Prohibition in the Land of Rum
“Remember the party we threw on the beach the day Prohibition ended, Nestor?” Abuelo asked his childhood friend. “Don Lolo let us drink the pitorro from the barrels he’d buried in the sand.”
The two men howled at the memory, while I sat in confusion. I was only ten, but I’d learned about Prohibition from watching movies. It involved Chicago, gangsters, machine guns, and bars in basements far from Puerto Rico.
“Of course we had Prohibition,” Abuelo explained to me. “We’re part of the United States, aren’t we?”
The concept blew my mind then, and it still does now that I’ve delved a bit more deeply into the topic. I assumed the U.S. forced Prohibition onto the island with the Jones Act of March1917, along with U.S. citizenship, the English language, and the draft. But no. The Jones Act gave Puerto Ricans the right to vote for or against Prohibition in a referendum that summer. And the Puerto Ricans VOTED YES. What??? I know!
Rum wasn’t just part of the culture, it was a cash cow for the island, responsible for 39 percent of all insular tax revenues. Nobody expected Prohibition to pass, so anti-Prohibitionists didn’t campaign very hard during the twenty weeks before the election. But the Prohibitionists sure did. They tied alcohol to the worst of society’s problems. And, in a stroke of brilliance, appealed to the strong Puerto Rican sense of loyalty. Voting for Prohibition would demonstrate to the Americans that Puerto Ricans appreciated their new status and would honor the work of Luis Muñoz Rivera, the revered statesman who’d helped the Jones Act come to fruition during his years representing Puerto Rico in the U.S. Congress. The moral and emotional arguments hit home, and Prohibition passed by a margin of almost 2 to1.
I like to believe that most people voted for Prohibition with the expectation that it could never be effectively enforced. Puerto Rico boasts six hundred miles of coastline with easy access to other islands where alcohol was legal. The federal government appointed a team of eight agents, four clerks, and one chemist to patrol the coastline, while people continued to distill their own rum—pitorro or cañita—as they had for centuries. Unable to patrol the coast with such meager resources, the Feds targeted the more than ten thousand small stills. While the rich bought smuggled scotch and whisky for up to $60 a case, the small clandestine operations bogged up the courts.
People began to view Prohibition as an American bullying tactic against the poor and regret for passing it set in until it was finally repealed in March of 1934, much to Abuelo’s and the rest of the population’s delight. I shudder to think the world and I came close to being deprived of seeing my great-aunt Amparo do the twist down to the floor after a couple of shots of rum. ¡Salud!
