The Final Days and the Struggle Continues

I never had the privilege to meet Diana Caballero. But she was a presence in my life through her partner, Jose La Luz, a founding member of Democratic Socialists America (DSA) and former national leader I’ve known for nearly two decades. Diana passed away late last year, and today SMC is privileged to share a personal reflection written in 1983 on her experiences in the revolutionary socialist trend of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement. 

From the 1970s to her death, Diana remained a socialist. Her commitment, however, was challenged not just by capitalist hegemony but by abuse at the hands of members of her own organization. Her traumatic experience of being kidnapped and tortured by ostensible comrades resulted from conditions including a rising right, increased political repression, and a sectarian and inward turn on the revolutionary left. The desire to discover traitors overwhelmed the plans to seek out recruits, and carried a steep personal cost.

I find Diana’s history rhyming with today, with lessons about self-destructive behaviors we need to learn from. Despite this tragic story, there is still inspiration. Diana never gave up on mass work. Her organizing focus would shift, but her steadfast commitment to radical transformation held.

Even before I joined the DSA, I grew up respecting movement elders such as Diana and her revolutionary Puerto Rican independentistas. They included the Young Lords Party (YLP). The YLP conducted mass work by asking community members what injustices they experienced. In one famous instance, while some of the YLP cadre expected denunciations of imperialism, the street consensus was that garbage pickup in New York’s El Barrio was under-served compared to other neighborhoods.

The revolutionary socialists listened to the masses and took action. They burned the unpicked garbage to draw attention to neglected service. This action led to more consistent trash pickup and served as a victory for the party and the people.

This story taught me the line between revolutionary and reformist is not always so clear. The direct action tactics were radical in nature, but the ultimate result was sewer socialism: better public services for all. The actions did not shift the balance of power towards labor over capital, but it did show a community that change was possible even if not through traditional means.  

As we enter into a second term of Donald Trump, stories such as this and heroes like Diana can remind us that change is very much possible under difficult circumstances; so we must not succumb to the temptation to abandon mass work and turn on each other. Socialists can be the catalysts in both revolutionary shifts and self-destructive behavior. We know this history – it’s up to us to select the correct path forward.

I was a Young Lord at heart for a very long time but didn't start working with the organization until about 1972. Prior to that I did work with El Comite,' which was another Puerto Rican organization. I started working with the YLP [Young Lords Party] when it was changing to PRRWO [Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization]. I worked in education with parents, working on bilingual education but also with Puerto Rican political prisoners.

This was early 1970s; bilingual education became our civil rights issue. It was a lot of work to get these programs started, to get teachers hired, to get materials for kids, to get parents organized. It's interesting because the education work was what I did and that was what I felt I could contribute, but I think that whole era represented for me a turning point in terms of who I was. It was period of definition as a Puerto Rican.

I also did work with Frente Unido Pro Defensa de los Presos Politicos Puertorriqueños, which was a coalition of Puerto Rican organizations around one common issue, the defense of political prisoners. The Frente Unido, the United Front, brought together all the different defense committees - the Pancho Cruz Defense Committee, the Bengy Cruz Defense Committee, Carlos Feliciano Defense Committee, the Committee to Defend the Nationalists.

My main work was in education in community school district one on the Lower East Side. It was the first time there was a Puerto Rican superintendent in that district, Luis Fuentes. There was a Support Los Ninos slate; it was very active in terms of getting Puerto Rican parents involved in local school board elections. So wanting to give the YLP/Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization recognition for being part of that work, it was important to have people identified openly as being part of a group providing leadership.

Well, this was the early 1970s, I would say '72 and '73, and there was student-organizing work in the high schools as well as on college campuses. But the push was mostly for doing work as close to the working class as possible so that meant working in factories. It meant organization members being pulled out of either student work or work in public schools with parents to go into the factories and work closely with the workers. Organizing in the unions, organizing in the shops was the thrust in the organization. Some members were also working in daycare centers.

When I look at it now, I have one analysis. When I think of it then, at that time, I felt it was the correct thing to do cause I felt, if it's true, we're about to make proletariat revolution, it makes sense to be where the workers are and that's in the factories, so it made a lot of sense to me. But, I also found myself in conflict because having been involved in education and working with parents knowing that our people feel oppression everywhere, not just in the factories. It's our kids, it's the parents, it's our families, so I had that conflict. On the one hand feeling, this is a politically correct move but, on the other hand, having conflict with it and saying this other work is important as well.

I was being told "you're such a petty bourgeois element; you don't want to leave this education work, but eventually you're gonna have to go and go into the factories, and the reason you don't want to do that is because it's hard labor". I felt that's not the reason; there's work that has to be done here as well. This was one of the reasons why, in 1976, I was one of the first during that period to be purged from the organization. They kept telling me, "you're a petty bourgeois element. You should be going to the point of production, and your wanting to work in the community is a counter revolutionary act that you should pay for."

By this time, there was no storefront or anything like that. The visibility of the organization in the community was through individuals. There was not the kind of presence where the community can say that organization is involved in this community.

We were organized into sections. I was part of the community section that involved people who were working in the public schools; it involved people who were working in daycare centers. We'd talk about the work, what was happening in this center, what was happening in that school, who were the people we could organize. We met at people's homes, and we'd meet for marathon meetings, sometimes four or five hours. Meetings would go on till two or three o'clock in the mourning. First, we'd have a study section on politics, economy, on Marxism, Leninism; then the last thing on the agenda was a discussion about the work in that particular area, and many times we never got to that.

There was always a Central Committee, and there was a responsible cadre in the sections who would then be accountable to the Central Committee, who reported back to the other level of leadership. Most of what was happening was the study and preparing for the development of a new political party and for proletarian revolution. Everything had to be geared in that direction. If my work in education, my work with parents associations did not talk about proletarian revolution, I was criticized, and I was told I was a "petty bourgeois element" that I was going against the wishes of the organization.

I wanted to feel that I was doing the right thing for my community, and I looked upon these people as the ones who knew so much more than I did. Therefore, what they were saying had to be right, but I was also conflicted because I had a difference of opinion but was afraid to verbalize it.

Whenever there was a dissenting voice, the leaderships from above would make sure that voice would conform to what the leadership was thinking. If you had a dissenting voice, it was internal; you couldn't verbalize that or you were in a lot of trouble if you did. It was a very interesting period of repression on a number of levels.

It was 1976. At that point, what the organization was doing was uniting with other groups from around the country. Different groups that had started as the organization did, being community oriented, eventually evolved into groups that talked about revolution in a very abstract way and talked about organizing in a very abstract way. Discussions at that time had to do with what was happening internationally with the Soviet Union or with China and basically that was the work, just trying to bring together these forces to build this new Communist Party in this country and have a revolution.

People have blamed the police for infiltrating and moving the organizing in that direction. I don't think it is all due to that. I think there was still some people who were coming to this from a good place and felt it was the right thing to do, and then I think some people were into some grandiose plans to make a mark.

Whenever I verbalized you have to organize the grass roots; you have to work with parents; you have to think about what's happening in classrooms as well; I'd be criticized for that. I kept doing my work a certain way, and I kept getting criticized. I was singled out and my compañero at that time was also singled out because his ties to the student movement were very strong. We were targeted, and I would say that at that time we probably were the two in the New York area that had the closest ties with community and were criticized for having those ties. The leadership targeted us cause we were not kowtowing to what leadership was saying we had to do.

I remember being at a meeting of the community section and seeing leadership people coming in. After about two hours, I realized that I was being targeted. Being attacked verbally and criticized for the work that I was doing and told that I would have to be taken to another place or someone else's home. They said, they had to talk to me because they felt that I was conspiring against the organization. This was all very preliminary.

I felt they were honestly making a mistake about what I was doing, but I was taken from that meeting and kept for three days, questioned, terrorized. Terrorized verbally, terrorized physically, terrorized by people in leadership who at one time I respected very much and being questioned and being interrogated and being told to stay awake all night or if I fell asleep I would be hit so I would be awake to answer questions. It took about a day and a half for me to realize that I was being accused of fractionalizing and organizing against the organization and doing the work of the police.

At this time, I was alone trying to figure out how long this would go on before I could leave and go home. Looking out the window to see if there were ways that I could escape. Trying to be as honest as I possibly could about things that I was being asked. I was very afraid. I didn't know what was gonna go on, and I didn't know where my compañero thought I was either. I didn't know what was happening with him. Meanwhile, he had also been kidnapped and taken some place, beaten and also questioned. Finally, they had me for three days; they had him for two days, and they brought us together on the third day beaten up with a group of about ten to twelve people. Some people who I didn't know were involved in this. They brought us together in the home of one of the members and beat us in front of each other. The leadership of the organization wanted people to think that we were police infiltrators and organizing for the police.

We were targeted because we maintained ties with community. That was a motivating force in our being targeted during that phase, which was 1976. The leadership pretty much convinced others in the organization because they accused us of working with the police, of having infiltrated the organization, and working with the police to destroy the organization.

A lot of that was kept from us. In fact, when the things were happening to us during that three-day period and even after that, people didn't know, all the other younger people especially in the organization didn't know that had happened to us either. People didn't find out for months later so it was very well kept, very well kept.

It's difficult to remember, but I remember a couple of things having to do with my relationship with Iris [Morales.] Basically it was brought up a couple of times, and how interesting it was to them that we had a relationship in terms of our similar thinking and that we were still in connection.

Some of the people who participated were people who I had considered close friends, who I supported economically. We had to give half our paychecks to the organization, as well as my compañero’s paycheck. We did with all good intentions because we felt it was our responsibility to do that; these were people we knew, people who I worked with in the community section, people who had been leadership in the organization since the beginning who I had tremendous respect for and other people who I didn’t know.

At the meeting we started from thinking that this was just another criticism self-criticism session, that we could talk this through, but after about a day, I started realizing there's some irrationality going on, and things happening that I didn't completely understand. There was a point where my feeling was if you want to hear me say that I don't want to work with the working class, even though that's not in my heart, I felt that’s what I was gonna say it because I felt whatever I said didn't matter. But it didn't start like that. It started with what I thought was gonna be the honest exchange, which turned into something that was very irrational, very sick and very traumatic.

At the point when they brought my compañero and myself together, we realized the quicker we said what we had to say the quicker we could get out there. They left us alone after they beat us up. I said, "they gonna kill us," and he said they possibly could. We knew they were coming back; we knew we just had little time, this was all instinct; it was get up now or we don't get out. They left us with a younger person, and we were able to physically get out of there fast. Where the strength came, after not having slept for three days or eaten for three days, the strength came in that we were determined to get out of there. So we had to find our way out. I had to break a bottle over the man's head who was watching us, tear the phone out of the wall, grab our stuff and get out of there. It was March in the middle of the night.

Our first instinct was to go to family. For the next weeks, we lived in terror, in fear. It's amazing because you feel that these people were omnipotent, that they can find me, that they could tap our phones. They didn't have that power, but at that point you're so vulnerable and so scared and so weak, because it was their intention to do that, that you feared for your life. So it was our underground period where no one knew where we were; we didn't speak with anyone; we needed to put our strength together and reflect on what just took place and try to figure out what's gonna go on in our lives from now on because it was a total disconnect with a world that we had been very much part of for a number of years, intensely a part of.

The disruption was very traumatic, and it was not easy to put ourselves together, but we had the support of family that helped us, a very nourishing environment, which is very important, a very stable environment. At some point, we were saying, I don't want to know from this kind of work. But I kept thinking, if I really believed in this then, I would still believe in this regardless of what happened. If I believe that there has to be change, and if I believe that we have to work and be organized and make real change then I'm gonna believe it even now. But you're also trying to think of how you're going to protect yourself, how you're going to live, how you're gonna move around in the world, in the city never, mind the world. But it took us weeks. We talked about it everyday; we'd talk a little bit more trying to work through what happened, what took place, what are we going to do now. Then we started making connections with people that we felt we could trust. We thought about the people that had also gone through this before we did.

We didn’t know how this would be brought out in terms of the movement and how people would know what happened and what took place, but we started making connections with some of the people that had left the organization, either voluntarily left or also traumatized to leave. So those connections started happening, and we had to put our lives back together; we had to do that. It meant where we were gonna work, how we were gonna watch after each other; how we were gonna be secure; how we were gonna live.

We received a telegram through one of the family members. Mixed feelings, you know, on the one hand it was, wow, there are people reaching out to us. We saw the list of people who were reaching out to us, we said, my God that's some mighty mixed group of people. Mixed in the sense of the people who united and were coming together for this; that was real important that reaching out.

Well after putting the pieces together, I mean first it meant getting our personal lives together in terms of a safe environment, to live, in terms of work. I continued my work in education outside of New York City. I went to work in Long Island, working with parents, working with teachers, doing work in bilingual education. My work in Long Island was very good work while still being afraid for my life looking around me at all times, wondering if anyone was gonna grab me again, and kidnap me again.

We also knew that where there is injustice, you have to organize against that injustice. How we would do that, we didn't know. We eventually came back and started doing more political work. Our coming back was working with the committee to free the Nationalist political prisoners and working with some people that had already been organizing for a number of years in that area. Going back to do that kind of work meant putting out a newsletter, speaking about the case of the Nationalists. Little by little making ties with different people who were involved and getting our strength back and our ability to do be able to do the things that we believed. There was a takeover of the Statue of Liberty and that came about as a result of the work of the committee to free the Nationalists. This also became a time of working with other groups as well so the Statue of Liberty takeover involved not just Puertorriqueños or African-Americans, it involved some folks from the White community that also believed in this and wanted to be part of something together because the Statue of Liberty takeover was to put forward very publicly the situation with the Nationalists and the importance of their freedom.

When I came into the movement in 1970-1971, I came in because of the Nationalist prisoners, my learning about being Puertorriquena, my learning about these revolutionaries from Puerto Rico that committed these acts to me were acts of a fight against injustice and acts that had to do with the self-determination of Puerto Rico. It was important work for me to again say I wanna get involved in this, and I did. It was interesting because I remember the first time that it was shared with me that there was gonna be this act taking over the Statue of Liberty. I said wait a minute, we just got kidnapped, tortured; we're just putting our lives back together again, and how are we going to takeover the Statue of Liberty. I said wait a minute, I was not gonna do what I did before, which was follow blindly whatever I was told to do because it was the politically correct thing to do. They've got to convince me. I have to understand it, I have to embrace it, not be forced into it, and this is what happened. It was really having a dialogue about why this was important for us to do, and I got involved. I drove the car; it was timed just right. I had to get to the ferry to take that ferry to the statue at a certain time, and everything had to be timed just right. I mean it was putting together the best skills of the people involved; the skills to organize, the skills to educate because it was an educational campaign as well. It was bringing together things that should have been brought together cause that's what you do to organize. You organize, you educate, you involve people, there's dialogue, there's process, it's not just cut and dry. It was bringing together a good group of people that knew exactly what to do, and it was an act that went down in history and that I'm very proud to have been part of.

Taking the Statue of Liberty brought international attention to the imprisonment of the Nationalist political prisoners, which was an important thing to do because we knew we had to get them out of jail. The time was right to do that, but also it brought together groups of people and organizations from our own community that many times did not work together for whatever political reasons, brought us together, cause it was an issue that we could find unity around. Seeing the Statue of Liberty with the Puerto Rican flag on her head on every major newspaper in this country and internationally again was significant in terms of el Puertorriqueno and our struggle. The role that I played contributed to that action because as our community started coming down to South Ferry; people had started hearing it on the radio or reading about it on the paper. People started coming down, the press came down, and myself and another compañero were the ones responsible for organizing what had to be done on this side while the other compañeros were at the statue. Our work involved the press; it involved the education and bringing together of the people that came down. At one point, I was almost flown out on a helicopter to bring food to our prisoners at the Statue of Liberty. It was something that brought people together, and we were able to really execute this act. The Nationalist prisoners were not just an issue belonging to the Left or an issue belonging to the Puerto Rican movement, it was an issue belonging to the Puerto Rican people.

Bueno, the release, the final release was an incredible day. We were over at the church on 59th and 10th Avenue, and there they were, these people that we had read about. There they were in person Lolita, Rafael, Irving, Oscar, Andres. The release of the Nationalist was an amazing celebration in our community. This was something that touched the heart of all Puerto Ricans, all Puerto Ricans who were there to greet them. Lolita was given the Puerto Rican flag that hung on the Statue of Liberty, so that was also quite an experience to see her get this flag, and then take it to Puerto Rico and put it at Don Pedro Albizu Campo's grave. It was incredible. I guess looking at the Puerto Rican prisoners that we have today, it is important to take lessons from the work that was done to free the Nationalists and always know that it can be done. It’s got to be organized. We still have political prisoners.

During the late 1970s, beginning of the '80s, was when a lot of us saw ourselves getting involved around issues of media racism and the depiction of Puerto Ricans in the media was important especially since the movie with the great white liberal, Paul Newman, was coming out, Fort Apache the Bronx. An incredibly effective campaign, because even though the movie did come out, the issues about racism historically, not just with the Puerto Rican community, with the Chicano community, with Asian community; those issues were finally brought to the forefront in a very organized way. It was a campaign that took on all different fronts from dealing with the press around the issue, to organizing, to disrupting filming of the movie.

For a lot of us in New York the issues around the political prisoners and the media racism got us involved again. We saw the need to build an organization of Puertorriqueños. It couldn't just be getting involved in an issue; it had to be something more than that. It also meant all of us accepting the fact that we were ready to do this, and we were. Not just in New York but also in Philadelphia, some of our folks from Chicago, from New Jersey began to talk about the need to bring together our people to organize something that would struggle for the democratic rights of our people. It took two years of discussions, dialogue, of people meeting in different communities, Puerto Rican communities, different parts of the country. It took two years to form the National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights, an important organization that had its founding convention in New York City in 1981. It organized and brought us together to be analytical about the issues, to begin organizing once again, to learn from the mistakes of the past and hopefully not make them again. The driving force was the need to bring people together in an organized form.

The basic mission of the Congress was to fight for the basic democratic rights of the Puerto Rican people in this country on a lot of different levels. It also meant a fight on the electoral level. It meant looking at what our fight was. Was it democratic rights of the Puerto Rican people in this country? Then how to organize that fight on all different fronts and accepting that all different fronts are viable not that one is better than the other, but that they are all viable and that everyone has a contribution to make in all those areas.

There was a lot of work also with the labor movement besides the work in education, with political prisoners, and against racism by the police in our community. We had chapters in Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey. We were looking at the base, because one of the mistakes we made in the past was just mechanically applying things to different situations, and it just doesn't work that way. That was significant in terms of the National Congress. It had different areas of work and actual involvement in the electoral arena. The organization didn't run candidates but did support people's efforts to run. That was something very different. My involvement in education naturally took me to work around school board elections, which was work that I've done for a number of years, but it gave me a different approach, a different outlook about school board elections and learning how to negotiate the system. The National Congress was different from the traditional Puerto Rican leadership. We wanted to find our way to do this learning from the good things from the traditional leadership, avoiding the bad things from that traditional leadership. Learning how to do this and how to negotiate the system in a very different way. It's not the usual power broker type mentality. How you negotiate the system for it to work, for you to change it, for you to impact on it because it's gotta work for us. It's a very different approach.

Bilingual education was a constant issue, the cornerstone of our civil rights issues. It was also an issue that brought together Puertorriqueños with other Latinos, with undocumented workers, with new immigrants, not just Latinos but with the Asian community, especially with the Haitian community. It was an issue that touched all of us; it was coalition building. An issue that was very significant and still is because we've got the 1994 version of English Only right before us now.

In the National Congress my work was to organize the national task force for bilingual education, which brought me together with people from Pennsylvania, New Jersey Puerto Ricans from different parts of the East Coast. That work meant testifying in Washington DC, which was also something I never thought I would be doing, actually testifying at federal hearings about bilingual education. The work was national in scope; it meant also organizing parents, which was local in scope; it meant bringing those things together.

When I was elected to leadership in the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, it indicated to me a recognition of something that took a long time for me to recognize in myself, which was the ability to be the leader of something. I never look at leaders as individuals. One of the good things about having been doing the work in the organization during the '70s is this collective thinking; collective spirit is something very positive and very important. There is not one leader; there is a collective of leadership, but I did get elected to leadership twice. I became the President in 1983, and I served two terms until 1987. The first elected woman President in the organization. Not an easy period. Difficult, a major responsibility I took on with all heart and soul behind it.

I've been a community activist for like the last twenty-five years and most of my work has been education. I believed then, as I believe now, that there has to be a fundamental change in the way that children are educated in this country, in particular the Puertorriqueño and Latino children. One real positive experience that the Congress gave me was knowing how to organize different sectors of people and how to build coalitions. Many of us education activists here in New York felt that we also had to build a coalition effort among Puertorriqueños and Latinos because what we kept doing was responding to the crisis as opposed to having a real plan on how to deal with the crisis of education of Latino kids. So in 1984 many of us got together there was ASPIRA, the Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos, the Puerto Rican Educators Association, the Association of Progressive Dominicans, a parents group from District 3, the National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights - and talked about what is it that we were going to do and how is it that we're going to do it.

In 1984, we organized into the Puerto Rican Latino Education Round Table, a coalition of our community organizations of educators, of parents, to respond proactively to the crisis. In that response, it meant knowing how to do things on a policy level and knowing and continuing with the grassroots ties. This coalition was very important because it wasn't just the usual good government type group that talks about advocacy and policy but has no ties with their community. The coalition, the Round Tables’ definition of itself was very important because we knew we had to do the work in all those different levels, but all those different levels had to be done and brought together. We've been together for little over ten years as a group. It's organizational membership, individual membership, people who have a mission in education, people who feel there has to be educational transformation. We've been involved still with our bilingual education issue. Also taking it out of that framework and looking at the issue of education of Latino kids because bilingual education is not just where our kids are in. In New York City only one in every four Latino kids are in bilingual programs, but embracing the issue of bilingualism and bi-literacy, the right to speak and learn in your language. We've been involved with the English Only movement, school board elections every few years, coalition building with other groups involved in education in New York City, dealing with the issues of decentralization and legislation to change the way the New York City school system is governed, working with parents. Right now my involvement, especially for the last two years, has been with a whole new initiative on school reform in New York City, which is to build small schools within this large institution of one million kids. We've got about 350,000 Latino kids in this system, and they're in the worst schools, the most over crowded situations, segregated situations. We still have the highest dropout rate of any other group. Even though we're organizing you know if we weren't there, it would be worse. But my work right now has been very directed towards helping to build a school, The Leadership Secondary School, which looks at our kids as leadership and tries to develop that potential. Our work is a lot in terms of impacting the direction school reform is taking, especially in New York City. With Latinos creating a vision and Latinos articulating a vision and Latinos implementing a vision of the education of Latino students. Our school, along with the El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, are the only two schools in this whole initiative to build new schools that are guided by a Latino vision.

I was Nationalist just like everyone else. When the YLP went to Puerto Rico, it was developing pride and nationalism so I found it a good thing. With the National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights, our focus is on the democratic rights of Puertorriqueños, but part of our platform also is to support the self-determination of Puerto Rico and how that support is actualized is not the same as going to that country. Then, I was worked up with that Nationalist pride and feeling. But now, it's the community struggles here; and the community there has the right to its self-determination, which means that the people in Puerto Rico determine.

That whole '60s period was so important, and I'm so glad I lived through it and was able to be part of it. A lot of people also became role models for me, a lot of the men and women from YLP especially those who are here today still doing their work tremendous role models and tremendous inspiration. But these days, my role models are the young people. Usually the role model is the older person, la que sabe, the experienced one. This next generation of our young people, you know, we've lost one generation, but there's another generation there that I'm not about to lose and that we can't lose. The kind of organizing, the kind of thinking the kind of participation, the kind of work that they're doing, it is incredible. It just keeps me going, and it helps me realize that all this was worth it because of what I see happening today.