930's, the leadership of the same party (as Marx would say, "repeated as farce") which has taken its name militantly denies the fact that Puerto Ricans are an oppressed minority within the U.S.A. (e.g., editorial, June 24, 1973). Thus the PSP pretends that it is unnecessary for island Puerto Ricans to constantly link their own class struggle to that of the mainland working class. Like all reactionary nationalists, the PSP hostilely rejects class princi ples whenever the "national question" is posed. It treats the U.S. working-class generally as almost equally "imperialist oppressors" together with the mainland capitalists.

The reactionary side of Puerto Rican nationalism shows most clearly as impotence whenever the PSP leadership is confronted with a situation which demands connecting the Puerto Rican workers' struggles to the mobilization of class struggle forces in alliance with mainland workers generally. By thus cutting off Puerto Rican workers from the of mobilizing mainland workers generally, the PSP (like other "left" nationalists) ensures the absolute crushing defeat of all island class struggles. As if half-conscious of this counterrevolutionary aspect of its nationalism, the PSP attempts to cover up its counterrevolutionary role of impotence with the most astonishing charades and double-talk.

The following summary prepared by a leading staff member in charge of the Island intelligence file, makes the essential case.

The EL MUNDO Newspaper Strike

From the first days of the strike in early February, both island and overseas capitalist firms put forth a united front with the newspaper to break this strike. They intended to use that strike-breaking as an example for on-going and future strikes. Therefore, the first picket lines were met with police clubs and the arrest of the strike leadership and rank and file.

Realizing the strength of the strikers, El Mundo decided to rent five helicopters to airlift the paper from the plant and to import scabs. When a legal challenge by the union failed, the "Armed Commandos of Liberation" (CAL), a petit-bourgeois nationalist terrorist group, bombed the five helicopters. CAL is viewed sympathetically by the PSP-MPI.

Labor Upsurge

General public sympathy for the El Mundo strikers was indicated by the rapid decrease of the newspaper's readership up until the point management opted for a lockout. Moreover, the United Workers Movement (MOU), a PSP front organization of progressive trade unions, mobilized their rank and file, especially the Teamsters, to join the picket line and to distribute propaganda about the strike. Similarly, students, intellectuals, and professionals organized rallies and marches in support of the strike.

During the seven-month El Mundo strike there were four other major strikes — by independent truckers, bus drivers and maintenance personnel, electrical and water services workers — and forcible land seizures by dispossessed people. In the first six months of 1972, there were more than a hundred strikes of more than 75,000 strikers. This figure is about twice the annual average in Puerto Rico.

All of this presented a clear opportunity for the Left to intervene in this mass-strike process. Immediately an island- wide strike-support organization could have been created to put forward a common interest program of expanded jobs, housing and necessary services by taxing capitalist income. In that period, such a Puerto Rican vanguard effort could have been made effective by spreading the struggle to the U.S. mainland.

Government Countermeasures

The local and "Yanqui" capitalists were very aware of the explosive potential of this strike wave. On June 23, the associate commissioner of the Industrial Commission of P.R. suggested the creation of a native Pay Board composed of eleven "authentic" union leaders selected by the rank and file. On the first week of August, 1972, the government of Puerto Rico (New Progressive Party) initiated a strike-breaker plan to temporarily replace the striking water services workers. The Civil Defense, the police, firemen, the Department of Public Works and Water Service would act as strikebreakers in this and other strikes in the near future. Although these two plans never materialized, it gives us a concrete expression of how aware the capitalists were of the potential mass-strike process going on.

Left's Response

In December 1971, Juan Mari Bras, the General Secretary of the PSP, said at a New York City lecture that his party had organized an "aspirant" group among El Mundo workers. Thus, by the outset of the strike on February 9, the PSP had an active militant caucus inside the Puerto Rican Newspaper Guild (UPAGRA).

The aims of this PSP-led caucus were to move within the union to more radical "pure and simple" trade-union positions, while the PSP militants played the role of the honest and humble "friends of workers."

[56]

At the time of the lockout (last week of June) the President of "El Mundo" Corp. sent a letter to her employees which was answered by the Workers Affairs Secretary of the PSP as follows:

In the present stage of our struggle, the strategy for economic strikes is set up by the workers headed by their own trade-union leadership. It is within this strategy that our support began to function. That is why we always insist that the terms of our support be determined by the workers. This is what is in harmony with the working-class-conscious development of the Puerto Rican workers and the ideological development of the most advanced trade-union leadership.