Man of the People

(See Cover)

Somber-eyed Luis Munoz Marin, the first popularly elected Governor of Puerto Rico, and the 122nd since Ponce de Leon, settled down last week to review the bills just passed by the island legislature. Don Luis liked most of the new bills, and the new budget in particular. It totaled $94 million and 46% of it was earmarked for health and education.

The legislature had also allotted more than $12 million for capital improvements such as highways and hospitals, more than $11 million for capital contributions for sewers, aqueducts, housing, and irrigation. But that was only a start on Munoz' program to make the island a better place to live. He planned soon to call a special session to provide for new schools, instruction for illiterates (25% of the island's population), child care, and the organization of cooperative stores.

Uphill Struggle. During his campaign for the governorship last fall, Munoz had electrified voters with a rousing, un-demagogic slogan, "Jalda Arriba!" (Uphill!). To crowds thronging around him he had cried: "The job takes time. We are going uphill." Since then, Jalda Arriba has been set to music and chorused at political rallied.

For Puerto Rico, overcrowded (pop. 2,200,000) and long tied to a one-crop (sugar) economy, the path ahead was indeed uphill. The hardest fact of the island's life is that it has too many people and too little land. Of its 1,000,000 arable acres, 300,000 are in sugar cane, the cash crop. That leaves less than half an acre of land per person for other crops and food production, and much of this land is eroded and exhausted. Unless Puerto Rico can perform a near-miracle of lifting itself by its own economic bootstraps, the problem of feeding the island will surely grow worse. With one of the world's highest birth rates (31.3 v. 24.4 per 1,000 in the U.S.), Puerto Rico's people are increasing at the rate of 69,000 a year. The population has more than doubled in the half-century of U.S. rule; it could double again in a generation.

A small, densely populated country such as Belgium can maintain a decent standard of living without a self-sustaining agriculture, because it has a high-geared industrial plant. But Puerto Rico is too poor in minerals and natural resources ever to support heavy manufacturing. It can and must develop light and medium industry. The alternative would be a future in which only an ever-increasing dole from the U.S. could prevent starvation. That is why Munoz Marin, applying the self-help principles of the Marshall Plan, has enlisted Puerto Rico in the uphill struggle.

Golden Bullets. In that struggle, money --i.e., private investment--is as basic as hard work. Since 1898 the U.S.--which was first indifferent and then embarrassed about the poor child on its doorstep--has spent over a billion dollars in or on Puerto Rico. Last year the Federal Government, in one way or another, spent $101 million in the island.

But Munoz Marin, once a Socialist, knows now that government-spending alone will not solve Puerto Rico's problem. If the island is to build a sound economy, and to live without the crutch of federal handouts, it needs private industry and old-fashioned capitalist help. Says Munoz: "I am out to increase production by any possible means--private, public, or mixed, as the case may be." To describe his government's part in industrial development, he coined his own neatly tailored phrase: "venture government." As Munoz sees the problem: "Somebody's got to take the chance, and if private capital won't, we have to."

The chief government agency in the drive for production is the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Corp., set up in 1942 under the wartime governorship of Rexford Guy Tugwell. PRIDC, which has spent about $27 million to establish new industries (the new island budget allots $1,700,000 for the corporation), started the ball rolling by setting up five factories to make cement, glass, paper board, shoe-leather products, clay products. Later, it began a hard driving campaign to sell private companies on Puerto Rico as a place for business.

To new industries Puerto Rico now offers tax exemption for twelve years. Even dividends are tax-free if collected in the island, for Puerto Ricans pay no federal income tax. Other PRIDC selling points are the island's abundant labor supply and the fact that wages tend to be lower than the 30-c--an-hour minimum in the U.S. To supply skilled workers, the government has built an industrial school equipped to train 3,500 workers at a time in 55 different trades.

New Jobs. Last week PRIDC, now headed by energetic Teodoro Moscoso Jr., announced that under agreements reached with private firms, 40 new plants were in operation or planned; five other companies were dickering to set up factories. Biggest of the newcomers is Textron Inc., which abruptly closed its Nashua, N.H. plant (TIME, Sept. 27) and is now finishing the first of five factories to manufacture rayon and other textiles in Puerto Rico. Other new plants include Tele-tone (radio tubes and equipment), Crane China, Fashion Rite Gloves.

These industries, when fully operating, will create 10.000 new jobs. By 1960, according to Munoz Marin's reckoning, Puerto Rico must have 300,000 new jobs; he believes it could be brought about with an industrial investment of from $600-$900 million. That would be a lot of dollars ; for Puerto Rico it would make a lot of sense. To guarantee ample power for expanding industry, the government is carrying out a major program of hydroelectric-energy development. Its goal is an output of 700 million kw-h a year by 1970. The latest step in the project is the massive $10 million Caonillas Dam in the hills between San Juan and Ponce (see cut).

The government and PRIDC are also trying to expand existing Puerto Rican industries. To help the rum industry recapture part of its $14 million wartime U.S. market (when U.S. drinkers had to buy rum to get a bottle of Scotch), the island government will spend $750,000 this year on advertising and promotion. Then there is the tourist business, which the government hopes will bring the island an annual income of $16 million by 1952. With tourists in mind, PRIDC is putting $5,000,000 into San Juan's new Caribe Hilton Hotel (300 rooms).

Life Span. The first large group of U.S. visitors ever to come to Puerto Rico were the 3,415 troops commanded by Major General Nelson A. Miles, who splashed ashore on the beaches at Guanica to end the rule of Spain in 1898. By the peace treaty, Puerto Rico became a U.S. possession. Puerto Ricans have U.S. citizenship; their Resident Commissioner in Washington has a voice in Congress, but no vote. Congress has the right to repeal any act of the Puerto Rican legislature. The right has never been used, but its continued existence irks Puerto Ricans.

Until last year, Puerto Rico's Governors were appointed by the U.S. President, subject to Senate confirmation. Judges of the island's Supreme Court are still presidential appointees, but Puerto Ricans feel that they took a long step ahead in the democratic process when a new U.S. law allowed them to elect their own governor.

The life span of the man they chose coincides almost exactly with the U.S. regime in Puerto Rico. Luis Munoz Marin was born on Feb. 18, 1898, five months before the troops landed (and just down the block from Fortaleza palace, where he now presides).

A poet, journalist and orator, Munoz Marin has combined high principles and shrewd politics to fashion a career that astonishes the friends and enemies who, only a few years ago, regarded him as dilettante, dreamer, revolutionary and bohemian. Munoz is a husky, stoop-shouldered man with eloquent dark eyes, a big nose, a cleft chin and furrowed brow. Except when he is amused or surprised, his face has a kind of built-in sad-angry expression.

He thinks in English or Spanish, can talk in either language with literary dignity or colloquial directness. Every observer who has talked with him or watched him campaigning has marveled at the kind of automatic transmission in his mind which enables him to shift his conversation or speeches into language of such needle-sharp simplicity and directness that it can go straight to the heart and mind of the humblest and least educated hearer. This has been a priceless gift. Munoz built his political career on the support of Puerto Rico's jibaros, the small farmers and rural workers who comprise about 70% of his island's population. They are still the bedrock basis of his power.

A Sense of Fellowship. Munoz himself has an almost mystical feeling of fellowship with the men of the countryside. Says he: "Our people have a real sense of what sovereignty means--perhaps better than anyone else in the world. We don't have sovereignty in the old-fashioned sense, but we do have freedom. Plenty of nations today have sovereignty without freedom. Our people know that the old-style colony is a dead thing. But they also know that there's no sense turning colonies into little nations; that would be like rebuilding two-wheel carriages into four-wheel carriages--in this world of airplanes.".

The Legend. Munoz came to politics almost by birthright. His father, Luis Munoz Rivera, often called Puerto Rico's George Washington, headed the colonial government in the latter days of the Spanish rule, and in 1897 obtained from the Madrid government a charter which provided some autonomies (e.g., the right to make trade treaties with foreign nations) which Puerto Rico does not have now. After the cession of Puerto Rico to the U.S., Munoz Rivera was invited to take a cabinet post in Madrid. He declined. He chose to stay in Puerto Rico, later became the island's Resident Commissioner in Washington. Today he is venerated for having won U.S. citizenship for his countrymen.

His son grew up in New York and got most of his education in Washington during his father's term as Resident Commissioner. He went to Georgetown Preparatory School, then began the study of law at Georgetown University. After his father's death he quit the law, before long was in New York trying to make his name as a poet and writer.

Over the years a legend has grown up that Munoz was a spectacular bohemian in the turbulent Greenwich Village of the '20s. The fact is that he only lived in the Village a few months. Through much of his New York life he and his young wife --Muna Lee, another young poet--were bourgeois suburbanites.

Suburbia. Their first house was on Staten Island, where they met Edwin Markham and formed a friendship that endured until Markham's death. Munoz' translation of The Man with the Hoe is still regarded as the authoritative Spanish version.

They had two children,* wrote and made their living as free-lance journalists and translators. Munoz contributed to the New Republic, the Nation, the Baltimore Sun and Henry L. Mencken's Smart Set and American Mercury. Of his poetry Munoz now says: "It stinks."

Later, he and his wife moved to Teaneck, N.J., and then to a Manhattan apartment on 97th Street just off Riverside Drive. Their friends, who dropped in for informal Sunday-night literary sessions, included Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Captain George (now Sir Hubert) Wilkins, Poets Constance Lindsay Skinner, Sara Teasdale, Horace Gregory; literary critic-to-be Lewis Gannett; Author and Geographer Earl Parker Hanson; Latin celebrities like the painter Zuloaga and famed Bullfighter Juan Belmonte.

His U.S. years gave. Munoz a good command of English, a sound understanding of U.S. intellectual and political life, and friends in New York and Washington who were later to help him in his work for Puerto Rico. In 1926 he moved back home. Munoz had hoped that life might be cheaper and more spacious in the land of his birth, but the poverty and slackness that met his eye in San Juan shocked him. He made up his mind in a hurry: "No Puerto Rican has the right to be a literato unless he first does something about conditions in this island."

City & Country. At the time, Munoz considered himself a Socialist; as early as 1920 he had joined the Puerto Rican Socialist Party which, by & large, was a collection of sincere but ineffective labor reformers. When, to his disgust, its leaders tied themselves up in a coalition with the rival Unionists and the Republicans, Munoz switched to the new Liberal Party. He worked in it until 1938, when he broke with the party leadership and pulled out, taking many of the most vigorous workers with him. Telling his followers that he was sick of politicos and city folk, he proposed to take to the hills, form a new Popular Democratic Party, and gamble everything, including his own political future, on an appeal to the jibaros.

That summer, he began his campaign in a Ford car, holding meetings in tiny villages, at the roadside, under trees. He spoke from the running board, from oxcarts, from piles of stones. A shabbily dressed man, with a simple eloquence and a poet's understanding of people, he got his message across.

One of his greatest achievements was to teach Puerto Ricans the true value of the ballot. Against the then-common practice of vote-selling, Munoz used an argument compounded of pity and scorn: "If you want to sell your vote for $2, all right. I don't blame you. I know $2 is worth something. But if you don't sell your vote, you can use it to get justice for your family. So remember: justice or $2. But you can't have both."

Thin Victory. In the 1940 election, Munoz' Populares squeezed out a thin victory. He became Senate president and, in effect, the real ruler of Puerto Rico.

The next year Rex Tugwell was appointed Governor and, teamed with Munoz, began what became known as Puerto Rico's Little New Deal. Some of the laws behind it were already on the statute books; Tugwell and Munoz breathed life into them. Among the important agencies that went into operation were the industrial-development and farm-development corporations, and the Puerto Rico Planning, Urbanizing and Zoning Board. The Land Authority tackled the job of enforcing a 40-year-old law limiting holdings of real estate by corporations to 500 acres. By the eve of 1948, the Authority had spent $25 million and reclaimed 70,000 acres, mostly from the big sugar companies, in order to establish land cooperatives and subsistence homesteads. (Its costly land-purchase program has now been slowed considerably; the budget allotment for next year is but $5,000,000).

Tugwell and Munoz also tackled Puerto Rico's desperate need for new housing. In San Juan, for example, handsome, tropical-style homes line many an avenue, but many are close to the dismal slums of packing-box houses like El Fanguito (Little Mudhole) that stretches two miles along the tidal flats. The government's answer was the San Jose Housing Project, now almost complete, which will provide shelter for 6,200 families from El Fanguito. So far only a few families have been moved out, and officials privately admit that it may be necessary to ring the slum with barbed wire to prevent new squatters from moving in.

Elsewhere the Puerto Rico Housing Authority has 37 housing projects in operation, occupied by 6,140 families. Other projects to be developed in the next two years will provide 8,000 to 10,000 homes. One of the world's biggest private housing projects is under way in the San Juan suburb of Puerto Nuevo, where the Long Construction Co. has finished 3,450 small houses and plans to build 1,400 more.

In the main, Munoz and Tugwell worked together harmoniously, though Munoz was more conservative than New Dealer Tugwell. Tugwell could never get over the fact that Munoz acted sometimes like a high-minded idealist, sometimes like a job-hungry political boss. Munoz, on the other hand, found it difficult to convince Tugwell that even an idealistic politician needs enough patronage to grease the machine and win the next election. Tugwell, under fire from the sugar industry, the press and the U.S. Congress for most of is stay, resigned in 1946.*

The Real Issue. Munoz never took his eye off the political ball. He won a smashing legislative victory in 1944, and by 1948 he was a shoo-in for Governor. In both campaigns he told his people that their old obsession about political status, i.e., whether they should demand U.S. statehood or national independence, was not a valid issue. The real issue, he insisted, was the social and economic welfare of the Puerto Rican people.

In desperation, during last year's campaign, some of his opponents even tried the unorthodox (for Puerto Rico) tactic of raking up his private life-Munoz' first marriage broke up in the late '303, when he fell in love with a former high-school teacher named Inez Maria Mendoza. They have had two children (now 9 and 8), were married two years ago, after Munoz finally got a divorce. In the election Munoz got 62% of the total vote.

His inauguration in January was a great occasion in San Juan. One of the most notable facts about the ceremony was the presence of an imposing list of U.S. bankers and industrialists, including Macy's Beardsley Ruml and David Rockefeller of the Chase National Bank.

Later, in conversation, Munoz remembered something else about the day: "You know, when they inaugurated me I had $17 in the bank. I had to tell them to get me out a paycheck right away." Munoz has never cared about money, and his present salary ($10,600 a year) is the largest he has ever earned; before his election he was living on his $94 weekly wage as an editor of the daily newspaper Diario de Puerto Rico.

An 18-Hour Day. In his early campaigning days, Munoz often trekked around in a pajama coat or open-necked shirt. "Putting on a necktie," he says, "alters a man's whole character." He worked odd hours, thought nothing of sitting up all night in a good political discussion. As Governor, he has modified many of his old habits, and now usually turns up in public looking clean but rumpled in a seersucker suit with a sober four-in-hand tie. He puts in regular office hours, and during the legislative session, sometimes worked an 18-hour day. During inauguration week, when he wore a white tie and tails for the first time in his life, he relaxed at a party by arguing at length with a friend that the atom bomb had made the tailcoat obsolete.

Munoz does not feel at home in La Fortaleza, the government palace which the 16th Century Spaniards intended to be a fort. "La Fortaleza," he says, "is beautiful, but it's not really a place to live or work in. It's for an old Spanish governor, writing a letter to the king--with a quill pen." He prefers Jajome, the Governor's summer residence in the hills north of Ponce, or his own rented ($52 a month) cottage at Sabana liana, twelve miles outside San Juan.

A man of hearty appetites, Don Luis eats everything. If he has a favorite dish, it is the second helping. Fabulous tales are told of his capacity for alcohol (an old Washington acquaintance says he once saw Munoz down 26 Scotch & sodas in an evening). But as Governor he has tapered off. Nowadays he takes only two or three straight shots of rum or brandy as an appetizer, and dilutes his wine with water. Munoz, a busy chain-smoker (Lucky Strikes), has lately surprised his friends by breaking the endless succession of cigarettes with an occasional cigar.

Longtime Cure. Although Munoz has refused to talk about his future, friends would be astonished if he had any plans except to finish his term, then run again. No one knows better than Munoz that Puerto Rico's worst headaches cannot be cured in four years.

For the biggest headache, tne island's mushrooming population, there is certainly no quick cure. Emigration to the U.S. has helped to relieve the pressure of chronic unemployment--and made New York the biggest Puerto Rican city in the world. Charter and nonscheduled airline operators, competing fiercely for passengers on the San Juan-New York run, at one time knocked the price of passage down to as low as $10. Last year 260,000 Puerto Ricans were already in the U.S. and the northward flow is continuing. But this transfer of population is at best a temporary expedient. Island officials have a recurrent nightmare in which the U.S. undergoes a business recession and the Puerto Ricans, who as unskilled workers would be the first to be fired, swarm back to their homeland.

Don Luis is sure that the only fundamental cure for his island's troubles is more plants, more jobs and more goods at home. If Puerto Rico can build up industry, and get on top in her battle of production, then a growing population will be an asset instead of a liability. For Munoz and his people the slogan is still: "Jalda Arriba!"

* Daughter Muna is now a graduate student of anthropology at the University of Chicago; son Luis is an editor of Munoz' party newspaper, Diario de Puerto Rico, in San Juan.

* Puerto Ricans applied their own names to their U.S. Governors. Admiral William D. Leahy (1939-40) became lija (sandpaper); Guy J. Swope (1941) became sopa (soup); and Tugwell became todo lo huele ("everything smells").

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