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Steve Howell is a journalist, author and former communications consultant. He has appeared as a political commentator on the BBC, ITV, LBC, Sky News and various podcasts and has contributed features and opinion pieces to publications such as The Nation, Big Issue, and The Guardian.

His latest book – Cold War Puerto Rico – examines the dissonance between American democratic rhetoric and the imperial reality of Washington’s dealings with its Caribbean colony. Focusing on the period from the 1945 to 1970, it shows how the US gave the island the appearance of autonomy while using repressive measures, orchestrated by the FBI, to silence activists and political parties pushing for full independence.

In this conversation with Tanya Singh, Howell delves deeper into the themes of his book, shedding light on the histories of McCarthyism and the infrastructure of communist repression. 

Tanya Singh: The book opens with your discovery of the FBI files on your father, which sent you on a journey that you say began 'without a thesis to prove or much sense of what I would uncover.' At what point in your research did you realize that your father's personal story was not an outlier or a footnote, but rather a thread that connected the Smith Act indictments, the HUAC hearings in San Juan, and the COINTELPRO operations in Puerto Rico? And did the process of writing this book change your understanding of who your father was—or who you are?

Steve Howell: I knew before receiving any of the FBI files that my father had been politically active in Puerto Rico in the 1940s, before I was born. He had talked about it occasionally when I was a child and his close friend, César Andreu Iglesias, had visited us in London in 1969. César is considered to have been Puerto Rico’s foremost Marxist but I didn’t know much about his role at the time. The papers my father left when he died in 1987 included the cartoons he'd produced for progressive publications under the pen names Diego Munoz and Pepe. That added to the story, but I didn’t appreciate the jeopardy these had put him in until 2017 when – after a long battle – I received the FBI files. Though incomplete and heavily redacted, they revealed the extent of the investigation that the FBI had mounted while he was in Puerto Rico to link him to the cartoons and that, even after leaving the United States in 1949, he’d remained under FBI investigation for two decades. The files showed that he had been under a series of ‘watch notices’ in case he returned to the US, that FBI agents had questioned several of his friends about him during the 1950s – including, in one case, explicitly with a HUAC subpoena in mind – and that his first wife had given the FBI a statement about his activities that was designed to be “admissible in court.” There were even memos from J Edgar Hoover to top CIA officials about him, but my separate FOIA to obtain their files on him was met with a refusal to confirm or deny their existence on national security grounds. From all this, it was clear that my father would have suffered the same fate as his Puerto Rican comrades had he not lived in Britain, which he must have known because he was still in touch with César. Discovering this did make me see him and my own childhood in a different light. For example, I realise now that he was careful what he said about his past political activities and that he had constructed a sanitised story about why he came to Britain for his wider circle of friends and colleagues. I also realise that his time in Puerto Rico was the defining, formative experience of his life and that he must have felt angry but helpless about the persecution his friends were suffering. The effect on me was to feel a strong connection with those people myself and to feel their story had to be told.

TS: In the book you write that Puerto Rico has been rendered 'virtually invisible' in standard histories of McCarthyism, despite having more Smith Act indictments than all but two US states. Given that you frame this erasure as stemming from Puerto Rico's liminal status—'foreign to the United States in a domestic sense'—do you see this historical invisibility as primarily a failure of US historians to look beyond the mainland, or does it reflect a deeper, more deliberate colonial logic wherein repression of Puerto Rican independence movements simply didn't 'count' as McCarthyism because the island's people were never fully recognized as political subjects deserving of the same civil liberties protections as stateside Americans?

SH: As I was doing my own research, it was very striking how histories of ‘McCarthyism’ and the FBI have almost entirely ignored Puerto Rico. For example, Beverly Gage’s 837-page biography of J Edgar Hoover, published in 2022, does not even have Puerto Rico in its index. From reading the book, the only brief reference to the colony I found was incorrect: it said COINTELPRO had been extended to the island in 1962 rather than 1960, as the FBI’s own files show. The date is significant because it means the FBI’s covert destabilisation programme was used against Puerto Rican groups before it was used against Martin Luther King Jnr and the civil rights movement, albeit only by five months. I don’t know why Gage made this mistake or gave so little attention to Puerto Rico, but her blindness is the norm. Of the two explanations you mention, I think both are to blame and they are hard to separate. There is no doubt that there is much more concern in the US about spying on Americans than on foreigners. Puerto Rico’s ambiguous status then comes into play – possibly subliminally – because it doesn’t really count as domestic spying. Either way, I don’t think it’s a good look – for US historians or progressive activists – to have ignored the repression of Puerto Ricans in the way they have.

TS: Your book traces how the legal infrastructure for anti-communist repression—the Hatch Act, the Dies Committee, the Smith Act—was largely built by conservative Democrats like Carl Hatch, Martin Dies, and Howard W. Smith between 1938 and 1940, years before Joseph McCarthy entered the scene. You also show that J. Edgar Hoover had already placed Puerto Ricans on his "custodial detention" list by 1941, while the US and USSR were still allies. Given this timeline, and your revelation that Puerto Rico's own "Gag Law" (Law 53) was rushed through the legislature in 1948 as a local replica of the Smith Act, do you see Puerto Rico as simply a colonial laboratory where mainland legal tools were tested and refined, or did the island's unique liminal status—neither fully domestic nor foreign—actually force the FBI and its congressional allies to innovate new forms of repression that would later be re-imported to the mainland for use against the civil rights movement and the New Left?

SH: I think the attitude and tactics of J Edgar Hoover and other key figures in Washington evolved over the period the book covers. In the early 1940s, Hoover undoubtedly saw Puerto Rico’s pre-eminent politician, Luis Muñoz Marín, as a threat. But he began to regard Muñoz Marín as an ally once it became clear that he would not pursue independence. A turning point came when the Nationalist leader Albizu returned to the island in 1947 - having been in prison in the US - and attracted huge crowds wherever he spoke. In response to that threat, the Gag Law was rushed through because, I think, Washington wanted Muñoz Marín – who became Puerto Rico’s first elected governor in 1948 - to be their front man if an open revolt started, as it did in 1950. In the anti-colonial environment of the time, it was preferable for it to look as if Muñoz Marín was dealing autonomously with a domestic problem. However, by 1954, that strategy was running out of road. After Muñoz Marín’s police made a hash of trying to arrest the communist leadership in March of that year, Hoover by-passed the Puerto Rican authorities and used his own agents to round them up to face indictment under the Smith Act later that year. From then on, Muñoz Marín continued to be sidelined as HUAC held its hearings in 1959 and then when COINTELPRO was introduced in 1960. I think it’s generally the case that the coercive agencies of imperial powers use colonies to test methods that are then available to be applied against their own dissidents. The Gag Law may have been passed after the Smith Act but it was used in a much more sweeping way than its precursor, and Hoover was known to be disappointed that he wasn’t given licence to use the Act to make more arrests in the US itself. Similarly, I think COINTELPRO being used first in Puerto Rico allowed the FBI to try out various tactics there that would then be used against US groups.

TS: Now that the book is complete, what's next for you as a writer and historian? Are there other chapters of this story that you plan to explore? And for our readers who want to go deeper into Puerto Rican history, beyond the red scare, which books would you point them to first—whether on the island's colonial status, its labor movements, its cultural history, or its ongoing struggles for self-determination?

SH: My interest is now turning in two directions. I am looking more closely at the way the FBI used MI5 to spy on people in Britain, as they did with my father. When Atlanticists boast of ‘intelligence sharing’ this includes – and probably is mainly – from spying on their own citizens and colonial subjects. In relation to Puerto Rico itself, I am delving further into how its colonial economy has evolved and the value the US has been extracting from the island, both as a military asset and from the wealth it produces. Around a third of the GDP that Puerto Rico creates is repatriated to the US in profits, dividends, rent and interest every year.

On the latter point, a foundational analysis is provided by James Dietz’s Economic History of Puerto Rico. Though published in 1986, its outline of how Puerto Rico has been exploited has stood the test of time. For a great introduction to the history and nature of Puerto Rico’s colonial status, I’d recommend Making Never-Never Land by Mónica Jiménez. By far the best overall history of the US colonial period is Puerto Rico in the American Century by César Ayala and Rafael Bernabe. And, for Spanish readers, a natural companion to my book is Borinquen Rojo by Emmanuel Figueroa Rosado, which is a history of communism in Puerto Rico from 1919 to 1945.

To read an exclusive excerpt from Howell's book, click here. 

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