Bandera Puertorriqueña

Foto by Leonardo Laboy, July 9, 2016.

Puerto Rico is a small island with a small population compared to the rest of the world. Puerto Rico is not even a "country" in the legal sense of the word yet it has its own flag that is the pride and joy of its owners.

The red, white and blue flag of Puerto Rico has a long and controversial history. It was created in New York City in 1895 by a group of Puerto Ricans that were part of the Cuban Revolutionary Committee. The purpose of this committee was to liberate Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spanish colonial rule. Among the Puerto Ricans was a young man named Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the acclaimed historian of the African-American community in the US. Read more about the flag in wikipedia.

Jump to 2016. Puerto Rico's government proclaims that it is in a debt crisis. It owes a record and mind-boggling $73 Billion dollars to Wall Street institutions. This is a sum it recognizes that it cannot pay. This deadly financial crisis is brought on by its colonial relationship to the United States. Year after year US companies get special incentives to set up shop while paying very little to do business. They take profits created by Puerto Rican workers while investing very little in the local economy. For the past 15 years american companies take on average $15 billion every year from the island. In addition, Puerto Rican government borrowing and over spending leads to this massive debt. Why? The statehood (PNP) and status quo (PPD) political parties vie for popular support to administer the colony for the US. The result is that government spending goes to pay vanity projects for the governors and their cronies. Administration after administration adds to the debt every 4 years until it reached a figure that the government itself recognized was impossible to pay. Result: the government can't even pay its employees; island unemployment skyrockets; imposition of sales tax for basic goods drives prices sky high. Wall Street has a stranglehold on Puerto Rico's economy and the US Congress steps in to make sure that Wall Street's financial institutions get paid (the hedge funds). The Congress enacts the PROMESA Law. This law systematically decimates what little democracy was left in the colony. The island is in turmoil and people start fleeing north because there are very little or no jobs to survive. PROMESA is a "government" collection agency for Wall Street to which the governor of the island responds to.

This is the context under which the black and white flag surfaces. A group of artists in Old San Juan calling themselves "Artists in solidarity and RESISTANCE" painted over a red, white and blue flag in Old San Juan (which they themselves had painted in January of 2012) with a black and white version.

Their reasoning:
Ours is a proposal of RESISTANCE, not to be thought of as pessimist. On the contrary, it speaks about the death of these powers just as we know them, but hope is still present in the white stripes that symbolize individual liberty and its capacity to claim and defend their rights.

And the statement continues: This act is the evidence that there’s an artistic community that is not willing to give up, that will stand up and fight against the impositions of an absolutist government and its policies of austerity; their most recent example: the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA).

Read the entire statement from Artists in solidarity and RESISTANCE here.




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