Last month, an admired and beloved friend came from Puerto Rico to visit me with his wife Gloria.  They stayed with me and Carmen for a couple of days breaking bread together and reminiscing about the Miami of the 1980’s.  Guillermo Colom was one of three men, in my experience, whose presence in a room inspired good will and love.  He worked as an agent of U.S. Customs all of his life.  He was a father, husband, and a loyal friend.  When we first met I was a Metro-Dade street cop.  His positive optimism for the human condition never failed to motivate me to be better than I really was.

Although Guillermo Colom was tranferred from Miami, we maintained and nurtured our friendship through these many years and every time I visited Puerto Rico I would go and see him in Aguadilla.  He was a church going man who put his family before all things.  He never strayed from the path, as I ashamedly did long ago.  He was a quiet hero, who persevered through his journey with dignity and love for all.  No wimp, an expert marksman with revolver and pistol. We spent a lot of time together at the firing ranges polishing our firearms skills. 

Guillermo Colom called me very early on the morning of April 28th to see how I was.  I’m irreversibly ill, according to the learned MD’s.  Sometime later that day, Guillermo Colom died.  So here are a few lines from Walt Whitman, just for you - dear Guillermo Colom, trusted and beloved loyal friend!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;                                                                                                          O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;                                                                                               Rise up-for you the flag is flung-for you the bugle trills;                                                                                                 For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths-                                                                                                          My Captain does not answer.                                                                                                                          O Captain! My Captain!  

You will always be my hero, Guillermo Colom…

Hector Varela

                                                                                                      �

My brother, Vitín, sent me five pounds of real chicharrón de Bayamón.  These are fried out pork skins that are traditional to this town and are tangy with spices that crack with sharp sound when you split them.  When I opened the FedEx box the delicious smell took me to another dimension.  Back to the days when I thought that I was “cool” and I rode all over Borinquen on my motorcycle.  That was post the Vietnam Tet offensive of 1968.  In 1968 America lost its soul and then the people took it back.  I worked for Daniel Construction, later to become Fluor/Daniel.  We designed and built more pharmaceuticals and chemical plants in Puerto Rico than anyone else and we were second in number of employees only to the Puerto Rican government.  I worked for a great man whose name was Roger Maldonado and in those days there was an unspoken rule that to work for him you had to have good military experience.  It was the way it was. We paid the best wages and all of our employees had health insurance from day one.  All of them.  That was his legacy.  Very seldom did we have labor unrest of any kind.  It was up to the field personnel managers to keep all of our projects open shop by ensuring that justice prevailed in everything, from hiring, performance evaluations, grievances and terminations.  Often, on my jaunts through the island, I would wind up in the “come y vetes” on the military highway to toss back a few cold Corona beers and snack on whole pieces of chicharrón from Bayamón.  Half crocked I’d jump back onto my motorcycle and zip home with the wind blowing through my hair, I had hair then, and the mellow throbbing of my V-twin engine instigated my idiot part to three quarter throttle.  Traffic wasn’t a problem; I rode in between lanes, impervious to the reality that all it would take was for a car door to be opened and ‘adios morón Héctor’.  Youth is like that.   

When I wrote Affinity for Trouble, available at Amazon, I returned to Puerto Rico to get the right feel for my beloved island.  I wanted to get all the details right.  I was eleven when I first left and twenty-five when I returned from eight years in the military.  It took me three years to reconnect with Puerto Rico and its unique contradictions.  In 1980, my wife Carmen and I left for good.  When I next really searched for Borinquen, her people had evolved in such a way as to be as unrecognizable as all environmentally degraded places that I have ever traveled to.  After roaming for a week, I wept for two days and said good bye forever.  “¿Qué sera de mi Borinquen, cuando llegue el temporal?”  I’ll never know, as now I’m irreversibly ill of body, according to learned physicians.  Yeah, the guys with MD after their names.   

I still hope that we can go forward in Puerto Rico by eliminating the per capita consumption of alcohol, the propensity for violence and crime, and to educate kids like we used to.  We need libraries and schools instead of poverty for lack thereof.  We need to be economically stimulated by the return of the 936 and 937 IRS exemptions rescinded by President Clinton and we need to restart our manufacturing capacity.  We need to stop the acrimony between the leading political parties.  We need cops with par to the U.S. salaries and benefits.  Ditto for the teachers, who will hopefully return to society children that will take their trash with them when they leave the beach.  Maybe they will even be able to read.  Empower them with disciplinary discretions such as a rap in the hand for the deliberately unruly.  Give children love, but don’t spare the rod. 

To get this done with the urgency of now, we need Senator Barack Obama as President.  This man is charged with a spiritual energy that I have not seen in my lifetime.  So vote for him in the primary.  All of America needs Barack as President now, and remember that Puerto Ricans are Americans.  Let us fix this thing.  From the bottom up.   

Last night I dreamt that I was real young again and wandering around the Plaza del Mercado in Santurce as I did as a waif.  I came upon a man weeping and instantly realized that it was Don Luis Muñoz Marín.  “Why are you weeping, Governor?” I asked.  “I weep from shame, boy.  Haven’t you heard about Aníbal?” he asked.  I had heard about Governor Aníbal Acevedo’s tribulations.  I took the hand of this man whose love was Puerto Rico and we wept together in the strange dimension where passer byes did not seem to see us.   

In talking to my brother, Vitin, who lives in Puerto Rico and votes in Puerto Rico, I was as excited as he is about the upcoming primary between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, right there, on our little island.  They are actually contemplating fighting for Puerto Rico’s fifty-five delegates, right there, in our cities and mountain island towns. 

Puerto Rico has been serving America since we were handed to this great Nation in 1898, as War booty by Spain.  The U.S.A. made us American citizens in 1917.  A Democratic President named Harry S. Truman, worked closely with our first native-born elected governor, Luis Munoz Marin, to create the compact that resulted in the present Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and granted us local autonomy.  America lifted us from incredible poverty.  Puerto Rico was once the “Poor House of the Caribbean”, and the United States of America with the prodding of Luis Munoz Marin provided the mechanisms to engage Puerto Ricans in modern productive work, eventually making us “The Pharmaceutical Capital of the World,” a title which we lost.  This was acquired  through IRS exemptions 936 and 937 and Operation Bootstrap.  Essentially, what the exemptions accomplished was for the Fortune 500-type corporations to repatriate the profits made in the Commonwealth without further federal taxes.  The tax savings guaranteed their investments. 

President Bill Clinton, while President of the United States, in his obsession with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), rescinded this privilege.  Senator Hillary Clinton, much like Judas, now denies NAFTA.  And, she could be telling the truth that she did not agree with it in its inception.  After all, she was just the First Lady.  Only she, Bill and her hairdresser know for sure.  

I pray that Senators Clinton and Obama both visit Puerto Rico and fight for the fifty-five delegates.  There is a spiritual energy about this campaign which I have never seen in my lifetime.  I want the world to get a glimpse at the Democracy which Presiden Harry S. Truman helped us create.  We have the highest voter turn-out in America.  When Puerto Ricans have an election the turn-outs are in the high eighties.

To lift Puerto Rico from poverty Luis Munoz Marin was forced to swallow his national aspirations for independence and use his love for people to create an autonomous covenant that would thankfully make us Americans forever.  That of course, is pure hope on my part, the hope for a “forever.”  

Senator Obama has a commonality with Boricuas, who are mostly like me, multiracial and have benefited from the necessity of food stamps and other personal experiences that have to be lived to be thoroughly and completely understood.  Puerto Ricans believe in miracles.  After all, weren’t we adopted and given the most coveted citizenship in the world?  What are the odds against that?  Senator Clinton has visited eighty countries, but she has never lived, or, worked or studied in them.  America needs change.  Puerto Rico needs change.  It necessarily must come from the bottom up with the least influence possible from Washington’s business as usual corporate lobbyists.  Who is best defined by this? 

Yes, we can do this.  We can have the first historical primary battle in Puerto Rico.  Welcome to Puerto Rico, Senators Clinton and Obama.  May the best man or woman win.  Yes, we can.  

By: Hector Varela 

Author: Affinity for Trouble, A Puerto Rican Story      

Since Puerto Ricans are Americans, they should know that there is an ongoing war between the United States of America, Europe and Asia for the economic dominance of the world.  Most pseudo-intellectual members of the media do not write about it, because simply, they have been convinced, in the pursuit of their journalistic careers to believe, that we the people, are just simply too stupid to understand it.  Their editors of course, demand that if they do write about such a thing, it must be done at the fifth grade level, where we the people, can then understand it.  That is not easy.  Our media likes facile, catchy soundbites.  Our education system gave up on reading a long time ago.

The aristocratic academics, who know nothing about real life, propose that what is going on in Iraq is a clash of civilizations between Christians and Muslims.. Islamists, Hindus and other religious groups readily swallow this horse-poop thesis.  Why?  Because they do not realize that Europe and America are secularist nations that pay scant attention to Christianity.  Hindus, Muslims and Buddists will readily lay down their lives for their religions, so they believe that Europeans and Americans would do likewise.  Nothing is farther from the truth.  They readily apply their own religiosity to the common people of Europe and America and focus on the ongoing war in Iraq as the Crusaders against the East.  The fact of the matter is that we would be hard pressed to find one hundred Europeans ready to lay down their lives for religion. As for the Americans, well we just hire it out to the lower classes. Patriotic symbolism seems to work. Americans do not understand the East, simply because we apply secularist human measures in our attempt to understand their zealous religiosity. 

Our befuddled leaders, who could care less, know that Iraq sits on oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia.  Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq stopped accepting U.S. dollars as payment for crude oil.  The Euro is kicking the hell out of a dollar currency that is in imminent danger of collapse.  There is no humongous debt of over ten trillion attached to the Euro. So it can become the new fiat currency of the world.  America is not teetering on the edge of recession.  We are in the recession ship, slowly sailing into Antarctic waters and an iceberg, named Depression, is looming.

We shipped our jobs overseas and they will never come back.  The protection of our borders is non-existent.  The IRS, quietly and without protest, jerked the rug out from under Puerto Rico by rescinding the 936 and 937 exemptions, effectively hanging us out to simply dry.  America’s ace in the hole is to me clear. 

Repudiate our external debt and bank on the mightiest Armed Forces that history has ever known and go after the Euro with our Amero.  Seal those borders pretty fast!  Remember, that in this economic war, Germany and France oppose every solution that America has come up with.  So please, rethink those Beemers and Mercedes Benz automobiles.  Let me know what you think.

In the meantime, buy yourself Gold American Eagles or Krugerrands and stock-up on long duration emergency foods.  Do not buy paper certificates that promise you gold.  Take delivery on the real McCoy.

Hector Varela �

When I was a child and through to my eleventh year on earth, I had never heard of Santa Claus. Of course we were poor and the American culture had yet to trickle down to us titeres in the arrabal. I did know about Jesus and everybody that I remember went to mid-night mass to acknowledge his message of hope. I wasn’t quite sure then what the entire message consisted of but I did know that we ate a lot better and adults acted as though they were happier within the neighborhood. The music scene was especially  vibrant and everybody went on trullas Navidenas singing Christmas music to all, and spontaneous parties would spring up everywhere. It was delightful in the urban core of Santurce. No Santa, and yet everybody was happy, singing, dancing, sharing food and drink and not one mugging, car-jacking, or armed assault took place during this Puerto Rican tradition. Si the creias que yo no venia….. Little people such as me, my little brother Vitin, and my sister Myrna knew that the three Wise Kings would leave a little something on January 6th provided that you left them a little water and some grass in a box to sustain their camels. There were no credit cards and no Plaza Las Americas Shopping malls. I don’t remember hearing of anybody going into debt over Christmas presents. I wish that I could have those times back. I’d gladly trade my present house for the little casucha on Calle Los Pinos. It was right next to my Grandmother’s house. Her name was Provi and boy could she cook! As a matter of fact I wish that I had all of them back. My mami Letty, my papi Guelo, Paula, my two first cousins Jose Antonio and Miguel Angel who died premature deaths with the latter succumbing to senseless gunfire in Villa Palmeras. I wish there existed a time machine so that I could get back all of the talent that Puerto Rico lost to drugs and gunfire. I could then ban the importation of drugs and guns. I could make it work too!! In the meantime I wish you a Merry Christmas and a prosperous and happy New Year. This comes from the very bottom of my heart. Oh yes, and thank you for buying my book “Affinity for Trouble- A Puerto Rican Story.” It nourishes my body, such as it is, and my spirit. It also proves that Boricuas can do anything in any language without that darned Santa Claus.�

Hector Varela   

Both places at first glance from your approaching airliner seem to be idyllic tropical paradises. But both are in a state of critical environmental collapse. The Loiza River in Puerto Rico winds down from a hilly country side and on through a big coconut palm plantation. When I was a very young man you could ride your bicycle from Isla Verde to the mouth of the river and board the hand-pulled ferry which could take a couple of cars, bikes and foot passengers to the other side of the river and right on to the town of Loiza. The old ferry is long gone. I don’t have the precise date when it was discountinued. It was obsolete the moment they built their superbridge. Besides, the river is nothing like what I remembered on my visits from 1960 to 1968 when I was discharged from military service, some time after the Tet offensive. I left the service in 1968 when America became obsessed with the Vietnam question. It was sort of like now with the Iraq question, but Americans were not nice about it and did not in fact see members of the military as any kind of heroes. Anyway, if you get near the river and look up stream you will see every imaginable piece of trash that you can find at the dump, including animal carcasses. Puerto Rico is ranked as the best place to live in Latin America, being under the U.S. Flag and all. Puerto Ricans are fast learners because now Puerto Rico is 2nd only to America itself in per capita production of garbage at 1,420 pounds per person a year. Just like South Florida, Puerto Rico works very hard at keeping out of the news the fact that minimally treated human effluent is pumped into the ocean. Just like Florida, a few weeks ago, Puerto Rico was forced to temporarily close six beaches because of coliform bacteria. Puerto Rico’s rapid development has also starred in polluting half of its surface water and 99% of its reservoirs.

Officials in Miami-Dade County cannot allow Puerto Rico, which is nothing more than a territory, to pull ahead in any statistics. So we, in Miami-Dade County, are happily pumping minimally treated waste water into our ocean at six different spots in South Florida. I understand from divers that grouper are in tune to eating this stuff. But I have no doubt that we will soon catch and pass Puerto Rico in these statistics. Our own Mayor, the Honorable Carlos Alvarez, recently said that there is no evidence to compel the closure of these pipes.

“How would you like your grouper prepared, madame, grilled, or, perhaps baked?”

By: Hector Varela�

 �

 In the early morning, just before sunrise, I often get up to a marvelous sight.  The sunlight seems to suddenly be everywhere vanquishing the darkness, that even now, in the age of technology; we don’t know how to quantify.  Let there be light and I can see the beauty of His trees: the mangoes, the avocado, the pomegranate that is now bearing fruit, the bananas, and a date palm gifted to me by Sgt. Matt Garrison, 4^th ID after his 2^nd tour in Iraq, they are from seeds brought back from Fallujah.  All these trees with their quiet distinct leaf patterns, together with the many flowers planted by my wife, Carmen, in His garden, bring ecstatic joy to the duality of my being.  They are all on my land, but do not belong to me, because I belong to them.

I hope that all humanity somehow stops every effort to subjugate others while in pursuit of religious, political, national, commercial, tribal and feudal interests, and instead, find their own spirits so that the light goes on from within to illuminate others with plenitude, equality, justice, and above all things, love. 

I thank America for being a self-correcting democratic Republic.  I thank Al Gore and John Kerry for not having started and for discouraging others from starting protests that could have led to serious consequences when they had clear evidence to do just that.  I thank President Bush for the executive order that allows active and retired certified law enforcement officers to carry weapons everywhere under the American flag.  I truly regret not being able to sincerely thank him for anything else.

I thank God for having been born in Puerto Rico from the criollo lineage that makes my spirit hum and my body want to dance to our Afro-boricua music.  I also thank the people of Puerto Rico for their patience, persistence, excellence and love.  But most of all I want to thank the men and women of the U.S. Military for their dedicated service under such trying conditions as those in the middle-east.

Happy Thanksgiving!

      �

I hope that some erudite reader can give me the names of the boricuas that participated in the American Revolutionary War.  Most of us know about the contribution of Puerto Ricans to American causes (war) since WWI.  By the beginning of the Korean War there were 20,000 boricuas in the U.S. Military, 90% of which were Army Infantry and Marines.  The U.S. Army’s 65^th Infantry Regiment arrived in Korea in September of 1950 from Puerto Rico with over 4,000 soldiers.  It was the largest boots on the ground regiment in the U.S. Army at that moment.  Superbly led by Col. Bill Harris, the 65^th Infantry was the top of the spear in every major campaign of the war and rescued the 1^st U.S. Marine Expeditionary Force when they were surrounded at the Chosin Reservoir.  The segregated all Puerto Rican Unit was finally integrated in 1953.  After the first twelve months of fighting, the 65^th Infantry was stripped, of not only its beloved commander, Col. Bill Harris, but also of its experienced combat officers and senior sergeants.  Winners of wars write the history and adjust the spin of what the people are told and can know about war.  So read with skepticism.  To my fellow veterans of all past wars, present wars, and wars not yet envisioned, I thank you for your service as the idealistic warriors you are or were once upon a time.  I personally go into a state of almost depression, when I now, in the twilight of my life, realize that most folks could care less about your sacrifices.�

By: Hector Varela

As we all know, in 1898 General Nelson Miles invaded Puerto Rico through Guánica. In 1899, the United States War Department initiated and concluded the first Federal Census on our island. By this time, Porto Rico, as the facetiously U.S. military renamed it, had endured four hundred years of a brutal colonization by Spain. However, in those four hundred years of inter-racial love we founded the newest and oldest race in the new world. The Department of War did not have the genuine appreciation from an aesthetic viewpoint for people of color that we had evolved in those four hundred years. Let us remember, that all boricuas have some color. Negrito is descriptive of love. Trigueño is descriptive of love. Piel canela…of love and desire.

The Puerto Ricans that the U.S. employed as census takers sensed that their employers saw color as bad and racial mixing as miscegenation in which Southern States, in many instances, had officially criminalized through statutes. In 1899, General G. W. Davis wrote of Puerto Ricans, “A family of a dozen may be huddled in one room. It is hard to believe that these emaciated beings are descendants of the Conquistadors. The total population was 953,000, with fewer that 20% able to read and write.” They completely ignored our Taino and African genes. With boricuas as census takers, we just simply became white. We learned their hypodescent rule, (one drop of African blood makes you a Negro), so we adjusted by viewing people as we had always done, with love and a tolerant grin. Most census takers adjusted to (B) for Blanco and not (Col) for colored, or (Mu) for mulatto. After all, no boricua deliberately screws another on behalf of any Government that screws us.

Pa’ lante boricua, que el que no tiene Dinga tiene Mandinga. My favorite words in life are: mondongo, mofongo, mango y guineo, and all of them are African words. When I was young, I was passionate about our coquettish piel canelas that happen to be the most beautiful and delicious amongst all women. There is no romance like our romance. No food like our food. No music like our music. Y ahora vienen las navidades. !Qué rico es ser boricua! Happy Thanksgiving, boricuas!

Hopefully, in the last Tidbits, you read into the census numbers what I intended, which is that their process, no matter how hard the Spaniards tried, was flawed. The landed proprietors concealed the real numbers to avoid taxes on their slaves. Puerto Rico by 1830, had the reputation of being very poor, so it attracted the sum total 2,833 naturalized immigrants as of 1830. The original 369 white Spaniards, who were all males, I submit to my compatriots, created families with the only women available, the indigenous Tainos and the ebony beauties of Africa. The fecundity of the women of the succeeding generations helped.

The census of 1834, reads as follows:

Next Tidbits about the first American Census in Puerto Rico following the Treaty of Paris, (after the invasion).

“Don’t you count that little trigueñito as a negro - he is my son!” As told to me by my father in response to a census taker’s question regarding a little dark boy posed to my grandfather by Americans in Arrozales, a Barrio of the District of Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in the early 1900’s.