Passive Puerto Rico and Revolutionary Cuba?

Lillian Guerra debunks the conventional stereotypes of the two islands in the U.S. imperial imagination: that of “Cubans’ inclination to chaos and revolution as well as Puerto Ricans’ alleged apathy and political passivity.” Guerra traces how these twin myths on Cuba and Puerto Rico were popularized during the first half of the twentieth century, to justify the territorial expansion, military expansion, political expansion, and economic expansion of the United States in the Caribbean. Yet the author shows that Cubans and Puerto Ricans developed their own strategies of resistance to U.S. hegemony and eventually negotiated significant autonomous spaces, albeit with distinct inflections, such as the Free Associated State in Puerto Rico or the Cuban Revolution. Despite their divergent political paths since the second half of the twentieth century, both “Puerto Ricans and Cubans have needed to break the monopoly on ideas, debate, and terms for understanding reality that a given political elite holds and enforces to keep its monopoly on power.” Today, the two islands face similar dilemmas, including the extreme reliance on the public sector (more in Cuba than in Puerto Rico) or massive subsidies from an external power (currently more extensive in Puerto Rico than in Cuba after the demise of the Soviet Union).