Sublime

Manuel Quezon, the president of the Philippine Senate and the indispensable power broker in the colony. Quezon was a master politician, adept at playing all sides at once. He had served on Aguinaldo’s staff (at age twenty) during the war, but after Aguinaldo’s surrender, he’d spied for the colonial government and helped bring the holdouts to heel.

Trinidad Oliva era un hombre que picaba alto. Se sentía injustamente postergado por el gobierno. Había estado preso en tiempos de Jacobo Árbenz por conspirar contra el régimen y no tenía la menor simpatía por Castillo Armas, de modo que podía ser una pieza clave para el proyecto.

Under the appointed mainland officials served elected Puerto Rican ones, less powerful but much cannier about local affairs. Chief among these was Luis Muñoz Marín, the leader of the island’s dominant party, who towered over the political scene from the 1940s through the 1960s. John Gunther deemed him “the most important living Puerto Rican.”

During his first seven years in the Senate—1949 through 1955—he was willing to help the Mexican-Americans on any issue on which their interests did not conflict with the interests of the Anglos. When the two groups were in conflict, he almost invariably came down on the side of the whites.

In 1938 he launched the Partido Popular Democrático, the party he would lead until the end of his career. It campaigned on a slogan of “Bread, Land, and Liberty,” though that last term, liberty, was kept ambiguous. It resonated with the widespread resentment of colonial rule in Puerto Rico, yet it was vague enough to encompass many possibilities. M

He, more than any other individual, knew which of the tens of thousands of administrative positions in that government were crucial to his purposes, and after a quarter of a century of power in the state, he had “Moses Men” in most of these posts.

In 1946 the Truman administration appointed a Puerto Rican as governor, Muñoz Marín’s colleague Jesús T. Piñero. In 1948, Congress allowed Puerto Ricans to elect their own governor. Muñoz Marín won easily, and he would keep the position until 1964. Now, holding the highest political office in the colony, he could move Puerto Rico down the new polit