Battleship Vieques: Puerto Rico from World War II to the Korean War

Abstract

Battleship Vieques: Puerto Rico from World War II to the Korean War By Cesar J. Ayala and Jose L. Bolivar By Cesar J. Ayala and Jose L. Bolivar Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2011 ISBN: 978-1-5587-6538-2 220 pages; $24.95 [paper]Battleship Vieques: Puerto Rico from World War II to the Korean War is a detailed history of the U.S. Navy's establishment of its Caribbean training "crown jewel" on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques within the context of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. It offers a regional context and documents the profound impact of military occupation upon the social, economic, and cultural life of the people of Vieques. That occupation, while devastating in multiple ways, also provided the seeds of resistance that culminated in a massive non-violent civil disobedience movement that captured global attention and forced the Navy to leave in 2003.Following the introduction, the book is divided into seven chapters. Chapters One and Two set the regional and local contexts for the militarization of Vieques during World War II. Chapter One provides a regional overview of the German navy's activities in the Caribbean during World War II, including a blockade and attacks on oil refineries. Among other problems, the war severely disrupted shipments of foods, fuel, and other materials between Puerto Rico and the U.S. The authors discuss the importance of war-related shortages as part of the ruling Popular Democratic Party's (PPD) strategies to consolidate power through land reform (especially the breakup of large farms with absentee owners), and targeted, state-sponsored industrialization. Faced with the dire scenario of possible starvation of an "essentially rural population" where overspecialization in sugar cane production forced it "to rely on food imports" (p. 19), wartime militarization through construction and expansion of U.S. military bases provided some economic relief. This chapter also discusses base construction during the 1930s in San Juan, where the Navy's propensity for excluding local contractors and dislodging residents foreshadowed its much larger construction projects during World War II in Puerto Rico, including Vieques. The authors note that while many historians "have emphasized the role of the insular government" in the transformation of Puerto Rico's economy during the 1940s from plantation agriculture to rapid industrialization, federal government expenditures during the same period-particularly related to the military-"had a profound transformative effect" (p. 25).Chapter Two offers a brief summary of Vieques' history, from colonial "frontier"- with Spain struggling to maintain control despite constant attacks and settlement attempts by its European rivals-to "plantation society." The latter began with sustained nineteenth-century development of a mainly sugar cane and cattle-based economy, encouraged by land grants to Europeans and dependent on formerly enslaved labor from eastern Puerto Rico and the eastern Caribbean. The authors emphasize that the extreme concentration of land ownership in few hands- unlike most of Puerto Rico (p.45), but typical of the sugar cane regions (Berman Santana 1996)-greatly facilitated expropriation by the U.S. Navy.Chapter Three provides considerable detail regarding the evictions and expropriations of land in most of the western and eastern sections of Vieques, as part of the Navy's plan to convert the island (along with nearly all of Ceiba's coast across the Vieques Sound and Culebra Island) into a giant military fortress during World War II. In this chapter, the authors are careful to distinguish between the formal expropriations (which affected relatively few because of the extreme land concentration) and the actual evictions. Nearly overnight, the latter drove thousands of small property owners and workers with long-held land use rights out of their homes, dumping them onto barren lands also taken by the military. …