Cafecito con… Steve Howell – Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony

Join author Steve Howell and Professor Sandy Placido as we explore Howell’s latest book, Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony, a gripping history of FBI surveillance, political repression, and the fight for Puerto Rican 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 César 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.

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Photograph belongs to Nico Andreu. Book cover design by Adam B Bohannon.