“Trump probably does not know his US history well enough to realise that he is not the first president to revamp the Monroe Doctrine for imperialist purposes.”
By Steve Howell
Last November, President Trump issued what he called a ‘corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine to mark the 202nd anniversary of the fifth president – James Monroe – asserting US continental hegemony. Quoting his forerunner’s message to Congress that “the American continents… are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonisation by any European powers,” Trump said: “With those mighty words, every nation knew that the United States of America was emerging as a superpower unlike anything the world had ever known.” The Monroe Doctrine, he continued, is being “reinvigorated by my Trump Corollary” and US leadership in the Western Hemisphere is “coming roaring back stronger than ever before.”
Trump probably does not know his US history well enough to realise that he is not the first president to revamp the Monroe Doctrine for imperialist purposes. In 1954, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, also claimed the historical precedent to frame all dissent in Latin America as a foreign conspiracy to legitimise US intervention. This extension of the Monroe Doctrine came as Puerto Rican nationalists staged an armed attack on the U.S. Capitol to protest the island’s colonial status, triggering another wave of repression on the island, with both communists and nationalists being arrested regardless of any evidence of involvement in the shooting.
Below is an extract from the chapter on these events in my book, Cold War Puerto Rico. The extract was published earlier this week by The Internationalist. The book itself is published today by the University of Massachusetts Press and is available online via Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and the online retailers for independent bookstores in the United States and the UK. For people in the UK and Ireland only (because of mail costs and tariffs), I have a limited number available via my website (using PayPal or credit card), which will probably prove cheaper than any other outlet because I’m passing on my author discount.
On Monday, March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists—Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores—met at Grand Central Station in New York City and boarded a train for Washington, DC. On the same day, in Caracas, the Organization of American States (OAS) was about to start its tenth conference, with the US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, determined to keep Puerto Rico off the agenda and put “a strong anti-Communist resolution” at the top of it.
Dulles had a hemispheric game plan, for which Puerto Rico would be militarily vital. The purpose of his resolution was to secure OAS legitimacy for US intervention in any country in the Americas against political forces that the United States deemed to be not “indigenous” but part of “an international conspiracy.” He presented this in Washington as an extension of the nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine, with the populist pretext for asserting US transcontinental power switching from defence against European colonialists to defence against “foreign ideologies.” US National Security Council records sum up Dulles’s cynical goal as follows: “In short, he argued that Communist subversion and subsequent control of any of the American Republics was tantamount to external aggression against such a Republic. Efforts, therefore, to counter such Communist subversion could not rightfully be described as American intervention.”
The nationalists travelling to Washington would probably have been unaware of Dulles’s wider agenda, but their choice of date was no coincidence. The United States wanted to suppress debate at the OAS about Puerto Rico’s status, having only three months earlier secured the UN vote that deemed the island to be self-governing. Venezuela’s pro-American regime had duly obliged by denying visas to independence advocates and arresting those who lived locally. In the face of this, Lebrón and her associates were intent on breaking the oppressive silence with what she called a “cry for victory in our struggle for independence.”
On arriving in Washington armed with pistols, the four nationalists made their way to the Capitol Building and found seats in the visitors’ gallery of the House of Representatives. At 2.30 p.m., with 373 members voting on a resolution below, Lebrón started firing her pistol toward the ceiling, shouting “Viva Puerto Rico!” After emptying her gun, she threw it down and began to unfurl a Puerto Rican flag. Her comrades, meanwhile, had fired their weapons downward, toward the floor of the House, wounding five representatives. Altogether, sixteen shots were fired before Lebrón, Cancel, and Figueroa were overpowered by police. Flores escaped, only to be arrested a few hours later.
As if to illustrate the nationalists’ point about the island’s subservient status, Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner, Antonio Fernós-Isern, was not in the chamber because he did not have a vote. Even when—as a trained doctor—he rushed to the Capitol to help the injured, he was stopped by police and confined to his office in what is now called the Longworth House Office Building. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, Fernós-Isern immediately resorted to red scare tactics, describing the attackers as “communist dupes,” adding rhetorically, “Can it be the doing just of Puerto Rican Nationalists?” The next day, Luis Muñoz Marín arrived in Washington to denounce the shooting as “savage and unbelievable lunacy.” After a difficult meeting with President Eisenhower, he pledged that “the authorities of the Commonwealth would intensify their co-operation with federal authorities to end this madness” and flew back to San Juan on March 5 to launch another clampdown.
Muñoz Marín’s first target was Albizu, whom he had pardoned six months earlier on condition that he not commit any further violations of the Gag Law. After the shooting in Congress, however, Albizu did not hesitate to praise the attackers, describing Lebrón as “a Puerto Rican heroine.” In an interview with El Imparcial, he said: “Lolita Lebrón and the gentlemen who accompanied her on that day of sublime heroism have warned the United States, emboldened with their atomic bombs, that duty compels them to respect the independence of all nations; to respect the independence of Puerto Rico. And that Puerto Ricans will enforce the respect to that sacred right.” At dawn the day after Muñoz Marín’s return, the police laid siege to Albizu’s house using tear gas and eventually captured him after what the press described as a two-hour gunfight. He would not be released again until a few months before his death in 1965. While Albizu was being arrested, the police rounded up thirty-six other nationalists at twelve locations across Puerto Rico.
With the next dawn came the turn of the communists. Jane Speed, described by the United Press for good measure as “red-haired” as well as part of the “red high command,” was among the first to be arrested. The police were, however, thwarted in capturing her husband, César Andreu, by the quick thinking of Jane’s seventy-seven-year-old mother, Mary, who lived with them. “Maga,” as she was known, had fought some tough political battles herself in 1930s Alabama, but she could not argue with the police because she did not speak Spanish. Instead, turning this handicap to her advantage, she played the part of an aristocratic gringa—using her five-year-old grandson, Nico, as interpreter—to delay the officers while César, who had been working in a back room, hid from them.
By the time Nico Andreu – seen here when we met in Puerto Rico in 2023 – was six years old his parents, Jane Speed and César Andreu Iglesias, had been arrested four times.
That morning, five other communists were captured: Ramón Mirabal Carrión, who had taken over from Santos Rivera as the party’s general secretary; Cristino Pérez Méndez, leader of the party’s municipal committee; Manuel Arroyo Zeppenfeldt, a retired print worker who had produced the party’s publications since the 1930s; Consuelo Burgos de Sáez Corales, a central committee member and the partner of union leader Juan Sáez Corales; and Félix Ojeda, the editor of the party’s paper who had previously been a Socialist Party member and worked for a former resident commissioner, Bolívar Pagán. All of the six arrested were well known to the FBI. Some were known personally to Muñoz Marín as former political allies. It seems highly unlikely that either the FBI or Muñoz Marín genuinely thought they had any connection with the Capitol shootings—never mind having evidence for it—given their long-standing public disagreements with the nationalists over tactics.
The PCP had attempted to preempt being targeted. Within forty-eight hours of the shootings, four party leaders had gone to the offices of one of Puerto Rico’s daily newspapers to make their position clear. The next morning, on March 4, while Muñoz Marín was still in Washington and before any arrests had been made in Puerto Rico, El Mundo reported that Pablo García Rodríguez, Juan Sáez Corales, Juan Santos Rivera, and Ramón Mirabal had visited their newsroom to say that the allegation that “communists participated in or inspired the shootings” was “false and ridiculous.” Their statement read:
“The unfortunate incident that occurred in the chamber of the House of Representatives is being taken by the government and the North American fascists as a pretext to intensify the terror and persecution that is taking place in the United States, in Puerto Rico, and in Latin America against the entire progressive, democratic, and national liberation movement. Our Partido Comunista Puertorriqueño, like any party that is guided by the principles of scientific socialism, is opposed to acts of terrorism as a method of struggle.”
Despite this, the authorities stuck resolutely to their game plan: arresting communists served Washington’s need to portray every manifestation of disaffection with the United States in Latin America as an alien communist conspiracy, aided by compliant US media outlets. When Puerto Rico’s police chief claimed that the communists had been “openly sympathetic to the violently anti-American Puerto Rican nationalists,” the United Press reported it without qualification on its wire service, and it was reproduced as fact in newspapers throughout the United States, Latin America, and beyond.
Faced with this misinformation, the CPUSA published its own statement in Spanish aimed at the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, which echoed its sister party in arguing that terrorism as a tactic is “harmful to the goals of the struggle of the working class and oppressed peoples.” The statement argued that “the first press reports clearly indicate that the McCarthyists are trying to take advantage of the incident to fabricate a ‘red plot’ . . . and intensify the attacks against the ENTIRE Puerto Rican national liberation movement, in Puerto Rico and in the United States.” Accusing the US attorney general, Herbert Brownell, and J. Edgar Hoover of “personally directing a wave of terror,” it claimed they had given Muñoz Marín “strict orders to unleash persecution against all those who favor Puerto Rican independence.”
Of the four who had visited El Mundo, only Mirabal was among the first group of communists arrested. The other three, like César Andreu, managed to evade capture in this “well-timed” roundup. Thus, of the “red high command,” the authorities failed to locate and arrest the party’s president, Santos Rivera; its treasurer, Pablo García; and arguably its best-known figures, Andreu and Sáez Corales. With those four having eluded the police, the United Press reported that the Puerto Rican justice secretary, José Trías Monge, had “launched an island-wide search for four other red executives” in which a force of two thousand officers was being deployed to “knock out the communist leadership.” This search proved as ineffective as the language was colourful. Nine days later, the four had still not been found, despite the police being stationed at intersections stopping “any person who looked like the wanted communists” and the army “being prepared for any emergency.”
- This article was taken from Steve Howell’s The Rest is Bullshit on 1 May 2026.
- Steve Howell is a journalist, author and former political adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. You can follow him on Twitter/X and subscribe to The Rest is Bullshit for regular updates and analysis from Steve.
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