COLD WAR PUERTO RICO | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation

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, destabilisation 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 César Andreu Iglesias and Jane Speed de Andreu, were meanwhile arrested and imprisoned multiple times during the 1950s. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, including interviews, personal papers 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 US itself. 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 joining us on the Busboys stage to share more about this “deeply researched and expertly written account of red scare politics in Puerto Rico” (Dr Hugh Wilford, author of The CIA: An Imperial History). Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Howell will be signing following the program.

This event is free and open to all. Doors open to guests at 5:30 and our program begins at 6:00 pm. The discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing. Copies of COLD WAR PUERTO RICO will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is IN PERSON.

We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books

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, Jacobin, Tribune, Big Issue, and The Guardian. His books include Game Changer: Eight Weeks That Transformed British Politics, which was a Guardian political book of the year in 2018. Steve was Jeremy Corbyn’s deputy director of strategy and communications in 2017 and worked as a senior adviser again for the 2019 general election. 

BOOK DETAILS

Cold War Puerto Rico

Anti-Communism in Washington's Caribbean Colony

By Steve Howell

May 01, 2026 | Paperback, 280 pages, $34.95

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