Stepchild’s Hunger

Even when the ships sailed regularly to Puerto Rico, bringing in the rice, beans and salt cod (staples of the natives’ diets) and taking away the sugar, rum, tobacco and coffee (cash crops that pay the natives’ paltry wages), there was hunger and destitution on this lush, mountainous, crowded island—stepchild of the U.S. economy. Now that German subs lurk in the Caribbean and ships are needed elsewhere for war, famine might cease to be a threat, become a grim reality.

In sunlit, stuccoed San Juan, beggars collapsed on the streets. There were fist fights when 22,000 pounds of spoiled codfish were dumped into the sea by customs inspectors. Last fortnight the New York Herald Tribune’s Homer Bigart reported, after a tour of the island, that storehouses were empty of rice and fish, that only a month’s supply of beans was available. In San Juan, prices soared: the cheapest kind of beef meat sold for hamburger at 59¢ a pound, small brown eggs were three for a quarter, onions 40¢ a pound. Quinine to use against malaria was gone; druggists worried over the dwindling stock of substitutes. The WPA estimated that of 320,000 students in the public schools, 200,000 are suffering from malnutrition.

Remedies. There was no mistaking the urgency in Washington, but the remedies applied to date have been inadequate. Month ago, WPA upped its Puerto Rican quota from 18,000 to 25,000. But this was just a drop in the bucket: unemployment has risen to 322,000, almost half the island’s employables. The war Shipping Administration’s promise of 30,000 tons of shipping space a month was coupled with the admission that this “practically cuts the island off from shipping commerce.” (In normal times, .shipping averaged four times as much.) Most help came from the Agricultural Marketing Administration, which was establishing food stockpiles on various Caribbean islands and helping to further a hop-skip-and-jump transportation route which makes use of schooners between the islands. But even some of the schooners, which can make the runs between the islands in daylight, had been machine-gunned by subs. And AMA had made fantastic and grievous mistakes: it sent 3,000 bags of sugar to Puerto Rico (where 400,000 tons are awaiting export); it ordered private exporters to move all flour from gulf ports, then set up its own flour stockpiles in the same ports.

Politics. Sitting atop the Puerto Rican volcano is earnest, curly-haired Rexford Guy Tugwell, original New Deal brain-truster, who came out of political retirement last year to take on the job of territorial Governor. The years have not increased Rex Tugwell’s capacity for smoothing out rough-&-tumble politics, nor have they diminished his love for long-range social planning. Although the effort to break up the large sugar plantations—pushed by Tugwell—is perhaps one way to end the island’s lopsided economy, it is of no help in the present crisis. With the help of Luis Mufioz Marin’s Popular Democratic Party, Rex Tugwell’s plans have squeaked through the legislature by slim margins while the opposition coalition screamed “socialism.” In Washington last week, a House committee approved Tugwell’s bill for $15,000,000 to aid Puerto Ricans to grow their own food, then tacked on a rider withholding all funds as long as Tugwell sits in the Governor’s chair. A Senate committee was considering a resolution to investigate the island’s economic and social conditions.

Although it is the bastion that protects the eastern approaches to the Panama Canal, Puerto Rico is puzzled by the war, which to date has brought it nothing but increasing misery. Long hopeful of freedom from the U.S., it was now looking for immediate help. As of last week, such help was not yet forthcoming.