Or Lebron more closely resembles Lebron?
Posted on 08/03/2010 7:41:42 AM PDT by Ebenezer
Dolores Lebrón Sotomayor, a Puerto Rican independence activist who spent 25 years in prison for participating in a gun attack on the U.S. Congress a half-century ago, died Sunday. She was 89.
Lebrón, better known as Lolita, died at 11:05 a.m. in a San Juan hospital of complications from respiratory disease, said Francisco Torres, president of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico. She had been hospitalized repeatedly in recent months for cardio-respiratory ailments.
Her widower, Dr. Sergio Irizarry, called her a mystic and a poet, who “wanted to make life a flower.”
Irizarry, who had been married to her for 26 years, said her faith made the years in jail less difficult.
Although known throughout the world for her one violent act, as the leader of the 1954 commando attack, she had tempered her stance in later years. She said repeatedly that she had not expected anyone to die in her spectacular attack, which included Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores and Andrés Figueroa Cordero.
“We were prepared to blow ourselves up,” she told this reporter on her release from jail. “We were sure we were goners and that they wouldn’t let us get out alive.”
Calling Lebrón a “heroine,” the Puerto Rico Nationalist Party declared seven days of mourning, and asked that the flags on the monuments in Lares and Cabo Rojo be kept at half staff.
“Lolita was the mother of the independence movement,” said Sen. Maria de Lourdes Santiago, of the Puerto Rican Independence Party. “This is an insurmountable loss.”
An inauspicious beginning
Lebrón was born on Puerto Rico Discovery Day, Nov. 19, 1920, in Lares, known as the cradle of El Grito de Lares, the short-lived bid for independence from Spain in 1864. As a young adult, she moved to New York, where she worked as a seamstress, often complaining to her bosses about how Puerto Ricans were treated in the factories. The treatment of her people spurred her development of Nationalist views and she became a follower of movement leader Pedro Albizu Campos.
As one of five siblings of a poor family, she had only an eighth-grade education. An unusually beautiful girl, she was also frail in health. After her father’s death, she began work as a seamstress, which helped her get jobs in New York, where she also studied at George Washington College during her free time.
Her involvement in social reforms that would protect women and children and other party issues earned her several high-ranking positions, among them secretary, vice-president and executive delegate of its delegation in New York.
In an earlier Puerto Rican Nationalist attack on Blair House in Washington, one of the perpetrators, [Griselio] Torresola was killed. The other, Oscar Collazo was sentenced to death. Lebrón participated in a campaign which eventually led to a presidential pardon for Collazo.
In their own spectacular attack, the four entered the U.S. Capitol with automatic pistols and fired nearly 30 shots from an upstairs spectators’ gallery onto the crowded floor of the House. As they unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, Lebrón shouted “Viva Puerto Rico libre!” They killed no one but five U.S. representatives were wounded, including one congressman who was shot in the chest.
Lebrón later said she never intended to kill anyone and that no one of the four expected to come out alive. She and the others — Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores and Andres Figueroa Cordero — received lengthy prison sentences. By his own admission, most of the shots were by Cancel, the only remaining survivor.
On the morning of July 8, 1954, Lebrón was notified of her son’s death, minutes before her sentence was handed down. The child, her second born, was barely into his teens and was living with his grandmother in Lares. The news threw Lebrón into a state of shock and she didn’t speak for three days. Her first child, Gladys, died in 1977, while her mother was in prison. This time Lebrón was allowed to return to Puerto Rico for her daughter’s funeral.
A solitary jail time
While in jail, she spoke out on several issues including the U.S.’s use of the atomic bomb, causing her to be distanced from the other inmates. She turned down several offers of clemency requiring her to apologize, because of her belief that the U.S. had betrayed Puerto Rico in granting Commonwealth. In a press release Sunday, the Nationalist Party emphasized that the purpose of the attack was to bring international attention to the “farce” that was the creation of the Commonwealth, only two years before the attack on March 1, 1954.
When President Jimmy Carter granted the four clemency in 1979 after an intense international campaign, they were released, returning home to a tumultuous welcome. Among the four, they had served a century in prison. Gov. Carlos Romero Barceló publicly opposed the pardons granted by Carter, stating that it would encourage terrorism and undermine public safety.
“At a reception for the prisoners at his home in Río Piedras after the prisoners’ release, poet Francisco Matos Paoli, who had been born in Lares five years before, and with whom she had a relationship in her early years. Many years later, after her release from jail, he received her in his home along with many of her supporters. With his wife, educator Isabel Freire, serving cheese and crackers, olives and wine, several young actors, including the late Coqui Gonzalez, performed the poet’s masterpiece “Canto de la locura.”
Continuing advocacy
“We didn’t do anything that we should regret,” Lebrón said upon her release. “Everyone has the right to defend their right to freedom that God gave them.”
She continued to attend political rallies on the island, and was considered a bastion of the small independence movement.
In 2001, she and five other people were arrested when they cut through a fence on Vieques. Her actions protested the death two years earlier of David Sánchez, a civilian security guard killed by an errant bomb dropped during a U.S. Navy training exercise. She was sentenced to 60 days in jail for trespassing.
Cancel Miranda, the only remaining of the four, said Sunday, “Lolita will never die.”
“She was one of the bravest and firm defenders of Puerto Rican nationality.” he said. “Apart from her obvious bravery, her tenderness, simplicity and faith in the people, particularly in future generations have made her transcend ideological frontiers, becoming the patrimony of all Puerto Rico.”
Rubén Berríos, president of the Puerto Rico Independence Party, called her “the most eternal woman of our history. Her faith, action and sacrifice transformed her into a patriotic mystic, radiating light and love. Her grateful sons and daughters revere her for her unbounded dedication to the motherland.”
Praise came from all ideologies, symbolized by Rep. Luis Raúl Torres, of the Popular Democratic Party, who called her “a woman of great wisdom and political conviction.
“Today we have lost one of the bravest women in the struggle for Puerto Rico’s freedom, a woman of great religious convictions and of great charity towards her detractors.”
Later years plagued by ill health
Five years ago, a fire broke out in their house, causing $14,000 in material losses, and she and her husband were hospitalized.
Two years ago, she fell in her house and broke her hip. She underwent surgery, having bolts and a metal plaque inserted.
A family source, who declined to be identified, said she was too ill to attend the welcoming last week of former Puerto Rican political prisoner Carlos Alberto Torres. After 29 years, he had spent more time than she had in jail, having been found guilty of “seditious conspiracy” as a suspected member of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN).
Even before that, she had spoken in softer terms of violent struggle. Bolstered by her strong Catholic faith on her return, she spent much time catching up with all she had missed, going to plays and participating in social activities.
In recent years, Lebrón tempered her support for violent struggle. She collected her mystical experiences in thick notebooks, hoping to write a book someday, not on her experiences but on her conversations with God.
“I think times have changed, and there is no need now to kill for freedom,” she told a local newspaper in 1998. “I would not take up arms nowadays, but I acknowledge that the people have a right to use any means available to free themselves.”
In her later years, as recently as four years ago, she expressed concern about drugs and corruption, and especially about the abuse of children, for whom she spoke of building a shelter. However, this was one dream her health did not permit her to realize.
Two of her closest relatives were her niece Linda Alonso Lebrón and her granddaughter, Irene Vilar, who wrote of her grandmother’s life, and several books about women’s reproductive life.
Lolita Lebrón has taken on almost mystical proportions herself, in part because of her beauty and her sex, and her early feminist and socialist convictions. A film, starring Eva Longoria, is being prepared.
A mass was held Sunday night, after which her body was transported to the Ateneo Puertorriqueño in Old San Juan until this morning, when it will be taken to St. Lukes Catholic Church in El Señorial, Río Piedras, for a mass. After a mass in the Old San Juan Cathedral this morning, she will be buried today at the Santa Magdalena de Pazzis Cemetery in Old San Juan. At press time, no time for the mass had been confirmed.
ping
Sotomayor? Wise Latina?
Any relation to the "Wise Latina"?
Jimmy freaking Carter.
Just in time to make that 9 AM tee time at the Hades Country Club.
Ruben Berrios makes me puke.
The way Berríos spoke, you would have thought Lebrón was a Puerto Rican Mother Teresa. Pathetic!
This one comes from the not-so-bright branch of the family.
Flash forward to present and the demands from THE RACE, who also have fled their failed state.
If the same happened today, they might be called a hero... especially if it was during a session on cap-n-trade or the like.
So I suppose Lebrón became "pro-choice" on her views on terrorism; personally opposed, but.
She should have been dead at 35!
“collectively they spent 100 years in prison”....should have been individually.
LOL! From tragedy to parody in a couple of paragraphs.
More evidence in support for the need of the death penalty.
How much you want to bet that Lebron more closely resembles Evan Longoria than Gabby?
Or Lebron more closely resembles Lebron?
“...her early feminist and socialist convictions.”
Buried in the next to last paragraph. It figures. Imagine that, a violent Socialist!
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