Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington's Caribbean Colony

A gripping history of FBI surveillance, political repression, and the fight for Puerto Rican independence

In the 1940s, with the construction of a naval base and a bombing range, Puerto Rico became a major geo-political military outpost for the United States. For a power claiming global leadership in a decolonizing world, however, the archipelago’s colonial condition underscored the dissonance between American democratic rhetoric and its imperial reality. The solution was a deal that, in 19...