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LUIS MUÑOZ MARíN: The Man Who Remade Puerto Rico by Peggy Mann

LUIS MUÑOZ MARíN: The Man Who Remade Puerto Rico

By

Pub Date: Sept. 1st, 1976
Publisher: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan

The career of Luis MuÑoz Marín isn't an easy one to summarize. Well into his adult life ""Luisito"" struggled with the burden of being the son of the patriot Luis MuÑoz Rivera and felt much more at home in New York than on his native island where politicians urged him to step into his father's political shoes. Years later, after campaigning among poor jíbaros in the mountains, he was shattered by the realization that the Puerto Rican people were not really interested in his lifelong dream of independence, and abandoned his goal in favor of a program of economic development. Mann's easy but spirited dramatizations make sense of both the personal false starts and the complicated issues, and she manages to establish MuÑoz Marín's contributions to the one-time ""poorhouse of the Caribbean"" without painting a falsely optimistic picture of either Puerto Rican prosperity or political unity on the independence question.