Our new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today !

As part of his campaign rollout in late February, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders appointed four national co-chairs to helm his bid for the presidency. While the selection of Ohio state senator Nina Turner, California representative Ro Khanna, and Ben and Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen surprised few, Sanders’s fourth choice was atypical. Carmen Yulín Cruz is, by all traditional measures, an odd choice. The current mayor of Puerto Rico’s capital city, San Juan, she has neither fundraising acumen nor a substantial electoral base that will play a major role in the Democratic primaries. Never before has a Puerto Rican officeholder been given such a prominent position in an American presidential campaign. Not once has a presidential contender so explicitly embraced a Puerto Rican politician on the left-wing of one of the island’s two major political parties. When she came to prominence in the aftermath of Hurricane María, Cruz was at the beginning of her second term as mayor of San Juan. She had first stepped into this role in 2012, in one of the most surprising recent upsets in Puerto Rican politics. After four years in the House of Representatives, she became the Popular Democratic Party’s (PDP) nominee for San Juan, when the party barons’ previous choice withdrew due to a domestic abuse investigation. San Juan is a bastion of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (NPP). Its mix of conservative business interests and an urban poor promised a better life under statehood cements a complicated electoral topography for the PDP. Cruz was, for all intents and purposes, a sacrificial lamb, a last-minute replacement sure to lose to three-term NPP incumbent Jorge Santini, who assured everyone that he would wipe the floor with his challenger. But Yulín Cruz defied expectations. Her speeches on the campaign trail were electric; her shrewd use of social media and cultivation of the press helped her overcome a dramatic disadvantage in fundraising. Her alliances with trade unions, student groups, and pro-independence factions all proved astute, as did her promises to administer the city transparently. Her first term saw a marked improvement in San Juan’s infrastructure as well as success in ratifying collective agreements with municipal employees. Those achievements, coupled with a mediocre opponent, ensured her reelection in 2016 — even as the rest of her party was decimated at the polls. To the chagrin of the unimaginative PDP elites — who resent her popularity and question her more strident denunciations of Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States — she is, by far, the party’s most potent electoral force. It’s too early to say how the Sanders campaign will choose to wield that force or how Yulín Cruz will use her role on the presidential campaign to influence local dynamics. But there is the potential for this partnership to threaten the status quo in both Puerto Rican and mainland politics. First, by making the financial immiseration and colonial subjugation of Puerto Rico a prominent issue in the Democratic primary debate. And second, by possibly laying the groundwork for novel alliances that can aid Yulín Cruz in a bid for governor of Puerto Rico.

Primaries and Pitfalls The strategic considerations driving Sanders’s choice are more straightforward. The Trump administration’s bungled response to Hurricane María remains one of its landmark failures, obvious to all. By selecting Trump’s most visible and strident antagonist on the issue, the self-styled “nasty” woman who denounced the president for the “unfathomable action of throwing paper towels at us [Puerto Ricans],” Sanders reminds primary voters of his willingness to challenge the president head on. Disaster capitalism has also worked to depopulate the island, with a disproportionate number of Puerto Ricans leaving for Orlando, Kissimmee, Tampa Bay and Miami. The electoral calculus here is clear. Florida remains at the crux of any Democratic candidates’ presidential aspirations. What is less obvious is how the relationship with Sanders will shape Puerto Rican politics, and whether Cruz intends to use her ties in Washington as a springboard for her own run for governor. The mayor is in a bind similar to that which Sanders faced in 2016. The party establishment is suspicious of her position on the island’s status (full sovereignty as the formula for decolonization) as well as her dalliances with socialist positions and organizations. The PDP remains divided between those who favor permanent union with the United States, whatever the circumstances, and the soberanistas or libre asociacionistas, who seek more autonomy and share a commitment to social justice. The former fear that Cruz will take over the party and move it to the left, embracing policies and positions reviled by those with ties to bondholders and corporate capital. The mayor would likely have to enter into a gubernatorial primary with an establishment candidate. Roberto Prats, her likely opponent, was rather fittingly the co-chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 and 2016 primary campaigns on the island. Known for his boyish good looks and eye for the camera, Prats has not offered a thoughtful remark or profound insight in his more than twenty years in public life. Following a term in the Senate and his last electoral defeat in 2004, he has dedicated himself to more profitable activities as a lawyer and lobbyist. Intellectual hollowness aside, his clear-cut appeal would be as the ready-made, electable alternative to the unquestionably calamitous current governor, Ricardo Rosselló, who declared his intention to run for reelection some weeks ago. Rosselló’s governorship has been disastrous in predictable ways. With no experience in the public sector and a declared taste for austerity and privatization, his term has been as misguided as it has been incompetent. While the now-governor was happy to promise vulture funds that he would pay the island’s unaudited debt while campaigning as a candidate, he has now come to the rather obvious conclusion that such an endeavor is impossible. He pleads constantly for more flexibility from the Junta de Supervisión Fiscal (Fiscal Supervisory Board), the seven-member body with full powers to oversee the island’s finances imposed by Congress and President Obama in 2016, but to no avail. Rosselló’s role has been simply to participate in a charade in which the junta first floats a harsh version of austerity, then sits back to see society’s response, before finally settling on a marginally less harsh reform that Rosselló then pushes under the pretense that he is making a reasonable compromise. The governor has failed at the most basic of tasks — receiving congressionally appropriated funds that have already been apportioned for his administration’s use. Intent on privatizing public corporations and importing the regressive charter school model to the island, he has not passed one tangible measure to improve the lives of workers or the poor. Without a plan or a vision, bereft of anything but unimaginative media advisers and stale ideas around him, he is increasingly captive to the conservative, Trump-like elements of his party, whose most recent coup de grace was the proposed construction of a Square of Believers (Plaza de Creyentes) outside the capitol building, to the tune of nearly $200,000. Money surely well spent on an island where children go to bed hungry. Even more frightening has been the governor’s travails in Washington. He ran on a ticket with Jennifer González, a former NPP speaker of the house and now resident commissioner, Puerto Rico’s non-voting, single member in the US House of Representatives. Known for little beyond her avid enthusiasm for President Trump, she famously declared, in the aftermath of Hurricane María, that “everything we’ve asked for, Trump has provided.” Paper towels notwithstanding, most in the media and on the island would beg to differ. With Puerto Rico sorely in need of reconstruction funds, González decided that pushing for statehood was the most apt use of her time. More recently, she has been unable to prevent drastic cuts to food stamps for the nearly 1.5 million islanders who benefit from federal programs. The Puerto Rican Federal Affairs Administration’s (PRFAA) efforts have been similarly pitiful. Ostensibly created to defend the interests of islanders and lobby Congress to bolster economic development, Rosselló appointee Carlos Mercader has spent his time cuddling up to Republicans and endlessly discussing the importance of statehood as the utopian solution to all Puerto Rico’s problems. The PRFAA’s operation is “a joke, almost criminally negligent in its lack of focus,” one senior congressional staffer — who’s been working to secure reconstruction funds for the island — told me. Another congressional staffer with decades of experience working with Puerto Rican officeholders and appointees was less sanguine: “Mercader? He’s a clown. Rosselló needs to send him home.” Mercader’s unmatched move to date: paying Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski a healthy sum to represent Puerto Rico in Washington. We must laugh, if only not to cry. Corruption, too, has festered. Following in the august footsteps of his father, Pedro Rosselló (1993–2001) — under whose watch more than two dozen administration officials were convicted of graft, including a secretary of education and two deputy chiefs of staff — the current governor has been unwilling or unable to control those around him. In January 2019, Treasury Secretary Teresita Fuentes offered her resignation. In her departing letter, she offered what leading Puerto Rican novelist Eduardo Lalo described as “a devastating verdict on what the government is cooking up outside the public limelight (un juicio devastador de lo que se cuece en el gobierno lejos de la luz pública).” What can be gleaned so far is that Fuentes was opposed to the fact that the Treasury Department of a bankrupt country, headed then by its now-reappointed secretary, Raúl Maldonado, gave out contracts to the tune of at least $2.8 million, apparently with serious irregularities, to known benefactors of the New Progressive Party. These benefactors have, in turn, subcontracted Maldonado’s son, who through at least five different companies offers his surely fantastic services to seven government agencies, one municipality, and the Senate. All this at a time when Secretary Maldonado was the chief official in charge of reviewing and approving all contracts worth over $10,000 with the Puerto Rican government. These officials are, for the most part, neither malicious nor malevolent. In office, Rosselló has rejected mobilization of his own constituents in favor of mollification of the various wings of the NPP. And this means corruption, which he must accept, or at least ignore, to sustain his support in the party. It is a strategy as much as a shortcoming. Incapable of exercising hegemony and unable to use force, Gramsci reminds us that “between consent and force stands corruption/fraud.” Like father, like son.