Puerto Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean

Since its first publication in 1963, Gordon Lewis's Puerto Rico has established itself and even today remains the definitive book on the subject. This is an in-depth attempt to show the political, social, cultural and even the psychological dimensions of American imperialism, rather than a mere case study in US federalism or as a so-called ‘showcase of democracy’.

Lewis treats the subject historically and descriptively; on the one hand, it is an account of Puerto Rico as a colony, first under Spain and after 1898, under the United States. On the other hand, it is a systematic analysis of contemporary Puerto Rican life, including its politics, economic organisation and socio-cultural make-up, which is as relevant for this new edition as it was forty years ago. By placing the island within its Caribbean setting, the author sought to expand the limited vision then typical of most books on Puerto Rico as simply a tropical extension of the American way of life. In the process, he projected Puerto Rico as a prototype of a new type of relationship between developed and underdeveloped countries. This was to establish Lewis as a maximum authority on not only Puerto Rican politics, but on constitution and political system-building in the Caribbean.

In his Introduction to this new edition of a Caribbean ‘classic' Anthony Maingot writes: ‘there was simply no one writing then, or, for that matter since, who has done the kind of scholarship evident in Lewis's life's work on the Caribbean'.