Blanca Canales Quotes

I was in jail for 16 years and 10 months, almost 17 years. The empire does not give recognition to the political prisoner.

There was racial separation in jail. In one section the white prisoners, in another section the Black prisoners; I was placed with the whites. After a few years they passed an integration law in the jail. The white prisoners refused to abide by that law. I and a group of white communist prisoners decided to struggle against this racism and show those people some decency and the reality that we are all the same. We were the first to integrate. From then on, united with my Black companeras, I enjoyed the best years I had to do in that prison.

The schools I went to only taught yanqui history. You know stuff like George "I never told a lie" Washington, Bunker Hill, Lincoln freed the slaves. The schools were run by yanquis and discouraged the teaching of Puerto Rican history. But I had a teacher once, Carmen Maria Torres, who used to smuggle into the schools books on Puerto Rican history and she would spend time telling us about Puerto Rican heroes like Betances, and the revolution in Lares on September 23, 1968-I felt re-born.

Today Puerto Rico is suffering the most monstruous intervention as our territory is surrounded with land bases and submarine bases with powerful atomic weapons that, because of the smallness of the island, can cause the destruction of all the Puerto Ricans and the total disappearance of the island from the map of the world. And as if this horrible menace were not enough, genocide is being perpetrated in the most shameless way with a massive house to house campaign to force the women to use a u.s. form of birth control. The plan is to prevent the birth of more Puerto Ricans. At the same time, they stop the advancement of our youth when they recruit them to take them to their deaths in the fields of Vietnam. On the other hand, they have no qualms in firing over the heads of the Puerto Ricans who live on the island of Culebra and the u.s marines have the audacity to ask that the people of Culebra abandon their island because the almighty marine of the biggest empire in the world has decided to use this island as a target for their military practices.

I believe that all of today's movements are important. What is needed is unity to achieve the independence of our nation. Some times posters, other times fires, strikes, votes, all that is necessary. My hopes lie with the youth, because you have the ability to carry the word onward.