Man of the People

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Somber-eyed Luis Muñoz Marin, the first popularly elected Governor of Puerto Rico, and the 122nd since Ponce de León, settled down last week to review the bills just passed by the island legislature. Don Luis liked most of the new bills, and the new budget in particular. It totaled $94 million and 46% of it was earmarked for health and education.

The legislature had also allotted more than $12 million for capital improvements such as highways and hospitals, more than $11 million for capital contributions for sewers, aqueducts, housing, and irrigation. But that was only a start on Muñoz' program to make the island a better place to live. He planned soon to call a special session to provide for new schools, instruction for illiterates (25% of the island's population), child care, and the organization of cooperative stores.

Uphill Struggle. During his campaign for the governorship last fall, Muñoz had electrified voters with a rousing, un-demagogic slogan, "Jalda Arriba!" (Uphill!). To crowds thronging around him he had cried: "The job takes time. We are going uphill." Since then, Jalda Arriba has been set to music and chorused at political rallied.

For Puerto Rico, overcrowded (pop. 2,200,000) and long tied to a one-crop (sugar) economy, the path ahead was indeed uphill. The hardest fact of the island's life is that it has too many people and too little land. Of its 1,000,000 arable acres, 300,000 are in sugar cane, the cash crop. That leaves less than half an acre of land per person for other crops and food production, and much of this land is eroded and exhausted. Unless Puerto Rico can perform a near-miracle of lifting itself by its own economic bootstraps, the problem of feeding the island will surely grow worse. With one of the world's highest birth rates (31.3 v. 24.4 per 1,000 in the U.S.), Puerto Rico's people are increasing at the rate of 69,000 a year. The population has more than doubled in the half-century of U.S. rule; it could double again in a generation.

A small, densely populated country such as Belgium can maintain a decent standard of living without a self-sustaining agriculture, because it has a high-geared industrial plant. But Puerto Rico is too poor in minerals and natural resources ever to support heavy manufacturing. It can and must develop light and medium industry. The alternative would be a future in which only an ever-increasing dole from the U.S. could prevent starvation. That is why Muñoz Marin, applying the self-help principles of the Marshall Plan, has enlisted Puerto Rico in the uphill struggle.

Golden Bullets. In that struggle, money —i.e., private investment—is as basic as hard work. Since 1898 the U.S.—which was first indifferent and then embarrassed about the poor child on its doorstep—has spent over a billion dollars in or on Puerto Rico. Last year the Federal Government, in one way or another, spent $101 million in the island.