Why Puerto Ricans were celebrating

Josi A Cru

The defeat of the US Olympic basketball team by the Puerto Rican 
team was cause for great jubilation in Puerto Rico. The loss by a 
lopsided score of 92-73 was declared "historic" by the press 
because the US has lost only three times in all the Olympic Games 
and this was its first loss since adding professional players in 
1992.

Why such a celebration? It doesn't necessarily mean a medal for 
Puerto Rico. In reality, it means much more. Despite being a 
colony of the US, the victory said, "We are a nation." It became 
a source of national pride, even for those who do not aspire to 
independence for Puerto Rico, which the US took over from Spain 
as a prize during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

In Puerto Rico the right-wing leaders who want this island nation 
to be annexed as a state by the US define Puerto Ricans as an 
ethnic group within the American nation. An overwhelming majority 
of Puerto Ricans has rejected this position. The annexationists 
work to destroy anything that smacks of a separate nation, from 
changing the school menus from Puerto Rican cuisine to American, 
to changing the official names of municipalities into English. 
Behaving as a nation in sports is no different.

In Puerto Rico "sports independence" doesn't only mean not having 
either the government or the political establishment of your own 
country interfering with athletics, it also means having one's 
own national sporting life free and separate from the colonising 
country — the United States.

Puerto Rico organised its own Olympic Committee in 1948, but it 
wasn't fully recognised by the International Olympic Committee 
until 1958. The Olympic Committee of Puerto Rico (COPR) has 
demonstrated a strong sense of independence from US pressures and 
control. The COPR participated in the 1980 games held in Moscow, 
despite a US boycott of the games.

Recently a legislative committee in Puerto Rico proposed that the 
University of Puerto Rico's sports programs disaffiliate from the 
National Collegiate Athletic Association because of rule changes 
that would prohibit Puerto Rican college students from playing in 
Puerto Rican sports leagues.

For Puerto Ricans, participating in international athletic events 
is an affirmation of their own nationality, as much as when the 
Puerto Rican sports authorities (or literary, educational, and 
economic agencies) protest US State Department denials of visas 
to Cubans to prevent them from taking part in Puerto Rican 
activities.

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People's Weekly World