Cold War Puerto Rico
Regular price
€33.99
20th century political repression
A01=Steve Howell
American colonial policy
American empire and resistance
anti-communist campaigns
anti-imperialist movements in the Caribbean
Author_Steve Howell
Caribbean Cold War history
Category=NHK
Category=NHTW
civil liberties in U.S. territories
COINTELPRO operations
Cold War intelligence history
Cold War repression
Cold War-era propaganda
colonial legacy of U.S. territories
colonial resistance networks
communist witch hunts abroad
decolonization resistance movements
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
FBI files Puerto Rico
FBI interference in activism
FBI surveillance tactics
forthcoming
government suppression of speech
hidden histories of McCarthyism
House Un-American Activities Committee
human rights under colonial rule
J. Edgar Hoover history
Latin American Cold War politics
legacy of political exile
military occupation of islands
national liberation movements
political dissent and repression
political prisoners in Puerto Rico
political surveillance archives
postwar American foreign policy
Puerto Rican identity politics
Puerto Rican political history
Puerto Rican radical movements
radical art and activism
repression of minority voices
resistance to federal control
San Juan political crackdowns
Smith Act prosecutions
state surveillance of artists
suppressed independence efforts
targeted dissidents in U.S. territories
U.S. counterintelligence programs
U.S. covert operations abroad
U.S. imperial strategies
U.S. naval expansion and resistance
unincorporated territory debate
Product details
- ISBN 9781625349484
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2026
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A gripping history of FBI surveillance, political repression, and the fight for Puerto Rican independence
In the 1940s, with the construction of a naval base and a bombing range, Puerto Rico became a major geo-political military outpost for the United States. For a power claiming global leadership in a decolonizing world, however, the archipelago’s colonial condition underscored the dissonance between American democratic rhetoric and its imperial reality. The solution was a deal that, in 1952, gave Puerto Rico a degree of self-government without changing its legal status as an “unincorporated” US territory. The US then publicly claimed Puerto Rico was now more autonomous while using repressive tactics such as FBI surveillance, arrests, destabilization, and other methods developed in Washington to silence activists and political parties pushing for full independence.
In Cold War Puerto Rico, Steve Howell examines how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI targeted Puerto Rican communists as part of an offensive against pro-independence parties and activists generally. Howell’s US-born father, who fell afoul of Hoover for producing radical cartoons while working in San Juan in the 1940s, remained on the FBI’s watch list long after exiling himself in Britain. His close friends, the Puerto Rican author Cesar Andreu Iglesias and Jane Speed de Andreu, were meanwhile arrested and imprisoned three times during the 1950s. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, including interviews and FBI files, Howell tells their stories along with those of other activists who battled indictment in 1954 under the Smith Act, challenged the jurisdiction of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Juan in 1959, and revived the Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1960s, despite the FBI deploying the covert tactics of COINTELPRO against them.
Puerto Rico is virtually invisible in histories of what is generally called McCarthyism, yet anti-communist repression was in many ways more intense there than in the mainland US. Now, with Puerto Rico’s future currently hanging in the balance, Howell’s compelling history demonstrates why we need to understand the long enforcement of its colonial status.
In the 1940s, with the construction of a naval base and a bombing range, Puerto Rico became a major geo-political military outpost for the United States. For a power claiming global leadership in a decolonizing world, however, the archipelago’s colonial condition underscored the dissonance between American democratic rhetoric and its imperial reality. The solution was a deal that, in 1952, gave Puerto Rico a degree of self-government without changing its legal status as an “unincorporated” US territory. The US then publicly claimed Puerto Rico was now more autonomous while using repressive tactics such as FBI surveillance, arrests, destabilization, and other methods developed in Washington to silence activists and political parties pushing for full independence.
In Cold War Puerto Rico, Steve Howell examines how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI targeted Puerto Rican communists as part of an offensive against pro-independence parties and activists generally. Howell’s US-born father, who fell afoul of Hoover for producing radical cartoons while working in San Juan in the 1940s, remained on the FBI’s watch list long after exiling himself in Britain. His close friends, the Puerto Rican author Cesar Andreu Iglesias and Jane Speed de Andreu, were meanwhile arrested and imprisoned three times during the 1950s. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, including interviews and FBI files, Howell tells their stories along with those of other activists who battled indictment in 1954 under the Smith Act, challenged the jurisdiction of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Juan in 1959, and revived the Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1960s, despite the FBI deploying the covert tactics of COINTELPRO against them.
Puerto Rico is virtually invisible in histories of what is generally called McCarthyism, yet anti-communist repression was in many ways more intense there than in the mainland US. Now, with Puerto Rico’s future currently hanging in the balance, Howell’s compelling history demonstrates why we need to understand the long enforcement of its colonial status.
Steve Howell is an Anglo-American journalist, author, and former communications consultant. He has appeared as a political commentator on the BBC, ITV, Sky News, and various podcasts, and has contributed opinion pieces to publications such as The Nation, Big Issue, and The Guardian. His books include Game Changer: Eight Weeks That Transformed British Politics, which was a Guardian best book of the year.
