Invisible Island

Puerto Rico y Cuba son dos alas del mismo ave"

-Pablo Milanes

Back in the days of nueva trova, that uniquely Cuban form of hippie-assed folk-singing that celebrated the collective triumphs of da people, there was a song that imagined "Puerto Rico and Cuba" as "two wings of the same bird." This sort of Cold War air-kiss encouraging the free associated state to your right to join hands with its socialist neighbor on the left (or at least that's how it looks if you're viewing a standard Mercator Projection) was just the kind of thing that made the good old boys in Washington nervous. Hence, the 1978 Cerro Maravilla affair, a sordid tale of political assassination that is unfortunately almost forgotten.

Twelve years later, a movie that depicted those events called "A Show of Force," which starred, among others, Amy Irving, Andy Garcia, Robert Duvall, and Lou Diamond Phillips, opened in New York, the city with more Puerto Ricans than San Juan, with almost no publicity, and closed a week later. There were rumblings about a media blackout, but of course this was met with stifled yawns in the pre cable-news era.

But are things any different now? Fast forward to April 18 in Trinidad, and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, who originally rose to power in the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, laments that the meeting he and Hugo Chávez and Barack Obama and several Latin American heads of state are attending should not be called "the Summit of the Americas" because Cuba and Puerto Rico were not represented.

At least that's what I read in this blog in Newsweek. Katie Connely's post describes Ortega's speech as "peripatetic," which etymology buffs will note derives from the Latin words adding up to "walk around." You know, meander. But Connely, clearly trying to avoid accusations of meandering, does not waste a single word on why Ortega mentioned Puerto Rico at all. Not even a parenthetical like: (Puerto Rico's representation as a nation would be irrelevant since it is an unincorporated territory of the U.S. and therefore not part of Latin America. In fact, it's new Governor, who is tied to the U.S.'s Republican party, recently named the assistant director of Puerto Rico's branch of the FBI as the island's police commisioner) perhaps.

Connely, however, should probably be commended for mentioning Puerto Rico at all. The rest of the media acts as if Ortega never mentioned it in the most soundbite-worthy comment of his peripatetic speech. Take Fox News.com's dispatch, "Obama Endures Ortega Diatribe." It ends with this strangely edited, peripatetic quote:

"This summit and I simply refuse to call it summit of the Americas. Yes, we are gathered here, we have a large majority of presidents, heads of state of Latin America and the Caribbean," Ortega said, lamenting the lack of Cuban participation in the summit due to it exclusion since 1962 from the Organization of American States. "They're absent from this meeting. One is Cuba, whose crime has been that of fighting for independence, fighting for sovereignty of the peoples. I don't feel comfortable attending this summit. I cannot feel comfortable by being here. I feel ashamed of the fact that I'm participating at this summit with the absence of Cuba."

"They're absent from this meeting?" "One is Cuba"? Somehow I'm not seeing Puerto Rico in here. I think I'll have better luck checking the travel section.