Puerto Rican Revolutionary Nationalism and Latin American Solidarity in the 1950s

This paper explores the transnational nature of Puerto Rican and Latin American nationalism in the 1950s as shown in the lives of three Puerto Rican Nationalists and the Latin American revolutionaries with whom they worked. It argues that anti-imperialism and trans Latin American solidarity were integral their understanding of nationalism. The Puerto Rican Nationalists were rooted in the fight to free Puerto Rico from U.S. colonial rule. At the same time, they were in active solidarity with the continental fight for liberation from foreign rule.

In October 1950 the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PRNP) launched an ultimately unsuccessful uprising against U.S. colonial rule in Puerto Rico. Carlos Padilla, a young Nationalist, was arrested, along with 1,000 other pro-independence Puerto Ricans. After his release a year and a half later he went to Cuba, where roughly ten other Nationalists were in exile. Two of the other Nationalists in Cuba were Laura Meneses, the Peruvian wife of Pedro Albizu Campos, the president of the PRNP, and Juan Juarbe Juarbe, the PRNP Secretary of Foreign Relations. Fulgencio Batista’s 1952 coup and his government’s friendly relations with the U.S. government, forced the three to flee Cuba.

Padilla went first to Guatemala, where the anti-imperialist government of Jacobo Arbenz welcomed him, and scores of other Latin American political exiles. After the U.S. government ousted Arbenz in 1954, Padilla went to Argentina, then traveled around South America before returning to Cuba and Puerto Rico in the late 1950s. Meneses and Juarbe went to Mexico where they, too, formed part of the exile community. They worked closely with Fidel Castro, who they had known in Cuba, and the July 26^th Movement. They moved to Cuba following the 1959 revolution and worked with the revolutionary government.