Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 14, 1993 TAG: 9311140175
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Sean Holton Orlando Sentinel
DATELINE: HUMACAO, PUERTO RICO LENGTH: Long
No one of any age should have been on this rickety outdoor stage. It was shaking from the blast of loudspeakers and groaning under the crush of several thousand slogan-shouting, fist-pumping, beer-drinking, salsa-dancing, flag-waving Puerto Ricans who are wild about statehood.
The top leaders of the movement were all on display - if the platform went down it would take everything they had worked for with it. Puerto Rico's statehood aspirations would collapse in a frightening heap of plywood, pipe, wires, bunting and American flags.
And way down in the rubble would be 89-year-old Luis A. Ferre, founder of the modern statehood movement. But the stage held, and there Ferre stood, smiling serenely, never flustered by the madness unfolding around him.
"I'm an old-timer," the former Puerto Rico governor said to an onlooker. "I've seen all this before."
But on Nov. 14, Ferre and the rest of Puerto Rico will lay eyes on something that even they haven't witnessed since 1967: A referendum to determine whether the U.S. commonwealth in the Caribbean prefers statehood, independence or continuation of its political status quo.
The ballot will be deceptively simple, right down to the geometric shapes used to represent each option: a circle for statehood, a rectangle for a continued commonwealth and a triangle for independence.
The issues behind the ballot are more like differential calculus. Sunday's answer will be the product of a political equation that is five centuries long, written in two languages and includes variables for everything from the Miss Universe pageant to the Olympic Games to the U.S. tax code.
All of this hair-splitting calculation may add up to nothing in the end. The vote is non-binding and will be used only as a measure of island sentiments if and when the issue is ever taken up by Congress, which alone has the power to admit states into the Union.
Gov. Pedro Rosello, the energetic Puerto Rico governor who led his pro-statehood party to power in last year's elections, will declare victory if the statehood position wins a plurality of votes. His next step would be to go to Washington with a petition for statehood.
But statehood opponents say anything less than 50 percent of the vote next Sunday should signal the death of the statehood movement. History may be on their side. Only 11 other U.S. states have held similar votes before admission to the Union, and nine of those approved statehood with margins ranging from 59 percent to 83 percent.
Each side of the political-status debate is argued with a passion that can start fistfights among the normally law-abiding U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico. And each side is based upon concepts that are essentially appealing to any American.
"Dignity first," said Raimundo Mutos Iglesias, a middle-aged pro-statehooder, at a rally in late October. "We have to be equal to the citizens of the mainland."
The statehooders argue their goal is the only logical culmination of the last century of island history. The United States took over Puerto Rico in 1898 from Spain and the island became a U.S. territory two years later.
In 1917, Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship. In 1952, Congress approved a commonwealth constitution, giving Puerto Rico autonomy over local executive, legislative and judicial matters.
Still, Puerto Ricans have virtually no voice in Washington. Though called upon to fight in U.S. wars, they aren't allowed to vote in presidential elections or to elect senators and congressional representatives.
The island's sole representative in Congress is a non-voting delegate, Resident Commissioner Carlos Romero-Barcelo. Were the island to become a state, its 3.6 million residents would give it two senators and six voting representatives.
Statehood also would automatically qualify the island for more federal dollars in welfare, food stamps and Medicaid. That has great appeal on an island wracked by poverty and unemployment and with a per capita income of about $5,100, about half that of Mississippi, the lowest-ranking state.
But just when the weight of those arguments seems enough to put you in the pro-statehood camp, you walk down a street and meet an advocate of continued commonwealth status. His arguments are equally sound, the political rallies he attends are equally passionate, and his party's caravans are just as large.
Statehooders "try to make us out to be the status quo, but the commonwealth is a dynamic status," said Jose Ariel Nazario, the commonwealth party's representative on Puerto Rico's election board.
Commonwealthers highlight Puerto Rico's long-established identity as an island of Spanish-speakers with a strong cultural identity akin to that of a Latin American nation. They also point to the economic benefits of their current association with the mainland, which exempts Puerto Ricans from paying federal income tax and encourages large corporations to set up job-creating factories on the island.
The incentive is known as the Section 936 credit of the U.S. tax code, and it allows tax-free profits for products made in Puerto Rico. The exemption costs the U.S. Treasury billions of dollars a year in lost revenues, but has spawned massive investment - mostly by pharmaceutical companies with Puerto Rican subsidiaries - and created more than 100,000 jobs.
Because the U.S. Constitution forbids preferential treatment for any state, Puerto Rico would stand to lose all of those benefits under statehood.
"Remember, with statehood, there is so much to lose," election commissioner Ariel said. "You have to talk about a tax problem. You have to talk about a heavily burdened middle class facing more taxes."
The cultural issues wielded by commonwealthers are no less potent. Unless Congress made unprecedented concessions, they say, becoming a state would mean an end to Spanish as an official language.
It would mean no more separate participation by Puerto Rico in the Miss Universe pageant, an issue especially relevant this year as the reigning Miss Universe is Dayanara Torres of Puerto Rico.
Finally, Puerto Rico would lose its Olympic team, a point driven home by a pro-commonwealth television ad showing a shocked Puerto Rican basketball player being stripped of his team insignia at his moment of triumph on the medal stand.
The commonwealthers' slogan depicts them as a happy middle ground between total assimilation and total independence: Lo mejor de dos mundos, "the best of both worlds."
The third choice on the ballot, creation of an independent Republic of Puerto Rico, is expected to draw no more than 5 percent of the votes. Though politically marginal and economically doubtful, the independence camp makes the most direct appeal to Puerto Rican pride and idealism.
Independence rallies draw heavily on the enthusiasm of the young and are powered by poetry and folk songs that disdain the island's five centuries of colonization, first by Spain, then by the United States.
One song at a recent youth rally in the historic capital city of San Juan spoke of hands that "build and bleed and from them will emerge the new liberated fatherland."
But "independentistas" also speak of practical things, like federal transfer payments, a gradual phase-out of tax breaks and favorable trade policies with the United States to ease the transition and avoid a slide into a Third World economy.
While acknowledging they have no chance of beating the other parties, independence supporters stress the fact that they might deprive statehooders of a clear majority in the three-way vote.
Independence got just 1 percent of the votes in the 1967 plebiscite. In that election, 60 percent chose commonwealth and 39 percent chose statehood.
This year, after sweeping the 1992 elections for local offices, the statehood party is in a stronger position.
But a recent newspaper poll shows it still trailing the commonwealth party by 5 points - 38 percent to 33 percent - with 24 percent of voters undecided.
Luis Ferre, who says he has seen it all before, knows enough not to believe in polls.
"Fifty-five percent," he predicted when asked how statehood would do at the polls next Sunday.
by CNB