Early in the afternoon of March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists smuggled pistols inside the U.S. Capitol, entered the visitors’ gallery at the House of Representatives and opened fire on the floor below, where more than 240 members of Congress were voting on an immigration bill.
As the attackers shouted slogans supporting Puerto Rican independence, attempted to unfurl a Puerto Rican flag and fired at random, some representatives believed that firecrackers had been set off. Speaker Joseph W. Martin Jr. (R-Mass.) declared the House in recess, apparently trying to maintain decorum, and took cover behind a marble pillar on the rostrum.
In the frantic minutes before the assailants were overpowered, they wounded five congressmen, all of whom survived. So, too, did the gunmen, the last of whom — Rafael Cancel Miranda — died March 2 at 89. Alternately labeled a terrorist and freedom fighter, he had devoted his life to the cause of Puerto Rican independence and spent a quarter-century behind bars before President Jimmy Carter commuted his sentence.
His death at home in San Juan, the U.S. territory’s capital, was reported by newspapers and confirmed in a Facebook post by his son Rafael Cancel Vázquez, who did not cite a cause.
While Mr. Cancel Miranda faded from memory in Washington, where the Capitol is now heavily fortified with metal detectors and police officers, he acquired a near-mythical status in Puerto Rico. Appearing in his trademark white guayabera summer shirt, he became a fixture of political rallies, wrote books and refused to apologize for a mass shooting that Martin once called “the wildest scene in the entire history of Congress.”
In interviews, Mr. Cancel Miranda and his gun-wielding associates — Lolita Lebrón, Andrés Figueroa Cordero and Irvin Flores Rodríguez — said that they were fighting to free Puerto Ricans from the yoke of American colonialism. The island came under U.S. control after the Spanish-American War and became a commonwealth in 1952, although to Mr. Cancel Miranda and many others it never achieved true self-determination.
“We never controlled our own country,” he told the New York Times in 2016, as the independence movement sought to reassert itself in Puerto Rico. Earlier that year, Congress created a financial oversight panel to manage the island’s crippling debt, drawing accusations that “a dictatorship” was deciding its fate and leading Gov. Alejandro J. García Padilla to appear before a United Nations committee, where he effectively declared that Puerto Rico was still a U.S. colony.
Mr. Cancel Miranda, who stood more than 6 feet tall but was known by the diminutive nickname Pito, was immersed in the independence movement from a young age. The son of a businessman and fiery Nationalist Party leader, he spent two years in a Florida prison after refusing to join the Army and was said to have listened to radio reports from behind bars as anti-colonial revolts rocked Puerto Rico in 1950. Later that year, followers of Harvard-educated nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos tried to assassinate President Harry S. Truman.
Commonwealth status for the island soon followed, and in 1953 the United Nations removed Puerto Rico from its list of “non-self-governing territories.” Keep Reading>>
