Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation

Instead, the following year, it outlawed all Puerto Rican currency and declared the island’s peso, with a global value equal to the US dollar, to be worth only sixty American cents.7 Every Puerto Rican lost 40 percent of his or her savings overnight.

Sanctuary was hard to find. “If you escaped the shells of the Americans, you could not escape the machine guns or bayonets of the Japanese,”

Puerto Rico suffered from many maladies, but, in the near-unanimous view of mainlanders, they all stemmed from a single root. The island’s women, as one official put it, “kept shooting children like cannon balls at the rigid walls of their economy.” Mainlanders lamented the overcrowding on the small island, which by 1950 had nearly 650 inhabitants

benefited from the soaring global interest in hula.3