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533 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1994)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0533 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE The last time The Annals published an issue on the Caribbean-volume 285 (January 1953)-it featured the birth, in 1952, of Puerto Rico's Estado Libre Asociado, the associated-commonwealth status the island has enjoyed since. The excitement in 1952 was not purely political; Puerto Rico had already started a dramatic economic and social transformation known as Operation Bootstrap. To read the 1947 book of one of the architects of the transformation, Rexford Tugwell's Stricken Land, is to understand some of the battles that had to be fought in Washington and San Juan before that so-called socialist experiment could be launched. The idea of central planning to bring about development with equity did not find a hospitable environment in the post-World War II period; a mindless sort of anticommunism was already dominant. In this issue of The Annals, Robert Pastor describes well how that climate affected U.S. policy toward the Caribbean. As far as Puerto Rico was concerned, fears of communism were misplaced. In the early 1950s, under the guidance of a brilliant generation of Puerto Rican politicians, the island's electoral democratic procedure served American foreign policy goals well. First, Puerto Rico was different from the many traditional dictatorships that populated the Caribbean. Its first elected Governor, Luis Mufioz Marin, became the faithful friend of a veritable army of exiles escaping from Rafael L. Trujillo's Dominican Republic, Anastasio Somoza's Nicaragua, Marcos Perez Jimenez's Venezuela, and Fulgencio Batista's Cuba. Not only was Puerto Rico a model to the oppressed people of these dictatorships, but it was also a beacon to the emerging first generation of anticolonial leaders in the other islands, which Franklin Knight describes in the present volume. Puerto Rico was regarded as a party democracy worth emulating and its policies of economic development and structural transfor- mation, known as industrialization by invitation, would influence a whole generation of Caribbean leaders such as Jamaica's Norman Manley and Trinidad's Eric Williams. As exhilarating as all this was, the political and economic showcasing of Puerto Rico was given even higher priority in the early 1960s after the Cuban Revolution took a sharp turn to the left. Puerto Rico's contribution became more than symbolic and ideological as a coterie of Puerto Rican intellectual- administrators provided advice and manpower to John F. Kennedy's Latin American initiatives, especially the Alliance for Progress. The island and its democratic leaders became actual and symbolic bridges to their counterparts in the hemisphere. It is illustrative of the speed of historical change that today-even as dramatic global changes in both ideology and practice are reformulating the nature of international relations, and there is, as Franklin Knight tells us, a changing of the guard in much of the Caribbean-Puerto Rico continues to 8

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