Global attitudes toward imperialism and colonialism cooled after the horrors of World War II, and the remaining superpowers entered the 1950s Cold War faced with international opposition to any lingering imperialist tendencies.
While Great Britain was jettisoning its former colonies and the USSR and USA pitted Cuba against Puerto Rico as a case study in the battle of communism against democracy, the United States needed to overcome the idea that Puerto Rico was one of the last remaining colonies in the world. The U.N. agreement to remove Puerto Rico from the list of colonial possessions was the result of related U.S. efforts to push back on the accusation of American imperialism.
A Page from History: Was the United Nations Correct about Puerto Rico?
The U.S. understandably felt pressure to disassociate itself from imperialism in the aftermath of World War II. Consider some of the things world leaders had to say about the United States in the 1940s:
- Jawaharlal Nehru of India said, “Whatever the future may hold, it is clear that the economy of the USA after the war will be powerfully expansionist and almost explosive in its consequences. Will this lead to some new kind of imperialism?”
- The CIA in 1948 reflected this attitude from India, reporting that “a strong suspicion exists in India that the US possesses the rapacious tendencies attributed to the British, and that in its foreign policy the US merely substitutes economic imperialism for the political imperialism so long practiced by the British.”
- Charles de Gaulle of France believed that the United States wanted to control the entire world, describing the U.S. as “an occupying state interfering in all economic, military and political processes in the world”.
- Raul Prebisch of Argentina complained that the United States used economic imperialism to oppress nations of Latin America in his Doctrine of Unequal Exchange. This theory was a major platform of Latin American attitudes toward the United States in the 1940s and beyond.
- The 1947 Rio Treaty and the 1948 OAS Charter, multilateral defense agreements within the Americas, gave Latin American nations hope that the United States would align with them as they had with Europe. Instead, the U.S. continued to use the Monroe Doctrine to justify aggressive action in Latin America.
- The School of the Americas, an American military school, was established in 1946 in Panama, where it operated until 1984. Graduates included people who went on to become notorious dictators across the continent. Father Roy Bourgeois said, “Here is the School of the Americas. It’s a combat school. Most of the courses revolve around what they call ‘counter-insurgency warfare.’ Who are the ‘insurgents?’ We have to ask that question. They are the poor. They are the people in Latin America who call for reform. They are the landless peasants who are hungry. They are health care workers, human rights advocates, labor organizers. They become the insurgents. They are seen as ‘the enemy.’ They are those who become the targets of those who learn their lessons at the School of the Americas.”
- Nikolai Novikov, Soviet ambassador to the United States, said in a telegram that “Careful note should be taken of the fact that the preparation by the United States for a future war is being conducted with the prospect of war against the Soviet Union, which in the eyes of American imperialists is the main obstacle in the path of the United States to world domination.”
Were they talking about Puerto Rico?
In general, foreign leaders complaining about American imperialism were most concerned about their own back yards. Puerto Rico was included as an example of U.S. hypocrisy, showing the United States lauding freedom and democracy while holding a colony. At that time, however, there were still many European colonies left in the world. The United States persuaded the United Nations to remove Puerto Rico from its list of colonies just as most imperial nations were arranging independence or full integration into the mother countries.
Former Colonies around the World
President Reagan’s Counter to Attacks of U.S. Imperialism: Puerto Rican Statehood
In 1980, U.S. adversaries continued to criticize the U.S.-Puerto Rico relationship, and then-Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan took on this issue in an op-ed he wrote for the Wall Street Journal:
Our keen “peacefully coexisting” competitor, the Soviet Union, is not unaware of the importance of Puerto Rico in the great global contest of ideas. As a “Commonwealth” Puerto Rico is neither a state nor independent, and thereby has an historically unnatural status. There is this raw nerve to rub, and our Marxist-Leninist competitors rub it. They’ve long thought of the island economics of the Caribbean as easy marks. I do not suggest that the Kremlin strategists expect to snap Puerto Rico into the Communist orbit any time soon, only that they find it convenient to use its unnatural status, creating tensions around the idea of American “colonialism.” “Yankee Imperialism.” We can’t merely defend ourselves against this attack. We must ourselves attack, not with terror, but with statehood.
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