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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 28, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Carlos Rovira: Why I fight

By Joyce Chediac

I stormed into the Workers World office after work, mad at my boss. Then I saw the banner.

It was a newly finished one on the struggle in Mexico, with a portrait of Emiliano Zapata. The Mexican revolutionary's peasant's face was worn from hardship but it radiated dignity, pride and leadership. Just looking at it made me feel better.

"Wow!" I said.

"Carlos did that," I was told. "Carlos Rovira."

This tall, slim man who wears a cap and large-framed glasses is a bicycle messenger. I have seen him wheel his bike into the office between deliveries and pitch in.

I saw him on TV too-a teenaged Carlos, wearing a beret and large glasses, guarding a truck. He was in "Palante Siempre Palante," the story of the Young Lords.

Racist slurs

Carlos was born of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York City in 1953. His parents and grandparents were in the Nationalist Party in Puerto Rico.

"The people of the island had no rights, and were subjects of a foreign power-the United States. Spanish was forbidden in the schools. The Puerto Rican flag was contraband." Carlos' father participated in the Jayuya uprising.

"After Jayuya, repression increased. So did hardships caused by U.S. economic restructuring. Many Puerto Ricans came to the U.S. In New York, Puerto Ricans were attacked at random by white racist gangs." This was distorted and trivialized in the movie "West Side Story."

"As a boy, we lived in a small five-room apartment in the projects with my aunt's family-seven kids and four adults.

"At 5 years old, my mother took me on the bus. She didn't speak English, and put the wrong change in. The white driver called her a `stupid s-c.' I never forgot it."

Carlos remembers a fifth-grade teacher calling classmates "filthy Puerto Ricans. This triggered suspicion in me. I put up gates and walls. I shut down and refused to learn."

The Young Lords

"In April 1968, the first Chicano Moratorium was held in Denver. A group of mostly Puerto Ricans went from New York.

"This was a turning point in my life. I was 14 years old.

"In Denver, I met Jose `Cha Cha' Jimenez, chairman of the Young Lords, a paramilitary Puerto Rican group modeled after the Black Panther Party. And I met Jose Garcia, who in 1969 organized the Young Lords in New York.

"The most dramatic action for me was in 1971, when we took over the First Spanish Methodist Church with rifles and shotguns after the police had killed a Young Lords member. Our 13 Point Program called for community control. We demanded that the church turn over its facilities to us.

"Our siege lasted a month before the church granted all our demands. Luckily, we had overwhelming community support and every progressive clergy in the city put pressure on the church not to allow bloodshed to take place.

"It was in the Lords where I learned to read and write. It was in the Lords where I learned dignity.

"I learned what struggle can do. Prior to the Lords, those of us who grew up in the U.S. were ashamed to be Puerto Rican. The Young Lords restored dignity and pride.

"Suddenly it was hip to be Puerto Rican. People wore Puerto Rican flags. Salsa became the popular music for the Latino youths.

"After 1972, the state targeted the Young Lords the way it destroyed the Black Panther Party. COINTELPRO [a government destabilization program aimed at destroying progressive organizations] planted agents, causing confusion, division and antagonisms. The intensification of infiltration caused the organization to dissolve by 1976."

In 1981, Carlos moved to New Orleans. He worked as an armed security guard in a bank. A cop moonlighting as a security guard called Carlos a racist name. Carlos shot him.

Carlos realized much later that the cop's racist slur tapped into the well of rage he still felt from the government destruction of the Lords.

"I was sentenced to 10 years. I did time in county jail, where they discovered I was an artist and put me in the inmates' arts program."

Carlos uses the artistic skills he sharpened in jail against the system that incarcerated him. Today, he paints "to show people in struggle in order to motivate them and instill revolutionary dignity."

Carlos was released in 1989 after serving six years in prison. He returned to New York City. "On my second day back in New York I came to WWP to find out where the movement was at.

"I had met Workers World Party in 1970. It was the only left organization that stood by us.

"Workers World helped me sum up my prison experience and the Young Lords-why it happened. What were the positive things that remain in storage to be used in a movement for Puerto Rican self-determination. I think it is the only group consistent with the revolutionary traditions that I come from.

"I'm a homeboy. I'm from the streets. I know about low self-esteem, self-hatred, the works. For me, political consciousness is a fortification, an armor for the spirit.

"Every day I get something out of being political. I make sure I walk tall. I remind myself that I have to stay a warrior."

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