PUERTO RICO 1965-1990: A Quarter Century of Highlights, Hope, Status and Stasis America’s Last Fortress: Puerto Rico’s Sovereignty, China’s Caribbean Belt and Road, and America’s National Security

PUERTO RICO 1965-1990: A Quarter Century of Highlights, Hope, Status and Stasis

by ROBERT FRIEDMAN • CHARLESTON, SC | PALMETTO PUBLISHING | May 12 2022 | 206 pages

Through his own newspaper articles and recollections of the time, Robert Friedman shows readers in this vivid and nostalgic memoir what it was like living in Puerto Rico from the mid-1960s through the 1970s and 1980s, the years he spent there as a journalist for the San Juan Star. The book is far from an encompassing history, but rather a personal timeline of the era, a journalist’s-eye view of life in the U.S. quasi-colony, whose island-born residents are U.S. citizens but who do not have all the rights of fellow citizens living in the States. Friedman gives readers an understanding of the humane, colorful, and difficult life lived by the island’s residents, as it was when he was there, and which, from all accounts, remains the same today. Readers interested in history and the Latin-American-U.S. relations that bring Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics to the U.S. mainland in search of a better life, are sure to enjoy this memoir, as will the more than 5 million U.S. mainland residents of Puerto Rican descent and the 3.2 million living on the island.

About the Author

Journalist-turned-novelist Robert Friedman was born and bred in the Bronx and lived in Puerto Rico for over 20 years, working as a reporter, editor and columnist for the San Juan Star. He also reported from the island for the New York Daily News as the tabloid’s man in and around San Juan. He moved to the nation’s capital in the 1990’s to cover politics for the Star until the paper folded in 2008. His journalistic work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Miami Herald among other publications. He is the author of six published novels: three of which have just been released as “The Puerto Rico Trilogy.” The three books offer a captivating, colorful view into the lives of individuals caught up in the island’s colonial politics. The novels explore with suspense, compassion and dark humor what it has been like for the island-born, the stateside ex-pats and the Cuban exiles living, loving, working and plotting on an island where the political and the personal just about always interconnect. “The Odyssey of Pablo Camino,” the first book, was inspired by a real-life incident when a stateside doctor, sent to the island for research, claimed in a letter that he purposely killed eight of his patients because of his disgust with the “natives.” In the novel, Pablo Camino, the doctor’s fictional son, a well-known, but troubled Puerto Rican artist, goes on a search for the truth of his father’s possibly murderous past, and about himself. “The Defining Sea,” book two, was also sparked by U.S.Puerto Rico history. Its plot is derived from the U.S, Navy’s decades-long live-fire and bombing exercises on the inhabited Puerto Rico island of Vieques, which caused death and serious illness. After his girlfriend is killed by police during a protest against the Navy’s maneuvers, Richie Perez, a 20-year-old University of Puerto Rico student, delivers drugs between the island and the states to raise money for a scholarship in her name and, along the way, learns hard truths about life, love and loss. “Ulysess in San Juan, the concluding novel, relates the relationship between Wolf, a Polish-Jewish concentration camp survivor, who has come to Puerto Rico to try to build his life again, and Carmen. a drug addict. The novel. set in 1980, takes the reader on a trip into the San Juan underworld, as well to other island sites to meet crooked and upright and deeply human characters. (It should be mentioned that “Odyssey” and “Sea” are rewrites of “Shadow of the Fathers” and “The Surrounding Sea,” two earlier published Friedman novels.) His other novels include “Caribbean Dreams,” a satirical crime novel set on the fictitious island island of Colon, a location very similar to Puerto Rico. Colon is also the scene of “Under a Dark Sun,” a tale of corruption, crime and colonialism. In “Island Wildlife: Exiles, Expats and Exotic Others,” the off-kilter denizens of a beachfront guest house struggle to keep their humanity in the Puerto Rico of 1987. Friedman lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. He has two grown daughters who were born in Puerto Rico.

VOL. XXXIV, NO. 1, SPRING 2022

Editores invitados / Guest Editors: Charles R. Venator-Santiago and José Javier Colón Morera The year 2022 marks the centennial of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Balzac v. People of Porto Rico, one of the most consequential Supreme Court rulings that shaped the status of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans within the US empire. Balzac affirmed the federal government’s power to rule Puerto Rico and its residents separately and unequally within the US polity. This special issue of CENTRO Journal collects several articles about this monumentally important judicial precedent and its continuous presence in the most important and populated colony remaining in the world. The articles presented help us understand the enduring continuities and discontinuities of the application of the doctrine of territorial non-incorporation to Puerto Rico, a possession inhabited by US citizens. The collection examines different dimensions of the legacy and continued impact of Balzac and it captures many of the complexities of this century of colonialism by judicial decree.

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America’s Last Fortress: Puerto Rico’s Sovereignty, China’s Caribbean Belt and Road, and America’s National Security