INVESTIGATION OF POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND SOCIAL

CONDITIONS IN PUERTO RICO

TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1943

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON INSULAR AFFAIRS,

San Juan, P. R. The subcommittee met at 10:30 a. m., at the Condado Hotel, Hon. C. Jasper Bell (chairman) presiding.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee will please come to order.

Gentlemen, we are assembled here at a meeting of the investigation authorized by House Resolution 159 under date of March 10, 1943.1 Mr. Reporter, I will hand you a copy of that resolution and ask you to put it into the record.

(H. Res. 159 is as follows:)

[H. Res. 159, 78th Cong., 1st Sess.]

RESOLUTION

Whereas various and sundry legislation has been submitted to the House of Representatives and particularly that embodied in H. J. Res. 47, H. R. 784, H. R. 1018, H. R. 1019, H. R. 1248, and H. R. 1393, with special reference to the political, economic, and social conditions in Puerto Rico; and

Whereas the President has submitted a recommendation to Congress embodied in House Report Numbered 126, Seventy-eighth Congress, and relating to political affairs affecting Puerto Rico; and

Whereas an inquiry and investigation into and a study of the political, economic, and social conditions in Puerto Rico are material and necessary to the proper performance by Congress of its legislative functions and duty relative to the legislation herein before mentioned and for the purpose of guiding and assisting Congress in the introduction and passage of such other or further legislation as may be found necessary or advisable: Therefore be it

Resolved, That the Committee on Insular Affairs, acting as a whole, or by a subcommittee, or subcommittees, appointed by the chairman, is authorized and directed to conduct a study and investigation of political, economic, and social conditions in Puerto Rico.

The committee shall have the right to report to the House at any time the results of its studies and investigations together with such recommendations for legislation as it may deem advisable.

For the purpose of this resolution, the committee, or any subcommittee or subCommittees thereof, is authorized to hold such hearings, to sit and act during the present Congress at such times and places as it deems necessary whether or not the House is in session, has recessed, or has adjourned, and to require the attendance of such witnesses and the production of such books, papers, and documents by subpena or otherwise, and to take such testimony as it deems necessary. Subpenas may be issued under the signature of the chairman of the committee and shall be served by any person designated by such chairman. The chairman of the committee or any member thereof may administer oaths to witnesses.

In the event the committee transmits its report to the Speaker at a time when the House is not in session, as authorized herein, a record of such transmittal shall be entered in the proceedings of the Journal and Congressional Record of the House on the opening day of the next session of Congress and shall be numbered and printed as a report of such Congress.

The CHAIRMAN. We have as our first witness Governor Tugwell, the chief executive of the island.

Governor, will you be kind enough to give your name and title to the reporter for the benefit of the record?

STATEMENT OF HON. R. G. TUGWELL, GOVERNOR OF PUERTO RICO

Governor TUGWELL. R. G. Tugwell, Governor of Puerto Rico.

The CHAIRMAN. Gentlemen, if it is satisfactory with the members. of the committee I would suggest that the Governor be given an opportunity to make his statement without interruptions from any of you.

Will you proceed, Governor.

Governor TUGWELL. Mr. Chairman and members, I have not prepared any written statement. I would, however, like to talk to you for a little bit about the basic problems of Puerto Rico as I have come to know them in the time that I have been here because I know that you will be interested in them on account of the legislation which comes before you and you need to have all the information you can get concerning the affairs of the island.

I should like the privilege, after a little bit, of submitting another more carefully prepared memorandum, if you have no objection. The CHAIRMAN. Certainly.

Governor TUGWELL. And I perhaps may have to call on one of my assistants for some help as I go on and I hope you will bear with me if I do that. Perhaps my statement will be somewhat rambling because it was not prepared; but I would like to talk some about the economic, social, and political conditions in Puerto Rico, because your terms of reference included all three of those, as I understood them.

I should like also to make some distinction between those problems which seem to be long-run and those which seem to be short-run, because there is a distinction between the two and they have to be treated in this way.

First, as to the economic situation of Puerto Rico, I will not go into any length about the basic conditions and figures because I know you have information yourselves from many sources.

Just briefly, Puerto Rico is an island 100 miles long and 35 miles wide, almost a rectangle, with about 2,000,000 people and the amount of good land is estimated at anywhere from one to two million acres, certainly not more than that of arable land-which, of course, makes a dense population for the amount of arable land.

It is a peculiar thing that Puerto Rico being an island in the Caribbean should be in a different situation than most other islands in the Caribbean in that respect. Consider Santo Domingo, for instance. San Domingo is an island whose arable surface, especially agricultural land, is probably six times as much as Puerto Rico, and yet it has a smaller population.

The CHAIRMAN. About a million and a half.

Excuse me, I did not intend to interrupt.

Governor TUGWELL. I do not object to that kind of interruption at at all. Yes; I think so; and that makes a different kind of problem. The Puerto Rican population has doubled twice within the last 100 years and, so far as we have been able to determine by very careful studies of the figures, the trends are not changing. Apparently the population is increasing just as fast as it was, we will say, 5 years ago,

so that the prospect is that by 1960 there will be roughly 3,000,000 people on this island.

That is the basic situation in Puerto Rico.

Now, of course, in such a situation, with a large population and a proportionately small amount of land, you would expect to have intensive use of the land, and perhaps intensive development of other sources of employment.

Well, in short, in Puerto Rico, the former is true. There is an intensive use of the land. Intensive use of the land, however, has history which can only be understood by a person who has studied agriculture perhaps in other places, because the basic crop grown on the land of Puerto Rico, that is, the flat land around the coast, is sugarcane, and sugarcane is a crop which lends itself to large-scale agriculture.

The result has been that in Puerto Rico during the last 40 years the land has drifted into larger and larger units of operation. Those units of operation do not always correspond with the owner of the land. Frequently the land is owned by a person or corporation which also leases a lot of other land.

There is also a curious circumstance in Puerto Rico which does not exist in other places. You will find often a large corporation or individual operator as a tenant of a small man who has gone to town leaving the corporation there as a tenant. And that has gone until most of the best land of the island is in these large units of operation. The same thing has been happening concurrently with the manufacture of raw sugar.

A few years ago in Puerto Rico there were quite a large number of sugar mills of smaller capacity than the mills which exist now. There has been a consolidation process going on. And there are fewer mills, "centrales," as they call them in Puerto Rico, to manufacture sugar from cane which is grown here.

The economic problems which go along with the type of agriculture and this type of development and these conditions can perhaps be imagined. There is a large wage-earner class. The sugar crop runs from January 1 to July 1 in normal years, but a year like the present year occurs once in a while when the crop is delayed about a month and runs about a month over at the other end. That is considered to be unfortunate by most sugar men because as the hot weather comes on, the sucrose content goes down so that they would rather get their crop earlier in the year. But roughly speaking there are 6 months of the year when the sugar mills are at the height of operations, and there are 6 months of the year when there is no work in the mills and very much less work in the fields, only the cultivation work which is a very small percentage of the harvesting work.

Sugar, although the most important by far, is only one of the crops grown in Puerto Rico. There are other crops which are important. One is tobacco, another coffee. Still others are frutos menores, or small crops of many kinds.

Coffee is one of the traditional old cultivations in Puerto Rico. It grows mostly in the hills in the back country. It is an excellent crop for the land in the hilly regions. As you will see, if you gentlemen visit the coffee country, it is a crop which grows on a tree which is almost a bush under other trees which are used for shade. It too is a crop which has a season, even a shorter season than sugar, and there is the

same problem of working part of the year; coffee even more than sugar. Sugar has had its ups and downs, and coffee has had its ups and downs, and in recent years mostly downs.

Puerto Rico grows a mild type of coffee, which is entirely different from the Brazilian coffee, which is more in use in the States, and the volume of its production per acre is very much less than the Brazilian type and it has usually been sold in the markets of the world at a very much higher price. It is considered to be a much finer product, grown in an entirely different way. The market for Puerto Rican coffee was traditionally a European market. This has, of course, been altogether cut off by the war, but even before the war it was dropping off because of tariffs against it and various other difficulties. So that coffee has fallen on very hard times.

For Puerto Rico this has been a very hard thing to contemplate because most Puerto Ricans will tell you the real Puerto Rico is back in the hills. People who live in the coffee country are considered to carry on the old traditions of Puerto Rico, and efforts have been made for many years to rehabilitate the coffee industry-even going to the extent of giving subsidies.

The Federal Government at the present time gives a subsidy, and the insular government gives a subsidy, but neither one has proved sufficient to save the industry. This is very unfortunate because it is one crop which is depended on in the high country in the hills.

Along with the rest of the difficulties last year and this year, there have been very small crops of coffee and a small crop of coffee is a bad thing for the proprietor of a farm because he has a small crop to sell and his expenses are correspondingly higher proportionately for a small crop than a large one, but it is almost a disaster for the workers there, for a small crop means they do not have very much work in the harvesting season.

The lowest wages in Puerto Rico are paid in the coffee country. There are several reasons for that. One of them is that it is grown in the more remote regions of Puerto Rico and in the more remote regions you find that wages are lower. I think it is perhaps true that workers in the coffee industry have less expenses than workers in other industries, certainly less than workers in the city. They have more access to home grown foods. They live on "fincas" of the proprietor and have access to the crops which are grown there for food.

The tobacco industry has in recent years had a very disastrous history, too. There are a number of reasons for that. One of them, of course, has been the difficulty associated with the change in demand for types of tobacco. The tobacco grown in Puerto Rico is a very specialized type.

Another, of course, has been the bad cultivation practices back in the hilly lands where the tobacco is grown. Through soil erosions and exhaustion of the soil so that the tobacco crop has become more and more difficult a crop to raise, year by year.

The history of the citrus-fruit crop in Puerto Rico is similar. Twenty-five or thirty years ago the citrus fruits were a very important part of the Puerto Rican economy. They were sold frequently in the United States and there were canning factories to preserve them, and all that kind of thing.

Now, in recent years, the competition of other areas whose orchards. have been planted more recently and have more advantageous types

of fruit have made it very difficult for the Puerto Rican citrus fruit to survive in the United States markets, and the orchards, a great many run down, have fallen on very hard times.

It makes it difficult for the proprietor and also the workers in those regions who have lost the work they depended on before.

Employment in most of these industries is seasonal and the fact that wages are so low prevents the workers from being able to build up reserves. They are left on their own from 6 to 8 months a year, and it is not any wonder, then, I suppose, that they come down from the hills and from the back country into the slums of the cities.

The growth of the slum areas in San Juan, Ponce, Mayaguez, and Arecibo has been noticeable. They are increasing and they are dangerous slums. They are slums in which most any kind of plague may start. Everyone associated with the government in Puerto Rico, and I think with related agencies in the Federal Government, would like to be able to find ways to get rid of them. That, perhaps, is another suggestion; but the slums have grown, and they have grown steadily and are not checked at the present time.

It is said that we have an excess of population in Puerto Rico. We have between 30,000 and 35,000 increase every year which means some five or six thousand new families that are being established every year. If the people cannot establish decent homes, they will establish the other kind, and frequently they will move into slum areas, many of which are built on piles over marshes, and establish their little homes and there begin to have children.

Because of all these matters the problem of Puerto Rico is a very difficult one. You know the United States took the responsibility for Puerto Rico in 1898. When General Miles landed he said he did not come to conquer Puerto Rico but came to bring to Puerto Rico the institutions of a free country and Puerto Ricans evidently depended on General Miles' promises, because there was not any serious resistance to American occupation and the transition from Spanish nationality to American nationality was made without any great disturbance.

There were one or two military governors, and then a civil government was set up under the first organic act, called the Foraker Act. There was no serious change in this organic act until 1917 when the so-called Jones Act was passed, which is the act now in effect-the constitution of Puerto Rico. The constitution of Puerto Rico, I should like to emphasize, is an act of the American Congress.

The economic condition at the beginning of the century does not seem to have been better, of course the population was very much smaller at that time and conditions might be thought to have been easier, and yet the published documents and records I have been able to see speak of exactly the same problems. In fact, somebody showed me a document written two centuries ago to the Spanish King, in which it was said that the great problem of Puerto Rico was overpopulation.

Mr. LECOMPTE. Two centuries ago.

Governor TUGWELL. I think that is true. It is a problem of the ratio of people to resources under given circumstances. The balance goes one way under some circumstances and under some circumstances it goes another and the resultant poverty or prosperity is the product of the relation of the two factors to each other.