Venezuela to 'Liberate' Puerto Rico? ¡Buena suerte, Pendejos!

Be careful who you threaten to invade...

[Note to Readers: A version of this essay was published Thursday morning (1/16) by American Thinker, and may be seen here.]

If you're not a regular reader of American Thinker, you might not be aware of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro's saber-rattling remarks last weekend about "liberating" Puerto Rico. It's not the sort of thing that the network news thinks is important enough to tell us about, but Monica Showalter's article about it can be seen here.

As Showalter notes, Maduro made his threat at the International Anti-Fascist Festival in Caracas. Like the black-clad hoodlums of "Antifa," Maduro is a Marxist thug who claims to be nobly resisting Fascism.

Most Venezolanos are not too enamorado of their presidente. Because maduro means "ripe," they like to say "Él no está maduro, está podrio" ("He's not ripe, he's rotten”). [Technically, "rotten" is podrido, but podrio is slang.]

He's not even threatening to invade Puerto Rico with his own military, but plans to have the heavy lifting carried out by the military of his socialist ally, Brazil. ¡Buena suerte, Pendejos!

Any talk of invading Puerto Rico reminds me of two things.

The first is my first exposure to Mexicans, when I worked in the apple orchards of Washington's Yakima Valley. I was an "orchard man": I cut boards into props to keep the limbs of the apple trees from breaking under their heavy burden of fruit, and I drove the tractor pulling a trailer full of props through the orchard.

I had driven back to Seattle from my cabin on the Olympic Peninsula near Sequim (pronounced "Skwim") and then on to Cashmere, Washington, on the advice of my friend, the late singer and songwriter "Lonesome" Steve Mitchell, who had worked in the orchards. He told me to go to a bar called "The Veil of Cashmere" ('Get it?) where I would find a bulletin board listing work to be had. I was hired because I was young and strong and spoke enough Spanish to communicate with the pickers and orchard workers, who were whole families of Mexicans who had come North to work in the orchards. The Mexicans lived and cooked their meals in shacks, and I subsisted mostly on apples (Standard Delicious, a variety not seen much anymore) and slept in my hippie panel truck with my white GSD "Ajax," who loved to run alongside the tractor and bite at the tires.

I always got a chuckle out of the Mexicans when I told them about my dog: "Yo le quiero mucho, y él me quiere mucho. Él me da besos y duerme conmigo en la cama. Y ambos somos varones. Pero no somos maricónes, somos solamente buenos amigos."

What does this have to do with Puerto Rico? Well, naturally the Mexicans asked me where I had learned Spanish, and I replied "Nací en Nueva York (I was born in New York) y vivía en un barrio Puertorriqueño (and I lived in a Puerto Rican neighborhood)." And when I said that, all the Mexicans took a little step back.

[I had actually lived not in but adjacent to a Puerto Rican neighborhood, and spent a good bit of time below 14th St. And in grade school and junior high plenty of my classmates were Puertorriqueños.]

It was years later, when I actually spent time in Mexico, that I came to realize that, to Mexicans, the word for "neighborhood" is colonia; to Mexicans barrio, what Borinqueños called their neighborhood in New York, meant "ghetto." So maybe that's why they seemed to take a step back. But, one way or another, there seemed to be a pecking-order among Latin Americans, and the Mexicans seemed to think that Puerto Ricans were nobody to mess with.

Given how many Boricuas have served with distinction in our own armed forces (which Showalter notes in her article), I tend to agree. Consider how many champion boxers are of Puerto Rican heritage. And think of The Sharks in West Side Story.

And the second thing that talk of invading Puerto Rico reminds me of is a line that Humphrey Bogart delivers in Casablanca. When Major Strasser hints that the Nazis may one day occupy New York, Bogart's Rick Blaine cautions him, "There are certain sections of New York I wouldn't advise you to try to invade." The owner of Rick's Cafe might not have been specifically referencing NYC's barrio Puertorriqueño, but substitute "Puerto Rico" for "New York" and that bit of advice is igualmente verdad.

ST