Puerto Rican bombing in NY

A couple of years ago, I did a talk about Christmas with my daughter and family in Vermont and maybe because it sounded like a Victorian countryside Christmas in excelsis – a preposterously romanticised Christmas card, what with the snow knee-deep outside and blanketing every roof and ledge with massive slabs of icing and what with all the food, the chicken, the turkey, the venison raised or shot in the vicinity and the children sledding in brilliant sunshine at 30 below zero – anyway, a surprising number of people in other and duller landscapes took to it and in November and early December I got letters from them saying, like merry children who want you to read the same story over and over, saying, 'We hope you're going to Christmas in Vermont again.'

Well, we did go again up to northern Vermont and I will make it brief so as to let down lightly all those moppets gathered round the fireside or the stove side for their favourite story. I can give you the gist of it in a sentence or two. On Christmas morning, my son-in-law said, 'Do you realise that it's 88 degrees warmer than it was on Christmas morning two years ago?' Well, I certainly realised. On Christmas morning 1980, we looked out on a brilliant sky and two ten-foot high rolling hills of snow just outside the house which had not been there two days before. They turned out, after some powerful shovelling, to be motor cars. The outside thermometer registered 32 degrees below zero. For oldsters who count differently, let's say 64 degrees of frost.

On Christmas morning 1982 there was not a flake of snow in sight and the same thermometer registered 56 degrees Fahrenheit. A good many of the local people were glum indeed. My son-in-law's closest friend, a merry, handsome youth in a sweater, corduroys and absolutely ordinary shoes – an exotic sight up there in December – he came in and he was thinking of petitioning the president – the President of the United States, that is – to have the state of Vermont declared a disaster area. He, the merry youth, has just been elected Lieutenant-Governor of the state and he takes his duties as seriously as any other young man suddenly elevated to political grandeur. But there was nothing extreme or grandiose about the suggestion of disaster.

Vermont, for all its great, rolling beauty, its very green valleys, its forested mountains, is a poor state. It has only half a million people in an area a little larger than Wales. The deceptively beautiful grass and crops are a very thin layer on glacial soil that has rocks and boulders just below the surface. You might guess at the existence of that grim bedrock from the fact that its chief crops are apples, syrup from the maple trees and hay. It's famous also for the quality of its marble. One whole end facade of the United Nations building in New York is made of it.

But the total value of its minerals – granite, marble, slate – is $49 million, whereas its really big income, $450 millions a year, comes from tourists, mainly from the legions of visitors who trek there in the blinding scarlet and gold of the fall on what are called 'foliage' tours and the skiers who start up there in November, leave around March but who pack every village and inn and motel and ski lodge and ski lift around the Christmas and New Year holidays. Well, now you can see why a snow-less Christmas is at once a freak and a disaster. The ski industry figures that it has lost so far, something over $100 million, a very bleak consideration in a state where the average per capita income is $7,800.

There was a minor disaster brewing for a great friend of ours who came up to stay with us – a big, bearded, giant of a man who spends his Christmases in Greece or Louisiana or Hollywood or France, wherever he happens to be making a picture. He's a movie art director, the deceptively simple term which takes in not only designing and building all the indoor and outdoor sets, transforming the land and the look of one country into the look of another. He built a Western ghost town in southern Spain and he put up Cape Cod cottages on the Norfolk seashore where they shot the movie 'Julia'.

But it also means adapting electrical supply systems to primitive places, shipping in the food for the cast, calculating the timed sequence of explosive flares that will set a whole mansion on fire – he had to do that once, a year or two ago, on Long Island – and a thousand other items of expertise that take in everything from finding a Napoleonic desk or a fifteenth-century Spanish frame or a non-reflective surface for a panelled wall and finding the proper sort of tomato juice or other liquid that will photograph like blood.

Well, you may have guessed. He's doing a comedy with Walter Matthau about getting through the Arctic winter in Vermont. It's to be called, 'The Survivors'. Big joke! The day they were to begin shooting this Saturday, it was grey and still up there, 33 degrees and no snow. So, he'd already ordered the snow machines to drive up from New York. They no longer use cornflakes. They make snow exactly as desperate owners of ski slopes make snow, but you can imagine the cost of making and tumbling enough snow on a swatch of Vermont, wide and deep enough to suggest that the main purpose of life up there in winter is survival.

Still, this is a picture with a modest budget, no more, I understand, than $18 million. Can you imagine that? I was alive and well and sentient and beginning to turn grey haired when, in the 1930s, Hollywood announced to an awe stricken world, a colossal, a super-colossal, production – the first million-dollar movie.

Well, so much for Christmas. Would you like to hear about New Year's Eve back in New York? As the clock and the bells struck midnight, we looked out of our windows over Central Park and in the clear western sky there was a sudden shower of colour, fountains of rockets going off with a tremendous bang. These noises muted some other bangs coming from Downtown – the bang of bombs placed outside police headquarters and two federal buildings in Lower Manhattan.

The police didn't have to wait long to pin down or pin up a suspect. He obligingly called a local radio station after the first two bombs had gone off and was taped announcing that, 'We are responsible for the bombings.' We, being the F-A-L-N – the Armed Forces of National Liberation, a Puerto Rican terrorist group. The caller's voice was identified by a relapsed member of the FALN who has turned government witness.

It's not been so many years since even a New Yorker would have wondered at the initials F-A-L-N. We wonder no more. The Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional is the most active of Puerto Rican terrorist groups and the one that vows not to submit or yield until Puerto Rico is an independent nation. The political or quasi-sovereign status of Puerto Rico and the wishes of its inhabitants makes for the United States a burden not unlike the burden of Northern Ireland on Britain and the burden of exploration and empire has fallen, down the centuries, very heavily on its people.

Columbus came on it only a year after he set foot in the New World on the beaches of El Salvador. Sixteen years later, Ponce de Leon arrived and with him the Conquistadors who, even in an establishment text book on the history of American government, are described as 'falling like a blight upon the simple, island people who were then almost wholly ignorant of warfare'. So bitter was their enslavement that the original population was reduced from some 100,000 to 5,000 in less than a quarter of a century. Those who were not slain or had not died under the floggings of Spanish overseers or were unable to escape to other islands poisoned themselves and their children, or walked into the sea to await the shark.

The conquerors came on in waves, generation after generation, but the historic break with Spain came in 1898 with the brief but decisive Spanish-American war. Puerto Rico was ceded by treaty to the United States as a protectorate. When the Spaniards left San Juan, they lost their last foothold in this hemisphere.

For the first quarter of this century Puerto Rico was an outer, or outlying, possession and during the tenure of the one American president who yearned for an American empire, Teddy Roosevelt, was actually called the capital outpost of the Caribbean empire of the United States. Well, various amending acts have changed its status. It is a self-governing part of the United States – a commonwealth, with the same control of its affairs as any state of the union.

The Puerto Ricans are American citizens and, therefore, have right of free entry. This has been a problem in the past 30 years or so. The mayor of New York back then pointed figuratively to the Statue of Liberty and said, 'Come to us! Bring us your poor, your huddled masses!' And he expected that several thousand would take him up on it. Well, from an island with a population of four and a half million, one and a half million left for the mainland. Most, in the early days, to pack into the stews of Harlem to set up an unbearable tension between them and the blacks. Since then, they have scattered or come in to Miami, to Texas and up into the Midwest.

The ambiguous status of Puerto Ricans in their homeland makes for a mischievous spur to protest and rebellion. Though they are American citizens, they don't vote in national elections. They have one representative in Congress who has no vote, but they also pay no federal income taxes. Their industries and sugar and coffee plantations are heavily subsidised by the United States. There are protest movements, groups that want their country to become the 51st state and the FALN, that wants total independence.

Every time a referendum is taken, the overwhelming vote of the people is against independence, against statehood for the status quo. You can see why the Puerto Rican problem reminded me of the other troubles across the sea.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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